A small crowd of Beijing residents gathered on an ancient lane in the city’s Chaoyang District, arguing with workers who were building a 10-foot-tall corrugated metal fence to seal off their neighborhood last week amid a rapid surge in COVID-19 cases.

Workers were walling off multiple routes inside the maze of alleys known as hutongs, restricting population movement and causing mini traffic jams of bicycles, motorbikes, delivery carts, and cars as they tried to squeeze through the few narrow outlets.

“It’s because of the outbreak!” a woman said with exasperation, walking away after residents failed to stop the blockage. “We can still get out on another lane,” another woman said with resignation.

But all the freshly built barricades in the neighborhood were suddenly dismantled after popular frustration erupted in rare nationwide protests in Beijing and other cities over China’s strict “zero-COVID” policies last weekend. “It’s strictly forbidden to use hard partitions and hard fences to block fire exits and community entrances,” stressed Wang Daguang, Beijing’s official in charge of community COVID-19 prevention, on Monday.

The about-turn is one of several small but meaningful steps taken by Beijing and other cities in the aftermath of the protests to relax the stringent policy of lockdowns, quarantines, and constant testing that has grown ever more intrusive amid a record COVID-19 outbreak in China. It demonstrates how popular opposition can propel change in the authoritarian country, as it has over other public concerns such as air pollution and food safety in recent years.

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

Beijing residents try to get through a barricade before workers completely seal off the street in Beijing on Nov. 25, 2022.

“It appears that even the central government overestimated people’s ability to endure all the pain,” says Yanzhong Huang, director of the Center for Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University. “Given the rising social discontent … I don’t think the [zero-COVID-19] approach can be sustained that long.”

From Beijing to Guangzhou, a “new situation”

One of the clearest signs that the public outcry is helping drive a shift in policy came this week when China’s top official in charge of COVID-19 controls, Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, suggested the pandemic’s danger is waning, creating a “new situation” for China.

“With the weakening of the … Omicron virus, the popularization of vaccination, and the accumulation of prevention and control experience, China is facing a new situation and new tasks in epidemic prevention and control,” Ms. Sun said in a meeting with China’s National Health Commission on Wednesday, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency.

“We must … take small steps, without stopping,” she said, signaling a gradual but steady loosening of COVID-19 requirements. In a notable change in tone, Ms. Sun didn’t mention the official term for China’s “zero-COVID” policy, also known as “dynamic clearing,” in the Xinhua report.

While softening its tone, the central government has also put the onus for the lockdowns on localities, experts say.

“They are doing a couple of things at once that are both responsive to the public frustration about the zero-COVID: announcing some loosening of the restrictions, but at the same time blaming local officials for being too rigid in how they are implementing them,” says Bruce Dickson, professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University.

Across the country, Beijing, Guangzhou, and other cities until recently had been tightening their lockdowns and building new quarantine shelters. But despite facing major outbreaks by Chinese standards, cities that saw protests are now moving swiftly to lift or modify restrictions that have made life especially difficult for residents.

Beijing this week has begun to allow people who contract COVID-19 and their close contacts to quarantine at home instead of forcing them to go to hospitals or warehouselike makeshift quarantine centers. It has allowed certain groups of people – including older residents, people working from home, and students studying online – to stop getting routine COVID-19 tests every 48 hours. It’s also reopening some shopping malls.

The southern city of Guangzhou, which saw a string of major protests, has opened up several locked-down districts, stopped mass testing, and allowed close contacts of people with COVID-19 to quarantine at home. It also began allowing people to eat in restaurants again rather than order takeout.

Video obtained by Reuters

Residents confront workers in protective suits who are blocking the entrance of a residential compound, amid a COVID-19 outbreak in Shanghai, in this still image obtained from a social media video released Nov. 30, 2022.

Shift in messaging

Another important change is that Chinese epidemiologists and other experts have begun downplaying the risks of COVID-19 – signaling an effort by the government to tamp down fear among a public that has so far been warned to avoid the virus at all costs.

The weakening of COVID-19 variants “reminds us not to panic,” Lan Ke, director of a research team from a government virology laboratory at Wuhan University, was quoted as telling the state-run Global Times newspaper. “For ordinary people, the damage caused by coronavirus has markedly diminished compared to the original strain.”

