Category: Latest News

It’s been two years since “Normal People,” the series adapted from Sally Rooney’s novel of the same name, debuted on Hulu. Depending on how warped your perception of time is lately, that may feel like it was just last week. Or perhaps the experience of watching the show glimmers in your memory like a relic from another lifetime. I’m of the persuasion that it’s been just long enough that I’m ready for another Rooney adaptation, so I’ve been eagerly anticipating “Conversations With Friends,” which arrives on May 15.

If that seems far away, you can indulge any hankering for British drama this weekend with the first episode of the four-part “Masterpiece: Ridley Road,” about a Jewish hairdresser who infiltrates a neo-Nazi group in 1960s London. Or skip the drama and try Showtime’s “I Love That For You,” starring “Saturday Night Live” alums Vanessa Bayer and Molly Shannon as hosts on a home shopping network. The second season of the comedy series “Ziwe” premieres this weekend on Showtime as well.

Continuing in the comedy vein, Mike Myers plays multiple characters in the Netflix limited series “The Pentaverate,” a spinoff of his 1993 film “So I Married an Axe Murderer,” premiering Thursday (May 5, naturally). It also stars Keegan-Michael Key, Ken Jeong, Debi Mazar and Jennifer Saunders. And “Hacks” is back for Season 2 on HBO Max on May 12. (More grist for those of us marveling at the elastic nature of pandemic time: “Hacks” debuted a year ago.)

The absorbing documentary series “The Staircase,” about the writer Michael Peterson’s trial in his wife’s death, is getting the dramatization treatment on HBO Max starting Thursday. Colin Firth and Toni Collette play the couple, but I’m most interested to see Parker Posey portray the prosecutor Freda Black, who was an outsized character in the documentary. “Candy,” another true-crime tale, starring Jessica Biel and Melanie Lynskey, arrives on Hulu on May 9.

The real housewives of both Atlanta and Beverly Hills return in May, as do “Basketball Wives” and “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars.” On the documentary front, Netflix has “Meltdown: Three Mile Island,” about the 1979 nuclear accident in Pennsylvania, and “Our Father,” about the children of a fertility doctor who secretly inseminated patients with his own sperm.

And for those who’d like to escape the space-time continuum — and who can blame them? — there’s “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” starting Thursday, as well as “Obi-Wan Kenobi” and the first part of the fourth season of “Stranger Things,” both on May 27.

What are you looking forward to watching this month? Drop me an email.

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WEEKENDS ARE FOR …

🍿 Movies: Five horror flicks to stream.

🎭 Theater: “POTUS” is a new Broadway satire about presidential enablers.

🖼 Art: Even the “wrong” Picasso (now in Washington, D.C.) can be right. And Basquiat and Matisse are on offer in New York.

THE WEEK IN CULTURE

I got my first bunch of local asparagus this week and put it to excellent use in Eric Kim’s recipe for creamy asparagus pasta, with its silky, seaweed-laced sauce. The dish features a speedy and very smart technique: You boil rigatoni in water seasoned with a sheet of dried kelp (such as Korean dasima or Japanese kombu), then add more kelp to garlic- and red onion-spiked heavy cream. Sliced asparagus and slivers of toasted seaweed (gim, nori or seaweed snacks) are folded in right at the end for freshness and crunch. I doubled the asparagus, using the whole big bunch, and there was still plenty of the savory sauce to cover it all. The subtle umami flavor of the seaweed reminded me of a good aged Parmesan — albeit with a delightful saline kick.

REAL ESTATE

Philadelphia Phillies at New York Mets, M.L.B.: It’s very early. But … the Mets are good. In the latest edition of The Athletic’s M.L.B. power rankings, the Mets were No. 2, behind only the powerhouse Dodgers. On Friday, five Mets pitchers combined to throw a no-hitter. And their starter for Sunday, Max Scherzer, hasn’t lost a regular-season game since last May. 7 p.m. Eastern on Sunday, ESPN.

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NOW TIME TO PLAY

A former Marine infantryman who left Kentucky to defend Ukraine in March was killed this week while fighting alongside the Ukrainian military, according to his uncle. He is believed to be the first American killed in the fighting.

Willy Joseph Cancel Jr., 22, lived in Kentucky and worked as a correctional officer prior to his death, the uncle, Christopher Cancel, said in an interview on Friday.

The uncle said that someone who had been fighting alongside the younger Mr. Cancel had called his father and said that he had left for a nighttime patrol on April 24, and his unit was overrun by Russian troops, possibly the next day. The uncle said that the caller indicated that his body had not yet been recovered.

A fund-raising page set up by the family says that Willy Joseph Cancel Jr.’s wife also got a call, on Tuesday. “Your husband fought bravely, but unfortunately he did not make it,” the caller said, according to the account, which was written by his father. It did not say who made the call.

“Our entire family is simply distraught, and we have no idea how to continue,” the posting said.

A Ukrainian Defense Ministry official said on Friday that three foreigners — an American, a Briton and a Dane — had been killed fighting for the Ukrainian Army’s International Legion. The official did not provide their names for the record and asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak about them publicly. Any foreigners fighting for that branch of the army are effectively part of Ukraine’s military because they receive government salaries and are required to sign contracts.

Mr. Cancel’s mother, Rebecca Cabrera, told CNN that he was working with a private military contracting company, but on Friday, his uncle said the family did not know the name of the company and had not been contacted by any contractor after his death.

According to the Marine Corps, Willy Joseph Cancel Jr. spent nearly four years in the Marine Corps and received a bad conduct discharge, leaving the service as a private in November after serving time in the brig for an undisclosed criminal offense.

