Matt York/AP

Parents and children leave after receiving free Halloween candy from a businessperson in Lewiston, Maine, Oct. 31, 2023. Locals seek a return to normalcy after shootings that claimed 18 lives in their community on Oct. 25.

For years, mass shootings have prompted vehement debates in legislatures and at kitchen tables about the constitutional right to bear arms. But last week’s killings by a shooter in Lewiston, Maine, have given momentum to a national conversation about something more fundamental: the right to a reasonable sense of peace. 

At a time when the United States Supreme Court is expanding gun rights, many Americans are asking what peace in their communities looks like. 

Gun rights advocates argue that guns are a symptom and not a cause of the problem. They worry that eroding one constitutional liberty could be a slippery slope to an erosion of others. But a majority of Americans say gun laws should be tougher than they are now, according to Gallup. And mass shootings have led to states and cities seeking ways to regulate certain guns.

The way forward is uncertain, as communities and courts feel their way through the new landscape the Supreme Court is creating. For many in Maine, the state’s tightly knit communities were seen as its best defense against mass shootings. Now, the question in Maine and beyond is to what degree communities like Lewiston can decide for themselves how best to create a sense of peace. 

“This question of living free from terror ... [and] living free of being shot, that is one of the most important things in the modern gun debate, and that is starting to be vocalized more powerfully,” says Joseph Blocher, a professor at Duke University School of Law in Durham, North Carolina. 

The idea of safeguarding peace has long been accepted as having a place in U.S. constitutional law, as an extension of English common law, Professor Blocher says. “The common law tradition absolutely protected government’s power to prevent terror and intimidation.”

Shaking a state’s sense of safety with guns

The question is particularly pertinent for Maine, which has long seen itself as taking a middle line on guns. Known as a sportsman’s paradise, it has some of the highest rates of gun ownership and lowest crime rates in the union. Mainers have long felt a sense of immunity from mass violence. The Lewiston shooting shattered that sense of peace. 

Matt Rourke/AP

People gather at a vigil for the victims of mass shootings, Oct. 29, 2023, outside the Basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul in Lewiston, Maine.

“We have had a very responsible approach to guns,” says Richard Judd, a historian at the University of Maine. “Fathers would train their kids. Farmers depended as much on game and forage as they did their crops to survive. It was just a way of life. So guns as a defense is really less important here than guns as a form of independence.” 

One of those who has changed his views is U.S. Rep. Jared Golden, a Democrat and former Marine from Lewiston. He has vowed to work toward passing a national assault weapons ban. Mr. Golden said his past reluctance to support such a ban came in part from “a false confidence that our community was above this.”

But the ability of communities like Lewiston and states like Maine to set local standards is balanced against U.S. Supreme Court rulings since 2008 favoring gun rights. U.S. District Judge Robert Benitez cited a 2022 Supreme Court ruling – which required a historical analogue to any proposed restriction on the Second Amendment right “to keep and bear Arms” – when striking down California’s assault weapons ban in mid-October. The ruling is currently under appeal.  

Robert F. Bukaty/AP

Democratic Rep. Jared Golden of Maine speaks with a woman at a vigil for shooting victims in Lewiston, Maine. He says his past reluctance to support a national assault weapons ban came in part from “a false confidence that our community was above this.”

The debate in Maine is further complicated by questions surrounding authorities’ response to warnings they received months ago about Robert Card, the alleged shooter. A recently passed “yellow flag” law was not activated despite his documented mental health struggles and threats.

To gun rights advocates, gun control is a false bargain; they say tougher laws wouldn’t prevent mass shootings.

Next week, the Supreme Court will hear the case of a Texan who challenged the seizure of his weapons in 2020 after being placed under a restraining order for domestic abuse. His argument – calibrated for last year’s Supreme Court ruling – is that there were no laws against domestic abuse in 1791. A lower court agreed. 

Here is where gun control advocates and communities looking to pass gun control regulations say the Supreme Court must draw a line. In the past, the Supreme Court has upheld the ability of jurisdictions to seize weapons from people involved in restraining orders. A study in Injury Epidemiology found that nearly 60% of mass shootings between 2014 and 2019 were related to domestic violence.

“An unwillingness to look at legislative reasoning behind these gun [restrictions] is such a dangerous path to go down,” says Margaret Groban, a Maine resident and former assistant U.S. attorney. 

She hopes the upcoming case gives the Supreme Court the opportunity “to recognize the legitimate efforts of legislators to address violence in their communities.” 

