Brookings Today, 1/23/15

A roundup of some of the content published today at Brookings.

• New from the Brookings Press. A new expanded edition of Saving Europe: Anatomy of a Dream, by Brookings expert Carlo Bastasin, was released today. The book takes you behind the scenes of the European crisis—from its historic roots to more recent developments.
• Clean energy and oil prices. The price of crude oil has crashed in the past few months. On the Avenue Blog, Brookings experts Devashree Saha and Mark Muro explain why this isn’t necessarily bad for the clean energy sector.
• The Brookings Cafeteria Podcast. In this podcast, Bruce Katz of our Metropolitan Policy Program explains that the nation’s 388 metropolitan areas are “the true organic economies” and discusses why metro areas are at the “vanguard of policy innovation.”
• On the Middle East. Tamara Cofman Wittes and Marc Lynch discuss the absence of women from Middle East policy debates, and Bruce Riedel gives some background on Saudi Arabia’s new King Salman and why he will have his hands full from the very start.
• More on Europe. Daniel V. Speckhard explains why Sunday’s Greek elections are just the beginning of more turmoil for the Eurozone.
• Africa 2014 in retrospect. Following the release of this year’s 2015 Foresight Africa Report, Mwangi S. Kimenyi takes a look at last year’s report, including events and issues that had major impacts on the course of development in the continent in the last year.