The State Department said on Friday that it was aware of the reports of Mr. Cancel’s death and would provide consular assistance to his family. “Out of respect to the family during this very difficult time, we don’t have anything further to announce,” said Jalina Porter, a department spokeswoman. “We also do want to reiterate that U.S. citizens should not travel to Ukraine during this active armed conflict.”

“It is a very dangerous situation,” she added, saying that U.S. citizens in Ukraine were being singled out by Russian government security officials, and that “U.S. citizens in Ukraine should depart immediately, if it is safe to do so using commercial or privately available ground transportation options.”

Since Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24, an unknown number of Americans have volunteered to help Ukraine in various ways, including hundreds of military veterans seeking to join fighters on the ground. Ukrainian officials claim that thousands of foreign volunteers have joined the ranks for its military, but the true number is hard to track.

Two other American veterans involved in fighting in Ukraine were wounded this week, according to the family of one of them.

Paul K. Gray, 42, of Tyler, Texas, and Manus E. McCaffery, 20, of Parma, Ohio, both of whom had served in the U.S. Army, were injured on Wednesday when a Russian artillery shell hit their fighting position, according to Mr. Gray’s mother, Jan Gray.

The two were waiting to launch an ambush on a Russian tank when shrapnel hit Mr. McCaffery in the face and collapsed a concrete block wall on Mr. Gray, injuring his leg, according to Twitter posts by an American journalist, Nolan Peterson. Video and photos recorded by Mr. Gray show the two camouflage-clad fighters receiving first aid and riding in a military ambulance a short time later, with Mr. McCaffery’s face and head covered in bloody bandages.

Ms. Gray, who is a nurse, said she spoke with her son by video after the attack, who confirmed that the two had been wounded. “He’s doing well,” she said of her son. “The other boy I’m more concerned about.”

Mr. McCaffery’s family did not respond to a request for comment. Ms. Gray said at least one McCaffery family member was traveling to Ukraine.

Mr. Gray was an Army infantry sergeant who deployed twice to Iraq during the height of hostilities there, according to the Army. He told The Daily Texan in 2009 that he was medically retired with a Purple Heart.

Mr. McCaffery was in the Army for only two years — far short of the standard enlistment. He deployed to Afghanistan for one month in August 2021 and left the Army in January. The Army did not give a reason for his discharge.

Ms. Gray said the two men had grown close in Ukraine, and went everywhere together.

Mr. Gray has been a vocal proponent of defending Ukraine, she said. He moved to the country before the war, joined the military when Russia invaded, and has made several media appearances since to explain his decision.

“It’s my moral obligation,” he told Fox News in early March. “These are some of the best people in the world.”

Jane Arraf contributed reporting and Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

It took six walks and five pitchers, but the Mets secured the second no-hitter in franchise history when Tylor Megill and four relievers combined to shut down the Philadelphia Phillies in a 3-0 win at Citi Field on Friday night.

The feat is the latest highlight in a breakout season for Megill, who was the team’s unexpected opening day starter and is now 4-0 with a 1.93 E.R.A. in five starts. On Friday he had walked three and struck out five through five innings when he was pulled from the game. He had thrown 88 pitches.

Mets 3, Phillies 0 | Box Score | Play-by-Play

Megill was relieved by Drew Smith, who threw one and a third innings, walking one. Smith gave way to Joely Rodriguez, who walked two in an inning of work. Seth Lugo was fourth, retiring both batters he faced.

The team’s closer, Edwin Díaz, had a tough assignment with Bryce Harper, the National League’s reigning winner of the Most Valuable Player Award, leading off the ninth, but Díaz blew the Phillies away, striking out the side on 13 pitches.

While the Mets’ biggest issue seemed to a touch of wildness, the team’s pitchers were also bailed out multiple times by tough defensive plays by center fielder Brandon Nimmo.

The team’s offense kept the drama low on a night that belonged to the pitchers. Second baseman Jeff McNeil put the Mets ahead in the bottom of the second inning with a two-run single and first baseman Pete Alonso gave the bullpen some breathing room by hitting a home run in the bottom of the sixth.

The Mets once endured a rough stretch in which the franchise did not have a no-hitter from the team’s inception in 1962 until 2012 — even as the former Met Nolan Ryan threw a record seven — but finally had that streak end when Johan Santana threw a no-hitter against the St. Louis Cardinals on June 1, 2012.

“We are going to break up the big tech companies, ladies and gentlemen. We have to do it,” J.D. Vance hollered at a rally for Donald Trump in Ohio last weekend. “You cannot have a real country if a bunch of corrupt scumbags who take their marching orders from the Communist Chinese tell us what we’re allowed to say and how we’re allowed to say it.”

Mr. Vance, a 37-year-old memoirist and venture capitalist who is running in the Republican Senate primary in Ohio, is new to politics. But he was recently fortified by Mr. Trump’s endorsement in a hotly contested race, and his language on that bright and breezy afternoon was suitably bold.

Amid a nodding crowd of men and women in Trump T-shirts and MAGA hats, Mr. Vance’s gray suit may have looked a bit funereal, but his applause lines were decidedly unstodgy. He assailed Joe Biden as a “crazy fake president who will buy energy from Putin and the scumbags of Venezuela but won’t buy it from middle class Ohioans,” who live in a top fracking state.

“Scumbag” is a word that seems to have entered Mr. Vance’s public vocabulary only recently. It didn’t appear in “Hillbilly Elegy,” the tender 2016 autobiography in which he described his clannish and troubled Kentucky-descended family.

Ohio hillbillies — some of them natives, some of them migrants from Kentucky and West Virginia who manned Ohio’s factories in the last century — are Mr. Vance’s people. He wrote about them in his memoir without condescension or squeamishness: his drug-addicted and erratic mother, who asked him for a cup of his clean urine one morning when she expected to be drug-tested at work; the various boyfriends, husbands, police officers and social workers her misadventures brought into the family’s life; his tenacious grandmother Mamaw, who, as he recalled more recently, “loved the Lord” and “loved the F-word” and owned 19 handguns.