During recent years, mass shootings have prompted such efforts. After the 2018 Parkland school shooting, Florida raised its weapons-buying age and instituted a red-flag law that allows confiscation of weapons in some cases. Ten states now have outlawed certain kinds of assault-style rifles as well as large-capacity magazines.

In courts, a “one-way ratchet”?

For now, courts are stuck in a chaotic moment, unsure of how to apply the new high court rulings to emerging threats to peace.

“If the word ‘Arms’ in the Second Amendment is going to expand over time, then there needs to be a proportional change in the capacity of society to regulate that gun,” says Professor Blocher of Duke. “Otherwise, it’s a one-way ratchet in favor of more and more powerful guns in more and more people’s hands – and a sort of parallel hamstringing of society’s ability to protect itself through laws.” 

This is also a slippery slope, gun control advocates say: peace through strength of force – a private arms race. “There is a belief that an armed society is a peaceful society, and it’s a very different worldview: ‘if only more people in the bowling alley had been armed,’” says Ms. Groban. “It’s about what you think our society should look like. What do you want in terms of a community living together peacefully?”

David Yamane, a North Carolina gun owner and scholar, isn’t sure that turning in his assault-style weapons would improve public safety or his personal safety. Yet shootings like those in Lewiston have given him pause.

“This is an incredibly fraught and emotionally trying issue,” says the Wake Forest University sociologist. “You’re balancing between individual rights and the common good. What sorts of individual sacrifices do we make as fellow citizens in order to try to achieve some greater public safety?”

Editor’s note: A reference to state laws has been corrected to use the term large-capacity magazines.

With her Palestinian grandmother living in the West Bank, one of her Palestinian American constituents dodging Israeli strikes in Gaza, and her fellow Democrats trumpeting strong support for Israel, Rep. Rashida Tlaib took the mic at an Oct. 18 rally to give the president of the United States a piece of her mind.

“I’m telling you right now, President Biden, not all of America is with you,” she shouted, standing in front of a banner reading “CEASEFIRE,” the Capitol dome behind it in the background. “I think the White House and everyone thinks we’re just going to sit back and let this happen.”

Well, Representative Tlaib, for one, is not sitting back. Even when other Democrats call her positions “offensive” and “despicable.” Even when she is hounded in the halls of Congress by a Fox reporter asking over and over if she has any comment on “Hamas terrorists chopping off [Israeli] babies’ heads.” And even though she faced a Republican effort Wednesday evening to censure her for “antisemitic activity,” “sympathizing with terrorist organizations,” and, among other things, leading those Oct. 18 rallygoers in an “insurrection” into a House office building. There, hundreds of Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian, and other protesters were then arrested for sitting on the floor with “cease-fire now” signs and chanting, “Not in our name.” 

As the only Palestinian American serving in Congress, Ms. Tlaib has become the face of a small but vocal progressive minority challenging Congress’ long-standing bipartisan support for Israel. Their movement reflects growing sympathy for the Palestinian cause among Democratic voters, which earlier this year surpassed support for Israel. It is also the result of a gradual diversification of lawmakers and staff on Capitol Hill, where many nonwhite members and aides express solidarity with the Palestinian cause.

Nearly a month after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack that killed more than 1,400 Israelis, however, these progressives appear to have had little impact on U.S. policy toward its closest Mideast ally – though they may well have an effect on the 2024 elections. 

Only 16 other lawmakers – all people of color – have joined Ms. Tlaib in supporting a cease-fire resolution brought by Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri, while more than 400 voted in favor of one supporting Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization and the governing authority of Gaza since 2006. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 8,500 Palestinians have been killed so far in Israel’s military response. Ms. Tlaib says Israel’s campaign in Gaza – where Hamas is operating from within a crowded civilian population as well as underground tunnel networks – amounts to genocide. 

Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/AP

Rep. Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri, speaks as Rep. Rashida Tlaib embraces her during a demonstration calling for a cease-fire in Gaza near the Capitol in Washington on Oct. 18, 2023.

“I think that history will write that she was the moral conscience of Congress right now – she and Cori Bush,” says Sandra Tamari, a Palestinian American organizer based in St. Louis, who got to know Ms. Bush during the 2014 Ferguson uprising after police killed Michael Brown. 

“Every Democratic lawmaker who has not signed on to the cease-fire [resolution] or called for a cease-fire is on notice,” adds Ms. Tamari, executive director of Adalah Justice Project, which participated in the Oct. 18 rally and has staged sit-ins in the offices of Democratic members of Congress. “We will continue to disrupt business as usual.”