In some ways, this shift in official messaging is catching up with mainstream Chinese views, experts say. Awareness has grown among ordinary Chinese that the rest of the globe has moved on from the pandemic and fully opened up – underscored by television broadcasts here of maskless fans filling stadiums at the World Cup soccer tournament.

On China’s Twitter-like microblogging website Weibo, the lack of masks at the World Cup in Qatar has been a hot topic in recent days. “The World Cup gave a vivid political lesson on epidemic prevention,” wrote one person. “It is certain that the epidemic prevention policy will be adjusted after the World Cup.”

“We as a whole are more connected than ever, and this is absolutely true of Chinese citizens,” says Jennifer Hsu, research fellow in the Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Program at the Lowy Institute. “Three years on, there is that frustration” among Chinese as they watch “fellow citizens around the world … [gathering] without masks on.”

To be sure, even as Chinese authorities ease restrictions in response to public pressure, they could reassert them if cases and deaths begin to spiral, experts say. 

“The health care issues favor maintaining some kinds of controls … but the economic and political considerations suggest loosening them – so they are working at cross purposes,” says Dr. Dickson, author of “The Party and the People: Chinese Politics in the 21st Century.”

For the time being, though, residents of Beijing’s Chaoyang District neighborhood are breathing a little easier. “Having the streets blocked was pretty inconvenient,” says Zhao, a shopkeeper, withholding her first name. “Things are better now.”

Isaiah J. Downing/Reuters

Flowers, candles, and mementos are left at a memorial after a mass shooting at LGBTQ nightclub Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Nov. 26, 2022.

In the United States, a male under 25 is now the most likely suspect of a mass shooting.

Consider three examples from this year:

• A 22-year-old wearing body armor and wielding an AR-15 attacked an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in November, killing five and injuring 17.
• A 19-year-old New York man pleaded guilty Monday to domestic terrorism motivated by hate, which his lawyer said “represents a condemnation of the racist ideology that fueled his horrific actions on May 14.” He will be sentenced to life in prison without parole for opening fire in a Buffalo grocery store, killing 10 Black people and injuring three others.
• And in Uvalde, Texas, an 18-year-old in May used an assault-style rifle to kill 19 schoolchildren and two teachers before being killed by police after a long standoff.

Of the 30 deadliest mass shootings between 1949 and 2017, only two were carried out by someone younger than 21.

But six of the nine deadliest mass shootings since 2018 were committed by people 21 or younger.

The reasons behind the shift are not conclusive, but experts cite the adolescent mental health crisis, male despair in America, and a loosening of gun laws that allows teenagers in more states to purchase weapons, including long guns. That has prompted a renewed scrutiny on the age of majority: Should it be 18 for everything?

“We know that boys’ impulse control develops later than females’, which is why so much crime is committed by youth,” says criminologist Scott Bonn, author of “Why We Love Serial Killers.” At the same time, he adds, younger people with relatively low stakes in society face “a boiling cauldron of rage and angst. It’s an ideal environment for these individuals to strike out.”

From drinking to voting, from draft age to gun-carry, the extent to which age equals license is still very much in play in America.

Adulthood is set at 18 across most of the world, including in the U.S. The Jewish Talmud declares 18 as the age at which one has enough sound judgment to make financial decisions. 

But there are growing questions regarding the extent to which ancient wisdom holds up in a modern country – particularly one flooded with hundreds of millions of firearms. That has left society pondering new rules for what Dr. Bonn calls “untethered semi-adults.” 

“It seems binary: One day you’re a minor and then you’re an adult,” says Vivian Hamilton, a law professor at William & Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia. But “what we’re learning is that you don’t just kind of cross over and develop all of the right capacities to be a fully formed and functioning citizen ... at once.” 

Like many young men in America, George Roberts grew up with a heady fascination and respect for guns.

For someone stumbling his way into manhood, he says a weapon offered protection and instant respect. Yet Mr. Roberts, who now practices shooting several times a month, waited until he was 25 to buy his first gun. As a younger man, he says, he just wasn’t ready.

“With guns you have to see the good with the bad, and younger people can struggle to tell them apart,” says Mr. Roberts, who is 27 and lives in Savannah.

Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor

George Roberts stops to talk outside the Quickshot gun range in Savannah, Georgia, on Nov. 21, 2022. A gun enthusiast, Mr. Roberts waited until he was 25 years old to buy a gun, guided in part by age limits on gun purchases.

Young people own guns at nearly the same rate as older generations, but are almost twice as likely to report carrying a gun.

Between 2015 and 2019, adolescents carried guns at a rate 41% higher than between 2002 and 2006, according to a recent study in the journal Pediatrics. 

At the same time, 5,465 murders in the U.S. in 2020 were committed by people ages 13 to 24, with the 20-24 age group peaking at 3,025 murders. Those 25-34 committed 4,364 murders. 

That same year, a gunshot became the main cause of death for young people for the first time in decades. Few of those were the result of mass shootings. Most gun deaths are related to gangs, partner violence, suicide, etc. 

“Twenty-one would be a safer age”

Jason Yoon is well aware of these emerging dynamics. The 24-year-old Bellevue, Washington, resident began work at the Second Amendment Foundation, which advocates for gun rights, before buying a gun.

Mr. Yoon watched his father, an immigrant, struggle with protecting his businesses, which include a small store and motel. After using a CO2 powered gun to chase off a would-be robber, the elder Mr. Yoon purchased a handgun and a shotgun. Jason Yoon followed suit, purchasing a handgun and an AR-15 rifle. They both keep their weapons in a safe to which only they know the password.

Mr. Yoon understands that the Constitution grants gun-owning rights to all Americans. He just thinks 21 would be better policy as a limit.

“Twenty-one would be a safer age,” says Mr. Yoon.

Most states have legal loopholes that allow 18-year-olds to buy or own a handgun, despite a federal prohibition. Over half of states have no limit on who can possess a long gun.

But recent shootings have shifted law. 

After the massacre at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, Florida lawmakers raised the gun-buying age to 21. Prosecutors testified that “18-to-20-year olds are uniquely likely to engage in impulsive, emotional, and risky behaviors that offer immediate or short-term rewards.” They called setting the age at 21 “reasonable.” 

Earlier this year, New York became the seventh state to prohibit sales of semiautomatic rifles to those under 21.

In Texas, the dynamic is different. In 2021, Texas signed a law allowing 18-year-olds to carry a concealed weapon without a permit, but only if they have a court-approved protective order against someone. 

The risks of giving young and untrained people more gun rights is real, lawmakers acknowledged. But “you cannot remove all risk from society,” Texas Rep. Matt Schaefer, a co-author of the bill, told a local news channel last year.

Yet tweaking legal age limits has had profound effects on public safety in the past.

States that raised the drinking age to 21 before it became federal law in 1984 saw a median decline in vehicle crashes of 16%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The BMJ, a medical journal, recently published a study that showed states where the minimum purchase age for a handgun was 18 saw 344 more deaths by suicide, on average, than states with higher age limits. 

Meanwhile, increasing the age limit for at least some forms of gun ownership appears to be popular. The Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions found in 2019 that 73% of survey-takers – about 37% of whom were gun owners – said people should be 21 before owning a semiautomatic rifle.

Americans who reach the age of majority “are adults for all purposes,” says William & Mary’s Professor Hamilton, whose work focuses on legal age thresholds. “They have the same legal capacity as adults do. But we’ve increasingly been seeing the proliferation of exceptions to the age of majority – in both directions. That seems to point up that having a single age of majority is not sufficient to meet current social needs. 

“Instead, our lawmakers are increasingly realizing that decision-making capacity is context-specific.” 

One shift is around how different kinds of guns are viewed and used. As hunting has waned, gun manufacturers have increasingly framed their products as cultural markers, often aimed at younger buyers.

“Generally, until the rise of the era of the mass shooter with an AR-style rifle, people weren’t really concerned about 18-year-olds owning long guns,” says Wake Forest University sociologist David Yamane, author of “Concealed Carry Revolution.” “That distinction ... that hand guns are really for violence and long guns are for sport – I think that’s broken down in the minds of a lot of people.” 

That disconnect may be part of the debate that pits a constitutional right to bear arms against the perils of relying purely on age as the gateway to rights and responsibilities.

For that reason, “I do think that we might see [a raised age of majority] adopted in some states,” says UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, author of “Gun Fight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.”