These people helped him on his way from the blighted Ohio steel town of Middletown to the Marines, Ohio State and Yale Law School.

Published on the eve of the 2016 elections, “Hillbilly Elegy” made Mr. Vance, then 31, a literary sensation. It sold more than three million copies, and is still a staple of high school and college curriculums. Pundits most likely speed-read the book for its sociological “takeaway,” a description of the left-behind whites who then seemed instrumental in rallying the Republican Party behind Mr. Trump and would soon put him in the White House.

While the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” retained a lot of the exotic patriotism of his kinfolk, even to the extent of choking up whenever he heard “Proud to Be an American,” he drew the line at their chosen candidate. In spirited interviews, articles, tweets and text messages throughout the 2016 election season, Mr. Vance described Mr. Trump as “reprehensible” and an “idiot.” He didn’t vote for him. Many of Mr. Vance’s cosmopolitan literary admirers must have been consoled to think that discerning citizens could see through Mr. Trump, even in the parts of the country most taken with him.

But Mr. Vance backed Mr. Trump in 2020. And now, 10 days before the Republican primary on May 3, Mr. Trump has traveled to Ohio to tell a frenzied crowd that, even though Mr. Vance once said a lot of nasty things about him, he is a “fearless MAGA fighter” and “a great Buckeye.” And here comes Mr. Vance, bounding onstage to call Mr. Trump “the best president of my lifetime.”

Mr. Vance’s readers may feel let down and misled. So too, in their own way, may his Republican primary rivals in Ohio, who have been professing their fidelity to Trumpism, only to see their leader confer his blessing on a Johnny-come-lately. The conservative Club for Growth, which backs the former Ohio treasurer Josh Mandel, has spent millions on campaign ads that replay every Trump-skeptical thing Mr. Vance said half a decade ago. When Mr. Trump’s endorsement of Mr. Vance was first rumored, dozens of Mandel allies even petitioned the ex-president to reconsider.

Mr. Vance’s Trumpian turn has left a wide variety of people wondering whether it arises from sincere conversion or cynical calculation. But there is something more complex going on.

Readers of “Hillbilly Elegy” who find Mr. Vance’s campaign rhetoric a jarring departure may actually be misremembering the book. His Mamaw railed at the so-called Section 8 federal subsidies that allowed a succession of poor families to move in next door. Southern whites were migrating to the Republican Party, Mr. Vance wrote, in large part because “many in the white working class saw precisely what I did, working at Dillman’s,” a neighborhood grocery. There, thanks to food stamps, he wrote, “our drug-addict neighbor would buy T-bone steaks, which I was too poor to buy for myself but was forced by Uncle Sam to buy for someone else.”

If Mr. Vance and the people who populate his book were bursting with political impulses, they had as yet no political program, so their impulses meant nothing. Before Donald Trump, there was no place in the country’s political imagination — or its heart — for the poor whites he described. Mr. Trump changed that — nowhere more so than in Ohio. A lot of political gestures today don’t have the same meaning that they did five years ago.

Ohio has produced seven presidents and, until last fall, had a reputation as an electoral bellwether. In the 14 presidential elections between Lyndon Johnson’s victory in 1964 and Donald Trump’s in 2016, Ohio sided with the winner every time. In Joe Biden’s narrow 2020 victory, however, it lurched wildly to Mr. Trump, giving him an eight-point victory in the state. Some states voted more heavily for Mr. Trump, but none has been more transformed by him.

Mr. Vance is running for the Senate seat held for two terms by Rob Portman, a Republican who is retiring, and Mr. Trump’s endorsement has been the great prize in the Republican primary. At times the race has seemed less an election than an audition. The various candidates, including Mr. Vance, traveled to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort for fund-raisers and consultations and solicited the help of Trump allies and family members. (Donald Trump Jr. was an early Vance backer.)

Each of the Republican candidates in the primary has built his or her campaign around an implicit hypothesis about how to appeal to Mr. Trump, and thus about what Trumpism is in the first place. Jane Timken, former chair of the state Republican Party, tried to win over Mr. Trump by hard work and loyalty. In 2017, she led the Trumpian project of breaking then-Gov. John Kasich’s grip on the state Republican Party.

The former state treasurer, Mr. Mandel, appears to have been guided by the idea that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Having made his name promoting transparency in state accounts and other old-style mainstream Republican priorities, he now torques ordinary conservative dispositions into categorical imperatives. (“I think illegal immigrants should be deported, period,” he said at a debate in March, specifying that he meant “every single illegal.”)

Mr. Vance’s ultimately successful route to Mr. Trump’s favor was a bit subtler. To him the core of the Trumpian project isn’t intraparty power struggles or demagogy; it’s reconnecting politics to ordinary people. Mr. Vance tries to do this in a lot of different ways. For one thing, he calls for breaking up the nation’s cozy political system. After laying out a list of Mr. Trump’s triumphs to the MAGA crowd last weekend, Mr. Vance insisted, “The thing that Trump revealed, more than any policy achievement, is that we are living in an incredibly corrupt country.”

What does it mean, Mr. Vance likes to ask listeners, that six of the highest-income ZIP codes in the United States are in metropolitan Washington? How do legislators get so rich on the relatively modest salaries they make?

Mr. Vance also grasps, as Mr. Trump does, the deep discontent with political correctness, and the hunger for someone unafraid to stand up to it. If there was a moment in Mr. Vance’s campaign when his fortunes seemed to turn, it was his release of a TV ad that began: “Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans? The media calls us racist for wanting to build Trump’s wall.”