Censure vote blocked

The censure resolution was blocked from reaching the House floor by a vote of 222 to 186, with 23 Republicans joining all House Democrats. 

After the censure resolution against Ms. Tlaib was tabled, a retaliatory one targeting its sponsor – GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia – was also scrapped.

Ms. Greene, who has previously faced accusations of antisemitism herself, criticized her Democratic colleague for saying that progressive values were at odds with backing “Israel’s apartheid government” and implying that the “suffocating dehumanizing conditions” created by Israel’s tight control of people and goods in and out of the Gaza Strip led to Hamas’s “resistance” on Oct. 7. 

The censure resolution also misleadingly claimed that Ms. Tlaib had said the Holocaust gave her a “calming feeling” when, in context, the “feeling” in that 2019 comment was linked to Ms. Tlaib’s view that her Palestinian ancestors lost their land in order to create a safe haven for Jews after World War II. Controversially, she does not support a two-state solution to the conflict but rather one state for both peoples, which would mean Israel would no longer be a Jewish-majority state. 

“I will not be bullied, I will not be dehumanized, and I will not be silenced,” said Representative Tlaib in response to the censure resolution. If passed, such a resolution requires a member to stand in the well of the House while it is read aloud. Only a dozen members of Congress have ever been censured. 

The U.S., whose refusal to accept Jewish refugees from Europe after the Holocaust led many of them to seek refuge in their historic homeland instead, has been a strong supporter of Israel since it declared independence in 1948. The military aid it provided, beginning in the late 1950s, helped Israel win key wars which expanded its territory to include the previously Arab-held areas of the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, West Bank, Gaza Strip, and – for a time – the Sinai Peninsula. 

For the past decade, the U.S. has given Israel more than $3 billion annually in military aid, with additional defense funding such as $1.5 billion in 2022 to replenish the interceptors for its Iron Dome missile defense system that provides an aerial shield from Hamas attacks.

After the Hamas attack last month, the Biden administration requested an additional $14 billion in emergency aid. The aid, which the administration proposed as a larger package that includes help for Ukraine and U.S. border security, is caught in a partisan battle on the Hill. Newly elected GOP Speaker of the House Mike Johnson wants to separate out aid for Israel and pay for it with purported budget cuts. 

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Secretary of State Antony Blinken tells the Senate Appropriations Committee that the United States should immediately send aid to Israel and Ukraine, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Oct. 31, 2023.

Chink in the pro-Israel armor

Going forward, a key question is whether this progressive chink in Congress’s iron-clad support for Israel could grow larger. 

“I think we have to put all this in proportion and not overstate it,” says David Makovsky, an expert on U.S. policy toward Israel at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, noting the “overwhelming support” for Israel in both parties. 

But Hadar Susskind, a progressive Jew and president of Americans for Peace Now, says he has seen a shift over the past 25 years. 

“I do think the politics in Congress are changing,” says Mr. Susskind. He adds that a broadening spectrum of advocacy groups lobbying on the Hill and organizing trips to Israel has fostered a greater diversity of congressional views on Israel. The lobbying group J Street, for instance, stands as an alternative to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, the influential bipartisan lobbying group which is staunchly pro-Israel. 

Still, there remain major ramifications for challenging American support for Israel. The day after the Oct. 18 rally, congressional staffers put out a letter calling for a cease-fire. Reportedly, 411 of them supported the letter, but all anonymously.

The cease-fire debate

Progressives say they are supported by the majority of Americans, pointing to a poll released Oct. 20 by progressive think tank Data for Progress that showed 80% of Democrats, 57% of independents, and 56% of Republicans “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” that the U.S. should call for a ceasefire and de-escalation in Gaza, and use its leverage to prevent further civilian deaths. 

“It’s absolutely shocking to me that we’re not able to get traction for the most basic demand of a cease-fire,” says Ms. Tamari, whose organization held a sit-in in the office of Rep. Ro Khanna, a leading progressive who spearheaded an end to U.S. support for Saudi-led bombing of Houthi rebels in Yemen. Even so, he has yet to sign on to Ms. Bush’s cease-fire resolution.

Critics say a cease-fire would strengthen Hamas, enabling it to regroup, and undermine Israel and other parties’ leverage in negotiations for the release of more than 200 mainly Israeli hostages, including dozens with dual nationalities. Gaza’s civilian Palestinian population is also essentially being held hostage by Hamas, they argue. Hamas has not held elections since coming to power in 2006 and violently ousting their political rivals in 2007. 

