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Radu Jude's "I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians" is a complicated meditation on the responsibilities and limits of art in the face of horror. One of the most interesting documentaries of 2018 was Robert Greene's "Bisbee 17," about a historical re enactment in an Arizona town that exposed how past conflicts continue to fester. "I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians," the latest feature from the Romanian director Radu Jude ("Scarred Hearts," "Aferim!"), takes up a similar theme, showing that history is never neutral and that present day culture wars often carry out the violence of the past by other means. Mariana (Ioana Iacob), the heroine of this fictional, reality saturated film, would agree. A theater artist who shares the name of a well known poet, Mariana is planning an ambitious, provocative public pageant reconstructing a massacre that took place in Odessa in 1941. She envisions a show that will be more than just a dress up opportunity for military buffs. She wants to confront spectators and participants with uncomfortable facts about Romanian complicity in the Holocaust, and to challenge deeply rooted myths of national innocence. The slaughter mostly of Jews from territories that are now part of Moldova and Ukraine was overseen by Marshal Ion Antonescu, leader of Romania's Fascist government. Antonescu, executed in 1946 for war crimes, underwent a partial rehabilitation after the 1989 revolution, recalled by some as a staunch patriot whose fervent anti Communism led him into an unfortunate alliance with Nazi Germany. Both Mariana and Jude use their chosen art forms to push back against such revisionism. The movie and the theater piece within it insist that Antonescu (whose words are the source of the film's title), was a ferocious anti Semite and anti Roma racist, and that his army's killing of hundreds of thousands of Jews and other innocents can't be blamed on Germany, the Soviet Union or the fog of war. Until its devastating final scenes, the way "I Do Not Care" makes its points is discursive rather than dramatic. Its action consists mostly of a series of arguments between Mariana and others all men who think they know more (or at least show that they care less) about Romanian history than she does. Cast members complain about her ideas and techniques, threatening to quit if she doesn't cater to their sensitivities. Her lover, a married airline pilot, tunes out her passionate disquisitions on truth and justice. An official from the government agency funding her project subjects her to condescending lectures about other historical abominations. He pauses in these grandiloquent flights of whataboutism to threaten to cancel the performance, and also to ask her out for a drink. Iacob is energetic and persuasive in her portrayal of an embattled intellectual, defending the integrity of her vision against doubters and peppering her conversation with references to Hannah Arendt, Ludwig Wittgenstein and various homegrown literary luminaries. Her distrust of authority also has a feminist dimension. As in other recent Romanian films, this one casts an exasperated eye on a society where power and male pomposity go hand in hand. Mariana's personal, emotional and sexual struggles play out in the background, but they're clearly connected to the critical spirit of her work. There is an unmistakable idealism in her confrontational zeal, a faith in the power of art as a vehicle of moral enlightenment. If people see the truth about what happened in the past, their consciences will be awakened in a way that might help prevent history's horrors from repeating. Jude honors this belief even as he views it with mordant, fatalistic irony. Mariana insists that empathy, reason and the acceptance of complexity can be powerful political forces, even as her work illustrates, in ways she can't entirely control, that cruelty, ignorance and tribalism may be stronger still. I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians Not rated. In Romanian, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Kristaps Porzingis of the Dallas Mavericks is under investigation by the New York Police Department after a recent accusation that he sexually assaulted a woman last season while he was playing for the Knicks, according to two people familiar with the case who were not authorized to discuss it publicly. Porzingis, who had not been charged as of Saturday night, denied the allegation through a statement from his lawyer Roland G. Riopelle. "We are aware of the complaint that was made against Mr. Porzingis on Friday and unequivocally deny the allegation," Riopelle said. "We made a formal referral to federal law enforcement on December 20, 2018, based on the accuser's extortionate demands. "We also alerted the National Basketball Association months ago, and they are aware of the ongoing investigation of the accuser by federal law enforcement. We cannot comment further on an ongoing federal investigation." The N.B.A. spokesman Mike Bass said in a statement that the league was "aware of the situation," but he did not elaborate. An N.Y.P.D. spokesman would not confirm or address any complaints against a specific individual, saying, "The N.Y.P.D. takes sexual assault and all rape cases extremely seriously, and urges anyone who has been a victim to file a report so we can perform a comprehensive investigation, and offer support and services to survivors." Mavericks officials declined to comment, and a spokesman for the Knicks said, "This is Kristaps's personal matter and not related to the Knicks." The New York Post first reported Saturday that the woman told the police of the suspected attack from Feb. 7, 2018, on Thursday. Porzingis sustained a torn anterior crucial ligament in his left knee while playing for the Knicks on Feb. 6, 2018. The woman, according to the report, said Porzingis assaulted her hours later at the Sky building in Midtown Manhattan where each had a residence. The woman waited more than a year to come forward, according to The Post, because she had discussed receiving a payment of 68,000 from Porzingis. The Post also reported that the woman is in her 20s and that the N.Y.P.D.'s Special Victims Division has taken over the case. The Mavericks acquired the 7 foot 3 Porzingis from the Knicks in a seven player trade on Jan. 31, but Porzingis has not played this season for either team while recovering from the knee injury. On the call with the league office to complete the blockbuster deal, Dallas was apprised by the Knicks of a potential "extortion issue" with Porzingis, according to one person familiar with the details of the call who was not authorized to discuss it publicly. Porzingis will become a restricted free agent in July and is eligible for a five year maximum contract worth an estimated 160 million from the Mavericks. Team officials have said repeatedly since acquiring Porzingis that they hope to sign him as quickly as possible. LAKERS SHUT DOWN JAMES LeBron James's disappointing first season as a Los Angeles Laker ended abruptly when the team announced that it would hold him out of its final six games as a health precaution. "After consulting with our team doctors and medical staff, we have decided to hold LeBron out of games for the remainder of the season," the Lakers said in a statement distributed on Saturday afternoon. "This decision will allow his groin to fully heal, and is best for the future success of both LeBron and the Lakers." James thus ends his debut season as a Laker with just 55 of a possible 82 games played. He averaged 27.4 points, 8.5 rebounds and 8.3 assists and moved into fourth in career scoring ahead of Michael Jordan with 32,543 points. Back from a seven game trip that lasted more than two weeks, the Nets had a happy homecoming largely because of Russell, who added 10 assists and finished with 25 points after halftime. It was the third straight time he hurt the Celtics in the third quarter, and the Nets really needed this one after going 2 5 on the road and dropping into seventh place in the Eastern Conference. They are a half game behind Detroit and lead eighth place Miami by a half game and Orlando by one. "I told you, man, every one is going to be worth it," Russell said. "We need it, scratching and clawing for every one of them." Caris LeVert added 15 points for the Nets, who had dropped the final two games of the trip and still face a tough stretch now that they are back home. "We know that all these games coming up are playoff games," Coach Kenny Atkinson said. "It's just how we have to look at it. We're in it. We can't shy away from it." (AP) HEAT 100, KNICKS 92 Dion Waiters scored 28 points and Dwyane Wade added 16 in his last game at Madison Square Garden as Miami beat the Knicks. Harden had his 42nd career triple double and his third 50 point game in the last six. He made seven 3 pointers to become the ninth player in N.B.A. history to reach 2,000 career baskets from beyond the arc. A 3 POINTER RECORD, AGAIN The N.B.A. set a record for 3 pointers made for the seventh straight year, after the 25,808th of the season was made Saturday night. The league is on pace for about an 8 percent rise in 3 pointers over last season and 3s are being made 57 percent more often than they were five years ago. (AP)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
You were sure you left the keys right there on the counter, and now they are nowhere to be found. Misplacing objects is an everyday occurrence, but finding them can be like going on a treasure hunt without a map. Here are some recommendations from experts to help you recover what is lost. (Consider printing this out and putting it someplace you can easily find it.) One of the biggest mistakes people make is becoming panicked or angry, which leads to frantic, unfocused searching, said Michael Solomon, who wrote the book "How to Find Lost Objects." One of the axioms of his book is: "There are no missing objects. Only unsystematic searchers." Look for the item where it's supposed to be. Sometimes objects undergo "domestic drift" in which they were left wherever they were last used, Mr. Solomon said. "Objects are apt to wander," he wrote in his book. "I have found, though, that they tend to travel no more than 18 inches from their original location." Be disciplined in your search A common trap is forgetting where you have already searched, Corbin A. Cunningham, a Ph.D. student at the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University, said in an email. "Go from one room to another, and only move on if you think you have searched everywhere in that room," he wrote. Once you have thoroughly searched an area and ruled it out, don't waste time returning to it. "Don't go round in circles," Mr. Solomon wrote in his book. "No matter how promising a site if the object wasn't there the first time, it won't be there the second." An experiment at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland tested how efficiently we conduct searches. A computer screen was manipulated so a target that participants were searching for was readily visible in one half and blended in on the other half. Researchers monitored participants' eye movements using a high speed infrared camera. Researchers found that almost half of the eye movements were directed to the easy side even though it was readily apparent that the target was not there. "The most efficient way to find something is not to look where you don't need to look," one of the researchers, Anna Nowakowska, wrote in an email. "For example, if you're looking for your keys, you should focus on the areas with the most clutter because if they were somewhere more obvious, you would have found them by now. Our results suggest people probably waste a great deal of time looking in locations that they already know don't contain the thing they are looking for." Irene Kan, a professor of psychology at Villanova University who specializes in memory and cognition, said in an email that the key to finding misplaced items is forming a mental image of what you were doing or feeling when you last saw the missing item. Try to recreate as rich an experience as possible. Think about the location, what you were doing, the time of day, who else was there, your mental state and any other details. Engaging in this process, called context reinstatement, can help you recall details that might otherwise be inaccessible, she said. Dr. Gayatri Devi, a neurologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan who specializes in memory disorders, said recreating those moments can sometimes introduce a false memory that takes you off the trail. If two people are searching, use open ended instead of leading questions, she said. For example, ask: "When did you last see the missing item?" instead of "Remember? We were together in the car when we last saw it." One way to keep from losing things is to get in the habit of always putting them in the same place. When we lose things that are not part of our daily routine, such as important papers, it often happens because we are trying to keep them safe or private, Dr. Devi said. April Masini, who writes about relationships and etiquette for her website, AskApril.com, suggested taking preventive steps. "Put a neon Post it on important papers, a big, colorful bell type key chain toggle on your keys and keep the ringer on your phone (which, ideally, is in a rainbow colored OtterBox) so you can call it," she wrote in an email. "When you prepare for losing items which we all do at all ages you have a better chance of finding a marked to stand out item, than one that camouflages itself into your decor." If you prefer more high tech solutions, consider products like Tile or TrackR, which you attach to an item. An app helps you find its location. Other apps are available specifically to help you find your smartphone. Dr. Devi said as we get into our 40s and 50s, our memories can be challenged by the multitasking brought on by being at the peak of our professional careers and caring for children or parents. She emphasized that forgetting is hard wired into our brains as part of our evolution and that faulty memory is not a sign of lower intelligence.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
"I'm Patty Jenkins. I am the director of Wonder Woman 1984." "We need the police here right now!" So this is a scene which we had so much fun doing. It is the first scene in the film that happens to take place in current day. The only thing we've seen leading up to this is a flashback. And the first scene where we see Wonder Woman as an adult in our film. "What are you doing?" What was most important to me about this scene, was when I thought about what we were going to do with the second film, I realized we wanted to say something much more serious and kind of important than we did with the first film. So the immediate thing is, how do you do that and reach the audience that is most important to reach with that kind of message? Which is the youth audience. It's the heroes of tomorrow you're trying to inspire. So we immediately wanted to have a fun and engaging playful scene, which I'm very excited to be with kids and watch them watch this scene. In addition, I was craving seeing Wonder Woman at the height of her powers and having a good time, saving the day with no stakes. It's something that I love in so many superhero films. "We won't be doing that today." Where they're just on top of the world and you're watching them take care of everything. Another thing was, the '80s of it all. Lynda Carter's Wonder Woman was such a huge moment for Wonder Woman and her history in the world, and huge to me, because that's what I grew up watching. So getting to play with that version of Wonder Woman, which was something we hadn't gotten to touch on yet in the first film, was something that I realized I wanted to do right up front, because our story would not allow for her to have much more of that, because I always end up engaged with the main character's point of view. So of course, she goes into struggles immediately and doesn't get to just let loose and have fun. So that was a great thing to get into ala the '80s of it all, but also employing new technology. All of these things, including this shot right here of these human bodies slamming, and Wonder Woman jumping over the barrier and flying through the air. 100% real, not one digi double, not one special effect to make that happen. That was all wire work that we were able to design and engineer to get every single move there, because no one's ever tried to do something like this in a real location. And so that was an incredible challenge, great artisans and my amazing second unit director, Dan Bradley, my amazing stunt coordinator, Rob Inch. We just had incredible people working on this and making these magical things happen. And my cast here, of course, you know, made it a pure delight. SIRENS	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
NEW DELHI India is behind only the United States and China in its number of billionaires. But by global standards, its charitable giving is miserly. A few wealthy American philanthropists Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren E. Buffett are hoping to change that, one rich Indian at a time. The three Americans met behind closed doors with about 70 of India's wealthiest people Thursday afternoon at the Taj Majal hotel here, for a "giving discussion" meant to start gently preaching the gospel of philanthropy. "It is not a case where we passed around a tin cup or had a signup list," Mr. Gates said at a crowded news conference afterward. "Anything these people do will be their choice." None of the attendees Thursday, which included many of India's top business families, pledged immediately to give away most of their fortunes, as the Gateses and Mr. Buffett have done. But Mr. Buffett predicted that the meeting would eventually have an effect. "I would be almost certain" that philanthropy increases in India over the next decade, Mr. Buffett said at the news conference. "The people in that room drew strength and conviction from hearing others talk," he said. While India is home to more than 50 billionaires, the level of philanthropic giving is far lower than in the developed world. Although nearly every major company or prominent business executive has a pet charity or donates to a cause, the overall portion of income given away is low. The discrepancy can be glaring in India, which has the most poor people in the world. About 40 percent of its 1.2 billion people live below the World Bank's poverty line of 1.25 a day, and there are staggering rates of malnutrition and preventable diseases. "Philanthropy in India so far has been what we call feel good philanthropy, instead of outcome or results based philanthropy," said Parth J. Shah, the president of the Centre for Civil Society, a New Delhi research organization. People give money to temples, or establish schools or hospitals, he said, but they tend not to focus on the impact of what they have set up or how that impact could be multiplied. Charitable donations in India make up about 0.6 percent of the country's gross domestic product, well below the 2.2 percent in the United States, according to a study by Bain management consultants. And government and foreign contributors make up the majority of donations in India, with individuals and charities donating just 10 percent of the total, according to Bain. Still, the Bain report showed that India gave more as a percentage of its G.D.P. than Brazil (0.3 percent) or China (0.1 percent). Bill and Melinda Gates and Mr. Buffett introduced the Giving Pledge last year in the United States, and 59 wealthy American families have since promised to give half or more of their wealth to philanthropic activities. In September, Mr. Gates and Mr. Buffett held an event with China's richest to encourage donations, to a lukewarm reception. Only about two thirds of the invitees attended. Preparations for Thursday's meeting seemed intended to lower expectations. The event was named the "Giving Discussion," the guest list was closely guarded, and a press release afterward said that Mr. Buffett and the Gateses had "stressed that India would find its own unique approach" to charity. "In neither China nor India were we coming asking people to make any kind of commitment," Mr. Gates said during the news conference. Many Indian billionaires have not been big givers partly because the country does not have large, well run foundations and charities that could absorb hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in donations, said Jayant Sinha. He heads the India office of Omidyar Network, a philanthropic investment firm set up by Pierre Omidyar, the French born Iranian American founder of eBay. Some of India's richest men like Azim Premji, chairman of the technology company Wipro, have set up their own foundations. Mr. Premji recently gave his nonprofit organization shares in Wipro worth 2 billion to start a university and to help government run schools in rural towns and villages. Shiv Nadar, a founder of another company, HCL Technologies, has also started an education focused foundation. "There are now some good examples of where people have put their money to very effective purposes, but they have had to work hard on the professionalization and the institutionalization of their philanthropic arms," Mr. Sinha said. "There is no point giving it away if you can't apply it well." Furthermore, Mr. Sinha said, many of India's billionaires have earned their wealth relatively recently and are still actively managing businesses. That helps explain why many have not yet begun to give much away or establish robust philanthropic organizations. For that matter, it was only after Mr. Gates stepped back from the day to day running of Microsoft that he and his wife became global philanthropists. Older and more established Indian business families have focused more intently on philanthropy. Companies that are part of India's largest conglomerate, the Tata Group, for instance, are partly owned by charitable trusts started by the Tata family. The trusts use the dividends they earn from Tata companies to support charities and social programs across the country. An earlier generation of the Tata family also founded several of India's most prestigious universities, including the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. But many of those institutions were established several decades, or even a century, ago, and the current generation of wealthy Indians has not matched the ambition of those earlier efforts, experts say. Bill and Melinda Gates and Mr. Buffett have been criticized by other billionaires for their charitable impulses. On Thursday, for example, Mr. Buffett shrugged off one such critic, fielding a question about the telecommunications billionaire Carlos Slim Helu's widely reported remark that creating jobs was more important than playing Santa Claus.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
They thought college was too soon for lifelong love, so they scheduled their next date for a little later 60 months. When I told Howard that we should meet again in five years to see if we were meant to be together, I thought I was just being practical. My idea was less about romance than hedging our bets. I was only 18 then, a freshman at Cornell, and he was barely 21. We had dated since September and now it was spring. Soon we would be headed back to opposite coasts, he to San Francisco and me to suburban New Jersey . The impending separation was forcing us to re evaluate. Our dorm room conversation went something like this: Me: "I think finding The One is a matter of person, place and time. What if we're both the right person but this is the wrong place and time? We'd miss our chance and regret it." Him: "So, are you saying we should stay together?" Me: "No. I don't want to marry the first guy I'm serious about. I'm saying, let's give ourselves a second chance. Let's meet in five years. I'll be 23, and you'll be 26. We'll see if we want to get back together." Meeting in a public place would minimize any unwanted intimacy if things felt awkward. Four o'clock made sense because we could start with a drink, and if things went well, we could proceed to dinner and go from there. If things weren't going well, we could go our separate ways. The New York Public Library was a sentimental choice; as English majors, we had spent a lot of time around books. And it was an easy landmark to find, one that was likely to still exist in five years, unlike a restaurant or bar. Although the first Sunday in April was our original choice, I soon realized that could fall on Easter, and my mother, a firm Catholic, would never abide my heading into New York City that day; we'd be having a family celebration. So Howard and I took back our half dollar bills, crossed out April, wrote May and handed them back to each other. And then we failed to break up. In fact, we stayed together that summer and through the whole next school year. It wasn't until the next semester, when he took a leave of absence and lived in Manhattan, that our relationship finally ended. (I started seeing someone else, he found out, and that was that.) We had three and a half years before our meeting. I used that time well. I had relationships, flings, crushes. With a few of those men, I wondered, "Is he The One?" For various reasons, the answer was never "Yes." Might it have been "Yes" if Howard and I didn't have our date planned? Maybe, maybe not. In any case, most of my interactions with men, whether short or long lasting, only strengthened my sense that Howard probably was The One and that I had been prudent to arrange our second chance. A part of our agreement that didn't make it onto the dollar bill was that we would tell no one, a rule I promptly forgot. At some point, I told my best friend. She thought the plan was creative (but felt bad for the guy I was seeing at the time). I also told my mother, which was a mistake. At the five year mark, I was living in Minneapolis. I was in a relationship that had been staggering along for months. As for Howard and me, we hadn't spoken or communicated at all for a couple of years. I vaguely knew of his whereabouts from mutual friends, but this was before cellphones, the internet and email, a bygone era where you could actually lose touch with people and not know how to contact them even if you wanted to. That's what had happened with us. Nevertheless, a few days before that first Sunday in May, I flew home to the Jersey suburbs for a visit with my mother, planning to head into the city for the weekend. My sister had an apartment on the Upper West Side, and it would be nothing unusual for me to stay with her because I always did when I visited. But my mother kept suggesting an alternative plan, arguing that it would be better to go into New York when my sister wasn't working (as a restaurant employee, she was busiest on weekends). "No," I said. "I have to go in this weekend. I'm meeting Howard on Sunday." That stopped her. "I didn't know you two were still in touch." "We haven't been," I said. "But we agreed to meet on the first Sunday in May this year, so I have to be in the city." "When did you make this agreement?" "Oh my God! Five years ago? Are you out of your mind? Doesn't he live in California? He's not going to fly all the way to New York for this." "Yes, he will. I'm sure he'll be there." While I was on the train into Manhattan, my mother called my sister and urged her to keep me from following through, fearing I'd be heartbroken when Howard didn't show. When I arrived, my sister said, "You're trying to live your life like a movie. Real life doesn't work like that. He's not even going to remember, much less travel 3,000 miles. You're setting yourself up for big disappointment." She had to work that afternoon and evening, so I was (quite happily) on my own for the walk from the Upper West Side to Midtown. A few minutes before 4 p.m., I found myself standing across the street from the library, scanning the small crowd in front, when suddenly I saw Howard heading toward the library's steps. We saw each other, smiled and waved. I crossed the street and we hugged in front of the lion (Fortitude, I learned later), then sat down on the steps and started talking. Our conversation lasted two days. Then Howard caught a plane back to California. It wasn't immediately "happily ever after" for us. I had to extricate myself from the relationship with the other guy. Howard and I also had to figure out how we were going to live in the same city. That fall I moved to the Bay Area for a couple of months on a work assignment. A few months later, he moved to Minneapolis, where we stayed for two years before moving to New York. And, yes, once we were back east, we married. I still resisted calling our story romantic. Friends who had heard the story tended to exaggerate the details, saying things like, "And you didn't see each other for 10 years?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
While various European film industries were decimated over the decades, France still stands strong, cranking out dozens of movies a year in every genre imaginable. Now, streaming allows us to sample this diversity, bringing over not just the art house fare that fed generations of American cinephiles, but also the box office hits and left field oddities that were not so frequently exported. As you can see with the following (mostly) lesser known selections, there is a recent French movie for every niche. Fans of "Idiocracy," "1984" and, er, "Cinderella" should check out this satire set in a bizarro world where men are subservient to women. Written and directed by the French Syrian cartoonist Riad Sattouf ("The Arab of the Future"), the movie imagines a military kingdom where polygamous women monopolize power and literacy, while their mates, led on leashes, cower beneath long robes. It is consistently, provocatively funny, all the way until a jaw dropping ending. Rent or buy from Amazon Prime Video, Vudu or YouTube. Set right after World War I, Albert Dupontel's outsize tale pitches a disfigured vet (Nahuel Perez Biscayart) not only against his commanding officer (Laurent Lafitte) but also the establishment that honors the same soldiers it sent to slaughter. Closer to the fantastical overtones of Jean Pierre Jeunet and Tim Burton than to your average war drama, "See You Up There" also has the epic breadth of 19th century novels. Rent or buy from Apple, FandangoNow or YouTube. Pauline Duhez (Emilie Dequenne) is a nurse making house calls in an economically depressed northern French town. Encouraged by a local doctor (the veteran actor Andre Dussollier), she decides to run for office on a far right list (modeled on the real life National Front). The Belgian director Lucas Belvaux calmly shows how a political party cleans up its image to peddle extremist views as it exploits financial distress and fears of "the other." The movie creates an unease that will feel familiar to many American viewers. We discover the disenfranchised Parisian suburb of Montfermeil through the startled eyes of Stephane (Damien Bonnard), a transferred cop teamed up with a couple of colleagues who like playing hard and fast with both rules and people. By now it should be obvious that this "Miserables" is not the musical. After a flare gun is fired, the fragile equilibrium between Montfermeil and its police is thrown out of whack, and the director Ladj Ly cranks up the tension until a finale worthy of a heart stopping thriller. Ly deftly positions "Les Miserables" at the intersection of the "banlieue" movie tradition, the French riots that regularly pit youth versus cops, and American grit a la "Boyz N the Hood." French noir directors have long learned to turn limited budgets into assets their films tend to be lean and mean. Frederic Schoendoerffer's "Fast Convoy" has a neat simplicity: a motorcade of four cars must transport 3,000 pounds of hashish from the south of Spain to Paris; naturally things go haywire, and then it's pedal to the metal. Benoit Magimel ("The Piano Teacher") plays the obligatory taciturn strong man, but it's the banter among the driving teams that keeps the action moving. Rent or buy from Amazon Prime Video, Vudu and YouTube. Thomas Lilti's hit dramedy follows a pair of internists in their first weeks at a hospital. Lilti, a former physician, is cleareyed about the impossible positions health care providers can find themselves in, but also about the reproduction of a certain social order. That last element is even more obvious in his film "The Freshmen" (2018), about two first year med students cramming for a brutal exam. Complete the director's excellent de facto trilogy with "The Country Doctor," (2016), which shows how the juggling of relationships and diagnostics is especially important for rural practitioners. Rent or buy from Apple, Google Play and Vudu. The director Lucile Hadzihalilovic's universe is primal yet sophisticated, and definitely not for everybody. In her second feature, "Evolution," tween boys are raised by women in nurse outfits who feed them vile, wormy gruel. Cryptic stuff happens, very slowly, and you can't stop watching. As in her debut, "Innocence" (2004), which took place in a girls' boarding school, the filmmaker is obsessed with body horror, especially linked to puberty. We have met the stranger, and it is within us.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Portraits clockwise from top left: Tom Jamieson for The New York Times; via Yip Williams family; Jeenah Moon for The New York Times Portraits clockwise from top left: Tom Jamieson for The New York Times; via Yip Williams family; Jeenah Moon for The New York Times Credit... Portraits clockwise from top left: Tom Jamieson for The New York Times; via Yip Williams family; Jeenah Moon for The New York Times The critic and author Clive James, who had unusually wide range and was a reliable comic presence on numerous British television shows, died at 80. As he once told the Book Review: "Spraying cold water on a witch hunt is one of the duties that a critic should be ready to perform." And Harold Bloom, often called the most notorious literary critic in America, died at 89, leaving behind a legacy of fiercely defending what he saw as the primacy of the Western canon. For more on notable authors we lost in 2019, see here.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
I have two toddlers at home. And the littler, at 18 months, is finally eager to sit through a book, or seven, if they engage her. She climbs up next to me on the couch while I drink my morning coffee, pointing and shouting, "Book, book, book!" Or, if I'm already holding one and haven't started quickly enough, she'll shout: "Read! Read!" My 3 year old is captivated by surprising or funny sounding words, and already appreciates some of my favorite books from childhood (I have, naturally, read him nearly all of William Steig, to me the undisputed master of children's literature), as well as many newer picture books with good stories. But when both kids are on my lap, the chunkier board books, with fewer words and a smaller format, are best. I've learned to perform, as the added theatricality both pleases my son's desire for wordplay and sonic delight and helps keep my daughter's attention. These new board books find ways to break down the barriers between little listeners and the books themselves, helping parents like me put on a successful story time show. "You can read this book in the bath," begins HUG THIS BOOK! (Phaidon, 30 pp., 9.95; ages 0 to 4), written by Barney Saltzberg and illustrated by Fred Benaglia. This one started out as a bigger picture book, but the new board book version is a clear winner, inviting touch and placing the youngest readers right in the middle of the action, in a familiar location. Later, they are told, "If you read this book being tickled, I dare you not to laugh." Stimulated from awareness to empathic interest, my kids were enraptured, aware the book was talking about itself, directly to them. "You can kiss and hug and smell this book" elicited tiny smooching sounds from my daughter, while my son leaned in close and sniffed it. The sketchy, energetic illustrations in a limited but bright palette charmed us all. As if more proof was needed that the kids and this book were on the same wavelength, my son asked me to read it again even before we got to the last page: "Even though this book is over, it isn't really the end. You can start at the beginning and read it to a friend."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