The ad took voters by the collar. The sense among Ohioans at town halls that they are being cast as “bad people” for holding contestable but reasonable political views is palpable. They have reason to think their lives and careers can be damaged by the merest imputation of racism. A person like Mr. Vance who is willing to crack a joke about the term “racist” is someone fearless enough to follow into battle.

From Mr. Trump’s perspective, it cannot have harmed Mr. Vance that he was willing to burn his boats this way. Donald Trump Jr., traveling with Mr. Vance in the week his father endorsed him, drew a contrast between Mr. Vance and other Republicans who “crumble the moment the media falsely accuses them of being ‘racist.’”

The barrage of televised attacks on Mr. Vance for his previous anti-Trump remarks may even have provided him with a Trumpian credential, as one who can handle nonstop negative publicity. This is not to say that Mr. Vance lacks his own formidable supporters: Peter Thiel, a Trump supporter in 2016 and a Vance friend, has reportedly made $13.5 million in campaign contributions to Protect Ohio Values, a super PAC backing Mr. Vance.

The ads that were meant to deny Mr. Vance the Trump endorsement set up an institutional confrontation that may also have worked in his favor. The Club for Growth, the Washington-based anti-tax group backing Mr. Mandel, was responsible for the ads exposing Mr. Vance’s anti-Trump remarks in 2016. But back then the Club itself was among the most Trump-hostile of Republican groups.

It continues to pursue a largely supply-side, limited-government, free-trade agenda, at a time when the Trumpified Ohio G.O.P. has grown so suspicious of corporate progressivism (or, if you will, “woke capital”) that it distrusts even the Chamber of Commerce. Mr. Vance’s aides took to calling Mr. Mandel’s backers “The Club for Chinese Growth.”

Then one day about two weeks ago, Mr. Vance was having a milkshake with his son when his phone rang and a voice on the other end said, “Hey, this is Donald Trump.”

Mr. Vance himself has a theory about why he got the Trump endorsement and his rivals did not. It is that he treated Mr. Trump not just as a person to be flattered or parodied but also as the source of an actual political program to be carried out.

“A mistake that a lot of the other guys made is that they think that ‘America First’ is a slogan or a talking point,” he told the Dayton reporter Chelsea Sick recently. “But there’s actually a substantive agenda behind it.”

That agenda involves trade policy, drug policy, securing the Mexican border and steering clear of unnecessary foreign wars. Some of the other candidates seemed unaware of how seriously Mr. Trump takes those things.

“He’s a smart guy,” Mr. Vance continued. “So, unfortunately, you can’t just say nice things about Donald Trump in public. You actually have to align yourself with an agenda.”

The heart of that agenda is resistance to globalization. If you wanted a one-word answer to why Mr. Trump has so rocked Ohio politics it would be: NAFTA. The North American Free Trade Agreement of 1993 remains a symbol of the institutional adjustments that, over the course of a generation, turned the United States from a manufacturing economy into a service economy.

Whether free trade and globalization have been good or bad for the United States is a complicated, multivariate calculation. But it is not complicated for most Ohioans. The state’s manufacturing power was once so prodigious that you almost suspect you’re reading typos when you see it quantified: Did G.M. really make more than 16 million Chevy Impalas and Pontiac Firebirds and other models at its Lordstown plant in the Mahoning Valley between 1966 and 2019, when the plant ceased production? Did the Lorain works, an hour and a half away, really produce 15 million Ford Fairlanes, Mercury Cougars and so on, between the Eisenhower administration and 2005?

Simply scuppering the infrastructure that made such achievements possible — along with the decent-paying jobs that knit together the whole culture of the state — looks profligate to Ohio eyes. Each of these plants also had a constellation of businesses around it, some small but others vast. Armco, where J.D. Vance’s grandfather worked, rolled steel for automobiles.

This is by now an old story, but in Ohio the arrival of Donald Trump has made it a thoroughly different story. For three decades after NAFTA passed, no major-party presidential nominee dared raise his voice against it — until Mr. Trump, who had always railed at NAFTA, came along.

As long as the state’s main grievance was closed to debate, the essential conservatism of the state’s electorate was hidden under a blanket of apathy and cynicism. For a while, Democrats alone voiced misgivings about globalization — Representative Marcy Kaptur, in her lakefront district; Senator Sherrod Brown; and Representative Tim Ryan, the likely Democratic candidate for the seat Mr. Vance is contesting. That made conservative Ohio look like more of a swing state than it actually is.

Whether Mr. Trump effectively stopped anything related to globalization can be debated. But his arrival on the scene was, for Ohioans, an electroshock, a vindication, a license for rebellion.

Mr. Vance can be expected to have a feel for this. As he often says on the campaign trail, the decline of Middletown coincides with his lifetime. At a campaign event in Beavercreek, near Dayton, Kim Guy, a retired nurse, stopped at the front door before leaving and patiently explained why she was supporting Mr. Vance. She didn’t mention this or that policy or whether his change of heart was credible. “He lived it” is the main thing she said. “He had to get down to ramen noodles the last week of the month. The rice with warm milk. He lived it.”

Before Mr. Trump’s arrival on the scene, Mr. Vance’s hillbillies fit poorly into the prevailing political framework for helping the downtrodden. Perhaps those people could be seen as another of the inexplicably overlooked minorities who, in the half-century since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, have from time to time come to the country’s attention — a kind of mission land to which the newest gospel of compassion, progress and rights hadn’t yet spread.

But that perspective was always distant from the way Mr. Vance saw the world. “A compassion that assumes a person is disadvantaged to the point of hopelessness is like sympathy for a zoo animal,” he wrote in the Catholic journal The Lamp in 2020, “and I had no use for it.”