“If you want a better future for Gaza, you want to make it a future that is a post-Hamas future,” says Mr. Makovsky, a former senior adviser at the State Department on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. 

At the same time, progressives – including many staffers sharing anguished accounts anonymously with the Instagram account @dearwhitestaffers – say they are disturbed and demoralized by what they see as a lack of empathy for Palestinian lives from Mr. Biden and members of Congress. Already, the reported death toll in this conflict is nearly four times that of the 2014 war, which lasted twice as long and included a major ground offensive.

Ms. Tlaib has come under strong criticism for her refusal last month to delete a tweet blaming Israel for a hospital strike despite U.S. and Israeli assessments pointing to a misfired Palestinian rocket. Six days later, she explained why, backing an independent investigation.

Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal says a major factor behind why more of the caucus’s 100-plus members have not supported the cease-fire resolution is how little space there is in the U.S. to have a real conversation about what’s happening, in part due to pressure from Israel-related groups that pour significant money into election campaigns. 

J. Scott Applewhite/AP/File

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who leads the Congressional Progressive Caucus, speaks to reporters outside the House chamber at the Capitol in Washington, Sept. 21, 2023.

“There’s difficulty holding that both things can be true … that you can be against Hamas and against the attacks and condemn all of that and call for the hostages to be released, and you can stand up for all parties following international humanitarian law,” says Representative Jayapal. That lack of nuance and recognition of the complexity of the situation leads to labels that can be tough to survive politically.

Lara Friedman, a former U.S. foreign service officer in the Middle East and now president of the Foundation of Middle East Peace, says that absent support from the Biden administration or leading advocacy groups, those supporting a cease-fire will be called anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and pro-Hamas. “That’s a hard place to put yourself,” she says. 

What Biden’s defenders say

Biden supporters, for their part, say he has not been duly credited for his work urging Israel to exercise restraint, and pushing for humanitarian aid to the estimated 2.2 million civilians in Gaza. 

Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia says he thinks that’s the main reason the president traveled to Israel last month – not just to convey support, which can be done from afar, but to look his counterparts in the eye and urge restraint.

He sums up the president’s message as: “ ‘Look, learn from our own mistakes after 9/11. When we broadened it beyond the perpetrators of the attack, we lost the support of an awful lot of people around the globe.’”

But the president’s approach has fallen far short of what progressives and Arab Americans would like to hear. A poll released yesterday by the Arab American Institute notes that Arab Americans account for hundreds of thousands of voters in key swing states, including Ms. Tlaib’s home state of Michigan. It showed Arab American support for President Biden plummeting to 17% from the 59% who supported him in 2020. 

“We showed up and you betrayed us,” said Ms. Tlaib at an Oct. 20 rally near the Capitol. Then she assured those present: “You will always have a sister in Congress that will speak truth to power.”

Editor’s note: This article was updated on Nov. 2 to reflect the tabling of a resolution to censure Ms. Tlaib Wednesday evening.

Courtesy of OCHA

Andrea De Domenico, head of the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Amid an intensifying war that has killed more than 8,500 people in Gaza and cut fuel, electricity, food, and water supplies to a captive population of 2.2 million people, international pressure is growing to address a humanitarian disaster.

Meeting the needs of 1.4 million displaced people in a war zone falls on the shoulders of United Nations agencies such as the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA. Andrea De Domenico, head of OCHA in the occupied Palestinian territories, spoke Tuesday with The Christian Science Monitor from his office in Jerusalem about the U.N.’s efforts and Gaza’s unprecedented humanitarian crisis.

What is the most important thing for the outside world to know about the humanitarian situation in Gaza?

The scale of human suffering and pain that is unfolding for civilian Palestinians in Gaza is simply beyond imagination. First of all, Gaza is the only place on the planet where, when a war starts, you cannot flee. It is as simple as this.

You have 1.4 million people displaced today; more than 600,000 are hosted in U.N. premises, UNRWA in particular, whose staff’s bravery and heroic efforts are commendable. There has been no electricity and very limited water for three weeks, and humanitarian aid is entering literally drip by drip, drop by drop. It is unsustainable.

Israel has restricted the entry of fuel into Gaza because it says it fears Hamas will use it. Why is fuel so important to the humanitarian response?