POINT BREAK (1991) Stream on Hulu; Rent on YouTube, Vudu, Amazon, Google Play and iTunes. This '90s testosterone fueled thriller, directed by Katheryn Bigelow, has it all: surfing bank robbers, skydiving, Gary Busey and the internet's latest crush, Keanu Reeves. Reeves plays Johnny Utah, an F.B.I. agent who embeds with a gang of surfers that may be involved in a string of robberies. Utah soon finds himself in a cat and mouse game with the group's leader, Bodhi (Patrick Swayze). In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Just as she did in 'Blue Steel,' the director Kathryn Bigelow observes the peculiar complicity that develops between a law officer and a seductive criminal." THE OLD MAN THE GUN (2018) Stream on HBO platforms; Rent on Amazon, YouTube and Google Play. Not all films about bank robbers are high octane thrill rides. In "The Old Man Gun," based on true events, Robert Redford plays Forrest Tucker, a career criminal who spent most of his life, into his late 70s, getting locked up for robbing banks and breaking out of prison. The film, directed by David Lowery, examines Tucker's mysterious motives as he moves into the final phase of his life. Along the way, Tucker connects with old compatriots, played by Danny Glover and Tom Waits, meets a love interest, played by Sissy Spacek, and evades the cops, led by the dogged detective John Hunt (Casey Affleck). Praising Mr. Redford's performance in his review, A.O. Scott wrote in The Times, "At a time when bluster, bragging and histrionic displays of self pity are apparently the defining characteristics of American manhood, it's nice to be reminded of the virtues of discretion and quiet."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Last Christmas, Michael and Gisel Davila, a Cuban American couple who live in Queens, N.Y., were talking to her mother, Maria C. Castillo, while visiting her in Miami. It was a casual conversation, full of small talk about the holidays and work and the weather, until Ms. Davila, 30, mentioned that she and her husband were thinking about booking a trip over a long weekend to Cuba. "It wasn't good," said Mr. Davila, 33. "I seriously believe if I went to Cuba with my wife, my mother in law would never forgive us." For most Cuban Americans born here, the island of Cuba has existed as only a mythological ideal: a place whose culture, language and food could be recreated in exile but whose physical land could only be experienced through stories passed down from immigrant parents and grandparents. But now, thanks to the restoration of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, the island is within easy reach and has emerged as a trendy destination, with companies like Google and Chanel holding high profile events on the streets of Havana. While immigrant families have been legally allowed to visit Cuba since 2009, they are now thinking much harder about it since the subject is constantly in the news and their non Cuban friends and colleagues are increasingly going. But within immigrant families, the question of whether to visit Cuba is not a simple one, and in some cases, it is creating dissension between members of different generations. Parents and grandparents who lived through the Communist revolution led by Fidel Castro are gripped by angst in considering their loved ones stepping foot on Cuban soil still ruled by Mr. Castro and his brother Raul. Members of younger generations who were born in America long to see for themselves a country that has loomed so large in the back stories that shape their identities. "Imagine growing up hearing about it, and never being able to get there," Ms. Davila said. "It's like this fruit that is dangled in front of your face, but you can't actually touch it." She and her husband are eager to go, and it irks Mr. Davila that so many travelers without an ethnic connection to Cuba have experienced his family's country before he has. But they also take seriously Ms. Castillo's opposition. Like many who escaped the rule of Fidel Castro in the 1960s and 1970s by leaving all their possessions behind, she recoils at the idea of her loved ones lending legitimacy and financial support to a country still under Mr. Castro's administration. "I don't see why she has to go," Ms. Castillo said of her daughter. "Nothing has changed. The money doesn't go to the people. It all goes back to the regime." She feels so much anger toward Mr. Castro, she said, that she refuses to utter his name. On Mr. Davila's side, his aunts, uncles and cousins are opposed to relatives visiting the island. At a recent family dinner of roasted pig, fried plantains, rice and beans, some people were referring to Mr. Davila's brother George, a 37 year old litigation lawyer in Miami, as "a Communist" for having visited Cuba three times. "There was like food being thrown," Mr. Davila said. "When they first found out I was going, my father's sisters were like: 'Why are you going? You are going to get yourself arrested. You are going to contribute dollars to the government. You are going to get Communist brainwashed,'" George said. George and Michael's mother, Maria Davila, was shamed by friends and relatives for allowing George's travel. "They told me and my husband that we were crazy Communists," she said. "And I said, 'No, we want them to experience what we had there and see another side of the world.'" Miranda Hernandez, a 20 year old college student at the University of California, Berkeley, said that she was always nervous about how her family would react if she even considered a visit to Cuba. "When they did speak about Cuba, they made it sound like North Korea with nice beaches," she said. "I was raised being told I had no business there." But this year, she decided to go despite their objections. She turned to CubaOne, a new nonprofit organization that sends Cuban Americans in their 20s and 30s to the island free. It is modeled after Birthright Israel, a group that provides educational trips to Israel for Jewish young adults ages 18 to 26. CubaOne has received 1,100 applications for the 40 spots it has available this year, according to a founder, Giancarlo Sopo, 33. Ms. Hernandez went on CubaOne's inaugural trip this June. She saw the apartment in the Luyano neighborhood of Havana where her mother grew up and the hospital where she was born. She also met her great uncle, second cousin and twin 16 year old third cousins who, she was surprised to know, listen to the same music as American teenagers (Kanye West, Chance the Rapper and Chris Brown). Ms. Hernandez shared with her Cuban family stories and photographs of her Cuban American family. "When I met them, it was as if I knew them my entire life," she said. "It was surreal." When Ms. Hernandez first told her parents she would be going on the trip, the conversation turned to yelling. "Why would you want to go there?" she said her parents said. "They're going to show you the nice tourist parts." After the trip, they were calmer and looked at the videos and photographs she took. "They were glad that some things have changed, and that I saw the real Cuba instead of just lying on a beach to sip mojitos like most tourists," she wrote in an email. "On the other hand, they were upset about the island's physical decay." Steven Andrew Garcia, a photographer and video director in Los Angeles, went on the CubaOne trip, too. His father was not thrilled. Like many Cuban exiles, Mr. Garcia's father is deeply distrustful of the Cuban government and feared for his son's safety. "My dad questioned who would be financing and coordinating this trip," said Mr. Garcia, 29. When he made it clear to his father that he had made his decision and intended to go, his father urged him to be careful, telling him, "Just stay with the group and don't get lost." Vanessa Garcia, now a 37 year old writer (who is not related to Mr. Garcia), learned the hard way that her mother would take issue with her traveling to Cuba. Back in 2009, taking advantage of the new law that permitted Cuban Americans with relatives living in Cuba to visit the island, Ms. Garcia bought a plane ticket to Havana with her sister, and then told her mother, Jackie Diaz Sampol, about the trip they were going to take in a few weeks. "She got so, so, so red and had a vein popping out of her head," Ms. Garcia said of her mother, "and she said: 'I am going to have a heart attack. You are going to kill your mother.' I tore my tickets, even though we paid 500 for each of them and they were nonrefundable, and threw them down the toilet. I couldn't do that to my mom." Ms. Diaz Sampol, now 60, said she fretted over the prospect of her daughter going because she worried about her physical safety. "She was naive, in my opinion, thinking you could go to Cuba like any other country," she said. They reached a detente of sorts in 2014, when the mother and daughter traveled back to Cuba together. (And when Ms. Garcia decided to travel to Cuba last May, she hatched a plan to avoid maternal interference: She waited until the night before she left to tell her mother and stepfather of her plans.) Not all younger Cuban Americans are eager to visit. For Michelle Marie Arean, a 35 year old associate editor at Recommend, a travel trade publication based in Miami, the stories she grew up hearing, about government raids of the family home and how her grandfather was exiled to a sugar cane farm where he was abused, were enough to turn her off. "I wouldn't want to give money and support to a government that took so much away from my family," she said. She said she would go if the leader is ousted. It's a stance that baffles her non Cuban friends and colleagues, she said. "It's opened my eyes to how many people who are not of Cuban descent simply do not understand what our families went through," she said. Many of those who are opposed to visiting Cuba say they would change their minds if there were a new, non Communist government. But Aliza Wechsler, 31, has a different condition: She will travel there only if her mother, who left Cuba when she was 7, goes, too. "I would regret it for the rest of my life if I didn't go with her and see it through her eyes," said Ms. Wechsler, who lives in New York. At least a few times a month, she said, she calls or emails her mother to ask her if they can start to plan a trip. Ms. Wechsler's mother, Lily Wechsler, a 63 year old banker in Miami, said she would like to visit Cuba with her daughter, in a few years when prices become more reasonable. But just as Aliza wishes to travel there with her, Lily wishes to return to Cuba with her oldest sister, who escaped Cuba when she was 20, immediately after her honeymoon. But her sister, Lily said, refuses to go back. "We do disagree," she said. "I do try to convince her. Ideally I would want to go with her because just like Aliza is waiting to go with me so I can make the experience meaningful, for me, I would have loved to go with her because she would have given it a lot more meaning." She added, "But that's not going to happen unless both Castros die tomorrow and communism stops."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
NASHVILLE Last spring, in a charmingly overstuffed and dingy house turned recording studio tucked away in an ugly industrial stretch a few miles from Music Row, the singer and songwriter Sophie Allison was gently bossing around four babyfaced dudes because, somehow, that had become her full time job. There was a raccoon in the ceiling and apple cider by the jug as Allison, who is 22 and performs emotionally incisive indie rock as Soccer Mommy, took breaks from discussing Lil Uzi Vert or singing along to Avril Lavigne and Ashlee Simpson songs to record her new album, "Color Theory." Almost a year before its release next month, her second studio LP and first for a larger record label was already shaping up to be her most fully realized work yet, the next step in her steady journey toward budding indie rock stardom. At Allison's side, and in her creative thrall, were four friends enlisted to help execute her plans: a young producer energized by the vintage studio equipment at hand; a good natured guitar player (who also happened to be Allison's boyfriend); a lanky bassist; and an old pal with a video camera, hired to document the process. It felt like a sleepover with no parents home. Allison, who can go giddy when discussing video games or "The Vampire Diaries" but usually defaults to a self deprecating deadpan, knowingly leaning into her internet sad girl persona, was obviously the ringleader. She wore pigtails, a Harley Davidson T shirt, a long skirt, Doc Martens and cat eye makeup as she languidly tried vocal takes on fuzzy old microphones and sourced sound effect samples from a pile of dusty floppy disks. "On the last record, I didn't have any experience in a studio, so I didn't know how to bring in any ideas," she said later of her debut, "Clean," which made both of The New York Times pop critics' best albums lists in 2018. "This time, I had basically learned how it works. I had so many thoughts on how to make my vision of the song itself match the recording." But even as Allison bloomed in real time, gaining technical confidence and growing into a professional musician with real ambition and intentionality a fair distance from the heart shredding, raw bedroom demos that sent her on this path she has also spent the last two years adjusting to her role as an employer, a decision maker, an adult with an itinerant lifestyle and a public figure with an expectant, intimately engaged and growing audience. It may go largely unremarked upon, but the life of a moderately successful rock singer, especially these days, can be as managerial as it is glamorous. "I'm touring for a living and I run a small business, basically," Allison said last month at the cozy home in her native Nashville that she rents with her older sister and her bandmate slash boyfriend, Julian Powell. "It is a very isolating existence," she admitted. "You're gone all the time. The friends you do make are also gone all the time." And much of her life and career exist online, where she cannot help but obsessively read just about everything any random person says about the band that is now her world. While Soccer Mommy's fan base remains intimate enough that listeners are generally supportive and adoring, "none of them really know you," Allison said. "A lot of them don't understand anything you're going through." The work is supposed to help with that, and "Color Theory," out Feb. 28, while blisteringly personal, is also an offering of connection. Meticulously conceived as a three movement cycle divided by mood and theme, each represented by a color blue for sadness, depression and heartbreak; yellow for paranoia and illness, mental and physical; and gray for death the album can be piercing in both its plain spoken specificity and also in its wide lens view of personal trauma and suffering. "It's a halfhearted calm the way I've felt since I was 13," Allison sings on "Bloodstream," the crushing opening track, "'cause I may not feel it now, covered up the wounds with my long sleeves/but I know it's waiting there swimming through my bloodstream/and it's gonna come for me." The self proclaimed "princess of screwing up," Allison could only laugh when confronted with the heaviness of her new songs, which camouflage their bleak illustrations of physical and mental decay in lush, even peppy '90s alternative musical packaging. ("Color Theory" was engineered and produced by Gabe Wax, known for his work with Big Thief, the War on Drugs and Frankie Cosmos.) "I feel like it really bangs," Allison said with a shrug of the finished music. Though "Color Theory" veers from the spiky irreverence of previous Soccer Mommy songs like "Your Dog" or "Cool," Allison tells a trickier story, nimbly linking her own lows to those of her mother, who was diagnosed with cancer when Allison was a teenager. On the seven plus minute centerpiece, "Yellow Is the Color of Her Eyes," and the closing song "Gray Light," she does not shy from the cold indifference of mortality ("loving you isn't enough/you'll still be deep in the ground when it's done") and she ends the album with a line no more hopeful than where she began: "I'm watching my mother drown." Yet the desolate version of Allison in Soccer Mommy songs, aching from hours of depressive TV watching in bed, is at odds with the self assured artist and goal oriented overseer she has become since dropping out of New York University to pursue music full time after her dorm room recordings took off online. "Clean" put Allison in a league with a growing crop of assertively independent female musicians and led to opening gigs for Liz Phair, Paramore, Vampire Weekend and Wilco. Hayley Williams, the lead singer of Paramore, said in an email that she felt like a "a proud big sister" to Allison and Soccer Mommy, a group she discovered at a time when she was "craving a connection to a community of women really to any expression of femininity, specifically in music and art," after years in a male dominated scene. "I felt drawn to the sincerity and simplicity of how she was trying to assert her worth while also exposing a weakness and a longing," Williams wrote of Allison's songwriting. She recalled that after one performance by Soccer Mommy on tour, "Sophie was pointing out mistakes each one of them had made during their set and what needed to improve. It wasn't ridiculous and it wasn't even egotistical. In fact, I was really inspired by how cool she was with just leading her band. If we're being honest, I was never that way in my own band. I'm still not." Through her proximity to successful career acts, Allison has honed the drive she's nurtured since telling her parents around the age of 5 that she was going to be a rock star. Raised on the canny work and work ethic of artists like Taylor Swift, Lavigne and Phair, Allison is frank, if a little abashed, about the scale of her ambitions for Soccer Mommy. "My dream and it's a long way off, if ever even possible," Allison said, with a pile of additional qualifiers, "would be that I can get, like, even just one of my Soccer Mommy songs into the Top 40" a crossover hit by a girl with a guitar that harkens back to when Allison fell in love with music as a child. "It's not going to break my heart if I can't do it," she added, "but I do have that ambition to possibly be really big one day." Compromise, however, is out of the question for now. Allison said that she would never work with a pop oriented co writer, and she declined to even make a shorter radio edit for "Yellow Is the Color of Her Eyes," the de facto first single from "Color Theory." Alex Ross Perry, the Brooklyn filmmaker who directed the song's music video, marveled at the sturdiness of Allison's gut instincts. "You kind of have to be young and so confidently unquestioning in your decisions to lead off your new album with a seven and a half minute song," he said, adding: "What she's doing is so wrought and almost conceptual. Those are big power moves for someone barely of drinking age to be making that early in their career." Back when she was uploading her diaristic song sketches to Bandcamp, where listeners could throw her a few bucks if they felt like it, music "wasn't a career," she said. "I was just happy to have anything coming in. Now I know that I have to work to make money, not only for me, but to pay everyone that's working for me better." "That's a large goal of mine," she continued, "to be able to pay the guys more money. Whenever it's in the budget, I want to go up for them until it's at an extremely livable wage, where they don't have to have other jobs when we're off for a couple months." Her own aims are equally modest. "I don't want to have millions of dollars and be like, rich and famous," Allison said. "I want to be able to have a house like this even, for my life, and be comfortable." She recently upgraded from a beat up Subaru Outback (bumper sticker: "silly boys trucks are for girls") to a Ford Ranger pickup ("the one with the big Buffy sticker on it") that's not much younger than she is. That she can excavate her emotional demons in order to achieve such a lifestyle is still something she is getting used to a reality that can be as daunting as it is thrilling, especially as she comes to terms with who is in charge. "It's definitely on me," Allison said. She couldn't help but sound prepared.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
"Return Trips" is a typical exercise in perambulating free association, opening with the narrator's tryst (in Yugoslavia yet) with a sweet natured youth named Paul who will shortly die of a congenital heart defect; for the rest of the long story we're reminded of Paul, here and there, as a kind of idealized alternative to the other men in the narrator's life before and after circling back to the ur trauma, long ago in Hilton, when she was walking home with a boy and spotted her father kissing a strange woman in their wood paneled Chrysler: "'I hate him' is what I thought." The perspective of the Fitzgeraldian hero "simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life" is most resonantly expressed in the pursuit of love, but one of the men with whom Adams pursued it, Saul Bellow, considered this a limitation of her first novel, "Careless Love": "Women like your heroine do seem to live completely in relationships and think of very little apart from their own feminine happiness," he wrote her. Such a formulation applied less and less to Adams's mature work, whose heroines are certainly concerned with their own happiness, romantic and otherwise, but tend to be unhappy each in her own lonely way. Ardis Bascombe, in "Beautiful Girl," is a North Carolina tobacco heiress and former beauty queen who spends her days, in San Francisco, getting drunk in her kitchen and mooning about the past. Lest one think this a simple matter of lost youth and looks, we learn via a passing thought of Ardis's daughter (Adams has a nice touch with narrative point of view) that her mother "used to be so much fun" in a way that might explain why Ardis moved to San Francisco: "I sincerely hope that both my daughters marry them," she once remarked to a Winston Salem "real estate woman" who wanted to keep blacks out of the neighborhood. "I understand those guys are really great. Not, unfortunately, from personal experience." Carol Sklenicka is a lucid, scrupulous writer, as readers of her acclaimed biography of Raymond Carver will attest. Her description of, say, a late life surgical procedure that Adams endured the ghastly "degloving" of her face to remove a tumor from her nasal cavity would pass muster in a neurosurgeon's how to guide. Such a conscientious and (it must be said) rather humorless sensibility works well with inherently dramatic material, and so is perhaps better suited for a redemptive fable about the colossal alcoholic Carver, who somehow kicked both booze and the worst predations of his machete wielding editor, Gordon Lish. By comparison, most of Adams's life had a fairly decorous surface ("Never a harsh word") whose fraught subtext needs teasing out by a subtle fiction artist. Consider: At Myrtle Wilson's party in "The Great Gatsby," Tom Buchanan breaks Myrtle's nose, while, in Sklenicka's first biography, a drunken Carver ("Bad Ray") smashes a bottle upside the head of his long suffering first wife, Maryann. Both are powerful scenes and yet: In the first case what we remember most (among a melange of other nuances) is Myrtle's story about the way her drab husband had to borrow the suit he married her in. In "Alice Adams," however, the prosaic remains decidedly prosaic. "The evidence of Adams's letters, fiction and later notebooks suggests that Alice probably did not go 'all the way' with any of those Madison boys," writes the meticulous Sklenicka, who sometimes injects gravitas into these early pages "the disturbing news from Europe," and so on in ways that seem tangential, at best, to the immediate concerns of her teenage subject. Such historical digressions go on for a page or a paragraph, or else are woven into a single sentence like a discolored skin graft: "Back in Cambridge in the spring of 1945, as the Russians and Western Allies conquered Germany and revealed Nazi concentration camps to the world, Alice joined another short story class with less satisfactory results." Once Adams's professional career takes off, references to the wider world are largely obviated by discussions of her work, her book tours (and other travels) and her impressive royalty advances. Of her 11 novels, her most successful was "Superior Women" (1984), an all but explicit homage to Mary McCarthy's "The Group," which gives a portrait of the author's generation via the stories of a few friends from Vassar; in Adams's novel, the friends are from Radcliffe. Fawcett Crest bought the paperback rights for a whopping 635,000 perhaps the most noteworthy moment from that particular era in Adams's life, as Sklenicka readily concedes: "As a result of her successful move into full time authorship, the fiction she produced almost overshadows the biographical facts of her life in the early 1980s." Almost. Another piquant aspect of the story is the way Adams's life came to mirror that of her parents: Her oldest friend pointed out how Alice "was beginning to look like Agatha" her homely, unhappy mother at a time when she lived with a handsome interior decorator, Bob McNie, who drank and was probably bipolar like Adams's father. After the relationship ended, belatedly, Adams cast doubt on the man's reputation as "the only heterosexual decorator in San Francisco" with a novel, "Almost Perfect" (1993), that she'd provisionally titled her "Book of Bob." ("We can be fairly certain that Alice did not invent the bisexual theme," Sklenicka certifies, pointing out that McNie's children found a large cache of gay pornography after his death.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
On Tuesday at the David H. Koch Theater, the National Ballet of Canada, which commissioned this 2011 "Alice" with the Royal Ballet, gave the work its New York debut, courtesy of the Joyce Theater Foundation. It isn't just the title character who is timid. Again and again, over a swift 2 hours 45 minutes, as the production ingeniously finds ways around the many obstacles in adapting a picaresque book of nonsense to the stage and making a ballet out of it, it shows a cautious clinging to convention and a lack of faith in the imagination. This "Alice" makes entirely too much sense. The problems begin in an added prologue, set in 1862 outside the Oxford deanery of the real life inspirations for Carroll's work. In this altered scenario, by Nicholas Wright, Alice's age has been advanced into adolescence, allowing the role to be played without awkwardness by an adult dancer, but she has also been given a cross class love interest in the gardener's son, Jack. It is Jack, reappearing in Wonderland as the Knave of Hearts, who provides a romantic through line to Alice's adventures. To an even greater degree than in "The Wizard of Oz," all the characters in the prologue have counterparts in the fantasy world, played by the same performer. For there to be a Queen of Hearts, Alice must get a controlling mother. For there to be a hookah smoking caterpillar, a rajah must visit the deanery. It's all worked out cunningly, yet these one to one correspondences are a deadly tidying of Carroll's imagination or that of any child. But the deanery does look smashing, as do most of Bob Crowley's proliferating set designs. And despite the literalism of having a dull Carroll figure become the White Rabbit, that transformation is effected wittily. The fall down the rabbit hole, the changes of scale in Alice's shrinking and growing: These and all the other theatrical challenges are met by a seductively smooth orchestration of mobile sets, puppets and video animation. The Cheshire cat comes in big pieces, wonderfully assembled and disassembled by men in black. In the croquet match, the floppy flamingos and spiny hedgehogs (played by failproof kids) delight. The courtroom as a house of cards enchants. Mr. Wheeldon's choreography is more problematic. Some of the characterizations are nicely specified in dance: the twitchy White Rabbit, the frog and fish footmen whose airs are both aristocratic and animal. Mr. Wheeldon's high skill and some touches of real choreographic inspiration are most apparent in several ensemble divertissements. Yet apart from a dance for a pack of cards that is cardlike in its flipping flatness, even these segments are too generic, almost lifted from some other ballet. Mr. Wheeldon is ultimately hurt more than helped by Joby Talbot's score, though the reverse may seem true. The music is as carefully worked out as everything else in the production, and tightly integrated. It's pushy, programmatic, often coarse, spelling out each episode and emotion in capital letters. Driving along, it aids Mr. Wheeldon in illustrating each picture but doesn't give him any room to breathe. What is missing is any choreographic equivalent of Carroll's irony and wordplay, any translation of the friction between sense and nonsense into the logic and illogic of ballet in other words, a reason for "Alice" to be a ballet. One exception is parody. It's a good joke to make the Queen of Hearts a controlling ballet diva in slapstick sendups of "Carmen" and the Rose Adagio from "The Sleeping Beauty." As the Queen of Hearts, Greta Hodgkinson gave the most vivid performance. Dylan Tedaldi was a sprightly White Rabbit, especially in his jazzy late solo. There was fine dancing in smaller roles and good character work through the ranks (a droll Rex Harrington as the ineffectual King of Hearts). Guillaume Cote's elegance didn't make the Knave any less blandly sunny, and Jillian Vanstone's pretty ballet manners colored this Alice's passivity insipid. The pas de deux for Alice and the Knave, introduced in the prologue and threaded through the story, are crucial to the production's failures even as they succeed on their own terms. As love pas de deux, they are lovely enough. They make tried and true ballet sense: Alice's trademark motion, a horsy kick toward the ground, finds support in the Knave's partnering. But surely among the best aspects of the Carroll "Alice" books is the absence of this kind of love story. When, in this production's dispiriting coda, modern day equivalents of Alice and the Knave repeat their duet, it's a final, fatal example of thorough craft running ahead of insight. This "Alice" might have been something rare and valuable, a story ballet with an independent heroine. Instead, it neglects one of the most modern elements of the books: Carroll's willful, argumentative Alice. Where did that girl disappear to?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Credit...Ryan Stone for The New York Times Shari Redstone pulls her iPhone out of her purse to show off "just one" picture of her grandchildren. She laughs then apologizes when she sees that the back of the phone is covered with heart shaped stickers the result of a craft session with the two youngsters. Petite, with coifed blond hair, sharp blue eyes and a cautious smile, Ms. Redstone is the picture of a doting grandmother. Beneath that cheery exterior, though, is a tenacious woman at the center of a battle over her family's fortune as well as the fate of two of the world's largest media companies, Viacom and CBS. "My life is really good," Ms. Redstone, 61, said during a rare interview recently. "It is a dream life," she said, "except for the part that is not a dream life." Ms. Redstone is the intensely private daughter of Sumner M. Redstone, the pugnacious mogul who ruthlessly assembled a 40 billion entertainment empire, including Viacom's MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon cable networks, the Paramount film and television studios and the CBS broadcast network. A Massachusetts native who speaks in a pronounced Boston accent, Ms. Redstone shies from public attention with the same alacrity that her father attracted it. Her father and mother divorced after 52 years of marriage. He then remarried and dated women decades younger. He was sued by Ms. Redstone's uncle, brother and cousin. He has feuded publicly with his children and cycled through a series of chief executives at his companies. He famously declared that he would never die. Now, Mr. Redstone is 92, in poor health and confined to his 20 million Beverly Hills mansion. After he dies, or is deemed incompetent, Ms. Redstone is expected to face off against Viacom's current leadership, including some of her father's closest confidants, to determine what becomes of his media empire and by extension her children's inheritance and family's legacy. The relationship between father and daughter is complicated. She was the one he phoned after surviving a hotel fire when he was 55. He persuaded her to join the family business and once told a reporter that life wasn't complete until people had "met Shari." Today she's not in his will. The bulk of the estate goes to charity. Ms. Redstone says that she has patched up her "very public" disagreements with her father. Lately, she has been a frequent presence in his home. That portrayal of their relationship is being challenged now in a salacious lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles by a former companion and romantic partner of Mr. Redstone. The suit says that he is not mentally competent and that Ms. Redstone manipulated him to take control of his life, his companies and his money. "The rosy picture painted by Shari of her supposed reconciliation with her father is a smoke screen," Manuela Herzer, the former companion, said in a recent declaration to the court. "Her sudden conversion to the loving, omnipresent daughter coincides with this epic battle" for control of his empire. Ms. Redstone declined to discuss the suit or her father's health. Her spokeswoman called the claims in the suit "unfounded," as have lawyers for Mr. Redstone, who declined to comment beyond their court filings. But even the judge presiding over the case has questioned whether the relationship between the father and daughter is "as 'patched up' as claimed," citing that Mr. Redstone put Viacom executives ahead of his own daughter to make decisions about his health in case he is incapacitated. That legal brawl, scheduled to go to trial in May, is just one part of a broader struggle for money and power across Mr. Redstone's empire. The battleground is a uniquely convoluted corporate structure. The trust wields great power. It could, for instance, endorse the current leadership, install a new board and executive team or even sell the companies. Ms. Redstone is one of the seven voting members of that trust. She declined to discuss board activity, and her exact plans are not clear, beyond that she does not personally want to lead either of the two companies. Also not clear is how many members of the trust will side with Ms. Redstone. Several people close to her, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deliberations are private, say she has the support of at least two. While Ms. Redstone has supported the executive ranks at CBS, which has delivered fairly strong results, she has opposed the leadership at Viacom, which has struggled as younger viewers abandon traditional television and flock to the web. Last month, she voted against elevating Viacom's chief executive, Philippe P. Dauman, to the chairman's position when her father vacated it. Earlier, she declined the position for herself. Ms. Redstone is known to say that she has 80 percent of her father's brains, 90 percent of his passion and 100 percent of his obsessive nature. That is likely to be a forceful combination as she prepares for what is certain to be an epic saga. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Ms. Redstone was born in 1954, the same year her father left his lucrative job at a Washington law firm to return home to the Boston area and join his father's movie theater chain, eventually called National Amusements. He traded his annual pay of about 100,000, or about 880,000 today, for an initial salary of about 5,000, or about 44,000 today. Back then, Mr. Redstone was a local entrepreneur, intent on expanding his chain of drive in theaters and trading up to indoor theaters. All that changed in 1987 when Mr. Redstone wrested control of Viacom in a hostile takeover, claiming his position as a global media titan. Sumner Redstone with his daughter, Shari, in 2000 at an awards ceremony in New York. Ms. Redstone says that she has patched up her "very public" disagreements with her father. By then, though, Ms. Redstone was already in her 30s. "My father was always my father I never really saw him in any other role," Ms. Redstone said in the interview. She described her childhood as a typical suburban upbringing. The family lived in a modest house in Newton, Mass., just outside Boston. She recalled how, back in the movie theater days, he would bring home books and Tootsie Rolls from his business trips. There was a glamorous side. In college at Tufts University, Ms. Redstone and a friend wanted to spend a summer in California, so her father set her up with a job at Paramount, where she worked on TV shows like "Love, American Style" and "Mannix" and made her share of coffee runs. Still, she said, she never saw herself working in show business. "My father was a very strong, powerful presence in the industry, and I think it was really important for me to establish myself in a world that had nothing to do with him," she explained. Her preference, she said, was a career in social service. One friend, James Packer, the Australian billionaire and son of the media mogul Kerry Packer, who died in 2005, said in an interview that he understood the pressures. "We're the children of fathers with big shadows," he said. "We are all so lucky to have those fathers. Life is complex." Ms. Redstone went to law school and worked as a criminal defense lawyer at a small Boston firm. She married in 1980, started a family and, when her children were older, decided to pursue a degree in social work after volunteering at a trauma center for abused children. "My grandfather started this business," she said. "It was our family legacy." Ms. Redstone, who was going through a divorce at the time, agreed to work at National Amusements two days a week for a year. Six months later she was working full time. At National Amusements, Ms. Redstone focused on two areas where she thought she could carve out her own reputation: expanding internationally into Russia and South America, and upgrading the moviegoing experience beyond popcorn tubs and sticky theater floors. In some theaters she began adding reserved premium seating, full dining menus and cocktails she helped design, such as the S'mores Martini, a mix of vodka, toasted marshmallow syrup, cream and a marshmallow garnish. She is particularly proud that Tom Brady, the quarterback for the New England Patriots, and his wife, Gisele Bundchen, have told her that they go to the chain's Showcase SuperLux theater in Chestnut Hill, Mass., for date night. "I don't like to follow in the footsteps," Ms. Redstone said. "I like to learn from the footsteps that came before me, forge a new path." National Amusements is a private company, so it is difficult to gauge its business performance over the years. Jawad Hussain, an analyst for Standard Poor's, called the company's management and governance "weak" because National Amusement's core theater business is operating "below average compared to peers" on measures such as cash flow generated per theater. As time went on, the harmony between father and daughter got out of sync. There was a series of public squabbles after Mr. Redstone brought her in as vice chairwoman of Viacom in 2005. (The first time he asked, she said no.) She pushed for more authority and stronger corporate governance measures, such as tying compensation to performance. At least once, he threatened to oust her. She was the only member of the National Amusements board to oppose investing several hundred million dollars in Midway Games, the video game company that eventually filed for bankruptcy. And in 2008 she helped National Amusements refinance debt payments that ultimately forced the sale of Viacom and CBS shares, which he had opposed. Philippe P. Dauman and his wife, Deborah, last October in Milan. Last month, Shari Redstone voted against elevating Mr. Dauman, Viacom's chief executive, to the chairman's position when her father vacated it. Over the years, some Viacom executives described Ms. Redstone as meddlesome and impatient in a quest for power, questioning her business acumen. Mel Karmazin, a former chief executive of Viacom, decided that neither Ms. Redstone nor her brother, Brent, who both were on the board at the time, should attend budget meetings. Some media executives have questioned whether the reaction to Ms. Redstone was, in part, because she was a woman in a male dominated business. Others characterized her as earnest, eager, smart and cognizant of the digital changes transforming the business. After helping National Amusements negotiate its debts, Ms. Redstone decided it was time to set off on her own path. Today, she remains its president, yet her new focus is the venture capital firm Advancit Capital, which she started in 2011 with her son in law, Jason Ostheimer. The firm, which invests in media and technology start ups, has had some high profile sales, including a 500 million sale of Maker Studios, which creates online video programming, to the Walt Disney Company. Advancit recently filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise an additional 40 million for investments. "I am seeing the world as it is going to be," Ms. Redstone said of Advancit's ambitions. "I am exposed to the future, not just of media, but of the world." Ms. Redstone also spoke in April at the White House on behalf of a group promoting legal help for people with low incomes, a reflection, she says, of her early career dreams. Over the years, Ms. Redstone has struggled to balance her desire to make her own mark on the Redstone legacy yet live a quiet life and shield herself, her children and her grandchildren from the spotlight. She loves to cook, has held season tickets to the Patriots since 1986 and asks for recommendations for new TV shows to binge watch. Two favorites are "Jane the Virgin" and "The Bletchley Circle." She is known to walk the hallways of hotels for exercise and at night listens to podcasts or short stories by Dostoyevsky because she doesn't sleep well. "It is really hard when your life is scrutinized by people who don't know you and who don't really know what the situation is," Ms. Redstone said. "So I avoid the good and the bad and just try to live in a world where I can insulate myself from whatever is out there." Recently, Ms. Redstone and her family took a vacation to celebrate her mother's 91st birthday. After a dinner one evening in a room overlooking the ocean, Ms. Redstone received a note from the staff telling her that they appeared to be the perfect happy family. "Oh, God," she later recalled, with a laugh. "You guys don't know the half of it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
When she ran for the House in 1970, Abzug, with her omnipresent hats and flashy polka dotted dresses, became, as Zarnow writes, "the most recognizable woman in U.S. politics." That wasn't necessarily all that hard at the time only 14 of the 435 House members were women, most of them trying to look as inconspicuous as possible in a deeply male world. It was inevitable that Abzug, who liked to say she was "born yelling," would make a splash. When President Gerald Ford was in hot water for his pardon of Richard Nixon, he agreed to testify before a congressional committee as long as there was a time limit "and no questions from Bella Abzug." There were the many, many critics, not all of them high minded. "With idol appreciation came degrees of hate: abusive mail, death threats, lampooning and weight shaming. Some questioned her authenticity as an activist, feminist, heterosexual woman, devout Jew and loyal American," Zarnow writes. You can't help thinking she was lucky to have missed the age of Twitter. But men did feel more liberated to make fun of a woman's looks in public back then. The all male New York press club Inner Circle featured a well padded Bella impersonator in its 1971 show, who danced around singing: "I guess I've never been the high fashioned kind / Mother Nature gave me a big behind." Abzug's career has been the subject of a lot of books over the years, and Zarnow focuses on her progressive politics rather than her persona. The book gives rather short shrift to Abzug's many failings as a boss. (She reportedly told staff members who called in sick: "I don't give a damn. As long as I'm paying your salary you'll show up.") An aide claimed that when he and Abzug had a disagreement, she gave him "a whack on the side" that left him doubled over in pain. To be fair, the next day, she was on the phone: "I called to apologize. How's your kidney?" Abzug won her first campaign by organizing like hell against the veteran incumbent Representative Leonard Farbstein with squads of volunteers who were mainly women. Once she got to Washington, her fellow House Democrats weren't always thrilled with her voluble performances on the floor on one occasion, Zarnow reports, they thwarted her attempt to force a vote on an antiwar resolution by "physically holding her down." But her organizational talents came in handy. She mastered the procedures, attaching amendments to totally unrelated pieces of legislation as one aide said, "the way Southern senators did" and tweaking bills so that funding for pretty much any program included a provision banning sexual discrimination. Given her short stint in Washington, Abzug accomplished quite a lot, particularly when it came to women's rights. (Zarnow also gives her credit for an amendment to the Federal Highway Act that earmarked funds for the creation of wheelchair access ramps.) She survived a Republican attempt to redistrict her out of office, and if she had stayed on, she might have piled up seniority and legislative achievements for the rest of her life. But just into her third term, she decided to run for the Senate seat occupied by the conservative James Buckley. So did a lot of other people the field vying for the party nomination seemed to include half the Democrats in the city. The United Nations ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a moderate, turned out to be the prime contender. Zarnow says that Abzug, who lost 25 pounds for her campaign, made a mistake in softening her feisty image: "It allowed the contest to become a choice between feminine and masculine leadership." But she also argues that Abzug leaned too heavily on "democratic socialist principles" at a time when New York City was teetering on bankruptcy and people were perhaps more scared than angry.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