Events since 2016 have presented Americans with another option — a Republican Party reoriented around the priorities of Donald Trump. Mr. Vance does not look out of place in the heart of that party. In early April he was the only candidate to win the endorsement of Ohio Right to Life, an anti-abortion activist group. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the often outlandish Republican of Georgia, endorsed him, too. Asked at a debate to disavow her, Mr. Vance replied that he would not, because he had been taught that you shouldn’t “stab your friends in the back.”

That kind of talk is all over “Hillbilly Elegy.” It is practically his Mamaw’s philosophy of life.

At his appearance in Beavercreek, Mr. Vance spoke about his mother, clean for seven years, and how the fentanyl on today’s streets might have killed her had she still been using. Eventually he would get around to denouncing the “nonstop violence, sex-trafficking and drugs” at the Mexican border and calling for the building of Mr. Trump’s wall, but for a moment his conversation took on a softer note.

“I love this country,” he said. “I love that it’s not just a country for everybody who does everything right, but it’s also an America for the giving of second chances. It’s for people who keep getting back on the horse.”

It can be difficult, even disorienting, to think of Donald Trump as having provided certain Americans with recognition, a second chance, a possibility of renewal. But he has. A politics that was unavailable has been made available. Under such circumstances accusing Mr. Vance of not backing Trumpism during the Obama administration is like accusing someone of not backing the New Deal during the Hoover administration or not backing gay marriage during the Reagan administration.

Mr. Vance’s liberal admirers and conservative opponents are not wrong to feel that something has changed since his book came out in 2016. But it isn’t Mr. Vance. It’s the country.

This was before his biggest dreams began to blossom, and before his career fell apart. This was Trevor Bauer from three years ago, over lunch in suburban Cleveland, describing the forces that drove him.

“I want to be a billionaire,” Bauer said, the same way you might order a sandwich. “Not because I care about the money at all, just because that’s the highest level of achievement in the business world. That’s a marker of a successful business person. So I would want to do it just to do it.

“I want to win three Cy Youngs to do it. I want to win a World Series to do it. When I went to college, I wanted to win the Golden Spikes Award, and when I won it I was like, ‘OK, great,’ and I moved on to the next thing. It’s part of what makes me somewhat unhappy a lot in my life, is I don’t celebrate my successes. I just move on to the next one.”

Bauer would win his first Cy Young Award the following year, for Cincinnati, and then sign a three-year, $102 million contract with his hometown team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, in February 2021. He pitched his final game for them last June, and may not pitch again for a very long time.

Major League Baseball suspended Bauer for two years on Friday for violating the league’s domestic violence and sexual assault policy. The suspension covers 324 games, without pay, and runs into the 2024 season. Bauer, 31, had been on administrative leave with pay since last July 2, and because he did not reach an agreement on a penalty, he was not given credit retroactively for time served.

“In the strongest possible terms, I deny committing any violation of the league’s domestic violence and sexual assault policy,” Bauer said in a statement. “I am appealing this action and expect to prevail. As we have throughout this process, my representatives and I respect the confidentiality of the proceedings.”

Under M.L.B.’s joint policy with the union, which began in 2015, a player is subject to discipline for “just cause” by Commissioner Rob Manfred even without a conviction or a guilty plea. Bauer’s ban is the longest of the 16 players suspended under the policy, and he will be the first to take his case to an arbitrator. No date has been set for a hearing.

Bauer was investigated by the Pasadena Police Department after a woman accused him of assaulting her during sex in Pasadena, Calif., early last season. Prosecutors decided in February not to pursue criminal charges against Bauer, who this week filed a defamation and tortious interference lawsuit against his accuser and her lawyer.

Bauer’s accuser had sought a temporary restraining order against him last June, but a Los Angeles Superior Court officer dissolved it in August, calling some aspects of the request “materially misleading.” The judge noted that photographs of the woman’s injuries were “terrible,” but ruled that Bauer had not exceeded limits on rough sex set by the woman.

Baseball’s investigation covered not just that incident, but another reported last summer by The Washington Post, which detailed how an Ohio woman had sought a protective order against Bauer after accusing him of punching and choking her without consent during sex. Bauer has called that report false. A third accusation was reported by The Post on Friday.

Friday’s announcement by M.L.B. did not specify how the league determined Bauer had violated the joint policy. But it is a formal declaration that Bauer, for now, is barred from the league he has chosen as the vessel for his life ambitions.

Some of his goals, Bauer has insisted, are designed to help the game thrive; if he were solely in it for himself, he has reasoned, why else would he be so public about his training methods? He was, indeed, an early adapter and eager promoter of using technology to improve pitch design and increase velocity. Early in his career he spent $30,000 on a high-speed camera system to use in his personal training.

“The opportunity cost in not investing is way higher than the cost of investing,” Bauer explained in 2015 — and sure enough, he became very rich, and many of his training tools have become mainstream.

Bauer has also styled himself as a crusader against baseball’s stuffy adherence to tradition. On Thursday he posted a video of a Pittsburgh prospect, Oneil Cruz, celebrating a homer by flipping his bat and checking his wrist — time to end the game? time for a call-up? — on his trot. Bauer declared Cruz the latest winner of his contest rewarding minor leaguers for doing cool stuff. (He did not use the word “stuff.”)

“He turned a boring walk-off homer in the minor leagues that no one would have seen into a shareable moment that everybody gets to see now,” Bauer says in his post. “That’s worth $2,500.”

Of course, Bauer also stands to profit by sharing Cruz’s homer: In the post, he is wearing a headband with his personal logo, which sells for $25.95 on Bauer’s personal website. That item is sold out now, but the site does have a $32.99 T-shirt in stock with this timely slogan: Bring Bauer Back.