Fuel has affected everything from the butcher to the bakery to the supermarket to the hospital to mobile networks to the desalination plant. ... All the groundwater in Gaza has been penetrated by seawater, so it is not drinkable without desalination. All these services depend on fuel-run generators.

My U.N. colleagues now have to prioritize the limited amount of fuel we have. Do we give fuel to the hospital where they are saving lives and the treatment plant where they are providing clean drinkable water for a population? Or do we give fuel to the OCHA team that has to go out, do an assessment, see people, and allow us to plan the humanitarian response? This impossible choice has been imposed on us by the dynamic of the current conflict.

A few dozen aid trucks are currently entering Gaza daily. The United States says it is trying to increase that number to 100. How many are needed to meet Gaza’s needs?

Before the war, under a blockade regime, there were 500 trucks traveling through Rafah daily giving a decent access to basic needs for people who had the means to purchase them. With the total obliteration of entire neighborhoods in northern and southern Gaza, it is very difficult to gauge: What is the right number? What I know is that there are at least 1.4 million people that every day need to be fed, have access to clean water, and have basic needs addressed, like hygiene.

Mohammed Salem/Reuters

Palestinian residents of Gaza who fled their homes due to Israeli strikes take shelter in a United Nations-run school, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, Oct. 23, 2023.

Before the war, the highest rate of food insecurity in the region was in Gaza; they were aid-dependent. The aid that was stored and distributed was based on a functional city where you could cook and get water. Right now, one of the big problems is that the aid that is coming in is not matching the needs on the ground. You can no longer send beans because people don’t have gas or water to cook it. We need ready-made food and ready-made meals.

When you have 20 or 30 trucks coming in for 2 million people, you prioritize food, water, and medicine. But what about hygiene kits? What about bedding, blankets, and shelters for people who have lost their homes or have had their temporary shelter destroyed? What type of sanitation are you providing if you want to prevent the spread of diseases?

As an example, to provide the minimum level of water for survival for 2.2 million men, women, children, and infants in Gaza, we need to bring in 47 million liters of potable water for 10 days. In terms of trucks, that is 1,200 trucks over 10 days, or 120 trucks of water per day, just to maintain survival. We are really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

This week saw the ransacking of UNRWA warehouses by some Gaza families. Is this a sign of a breakdown of civil order?

People are being pushed to the brink of total desperation. The inability of the international community to respond to their needs is cracking the fundamental fabric of these communities, and it is breaking their trust in us.

People who didn’t have the means to buy what little was remaining in the market were desperate and willing to do anything to get their hands on something that may save their children. They attacked the main UNRWA logistics base, and it has been completely looted. How can you blame desperate people? We warned both [warring] parties: If we reach the point of civil unrest and break the trust of the people, this will progressively undermine our ability to deliver services. To keep people’s trust in us, we must follow the humanitarian principle of providing assistance wherever it is needed.

Hatem Ali/AP

Civilians exiting Gaza make their way to the Egyptian side of the border crossing with the Gaza Strip in Rafah, Nov. 1, 2023. Hundreds of foreign nationals and dozens of seriously wounded Palestinians were allowed to leave the besieged enclave for the first time since the Hamas-Israel war began more than three weeks ago.

Israel has called for the evacuation of hospitals in northern Gaza such as Al Shifa, claiming they housed Hamas militants. Why has the World Health Organization described such an evacuation as “impossible”?

There is no alternative to these hospitals. Around 64% of the 3,600 hospital beds pre-war were in the north, and the two largest hospitals, Al Shifa and Al Quds, are in the north – all due to the concentration of population. The current number of wounded is at 20,000 or more. In an American town in normal circumstances, it would take weeks to plan the evacuation of a hospital, assuming you have somewhere to go.

Unplugging the respirator to people in Al Shifa and unplugging the incubators for neonatal cases in Al Quds just because you want to transport them is a death penalty. There are claims of massive misuse of these hospitals [by Hamas fighters], but I am sorry: You have to find another way.

Both the U.N. and the European Union have called for “humanitarian pauses” in Gaza. Why are they important?

Humanitarian pauses are absolutely paramount. We need these pauses to allow us the ability to move, to reach civilians, to check and verify needs, to deliver the bare minimum of assistance. A pause will also help us reset our own ability to operate inside Gaza. You can’t do this when tanks are cutting the north from the south and firing on cars that at face value are transporting civilians.

From actions to rhetoric, does the dehumanization in this conflict pose an additional challenge to humanitarians?