For Rocko Gieselman, a student at the University of Vermont, the label "girl" or "boy" never felt right; "transgender" did. Rocko Gieselman looked like any other undergraduate at the University of Vermont but perhaps a little prettier, with pale freckles dancing across porcelain skin and bright blue eyes amplifying a broad smile. Black bra straps poked out from a faded black tank top emblazoned with the logo of the indie band Rubblebucket; a silver necklace with an anchor dangled over ample decolletage. Gieselman, a 21 year old senior majoring in gender studies, was chatting cheerfully from a futon, legs tucked sideways, knees forward. In the tidy, poster filled apartment that Gieselman shares with a roommate near campus, we were discussing the dating landscape. Gieselman, who came out in seventh grade, blushed and smiled shyly: "My partner was born female, feels female. The partners I'm attracted to are usually feminine people." Gieselman, too, was born female, has a gentle disposition, and certainly appears feminine (save for a K. D. Lang cut). But Gieselman self identifies not as a gay woman but as transgender. Unlike men and women who experience a mismatch between their bodies and their gender identities and take steps to align them, Gieselman accepts having a womanly body, and uses the term along with "genderqueer" to mean something else: a distinct third gender. While a freshman at Burlington High School, Gieselman began feeling that the label "girl," even "lesbian," didn't fit. "Every time someone used 'she' or 'her' to refer to me, it made this little tick in my head. Kind of nails on a chalkboard is another way you can describe it. It just felt wrong. It was like, 'Who are you talking to?'" Being a boy didn't feel right, either: "I had a couple months where I gave it a go. I tried to bind my chest with an Ace bandage every day. I wore some masculine clothes and told my friends to call me Emmett." Neither category applied. "It felt not only like I was invisible but, especially at that time when hormones are aflutter, like no one would really know what I was like for the rest of my life." Gieselman began spending time at Outright Vermont, a trans and queer youth center where the gender lexicon of activists and academe is widely accepted. "As soon as I learned about a genderqueer identity, I was like, 'Oh! That's the one!'" said Gieselman, who frequently ends sentences with a gentle laugh. "Before, it had been really difficult to explain how I was feeling to other people, and even really difficult to explain it in my own head. Suddenly, there was a language for it, and that started the journey." Gieselman dumped the girlie name bestowed at birth, asked friends and teachers to use Rocko, the tough sounding nickname friends had come up with, and told people to use "they" instead of "he" or "she." "They" has become an increasingly popular substitute for "he" or "she" in the transgender community, and the University of Vermont, a public institution of some 12,700 students, has agreed to use it. While colleges across the country have been grappling with concerns related to students transitioning from one gender to another, Vermont is at the forefront in recognizing the next step in identity politics: the validation of a third gender. The university allows students like Gieselman to select their own identity a new first name, regardless of whether they've legally changed it, as well as a chosen pronoun and records these details in the campuswide information system so that professors have the correct terminology at their fingertips. For years, writers and academics have argued that gender identity is not a male/female binary but a continuum along which any individual may fall, depending on a variety of factors, including anatomy, chromosomes, hormones and feelings. But the dichotomy is so deeply embedded in our culture that even the most radical activists had been focused mainly on expanding the definitions of the two pre existing categories. Today, a growing number of students are embracing the idea that when it comes to classifying gender, there should be more than two options something now afforded by the dating website OkCupid and by Facebook, which last year added a tab for "custom" alongside "male" and "female," with some 50 options, including "agender," "androgyne," "pangender" and "trans person," as well as an option for controlling who can see the customized version. Activists on campuses as diverse as Penn State, University at Albany, University of Chicago, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and University of California, Riverside, are laying claim to a degree of identity freedom nearly unimaginable when the first L.G.B.T student centers were established. Today's students, who grew up with Gay Straight Alliances in their high schools, with transgender people represented in the media and with transgender rights percolating through the courts, arrived on campuses already L.G.B.T. friendly and, in many cases, equipped with gender neutral housing and bathrooms. In hopes of raising consciousness of the biases built into social structures and into the language we use to discuss them, students are organizing identity conferences and inventing new vocabularies, which include pronouns like "ze" and "xe," and pressing administrations to make changes that validate, in language, the existence of a gender outside the binary. Certainly, there's a long line of people throughout history whose traits have put them outside norms, and some cultures long ago formalized the existence of a gender that isn't purely female or purely male, like the American Indian's two spirits or India's hijras. But the binary is a belief system at least as old as Adam and Eve, and most people don't even realize it's there. "It's like a constant coming out process, educating those around you that there is a gender binary, and this is what it means to identify outside of it," said Gieselman, who works on campus planning gender related events. Identifying as genderqueer is an opportunity to self invent, unburdened from social expectations about dress and behavior. Occasionally Gieselman wishes for a lower voice and flatter chest, but other times feels O.K. with, even happy about, having a feminine physique. "Even within the same day or the next day I can suddenly really love how my chest looks in a sundress," said Gieselman, who wears two small nose rings. In the bedroom closet hang T shirts, flannels, dresses and a rack of bow ties. It might seem a simple turn of events, but adding gender neutral options to the University of Vermont's information system took nearly a decade of lobbying, the creation of a task force of students, faculty members and administrators, and six months and 80,000 in staff time to create a software patch. One key to the developments is Dorothea Brauer, a plain spoken, big hearted mental health counselor known to everyone as Dot. Ms. Brauer spent nine years working at the campus counseling center before becoming, in 2001, the director of what was then called the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning Ally Center. While in her 20s and living in New Jersey, Ms. Brauer, who wears her hair cut short with a single, long braid down her back in tribute to a Cherokee grandmother, was spending time with a woman when an acquaintance changed the course of her life by inquiring about the relationship, and then pointedly but nonjudgmentally asking, "Honey, are you gay?" "I said, 'Well, yeah, but only with Anita,' " recalled Ms. Brauer. (Anita would turn out to be her life partner 32 years and counting.) "That's how clueless I was," she said, chuckling over a taco salad lunch at the Penny Cluse Cafe in downtown Burlington. "I was 24, 25, and scared to death. I came out to my mother, only my mother, because I became physically ill with depression." A decade later, as one of the few out women on campus in the 1990s, she treated students with debilitating identity issues, some of whom attempted suicide or faced a psychotic break. (L.G.B.T.Q. youth are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide as their heterosexual peers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) Ms. Brauer's first act upon being installed as the center's director was to assign a graduate student to research and catalog the unmet needs of the transgender community. Among the difficulties faced by transgender students: inability to use bathrooms marked "men" or "women" for fear of a confrontation with a confused classmate; being accused of using a stolen student ID in the cafeteria because the name printed on it didn't match someone's gender appearance; and having the faculty rely on a student information system that listed only legal names, leading to occasions when a student might be embarrassed or inadvertently outed. Ms. Brauer heard about one distraught transgender freshman whose professor, while calling roll, first read the student's feminine legal name, then announced the male nickname. Ms. Brauer reached out to the registrar, Keith P. Williams, who worked with the university's lawyers to allow transgender students to change their first name in the schoolwide system, but doing so required an in person visit to the dean of students' office and filling out paperwork. She then set to work waging a campaign to educate, face to face, members of the faculty, staff and administration on why language sensitivity was so important to a student's self respect and assisted students in getting school policy amended to specifically prohibit discrimination based on gender identity. By 2009, faculty members themselves began pushing for a broader solution to the identification issue, and Mr. Williams created a task force to look into how students could register a preferred first name without having to make a special request. The task force realized that the only way to guarantee a professor would properly refer to a student was to supply the student's pronoun on class rosters and advisee lists. Then came the question of which gender neutral pronoun to offer. "Students proposed 'they/them' pronouns, but the faculty vetoed the idea because they said it is grammatically incorrect," Mr. Williams recalled. "They said, 'You don't put a plural pronoun with a single individual.'" A second option, also being used in various trans communities, was "ze" (pronounced ZEE), a riff on the German pronoun "sie," with "hir" replacing "his/her." Bowing to the faculty, the task force selected "ze" and revised its information system, becoming the first school in the nation at which students could select their pronoun. They could also leave the field blank, or opt for "name only," indicating a preference for being referred to by name instead of by pronoun. The change fueled gender awareness campaigns by students all over the country. So many administrators were receiving requests that, in 2012, the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers convened a task force to draft a list of best practices for handling transgender student records. In September, the university's pronoun options were expanded yet again to include "they," as grammarians have reminded naysayers that the English language is constantly evolving. Since 2009, 1,891 University of Vermont students have specified a preferred pronoun, with 14 opting for "ze," 10 for "they" and another 228 for name only. On campuses across the country gender conscious students have adopted the earnest, P.C. practice of starting social interactions by introducing themselves by name and "P.G.P.," or preferred gender pronoun. (The most semantically obsessed still object to the word "preferred.") Robyn Ochs, an educator who helped found an early L.G.B.T. faculty and staff group at Harvard, believes that Vermont's changes are nothing less than lifesaving. "Some people try to reduce this whole topic to kids trying to be cool or they're just acting out or whatever, just trying to be different or new," said Ms. Ochs, who has visited some 500 campuses to speak on L.G.B.T. issues, and often facilitates a discussion she calls "Beyond Binaries." "But there have always been people who have felt profoundly uncomfortable in their assigned gender roles," she said. "Anything we can do to make them safer, or make them feel recognized, heard, seen, understood, we should do. To validate their identity and experience could, in fact, save their life." How does one explain to family members what it means to be neither male nor female? Once, at age 15, in conversation with an aunt at the kitchen table, Gieselman tried unsuccessfully to diagram the concepts of gender and sex on a napkin, with gender referring to the attitudes and behaviors a society associates with a person's biological sex, and sex referring to a person's biological status (not to be confused with sexual orientation, one's romantic interests). "I don't even know what it was I was trying to show," Gieselman, an eighth generation Vermonter, recounted with a laugh. Gieselman's grandmother, too, had a few questions about the napkin. "They were very confused," Gieselman said, "and still are." Sara Miller, Gieselman's mother, said that when her teenager first came out to her and offered to provide a pronoun chart for reference, she scoffed. "At the time, it irritated me to no end," said Ms. Miller, a social worker. "I was like, 'Really? This is what our struggle is going to be about? Pronouns?'" But Ms. Miller has learned to accept the person her former little girl has become. "It's grown out of the process of really seeing how Rocko has grown as an individual and an adult, seeing how Rocko is their own person, and not a child," Ms. Miller said. "This is how they presents themself to new friends and colleagues and employers and students. That group knows Rocko only that way." Although Ms. Miller tries her best to always use "they/them" pronouns, she often slips up, but Gieselman isn't bothered. "Rocko and I have an understanding. She knows I try," said Ms. Miller, slipping up again. At last summer's orientation for new faculty members, Ms. Brauer handed out pocket size pronoun charts created by the L.G.B.T. Resource Center at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She also gave out her cellphone number and words of support: "If you're struggling with it, give me a call any time and I'll walk you through it, and give you time to practice, and walk you through any questions you might have." Use of "they/them" is so widely accepted in the politically correct enclave that is Burlington that a colleague at Feldman's Bagels, where Gieselman works part time, recently asked if it was O.K. to correct a customer who uses the wrong pronoun because she knew Gieselman wouldn't. "I know if something might be bothering them, they wouldn't necessarily say something about it," said Alexa Ciecierski, a morning shift co worker. At the apartment that afternoon, Gieselman talked excitedly about finally receiving documentation of a legal name change, which arrived in the mail that afternoon, and showed off several gig posters brought home by a roommate, who manages local bands. On the coffee table, a collection of Angel Cards filled a small bowl, each billet offering a single word like "discernment" or "balance" or "integrity," meant to be chosen and read for a daily dose of inspiration. "Do you want to pick one?" Gieselman asked me. I reached in the bowl and pulled out "strength." Gieselman leaned forward off the futon, swished the cards around, plucked one from the center, smiled, then read it aloud: "Freedom."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
LOS ANGELES Studies have long shown that gun violence in PG 13 movies has been rising, sometimes exceeding what is shown in popular R rated films. Now there is research suggesting that some parents think 13 is too young to see intense shooting, even when it appears justified. "The findings suggest that parents may want a new rating that the film industry is taking inappropriate advantage of the PG 13 system," said Daniel Romer, the lead author of the study, which was set for publication on Monday by the journal Pediatrics. He added, "These movies often get a PG 13 rating by omitting the consequences, such as blood and suffering, and by making the use of gun violence seem justified. But parents of teenagers say that even scenes of justified violence are more appropriate for teens who are at least 15." The Motion Picture Association of America, which runs the voluntary domestic film ratings system, declined to comment. The study, arriving during a renewed national gun debate after the massacre in Parkland, Fla., sought to understand, in part, whether justified gun violence in PG 13 movies was less problematic to parents than the unjustified variety. The researchers, working with support from the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, showed four 90 second clips of the two types of violence to a national sample of 610 parents who had at least one child between ages 6 and 17.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
In a sign of the growing potential under the federal health care law, several insurers that have been sitting on the sidelines say they will sell policies on the new exchanges in the coming year, and others plan to expand their offerings to more states. "Insurers continue to see this as a good business opportunity," said Larry Levitt, a health policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation. "They see it as an attractive market, with enrollment expected to ramp up in the second year." Eight million people have signed up for coverage in 2014, and estimates put next year's enrollment around 13 million. In New Hampshire, for example, where Anthem Blue Cross is the only insurer offering individual coverage on the state exchange, two other plans, both from Massachusetts, say they intend to offer policies next year. Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, a nonprofit insurer with 1.2 million members, said it expected to participate in the exchanges in both New Hampshire and Maine for the first time and to add Connecticut to the mix in 2016. UnitedHealth Group and Cigna, which were notable in their caution about the exchanges last year, are expected to enter more markets this year. In Washington State, United is among four new insurers that have told state regulators they are interested in offering plans in 2015. Cigna's chief executive, David Cordani, said in an interview that the company's "bias" was to expand beyond the five states where it now offers coverage on the exchanges. But he cautioned that the company, which sells plans mainly through large employers, would be selective about picking new markets. "We don't see it as a land grab opportunity," he said. Assurant Health, a unit of a for profit specialty insurer in New York, sold policies off the exchanges in 41 states last year and said it now intended to offer plans in some exchanges. Assurant is joining the exchanges "to serve more consumers and provide additional choice for customers purchasing on and off the exchange," Mary Hinderliter, a spokeswoman, said in an email. "We are evaluating exchanges on a state by state basis and continue to finalize our strategy," she said. Companies must decide in the coming weeks whether they want to participate in the online exchanges run by the federal government, and states may have their own deadlines. Federal officials said they were heartened by the continued interest from insurers. "We are still early in the process but it's a positive sign that after just one open enrollment season we are already seeing new entrants and more competition in the marketplace," said Erin Shields Britt, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services. The critical question about premiums what insurers want to charge in 2015 and what regulators will allow them to charge will not be settled for months, and insurers do not have enough experience to know if the prices they set for 2014 will cover the medical costs of the people enrolled in their plans. As a result, some insurers expressing interest now may back out later, and regulators could refuse to license a new entrant. Premiums varied widely in many markets during the last enrollment period, which ended in March. But as a handful of states have released insurers' proposed premiums for 2015, the difference appears to be narrowing, said Brett Graham, a senior executive for Leavitt Partners, a consulting firm, and he has not seen any insurers leave the market. Early filings in Washington and Virginia show potential rate increases in the single digits. WellPoint, which has a large presence on the state exchanges, says it has no plans to leave any of its markets, and Aetna has also indicated it will most likely be in about the same number of markets. Humana says it has not yet decided what it will do. Several smaller insurers say there are opportunities for expansion, especially in those states where competition is limited. In New Hampshire, for example, Harvard Pilgrim offers employer coverage in the state and had already planned to begin selling individual policies through the state exchange. "It's not really a place where very large scale carriers are going to make a decision to come in," said Beth Roberts, a senior vice president for the insurer. "It's a perfect opportunity for growth for us." Harvard Pilgrim says it waited a year because of the logistical hurdles involved in offering coverage in the state, not for any lack on interest on its part. "It was really an issue of not having the ability to ramp up as quickly as we needed," Ms. Roberts said. The other insurer planning to join the exchange, Minuteman Health, is one of the 23 nonprofit cooperatives set up under the law to increase competition. In Massachusetts, Minuteman distinguished itself through its low prices, the result of a narrow network of hospitals and doctors. In New Hampshire, the co op said it hoped to win customers by focusing on those individuals who do not yet have insurance. "The game there is to try to knit together the best access while having a competitive price point," said Thomas D. Policelli, the co op's chief executive. Idaho has a similar dynamic, where the Blue Cross plan has long been dominant, according to Jerry Dworak, the chief executive of the Montana Health Co op, which managed to seize 40 percent of the exchange market in that state. Blue Cross of Idaho, where Mr. Dworak once worked, captured the bulk of the exchange business. "We came to the conclusion Idaho really needed a co op to compete with the Blues," he said. In West Virginia, where there is also a dearth of competitors on the exchange, the Kentucky Health Cooperative has said it plans to offer coverage next year. In a few markets, Blue Cross plans, which traditionally are the largest players in any given market, remained bystanders last year. But there are signs of change. Wellmark, the Blue Cross for Iowa and South Dakota, has said it plans to offer coverage on the exchanges this year, while Blue Cross of Mississippi said it had not yet decided. The advantage of having a large player join the fray extends beyond the additional competition, Mr. Levitt said, to its ability to attract more overall customers through heavy marketing. More health systems also seem interested in offering plans for 2015, at least from early signs, said Erica Coe, a health care expert for McKinsey Company, a consultant that analyzed the competitive landscape in 2014. While some providers, like North Shore LIJ Health System in New York, entered the exchanges last year, more are expressing interest in states like Virginia and Indiana. The market dynamic is such that insurers who wait a year or two may not be disadvantaged, Mr. Levitt said. People buying coverage in the individual market tend to be focused on price and may quickly switch plans if better deals become available. "If they come in low, they could really alter the landscape," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Knowing that what's cutting edge today may become obsolete tomorrow, developers often take a less is more approach to smart home features. Digital tastes vary, the thinking goes, and who wants to get stuck removing unwanted technology? But a new 42 story Murray Hill condo is betting that when it comes to temperature and lighting, buyers essentially want the same thing and that the latest equipment for controlling them will stay relevant. One United Nations Park, the condo portion of a condo and rental tower from the developer Solow Building Company, at 695 First Avenue, is offering a built in automation system in its 148 units that will turn on the heat, lower the shades and turn off the lights. Having all three features is unusual in a new development, brokers say. What also seems notable is that the digital extras, from Crestron Electronics, are not options but will be ready to go in every apartment as soon as buyers move in next year. "Developers see the need to differentiate themselves," said John Clancy, a vice president at Crestron, which once focused on single family houses. But about a decade ago, the New Jersey based company began expanding into multifamily projects with the installation of sophisticated smart home systems in Walker Tower, the Chelsea condo, and has become an industry leader. The creators of smart home offerings like to promote how someone can easily turn up the heat in their living room while heading home in a cab. But brokers say that users are increasingly interested in amenities that don't require being tethered to a phone. Indeed, it might be frustrating to have to enter a dark apartment just because a phone is lost in the bottom of a bag. Wall mounted touch screens, which are hard wired and don't depend on internet connectivity, then, are growing in popularity. At One United Nations Park, which faces the East River at East 40th Street, near the United Nations complex, every apartment comes with a single seven inch screen, typically mounted near the kitchen. The screen also has programmable options, like "party," which can be set to dim lighting and bring up the shades, or "sleep," which can lower the shades, turn off the lights and set the temperature. With the shades, the outside facing sides are gray, to complement the facade's obsidian hue. Buyers select the color of the interior sides from among 500 options, according to Crestron. The building was developed by the Solow Building Company and was designed by Richard Meier's architectural firm. Solow has also included the wiring for automated audio, video and security services, making it easy to hook up stereo speakers, install a television or set up an alarm system without ripping out ceilings and walls. "Developers don't always go this extra step," said Melanie Estrada, the agent with Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group overseeing sales. At 90 Morton Street, a 35 unit West Village condo conversion, the developer Brack Capital Real Estate installed wall mounted five inch Crestron screens, which works as an intercom They also adding wiring for shades, but did not include shades or wiring for controlling heat and lights. Buyers would need to cover those features themselves. But at 275 West 10th Street, a nearby 38 unit condo conversion called the Shephard, buyers will only encounter Crestron technology in common areas like the lobby. Apartments are merely pre wired, said Miki Naftali, the chairman of the Naftali Group, the building's developer, who added he regretted installing smart home systems when redeveloping the Plaza Hotel as a condo in the mid 2000s; its technology quickly became outdated. "We don't want to force anybody to use a specific system," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
For many years, the N.C.A.A. Division I men's hockey tournament was a celebration of the sport's aristocracy. Increasingly, it is becoming a demonstration of the sport's parity. Of the 16 teams in this year's tournament, which begins Friday, only six have won a national championship. Arizona State, in only its third season playing a full Division I schedule, is the first independent to make the tournament in 27 years. Another first time participant is American International College, a school of less than 2,000 undergraduates in Springfield, Mass. Bowling Green State is in the tournament for the first time since 1990; the University of Massachusetts for the first time since 2007. The fresh faces have come at the expense of college hockey's traditional powers. For the first time since 1970, Boston College, Boston University, Michigan, Minnesota and North Dakota all missed the tournament. Combined, they have won 32 national titles. A variety of factors have contributed to the flattening of the pyramid atop college hockey. N.H.L. expansion and the growth of youth hockey in places like Illinois, St. Louis and the Sun Belt over the past couple of decades have deepened the player pool. Top level recruits have more attractive destinations to choose from with the rise of programs like Penn State, Arizona State and Minnesota Duluth, which has won two titles since 2011 and is the top seed in this year's Midwest Regional. Two of the top six overall seeds in this year's tournament No. 2 Minnesota State and No. 6 Quinnipiac were Division II programs in the 1990s. Over the last seven seasons, though, they have the most wins in college hockey. Minnesota State has yet to win a N.C.A.A. tournament game in Division I, but Quinnipiac has reached two Frozen Fours and lost in the championship game to Yale in 2013. "We're winning with a lot of kids nobody wanted," he said. "They're our bread and butter." He added: "Success depends on more than just having talent. You need an identity and a culture." A.I.C. Coach Eric Lang won only eight games in his first season, 2016 17. But last season the Yellow Jackets won a postseason series for the first time, and in 2018 19 they had the best regular season record in Atlantic Hockey and won the conference tournament. "Every team has to find their competitive advantage," said Lang, whose team faces top seeded St. Cloud State on Friday. "For us, it was going over to Europe to recruit. We're probably 60th among the 60 Division I teams in terms of resources, so we have to turn over every rock here." A.I.C.'s roster features 11 players from seven European countries, including Norway, Slovenia and Ukraine. While the most prominent programs continue to get more than their share of top N.H.L. draft picks and players from USA Hockey's National Team Development Program, many of these players leave college after one or two years. At rising programs, the rosters are stocked with players from the amateur United States Hockey League or the top Canadian junior leagues. These players not only typically stay in college for at least three years, but they also start their college careers at an older age. It's not unusual for 17 and 18 year olds to be playing against skaters six and seven years older. The teams with older players have more continuity from year to year, as well as more critical experience in postseason play. Four teams in the tournament Minnesota State, Arizona State, A.I.C. and Ohio State have an average age over 21. "There's a ton of really good players out there, and there aren't enough stalls with only 60 teams," said Arizona State Coach Greg Powers, whose team plays Quinnipiac on Saturday. "And when you get older players, they're ready made for college hockey from the physicality standpoint." Michigan Coach Mel Pearson led the Wolverines to the Frozen Four in 2018 but finished 13 16 7 this season. Referring to the changing dynamics in college hockey, particularly the balance between recruiting players the N.H.L. covets and building an experienced roster, Pearson admitted: "I don't think we've adapted yet. We're still trying to figure it out." "In basketball, you can win with three players," he added. "In hockey, you need nine or 10 pretty good players for a chance to compete." Perhaps the team with the most daunting route to the tournament was Arizona State. With no conference affiliation, the team regularly traveled far for games, and most of its home games were played at a community ice rink with less than 1,000 seats. The Sun Devils won only 23 games the last three years. This season they finished 21 12 1, despite road trips to Penn State, Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, Boston University, Rochester Institute of Technology and Minnesota. Eight months after winning the national club hockey title in March 2014, Arizona State announced it would play as a Division I program for the 2015 16 season. "We just jumped into it and had to figure things out along the way," said Powers, who coached the club program after playing goalie for it in college. "We learned that it's O.K. if you don't have the answers right away." The players from his first recruiting class are seniors this season. Powers said he expected to be playing in a new on campus facility sometime during the 2020 21 season, an indication of the university's commitment to hockey. "It comes down to having the right people passionate about getting it done," he said. "If you have the right people in place, you're going to have success." Boston College won the last of its five N.C.A.A. titles under Jerry York in 2012 and has reached the Frozen Four twice since, but the Eagles have missed the tournament three years in a row. "Everybody's putting a lot of resources into their programs now," York said. "I think it's great for college hockey. We've got to keep growing our sport."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
PHILADELPHIA In the tower of St. Mark's Episcopal Church here, a circle of men and women were taking turns pulling ropes that moved up and down through holes in the ceiling some 20 feet above them. The ropes were attached to eight bells hanging in a belfry, and the adults were working hard to create the glorious and constantly changing cascade of notes that rang out over Center City Philadelphia. The participants are "change ringers," practitioners of an ancient art that first summoned the faithful to church in 12th century England. Today, the art is kept alive by small bands of devotees, many of them older adults, at various locations around the world, particularly in England. The combination of mental discipline, physical stamina and rigorous teamwork helps to explain the appeal of change ringing to retirees, who typically have the time and experience to become successful ringers, and who are the majority in many ringing groups. For those accustomed to the automated church bells ringing on the hour or at regular intervals, change ringing is a more complex undertaking. The ringers at St. Mark's and about 6,000 other churches of various denominations around the world create their joyful symphony with a small number of bells typically six or eight. The notes remain the same, but the bells are played in a perpetually changing sequence and emphasis, requiring close teamwork, a keen memory and years of practice. "The mental agility and the social side is definitely a big part of it," said Bruce Butler, president of the North American Guild of Change Ringers, which was started in 1972. Many value the friendships they have built over the years with their own groups, and with the ringers who welcome them in other cities or countries. "You can walk into a tower anywhere on a practice night and someone will immediately say, 'Are you ringing?'" said Andrew Evans, 65, an Englishman who usually rings at Gloucester Cathedral in England but was recently in Philadelphia for the annual Quarter Peal Weekend held by the Philadelphia Guild of Change Ringers. "They will say, 'Yes, O.K., what do you want to ring?' Then you have a ring and go to the pub." Mr. Evans, a retired research director for a French multinational company, said he used to play golf before he lost the sight in his right eye, and with it, the ability to putt. So he was looking for another social activity that gave him some exercise. He decided to revive his experience of ringing, which began when he was 15 and growing up in an isolated English village where there was not much for a teenager to do besides ring bells in the local church. Ringing a "method" the name given to a set pattern of notes requires the participants to memorize the order in which their bells will sound in relation to all the others, a sequence that will change with each rotation of notes. While each of the methods practiced at St. Mark's on a recent evening contained a few dozen changes and lasted five to 10 minutes, the longest sequence commonly performed known as a "peal" contains 5,040 changes. It takes about three hours to go through the sequences, which can test the mental and physical reserves of the ringers. The Quarter Peal Weekend drew about two dozen ringers who gathered at the Church of St. Martin in the Fields in Philadelphia's Chestnut Hill neighborhood. Groups of eight rang a series of quarter peals, each of which contained about 1,260 changes and took 40 to 45 minutes to complete. "When the local band is not good enough to ring something more complicated, you can get expert ringers who come from other towers where they can't ring this more complicated method and the combined group can ring it," said Donald Trumpler, 86, who began ringing in 1965 but no longer participates because of physical frailty. He and his wife, Elisabeth Trumpler, were among the founders of the North American Guild of Change Ringers. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' "If you ring just in your own tower, you get a level of comfort with the bells but you don't progress beyond that," Mr. Trumpler said. "Getting out of that comfort zone in order to ring heavier bells, lighter bells, bells that don't go as smoothly as they do at home, that's a learning experience." Mr. Trumpler, a former mathematics professor, said that any novices at the Quarter Peal Weekend would have to be guided by the experts. "To ring a complex method, you need at least N 1 expert ringers where N is the number of bells," he said. The mathematical nature of change ringing helps to explain why it sometimes attracts those with a scientific bent, said Paul Heinsdorf, a math student at Temple University. "It's interesting because it's all about permutation groups," Mr. Heinsdorf said. "You'd be surprised how many people who do this are physicists or mathematicians." Mr. Heinsdorf began ringing when he was 11 or 12 and stopped when he was 14 but always "came back to the tower." He now rings at St. Martin's once a week during the summer and is trying to build his skills. But he is under no illusions about the amount of work that will take. At 34, Mr. Heinsdorf was one of the youngest ringers at the Quarter Peal Weekend. His participation was especially welcomed by older ringers who fear the art will eventually die out unless younger recruits can be found. "You can learn how to ring a bell in a day, but the speed, the precision, the permutations required, I'm not there yet," he said. "This is not something that you can walk into a bell tower and do. This is a technical skill where you are observing everybody else, and you have to know where the pattern goes in the future." Memorizing the changes requires a lot of study beforehand, she said, and a lot of concentration during the performance. But once you have mastered the technique of pulling your rope, there is not too much physical strength involved, added Ms. Clopper, who weighs 100 pounds. She usually rings the treble, or smallest bell, but has rung bells weighing up to one ton. "It's mostly technique," she said. Ringing has taken her to several cities, including Honolulu, Vancouver and Little Rock, Ark. But the highlight, she said, was ringing a method called "Cambridge Surprise" at Great St. Mary's Church in Cambridge, England. Whatever the motivation, many ringers find themselves drawn back to the tower once they have acquired a taste for it, Mr. Heinsdorf said. "No matter what you do, you are always going to come back ringing."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Edwin Sherin, who directed James Earl Jones on Broadway in "The Great White Hope" and enjoyed a successful career in television, most notably as a director and executive producer of "Law Order," died on Thursday at his home in Lockeport, Nova Scotia, Canada. He was 87. The death was confirmed by his stepson, Jace Alexander. Mr. Sherin started out as an actor in the mid 1950s, appearing in productions at the Phoenix Theater in New York City, where John Houseman was the producing director, and as a member of Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival. He also acted in dozens of television productions, including plays presented by "Omnibus," "Playhouse 90" and "Studio One." He turned to directing in the 1960s. "I could not stand the way some directors treated actors," he explained in an interview with the Directors Guild of America in 2005. In 1964, after directing "The White Rose and the Red," a compilation of scenes from five Shakespearean history plays, at the Off Broadway theater Stage 73 and an acclaimed production of "The Wall," Millard Lampell's play about the Warsaw ghetto uprising, at Arena Stage in Washington, he was hired as Arena's associate producing director. He held that post until 1969. At Arena, he developed Howard Sackler's play "The Great White Hope," casting Mr. Jones and his co star, Jane Alexander, in what would prove to be career making roles. Mr. Jones played Jack Jefferson, a champion heavyweight boxer based on Jack Johnson, who reaps a whirlwind of white hatred by defeating white opponents and taking up with a white woman. Ms. Alexander played Eleanor Bachman, his lover. Both won Tony Awards for their performances after the play transferred to Broadway in 1968. Mr. Sackler was awarded a Tony for best play. Mr. Sherin, although not nominated for a Tony for "The Great White Hope," won the Drama Desk Award as best director. In 1974 he was nominated for a Tony as best director for "Find Your Way Home," John Hopkins's play about a woman dealing with her husband's infidelity. (The award went to Jose Quintero for "A Moon for the Misbegotten.") He reunited with Mr. Sackler in 1980, directing his play "Goodbye Fidel" on Broadway, this time with unfortunate results it closed after six performances. After serving four years as artistic director of the Hartman Theater in the Stamford Center for the Arts in Connecticut, he shifted his focus in the mid 1980s to television, earning a reputation as a highly efficient director with a velvet touch when handling temperamental actors. After directing several episodes of "Tour of Duty," "L.A. Law" and "Homicide: Life on the Street," Mr. Sherin became a kind of director in residence for "Law Order." He directed 36 episodes of the original series and served as executive producer for 151. "He figured out how to move the actors around, rather than the cameras, which saves time and money," his stepson, who himself directed more than 30 "Law Order" episodes, said in an interview. "This became the signature style of the series, a verite, hand held look that was picked up by other shows as well." Edwin Sherin was born on Jan. 15, 1930, in Danville, Pa., and grew up in Hattiesburg, Miss., and, from age 10, in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan. His father, Joseph, was a textile worker. His mother, the former Ruth Berger, was a homemaker. His sister, Edith, who died in 1994, also made a career in the theater. Under her married name, Edith Markson, she helped found the Milwaukee Repertory Theater and the American Conservatory Theater in Pittsburgh. At 16, Mr. Sherin dropped out of DeWitt Clinton High School, where he was the star quarterback, and made his way to West Texas, where he worked on a cattle ranch before resuming his education at the Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs. He graduated in 1948. At loose ends after leaving the Navy in 1955, Mr. Sherin stopped by Paul Mann's Actors Workshop in Manhattan one evening to meet a girlfriend and became entranced by a rehearsal of "The Cherry Orchard." He took classes at the workshop and later studied with Mr. Houseman at the American Shakespeare Festival Theater and Academy. His date that night, the English actress Pamela Vevers, became his wife. The marriage ended in divorce. At the Arena Stage, he cast Ms. Alexander in the Shaw play "Saint Joan." It was the beginning of a long personal and professional relationship. She appeared under his direction on Broadway in "6 Rms Riv Vu" (1972), "Find Your Way Home" (1974), "First Monday in October" (1978), "Goodbye Fidel" (1980) and "The Visit" (1992). In 1975 he married Ms. Alexander, who survives him. In addition to her and his stepson, Mr. Sherin, who also had a home in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., is survived by two sons from his first marriage, Anthony and Jonathan, and six grandchildren. Mr. Sherin made something of a specialty of Tennessee Williams. He directed a revival of "A Streetcar Named Desire" in London in 1974, with Martin Shaw, Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom, and, a year later, a Broadway revival of "Sweet Bird of Youth," with Christopher Walken and Irene Worth. He directed the original production of Williams's "The Eccentricities of a Nightingale" on Broadway in 1976. He also directed two theatrical films: "Valdez Is Coming" (1971), starring Burt Lancaster and based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, and "Glory Boy" (1971), with Arthur Kennedy and William Devane, also known as "My Old Man's Place." In his most recent outing as a theater director, in 2009, Mr. Sherin directed Ms. Alexander in the Thom Thomas play "A Moon to Dance By" at the Pittsburgh Playhouse and at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, N.J.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