“At what age do you have rights?”

Twenty-four-year-old Courtney Parker has deep concerns about that trend.

Ms. Parker grew up around guns in rural North Carolina. “My family’s tradition at Thanksgiving is, we’re going out in the backyard and blow stuff up,” she says. “That’s what we do in the country.” 

But Ms. Parker, who now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, and is an outreach coordinator for Gun Owners of America, also watched her father take different approaches to her brothers. Her oldest brother hunted alone in a deer stand at 13. A younger brother wasn’t deemed ready at that age.

“To me, it’s more of a parental understanding of your child as to whether or not they’re ready to handle weapons,” says Ms. Parker.

But “I don’t see in the Constitution where there’s an age limit on being able to defend yourself and your property and your family. ... If an 18-year-old can go and fight and bleed and die for their country, I don’t see why it should be [against the law] to own and carry back in the states,” she says. “At what age do you have rights? We don’t ask the government for permission to speak our minds at 18 or 21?”

Indeed, courts have already begun to weigh in on the question.

After a California appeals court found that a ban on semiautomatic sales to those under 21 was unconstitutional, Judge Ryan Nelson wrote, “America would not exist without the heroism of the young adults who fought and died in our revolutionary army.”

At the same time, it’s clear to some experts that cultural dynamics – including violent political rhetoric – also has played a role.

In his book “Violence,” James Gilligan, the former chief psychiatrist of the Massachusetts juvenile prison system, wrote that violence is a primary way to ward off shame by making others weep instead. 

“That’s the idea of violence as the means by which you restore or reclaim a damaged sense of masculinity,” says Michael Kimmel, a sociologist and former professor at Stony Brook University. “And that’s the profile of so many school shooters. Every one of them had been bullied, beaten up, and targeted for years.”

Those dynamics have left some lawmakers looking for other solutions. 

In October, the New York attorney general published a report citing the “dark web” as a major influence on the Buffalo grocery store shooter. The attorney general is recommending that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act be amended to amp up the responsibility of online platforms to stop violent and unlawful content from being seen.

“At 17 [one’s] son is not old enough to drink legally, but if he goes off to a party, you have to trust that he is going to be able to get home safely, figure out who the designated driver is going to be, and then you have to let him go,” says Professor Kimmel, author of “Guyland.” “And that means you are condoning something that’s illegal. That’s what it means when he’s not old enough to drink but old enough to drive. It’s a bad combination.”

“There are contradictory themes when we grow up, and we learn to navigate our way through by knowing when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em,” says Professor Kimmel. “It’s not just the maturity of the individual, but also the resources that one has at hand.”

Many Americans remember first shooting at young ages. Some 37% of gun owners say they owned a gun before age 18. Ryder air rifles are iconic. Urban high schools in Georgia have basement shooting ranges for 10-meter Olympic air guns.

Many are like Jack, a 21-year-old soldier at Hunter Air Field in Savannah, who declined to give his last name for privacy reasons.

Emerging from Quickshot, a Savannah shooting range, in civilian clothes, Jack says the Army fine-tuned his rifle skills. But shooting downrange is far different, he says, from potentially confronting an assailant on the streets or at his apartment.

So he is mulling concealed carry. “I just don’t want to be in a situation where I might need it, look down, and see that it’s not there,” he says. 

Mr. Roberts, the Savannah gun owner, has no problem raising the age of long-gun ownership to 21, but wonders if that will really address the deeper problems of disturbed and disconnected young men.

Parents and other community members, he says, should listen more closely to teenagers who express interest in guns. If they are interested, he says, show them how to do it responsibly – thus providing not only education, but oversight.

“The best, maybe only, thing to do,” says Mr. Roberts, “is take them under your wing and show them how to do it the right way.”

Pentagon officials laud Ukrainian soldiers for “not asking anyone to fight for them,” as Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin often points out. “All Ukraine is asking for is the means to fight – and we’re determined to provide that means.”

That equals weapons and ammunition – lots of it – and it’s no small feat to keep it coming. American military stockpiles are now “dangerously depleted,” warned a July report from the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. 