What we are witnessing today is a complete lack of humanity. The attack on the seventh of October by Hamas on Israel was horrific, brutal, violent, inexcusable. And we also witness a dehumanization element on the other side. The U.N. has stood firm demanding the immediate freeing of Israeli hostages and their humane treatment.

But that does not mean because of these atrocities you can flatten an entire city. That is why our call is this: Let’s preserve a space for humanity. If we lose that, we not only lose our humanity, but we will not live in a better world tomorrow. Globally, there is a political echelon that is completely untouched and unmoved. For me, we cannot lose perspective. We have to put a limit to this suffering.

For once, New York Yankees fans wish their team were more like the Texas Rangers.

It’s not just that the Rangers are one win away from clinching the World Series. It’s also that, in an era when baseball in particular is increasingly defined by statistical analysis, the Rangers seem to be a testament to steady, old-school thinking. They still have, as many see it, a baseball soul.

The portrait is admittedly simplistic. Everyone uses statistical analysis to guide their decision-making – even the Rangers. But as the season draws to a close, it’s the time for an annual reset. And some fans are starting to worry that the relationship between America’s pastime and on-field statistics has gone too far.

The Yankees are only the most convenient target. Their commitment to distilling baseball into advanced metrics didn’t work; they missed the playoffs. But the sense that the sport has essentially been overtaken by mutual fund managers is widespread.

“The idea is that the Yankees’ use of analytics has failed them because analytics cannot take ‘heart’ and ‘clutch’ into account,” says Michael Quinn, a professor of sports media at Manhattan College. “The Rangers have heart and that propelled them, whereas the Yankees just have calculators and by-the-numbers accountants.”

Rick Scuteri-USA TODAY Sports NPSTrans toppic

Texas Rangers left fielder Travis Jankowski hits a single against the Arizona Diamondbacks during Game 4 of the 2023 World Series in Phoenix Oct 31, 2023. The Rangers are one game shy of winning the championship.

Should fans be content with game-time decisions made in the name of risk aversion, and free agent signings made in the name of sustainability?

“[Some feel] it’s trying to take the mystery out of the sport,” says Professor Quinn. “It’s trying to take the heroes and the heart out of the sport.”

Baseball is no stranger to statistics. But since the 2002 Oakland Athletics pioneered the modern “sabermetrics” movement, teams have relied on formulas and data points that are increasingly complex – and, to some, incomprehensible.

Dan Secatore runs “Over the Monster,” a fan blog for the Boston Red Sox. He says that when fans voice their dissatisfaction with analytics, they are not voicing the same complaints that are shown in the “Moneyball” book or movie, which both chronicle the 2002 Athletics team.

“We all came to view players the same way,” he said, referring to sabermetrics such as on-base percentage and wins above replacement. “But then [teams] moved on and started applying the same metrics to, ‘How should the game be played?’”

The result has been years of heavy investment in analytics, as teams use the numbers at their disposal to decide everything from pitching matchups to roster construction.

“Teams began to be taken over by guys with backgrounds at McKinsey and Wall Street, who began to prioritize risk management ... above anything else,” he said.

Ben Margot/AP/File

The 2002 Oakland Athletics – shown Sept. 4, 2002, after setting an American League record for wins – pioneered the data analytics approach to Major League Baseball made famous in “Moneyball.”

Case in point: After the Seattle Mariners narrowly missed the playoffs this year, team executive Jerry Dipoto argued that his team’s season was actually a success. He noted that, historically speaking, teams winning 54% of their games (as the Mariners did) are likely to eventually appear in a World Series (which the Mariners, to date, never have). “We’re actually doing the fan base a favor in asking for their patience to win the World Series while we continue to build a sustainably good roster,” he said.

“That’s really where the backlash is now,” says Mr. Secatore. “Fans want to win – but they don’t want their teams to be turned into mutual funds where the goal is slow-and-steady, sustainable growth. They want to know that their owners are trying to win the World Series.”

Analytics are commonly used by teams to identify a player’s “value” – both individually and as part of a team. Front offices looking for a competitive advantage tend to look for “undervalued” players – which critics see as a reluctance to spend big or commit to winning.

“It just binds you where you are. You have to make these penny-pinching moves [for trades and signings] that aren’t going to move the needle,” says Joe Castellano, a Yankees fan from Long Island.

For lower-budget teams like the Athletics, which need to identify undervalued players, analytics can be indispensable, says Mr. Castellano. But for teams like the Yankees, he says, the pursuit of “value” has distorted their worldview and made penny-pinching seem a virtue – all while the Rangers doled out $800 million over the past two years to sign the top players on the free agent market. 