SHANGHAI For years, China's export juggernaut has been fed by highly efficient factories, low cost labor and a fleet of container ships capable of transporting huge volumes of toys, textiles, electronics and other goods to every corner of the world. But there is a surprisingly weak link in the Made in China chain. Moving those goods from the factory floor to one of China's enormous seaports often a drive of less than two hours typically means relying on an independent trucking company. And as vital as trucking is to China's mighty export machine, the government seems to be ignoring the drawbacks of what analysts say is an increasingly disorganized, inefficient and even costly way to transport factory goods to seaports. Trucking's tenuous status has been underscored by recent protests and demonstrations by drivers. Last week, in an unusually bold display of public anger, 2,000 truckers went on strike in Shanghai to complain about the rising cost of fuel and unfair government transportation fees. Some protestors hurled rocks, tried to overturn police cars and smashed the windshields of truck drivers who refused to join the strike. The Shanghai municipal government eventually ended the three day strike by arresting protestors and threatening strike organizers, while also promising to lower some fees that trucking companies must pay to use the roads and seaport. But the challenges that trucking pose to China's 1.5 trillion a year in exports are still in place and could become even greater, now that huge factories have begun relocating to poorer, inland regions to save on labor costs. "Our concern is that as these factories move away from the coast, the service standards won't keep pace," said Ken Glenn, an executive at APL, a transportation services company. "Rail and barge are even less developed." Within China, thousands of small trucking companies, many of them family owned, compete by promising low cost delivery. Then they overload their 18 wheelers in dangerous ways, pay bribes to ward off highway inspectors and hope to eke out tiny profits. Now, though, with global oil prices sending the cost of fuel soaring, many truckers say they are heading toward bankruptcy. Mark Millar, a China logistics expert at M Power Associates in Hong Kong, sees Chinese trucking as "a seriously fragmented and brutally competitive industry." "Most of the drivers are owner operators, and in order to make money, they carry more cargo than the truck is supposed to hold," Mr. Millar said. "This is obviously not a healthy model." Not all trucking in China is such a seat of the pants affair. Some global companies transport goods by truck in sealed shipping containers from factory to dock, sometimes accompanied by security escorts. But more often, goods destined for export are delivered to seaports by small trucking companies usually hired by logistics firms that bargain to get the lowest possible shipping price. To scrape by, many of the small trucking firms violate the law, pay bribes to avoid heavy fines and transportation restrictions, and even force drivers to sleep in the trucks overnight, sometimes in insecure parking lots. These rigors might seem to contradict the heavy investment in infrastructure and expressways that China has made to make its transportation network more efficient. But many of this country's modern roadways are expensive toll roads. And the government has placed tough regulations on many aspects of the transportation industry, which analysts say have burdened companies with heavy taxes, insurance and government fees. As a result, transporting goods by truck in China is relatively more expensive than doing so in the United States. According to the American Trucking Associations, moving goods by truck in the United States costs about 1.75 per mile. That includes driver salaries, truck leases, insurance, tolls and many other related costs. By comparison, trucking costs in China's two biggest export regions the Yangtze River Delta region near Shanghai and the Pearl River Delta around Hong Kong are 2.50 to 3 a mile. That is despite low pay to Chinese drivers, who might earn only 25 cents an hour, versus about 17 an hour in the United States. Corruption is also a major problem. Chinese truck drivers say highway and port inspectors routinely demand payoffs or bribes. Drivers who refuse to pay may find themselves hit by large fines for even the smallest infraction. (That many of the trucks are overweight makes them ripe for sanctions.) Some regions even operate illegal toll booths. Rachel Katz, a Fulbright research fellow from the United States who is spending a year in China traveling with long haul truck drivers, says the drivers are constantly harassed by highway officials. "There's every kind of fine you can imagine," she said in a telephone interview from Chengdu, in southwest China. "There are many different people regulating the roads and finding a way to tax the truckers. I can't believe the system operates this way." Truck drivers do not get much sympathy from their clients factory bosses who are also struggling to cope with inflation. With labor and raw material and energy prices soaring here, factories are reluctant to pay higher fees to move goods to the major ports. Besides, many of the factory bosses seem to recognize that there is an oversupply of small trucking companies desperate for cargo. "They face a situation of absolutely cutthroat competition, and many of them are not well educated," said Tyrrell Duncan, a transportation director at the Asian Development Bank. "There aren't programs to train them." Qi Zhenwei, who is 35, and his 31 year old brother, Qi Erwei, are typical trucking bosses working in Shanghai's bustling Baoshan port district. Despite fears of government reprisals, they agreed to talk this week in the rusted metal container that now serves as a lounge at their dusty truck depot, amid engine parts and a bucket filled with cigarette butts. Between phone calls and dashes in and out of the makeshift lounge to talk to colleagues, they told their story. Until about seven years ago, they were peasant farmers struggling to make a living in Henan Province, one of the country's poorest regions. Neither of them had finished high school. They traveled more than 500 miles east to Shanghai and found work as truck drivers. ("I once went 24 consecutive days without sleeping in a bed," Qi Zhenwei said.) Eventually, they earned enough to combine their savings with 100,000 they borrowed from some friends and relatives to buy their own fleet of five new and used Chinese made trucks. But shortly after they invested in some of their most expensive vehicles, the global financial crisis struck. Exports plummeted, devastating their container hauling business. A year later, in 2009, when China's exports began to rebound, so did inflation and fuel prices. And now, the brothers are faced with greater competition from a growing number of small trucking companies. The brothers refused to talk about the recent strike here, saying the government had been visiting all truckers in the area. But they freely discussed their costs: tire fees, insurance, driver salaries, road use fees, oil changes, repairs and even fees that trucks pay to enter the city. "If I had a chance to sell the truck, I'd get out of the business," the older brother said, dejectedly smoking a cigarette. "I'd go back to my hometown. Now, people there are planting crops for Chinese medicine. And they're making good money."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
WASHINGTON Lael Brainard is poised to win another round this week in her fight for the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low. Ms. Brainard, a Fed governor in Washington since 2014, has emerged over the last year as a leading advocate for patience, pressing the case that low rates are important for domestic economic growth and for global stability. The Fed is expected to announce on Wednesday, after a two day meeting of its policy making committee, that it again will pass on an opportunity to increase its benchmark interest rate, although officials have said they are still considering rate increases later in the year. Ms. Brainard has become the leading voice among Fed officials for a concern widely shared among left leaning economists: that the central bank will raise rates too quickly, potentially stifling economic growth. It is a role that has raised her profile in Democratic circles, and driven speculation that she is in line for a top job if Hillary Clinton wins the White House. Gene Sperling, a longtime Democratic policy maker who is now advising Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign, hired Ms. Brainard as his deputy at the Bill Clinton White House in the mid 1990s. He said he was tickled that lately, when he gives public speeches, he is often asked about her views. "My outside impression is that she has been as much a champion as anyone on the inside for the go slow, full employment perspective that many of us on the outside are advocating for," Mr. Sperling said. Ms. Brainard has fueled the talk about her future by donating 2,700 to the Clinton campaign the maximum amount an individual can give raising eyebrows at the Fed and among congressional Republicans. Mrs. Clinton has said she intends to fill half her cabinet with women, and Ms. Brainard is among the few widely regarded as having the relevant credentials to serve as United States trade representative or, even better, Treasury secretary, a job no woman has ever held. Senator Richard Shelby, the Alabama Republican who heads the Senate Banking Committee, which oversees the Fed, said Ms. Brainard's donations "call into question the political independence" of the central bank. Fed officials have said that Ms. Brainard did not violate any rules. Ms. Brainard declined to be interviewed for this article. The description of her views is based on her public remarks and the accounts of others. Ms. Brainard's case for caution combines the idea that the domestic economy is not ready for higher rates, with something new and controversial: that the Fed should care about other countries. The American economy, until recently, seemed impervious to all but the largest global shocks. But the integration of financial markets has increased the importance of events elsewhere. The rest of the world plays a growing role in determining American mortgage rates. "The world has just changed fundamentally," Ms. Brainard said at a New York conference in February. "What China does matters to the U.S." In placing greater weight on the global economy, Ms. Brainard has argued that the Fed needs to consider the impact of its decisions on other countries. She said at the February conference the Fed might achieve better results by coordinating with other central banks. Otherwise, she said, countries may simply steal growth from one another. "There is a risk that uncoordinated policy on its own could have the effect of shifting demand across borders rather than addressing the underlying weakness in global demand," she told an audience of academics and policy makers at the United States Monetary Policy Forum. "I tell other central banks, 'I'm really sorry to tell you this, but the Fed doesn't care about you at all,'" said Mr. Meyer, who runs L. H. Meyer, a research firm. "You can say that's very nasty, very selfish. But do you think that other central banks care about us? Of course not. They don't want us to hurt them, but they don't care what their actions do to us." Others, however, say a recalibration is overdue. Eswar Prasad, a professor of international economics at Cornell University, said financial integration had clearly amplified the Fed's role in the global economy, even if the contours were just beginning to be understood. "Many people have taken an ostrich 'head in the sand' approach," he said. "But the financial channel is clearly a crucial one, and the fact that it is not well understood is not an excuse for ignoring it." Ms. Brainard was raised to see America in the context of a broader world. As the daughter of a State Department diplomat, she spent parts of her childhood in communist Poland and in East Germany. "She is basically an internationalist," said Edwin M. Truman, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who worked with Ms. Brainard in both the Clinton and Obama administrations. "That's not particularly popular these days, but she lives and breathes the idea we're all in the same boat and we need to cooperate. And cooperating doesn't mean do what the U.S. says or else." Ms. Brainard, who holds a doctorate in economics from Harvard University, was hired in 1997 as Mr. Sperling's deputy on the National Economic Council. Mr. Sperling, then 38, said he was advised to find a more experienced deputy than Ms. Brainard, then 35. But she was already working at the White House, and each time he interviewed someone else, he came away convinced that Ms. Brainard was a superior choice. Ms. Brainard later served as President Clinton's "sherpa," or liaison, to the Group of 8 industrial nations. "She's supersmart, well prepared, even tempered," said Mr. Sperling, who worked with Ms. Brainard in the Obama administration. "Anything she touches will be done to the highest standards." After spending eight years at the Brookings Institution, waiting out George W. Bush's presidency, she joined the Obama administration as under secretary for international affairs at the Treasury Department. In that role, she spent long hours trying to cajole European leaders into addressing the continent's problems with greater vigor. She also played a leading role in selling an overhaul of the International Monetary Fund's ownership structure that gave greater control to emerging economies, principally China, at the expense of advanced economies, particularly in Europe. Ms. Brainard is "not a backslapper," said Mr. Sperling, but she has developed a reputation as a subtle but unbending advocate for the goals she is assigned to pursue. Mr. Prasad, a former official at the International Monetary Fund, said Ms. Brainard conveyed a sense of empathy and respect for the interests of other countries. "She did not come across as a very aggressive advocate, so she was a very effective advocate," he said. "She has a lot of credibility with policy makers around the world as a consequence of that, especially in emerging markets." Ms. Brainard joined the Fed in the summer of 2014, but she said almost nothing about monetary policy until October 2015, as the Fed prepared to raise rates for the first time since the financial crisis. The move was hotly criticized by left leaning economists and by centrist Democrats like Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary. And in that October speech, Ms. Brainard chimed in, breaking with the Fed's chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen, to argue that the Fed was overstating the risk of inflation and underestimating the threat of a global downturn. Ms. Brainard and Daniel Tarullo a fellow governor and former colleague in the Clinton administration who raised similar concerns ultimately acquiesced in the Fed's December increase, providing Ms. Yellen with unanimous support. While regional reserve presidents frequently dissent, no Fed governor has done so in the last decade. But since December, Ms. Brainard's public speeches have become more frequent and more forceful. And maybe she won't need to formally dissent. After all, the Fed, which entered the year predicting that it would raise rates four times, has yet to move again.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
When you think of ballet, you likely hear Tchaikovsky. Though he composed scores for only three ballets, they've endured: "Swan Lake," "Sleeping Beauty" and "The Nutcracker." (Thanks to the latter, he's inescapable come Christmas.) This week, American Ballet Theater departs from its story ballet marathon to conclude its spring season with a tribute to the Russian Romantic. "Tchaikovsky Spectacular" mixes and matches works set to his well known ballet music and those that found inspiration elsewhere in his oeuvre. Among them: "The Nutcracker Pas de Deux" and "Aurora's Wedding" from "Sleeping Beauty," by Alexei Ratmansky, and "AfterEffect," a 2015 work by the Ballet Theater principal dancer Marcelo Gomes. George Balanchine, a big Tchaikovsky fan, is represented here as well with "Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux," from 1960, set to a lost then found piece of the original "Swan Lake" score, and "Mozartiana," an ode to Tchaikovsky's musical forebear, which Balanchine first choreographed in 1933. (abt.org)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Most mornings, things are pretty chill on my Facebook feed. There's the ongoing simmering outrage about the current administration interspersed with posts about kids, about books, about yoga. Someone's posting a pair of dresses and asking her friends to vote; someone's sharing a video of her child at the high school talent show. Typical middle age mom stuff. But on Monday morning, I woke up to major mom drama. My Facebook community was convulsed in a take no prisoners battle, a war being waged on the tanned, taut terrain of Jennifer Lopez's body. Yes, she shared the bill with the 43 year old Shakira, but the most intense debate was all about the seven years older Jenny From the Block. In this corner: the women who found J. Lo's Super Bowl high energy hit mash up unnecessarily salacious, designed to titillate male viewers, performed for the male gaze. "Sponsored by Pornhub," sniffed one. "Trashy," said another. Why did there have to be a stripper pole, and why couldn't she have worn more clothes? Call them the Pearl Clutchers. In the opposing corner: the women who found the show inspiring, a stirring political statement, a demonstration of Puerto Rican pride and also what a woman's body can do, given the right combination of genetics, effort, discipline and money. Call them Team Rump Shakers. Whether women singing and dancing in barely there costumes or otherwise celebrating their bodies is empowering, or an assault on our ability to move through the world as men's equals, is one of those forever fights that flares up whenever sex workers' rights or pornography are debated or Emily Ratajkowski posts a topless selfie. What gave this iteration its special sauce, however, was the age of the woman at its center. If there was one thing the Shakers and the Clutchers could agree on, it's that Jennifer Lopez looks amazing. At 50, she is a force of nature, a woman who looks so amazing it's like evolution took a tiny step forward, just for her. "I can't believe she's 50 and looks so good!" women said. Which quickly became, "I can't believe I'm 50 and I look so bad!" ("Aside from making me feel physically deformed, that half time show was 100!" wrote the Sports Illustrated editor Sarah Kwak.) Some members of my social media community were in awe. Others myself included were feeling personally judged. I'm just a few months younger than J. Lo, and, with every birthday, I have asked: Is this the year it ends? Surely there's a finish line; a point we'll reach when the You Must Be This Hot in Order to Participate sign at the amusement park ride disappears, and we all get a seat on the roller coaster (right alongside the lumpy, balding, graying, potbellied men who've been riding the entire time). That's what I always imagined. But I also thought that pregnancy would be a nine month time out from competing in the Looking Good Olympics. Alas, I had my daughters in the heyday of the Hot Mom, an era where billowy maternity garments gave way to bump hugging body con styles, where celebrities left the hospitals holding their newborns, wearing their skinny jeans. No respite there. Forty was clearly too soon to surrender, given Halle Berry and Jennifer Aniston, Brooke Shields and Lisa Bonet, not to mention those ubiquitous lists of 10 Celebrities Who Are Unrecognizable Today (You Won't Believe Number 8!) that popped up every time I went online and told me that gaining weight and aging visibly were a fast road to irrelevance and mockery. Still, I'd been picturing 50 as the year when I'd be done. I'd quit dyeing my hair and donate my high heels; I'd greet the occasional chin hair with a Buddhist master's zen and treat my body like a place I could exist without apology instead of something akin to a seedy apartment complex, a place I needed to constantly manage and improve, with unruly bits to be waxed and plucked, painted and dyed, trussed in spandex and lifted with underwire. I have always tried to tell myself that celebrity bodies are a little like art galleries. I can appreciate and be inspired by their beauty. I can acknowledge the time and money that went into their creation. When I've finished looking, I can go home, secure in the knowledge that nobody expects my living room to look like that. Then I saw the meme that made the rounds on Monday. "50 Years Old in 1985," read one side, with a shot of Rue McClanahan from "Golden Girls," in period appropriate feathered hair and a dowdy looking sweater. "50 Years Old in 2020," read the other side, with Jennifer Lopez in a silver bodysuit, toned thighs gripping the pole, honeyed locks streaming, and bronzed skin gleaming, looking impossibly ... impossible. If Blanche Devereaux is now, through some cruel twist of the worst timeline, on the Not side of Hot or Not, I guess Dorothy Zbornak is completely out of the question. And Dorothy had been my plan all along! The answer, I think, is to watch these types of performances like a man. Women watch a 15 minute show featuring elite entertainers and, in some cases, end up feeling bad about ourselves. Men, meanwhile, watch a three hour game, played by elite athletes with single digit body fat, and most won't feel a single twinge of self doubt, or miss a single chip from the nacho platter. Women see inspiration or goals we've failed to attain or a pretty stick to beat ourselves up with. We hear a voice (sponsored by Weight Watchers and Revlon and Planet Fitness and Jenny Craig) whispering This can be yours, if you just work hard enough. Men see entertainment, athletes who exist on a different plane than mere mortals. Their inner voice whispers, Are there any more nachos? I don't even think it would occur to them to feel bad, or try to emulate what they saw. And so, my fellow Gen X ladies, if you want to be J. Lo, more power to you. If you want to be Blanche, be Blanche. But if it's always been about Bea Arthur, come sit back here, with me, in your Eileen Fisher tunic and the newish bifocals you haven't quite mastered. We'll wait till the crowd goes home, and we'll dance like nobody's watching.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
When two teams scuffle on the field before the game even starts and both head coaches appear to still be at odds after the final whistle, it is pretty clear the contest was something more than just another regular season N.F.L. game. Indeed, when the Tennessee Titans defeated the Baltimore Ravens, 30 24, in overtime Sunday, the outcome was a weighty, emotional lift for the struggling Titans and their sledgehammer running back, Derrick Henry, who delivered the final gut punch to the reeling Ravens. One team left the field buoyant, the other rattled and questioning itself. It was a rematch of the A.F.C. divisional round playoff game from January, when Tennessee upset Baltimore to end the Ravens' run as a top Super Bowl contender. In the wake of Sunday's loss, it is not a stretch to say the Ravens, who now have a 6 4 record, have yet to recover from that playoff defeat. Adding to Baltimore's letdown was the stunning climax to Sunday's defeat: Henry ran over several members of the Ravens' vaunted defense on his way to an authoritative, 29 yard touchdown that left the Titans celebrating in the Baltimore end zone. Asked if the victory re established Tennessee, which lost to the Kansas City Chiefs in last season's A.F.C. championship game, as a gritty contender in a conference with several high performing teams, Vrabel said: "I think so. I hope so. I know that the players believe that and can see that." None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. The Ravens, losers in three of their four games after an October bye week, were wondering what had gone wrong after a 5 1 start to the season. "We just can't put 60 minutes together as a team," said defensive end Derek Wolfe, who noted that the Ravens led, 21 10, midway through the third quarter. "We've just got to play better in the fourth quarter." Baltimore's mantra during last week's preparation was "just finish," a bit of motivation that did not improve the team's sluggish fourth quarter play Sunday. Things will not get any easier for Baltimore. They will soon travel to Pittsburgh for a Thanksgiving Day game against the Steelers, who beat the Ravens, 28 24, in Baltimore earlier this month. Before kickoff on Sunday, Titans cornerback Malcolm Butler stood at midfield on the Ravens' logo at M T Bank Stadium along with most of his teammates and shouted at the Baltimore sideline. Ravens Coach John Harbaugh walked out to confront Butler, and a jumble of players from both teams gathered as Harbaugh and Vrabel jawed at each other through face masks mandated by the league during the coronavirus pandemic. After the game, Vrabel at first celebrated with some of his players, then approached Harbaugh, who seemed to rebuff Vrabel's attempt at a handshake or traditional postgame salutation. Television replays of the scene showed a brief interchange on the field and did not reveal the coaches shaking hands, although Vrabel denied afterward that Harbaugh had declined to do so. "No, absolutely not," Vrabel said. "I have a lot of respect for John. We shook hands." Meeting with reporters after the game, Harbaugh lamented his team's late game collapse. "We didn't tackle very well at the end of the game that's the difference in the game," he said. The game winning run by Henry was no doubt fresh on Harbaugh's mind. With the Titans appearing ready to set up an overtime field goal attempt by Stephen Gostkowski, Henry, who was held to 44 rushing yards in the first three quarters, ran off left tackle and broke two arm tackles at a crowded line of scrimmage. He then took a jump step to his right and outsprinted the remaining Ravens to the end zone. "He's the best running back in the league," said Wolfe, who grasped at Henry's lower legs on the clinching touchdown run. "That's what he does." Vrabel said he had sensed that his team was ready to finish off the Ravens, who won the coin toss after the fourth quarter and had the first possession of overtime, but punted after three fruitless plays. "You could tell as the game went on that we were wearing on them," Vrabel said. "It was tough sledding at first today, but looking at their body language on the sideline and on the field, I thought we were going to be able to break through." Though the Titans took a 7 0 lead on their opening drive, the Ravens chipped away with two Justin Tucker field goals and stormed ahead, 14 7, on a 2 yard touchdown run by J.K. Dobbins and a successful 2 point conversion. A precise, deft 31 yard touchdown pass from Baltimore quarterback Lamar Jackson to tight end Mark Andrews seemed to have the Ravens well positioned, but they did not score another touchdown in the game, despite three other drives inside the Tennessee 20 yard line. In the closing moments of the fourth quarter, Baltimore advanced to the Titans' 10 yard line, but two Jackson passes fell incomplete and Tucker sent the game to overtime with a 29 yard field goal. Jackson, who has spent most of this season trying to recapture the magic and production of the 2019 season, when he won the N.F.L.'s Most Valuable Player Award, completed 17 of 29 passes for only 186 yards with one interception to complement his one touchdown pass. His counterpart for Tennessee, Ryan Tannehill, completed 22 of 31 passes for 259 yards with two touchdowns and an interception. Asked about the Ravens' struggles near the Titans' goal line, Harbaugh shrugged and said, "We're just not getting it done." His response was similar when asked how his team could regain its momentum toward a playoff berth. "I don't know, we just have to win as many games as we can," Harbaugh said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Q. I keep getting Instagram alerts on my phone that say someone has updated a "story." What exactly is an Instagram story? A. Instagram, primarily known as a social network for sharing smartphone camera photos in a square format, added a feature called Stories in 2016. Stories are basically temporary compilations of photos and videos on a theme, like a visit to a theme park. You add to the collection over the course of the day and can annotate the material with text, virtual stickers and digital doodles. Instead of posting multiple pictures and clips separately, where your friends might miss some of them, you can start a Story that lets all the content be viewed in one place. To see a Story in the Instagram mobile app, tap the house icon in the lower left corner of the screen to go to the Feed page. Stories shared by accounts you follow appear at the top of the screen, so tap a profile icon to see the content. The app automatically moves to the next Story in your feed unless you tap the X in the corner to stop.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
According to documents seen by The New York Times, "JAB has, however, made significant investments in coffee and related areas in recent years, and as a result, now considers its investment in luxury as noncore." JAB, which has its headquarters in Luxembourg, wants to focus on its investments in Coty, in which it has a 36.84 percent stake, and the numerous high end coffee businesses, which also include Stumptown Coffee Roasters and Intelligentsia Coffee Tea. Shedding its investments in the three leather goods companies would take JAB out of the fashion industry, ending an eight year effort to build a viable luxury group to compete with the Big Three LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Richemont and Kering and possibly signaling further consolidation in an industry already wrestling with slowing growth and changing consumer tastes. The strategy shift also speaks to the increasing desire of consumers to spend money on experience including on morning drinks of choice instead of, say, handbags. JAB entered the luxury market with fanfare in 2007 and soon snatched up brands such as the American based designer Derek Lam; the Italian handbag label Zagliani (then known for using Botox in its exotic skin totes and purses to keep them supple); the British jeweler Solange Azagury Partridge; and leather goods names like Jimmy Choo, Bally and Belstaff, all under a new division called Labelux. Only four years later, however, it sold its stakes in the Lam and Azagury Partridge businesses to the brands' founders, and in 2014 decided to refocus on leather goods, bringing the remaining brands directly under the control of JAB Holding (it closed Zagliani in 2015).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
More than 100 Saabs, from the streamlined 1947 prototype known as the Ursaab to a 2010 9 5 sedan, are to be taken from their home at the company's museum in Trollhattan, Sweden, and sold to the highest bidder. As part of an effort to liquidate the assets of the Swedish automaker, whose parent company declared bankruptcy in December, Delphi, a Swedish law firm handling aspects of the bankruptcy process, was soliciting bids for specific cars or for the whole collection last week. The auction comes during a tumultuous time for the brand. Several board members of Swedish Automobile, the automaker's parent, announced on Wednesday that they were stepping down over disagreements about the company's finances. Included in the auction are examples of Saab's everyday models, like a bright red 95 station wagon with fins from 1959 and a pearl white 900 convertible from 1983, a big success for the company at the time. There are also concept cars like the streamlined 9X from 2001 and two examples of the very rare 1956 Sonett sports car, which like the Chevrolet Corvette, a model with which Saab would share a fraught corporate parenthood under General Motors, had a fiberglass body. Notable by its absence on the list is the PhoeniX, a concept designed by Jason Castriota for the 2011 Geneva auto show. The PhoeniX was said to presage the future design language of the automaker. The AeroX concept of 2006, however, which was named the best design of the 2006 Geneva show, is lot No. VM567. "The sale is unprecedented because not only does it include many Saab rarities, but handmade prototypes and even the very first Saab made," Steven Rossi, a former public relations director for Saab in the United States, said in an e mail. Tim Colbeck, the most recent president and chief operating officer for Saab Cars North America, is hoping the collection will not be broken up. "The sad reality of the situation is the company is in bankruptcy proceedings and the receivers will do what they can to maximize the value," he said in a telephone interview. "Quite a few of the cars are significant. The best outcome is that a collector or museum would buy the whole thing. We can only hope that the cars will end up with people who can take care of them for posterity." One such institution, the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, will not be looking to augment its collection. "Petersen is not going to be bidding," Buddy Pepp, the executive director of the Petersen, said in a telephone interview. "As much as we would love to have the collection or some of the individual cars, it's just not feasible at this time." Mr. Pepp added that Saabs are generally "not on the top of many car collectors' lists." Even so, when asked which car from Trollhattan he'd most want to acquire, he didn't hesitate. "Numero uno," he said, referencing the so called Ursaab, known internally as Project 92. "That's going to be a very collectible car, and we would love to have it. But it will go for a lot of money." Mr. Colbeck's own Saab dreams, and indeed regrets, are modest. He fondly remembers his 1985 900 SPG. "They didn't make very many of them," he said. "I wish I'd kept that car."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