But senior U.S. officials have answered, in effect, “We’ve got this.” These reassurances have not wavered despite lingering concerns about how, exactly, the United States and its NATO allies will balance their considerable support for Kyiv with the need to make sure they have enough arms to defend themselves if an adversary attacks. 

Still, helping Ukraine repel Russia is worth taking some risks, many military analysts say. “We’ve not been in a position where we’ve got only a few days of some critical munition left,” Pentagon comptroller Michael McCord told reporters recently. “But we are now supporting a partner who is.” 

What have the U.S. and its NATO allies already given Ukraine, anyway?

The U.S. has tapped into its existing weapons stockpiles 26 times since February, committing more than $19 billion in security assistance to Ukraine, Pentagon officials say. It’s a big jump – between 2011 and 2015, for example, the U.S. drew down stockpiles 13 times to help allies globally. This amounts to 56% of military aid to Ukraine among 40 major donor countries, according to the Kiel Institute in Germany.

This includes Javelin missiles; anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles; hundreds of Humvees and light tactical vehicles; millions of rounds of small arms ammunition; hundreds of generators, tents, and heaters; and “several thousand pieces” of cold-weather gear for the approaching winter, to name just a few key pieces of kit. 

Roman Chop/AP

A Ukrainian soldier fires an anti-tank missile at an undisclosed location in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, Nov. 17, 2022.

The Pentagon has also announced that it is doubling to roughly 40 its shipments of High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) to Kyiv because of their “outsize” impact on the battlefield. 

NATO allies are also opening their weapons stores to Ukraine. Slovenia pledged 40% of its tanks and Norway 45% of its howitzer long-range weapon supplies, according to Kiel Institute analysis. Russian neighbor Estonia has given the equivalent of one-third of its defense budget to Ukraine, Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur said in recent remarks at the German Marshall Fund.

Is the U.S. giving Ukraine its best stuff – and should it? 

Despite pleas from Ukraine and even some NATO allies, the U.S. has not sent fighter jets, tanks, or its Patriot air defense systems to the battlefield. 

These decisions are the result of a confluence of concerns: the risk of escalating the war with Moscow or technology falling into Russian hands, and the fact that some weapons are simply too high-tech for Ukrainian soldiers to quickly learn to operate and – equally tricky – to maintain on an unrelenting battlefield. 

Still, some NATO allies have lobbied hard for policy changes. When Germany offered to deploy Patriot missile systems along Poland’s border with Ukraine, Warsaw suggested Berlin instead deliver the systems to Kyiv. Poland made a similar suggestion earlier in the war, offering to transfer its U.S.-made fighter jets to Ukraine.

These proposals have been rejected. A single Patriot battery requires about 90 troops to operate it – troops the U.S. and Germany refuse to send to Ukraine, since should they be harmed, NATO would be forced to retaliate against Russia, catastrophically widening the war. 

There is widespread agreement that this is the right approach. At the same time, having seen the Ukrainian military in action, the U.S. has reevaluated its position to some extent, says Max Bergmann, director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington.

After the first Russian invasion, which resulted in the annexing of Crimea in 2014, the U.S. remained reticent about “providing Ukraine with any sort of advanced technology, including Javelin missiles, to a military infected with Russian agents,” Mr. Bergmann says. “Now, the U.S. has opened its aperture when it comes to military technology, because Ukraine’s needs outweigh the risks of Russia getting its hands on it.”  

Will the U.S. and NATO allies have enough weapons in their stockpiles to defend themselves in the future?

The U.S. is certainly running through stockpiles of some of its weapons – an estimated one-third of its inventory of Javelin and Stinger missiles, for starters, according to a CSIS analysis. Others – guided TOW anti-tank missiles and launchers among them – remain “plentiful” alternatives. The U.S. has given more than 1.5 million 155 mm projectiles to Kyiv, “probably close to the limit” that Washington can give “without risk to its own war fighting capabilities,” the report adds.

Given battlefield demand and profit potential, defense contractors are increasing production. Lockheed Martin plans to boost output from 60 HIMARS to 96 annually, for example. These ramp-ups can take months or even years, however.

In the meantime, while officials understandably dislike dipping below designated stockpile levels, there’s always the possibility of adjusting these to “absorb a little more risk, and I think that’s something worth doing,” Mr. Bergmann says. “If a Russian tank is destroyed, that’s ultimately depleting your adversary. I think that’s something that has to be taken into account here.” 