Manfred answered that plea on Friday with an emphatic no. For the next two years — barring a successful appeal — Bauer must pursue his billion dollars outside of M.L.B. It will take a lot of T-shirts to get there.

Everywhere they look, stock investors see trouble ahead.

Runaway inflation, and the interest rate increases meant to contain it, will make life harder for consumers. A severe Covid lockdown in China and the invasion of Ukraine are adding to disruptions in the flow of goods across borders, contributing to rising food and energy prices, and threatening corporate profits.

On Wall Street in April, it all seemed to build to the same conclusion: The economy is about to take a hit.

That fear led to the S&P 500’s worst monthly decline since the March 2020 panic over the coronavirus. After a 3.6 percent plunge on Friday, the index was down 8.8 percent for the month. Stocks are now down more than 13 percent in 2022.

The blow was softened a little by earnings reports from companies, including some of the most influential technology firms, like Microsoft and Facebook’s parent, Meta Platforms, that pleased investors. The job market and data on consumption also continued to show signs of resilience.

But analysts say that Wall Street’s pessimism isn’t likely to end until the major concerns are resolved, and when that will happen seems impossible to know.

What matters most is the impact that all of this will have on consumers, who account for the largest share of economic activity in the United States. While consumer spending has held up for now, several measures show that sentiment is eroding quickly, and economists expect demand to slow as people face high prices and rising borrowing costs at the same time.

“The consumer is the main driver of the U.S. economy,” said Kathy Bostjancic, chief U.S. financial economist at Oxford Economics. “So how the consumer goes, so goes the economy.” Ms. Bostjancic said that as the Fed continues to raise rates this year and into next year, “we see more vulnerability for the consumer and risks of a consumer pullback rise.”

Ms. Bostjancic’s firm has reduced its expectations for gross domestic product growth this year to 3.1 percent, compared with 5.7 percent reported for 2021. But the outlook for 2023 is where concerns are particularly evident. Oxford Economics is forecasting growth will slow to 2 percent, but others are predicting a recession.

What the Federal Reserve does and says will be crucial. The central bank raised interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point in March, after having held them near zero since the coronavirus pandemic began. With consumer prices already rising at the fastest pace in four decades, that move was largely expected.

But in April, Fed officials began to shift their view, expressed in speeches and other public comments, on how quickly interest rates will have to rise to get inflation under control, and Wall Street’s economic projections shifted too. In the futures market, where traders bet on how high interest rates could go, the predominant view now is that the Fed’s benchmark rate will climb to around 2 percent by July — something that seemed unimaginable even a month ago.

For that to happen, the central bank would have to raise its policy rate by half a percentage point at each of its next three meetings, starting with an increase next week, and the fear is that such aggressive increases will trigger an economic slump, rather than just cooling things down enough to slow inflation but keep the economy growing.

“Every time the Fed has spoken, markets have taken it fairly negatively,” said Saira Malik, chief investment officer at Nuveen, a global investment manager. “Investors are concerned that with these multiple rate hikes, the Fed is going to cause a recession rather than a soft landing.”

Higher interest rates will hit consumer demand. Mortgage rates, for example, have already jumped to above 5 percent from 3.2 percent at the start of the year, eating up new home buyers’ budgets. Other borrowing costs, everything from consumer loans to corporate debt, will rise as the Fed pushes its benchmark rate higher.

For now, many companies — from United Airlines to PepsiCo — are passing on rising costs and reporting that sales continue to rise.

On Thursday, the government’s report on gross domestic product highlighted the resilience in consumer spending, which rose in the first three months of the year, but economists are wondering how long this will continue.

“There’s going to be a natural slowdown in spending, maybe before interest rates increase, as costs increase,” said Jean Boivin, head of the BlackRock Investment Institute. “The central bank will need to monitor that very carefully because, if it happens naturally and then you add interest rate increases, this is how you get to a recession scenario.”

Broadly speaking, earnings reports this week have shown that profit growth continues. About 80 percent of companies in the S&P 500 to report results through Thursday did better than analysts had expected, data from FactSet shows.

But other companies have only added to the downdraft. Netflix plunged after it said last week it expected to lose subscribers — 200,000 in the first three months of the year, and an additional two million in the current quarter. The stock dropped more than 49 percent for the month.

On Friday, Amazon slid 14.1 percent after the e-commerce giant reported its first quarterly loss since 2015, citing rising fuel and labor costs and warning that sales would slow. Its shares fell 23.8 percent in April.

General Electric on Tuesday warned that the economic fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would weigh on its results. Its shares fell 10 percent that day and about 18.5 percent for the month.

The war, which began in February, brought a new risk to the fragile global supply chain: Western countries’ sanctions on Russia, including a ban on oil imports from the country by the United States, and European promises to limit purchases of Russian oil and gas.

Now, executives are also assessing how the Covid-19 lockdowns in China could affect profit margins. Multiple cities are in lockdown in the world’s second largest economy, and although factories remain open, China’s draconian “zero Covid” policy has led to interruptions in shipments and delays in delivery times.

Texas Instruments Inc. and the machinery maker Caterpillar cautioned investors this week that the lockdowns in China were affecting the company’s manufacturing operations. On Thursday, Apple also warned that the outbreak in China would hamper demand and production of iPhones and other products. The company’s shares fell 3.7 percent on Friday, and ended April with a loss of 9.7 percent.

The outlook for the economy, the effects of the Ukraine invasion, the lockdowns in China and exactly how fast the Fed will raise interest rates are still unclear. Markets are likely to stay volatile until they are.