“There’s no excuse for us not to be spending in that way,” he says.

David J. Phillip/AP

Texas Rangers manager Bruce Bochy hugs catcher Jonah Heim after winning the American League Championship Series Oct. 23, 2023, in Houston. Mr. Bochy’s Rangers have been praised for what fans call their old-school approach to baseball.

That’s not to say the Rangers are still operating in a pre-“Moneyball” mindset. According to Andrew Baggarly, a baseball writer for The Athletic, “Every team has analytics baked into their decision-making.”

Even Bruce Bochy, the Rangers manager widely perceived as “old-school,” has acknowledged how data informs his game-time decisions: “You’re crazy not to listen and get all the information you can.”

It’s just a matter of how obvious those decisions are for casual viewers, says Mr. Baggarly. “Do fans feel like their teams may be tilting a little too far on the spectrum towards data? And have they lost a little bit of their soul along the way?”

Frustration also boiled over this year in Boston, where many Red Sox fans celebrated the firing of general manager Chaim Bloom, an analytics guru who, according to Mr. Secatore, had tried to build a “cost-controlled pipeline of players” after years of uncontrolled spending. Mr. Bloom’s four-year tenure saw the departure of several popular stars and ended with a last-place finish in the division.

“In a lot of cases where teams are doing less and figuring they have a chance to get in [the playoffs], it means frankly they’re not creating a product that is as compelling and as entertaining,” says Mr. Baggarly.

Baseball’s unique reverence for tradition has only deepened the controversy, says Professor Quinn. For once, statisticians are the in-group, and longtime fans are the outsiders. “There’s a feeling that some of the people who used to watch don’t really belong in the game anymore.”

The conversation over analytics mirrors what’s happening in society, says Mr. Secatore. “We’re sort of all at a point now where we all acknowledge that Amazon, for example, is a much more efficient way to shop ... but maybe we’re missing something that we had before. Maybe there are certain things in our society that should be a little bit more inefficient.”

"Absolution," by Alice McDermott; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 336 pp.

Alice McDermott is known for fiction that probes the lives of working- and middle-class Irish Catholic families in New York’s outer boroughs and Long Island. Her exquisitely observed stories of weddings, wakes, marriages, births, sorrows, and joys are underpinned by questions of moral responsibility and forgiveness. 

McDermott’s powerful ninth novel, “Absolution,” is at once an exciting departure and a fitting development. Set primarily in Saigon in 1963, shortly before the United States’ full involvement in the Vietnam War, the book focuses on the wives stationed overseas with their American husbands. Their job was to support and “adorn” their spouses rather than question their business. (Among other things, “Absolution” offers a sharp-eyed portrait of the changing face of American marriage.)

“Absolution” is partly a response to Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, “The Quiet American,” which depicts the breakdown of French colonialism in Vietnam and America’s early involvement there against the backdrop of an unsettling love triangle. In contrast to Greene’s male-dominated narrative, McDermott’s novel features women – at least, American women – at its center. 

She frames “Absolution” with an engrossing, elegiac correspondence between two of these women nearly 60 years after the events in question. This adds the benefit of hindsight to the women’s attempts to sort out their experiences in Vietnam. The correspondents who narrate alternating sections of the three-part novel are Tricia and Rainey. As a shy, naive 23-year-old newlywed in 1963, Tricia  accompanied her husband, Peter, a lawyer and engineer, to Saigon. Rainey is the daughter of Tricia’s best friend there – wealthy, confident Charlene, wife of an oil executive. 

In the novel’s opening pages, which could be titled, “How I Met Your Mother,” Tricia paints a vivid portrait of Charlene – a wily, athletic mother of three with piercing green eyes, fingernails bitten down to the nubs, and a “predator’s eyebrows.” They meet at one of the frequent cocktail parties that filled expats’ calendars. 

Charlene has brought along her school-age daughter, Rainey, and her infant son, whom Charlene quickly hands off to the pliant newcomer. Tricia is mortified when the baby spits up all over her silk dress, causing her to miss most of the party while a Vietnamese servant deftly cleans her up. But she is enchanted by Rainey’s Barbie doll and marvels that, unlike the baby dolls she played with as a child, this doll “was meant for a thousand different imaginary games: nurse, stewardess, plantation belle, sorority girl, night club singer ... bride.” Of course, Barbie doctor and Barbie lawyer dolls were not yet in the picture. (The toys, which feature prominently in “Absolution,” are having a moment in the wake of the “Barbie” movie.)