It was his 16-year-old granddaughter who asked just the right question.

“What’s your superpower?” she asked Alfred Molina.

Mr. Molina plays Chief Inspector Armand Gamache in the new TV series “Three Pines,” out Dec. 2 on Amazon Prime Video.

The British American actor had, by his own account, been “waffling on” to his grandchildren about the complexities of the character, based on the award-winning detective books set in rural Quebec by Canadian author Louise Penny.

Then he found her answer. “Empathy.”

And so it is that Mr. Molina, best known in America for his role as the villainous Doctor Octopus in the “Spider-Man” franchise, has taken on a role that was originally conceived by Ms. Penny as the embodiment of goodness and decency.

“And that’s modeled right from the bat,” says Ms. Penny of a mystery series that’s always been far more than a whodunit. “And I don’t think there’s a time that we’ve ever needed that more.”

From the very first scene of the eight-episode series, the cameras narrow in on Inspector Gamache’s eyes, eyebrows furrowed, looking out at a protest in front of Quebec’s police headquarters. Officers are shoving a group of Indigenous women who demand the police look for a missing girl. Finally, he can’t take the abuse of power. He walks outside and pulls the officers off, driving the girl’s family home and launching one of the major throughlines of the series, which run alongside the “weekly murders” that he and his team set out to solve.

Mikael Theimer

Award-winning author Louise Penny has written 18 novels about Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and the rural Quebec village of Three Pines. When she began, she was told no one would read a novel set in Canada. A TV series based on her books, "Three Pines," debuts Dec. 2.

Through it all, says Mr. Molina, Gamache is “seeking to understand why people behave the way they do, which I think is a kind of offshoot of goodness in a sense.” 

“It is understanding that all of us are capable, given a certain set of circumstances, of doing something terrible. ... So he’s much more interested in why things happened rather than how, where, and when.”

Far from worrying about whether “goodness” is interesting enough for audiences, Mr. Molina says Gamache’s humanity has made it one of the best roles he’s played.

Fans around the world are waiting with equal anticipation – and dread – to see how the TV show compares to the beloved characters of their imaginations who populate the fictional town of Three Pines in now 18 books. Ms. Penny’s latest, “A World of Curiosities,” also came out this week to rave reviews. (The Monitor highlighted it as one of November’s best books.)

The author’s many fan pages are full of speculation about whether the televised “Three Pines” is too dark – it can be, according to Ms. Penny – or whether Gamache can match their expectations without being himself Quebecois. Mr. Molina intentionally decided not to feign a French accent so as not to pretend to be representative. He didn’t know the books before he was asked to play the role but now counts himself a fan. 

“I don’t watch adaptations because the books are always better,” says Chief Inspector Gamache fan Karen Scott from Oshawa, Ontario, who doesn’t have an Amazon account but says an author endorsement would make her sign up. “I’ll watch it only if Ms. Penny endorses it.”

The perfect chief inspector

Ms. Penny says that watching 2 million of her words and the last two decades of character development translated to the screen – especially Gamache, whom she modeled after her late husband, Michael Whitehead – was fraught.

“It was awful, awful, awful,” says the award-winning author. “But the cardinal sin and something that would have been unrecoverable would be miscasting Gamache. They had to get that right.”

In the end, she says, Mr. Molina was perfectly cast.

The TV “Three Pines” (rated for ages 16+ by Amazon) is different from the welcoming village of found family she created, “but the good far outweighs what I would consider to be the flaws,” she says.

Fans will also be offered a completely new storyline and perspective that appear nowhere in the books. The Indigenous story – from that first scene – and a murder case that revolves around Canada’s brutal history of residential schooling for Indigenous children are central to the series.

Not only does the storyline bring Canada’s current reckoning to an international platform, but it’s also done with nuance and authenticity – thanks to work the team did with Indigenous actors, the director Tracey Deer, and consultants. In the series, Sgt. Isabelle Lacoste is played by Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers alongside Mr. Molina, who says learning this history was a listening process.  