“There are definitely a lot of open-ended and unquantified risks looming,” said Victoria Greene, the chief investment officer at G Squared Private Wealth, an advisory firm. “The U.S. economy lives and dies for the consumer, and as soon as this consumer starts to slow down, I think that will hit the economy hard.”

There’s a classic YouTube video titled “NY Jets Draft Blunders” that has amassed nearly two million views. It shows an ESPN-produced montage of Jets fans reacting in despair to the team’s draft selections in the ’80s and ’90s, like when the team famously chose quarterback Ken O’Brien over the future Hall of Famer Dan Marino in 1983. In some cases the cascade of jeers begins at the mere mention of the position being drafted — a first-round fullback? — even before the player’s name is revealed.

It’s a 1-minute 38-second snapshot of what Jets fandom has often been. Recent history hasn’t been much better for those who root for the Giants. Over the past five seasons, the teams share the league’s worst record, 22-59, and a major factor in that inglorious mark has been draft-day decisions that proved worthy of those famous boos.

Which is why what happened Thursday night was in itself newsworthy: The Jets and the Giants each had good plans for drafting in the first round that they executed well, creating excitement around their selections. In other words, the teams didn’t give their fan bases anything to boo about.

Both entered Round 1 of this year’s N.F.L. draft with two picks apiece in the top 10, a godsend for rosters with holes at some of the game’s most important positions. At pick No. 4, the Jets secured the player many evaluators viewed as the top cornerback this year, Ahmad Gardner of Cincinnati. With the No. 10 pick, one of the first-round selections they picked up through the 2020 trade of safety Jamal Adams to Seattle, the Jets added a target for their second-year quarterback Zach Wilson in Ohio State receiver Garrett Wilson.

By the time the Giants were on the clock for the first time, defensive players had been taken with each of the first four picks, one of the scenarios the team had gamed out in advance. They decided to use the fifth pick on Oregon edge rusher Kayvon Thibodeaux, hoping he could help return the team to the days of having a fearsome pass rush. The Giants knew they could still get one of the top available offensive tackles at the seventh pick, and they did: Alabama’s Evan Neal, who will bookend the line with Andrew Thomas, a 2020 first-round pick.

But at the end of the night, the Jets had one more surprise: They traded back into the first round to nab Florida State edge rusher Jermaine Johnson II, a player many analysts had expected to be taken in the top half of the first round. General Manager Joe Douglas said at a news conference Thursday that the team began to discuss making a move for Johnson around pick No. 15, before striking a deal with the Tennessee Titans to take him at No. 26.

“You get three impact players at three premium positions — you dream of it happening,” said Coach Robert Saleh. “It was a really good day.”

Of course, there’s no guarantee that any draft pick will pan out, no matter how sound of a decision it seems at the time. The Philadelphia Eagles once conducted an analysis of the success rate for first-round picks, defining success as drafting a player who became a full-time starter for at least two of his first four seasons, and determined there was about a 50-50 chance of hitting on a player no matter where in the first round he was taken.

But with solid strategies, and a bit of luck, both the Jets and the Giants came out of Round 1 with players who give them a chance to deliver a much-improved brand of football from what their fans have had to endure the last few years.

“I’m hungry,” Thibodeaux said. “And I feel like New York is the pinnacle of a dog-eat-dog world.”

Both teams are at inflection points. For Douglas, entering his third draft with the Jets, the roster was still in a place where it needed to get better in a hurry, for the sake of Saleh, Zach Wilson and Douglas himself. And after an uncharacteristic revolving door in East Rutherford, N.J., the Giants’ new regime of General Manager Joe Schoen and Coach Brian Daboll is trying to get the franchise back on course.

There are still six more rounds of the draft, and months before any of these players will play in an N.F.L. game, but Thursday night felt like a win for two organizations that haven’t had many in recent years.

Plans to install 60 square kilometers of solar panels in Vermont are suddenly on hold.

In Maine, a solar farm that would power hundreds of homes is partly built but might not be completed.

And a project in Texas that would have powered more than 10,000 homes was weeks away from breaking ground but has now been postponed until at least next year.

Around the country, solar companies are delaying projects, scrambling for supplies, shutting down construction sites and warning that tens of billions of dollars — and tens of thousands of jobs — are at risk.

The tumult is the result of a decision by the Commerce Department to investigate whether Chinese companies are circumventing U.S. tariffs by moving components for solar panels through four Southeast Asian countries.

Though officials have not yet found any evidence of trade violations, the threat of retroactive tariffs has effectively stopped imports of crystalline silicon panels and components from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. These four countries provide 82 percent of the most popular type of solar modules used in the United States.

In a matter of weeks, 318 solar projects in the United States have been canceled or delayed, and hundreds of companies are considering layoffs, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, which surveyed more than 700 companies in recent days.

Energy experts warn that the fallout is only beginning. A monthslong halt on imports from the four countries could have lasting ramifications for the multibillion-dollar solar industry and for the Biden administration’s ambitious goals to ramp up renewable energy development to combat climate change.

“The industry is essentially frozen,” said Leah Stokes, a political scientist who studies climate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It’s already leading to layoffs, to say nothing of the impact on our climate goals.”

The Commerce Department initiated its investigation on March 25 after Auxin Solar, a small solar panel manufacturer based in California, filed a petition requesting an inquiry into whether China was circumventing rules intended to prevent state-subsidized solar parts from flooding the U.S. market.

Tariffs on Chinese solar panels have been in place since 2012, when the Obama administration imposed them in hopes of promoting domestic manufacturing and preventing China from dominating the emerging global market. In 2018, President Donald J. Trump imposed additional tariffs on certain solar products from China, and Mr. Biden extended those tariffs in February.

For more than a decade, China has dominated the global supply chain for solar panels. The government’s policies and subsidies have nurtured giant factories churning out materials like polysilicon and components like solar cells that absorb energy from sunlight and convert it into electricity.