UnitedHealth's main argument was that the venture formed by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase was a competitor. UnitedHealth Group, the giant health insurance company, on Friday lost its case to prevent a former executive from working at the new health care venture formed by three powerful corporations, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase. A federal judge in Boston denied UnitedHealth's request to have the executive, David William Smith, immediately stop working. Mr. Smith was an executive at Optum, a unit of UnitedHealth, and it accused him of taking corporate secrets to what it claimed was a competitor. Mr. Smith has denied any wrongdoing. In its court filings, UnitedHealth argued that Mr. Smith's role at Optum made him privy to sensitive information about its plans. Among Optum's businesses is one of the nation's largest pharmacy benefit managers, which serve as intermediaries between drug makers and employers that purchase medicine for their workers. The industry has been sharply criticized for a lack of transparency in how pharmacy benefits managers operate, and Optum's two main rivals recently merged with two large insurers, Aetna and Cigna. While Judge Mark L. Wolf ruled against it, Optum emphasized that the issues remain unresolved and would need to be settled in arbitration. "We are committed to protecting our confidential information and will aggressively do so in arbitration," said Matt Stearns, a spokesman for Optum, in an emailed statement. A spokeswoman for the new venture, referred to as "A.B.C." or "A.B.J." in court papers, declined to comment. Unlike court proceedings, the arbitration sessions would not be public. The case against the nascent venture has highlighted the anxiety of established insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers over newcomers to their territory. From start ups to giant technology firms, the new rivals threaten to unseat companies, like UnitedHealth, that have traditionally dominated these markets. Amazon, which has made tentative forays into the pharmacy business, has emerged as a particularly worrisome competitor. The legal wrangling, which included testimony unsealed by the judge earlier this week, also revealed new details about the powerful triumvirate's plans. While the companies have said that the new venture was not created to generate profits, they have been cryptic about exactly what changes they could make to lower costs and improve the quality of care for their employees. The company made headlines last summer with its choice of chief executive, Dr. Atul Gawande, a high profile physician who writes for The New Yorker. The court proceedings also underscored just how unhappy customers particularly these three employers are with the status quo. "We've been asked to solve a very big problem, which is to figure out new ways of health care," John C. Stoddard, a senior executive for the new venture, testified. The three employers combined are spending about 4 billion a year on the roughly one million people they cover. But employees "have a poor experience," Mr. Stoddard said. "They're not getting the care they need, and the costs continue to rise," he said. "We wouldn't exist unless there was a need to come up with and find a new solution to the problem." The venture, which has no name and fewer than 20 employees, plans to tackle several areas, including how benefits are provided through traditional health insurance plans, Mr. Stoddard said. High deductibles, which force employees to pay for significant amounts of their care before their insurance kicks in, are a hardship for "fulfillment center workers and call center workers," he said. The companies also want to see if they can lower the cost of drugs for chronic conditions. In his testimony, Mr. Stoddard insisted that the new venture had no plans to enter the pharmacy business but wanted to better understand the process and the actual cost of drugs. "That doesn't make us a competitor," he said. "That makes us a very informed customer." The employers also want to make it easier for workers to see a doctor, Mr. Stoddard testified. Because Optum also operates a large network of primary care doctors, the venture might want to work with Optum to provide employees with easier access to physicians. "That's why this is so crazy to me: that they think of us as competitors, when I see us as potential partners," Mr. Stoddard said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Nick Denton, the founder and chief executive of Gawker Media, filed for personal bankruptcy on Monday to protect himself from a legal judgment awarded in March to the former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan in an invasion of privacy lawsuit. "Ever since the verdict, this was a likely outcome," Mr. Denton said in an instant message. Gawker, which faces a 140 million judgment, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June and put itself up for sale. The company will be sold at an auction that is expected to occur later this month. Filing for bankruptcy puts a stay on claims from creditors, including court judgments, meaning Hulk Hogan, whose real name is Terry G. Bollea, will not be able to collect his award. Gawker is appealing the judgment made by a jury that awarded Mr. Bollea 115 million in damages and 25 million more in punitive damages. Mr. Denton is personally liable for 10 million and jointly liable for 115 million.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
It was the day before my wedding, and I still didn't have a dress. In less than 24 hours, family and friends would be gathering to celebrate the occasion, and at this point my "something borrowed" was going to be an entire church outfit. Was I concerned? Not really, and not for long. I decided to throw a Hail Mary at my mom by asking if she would make a skirt to match the 10 top I found. She did. And it was lovely. My wedding dress was just one of many things I wasn't concerned about. For example, five days earlier (on a Thursday, which also happened to be New Year's Eve), I was on the phone with the woman who would become my banquet coordinator. The conversation took place about an hour after I was officially engaged (with an 8.88 Walmart wedding ring purchased that morning) while hiking in the Sedona Verde Valley in Arizona. The couple became engaged while hiking in Arizona. HER (choking cough) "Excuse me? You're getting married in five days, and you're just calling me now?" ME "Well, I actually think I'm being quite generous. I just got engaged, and you're my first call. I figured I should work out some logistics before texting everyone. And no, I'm not pregnant." HER "Well this is unusual. How many people are you expecting?" HER (cough) "One hundred people with five days' notice?" ME "People do it for funerals all the time. If I've underestimated, we'll have leftovers. If I overestimated, I'll just make my family eat last." HER "I'm not sure how to process this. O.K., let's talk about flowers." ME "The room is beautiful enough, so I don't think anyone will notice. Seems wasteful." HER "How about tablecloths and napkin colors?" ME "Just whatever is cheapest and most convenient." ME "Well, I guess the only suit my fiance has right now is navy. Plus, he has a pink tie. So I guess we'll go with that for our wedding colors. Navy and pink." The entire luncheon was planned in an hour. Because Rob Reading, now my husband, and I knew each other for four years and had been dating for a year, we already knew we wanted to spend eternity together. (We had already met with our bishops for premarriage approval but had not become officially engaged.) And because of my husband's maritime work and subsequent transfer from London to the Bay Area, along with my working on the legal team for the Little Sisters of the Poor Supreme Court case, we figured we had two options in the moments after his proposal: get married in a week or in a year. We eagerly decided it was T minus five days to put my theory to the test. Why five days? Long ago, I became convinced that modern weddings were unnecessarily burdensome. My theory: You could plan a beautiful wedding in a week. The second call I made that day in the desert was to my parents (who told me their prayers were answered). The third call that afternoon was to the Salt Lake Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints. I wasn't concerned about getting a slot at the temple because early Tuesday morning isn't prime time for weddings. Wedding invitations were soon sent (yes, that day) via text message with a collage of selfies saying: "Would love to have you come if you can make it. No gifts. Just love." I called in favors from my best friends to do photos, hair and makeup. I pulled strings to get performers and an M.C. for the event. As I was the last of six children to marry (not to mention my 13 foster siblings), my parents certainly weren't complaining. In addition, the small farm town that I grew up in more cows than humans was rejoicing that the two of us, in our 30s and 40s, were marrying at all. To be sure, five days' notice was inconvenient for our guests, and there were a few who could not make it. But whether five days or five years, it would have been inconvenient and there would have been those who would have missed it. And surprisingly, there were only a handful of close friends who couldn't make it, the same rate as any wedding. And some of the best parts? Total planning time: 26 hours. Total cost: 4,500. The result, on Jan. 5, 2016, was the perfect wedding day. People said that it couldn't have been more lovely if we had had a year to plan it. No one noticed that we didn't have flowers. Or, as my mother, Marilyn, said: "Hallelujah! Hallelujah for putting the relationship above a wedding reception. Hallelujah for not worrying about complicated logistics. And hallelujah for not having enough time to change your mind!" Rob also saw the beauty in our short engagement and the microburst planning period. "The longer it plays out, the longer the nuisance," he said. "It would have been just an obstacle to starting our life. So why wait?" We may not have a 200 gravy boat, and I may have worn an 8.88 Walmart wedding ring that eventually turned my finger green, but our flowerless, navy and pink wedding set the perfect precedent for married life elegantly simple. Read More: Here's How She Planned Her Wedding in a Week	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
General Motors has a long history of killing off worthy cars. The Pontiac Fiero is the most infamous example, an initially mundane two seater that developed into a capable performance machine just in time for production to cease forever. A more recent casualty was the 2008 9 Pontiac G8, a rear drive performance sedan that was canceled when its brand fell under the ax as G.M. approached bankruptcy. The G8 was actually selling pretty well, all things considered Pontiac moved 38,159 cars despite the G8's horribly timed release into what seemed like an economic Armageddon thus setting up the business case for a do over. Pontiac no longer builds excitement, but the hot rod G8 GXP is back as the Chevrolet SS. By car building standards, this is quite a soap opera. We all thought Troy died in that luge accident, but he just showed up unannounced at Marlene's dinner party! The G8 is only one chapter in the SS's unusually convoluted gestation. This car made its debut in Australia in 2006 as the Holden Commodore. Two years later, America got the Pontiac version, which in 2011 evolved into Chevrolet's commercial police special, the Caprice PPV. Still built in Elizabeth, Australia, the Chevy SS is the latest and probably final iteration for the brawny Holden. Sadly, the 6 speed manual transmission available on the Pontiac G8 GXP didn't leap the chasm from Old G.M. to New G.M. A dingo's got my clutch pedal. The SS's styling hints at the age of the car's design, which was most likely plugged into a CAD program at least a decade ago. The shape is clean but sedate the recently redesigned front drive Impala has more stylistic bravado despite its comparatively modest performance hardware. The SS could use some hood scoops, or racing stripes, or maybe a big tachometer bolted to the hood. As it is, the polished forged aluminum wheels and 14 inch Brembo front brakes are the main signifiers that this is anything other than a workaday Chevy family car. And maybe some people like it that way, but I'm a little wistful for a dash of that old time Pontiac vulgarity. The G8 had hood scoops. Nostrils, really. As for the SS's design, the only other obvious artifact from the mid 2000s lies under the hood, where we find a 415 horsepower version of the 6.2 liter LS3 V8 that once powered the Corvette. While G.M.'s latest V8s use variable valve timing and direct injection, the SS employs neither. In the case of a straightforward pushrod V8 like the LS3, tuning for outright high r.p.m. power will cause the motor to shake at idle like an unbalanced washing machine. If you tune for a smooth idle and more low r.p.m. torque, then your V8 gets wheezy at higher engine speeds. Most pushrod V8s thus occupy a middle ground, and the SS strikes a logical compromise between refinement and high revving horsepower. Fire the ignition and the SS rocks ever so softly from side to side at idle, like a boxer ready to charge from his corner of the ring. At low engine speeds, the car can feel a bit sleepy an LS3 trait shared with the Camaro SS and maybe less powerful than its 0 to 60 m.p.h. time, about five seconds, would suggest. But by 4,000 r.p.m. you feel as if you've strapped a chair to a controlled demolition. Passing power is immense, with the 6 speed automatic transmission delivering a quick downshift if your right foot so much as grazes the accelerator. With a manual transmission, the Pontiac G8 GXP got off the line with slightly more urgency, probably as a function of its 3.70 final drive ratio. The SS, like the GXP with an automatic, uses a taller 3.27 final gear, presumably to salvage some shred of fuel efficiency. And it's the barest of threads. The SS's gas mileage is thoroughly horrible, saddling buyers with a 1,300 gas guzzler tax. The car's E.P.A. rating of 14 miles per gallon in the city, and 21 on the highway, makes it a little bit better than a Rolls Royce Wraith (13 city, 21 highway) and a little bit worse than a 4 wheel drive Chevy Suburban (15/22). Does this thing have pilot lights in the tailpipes? The upshot is that your fuel bill is offset by a reasonable base price. The SS starts at 45,770 (including the guzzler tax), and it's essentially loaded: standard features include high intensity headlights, a rear view camera and a full suite of electronic safety aids. This is also the first Chevy with a hands free self parking feature. The only options are a sunroof ( 900) and a full size spare tire and wheel ( 500). The SS's main competitor would seem to be the SRT Charger, which checks in at about the same price in no frills Super Bee trim. On paper they look comparable, but the Charger is a big, extroverted lunkhead. I mean, you can get it painted purple, for goodness' sake. The Chevy's buyers might otherwise spend their money on a BMW, whereas the Charger's buyers might otherwise spend theirs following Motley Crue on tour for a year.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
LIKE many young married people, Steve and Logan Kinney dream of owning a home. So after several years of diligent saving, the couple, both teachers, scoured the listings in Boerum Hill, the leafy Brooklyn neighborhood where they rented. But before long, they realized that home ownership would require living within the four walls of a studio. And even that was a stretch. "From what I've been told from TV, you are supposed to get a house," said Mr. Kinney, 27, referring to the progression of life after marriage. "And then I get to sit in a nice chair." So they kept a sense of humor and broadened their search to seemingly more affordable areas: Jersey City, the Rockaways in Queens and neighborhoods farther out in Brooklyn. Their jobs at opposite ends of the city she teaches first graders in Harlem, while he works in Rockaway Park further complicated their search. But the real challenge was their price range: with a budget of only 250,000, their quest was over shortly after it began. Considering the city where they live, the Kinneys' predicament is not unusual. Yes, prices have tumbled 32 percent from their peaks, according to Fiserv Case Shiller, and housing is now more affordable across the nation. But the couple lives in one of those places where the crash seemed to play out only on the nightly news. Here, gravity defying ZIP codes rule the land, pushing home ownership out of reach for everyone but the most affluent. In fact, prices in several metropolitan areas including New York, Los Angeles and Boston will end up being higher than their prebubble levels, at least relative to local income, said David Stiff, an economist at Fiserv Case Shiller, which tracks the real estate market. There are a few reasons, but one of the main drivers is the work force: these areas develop pools of specialized, highly compensated employees. Think of Silicon Valley in Northern California, the financial industry in New York or the biotechnology sector in Boston. "When that industry booms, it drives up home prices for everyone," Mr. Stiff said. "Through each boom cycle, the price levels relative to income at the end of the cycle will be higher than at the beginning, so you get a ratcheting effect of unaffordability." And even though lower and middle income households are not directly competing with the wealthier workers for housing, they are still affected. "Each step of the way they are pushing prices up out to my market," he added. "So in many instances, the only option is an extremely long commute." When prices peaked, the median cost nationwide of a single family home was 226,000, four times the median income. Since then prices have dropped to levels last seen in the mid '90s: at 166,000, that's about 2.7 times the median income of 61,593, according to Fiserv. But things begin to look a lot less affordable when you consider hot spots like Los Angeles. The median home there costs about 5.86 times the median income, compared with 4.89 in San Francisco. New York isn't far behind: the median home runs about 4.62 times the median income, in part because of foreign buyers who take advantage of a weaker dollar. In Boston, it costs 3.7 times median income. For many would be buyers, that means it is simply more affordable to rent. But that can be frustrating for people who thought they had done everything right, except for choosing a higher paying profession. The Kinneys both went to Rutgers, a public university in their home state, to keep student debts manageable. Instead of attending graduate programs at costly private schools, they became New York City Teaching Fellows, an intensive teacher training program that subsidizes the cost of a master's degree in education. When they moved in together, the couple began saving about 700 each month, and Mr. Kinney helped his future wife extinguish the credit card loans she had accumulated in school. Their wedding, two years ago, was a small affair in Ms. Kinney's mother's backyard in New Jersey, where Mr. Kinney's father served as the photographer. They honeymooned in Paris, but did it on a student's budget, staying in hostels and subsisting on baguettes. Today, they have no debt other than Ms. Kinney's student loans, which total about 25,000 not too bad, relative to many of her peers. They've been saving about 1,000 most months and put an additional 15 percent away for retirement. They both have credit scores that top the enviable 800 mark. So why can't their savings yield enough money for a hefty down payment? "It feels like anytime we hit around 20,000 something terrible or some unexpected thing happens," Mr. Kinney said of their savings which reached about 22,000 at its peak. He planned on coming up with another 20,000 for their down payment by borrowing from his pension. But that still wasn't enough to stretch their price range much further. Since then, their savings has dwindled a bit, largely because so many things need to go right for it to grow. About a year and a half ago, Ms. Kinney was working as a special education teacher through an agency, but her small caseload and collection of part time jobs didn't generate enough income. Mr. Kinney recently returned to graduate school, because more credits will lead to a higher paycheck, while Ms. Kinney spent about 2,500 getting certified in yoga instruction so she can teach during the summers. Their quest to find a cheaper rental also cost them thousands in brokers fees each time they moved. Then there's the 800 they had to spend on shots for Marley and Bucu, their dog and cat. "Unless you are a lawyer, owning a home is out of the question," said Mr. Kinney, adding that they would need to save the equivalent of one year's salary, before taxes, to come up with the full 20 percent down payment needed to avoid private mortgage insurance. "That's a lot of money and assumes nothing ever comes up." And that doesn't even include the 10,000 cushion they would like to keep in the bank after the down payment and closing costs which would make them comfortable buying. Saving that much has always been a slog, which is why experts say that first time home buyers rarely come up with the full 20 percent down payment. In fact, more than 53 percent of first time home buyers obtain mortgages through the Federal Housing Administration's program, where government insured loans permit borrowers to put as little as 3.5 percent down, according to a September survey of 2,500 real estate brokers conducted by Inside Mortgage Finance and Campbell Surveys. Only about 11.2 percent of first time home buyers took traditional mortgages that are backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The remainder paid with cash, private financing, or through programs sponsored by the Veterans Affairs or Agriculture Departments. The Kinneys were considering an F.H.A. mortgage, but for now, they're back to watching their spending. They rarely eat out, though they do splurge on organic produce. Mr. Kinney said he could draw a map of the city's best happy hours, which "dovetails nicely with the fact that we're public school teachers and have been up since 5 a.m."; they are ready for bed soon after the specials are over. He has worn the same 20 sneakers for two years. They reward themselves with one vacation a year, which is typically financed with half of their tax refund. The other half is saved. The couple said they were grateful for what they have. Still, the inability to buy makes them feel as if they are living an extended adolescence, especially because they're eager to start a family. "There is something about that that makes you feel like you are not fully a member of society," Mr. Kinney said. "You still feel like a child," Ms. Kinney added, conceding that sometimes she feels that the goal is so far off that it's not even worth trying. But during those moments, Mr. Kinney, the money manager, tries to keep them focused (just don't tell him it's a great time to buy). The couple might also move West at some point, but not until the economy improves. And right now, they love living in New York. Meanwhile, they have managed to find a two bedroom rental that feels more like home, a few blocks from the sand and surf in the Rockaway Beach section of Queens. At 1,600, it costs the same as the dark basement studio they had rented in Brooklyn. "Rockaway Beach is a little far out there," Ms. Kinney said of her three hour round trip commute, "but whenever I come home I will have the ocean at my door." And that doesn't cost their down payment fund anything at all.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Re "Focus on Governors, Not Trump," by Nikki R. Haley (Op Ed, April 10): Nikki Haley's struggle to obscure President Trump's ineptitude during Covid 19 contains a testimonial ode to Barack Obama's leadership. Ms. Haley recounts a bygone era when as governor of South Carolina under Mr. Obama she could count on cooperation with the president to put "differences aside to serve the immediate needs of our joint constituents." Ms. Haley also writes: "It's true that states shouldn't have to compete, to bid against each other for supplies at inflated prices. And party politics shouldn't factor in disbursing federal resources to states." While this was not the case for Ms. Haley under Mr. Obama's presidency, tragically, because of Mr. Trump's failure to lead or care, this is now exactly the situation. Governors are leading heroically, battling a shameful void of federal leadership and coordination, and a failure to provide resources. Ms. Haley's shameless audition letter for vice president can't camouflage the simple truth that she was lucky to serve under a deft leader when she faced crises as governor. Today, as Americans die by the thousands and overflow morgues, our governors live in a different universe, left on their own to fight for resources while our president obsesses about ratings and vendettas.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
EDMONTON, Alberta Steven Stamkos didn't need much time to make his mark on the Stanley Cup finals. In his first game since February, the Tampa Bay captain helped put his team within two games of winning a title when he scored on his only shot of the game, a 5 2 win for the Lightning over the Dallas Stars on Wednesday night. "It was just an amazing experience to share with my teammates," Stamkos said. "It was amazing to be part of a huge win for us and I was just really happy to contribute in a game that I didn't play too much." Nikita Kucherov, Victor Hedman, Brayden Point and Ondrej Palat also scored for Tampa Bay, while Dallas got a shorthanded goal from Jason Dickinson and one at even strength from Miro Heiskanen. Andrei Vasilevskiy picked up his playoff leading 16th win with a 22 save effort. Anton Khudobin made 24 saves through 40 minutes for his second straight loss. The backup goaltender Jake Oettinger took over in the third period, making three stops. Stamkos played just two minutes and 47 seconds over five first period shifts, while becoming the second player in N.H.L. history and the first in more than 80 years to score while playing his first postseason game of the year in the finals. "He only had five shifts, but probably as efficient of five shifts you're ever going to see in a National Hockey League playoff game," said Lightning Coach Jon Cooper, who admitted that he didn't expect Stamkos to have any ice time limitations when he put him into Wednesday's lineup. Stamkos said that he was cleared to play on Tuesday, but he declined to further explain what kept him sidelined, or why he didn't take a shift after the first period. He did stay on the bench for the final 40 minutes and go through the congratulatory line with his teammates at the end of the game. "There's been a lot of behind the scenes things that I'll be glad to share with you guys after the season," he said. "We're focused on winning right now, and tonight was a step in the right direction." A core muscle injury ended Stamkos's regular season on Feb. 25 and caused him to have surgery in March. Before he was sidelined, he had been on a 15 game point streak in which he had 12 goals and 10 assists. Originally expected to play much earlier in the postseason, Stamkos had been with his teammates ever since the Lightning entered the N.H.L. bubble in Toronto in late July. In addition to Stamkos's goal, the Lightning's other stars delivered offensively. Five minutes and 33 seconds into the first period, Nikita Kucherov tallied his playoff leading 29th point when he streaked down the slot and beat Khudobin after an uncharacteristic giveaway by Heiskanen at Dallas's blue line. Kucherov added his 30th point on an assist in the second period. Barely a minute after Kucherov opened the scoring, Stamkos's goal came when he cut in off the boards and surprised Khudobin with a quick snap shot from just above the right wing face off dot, eliciting a raucous cheer from the Lightning bench. "You watch the kid, what he's done for the last however many months," Cooper said. "For him to be able to do that I think however Stammer was feeling at that moment, all the players expressed it on the bench." Defenseman Jan Rutta also scored his first postseason point on Stamkos's goal. Injured in round robin play back in August, he didn't get back into the lineup until Game 2 of the finals. "They made two good shots early," the Stars captain Jamie Benn said. "They capitalized on their chances and we didn't." "I thought the first period, we made some mistakes from key guys who normally don't make mistakes. And we paid we for that," Dallas Coach Rick Bowness said. "Then we just started scrambling." The Stars have made a habit of pushing back when they fall behind in games. On Wednesday, they did their best to complete their ninth comeback of the playoffs, but they fell short. They outshot the Lightning 16 8 in the first period and narrowed the score to 2 1 with Dickinson's shorthanded goal, but couldn't get any closer. Alexander Radulov took a hooking penalty late in the first period, then Hedman extended the Lightning lead just 54 seconds into the second, scoring his 10th of the postseason on the power play with a quick wrist shot from the high slot. Tampa Bay dominated the middle frame, outshooting Dallas 21 4 and adding two more goals. Brayden Point picked up his playoff high 11th goal of the postseason at 12:02, then helped set up linemate Ondrej Palat for his 10th at 18:55. "I think the energy on our bench and the confidence in one another, the trust in one another was something incredible," Lightning defenseman Ryan McDonagh said. "We were just rallying so hard for one another and trying to pick each other up that whole game."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
I'll never forget the pleading that goes on in "Sorry We Missed You." It's desperate but futile. Life goes on, they say. So does the global marketplace. If you order a shower curtain or diapers or a new phone, you probably need it yesterday. Ken Loach's brutally moving agitprop drama demands a thought be spared for the anonymous souls who drop this stuff off. That shower curtain might be the death of them. It's an easy movie at first. Ricky Turner (Kris Hitchen) has done blue collar labor all his life. Now he's through with bosses breathing down his neck, so he takes a job as an owner driver for a third party delivery company out of Newcastle in northern England. (The title refers to those door tags you get when a package needs a signature and you're not home.) Gig economy freedom appeals to him. But anybody watching Ricky natter on about blissful independence, in these opening scenes, can already sense the bad news rising maybe even before his new not boss, a big bruiser named Maloney (Ross Brewster), tells him, "Like everything around here, it's your choice." First of all, Ricky has no van to transport the parcels. A new one costs about 18,000, and he doesn't have that kind of money, not even for the 1,200 down payment. When he strong arms his wife, Abby (Debbie Honeywood), into selling the family car that she also depends on for her own job taking care of the disabled, elderly and infirm, you feel the movie starting down a track that will, at some point, make you get angry, then consider terminating your Amazon Prime membership. Except this is a Loach movie, and along with being one of Earth's most venerable and venerated directors, he's almost without peer as a filmmaker formidably committed to exposing the sins of our wages. For six decades, his film and television work "Kes," "Riff Raff," Ladybird, Ladybird," "My Name Is Joe," "Looking for Eric," "I, Daniel Blake" has looked at regular working folks and, often, what that work costs them. He knows you're unlikely to cancel anything. But he damn sure wants you to think long and hard about that next one click buy. Paul Laverty has written many of Loach's scripts, including this one. He's attuned to seeding problems early so that they sprout distress later. Abby's employment becomes as central to the drama as Ricky's. With the car sold, she has to take the bus, and like her husband, she works for a subcontractor that has no evident concern for her humanity, let alone that of the clients whom she treats with maximal warmth and heroic empathy. She, too, works long, difficult hours and has to manage her family and her clients on the fly. Her title is care worker; the marvel of Honeywood's performance is how to heart she's taken the term. The Turners have two kids, a teen angel named Liza Jane (Katie Proctor) and an older, adolescent punk called Seb (Rhys Stone), whose rebellious street art compounds the household stress and jeopardizes Ricky's ability to meet his relentless delivery quotas. Loach knows how to direct actors to appear true, to be capable of surprise. Stone, for instance, is acting his surname, but there's something soft and knowing in this guy that's always absorbingly present. And Hitchen sees to it that Ricky's delusions, stubbornness and iffy decision making never tip into stupidity. He's peevish, slack jawed, a little rascally. He loves his family and his football team (Man U, not Newcastle, as one appalled parcel recipient observes). The acting here smooths out the blocky, talky, implausibly ruminative aspects of Laverty's writing. Like, when Ricky and Abby lay awake and discuss their troubles. There's a tidiness to that scene that feels more screenplay than natural intimacy. Still, you believe this family. You believe in them. There are also all kinds of meaningful, seemingly disposable, smart details. The film contains, for instance, one of the movies' more moral arguments for the up and downsides of advanced communication: Abby's life would shatter without her phone; Seb's psyche shatters without his. For everything to go right with this family, not one thing can go remotely wrong. No one can afford to get sick, attend an unscheduled school meeting, miss a bus, be robbed. It's all too precarious, which is to say it's all too real. Watching the Turners, I thought about the scam the Kim family pulls in Bong Joon Ho's "Parasite" and how that film ingeniously reconsiders class warfare as nightmare farce. Both movies become tragedies, but Bong's feels like an allegory where Loach's feels like activism. They're both thinking large and minutely. But globalism's faceless grind couldn't be more local, more personal than it is in "Sorry We Missed You." The movie's as pungent as "Parasite" but with none of the comic frills, none of Bong's cinematic fashion. It's closer, actually, to that astounding documentary about the Macedonian beekeepers, "Honeyland." There's no way for Loach to have gone smaller. When the movie's over, you have, indeed, witnessed a tragedy, just not the usual kind. Nobody dies. No one goes to prison (there is one police station visit unlike any I've seen). But life: that's the tragedy, what it takes to get by, what it takes be just a little bit happy for one lousy meal. The stakes of the film are simultaneously huge and small. The Turners don't need much. Some stability; a steady income, of course; more time would be a dream. Really, though, the most precious thing they have is each other. But there's no time for that because then there'd be no money.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
What can fliers expect at airports this summer from the Transportation Security Administration? Yes, there are those constant warnings of long lines at security checkpoints, but the agency recently introduced pilot programs for two technologies intended to significantly speed up the screening process: computed tomography three dimensional (CT 3D) bag screening and biometric fingerprint identification. The CT 3D bag screeners are being tested at two United States airports, Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and Logan International Airport in Boston, while the biometric fingerprint screeners are being tested at Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport and Denver International Airport. The tests started in the beginning of June and have no set end date, said Mike England, a national spokesman for the T.S.A. "If both trials are successful, fliers could be in store for faster and more efficient security," he said. Also, contrary to buzz on social media, one thing fliers shouldn't expect this summer when going through security lanes is being asked by the agency's employees to remove their books from their carry on luggage. Mr. England emphasized that such claims were not true. "At no time has the removal of books been T.S.A. policy, nor are we considering making it policy," he said. But Mr. England did say that T.S.A. employees may occasionally ask travelers to declutter their carry ons by removing items from them and placing these items into separate bins so that the bags are easier to screen.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
A coyote attacked a 5 year old boy near the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum in Chicago on Wednesday, sending him to the hospital. He was in stable condition, the Chicago Fire Department reported. Later that day, a coyote bit an adult man on the buttocks, according to news accounts. The man showed up at another Chicago hospital with a minor injury. Since a coyote had not been caught, it was not clear whether the same animal had assaulted both people. The individual attacks, particularly of a child, are frightening. Although such events are rare, they are now common enough in major urban areas to be familiar. The reason is the extraordinary number of coyotes now living in the midst of densely settled cities. Coyotes have long been present in much of North America, but since 1900 their range has grown enormously, expanding east, north and south. In more recent decades, they have moved into urban areas. Coyotes have been colonizing the canyons of Los Angeles at least since the 1970s. First seen in the Bronx in the 1990s, coyotes have grown in numbers on the streets of Manhattan, and have attacked children in the New York suburbs. They have really taken to the Chicago area, with an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 coyotes in Cook County, according to Seth Magle, the director of the Urban Wildlife Institute at the Lincoln Park Zoo. He and his colleagues have been studying Chicago coyotes for about 10 years. Given the number of animals there, the attacks are extremely rare, he said. Their relationship with humans is profoundly complicated. The day before the two attacks, the same Fire Department that took the little boy to the hospital rescued a coyote from Lake Michigan. Chicago Animal Care and Control cared for that coyote by taking it to Flint Creek Wildlife Rehabilitation. It tried to control the second by searching for it. The reason coyotes move into urban areas seems to be that, like raccoons and white tailed deer, they can adapt to living around humans. Other canids, like wolves, need space and bigger prey. Coyotes can survive on squirrels, mice, rabbits and birds, which make up most of their diet in Chicago, Dr. Magle said. They do not eat much garbage, unlike raccoons, but they do eat some. And by and large, they try to stay out of sight. They do remarkably well in cities, apparently having larger litters than they do in rural areas. Also, they have similar taste to humans in terms of where they like to live. "Coyotes prefer the richer part of town," Dr. Magle said, perhaps because they are attracted to bigger yards and more places to hide, or perhaps because of better access to garbage. They are, by nature, nocturnal. But not always. Anyone in a city where coyotes live has seen them during the day. In 2009, Stanley D. Gehrt and other researchers at The Ohio State University did an analysis of 142 reports of coyote attacks from 1960 to 2006, mostly from news media reports. In Chicago, there were 20 times as many news accounts of coyote attacks in 2005 as there were in the 1990s. About 37 percent of the attacks appeared to be predatory. Small children are most at risk in this kind of attack. One question that scientists are asking about urban coyotes is whether they have become more bold, meaning more willing to try new things and take chances. Roland Kays at North Carolina State University, one of the researchers looking into this question, said that coyotes are incredibly adaptable and that they have a great ability to assess risk. In rural areas, they are very shy around humans, "because a bold coyote is going to get shot." But in a city, that is probably not an issue. He suggested that people should not overestimate the danger from coyotes, pointing out that dog bites are overwhelmingly more of a problem than coyote attacks, but people are able to keep that problem in perspective and "don't freak out when they see a dog." He said that in most cases, people should not be worried if they see a coyote, since almost all of the animals want to avoid people. But, he warned, keep an eye on them, and be particularly alert if you have small children with you or if the coyotes are acting strangely or approaching people. Rabies is not common in coyotes, but it can occur.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Most of us have a swimming story, even if only a short one about why we don't do it. These tales tend to feature a cavalier coach whose go to technique was a heartless shove, or a slightly older or bigger child with a yen for dunking the new kid in the pool. The former is the kind of person one hopes is vanishing from our culture; the latter will be there at the end of time, chortling. The nonswimmer holds on to the names of these villains forever along with the secret belief that the real culprit was his or her own fear. Swimming, perhaps the most commonplace and relaxing way of putting yourself in total peril, is a real mind game. Bonnie Tsui's "Why We Swim," an enthusiastic and thoughtful work mixing history, journalism and elements of memoir, is ostensibly focused on those who do swim, rather than those who don't. Tsui sets out to answer her title's question with a compassionate understanding of how that mind game stops some and a curiosity about how and why it seduces others. She herself is a lifelong swimmer who has competed (first as a child on Long Island, with the Freeport Sea Devils, and more recently with a masters group in the Bay Area) and who also surfs, a sport where the base requirement is being fine with receiving full body punches from waves. For her, swimming is not static. Even when she is returning to the same swimming spot, it's always a different adventure. "To live deliberately as a swimmer means you are a seeker; a chaser of the ocean's blue corduroy, a follower of river veins," Tsui writes. She chases some blue corduroy on these pages, like on the day she takes her first wetsuit free swim in San Francisco Bay in "almost balmy" 56 degree water. When she's finally thawed out, she walks the waterfront, smiling proudly to herself, "newly attuned and alert to the pulse of the bay as an echo of my own. Why did I do it? I realize that it's because I want to knock on heaven's door and have a chat with the Devil too." "Why We Swim" incorporates the stories of daredevils, but it also covers tales of survival and inspiration. The book is divided into five sections, or rationales, for swimming: survival, well being, community, competition and flow, described by the Hungarian American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as "the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