It’s the reason Amber Dowling, an entertainment writer in Canada, gave the show a rave review in Variety. “They actually take their time and they incorporate it; they layer it in. It’s not just one story,” Ms. Dowling says in an interview. “The Indigenous throughline, I feel, is the big story. That’s the story that’s informing the main characters. And I feel like the murders of the week are what’s informing the town characters.”

When Ms. Penny was trying to publish her first book, she was told that no one would want to read a crime novel set in Canada. In the end, what readers often say they love best is its celebration of Quebec (Ms. Penny was named to the Order of Canada in 2013 for her contributions to Canadian culture).

In the adaptation, produced by Left Bank, which also produced “The Crown,” fans will get to revel in that. They will recognize the pretty Eastern Townships outside Montreal where Ms. Penny lives, the characters, and their gathering spot at the local bistro, where a sense of community is cherished more than in the rest of North America. And viewers will also see a Canada that has abused and terrorized Indigenous populations, a damning look that is too often swept under the rug. 

“If we lose sight of goodness ...”

Ms. Penny says the series in the end achieves what she set out to achieve 18 years ago. “The thing that keeps coming back and that is for me the spine of the books, including [“A World of Curiosities”], and the TV series, is the quote from [the poet W.H.] Auden to Herman Melville.”

It inspired the entire series, and she quoted it once to the Monitor in a profile in 2018, but after so much has happened – the pandemic and dangerous political polarization – it feels even more pertinent. “Goodness existed: that was the new knowledge. His terror had to blow itself quite out / To let him see it.”

“The books and the TV series are about terror,” Ms. Penny says, “but they are equally about goodness.”

And Gamache is the perfect vessel for that message. “He understands that there’s a duality, that we’re all complex,” says Mr. Molina. “But if we lose sight of goodness, not just as a characteristic, but also as something to be aimed at, something to be hoped for, then we kind of lose a lot of our own humanity.”

Prue Leith, “The Great British Baking Show” judge, wears yellows, blues, and reds that are as bold as a Mondrian painting and embody the bright optimism she exudes on screen.

Ms. Leith is perhaps Britain’s answer to Martha Stewart. By age 29, the South Africa-born chef had launched Leiths, a Michelin-starred restaurant. In 1975, she founded her first cooking school. She later became a newspaper food columnist, cookbook author, romance novelist, and a judge on several British culinary television shows.

Ms. Leith, who was made a dame by Queen Elizabeth II in 2021, is also the author of the recent release “I’ll Try Anything Once,” an updated version of her autobiography. 

Her latest endeavor is a new iteration of “The Great American Baking Show.” Filmed inside the same tent in Britain as the original flagship show, it features American contestants under the watchful gaze of Ms. Leith and her regular judging partner Paul Hollywood. The series will debut on the Roku Channel in 2023.

In the meantime, a celebrity holiday episode is streaming as of Dec. 2 on Roku. Ms. Leith spoke with the Monitor via Zoom. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The holiday episode features celebrities such as actor D’Arcy Carden (“The Good Place”) and football player Marshawn Lynch. It seemed like some of them had never set foot in a kitchen before.

[Paul and I] both enormously enjoy the celebrity shows because we usually film them after a run of the main show. You’re dealing with nothing but madly ambitious bakers for whom it matters tremendously that they don’t go home. It’s a life and death thing for them. And then you get a bunch of celebrities who are in the tent for completely different reasons, usually because they’re fans of the show. So the atmosphere from the beginning is not so competitive.

What’s interesting is, towards the end of the two days, every single one of those bakers wants to win! ... [Marshawn] was convinced he was doing everything wrong. He was absolutely sure he shouldn’t be there. He was really worried. Well, his attitude changed. He was good.

When you’re judging contestants, you always seem to try to find something positive to offer as feedback. Why?

It’s quite something to cook something in front of millions of people with cameras on. I don’t want it to be stressful. I think it’s so easy for us as judges, because we see so much great baking all the time, to just take it for granted that they can make a perfect sponge or that they can make a really delicious butter icing. The easy thing to do is to look for the problems so that you’ve got something to criticize. I make an effort to remember this is a great bake to start with, and then there’s something wrong with it. 

Did “The Great American Baking Show” contestants bring particularly American flavors to the recipes? 

I do remember having to be educated in one or two types of cake that I wasn’t familiar with. Americans tend to put a little bit more sugar into stuff. Americans are much more used to chile than we are. Once or twice we get chile that would absolutely blow your head off!