Charlene is a woman who, born 30 years later, might have run a major corporation. But in her era, she is limited to concocting elaborate schemes in a desire to do good and do something other than just stay at home. Charlene comes up with a plan to produce and sell “Saigon Barbies” at exorbitant prices to wealthy Americans. The Saigon Barbies are dressed in Vietnamese silk costumes that have been meticulously sewn, for a small fee, by the nimble woman who set Tricia to rights at the cocktail party. The proceeds go toward gift baskets of stuffed animals and candy for Vietnamese children in orphanages and hospitals.   

Not everyone thinks Charlene’s charitable efforts are worthwhile. A major’s wife argues that “there’s a real danger in the bestowing of gifts upon the hopeless only to inflate the ego of the one who does the bestowing.” But Charlene pushes back, insisting that doing even a little good is better than giving in to the impulse to turn away.

The novel’s setting, in a country soon to become a battleground for conflicting ideologies – a war driven in no small part by economics and a lust for oil – provides an excellent canvas for an examination of moral equivocation that has marked much of McDermott’s work. Saintly people in this novel, as in her others, come in all forms, including a scruffy, retired Army medic who returns to the jungle to do what he can to help, and the gentle Vietnam veteran who, with his wife, in late middle age, adopt a baby with Down syndrome.  

Sometimes knowing what’s the right thing to do is impossible, and so is absolution. Such is the case with Tricia’s dilemma over whether adopting a Vietnamese baby girl born into dire poverty will save the child from suffering and relieve the birth family of a burden, or cause them more sorrow.  

In her 2006 novel, “After This,” McDermott wrote about the lasting effects of the death of a son in Vietnam on each member of a Catholic family on Long Island. But she is up to something different here. “Absolution” is not about the war but addresses the question of forgiveness on both a personal and political level. Few writers have written about moral qualms with such sensitivity.

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Muslim Palestinian women gather at Al-Aqsa compound, also known to Jews as the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem's Old City amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas.

In the decade before 2022, the number of active conflicts in the world rose from 33 to 55, according to the Peace Research Institute Oslo in Norway. During that period, no single war was fully quelled by international peace efforts. So it may seem like an odd moment for optimism, as a number of people are making quiet efforts for peace building during the current Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

One approach, according to an article in the journal Foreign Affairs, requires “a broad coalition of politicians, business leaders, the UN, peace builders, and local communities.”  Another one, says Tasneem Noor, program director of NewGround, a Jewish-Muslim community-building organization based in Los Angeles, is for individuals to look at their own assumptions about the conflict. “There is a value of looking for the goodness, even in the hardest of times,” she told PBS NewsHour. “Radical listening ... is a powerful way of disarming so much of the angst and the anger that we hold.”

Every security challenge, the United Nations notes, is compelling new ways of “weaving a safety net of adaptation, collaboration, and innovation.” Solutions to climate change in the Sahel region of Africa, for example, offer fresh ways to safeguard and stabilize communities affected by violent extremism. More than any other conflict, however, the crisis in Gaza is showing the positive potential impact of the thoughts and actions of individuals.

Take, for example, a City Council meeting last week in Sacramento, California, that turned into a forum for healing. Community members had sought a resolution calling for a cease-fire in Gaza. When protesters interrupted the meeting with antisemitic insults at the city’s Jewish mayor, people who identified themselves as Palestinian Americans rose to leave. They wanted no part of the ugliness. That led to a moment of reconciliation and empathy.

“I was just very moved by the reaction of Palestinian Americans,” Mayor Darrell Steinberg told The Sacramento Bee. “Even though it was a small moment ... in a troubled world, it just gave me hope that maybe peace is really possible.”

Such incidents are happening in many places. In Winnipeg, Manitoba, Muslim and Jewish communities have held numerous shared events since the Gaza crisis erupted last month. The events have allowed both sides to share their grief. In Berlin, Israeli and Arab students at the Barenboim-Said Academy refused to let their divided anguish derail a scheduled concert last week.

“Now is the time to remove the walls and look at each other,” Katia Abdel Kader, a violinist from Ramallah, West Bank, told The New York Times. “The moment you just look in someone’s eyes and you understand we’re just the same – that’s what matters for me.”

Insights like those create broad ripples. They move individuals from narrow misconceptions to what Eboo Patel, president of Interfaith America, calls a framework for pluralism built of respect, empathy, and cooperation. They add up to a potential new era of peace building.