In 2015 Philip Mullaly was strolling along a beach in Victoria, Australia, when he spotted what looked like a shining serrated blade stuck in a boulder. Using his car keys, Mr. Mullaly carefully pried from the rock a shark tooth about the size of his palm. He didn't know it at the time, but the tooth he uncovered once belonged in the mouth of a 25 million year old giant shark that was twice the size of a great white. "It was an awesome creature, it would have been terrifying to come across," Mr. Mullaly said. Though Mr. Mullaly, who is a schoolteacher and amateur fossil hunter, has collected more than a hundred fossils, he never before found a prehistoric shark tooth. He returned to the boulder a few weeks later and to his surprise dug up several more three inch teeth. "It dawned on me when I found the second, third and fourth tooth that this was a really big deal," said Mr. Mullaly. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. He contacted Erich Fitzgerald, a paleontologist at the Museums Victoria in Melbourne, which announced the find on Thursday. Dr. Fitzgerald identified the teeth as belonging to a type of mega toothed shark called the great jagged narrow toothed shark, or Carcharocles angustidens.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
SAO PAULO, Brazil It was around 5 a.m. on an average Tuesday. I was sitting on the sofa eating toast when I received a Facebook notification saying that a police raid had just begun. "Please don't leave your homes," I read. "If you are outside, take shelter!" Classes were canceled that morning. Armored tanks rolled through the streets, shooting seemingly at random. By 8 a.m., according to reports, police officers broke into homes and tortured residents. Others headed to the roofs to set up sniper hide outs. The operation lasted all day. It was entirely typical. Of course it didn't happen where I live a middle class neighborhood in Sao Paulo, where such acts of state terror would be nearly inconceivable. No, the operation took place last month in Complexo da Mare, a complex of 16 favela communities in Rio de Janeiro where approximately 140,000 people live. I recently started following the Facebook page "Mare Vive" (Mare Lives) months ago, in a vague effort to grasp what it would feel like living in a Rio favela. To keep residents safe, the page shares information and live updates on police raids in the community. Almost every morning, around 5 a.m., I receive their daily forecast. Will everything be calm in the favela today? Or are the tanks already rolling in? It's almost like a weather forecast if only you could trade raincoats for bulletproof vests. And yet I can shut down the computer and forget all about it right away, if I want to. Residents can't. In 2019, according to a report by the nonprofit group Redes da Mare, there were 39 police operations in the complex one every 9.4 days that lasted almost 300 hours and left 34 people dead. (None of them were white.) Twenty four school days have been lost. (School is canceled when there's a police raid.) The raids are part of a disastrous policy to combat drug trafficking in Rio de Janeiro. The state's security forces have always been violent and unaccountable for their actions in the favelas, but things have gotten even worse under the country's far right president, Jair Bolsonaro, and an ally, Rio de Janeiro's governor Wilson Witzel. Mr. Witzel has promised to "slaughter" criminals in the communities, saying that the military police should "aim at their little heads." This is at the core of his public security policy, which consists of tough on crime rhetoric, giving carte blanche to the police and nothing else. Last year, he claimed he should have the right to send a missile into a favela in order to "blow up these people." He encourages incessant and deadly police invasions into poor communities in pursuit of drug gangs, failing to recognize that most of the residents are law abiding, working citizens. As a result, police killings in the state of Rio de Janeiro reached a 20 year high last year, with 1,810 people murdered by security forces almost five deaths per day. (Twenty two police officers were killed in the same period.) Police forces are now responsible for 43 percent of all the violent deaths in the state, an astonishingly high number even by Brazilian standards. While the authorities claim that most of the victims are gang members who engaged in confrontations with the police, many cases show signs of being extrajudicial killings. Other times, victims are innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire: Six children died last year during police raids in Rio de Janeiro's poorest communities. (Most of these murders are still unsolved.) Other victims were wrongfully targeted; if you are black and live in a favela, anything can be mistaken for a gun. People have been killed for carrying an umbrella, an hydraulic jack, a cellphone, a backpack. Four years ago, a 16 year old boy was killed when his bag of popcorn was mistaken for drugs.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Before handing the keyfob to a stranger, the Corvette owner can punch in a four digit code on the car's touch screen, disabling the audio system, locking the glove compartment and turning on the video recorder. Video from the front facing camera as well as audio from inside the car is stored on the SD card, which the driver can watch later for errant behavior like excessive acceleration and hard braking. A 32 gigabyte card should hold more than 12 hours of video, Mr. Charles said. To allay fears of Big Brother abuse, General Motors does not allow the video to be streamed live from the car, though the technology exists to make that possible. Furthermore, owners do not receive live alerts or text messages saying, "The garage attendant is driving your car at 100 m.p.h.!" "The key thing is that the data only goes on the SD card," Mr. Charles said. "It's owned by the driver. There's nobody else monitoring it." So it is not intended for use by, say, an insurance company. The feature is not included on all 2015 Corvettes; the performance data recorder and valet mode are part of an optional 1,795 navigation package. Unlike dashcams, the Corvette video system will not automatically recognize an impact and record an accident. Drivers have to give their permission by starting the personal video recorder each time they get behind the wheel.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
In 1969, when "Boesman and Lena" had its debut at Rhodes University in South Africa, it was clearly a document of apartheid even though its title characters were played in blackface by white actors, including Mr. Fugard himself as Boesman. And audiences who saw the New York premiere in 1970, starring James Earl Jones and Ruby Dee, would likewise have understood it as an outcry against the dehumanizing effects of a specific South African injustice. So when I first encountered the script in college, it read almost as reportage or agitprop, with an implied call to action. The power games Boesman and Lena play with each other, fighting over their few prerogatives of wine and shelter, obviously recapitulated the greed and sadism of their white oppressors. (Boesman beats Lena as his overseers beat him.) Their disdainful attitude toward an old Xhosa man they encounter on the mud flats in the country's racial profiling system, the Xhosa are black, a step below colored is just apartheid paid downward. But by the time of the first major New York revival, at the Manhattan Theater Club in 1992, South Africa was beginning to emerge from apartheid, and so was the play. In his New York Times review of that production, Frank Rich had merely to note the homelessness then common on city streets to argue that the play had become "uncomfortably literal." Boesman and Lena were no longer just victims of apartheid; they were victims of poverty anywhere, sleeping outside the theater, for instance, on filthy subway grates. What's new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter Ms. Farber's staging for Signature Theater seems to complete this metamorphosis, clearly placing itself within the tradition of existential rather than political drama. For one thing it is perhaps too self consciously a beautiful production, especially as lit by Amith Chandrashaker to catch the actors' haunted faces in the encroaching dark. And where Mr. Fugard calls for a bare stage, the designer Susan Hilferty has allowed a single bent tree to grow, which by now is a Beckett bat signal pointing to "Waiting for Godot." With that context in place, the arrival of Boesman (Sahr Ngaujah) and Lena (Zainab Jah) cannot fail to recall that of Vladimir and Estragon at the start of "Godot." They seem more like fellow travelers than (as we eventually infer) common law spouses and seem far angrier at each other than at the system that brought them here. When the old Xhosa man (Thomas Silcott, devastating) arrives, he is not just a figure of pathos speaking a language they do not understand. He is Beckett's Lucky, in an overcoat.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
What to Watch: How About Cherry Pit Spitting or Australian Rules Football? Fans are growing restive as the reality sinks in: There are almost no live sporting events going on anywhere. Many people finding themselves at home 24/7 for social distancing might be tempted to turn on the TV, only to find repeats of "classic" (and not so classic) games exclusively on the menu. We found some sports (and some attempts at sports) that are still going on out there Major League Fishing anyone? at least for now. Down under, the news is brighter for the sports junkie. Australian rugby and soccer are soldiering on. And the Australian rules football season kicked off as scheduled on Thursday night in Melbourne. The atmosphere at the storied Melbourne Cricket Ground for Richmond Carlton was eerily quiet. There were players, television announcers and a handful of team officials, but the 100,000 seats, normally nearly full of leather lunged fans for the season opener, were empty. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. "We Will Rock You" and "Mr. Brightside" were gamely played over the loudspeakers to try to create some atmosphere. But the lack of cheering and singing made for a slightly empty experience, more like watching a practice session than a pomp filled season opener. Many took a cue from the music and looked at the bright side. "Mixed feelings watching this. It's sad, even depressing, with no fans, but it's the best result of a bad situation. At least we're getting to see some footy," Ronny Lerner posted on Twitter. Non aficionado television viewers may have been baffled by the footy, but some at least gave it a shot; in the United States it aired on Fox Soccer Plus. "Not a clue what's going on, but I'm watching live sports," enthused someone with the handle "Illegal Daniel." Still On: Cherry Pit Spitting, on ESPN ESPN, home to football, baseball and basketball in normal times, plans to run cornhole, ax throwing, miniature golf, cup stacking, arm wrestling and cherry pit spitting on Sunday. Feel free to read that sentence again. That leaves TVG as America's new ESPN, with horse racing nearly around the clock on the channel. Gavle in Sweden runs in the morning, Gulfstream in the afternoon, harness racing from Saratoga in the evening and Swan Hill in Australia (a veritable sports paradise!) late at night. "We hope that we can offer a safe diversion and a bit of entertainment for people, especially in light of the cancellation and postponement of so many sports events," said Kip Levin, the CEO of TVG. Why is horse racing chugging along in times like these? We'll wager you can guess. Turkey was one of the last European leagues to keep its soccer season going, with top level action played as recently as Tuesday. On Thursday, the leagues were shut down for a month. Basketball and volleyball were also halted. Shortly afterward came the news that Abdurrahim Albayrak, the president of one of the biggest clubs in the country, Galatasaray, was quarantined with suspicion of having the virus, the Turkish sports newspaper Fanatik reported. Fatih Terim, Galatasaray's manager, had been outspoken in asking that the season be suspended. John Obi Mikel, a Nigerian familiar for his years with Chelsea, left another Turkish team, Trabzonspor, this week. "I do not feel comfortable and don't want to play football in this situation," he said. Beyond Australia, soccer is now confined primarily to Africa, South America, and, for whatever reason, Belarus. Formula One, which had already postponed its first four races, threw in the towel Thursday on races in the Netherlands, Spain and even Monaco, the glamorous site of its most famous race.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The first promising vaccine for dengue a disease that afflicts hundreds of millions of people around the world is in jeopardy after the Philippines suspended it, amid widespread fears about its safety and growing public anger over its use in 830,000 schoolchildren. The Philippines government has begun investigations into the rollout of the immunization program by the French drugmaker Sanofi, which has come under fire for discounting early warnings that its vaccine could put some people at heightened risk of a severe form of the disease. The newly revealed evidence, confirmed recently by Sanofi's review of study data, found that in rare cases, Dengvaxia can backfire: If people who never had dengue are vaccinated and later become infected, the vaccine may provoke a much more severe form of the illness. The situation has become a public relations debacle for the drugmaker, which spent decades developing Dengvaxia, the world's first dengue vaccine. Politicians in the Philippines are demanding information about Sanofi's advertising campaign and their government's aggressive push, against the advice of some experts, to vaccinate a million children. The backlash has alarmed researchers who worry that Sanofi's stumble could stoke mistrust in vaccines around the globe. Sanofi's vaccine is approved in 19 countries and is the first to combat dengue, a disease spread by mosquitoes that infects about 400 million people worldwide. It puts 500,000 people in the hospital each year and kills 25,000, mostly in Latin America and South Asia. Infection rates can reach 90 percent in the Philippines, according to Sanofi. Death rates are highest among children, and just last week a 7 year old girl who had not been vaccinated died from dengue in the Philippines, according to news reports there. Late last month, Sanofi said its new analysis showed that vaccination should not be recommended for people who have never had dengue, advice that was echoed this past week by the World Health Organization. But that only adds to the confusion, because there is no rapid test to tell if someone has had the disease. Even though the risk from the vaccine is low, families fear it has turned their children into time bombs, in whom the virus could set off a life threatening illness. Leovon Deyro, whose youngest son received his last injection of the vaccine two weeks ago, said he suspects that Sanofi conspired with corrupt Philippine officials to circumvent regulations, something the company has denied. "We weren't told it was not safe," Mr. Deyro said. So far, he said, his son, who is 10, has had no worrying symptoms. But, he added, "They made my son and other students as guinea pigs." The Philippine health secretary, Francisco T. Duque III, said the government is demanding a refund from Sanofi for the 3.5 billion Philippine pesos, or about 69 million, it spent on the vaccine. It is also asking the company to set up a fund to cover the treatment of any children who develop severe dengue. "It's been very devastating for almost the entire country," said Dr. Leonila Dans, an epidemiologist and pediatrician at the University of the Philippines in Manila who had been an early critic of the vaccination program. "Even those who are not vaccinated are very emotional about it, because they feel for the kids who had the vaccine." The episode could prove to be a cautionary tale for pharmaceutical companies, who have already been reluctant to invest in vaccines and drugs that are used mainly in the developing world. Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University, said, "It's hard to think of another circumstance when a major public health program was introduced with this much controversy." The problems with the vaccine rollout have "cast a pall" on other efforts to develop dengue vaccines, he said, and public health experts are worried that the distrust could spill over to other vaccination programs. "Vaccines have plenty of controversy," Dr. Schaffner said. "We don't need to make more." Sanofi has said that the risk to people who get the vaccine is still extremely small. Moreover, in those who have previously been infected, the vaccine works well. In people older than 9, Dengaxia is about 66 percent effective. It is even more effective 81.9 percent in those over 9 who were previously infected. But that has not allayed fears in the Philippines, where Sanofi has said 10 percent of the children who were vaccinated probably had no prior exposure to the virus. Dr. Su Peing Ng, the head of medical affairs of Sanofi Pasteur, the company's vaccine division, said in an interview that "there is no cause for alarm," adding, "those vaccinated in high exposure settings are much more protected than those who were not." The World Health Organization, which published guidelines on how to use the vaccine in 2016, has distanced itself. "We did not give a blanket recommendation that the vaccine should be introduced," said W.H.O.'s representative in the Philippines, Dr. Gundo Weiler. "This is a decision for governments and governments alone." "It's a huge disappointment and it's a big lesson in humility," said Michel De Wilde, the former senior vice president of research and development at Sanofi Pasteur, who oversaw the vaccine's development until he left the company in 2013. The illness, also called breakbone fever, can be excruciating, with high fevers, headaches, muscle and joint pains and lingering weakness. Sometimes the disease causes hemorrhage or shock, which can be fatal. Some deadly cases have been linked to the fact that there are actually four different types of dengue virus. Research has found that severe illness can occur in people who had one type and later become infected by another. The body's immune response to the first virus is thought to make the second illness worse, a discovery credited to Dr. Scott B. Halstead, who has been studying dengue since the 1960s. In February 2016, as the Philippine program was getting underway, Dr. Halstead warned in a scientific article that the vaccine could put people at risk if they had not previously had dengue. He said the issue was well known. "We've been talking about this for years," he said recently. "It isn't any hidden secret." He and others pointed to a trial of Dengvaxia in children, published in 2015, that seemed to confirm fears that the vaccine could be harmful to those with no previous exposure. The potential danger is not from the vaccine itself, but from the immune response to it. The researchers found that in children under 9 years old, those who were given Dengvaxia and later caught dengue were more likely to be hospitalized for severe illness than those who had not been vaccinated. The finding originally led Sanofi to restrict Dengvaxia to children 9 and older, although the company did not concede that the higher hospitalization rate among younger children was due to their lack of prior dengue exposure. A panel set up by the World Health Organization recommended that the vaccine be used only in places where the incidence of dengue was high. Brazil decided to limit its government program to people who are over age 15. Even as Sanofi pushed back against researchers' warnings about the vaccine's potential hazards, it ordered another analysis of the data. Dr. Ng, the Sanofi official, said that before the additional analysis, "there wasn't a robust way in which we could answer that question. It's only this new analysis that has given us this insight." The new analysis found that lack of past infection was tied to an increased risk of severe dengue. But the risk was small two extra cases per 1,000 previously uninfected people vaccinated, over five years of follow up. And there were no deaths reported. But how to tell if someone has had dengue? Doctors and patients cannot always tell because symptoms can be vague. No rapid test exists. Current tests take a few days to produce results, and may have trouble distinguishing dengue from Zika, a related virus. Trying to use them would further complicate a vaccination process that is already cumbersome, because it requires three visits. Sanofi has said it will invest in efforts to develop a better test. At a Philippine Senate hearing on Dec. 11, Thomas Triomphe, a regional Sanofi official, emphasized the vaccine's benefits and said that to permanently remove it would leave 90 percent of the population "at the mercy of an epidemic which has been found to be preventable." But parents feel they have traded one risk for another that might be worse. Maria Brenal Bernal said her daughter, Reyna Rose, had been sick on and off since receiving her first shot of Dengvaxia in August. In 2016, Dengvaxia brought in 55 million euros, or about 65 million, which fell far short of the 200 million euros the company had previously estimated. Sanofi has recorded 22 million euros in sales of Dengvaxia for the first three quarters of this year, or about 26 million. Experts in infectious diseases say the vaccine is too valuable to be abandoned. "If we wait for the perfect vaccine, we will probably be talking about this 50 years from now," said Duane Gubler, an emeritus professor at Duke NUS Medical School, who favors using the vaccine, especially where dengue is highly endemic. He is one of the inventors of a competing dengue vaccine made by Takeda and has consulted in the past for Sanofi. The Takeda vaccine and another by the United States National Institutes of Health, which will be mainly sold by Merck, could be approved for use soon. According to the research so far, the N.I.H. vaccine, which is administered in a single dose, "gives a very potent response against all four of the serotypes," said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is overseeing the vaccine's development. Some analysts said Sanofi's struggles could have a chilling effect on investment in vaccines, which are greatly needed in developing countries. "I think anybody who deals in emerging markets noticed this one," said Les Funtleyder, a health care portfolio manager at E Squared Capital Management who invests in domestic and emerging markets. He said that many investors were likely to "ask the big companies, why are you doing this? It's like, all risk, no reward."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
On Sunday night, Fox aired "O.J. Simpson: The Lost Confession," a two hour special that the network has been promoting for weeks as a shocking, must see interview that was recently found. Originally shot in 2006, the conversation between Mr. Simpson and the publishing magnate Judith Regan was intended then to promote the ReganBooks release of "If I Did It," described as a "hypothetical" explanation of how the N.F.L. Hall of Famer might have murdered his ex wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman a crime for which he was acquitted in 1995. Thanks to the likes of the Oscar winning documentary "O.J.: Made in America" and the Emmy winning drama series "The People v. O.J. Simpson," interest in Mr. Simpson and the Brown/Goldman killings is at a new peak. So this interview wasn't so much rediscovered as dug up, to take advantage of a trend. Still, "The Lost Confession" did offer a rare chance to hear Mr. Simpson's own perspective on the murders (which he never testified about in the original criminal trial). And Fox tried to make the old interview relevant to today's news by putting it in the context of powerful, famous men abusing women. ALSO READ: Two Astonishing Views of O.J. Simpson and His Trial Hosted by Soledad O'Brien, "The Lost Confession" alternated clips from the interview with new commentary from a panel that included Ms. Regan, Christopher Darden (the lawyer who helped prosecute the original case), Jim Clemente (a retired F.B.I. profiler), Rita Smith (a spokeswoman for the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence), and Eve Shakti Chen (a friend of Ms. Brown's). Whatever explanations Fox has given for the existence of this special, there's more to it than just, "Hey, look what we found!" What's the actual story behind the interview? Why are we just seeing it now? And did we really learn anything from it? Why Was It Shelved? In 2006, Ms. Regan employed the ghostwriter Pablo Fenjves to turn conversations with Mr. Simpson into "If I Did It." It initially seemed like the latest coup for ReganBooks, a HarperCollins imprint that was renowned in the late '90s and early '00s for publishing hot take political commentary and salacious celebrity memoirs, in addition to popular literature. But publicity surrounding the project was mostly terrible. The Goldman and Brown families made public statements against both the book and the interview, raising concerns about the prospect of anyone Mr. Simpson, HarperCollins, Fox making money off murder. As the uproar grew, both the print and TV versions of "If I Did It" were scrapped. Additionally, Ms. Regan was fired from her own imprint, for reasons said to be unrelated to the project. (She later sued and won, claiming to have been defamed during her dismissal.) A version of "If I Did It" did eventually get released in 2007. The Goldmans were granted the rights to the material in order to help satisfy their civil claim against Mr. Simpson. They published the book as "If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer" putting the word "if" in almost imperceptibly tiny letters on the cover. Why Is It Airing Now? According to the executive producer, Terry Wrong, Fox dug up this interview to satisfy the huge demand for more O.J. related television. The former network executive Preston Beckman known on Twitter as "the Masked Scheduler" noted in a blog post that Fox probably intentionally showed it on Sunday night to counterprogram ABC's premiere of the revived "American Idol." ("They probably don't want egg on their face if 'AI' returns with an impressive number," he said.) In interviews leading up to the broadcast, both Ms. O'Brien and Mr. Wrong stressed that Mr. Simpson didn't get a dime for this special. He was reportedly paid 800,000 for the book "If I Did It" in 2006, but got no money for the interview then, according to Fox. Fox, on the other hand, definitely stands to benefit which was one of the complaints levied before the broadcast was scrapped the first time. Fox, Ms. Regan, Ms. O'Brien and Mr. Darden have all insisted that "The Lost Confession" is a vital document in the era of MeToo and TimesUp. The special was framed as a look inside the mind of a domestic abuser, and perhaps a warning to any woman who might be in a relationship with someone who talks the way Mr. Simpson does in the interview. Mr. Wrong also made sure to point out that unlike in 2006, the Brown and Goldman families gave their blessing to show this footage, ostensibly because they believe it makes Mr. Simpson look guilty. It certainly seemed that way. Bear in mind that this interview has been edited down from about four hours (according to Ms. Regan, in promos Fox sent to TV critics), and that throughout Mr. Simpson is referring to the "hypothetical" confession in the book "If I Did It." In the six minutes in which he talks about the murders, he describes being on the scene with a friend named Charlie whom the panel believes was just a voice inside his head. It's all very odd. That said, when Mr. Simpson describes grabbing a knife ("I do remember that part," he says), and recalls seeing copious amounts of blood, it doesn't sound all that hypothetical. The interview goes on to cover the aftermath of the crime including the infamous Bronco chase and Ms. Regan's questioning about what was going through Mr. Simpson's mind at that time keeps steering him toward explaining his feelings of anger, frustration, depression and yes, guilt. ALSO READ: The O.J. Simpson Murder Trial, as Covered by the Times "The Lost Confession" also offers a glimpse into its subject's character. It's fascinating to see Mr. Simpson blasting the media, all while frequently reminding Ms. Regan of his past reputation as a successful and popular guy. He seems to cling to every half truth about his relationship with Ms. Brown that makes him look like he's the real victim. Does It Actually Shine a Light on Domestic Violence? It definitely does. One argument in favor of airing this interview now is that the panel can contextualize Mr. Simpson's comments in ways that Fox might not have cared to do in 2006. When he confesses to getting "physical" with her on the nights when she called the police, for example, Mr. Simpson is quick to note that "she started it," prompting Mr. Darden and others to clarify just how violent and threatening he had been, according to the first responders. In the present day, Ms. Regan justifies her lack of follow up questions during the original interview by saying that she felt at the time that Mr. Simpson was already hanging himself with every word, and that if she had pushed him too hard he would have walked out. That's a debatable point. But it is remarkable over the course of the interview how often Mr. Simpson unbidden deflects blame back onto Ms. Brown, insisting that the media and the lawyers didn't talk enough about her shortcomings during the trial. That's textbook abuser behavior, persistently implying, "She was asking for it." Also while the program doesn't make too much of it, Ms. O'Brien's narration subtly lays out a story of privilege, wherein the authorities (and the public) give a battered woman less credence than the rich, famous man who tormented her. This particular aspect of "The Lost Confession" special exposing the nature of abuse clearly mattered to the producers. And to Fox's credit, each commercial break during the telecast began with a PSA for a domestic violence hotline. Oh, it's definitely both. Early on, especially, the recurring reaction shots of a crying Ms. Shakti Chen border on the exploitative. There's an extent to which Fox is trying to have it both ways here: cashing in on a valuable piece of tape from its archives, while trying to do some good with it. But on balance, it's better to have this interview out in the world, rather than locked away. It's a piece of broadcasting and cultural history, which supplements all the other O.J. Simpson coverage that filled the airwaves recently. As unpleasant as "The Lost Confession" is and though it doesn't offer any definitive closure it's still an illuminating part of a story that's been captivating us for more than two decades now, with no signs of losing its pull.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Now comes Albert Samaha, a first time author, with "Never Ran, Never Will." Whether deliberately or by coincidence, he has set himself an especially daunting task, because his book about two seasons with a youth football team takes place in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, just down Linden Boulevard from Telander's Flatbush, and considers in almost identical ways how sports impacts the lives of young, nonwhite, often at risk players. Does a game like football offer lifesaving discipline, fatherly coaches and means to a scholarship? Or is it just a cruel chimera, holding out the allure of an elusive pro career? And, to add a very current concern, is the risk of a head injury at a tender age worth the potential rewards of stardom? In plumbing these profound questions, Samaha immerses himself with the Mo Better Jaguars for the 2013 and 2014 seasons. Even though the Jaguars' three teams extend only from ages 7 to 13, existential consequences hang over their efforts. The team's head coach, Chris Legree, who was motivated to found the Jaguars by his participation in the Million Man March, has sent four players into the N.F.L., others to college scholarships at top rung football schools like Syracuse, and dozens to scholarships at elite private high schools like Poly Prep. But despite his ardent, paternal efforts, which Samaha captures vividly, Legree has also watched about 30 former players end up in prison. One of Legree's best players ever was shot dead at age 19. As Legree tells one player who shows signs of choosing the street over the gridiron: "You ain't the first guy. I've been around guys like you a lot of years and I know the signs. I'm always worried about you getting hooked up with the wrong people. You could get out of it and get on the right track, but you gotta be honest with me and I got to know what you want. Some guys don't wanna be helped. The coaches, they were looking for you the other day. Because I think you got a future. You got a chance. But no one wants to deal with problems. Courts, cops, gangs, stealing, drugs." A former college football player who now reports on criminal justice for BuzzFeed, Samaha brings empathy and scrutiny to his reporting. But his book suffers from structural problems and an inexplicable lapse in ethical judgment when it comes to identifying his characters. Sadly, these problems all could have been rectified with a firmer editing hand. The 2014 season supplies the core of the book's drama, yet Samaha devotes the first 70 plus pages to the essentially ephemeral 2013 games. Some of his finest character portraits of coaches and parents turn up only toward the book's end. It's also hard to understand why Samaha uses only partial names or nicknames for all of the players even though, in a recent essay for The Times, he was perfectly capable of fully identifying several of the Jaguars and even using their photographs.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
ZUCKED Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe By Roger McNamee The dystopia George Orwell conjured up in "1984" wasn't a prediction. It was, instead, a reflection. Newspeak, the Ministry of Truth, the Inner Party, the Outer Party that novel sampled and remixed a reality that Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism had already made apparent. Scary stuff, certainly, but maybe the more frightening dystopia is the one no one warned you about, the one you wake up one morning to realize you're living inside. Roger McNamee, an esteemed venture capitalist, would appear to agree. "A dystopian technology future overran our lives before we were ready," he writes in "Zucked." Think that sounds like overstatement? Let's examine the evidence. At its peak the planet's fourth most valuable company, and arguably its most influential, is controlled almost entirely by a young man with the charisma of a geometry T.A. The totality of this man's professional life has been running this company, which calls itself "a platform." Company, platform whatever it is, it provides a curious service wherein billions of people fill it with content: baby photos, birthday wishes, concert promotions, psychotic premonitions of Jewish lizard men. No one is paid by the company for this labor; on the contrary, users are rewarded by being tracked across the web, even when logged out, and consequently strip mined by a complicated artificial intelligence trained to sort surveilled information into approximately 29,000 predictive data points, which are then made available to advertisers and other third parties, who now know everything that can be known about a person without trepanning her skull. Amazingly, none of this is secret, despite the company's best efforts to keep it so. Somehow, people still use and love this platform. Hostile foreign intelligence services also love this platform, if only because its users have proved shockingly vulnerable to social manipulation a dark art the company itself has admitted to dabbling in. In 2014, the company set out to learn whether it could make its users sad and angry on purpose. It learned it could. When this astonishing breach of user trust became public, the company claimed it wasn't a big deal, that many companies did similar things. It was, and they don't. A tech company founded on creating human connection is now ripping American society apart and compromising our civic foundation, though not because it has overtly wicked intent. As McNamee elucidates, our "democracy has been undermined because of design choices." Choices including the platform's pleasurable, frictionless interface, which encourages users to stay and return. It's no stretch to posit that because human neurotransmitters respond to the platform's iconic use of a certain shade of blue, and spark with dopamine upon receiving a "like" or "tag" notification, desperate children are now living in cages and a raving madman occupies the Oval Office. Not even Orwell, after a feast of psilocybin, could have predicted this dystopia. This one's all ours.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