The ovens are in centigrade and the measuring cups are in the metric system. So that must be a bit of an adjustment for the American bakers. 

They will be baking very hard for six months before the show ever starts. You have to work very hard. They will be following Paul’s recipe books much more than mine, because he does more baking books than I do. So they will be very used to different measurements. I have to say, I rather like your cup … because it’s so easy, so quick. 

When you launched Leiths in 1969 was it more difficult then, as a woman, to be an entrepreneur?

I left the Cordon Bleu, where I trained as a cook, and I immediately just started cooking people’s dinner parties. I was a freelance chef for hire. I’d always work for myself. The problems for women in the workplace come from their bosses. 

I was always very entrepreneurial. When I opened that restaurant, I was losing money hand-over-fist the first few weeks. I thought, “I’ve never owned a restaurant. I’ve never worked in a restaurant. What am I doing, thinking I can run one?” And so I made a deliberate effort to make friends with some restaurateurs. I found a true and wonderful guy called Joseph Berkmann. He said, “You’re giving huge portions and people aren’t eating them all.” I thought because I had a fixed price, that I had to be very generous. 

The only woman running a posh restaurant in London at the time was Madame Prunier, and she was running her husband’s restaurant. Mine was the first one that was my own restaurant. So I got huge publicity. I filled the restaurant up with people. Gradually we got better at it. And then we got a Michelin star. 

What’s your philosophy on purpose and meaning and fulfillment?

I was born with this glass-half-full attitude. ... I’m always keen to know the next thing. If I go to a town, I want to go to the museums. I want to do this. I want to do that. I think the one quality which I think I have developed over the years, which is very useful, is that I’m quite dogged. You know, it’s, “I’ve got a good idea; I will stick at it until it happens and I don’t give up easily.”

“The Great American Baking Show: Celebrity Holiday,” rated TV-14, is streaming now on the Roku Channel.

AP

Fans watch the World Cup in the Holy Trinity Church in Sittingbourne, England, Nov. 21.

New census data in Britain caused a stir this week when it was revealed that England and Wales are no longer majority Christian. That shift has been coming for decades – brought on by a rise in other religions (Islam and Hinduism) and negative attitudes about Christian churches. It is reflected in a once-unimaginable political constellation: a Christian head of state, a Hindu prime minister, and a Muslim mayor of London.

For many in Britain, where national identity has long been shaped by a deep entanglement of church and state, Christianity’s minority status arrived sooner than expected. The number of people who identify as Christian dropped by 17% over the past decade. Those who claimed “no religion” soared by 57%. A similar shift is underway in the United States and across Western Europe. 

To focus on the numbers, however, misses something. As the world’s religions come increasingly into contact with each other, there is evidence that they are reinforcing similar qualities of thought – and perhaps a more faithful practice of shared convictions.

“The Christian calling to love God and love our neighbors endures, regardless of our demographics,” said Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Washington-based Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, on the website Sojourners. 

Indeed, the thinning out of pews in Western churches may not be a reliable indicator of attitudes toward spirituality or the enduring influence of Christian values in those societies. A 2018 Baylor University study of the increase of so-called nones – people who identify as having no denominational affiliation – found that while 27% of Americans attend a church service at least once a month, 58% pray weekly. In the United Kingdom, Anglican Bishop Philip North estimates that more than half those who say they are not religious nonetheless believe in God and a third of them say they pray. There remains “quite a significant spiritual questioning in the U.K.,” he told The Washington Times. Spiritual curiosity may be driving a generational shift among youth, too. A new study of teenagers in 26 countries published by the evangelical research group Barna in October found that 60% want to know more about Jesus.

For some, the decline of Christianity among Western nations and its growth elsewhere offers an opportunity to focus less on how it defines nations than on how it uplifts societies through individuals’ practice. “Isn’t Christianity steady, even on the rise, in the majority of the world?” Marlena Graves, an adjunct professor at Winebrenner Theological Seminary in Findlay, Ohio, asked Sojourners. “Our sustenance is to do the will of God whom we serve: loving God, neighbors, and enemies in practical ways, not in our imaginaries.” Qualities of thought, like salt, neither decline nor perish.