To avoid trade problems, U.S. solar installers have bought many of their panels from the four Southeast Asian countries. But according to Auxin, many of those panels are manufactured by overseas subsidiaries of Chinese companies and use cells, wafers and other parts that originated in China.

Until now, the Commerce Department had signaled that because the parts coming from China were substantially transformed by the companies in Southeast Asia, those components were not subject to the tariffs.

But if the Commerce Department finds that the panels coming from Southeast Asia included Chinese-made parts that should have been subject to tariffs, panels sold in the United States after the start of the investigation could carry steep duties. And the threat of those additional costs has caused shipments of solar panels to grind to a halt.

In an interview, Auxin’s founder and chief executive, Mamun Rashid, said that he filed the petition because he believes that existing tariffs are being undermined and hopes this investigation will help spur domestic manufacturing.

“Maybe the trade laws are being violated, that cheating is going on,” Mr. Rashid said. “We decided it would be irresponsible of us not to do something, not to speak up.”

Mr. Rashid said he had acted on his own and was not working in concert with any other energy companies, investors or industry groups.

The process for evaluating trade disputes is a complex system designed to prevent political interference. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo this week said that her department was legally obliged to pursue the issue.

“My hands are very tied here,” she said at a hearing on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. “I’m required by statute to investigate a claim that companies operating in other countries are trying to circumvent the duties, and I’m required by statute to have a fulsome investigation.”

A spokesperson for the Commerce Department said that it was “driving efforts to strengthen supply chains at the heart of the clean energy transition, including the solar supply chain,” and that it was “committed to holding foreign producers accountable to playing by the same rules as U.S. producers.”

Last year, the United States installed roughly 24 gigawatts of new solar capacity, a record aided by the plummeting cost of panels. But only about one-fifth of those panels were manufactured domestically, while the rest were imported primarily from Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia.

As the effects of the federal investigation ripple across the U.S. solar industry, its advocates are incensed.

“It is an absurd result that the mere request by one company can bring the industry to its knees in this way,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, chief executive of the Solar Energy Industries Association. “The U.S. solar market is in chaos. Shipments have stopped, installations are stalled, and people are starting to be laid off.”

The sudden freeze in solar panel installation is colliding with Mr. Biden’s aim to accelerate the annual pace of solar installations nationwide in order to realize his pledge to cut U.S. emissions at least 50 percent below 2005 levels by the end of this decade.

“For an administration that embraces renewable energy development as one of its core goals, this tariff investigation has undermined all of that,” said Nick Bullinger, chief operating officer of Hecate Energy, a solar company based in Chicago. “The investigation is having catastrophic negative impact on the renewable energy sector and driving up electricity prices. With each day the tariff investigation continues, the country is falling further behind in achieving our climate goals.”

The disruption is hitting companies large and small.

NextEra Energy, one of the largest renewable energy companies in the country, said it expected that between two and three gigawatts worth of solar and storage construction — enough to power more than a million homes — would be not be completed this year as planned.

“It is absolutely disrupting our solar business and the industry’s as well,” said David Reuter, chief communications officer at NextEra. Shares in NextEra have fallen 15 percent in the past three weeks.

At Green Lantern Solar, a private solar installer based in Vermont, work on projects in Vermont and Maine has come to a standstill.

“The ramification is very significant, not only to Green Lantern but all of our contractors,” said Scott Buckley, Green Lantern’s president. “We had to call all of our suppliers and have exceedingly tough conversations to say, ‘Thank you, but we can’t take deliveries.’”

In total, the Solar Energy Industries Association said that its members were forecasting a 46 percent decline in the number of solar panels they will install through next year.

However, another big solar company, First Solar, which manufactures a type of solar panel unaffected by the tariff dispute, said it was supportive of the investigation.

“What we are interested in is ensuring that there is a level playing field for domestic manufacturers,” said Reuven Proneca, a spokesman for First Solar. “We feel that the Department of Commerce’s decision to proceed with the investigation is a step in the right direction.”

For U.S. companies looking for solar panels, there are few easy substitutes for products from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.

“We have called every American panel manufacturer that we could find, and not one of them has panels available for us with any anticipated timeline that will allow us to keep these projects moving forward,” said Mr. Buckley of Green Lantern Solar.

Some solar industry advocates have suggested that the Commerce Department has the ability to quickly reverse course and put a swift end to the investigation.

“The secretary’s hands are anything but tied,” Heather Zichal, chief executive of American Clean Power, wrote in a blog post. “She has a path that is codified in the statute to stop a pointless process initiated over a phantom menace — and she can use those options in the coming weeks to breathe life back into an American solar industry whipsawed by her department’s actions.”

But Ms. Raimondo, responding to a question on Wednesday from Senator Jacky Rosen, a Nevada Democrat, said there was only so much she could do. “What I will commit to you is moving as fast as possible,” she said.

Some analysts have argued that the United States would have to invest far more heavily in domestic manufacturing in order to compete with the overseas production of solar products. The Build Back Better bill in Congress, for instance, would provide new tax credits for solar wafers, cells and modules produced at home. But that legislation remains in limbo after Senator Joe Manchin III, a West Virginia Democrat, came out in opposition last year.

While the solar industry awaits a decision by the Commerce Department, renewable power advocates worry that time is ticking away. The Solar Energy Industries Association estimates that the lost or delayed solar deployment resulting from the investigation will lead to an additional 364 million metric tons of carbon emissions by 2035, the equivalent of keeping 78 million gasoline-powered vehicles on the road.

“It’s going to slow down the industry at a time when we need to be moving faster,” said Ms. Stokes. “This could be catastrophic.”

Brad Plumer contributed reporting.