For many first time novelists, years of hard work (and often solitary time) culminate in seeing their book come into the world: going to festivals and bookstores to read sections aloud and connecting with readers face to face, inhabiting with others the worlds they built. But with social distancing guidelines discouraging gatherings of more than 10 people, publishing a debut has changed in ways that authors couldn't have foreseen just a few weeks ago. We spoke to several debut novelists about their books, their plans to promote their work and their days during this unusual time. My book is a dark comedy about a young man, Claude McKay Love, coming of age on Chicago's South Side, trying to navigate universal teenager angst while dealing with societal pressures. How were you planning to spend your time promoting and talking about your book? I spent most of February touring and giving interviews. I was supposed to go on my final leg this upcoming week. By last Wednesday, as the severity of this situation clarified, after a few events canceled, we decided to cancel everything. It seemed silly to put people at risk of contracting and spreading the disease for a reading. How are you spending it now? Now, my class at University at Buffalo has moved online. I also teach writing classes at Just Buffalo Literary Center. They've wisely closed. Until further notice, I'm hunkered down with my girlfriend, our dog and cat, video games, movies, writing projects and books. I'm editing my second novel. It's about an underground society that forms because America and the world are crumbling. Coming back to that work during these times is, well, surreal. Is there anything else you want to add or that's been on your mind in connection with this? Publishing and promoting a book is a stressful, maddening, exhausting, anxiety inducing and wonderful process. This book has taken up almost all my head space the past few months. It was the most important thing to me. This crisis has brought me back to reality. I'm no longer afraid of bad reviews, empty readings or a lukewarm reception. I'm afraid for the world. I also feel a deeper appreciation for literature's ability to transport us away from the present. "The Cactus League" is a community novel that charts the path of Jason Goodyear, the Los Angeles Lions' fantastic but flawed left fielder, as the Lions make their way through spring training in Scottsdale, Ariz. How were you planning to spend your time promoting and talking about your book? My publicist and I worked together to build out an ambitious schedule of events at independent bookstores, schools and festivals, with the understanding that those readings and conversations really do sell books. I was fortunate to complete the first half of my tour in February though I was in several Covid 19 hot spots, including Seattle, just days before the outbreak was detected there, and those happy, carefree and crowded gatherings now seem a bit ominous. I had a second leg charted visiting spring training and the Tucson Book Festival, then speaking to several university writing programs, including my graduate alma mater, Louisiana State University. I was supposed to be watching a Brewers spring training game right now! How are you spending it now? I'm trying to book podcast and radio interviews as much as I can, and I'm being pretty emphatic on social media about supporting not just my novel but all debut writers and independent bookstores (book events are a major driver of sales for them, too). I'm also spending a lot of time on triage at work by day I run The Paris Review. Making sure my colleagues were safe and healthy and ready to go remote, and postponing our 400 person awards dinner and fund raiser, also have kept me plenty busy. Is there anything else you want to add or that's been on your mind in connection with this? I'd love to plug the new website bookshop.org. You can order online, but the sales are fulfilled by indies, based on your geography. It just launched in the nick of time. My debut novel, "Temporary," is the story of a temporary worker who is assigned a series of surreal and improbable jobs on her quest for permanence she works as a pirate, an assassin, a ghost and even a bank robber. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. How were you planning to spend your time promoting and talking about your book? I am a former theater kid, and a well known ham, so more than anything I was looking forward to putting on a show. I think that when readers trek out to a book event, it's such a great way of saying "thank you" to do something a little bit different than a straightforward reading. For the Brooklyn launch, I had planned a performance of several sections of my novel, with a Greek chorus of readers, including the author Diane Cook, and the writer and podcast host Dennis Norris II. Coffee House Press, Emily Books and I had put together a tour of about 17 events in 12 different cities around the country. I was devastated to see these events disappear. It took so much time and care to put a tour together. I have been saving airline miles and taking on extra work for years to make it possible. My family has been planning to come to New York for months, and after they canceled their flights (the right decision), I spent a good hour crying and watching "Love Is Blind." Writing a book can be incredibly lonely, and I was so looking forward to the chance to share it with the people I love and admire, in person. How are you spending it now? Books Are Magic was set to host my book launch on Friday, March 13 (I know, I know). In the face of everything happening in the world, and after obsessively refreshing Twitter, it became clear that the events around my book were kaput. And then! The writer and bookstore owner Emma Straub had me and my editor, Emily Gould, stop by the store yesterday to film a short Q. and A. for Instagram. They even let me sing a couple of songs on my ukulele. And yesterday evening, my husband, along with the debut author Emma Copley Eisenberg, hosted a surprise digital book launch over Zoom. There were so many friends from near and far, and my mom was even able to join the video! People were on the chat with their babies, their toddlers, their dogs. Whole families were able to attend! There were old friends from high school and college, and friends from Twitter and the writing world who I have still never met in real life. It was incredibly moving. I had had a glass of wine, and so the evening ended with some vocal stylings, impressions of Idina Menzel and Audra McDonald, and a group rendition of "So Long, Farewell" from "The Sound of Music." That's something that never would have happened at a live event. It had a different, cozy energy, kind of like a literary sleepover. "Under the Rainbow" is about what happens when a queer task force is sent into the most homophobic town in America. How were you planning to spend your time promoting and talking about your book? I had a launch event on March 10 that was quite sparsely attended, and I was supposed to be a panelist at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books in April, which was just moved to the fall. I have another April event called Literary Orange that I suspect will be canceled, and even if it isn't, I don't think I'll feel comfortable attending. How are you spending it now? At home, anxious in old pajamas, which is basically my default setting! I'm spending a lot of time on Twitter and Instagram, trying to interact with people who are willing to amplify books coming out right now. Is there anything else you want to add or has been on your mind in connection with this? I think certain themes from my novel could really resonate with people right now: being trapped in a place you don't want to be (the most homophobic town in America, your tiny apartment), disruption of the status quo. Individual people are doing a lot to help next week I'm going on the Debutiful podcast for what the host is calling a Virtual Book Tour episode that will work just like a tour event, with a short reading followed by questions about the book. How were you planning to spend your time promoting and talking about your book? Definitely been a hard hit, especially this being my first novel I wanted to go all out. I was going to the A.W.P. conference in San Antonio to be part of two panels there. For the book release, I was going to do a church drag show. And then I thought, I didn't want my book to have the pandemic looming over it. We could have gone through with it, but I didn't want that looming over it. I wanted it to be something celebratory. I was going to fly to L.A. next week and do two events there, and then the San Antonio Book Festival. I still have my ticket to go to New York mid April, but am going to reassess. How are you spending it now? Yesterday, when I announced that I wasn't going to do the event here and was canceling the rest of the California tour, some people started reaching out to me. Friends with different skills asking if I wanted do a live reading, to video myself and post it on different sites. What's been happening today is reimagining what it will look like, mainly through the internet. It's not ideal, because I like seeing and hearing people, touching people, doing something live. The feeling is different. But it's about the circumstances and accepting what you can't control. Is there anything else you want to add or that's been on your mind in connection with this? A lot of the queer community is talking about elders and H.I.V., how to really tap into resources for folks that actually need them. And having conversations about how the queer community went through something like this, and we have avenues of how to deal with this. People are asking for people's Venmos, donating 50 or 100 to folks some underground economy starting. "New Waves" is a novel about how work culture bleeds into how we approach all the things in our personal life grief, racism, the internet, etc. It's funnier than how I just made it sound, though. How were you planning to spend your time promoting and talking about your book? I had a launch event at Books Are Magic, which had a really great turnout. At drinks afterward, a running theme was: "This is the last time I'm going out for a while." So I'm lucky that for pub day, I had a crowd of friends, family and strangers that felt celebratory. The rest of my tour will likely be postponed. It's disappointing, but there are larger things at stake than my in your feelings literary novel. How are you spending it now? Mostly texting and DMing with other writers who had books coming out around now. There are some people who are really crushed. I'm also on a handful of email threads with other authors most of whom I've never met, just people who are in the same boat. A sinking tide bums out all boats, I guess. I'm trying to figure out some more creative ways to keep up the energy around my book and others that dropped in the past few weeks. Everyone keeps suggesting doing livestreams in lieu of the events that have been canceled. I don't think it's a terrible idea, but I'm not entirely confident that these are ways people want to experience readings. There might be an upside, though: I think it may push authors and editors to think of creative, ambitious ways to do digital projects. Is there anything else you want to add or that's been on your mind in connection with this? A lot of the authors, publicists and editors I've talked to feel defeated by the circumstances. I get it. I'm definitely discouraged a bit, too. But there's an opportunity here, if we can all figure it out. The reality is that book events, while still effective in some ways, are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Which makes sense. Reading is a private, intimate act. Book tours have been a way to try and make these things social. (How many events do you go to that feel like they drag on for too long?) They're also expensive, and unless you're one of a handful of already well established authors, publishers are seeing them as an expense with very little return. I'm hoping these hurdles encourage us to think about how book promotion can be reinvented. "The Mountains Sing" is a journey into Vietnam's 20th century history via the lives of four generations of the Tran family. How were you planning to spend your time promoting and talking about your book? My publisher and I, as well as independent bookstores, several universities and cultural organizations worked for months together to develop a very exciting book tour which would take me to meet readers in many cities. I have my tickets to fly all the way from Indonesia, where I am currently based, to the United States. I planned to present my book in unique Vietnamese ways, including singing and performances. I had my ao dai dresses tailor made for the events. I was very looking forward to conversations with writers whom I most admire, including Viet Thanh Nguyen, Thi Bui, Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, Wayne Karlin, Madeleine Thien, Karl Marlantes and Ethelbert Miller, and I am devastated the book tour has been canceled. How are you spending it now? I am searching for online ways to interact with readers, via social media and press interviews. According to the Vietnamese saying, "trong cai rui co cai may good luck hides inside bad luck," this difficult time reveals the amazing and supportive spirit of the literary community. Is there anything else you want to add or that's been on your mind in connection with this? I fought my whole life to be able to become a writer, and now I need to fight against the coronavirus situation for my debut novel in English to reach readers' hands. My heart goes out to everyone who has been affected by this calamity. Amid all this, there is a need to keep the book business afloat by lending a hand to indie booksellers, publishers, authors. Books help keep us calm and are essential during this time of social distancing. For those reasons, I will be buying as many books released this month and next month as I can. "Lakewood" is about a young black woman who joins a government sponsored research study in an attempt to pay off her family's debts. How were you planning to spend your time promoting and talking about your book? I was scheduled to go to several independent bookstores, read at some university sponsored events, talk at a high school, go to Booktopia (a small literary festival in Vermont this year) and give craft talks for organizations like Literary Cleveland. How are you spending it now? I'm working with some other writers to possibly do some digital readings via Instagram Live. I'll still be on some podcasts and guest editing some Instagram feeds. I'm going to Skype into some book clubs. We're trying to reschedule book tour stuff for late April, early May, but that feels optimistic. I'm worried about the independent bookstores that are impacted by this. A lot of them have been incredible advocates for me and "Lakewood." I'll probably spend way more of this time encouraging friends and family to buy my book, any book, from them via online sales. Before, I would've been telling people to come out and get into the stores. Is there anything else you want to add or that's been on your mind in connection with this? One thing that has changed during book promotion for me is that at the beginning of it, the majority of people wanted to talk to me about race and the implications of it in "Lakewood." A lot of comparisons to "Get Out" were made. Now, because so much of the book's plot speaks toward economic inequities, toward the deep inequity in the U.S. health care system, we're now talking about how uncomfortably relatable the book has become to many more people due to Covid 19. The only positive I can take at the moment from this pandemic is that maybe it will help the unconvinced understand how cruel it is not to have easily accessible and affordable health care. It's about an Iranian bus driver in Tehran who reluctantly gets involved in politics and pays a heavy price, getting thrown into jail because he attended a strike organized by a union and spending a lot of time in solitary confinement. How were you planning to spend your time promoting and talking about your book? We had a few events lined up. The book launch was March 24, scheduled to be at the Center for Fiction, and I was excited to be in conversation with Shirin Neshat, the Iranian visual artist and filmmaker. Then I was heading to Australia in late April for the Sydney Writers' Festival (which is canceled, too), and then another festival in New Jersey. It was about half a dozen events, all of them canceled. Some postponed well, hopefully all postponed. Then there is the baby my wife just had yesterday, who was overdue, a week after due date. I was looking forward to the birth of these two things, one human, one book. One born all right, the other one ... facing a lot issues. How are you spending it now? I'll still be doing an NPR interview. To be honest with you, I'm so preoccupied with the baby that I don't care very much at the moment. It's kind of a blessing in disguise. I was concerned that I would be away from my family, and it's nice to be with them. I also teach at CUNY in Harlem. Those classes are also canceled. It's weird to think it feels like everything was put on hold as soon as he was born. Is there anything else you want to add or that's been on your mind in connection with this? I don't really know. It's a very weird coincidence. To have your life, all of these events of intensity meeting at one point within the span of a couple days. It's very complicated. I haven't really thought through it that much yet. If you have any kind of belief in the fact that no coincidence is entirely coincidental, then this is good material for obsessive thinking. "Catherine House" is a gothic literary suspense novel set at a mysterious cultlike college with a dangerous secret agenda. How were you planning to spend your time promoting and talking about your book? We were planning to do podcasts and interviews, book giveaways, social media pushes, bookseller dinners, media events and, of course, launch events at bookstores when it comes out.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
WASHINGTON The Potomac waterfront in the southwest quadrant of the nation's capital was once a symbol of urban renewal's high hopes and then of its crushing failure. It is undergoing a significant redevelopment that promises to remake the little used mile long stretch along the river's Washington Channel into a vibrant, mixed use community. Ground was broken in March, and, with six construction cranes towering above and excavation equipment operating below, work is well underway to remake the historic wharf, where Union troops landed in 1864 to save the city from the Confederates and generations of fishmongers hawked seafood fresh off the schooners and smaller workboats unloading there. The Wharf, as it is being called, is the developer PN Hoffman's "magnificent opportunity to undo the urban renewal legacy of the past and recreate the Southwest Waterfront as a great world class destination," according to the project's website. This would, it has been widely acknowledged, be a notable accomplishment. "We cleared 23,000 households, and the rest is history," Ellen M. McCarthy, the District of Columbia's acting planning director, said of the urban renewal project. "This is where we rectify all our mistakes." Southwest was the nation's first urban renewal project, approved in 1946 to replace what were then considered slums with a modern community that would include federal buildings, town homes and a variety of amenities. What it did, primarily, was displace thousands of residents, mostly African Americans. That gave rise to the pejorative term "Negro removal" applied to urban renewal and derived from this failed experiment, and destroyed a viable commercial waterfront. At that time, the neighborhood behind the bustling waterfront was a mixture of African Americans and immigrant Jews, whose dwellings and stores were considered expendable. The 2 billion mixed use project is Washington's most ambitious plan to date to correct what is now regarded as an egregious error imposed on the city by people then thought to be visionary planners. When completed, the project will encompass 3.2 million square feet on 25 acres of land. It will also use 50 acres of water, with three new public piers. There will be a 6,000 seat concert hall, several hotels and office buildings, rental apartments, condos, restaurants and shops, public plazas and parks. PN Hoffman, now teamed with Madison Marquette, was chosen from five developers that made formal proposals, narrowed from a field of 17 that responded to the city's initial request for bids. Gaining the needed approvals from more than two dozen agencies took seven years, Mr. Hoffman said, and required an act of Congress to decommission the federally owned channel so that it could revert to city ownership. The 99 year lease that PN Hoffman then obtained from the city allowed Mr. Hoffman to secure outside financing to supplement his team's 90 million investment. "We went all over the world looking," he said, including to China, the Middle East and New York, before landing PSP Investments, a Canadian pension equity firm, as the project's major financier, investing 220 million. "They were looking more for yield" than to build and sell off the project, he said. In addition, the project is to receive 198 million from city backed bonds. The project's simple name stems from a conversation that Mr. Hoffman had with the city's nonvoting congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, a Democrat. Mr. Hoffman said he had spent "tens of thousands of dollars with marketing people to come up with all these fancy names" for the development. He recalled his talk with Ms. Norton: "She said, 'You know, we used to call it the wharf.' I said, 'That's brilliant, that's what we're going to name it.' " He also plans to name a public plaza for the delegate, whose great grandfather escaped from slavery in Virginia to "the wharf" in the 1850s. Ms. Norton shepherded the crucial decommissioning bill through Congress. The waterfront is "incredibly valuable because of its proximity to the Mall," she said in an interview, referring to the National Mall, the green space between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial. "There you have upwards of 20 million visitors a year, and there was not much happening should they stroll down here. This was perhaps the most undeveloped asset in D.C. Well, it is going to become a destination." Inside the construction office, a converted three story hotel, the walls are lined with black and white photographs of the waterfront from the 1860s to the 1960s. The last vestige is the 200 year old Maine Avenue Fish Market, at the waterfront's western end, where fish is sold from floating barges. Mr. Hoffman plans to retain this colorful artifact but add picnic tables, transient docks for day trippers, and vendors hawking fruits and vegetables.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
What has happened to the white pantsuit? Watching the Democratic debate held in Atlanta on Wednesday night, it was one of the questions that stuck with me. It's not as important as Medicare for All, obviously, or economic disparity. But given the role white pantsuits have played in the national conversation for the last three years, it's not immaterial. (No pun intended.) It was only a mere presidential election cycle ago, after all, that the white suit was thrust into the limelight as a symbol of so much: women's advancement and opportunity, and the possibility of change. That it became not an item of clothing but a placeholder in a continuum that began with the suffragists, continued through Geraldine Ferraro , and resonated today. That it sparked mountains of text and tweets and entire Facebook groups dedicated to celebrating its meaning and urging adoption and then designating it the outfit of the opposition. That Hillary Clinton made it a cause celebre, WearWhiteToVote made it a hashtag, Melania Trump made it a pointed subject of speculation, and the women of the 116th Congress made it a gauntlet. Though she wore a red jacket for her initial appearance, back in June, by late July she had changed to head to toe white (not ivory, not cream), a look she repeated in October she didn't make the September debate, to her very vocal chagrin and again this week. She is also pictured in white, looking soulfully into the future, on the home page of her official campaign website. When she filed her official declaration of candidacy in New Hampshire, she was wearing a white jacket and shirt. She should, by all counts, be seen as the standard bearer of the tradition, so recently embraced by so many women. Yet reaction has been muted at best; more along the lines of "Hey, she looks really good in white," than "our champion!" Do we so quickly forget? Or is something else going on? It's not Ms. Gabbard's relatively small slice of support in a large field; both Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer, with similar polling numbers, have managed to parlay visual symbols (math buttons and tartan ties, respectively) into an easy form of engagement and associative shorthand. Part of the muted reaction probably has to do with the fact that Ms. Gabbard has engaged in a pretty public battle with Mrs. Clinton, calling her "queen of the warmongers" after Mrs. Clinton suggested Ms. Gabbard was the favorite Democratic candidate of the Russians. It may also have to do with the fact that instead of a single female candidate on the stage, there are still four (plus Marianne Williamson ), making the imagery of a woman standing in white less loaded with portent. But it most probably also has to do with the fact that Ms. Gabbard herself doesn't seem particularly interested in connecting with the suffragists, but rather is using her white suits to tap into another tradition, latent in the public memory: the mythical white knight, riding in to save us all from yet another "regime change war." Her white suits are not the white suits of Ms. Clinton, nor even the white of Ms. Williamson, whose early appearances in the shade often seemed tied to her wellness gospel and ideas of renewal and rebirth. Rather, they are the white of avenging angels and flaming swords, of somewhat combative righteousness (also cult leaders). And that kind of association, though it can be weirdly compelling, is also not really community building. It sets someone apart, rather than joining others together. It has connotations of the fringe, rather than the center. And it is a reminder that clothes, especially when it comes to the optics of politics during an era of the ubiquitous screenshot, are only as meaningful as the content that fills them.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
James Pokines, a forensic anthropologist at the Boston University School of Medicine, and his colleagues uncovered several 250,000 year old blades and hand axes, with bits of rhinoceros, horse and camel on them, in Jordan. "We know they were butchering them or processing the carcass," Dr. Pokines said. "But is it proof that they killed all of the species here? Probably not. They could have scavenged them all, but we don't know." The findings, which were published in The Journal of Archaeological Science, may be the oldest evidence of protein residue on stone tools.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The choreographer William Forsythe's work is mostly available online in snippets, so Boston Ballet's "Forsythe Elements" is a terrific opportunity to take a closer look at his ballets. The program (available by subscription though Sunday), features substantial excerpts from six works some filmed in November "In the Middle, Somewhat Elevated," "The Second Detail," "Pas/Parts 2018" and "Artifact 2017," and two newer pieces, "Blake Works I" and "Playlist (EP)." The program opens with an upbeat extract from "Playlist (EP)," "Impossible" (set to the Jax Jones remix of the infectious song by Lion Babe). One of the new films, it nods to the Age of Covid by separating the dancers into individually filmed boxes, then juxtaposing the boxes onscreen, which emphasizes the counterpoints and musical timings of the choreography. Three sections from the sparer, more modernist "Pas/Parts 2018" follow, showing how Mr. Forsythe has taken George Balanchine's expansions of classical form the elongated extensions of legs and arms, the precarious tensions of weight and balance into more extreme terrain. (The masks worn by the dancers look oddly natural in this piece.) The program also includes a conversation among Mr. Forsythe and six Boston Ballet dancers, in which they discuss dancing with masks (Chyrstyn Fentroy has a pro tip: a face bracket, a scaffold like support for the mask, keeping it away from the skin); mental strategies for getting through this moment; and meaning in contemporary ballet: "The step is the point" in Mr. Forsythe's work, Patrick Yocum, a principal dancer, says. For dance lovers, one of the very few silver linings of the pandemic has been the increased visibility of experimental or non mainstream work onscreen. The four current offerings at the Joyce Theater (online through Dec. 9) are good examples and testament to the interest that the Joyce's programming director, Aaron Mattocks, has in diverse performers and genres. The lineup features a marvelous, heartwarming tap concert from Michela Marino Lerman and her band, Love Movement, filmed at the Whitney Museum of American Art last year; works by the Pioneer Collective, a Miami based group of artists committed to queer visibility and inclusivity; a full length piece, "Fecha Limite (Expiration Date)," by a Colombian company, Sanfoka Danzafro, that explores the dance of that country's Afro descendent population; and dances from the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers, with concise, informative descriptions by its director, Louis Mofsie. Each is around 50 minutes long, and all are worth watching, but I was particularly struck by the powerful work of the Pioneer Winter Collective, which includes "Gimp Gait," a duet for the group's founder, Pioneer Winter, and Marjorie Burnett, a dancer with cerebral palsy. "Every body is important and valuable, but somehow we've been told there is only room for certain bodies," Mr. Winter says in an opening interview. Talking about the experience of working in a pandemic, he is sanguine. Artists thrive on obstacles, he says: "If you treat this like an endurance performance, you get something different out of it." Matthew Bourne and his company New Adventures have long specialized in large scale storytelling through dance. Unable to create new work in the current conditions, Mr. Bourne decided to offer three female choreographers, all dancers in his troupe, the chance to make short films with the financial support and artistic mentorship of the company. The series is called Adventures in Film, and the first one, "Nostos," by Tasha Chu, is already available on YouTube; the next two, by Anjali Mehra ("Little Grasses Crack Through Stone") and Monique Jonas ("Checkmate"), will be released on Friday and Dec. 12. (All will remain online indefinitely.) Unsurprisingly, given Mr. Bourne's influence, each film tells a story and is sensitively and imaginatively directed. Perhaps most ambitious is Ms. Mehra's "Little Grasses," based on a little known radio play by Sylvia Plath that evokes the lives and struggles of three women. Beginning in sepia tones and moving into color, Ms. Mehra manages to suggest the women's struggles around femininity, fertility, motherhood and independence, skilfully weaving the dancers and their individual stories together. Miami City Ballet has also commissioned new filmed work from female choreographers, and the first of these, "Places," by Claudia Schreier, is on the company's YouTube channel. Unlike the New Adventures pieces, it is abstract and balletic, a sextet for two women and four men, danced and filmed, by Alexander Izliaev with verve and wit. Are you feeling energetic? Exhausted? In need of detoxifying or meditative centering? There are classes for every mood in Cat de Rham's free Online Yoga Teaching channel, from "Bed Head Wake Up" to "Peaceful and Grounding" to a course for beginners. The soothing voiced Ms. de Rham practices Iyengar Yoga, a rigorous but accessible method that focuses on alignment, and she gives clear, concise instructions and relaxed alternatives if you are struggling with poses. Most of the classes are around 50 minutes, but if you don't have the time, Ms. de Rham has a solution; the 20 minute "Nutritious Quickie."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. President Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Tuesday, a move that had long been rumored to be imminent. Tillerson held the position for just over 14 months, a relatively short term for a secretary of state. Trump boasted to reporters that he had made the call to oust Tillerson "by myself." Jimmy Fallon found that amusing. "I heard Trump has been telling people that he fired Rex Tillerson all by himself. Trump brags about firing people the same way a toddler brags about using the bathroom alone for the first time." JIMMY FALLON	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The United Daughters of the Confederacy's most successful attempt at memorializing slavery at the national level happened during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who institutionalized segregation in the federal government. In 1914, the organization championed the Confederate Monument at Arlington National Cemetery, which features panels depicting "loyal" slaves and a "mammy" figure with two white children in tow. Whites' affection for "colored mammies" glossed over the violence and pain inflicted upon enslaved women who had their families torn apart. But African American clubwomen and reformers did not accept the "mammy" stereotype. Many were the daughters and granddaughters of enslaved women who had been forced to work as caretakers of other women's children. They quickly mobilized and led their African American allies in the N.A.A.C.P. and the black press in the fight against the proposed monument through letters to editors. Their defiant resistance made white Americans take notice. The civil rights and feminist activist Mary Church Terrell wrote a widely reproduced editorial in The Evening Star, a white Washington newspaper. Indicting the Southern white women who proposed the monument, Terrell's scathing critique called out their past and current complicity in the sexual abuse of black women by white men: "When one considers the extent to which the black 'Mammy' was the victim of the passion and power of her master or any other white man who might look with lustful eyes upon her," she wrote, it's difficult to understand how "the wives, mothers and sisters of slave owners could have submitted without frequent and vigorous protests to such degradation of the womanhood of any race." She added, "And it is harder to understand why their descendants should want to behold a perpetual reminder of the heart rending conditions under which Black Mammies were obliged to live." Terrell asked her readers to view enslaved black women as three dimensional human beings who were psychologically tormented by the prospect of having their children sold. Being forced to care for white children also came at the price of not taking care of their own children. Cutting to the heart of the myth of the nonproblematic love whites imagined they had given to and received from enslaved women, Terrell condemned these monuments as actively rewriting the history of slavery. Asserting the authority of the black community to define and value itself, she vowed that black women would do everything they could to resist the building of the monument.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
If the vanity of writers is originality, the vice of critics is classification. Novelists and poets show off their bright plumage and emit their unique trills and warbles while scholars and journalists peer through the foliage, identifying the specimens and sorting them into categories. Look: a regional realist! A flock of autofictionists! Was that a postmodernist? I've never seen one in the wild. If I have birds (and bird metaphors) on the brain it's because I've spent much of the past few months reading and rereading Joy Williams, whose books (four novels and five volumes of stories since 1973) abound with avian life. As I tracked the mutilated pelicans and the wounded heron from "Breaking and Entering," the "pet peahen named Atilla" in "The Quick and the Dead," the old woman whose body appears grotesquely birdlike to the heroine of "The Changeling," and the artificial and natural flamingos that pop up everywhere, I wondered if Williams, now 76 and a practiced observer of wildlife in her own right, might be the rarest of literary birds one who defies guidebook taxonomies altogether. It's easy enough to say that, but Williams's individuality isn't just a matter of idiosyncrasy, of plots and characters willfully torqued away from the ordinary. What she practices is more like camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams's imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colorations in the ecology around her. You can place her books on a shelf alongside, say, Raymond Carver or Karen Russell, Lauren Groff or Harry Crews, Kate Chopin or Nathaniel Hawthorne, and your ideas about them will change as tendrils of affinity snake from Williams's pages into theirs. This isn't influence or coincidence, though Williams shares geographical, generational and genre markings with those and many other writers. Russell wrote the introduction to a recent edition of Williams's 1978 novel "The Changeling" (grouping its author alongside "Ovid, Shakespeare, Morrison, God"), and you could make a case that they are, with Crews and Groff, leading exponents of the kind of contemporary literary Floridiana that focuses on the sometimes comic, sometimes grotesque, sometimes sad doings of wayward white people in the Sunshine State. Florida comes up a lot in Williams's work (she has written a nonfiction book about Key West). It's a landscape of vacation homes and cut rate amusements with a complicated gravity that expels some characters, attracts others and causes still others to sink into fragrant, hazy torpor. But she's equally at home in she has in fact lived in Arizona and Maine. She's not really a Western or a New England writer, though. Or maybe she is, insofar as the flat, dry heat of the desert affects the restless young women in "The Quick and the Dead" as much as the humidity of Florida afflicts the listless young women in "State of Grace" and "Breaking and Entering," and the deep, lonesome dark of a Maine winter shadows the mother and child odyssey in the short story "Escapes." Her sense of place is acute, but her places aren't steeped in history or tradition. People pass through or stop in them without always understanding or caring where they are. "It was one of those rugged American places," a minor character in "The Quick and the Dead" muses, recalling his hometown in Washington State, "a remote, sad ass, but plucky downwind town whose citizens were flawed and brave. He would never go back there, of course." What kind of writer is Joy Williams? If you put that question to me under torture you might! I don't know I would probably blurt out "a Vintage Contemporaries author." That's the imprint that has published most of her books, and while I know that a corporate brand isn't necessarily a meaningful literary identity, I want to insist that, for some of us whose tastes and sensibilities were formed in the 1980s, this particular brand kind of is. In the decades since, Vintage Contemporaries paperbacks issued between, say, 1984 and 1994 with their super glossy covers and bright white spines, their Philip Johnsonesque colophon, the too bright color illustrations that at once give away everything inside the book and miss the point entirely have become collectors' items and fetish objects. They are ugly and beautiful and distinctive in a way that can only start to convey, to those who weren't around, how weird it was to be alive back then. The covers sometimes more than the contents, since the collection was notably eclectic, inclusive rather than programmatic in its choices. It's preposterous to suggest that "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,""Bright Lights, Big City," "From Rockaway" and "Clea and Zeus Divorce" eye catching flagships in the vintage Vintage fleet as I remember it were all examples of the same thing. But they could nonetheless feel that way to an obsessive young reader in the days before recommendation algorithms. And for this obsessive young reader, the author who most consistently embodied whatever that thing might have been was absolutely Joy Williams. Her covers could be provocative and enigmatic, like the Modiglianiesque woman caressing her own armpit as she reclined above a blurb from Harold Brodkey for "State of Grace," or the woman (was it the same one?) seen from the back as she hugged herself next to a virtually identical Brodkey quote for "Escapes." ("To put it simply," said Brodkey, who was famous for not putting anything simply, "Joy Williams is the most gifted writer of her generation.") But for me the epitome of Williams, Vintage contemporaneity and everything I didn't understand about Reagan era America was "Breaking and Entering," her 1988 novel about a young Florida couple who squat in other people's houses and bump up against other human flotsam. That cover is almost absurdly literal: A woman in a blue bikini peeks through brass handled French doors. In their panes you see reflections of a beach, a palm tree and a pelican in flight. A dog crouches in front of the woman. These are Liberty and Clem, "a big white Alsatian with pale eyes," and their inscrutable gazes wary? teasing? hostile? bereft? hint at the novel's shifting, enigmatic emotional weather. That bluntly figurative illustration it reads as a highly specific picture, stylized and slightly fantastical but in no way abstract implies a tone and a subject matter associated with other well known writers of the time, who rendered fragments of American life with deadpan diction and hard empirical detail. It was called minimalism or (after a special issue of the literary magazine Granta) dirty realism, rubrics that have long faded from critical discourse. Those old labels can be suggestive, though, in the way that old paperbacks are. And Liberty and her husband, Willie, display some kinship with the unmoored, numbed characters who amble through the pages of Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver. This is partly a matter of the absences that define the minimalized fictional terrain of the 1970s and '80s. There is a general air of discontent, of alienation, but this feeling doesn't have a social cause or a political effect. It's just the way people are. There are richer and poorer people fancy villas and ratty apartments, childhoods of pampered leisure and first class schooling as well as back stories of deprivation and precarity but class is more often a source of atmospheric detail than an explanatory principle. Economics is tangential to eros and subsumed by ecology: Six dwellings. Nine. The swimming pools were lit. The sprinklers cast their slow, soft arcs. Thousands of dollars of lighting and millions of kilowatts of electricity were used to make green plants red and blue. Thousands of gallons of water from the sulfurous, shrinking aquifer were pumped up to make thousands of bags of cypress shreddings dark against the pale trunks of palms. Inside, on a white bamboo table, were a dish of peanuts, two empty martini glasses and a ceramic dildo. It may be that explanation as such the assumption that things in fiction happen for a reason, and that the writer's job is to supply or at least imply that reason is the most important absence in the Williams cosmos. Her characters, the women in particular, often occupy psychological states and exhibit behavioral patterns that might elicit a diagnosis of some kind. But it wouldn't just be reductive to say that Liberty suffers from depression, or that Pearl and the other heavy drinkers struggle with addiction or that the countless orphans, widows and parents of lost children nearly everybody in "The Quick and the Dead" and half of the population of the stories in the omnibus collection "The Visiting Privilege" are processing their grief. Phrases like those are cliches, examples of the kind of banal, flattened language Williams avoids the way her characters avoid permanence temperamentally and also programmatically. A lazy, secondhand phrase will sometimes turn up in quotation marks, but always flagged as a moral error, a sign of bad faith or bad taste, a category mistake. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. More often, people say remarkable things. You hear and characters overhear crazy stories, cracked bits of wisdom, fragments of longer conversations that threaten to distract you from the main action, like this: Kant said our senses were like the nightclub doorkeeper who only let people in who were sensibly dressed, and the criteria for being properly dressed or respectably dressed, whatever, was that things had to be covered up in space and time. Alice heard a woman say, "Before I start writing I feel affectionate, interested and frustrated. In that order. Afterwards I feel relieved, disgusted and confused. Sometimes I don't think it's worth it." I've often wondered if Williams invented these tidbits or collected them, or both or if having a fertile imagination and a finely tuned ear finally amount to the same thing. There is a plain everydayness to most of Williams's settings. An exception is the island estate in "The Changeling," which evokes both the spooky mansions of Gothic romance and the mad scientist research facilities of dystopian science fiction, but even that novel begins, like "Breaking and Entering," in a drab stretch of Florida. A woman is drinking alone in a bar hardly a remarkable sight. But this woman, named Pearl, is, like Liberty and also like the less evocatively named Helens, Glorias, Donnas and Alices who circulate through the other books embedded in, surrounded by and granted the power to utter sentences that are outrageous, disturbing and loaded with surprise. Williams's beginnings feint toward the usual introductory business offering names, setting scenes and invariably swerve into a sinuous motion that repeats until the last page, when the prose stops short and the reader keeps moving, like a passenger without a seatbelt. Here are a pair of beginnings, both from the 2004 collection "Honored Guest": Walter got the silk pajamas clearly worn. Dianne got the candlesticks. Tim got the two lilac bushes, one French purple, the other white an alarming gift, lilacs being so evocative of the depth and dumbness of death's kingdom that they made Tim cry. Miriam was living with a man named Jack Dewayne who taught a course in forensic anthropology at the state's university. It was the only program in the country that offered a certificate in forensic anthropology, as far as anyone knew, and his students adored him. You won't believe what happens next. Someone named Louise, a late arriving protagonist, gets her dead friend's dog, which she renames Broom, and finds her life disrupted. Miriam, for her part, falls in love with a lamp with a stag's hoof for feet, and embarks on a road trip with the lamp, Jack and one of his students. Here's where things end up in one of the stories: She herself could only think and she was sure she was like many others in this regard, it was her connection with others, really that life would have been far different under other circumstances, and yet here it wasn't after all. Is that Miriam or Louise? I'd rather not say. Maybe you can guess? There's no danger of spoiling anything, and no shame in being wrong. The anticipation of just how you will be wrong just how wrong you will be if you try to predict what will happen, is one of the keenest and most consistent pleasures of reading Williams. And also, as the passage above suggests, a philosophical insight, a universal principle of alteration and sameness. Her inventiveness is both linguistic and narrative. Her people don't behave in the expected ways, and neither do her words. Reality itself can seem to bend in her grasp, in subtle and also in florid ways. There is that strong and silent, oddly passionate lamp. A literal ghost appears in "The Quick and the Dead" too voluble and abrasive to be an alcoholic hallucination, though she may also be that. The island in "The Changeling" is full of weird enchantments that erupt, in the novel's harrowing and beautiful climax, into full blown wizardry. There are dark, fairy tale overtones in the parts of "Breaking and Entering" that recount Willie and Liberty's meeting as children, and a feverish magic infuses the dreamy, chronologically splintered coming of age story buried in "State of Grace," Williams's first novel. This lush, insistent and elusive strangeness might push Williams out of the realist camp altogether, and land her in the once overrun, now underpopulated zone of experimental fiction, the convention smashing avant gardism that the reticent realists of the '80s were often seen as reacting against. The hothouse fabulism of "State of Grace" and "The Changeling" might put Williams in the company of John Hawkes and John Barth, as the cryptic games and surreal humor of her stories (including the very short ones assembled in her most recent book, from 2013, "99 Stories of God") might reshelve them closer to Donald Barthelme or Lydia Davis than to Raymond Carver. Not that she needs their company. Her protean aspect her manner of showing both a realist and an experimental face, sometimes in the space of a single page exposes the limitations of such sorting. The bird evades capture, even in a notebook. Capture and evasion, not incidentally, are what she writes about most. Captivity and freedom are among the oldest and most adaptable themes in American literature. The captivity narrative, typically the ambiguously factual chronicle of a white Protestant woman's abduction by Indians, Catholics or other designated Others, may be the foundational American prose genre, dating back to pre Revolutionary texts like "A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson" and "The Redeemed Captive." It proved to be a highly elastic form. Autobiographies of the enslaved, central to the Abolitionist cause before the Civil War, brought political and moral urgency to the tropes of violated innocence and daring escape. Women stifled by the demands of marriage and the conventions of middle class propriety are fixtures of late 19th and early 20th century fiction. What are Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" or Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," two of the canonical works of Gilded Age literary feminism, if not captivity narratives recast as psychological dramas? I'm tempted to say the same about Williams's fiction, which features women grappling with various kinds of entrapment mostly emotional, psychological and spiritual, though sometimes physical as well. Does that make Williams a feminist writer? If this means just that she's sympathetic to the problems women face and interested in how they deal with those problems, well then of course. It's also worth adding that her view of men tends to be critical and sometimes piercingly satiric, focused equally on their power and their impotence. Fathers, suitors, sons and husbands are variously overbearing, needy, useless, volatile and out of the picture completely, leaving their wives, exes, daughters and widows to figure things out for themselves. But you read Williams in vain if you're looking for fables of empowerment or inspiring visions of sisterhood. Her heroines can be funny, brave and resilient for sure, but she is just as concerned with showing them as mean, mercurial, judgmental and passive. At the start of "The Changeling," Pearl has escaped, along with her infant son, from her husband, Walker, and his bizarre extended family. The patriarch is Walker's brother Thomas, an aristocratic intellectual who has conscripted the children in his household into a twisted educational experiment. But the novel isn't about Pearl's liberation. It flashes back to her courtship with (or capture by) Walker and her ambivalent submission to Thomas's authority. It then chronicles her return to the island, with results that defy easy summary. Pearl is the active underminer of her own agency, the high priestess at her own sacrifice, an icon of maternity at once selfless and monstrous. She shares her name with a singularly mercurial female character in American literature Hester Prynne's daughter in "The Scarlet Letter,"a "wild and flighty little elf" whose impish anarchy is both a manifestation of Hester's sin and proof of her rebellious, independent spirit. The paradox is that this Pearl, having made the passage from daughter to mother, is in rebellion against that very independence, in flight toward a captivity that promises neither safety nor stability, but rather an intensity of feeling that freedom can't quite deliver. It's still horrific, but like the households that sheltered and damaged Liberty in "Breaking and Entering" and the nameless narrator in "State of Grace," it's home. In "The Changeling," Williams pushes Pearl, the reader and her own imagination to an extreme she doesn't attempt to reach elsewhere. "The spirit inside it is not the human spirit," Karen Russell warns in her introduction. "It is far vaster than that." But the novel also underlines the dialectic that threads through nearly all Williams's fiction, winding from Key West to Tucson via towns and subdivisions too generic to name, and animating the episodic sprawl of "The Quick and the Dead" and the gnomic compression of the entries in "99 Stories of God." Her women are simultaneously stuck and adrift, alternating between motion and stasis, impatience and resignation, fury and compassion, longing and disgust until all those states threaten to blur together. But they never do. The particulars of experience are infinitely variable, as are the words Williams uses to capture it. To live in her world can be terrifying, its grim truths eloquently summarized in the recent story "The Mother Cell" by one of a group of women whose sons have been executed for murder: "We gave birth to mayhem and therefore history. Oh, ladies, oh my friends, we have resolved nothing and the earth is no more beautiful." But that's not quite the end of it, and Williams's harsh, funny, overgrown world is not without a measure of consolation, which you might almost call grace. This is how the story ends: "Of course it was all just whistling in the dark, but sometimes she would conclude by saying that despite their clumsy grief and all the lost and puzzling years that still lay ahead of them, the earth was no less beautiful."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The Children Never Had the Coronavirus. So Why Did They Have Antibodies? It's been a big puzzle of the pandemic: Why are children so much less likely than adults to become infected with the new coronavirus and, if infected, less likely to become ill? A possible reason may be that many children already have antibodies to other coronaviruses, according to researchers at the Francis Crick Institute in London. About one in five of the colds that plague children are caused by viruses in this family. Antibodies to those viruses may also block SARS CoV 2, the new coronavirus causing the pandemic. In a study published Friday in Science, the group, led by George Kassiotis, who heads the Retroviral Immunology Laboratory at the institute, reports that on average only 5 percent of adults had these antibodies, but 43 percent of children did. Researchers who did not participate in the study were intrigued by the finding. H. Benjamin Larman, an immunologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, called it a "well done study that puts forward a compelling theory which is supported by their data." Stephen J. Elledge, a genetics professor at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital, had a similar response. He and others have found many people have antibodies to common colds caused by other coronaviruses; in laboratory studies, these antibodies also block the new coronavirus. In March, as the pandemic was just beginning, Dr. Kassiotis and his colleagues decided to develop a highly sensitive antibody test. To assess it, they examined blood samples taken before the pandemic from over 300 adults and 48 children and adolescents, comparing them with samples from more than 170 people who had been infected with the new coronavirus. The scientists expected samples taken before the pandemic to have no antibodies that attacked the new coronavirus. Those were to be the controls for the test the scientists were developing. Instead, they found that many children, and some adults, carried one antibody in particular that can prevent coronaviruses, including the new one, from entering cells. This antibody attaches itself to a spike that pokes out of coronaviruses. While the tip of the spike is unique to the new coronavirus, the base is found in all coronaviruses, Dr. Kassiotis said. In lab tests, antibodies to the base of the spike prevented the new coronavirus from entering cells in order to reproduce. Now the researchers are planning to expand their study to monitor thousands of children and adults. Some have antibodies that can block the new coronavirus in lab tests. Others do not. "If they have the pandemic strain, are they protected?" Dr. Kassiotis asked. Will they get sick, he wondered, or will the infection be all but undetectable? Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Dr. Elledge and his colleagues at Harvard developed their own highly specific, sensitive and exhaustive antibody test, VirScan. It is able to detect a diverse collection of antibodies that are directed at any of more than 800 places on the new coronavirus, including the antibody that Dr. Kassiotis and his colleagues studied. After examining blood taken from 190 people before the pandemic emerged, Dr. Elledge and his colleagues concluded that many already had antibodies, including the one targeting the base of the spike presumably from infections with related coronaviruses that cause colds. But while adults might get one or two colds a year, Dr. Elledge said, children may get up to a dozen. As a result, many develop floods of coronavirus antibodies that are present almost continuously; they may lessen cold symptoms, or even leave children with colds that are symptomless but still infectious. While adults may not have detectable coronavirus antibodies, many may be able to quickly make antibodies if they are infected with a coronavirus. In typical viral infections, the immune system pours out antibodies to fight the virus. When the infection is quelled, the antibodies, no longer needed, diminish in number. But the body is left with so called memory cells that allow antibody production to soar rapidly if the virus tries to invade again. Then why do we have a pandemic? Shouldn't most of us be protected by memory cells left by other coronavirus infections? "It is quite possible that you lose your memory over time," Dr. Elledge said. He suspects that the new coronavirus may interfere with the activation of the memory cells able to respond to the infection. An infection "might give you a hazy memory that fades over time," he said. If so, a very recent infection with a common cold coronavirus would be needed to protect against the new coronavirus, and even then the protection might last only for a limited time. The new coronavirus would have hobbled the production of antibodies that specifically attack it. That might explain why children, with their seemingly continuous colds, are much better off than adults. Dr. Elledge said that if he is right about the loss of memory cells, that bodes well for vaccines. A vaccine boosts antibody production without the presence of a virus. So the virus "is not in the background, messing up memory cell formation," he said. Another possibility is that most adults actually are protected by memory cells from previous infections with the common cold. Although few have enough antibodies in their blood to protect them at any given time, they may be able to quickly make antibodies to lessen the impact of the new coronavirus. That might explain why many adults who are infected recover quickly. "We focus on those who get really sick, but 95 to 98 percent of those who get the virus don't have to go to the hospital," Dr. Elledge said. "There are a lot of people who do get better."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
David Hallberg, the American Ballet Theater principal dancer, who has been sidelined by injury for the last two and a half years, is returning to the company and planning to perform during its spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House. Mr. Hallberg, 34, who has spent the last year undergoing physical therapy with the Australian Ballet in Melbourne, Australia, and made a discreet comeback with that company last month, will take his place at the barre alongside his Ballet Theater colleagues on Tuesday morning, and begin rehearsals for the spring repertory. In a telephone interview, he said he wanted to take things one step at a time, and wasn't yet sure which roles he would perform. "I might have a slightly better idea of what I'll be doing in about two weeks time," he said. He added that he was very excited to be working again with Alexei Ratmansky, the choreographer who is the company's artist in residence, and who is creating a new work, "Whipped Cream" for the spring season. Mr. Hallberg, who has been called the world's foremost paragon of classical style, made history in 2011 by becoming the first American to become a principal at the Bolshoi Ballet. He said that the Bolshoi remained a second home to him and that he was looking forward to getting back to it "when the time comes." The injury to a deltoid ligament in the ankle led him to withdraw from performances in 2014, when he was dancing both with Ballet Theater and the Bolshoi. At the time, he said, he thought he might be off for six to eight months. "Two and a half years in a dancer's career at their prime is an unbelievably long time," he said, adding that he had worked very hard to get back to performance level.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Bobbie Battista, one of the original anchors of CNN Headline News and a veteran of various anchor jobs at CNN over two decades, died on Tuesday in Davenport, Iowa, where she lived. She was 67. A family spokesman said the cause was cervical cancer. After joining Headline News for its launch in 1982, Ms. Battista was promoted in 1988 to the parent Cable News Network, where she anchored coverage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, the gulf war and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. She became a familiar face in American living rooms, anchoring "CNN NewsDay," "CNN NewsHour," "CNN Daybreak" and "CNN PrimeNews." She was voted best newscaster in Cable Guide magazine's annual readers' poll in 1986. In 1998, Ms. Battista began a three year stint as the host of "TalkBack Live," an hourlong weekday afternoon program that featured guest newsmakers fielding questions from a studio audience and from viewers participating by phone, fax and the internet. (It was canceled in 2003.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
As measles spread across the nation earlier this year, 71 residents of Vancouver, Wash., fell ill, most of them unvaccinated children. So state Rep. Paul Harris, a Republican representing the district, sponsored a measure to limit exemptions from immunization. Activists protesting the bill converged on his legislative office; the resulting chaos led security officers to close the entire floor to the public. A death threat was posted on Facebook. Only a handful of Mr. Harris' Republican colleagues supported the measure because, they said, it infringed on individual liberties. The nation is struggling with the worst measles outbreak in 25 years, with over 1,000 confirmed cases in 28 states . M edical experts agree that vaccines prevent epidemics, save lives, and are very safe , though complications occur in rare cases. Yet curbing religious and philosophical exemptions to vaccination has proved extraordinarily difficult, pitting neighbors against neighbors, and sometimes paralyzing statehouses. So far this year, only two states Maine and New York have successfully outlawed all exemptions except those granted for medical reasons. But even in New York, where 80 percent of the nation's measles cases are concentrated, angry parents shouted and heckled from the Assembly gallery after the vote was called. Several politicians had misgivings about scrapping religious exemptions: The chairman of the health committee, Richard N. Gottfried, voted against the bill, which barely passed the assembly, but Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who had initially expressed reservations, signed it immediately. The wide majority of Americans support routine childhood immunizations. But a small and impassioned group of parents reject s vaccines for religious reasons or fears about their safety, often drawing support from conservatives wary of what they see as government intrusion into personal life decisions. Opponents describe tighter laws as an assault on their parental rights and religious freedom. In Washington State, opposition was so fierce that legislators managed only to eliminate exemptions based on personal beliefs, not those based on religion and only for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. Parents may continue to use religious exemptions to avoid the M.M.R. vaccine, and can cite other personal or moral beliefs to avoid other childhood vaccines. "We would have preferred removing the personal exemption for all vaccines, but we weren't able to there was so much political pushback," said state Rep. Monica Stonier, a Democrat who also represents Vancouver. "We just wanted to get something done." Opposition to vaccines has been around for almost as long as vaccines themselves. Massachusetts became the first state of many to make smallpox vaccination compulsory in the early 1800s, and in 1827 Boston became the first city to require the vaccine for school children. Nearly half of all states had vaccine requirements by the early 20th century. But they were not uniformly enforced, and some were repealed after protests. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Officials in Cambridge, Mass., sought to enforce the law during a 1902 outbreak of smallpox, and filed charges against Henning Jacobson, a resident who refused to be vaccinated because, he said, an earlier smallpox vaccination had made him and his son ill. The case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1905 that states had the authority to make vaccinations mandatory. Today all 50 states require certain vaccinations for students attending school, with exceptions made for children who cannot tolerate them because of underlying medical conditions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, a bipartisan organization that tracks vaccine legislation in the 50 states. Most states also grant exemptions for people who oppose vaccination for religious reasons, and until recently 16 states allowed exemptions based on personal, moral, philosophical or other beliefs as well, according to the N.C.S.L. But the norm today is to vaccinate. Over 80 percent of adults agree with experts that childhood vaccines are safe for healthy children, although most parents of young children worry about vaccines' effects, another survey found. Still, the vast majority vaccinate, and only 2.2 percent of school age children had a vaccine exemption in 2017, according to a national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a slight increase from the year before. Unvaccinated children aren't evenly distributed among the population; instead, they tend to cluster in certain communities, making them particularly susceptible to an outbreak. That the measles outbreak has been concentrated in communities where parents are more likely to take advantage of exemptions, such as among the Orthodox Jews of Brooklyn, has lent new urgency to efforts to limit them. "A crisis like this is often the catalyst and provides a window of opportunity" for tightening vaccine laws, said James Colgrove, a professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University. "This is a very, very serious outbreak, and I wouldn't be surprised if it prompted more states to move on this." California eliminated nonmedical exemptions to vaccines in 2015, after 159 visitors to Disneyland were infected with measles. Now, with 51 residents infected this year, state lawmakers are mulling a bill to rein in what critics have called bogus medical exemptions authorized by unscrupulous physicians (although most of those sickened with measles were adults). If the California bill passes, parents will have a much harder time obtaining a medical exemption for their child. Applications for medical exemptions would require approval by the state health department, which must conform to guidelines drawn up by the C.D.C. and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The guidelines lay out fairly narrow medical reasons to justify foregoing vaccinations: A child who went into a coma after a pertussis vaccine would be exempt from another pertussis shot, for example. But a child who had seizures for three days would not qualify for an exemption. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has expressed concern about government officials making decisions traditionally left to parents and physicians, although he did not say he would veto the bill. "I believe in immunizations," he said. But "I do legitimately have concerns about a bureaucrat making a decision that is very personal." Nearly a dozen states have recently proposed getting rid of personal belief exceptions, but efforts to pass bills have stalled or been derailed in several states. Take Oregon, which has one of the highest rates of vaccine exemptions: six percent of kindergartners were exempt in the 2014 2015 school year. (By contrast, fewer than one percent of kindergartners in New York have an exemption). But a legislative push in Oregon for limiting nonmedical exemptions provoked a furious backlash. The number of religious exemptions in New Jersey has increased to 12,300 in the 2017 2018 school year, up from 1,641 in the 2005 2006 school year, according to the state health department. "Whenever there is a risk of any kind, there needs to be a choice in the matter," Ms. Milner said. "Vaccines are a medical procedure, and there is a risk in any medical procedure, so there needs to be true and informed consent, and choice." One reason the laws nationwide have been slow to change: "People are talking about protecting their kids," said Mr. Tipping, the Maine lawmaker. "There are few things in the world that elicit that kind of passion."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
When President Trump signed a large package of tax cuts into law in 2017, the Internal Revenue Service moved to make sure the savings showed up quickly in paychecks. Doing so probably lifted consumer spending last year, but it may have hurt Republicans politically, new polling suggests. Nearly four in five people say they would rather overpay their federal income taxes and get a refund every spring effectively making an interest free loan to the government than underpay and owe money come tax season, according to a poll for The New York Times by the online research firm SurveyMonkey. That preference appears to be influencing how Americans view Mr. Trump's signature cuts: Among people who have already filed their tax returns, those who said they received a bigger refund this year are far more likely than others to approve of the law. The findings suggest that the administration's decisions on withholding may have hurt the law politically. "I was hopeful that the rhetoric for once was going to match expectations and it did not," said Tony Mendes, a 61 year old federal employee in Denver. "I got back less than I would have anticipated." Bigger paychecks for most but smaller refunds for some Independent analyses consistently show that the 2017 law gave most Americans a tax cut, and few families will end up paying more than under the previous rules. Federal officials faced a choice about how to pass those savings on to taxpayers. One option would have been to make most people wait until they filed tax returns this spring, delivering a tax season windfall but essentially delaying the cut by a year. Instead, the I.R.S. chose to begin withholding less from workers' paychecks early last year. That put more money in workers' pockets right away, but made the effects of the tax cut harder to see, since the savings amounted to just a few dollars per pay period for many people. The new law made numerous changes to the tax code eliminating and capping some deductions and credits while increasing others and the revised withholding rules did not account for every situation. As a result, government auditors warned last year that the withholding changes would reduce refunds for several million Americans. Treasury officials acknowledged on Friday that some people had struggled to navigate the new withholding setup, leading them to underpay their taxes. The department will not charge a penalty to those who paid at least 80 percent of their total tax liability during the year, the officials said. Previously, the penalty threshold was 85 percent. As of last week, I.R.S. statistics showed that the average refund had not changed for those who had filed. But total filings were down, and the share of returns producing a refund had declined by 0.5 percent age points, or about 300, 000 filers. (Experts caution against reading too much into tax statistics before the April filing deadline.) "You can see people potentially being frustrated if the tax season isn't playing out the way they expected," said Michelle Meyer , chief United States economist for Bank of America Merrill Lynch. "Other people might be quite pleased. It is quite split how people are being impacted by the tax cut." Democrats have accused the Trump administration of political gamesmanship . "The Treasury Department under withheld taxes from millions of families' paychecks to make the benefits of the tax law appear greater before the 2018 election, and the bill is now coming due," Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon , the top Democrat on the Finance Committee, said in an emailed statement . "Families who depend on annual tax refunds to pay down debt, cover medical expenses and afford car repairs are discovering their refunds are smaller or they owe money. " Among people who have already filed tax returns, 32 percent said their refunds had shrunk from a year ago, compared with 22 percent who said their refunds had grown, according to the Times survey. Another 11 percent said they owed money this year. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Tax refunds reflect the difference between what taxpayers had withheld during the year and what they actually owed. They reveal next to nothing about whether a given household got a tax cut under the 2017 law . Still, it is not always easy for taxpayers to figure out how they are affected by policy changes, and many people may draw conclusions based on the size of their refunds. Among survey respondents who said their refunds were smaller or that they owed money, just 35 percent believed they had gotten a tax cut as a result of the law. Among those whose refunds grew or stayed the same, on the other hand, 49 percent said they had gotten a tax cut. Laura Wronski, a researcher for SurveyMonkey , noted that Republicans were more likely to say their refunds had gotten bigger. "It's just unlikely that it aligns that perfectly along partisan lines," she said. "It's more likely that people are going to stick to the side they're on." Still, partisanship is not the whole story. Even among Republicans, those who said their refunds had shrunk were significantly less likely to believe they had received a tax cut. Will this year's spending be affected? By adjusting workers' paychecks right away, the I.R.S. may have helped pump up economic growth last year. People are more likely to spend small, incremental increases to their paychecks, economists said, whereas they often try to save larger lump sums. Consumer spending surged in the middle of last year, helping the economy to one of its best years of the past decade. The uncertainty over tax refunds could now be dragging spending down. Low income consumers, in particular, often rely on tax refunds to finance major purchases. Data from Bank of America showed a dip in spending among low income households in February, which could reflect a delay in tax refunds. "If you're used to getting a nice refund and then you discover you owe, that's a big shock," Ms. Meyer said. Low earners are not the only ones affected. Alan Abraham, who works in medical research in Pittsburgh, said he used his tax refund every year to buy season tickets to the Penguins. This year his refund was much smaller, and he has not decided whether to renew. About the survey: The data in this article came from an online survey of 10,046 adults conducted by the polling firm SurveyMonkey from March 4 to March 10. The company selected respondents at random from the nearly three million people who take surveys on its platform each day. Responses were weighted to match the demographic profile of the population of the United States. The survey has a modeled error estimate (similar to a margin of error in a standard telephone poll) of plus or minus 1.5 percentage points, so differences of less than that amount are statistically insignificant.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
A Theyyem dancer in Kerala, in southwest India. Theyyem is an example of trance dance and divine embodiment. The makeup takes hours to apply. The dance forms of India though I began to watch them over 30 years ago in London became a regular and deepening source of fascination to me only once I began work as chief dance critic of The New York Times in 2007. It's been a boon, after decades of dancegoing, to investigate them: They've extended my idea of dance itself, what it can be and signify. New York sees excellent examples of Indian dance each year. On April 25 26, three examples of its classical styles will be on view. Two, at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University, are World Music Institute "Dancing the Gods" performances, each exemplifying a different classical idiom. Bharata Natyam a genre rich in pure form and expressive acting, deriving from the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu has a centuries old matrilineal tradition. On April 25, Rama and Dakshina Vaidyanathan, mother and daughter, perform "Dwita Duality of Life." If "Duality of Life" were the title of a ballet or modern dance work, my heart would probably sink. Yet in Indian dance, philosophical themes are unpretentiously, modestly and affectingly addressed as if to illustrate, by focusing on the sublime, how much larger existence is than any mere dancer. (This music, this space, this myth, this god, this art: Though I bring them together, I am just a part.) On April 26, Parul Shah and Prashant Shah (no relation) perform in the Kathak style. Associated with northern India, Kathak is the form in which dance and music can combine to most playfully exhilarating effect; it can have terrific speed and rhythmic complexity. This program is called "Kadamb and Beyond: A Tribute to Kumudini Lakhia," acknowledging the work of the Kathak pioneer Ms. Lakhia and the Kadamb School she founded in 1967. Each of these can only hint at the dance variety of India. Twice in recent years, I've made four week visits there. The biggest lesson of my first trip (February March 2012) was that dance is more central to Indian culture than to any other I've encountered. Just one small example: On arrival at the airport in Bhubaneswar, the capital of Odisha, the poster welcoming arrivals was a vast image of Odissi, the state's beautiful classical dance form. More crucially, all around the nation, the Hindu gods are seen as dancing; and Shiva's dance is cosmological. The chief discovery of my second visit (December 2014 January 2015) was that dance in India covers a far wider spectrum than in any other culture in the world. To explain this, I single out just eight days, Dec. 18 to Dec. 25. Christmas Day I spent in Mumbai of course! watching a big Bollywood musical, "PK," an appealingly nutty crazy quilt in which a chap from outer space ends up breaking into song and dance as he falls in love with the Indian heroine. In "PK," dance keeps bubbling up at the oddest moments I especially liked the policemen who burst into dance as they chased after the hero. I had been in the southwest state of Kerala from Dec. 18 to Dec. 22, watching the local forms of Mohiniattam, Kathakali and Theyyem. Mohiniattam (all female) and Kathakali (all male) are recognized among India's classical forms; and though Kathakali and Theyyem are among its strangest, they now feature prominently in tourist imagery, for reasons of their exotically picturesque makeup. It was not till this trip that Kathakali Homeric in its epic meter, character packed drama and variety of intense dramatic color became a revelatory experience to me; and I would travel back for more. On the evening of Dec. 19, as I rushed in a cab from one side of Thrissur (a long and exuberant open air Kathakali performance) to the other (to catch Kalamandalam students dancing Mohiniattam) and back again, Thrissur's dance world felt as busy as New York's. I'd return, too, to further investigate Theyyem, which, though not the richest dance experience of my life, was far the strangest. This, like Kathakali, is an art that involves male performers in extraordinary makeup and elaborate costume. (Tourists may watch the performers in their lengthy preparations.) It's peculiar to the villages of north Kerala (and two adjacent regions of Karnataka); and I spent the morning of Dec. 22 in three of those villages watching Theyyem both in preparation and as event. The facial makeup is predominantly scarlet, but with complex internal patterning and drastic eyeliner. (In one case, metal tusks sprouted from the dancer's mouth.) This, like the costuming, indicates which of the local gods is being shown. The attire is amazing. One performer laced himself into four different skirts one on top of another; another was assisted into a rigid farthingale. The multiskirt dancer then had a rigid hoop fitted around his upper body, with fronds hanging from it; this tightly limited the movement of his arms and shoulders (his face and forearms protruded over its edge). The farthingale dancer had a triangular patterned pyramid, more than twice his height, attached to the top of his costume, like a spire. And it's thus in heavy, bright and intensely restricting outfits that the Theyyem performers dance. Footwork, not complex, is rhythmic; the dancer travels and rotates in space; in the face, only the eyes move, radiating vehemence. The steps and mobility of those I saw (hundreds of dances are said to exist) have nothing of the formal fascination of the Indian classical genres; but a stunted force, even violence, stays in the memory. Theyyem is an example of both trance dance and of divine embodiment. The dancer doesn't impersonate but becomes the god. In Mr. Dalrymple's "Nine Lives," the Theyyem artist Hari Das explains what divine possession is like: "When the drums are playing and your makeup is finished, they hand you a mirror and you look at your face, transformed into that of a god. Then it comes. It's as if there is a sudden explosion of light. A vista of complete brilliance opens up it blinds the senses." Though I had heard of trance dance and divine possession, I had expected them to be different more physically ample, for one thing. Mr. Das also relates how the genre's performers come from the lowest castes of Keralan society. During the three months of the Theyyem season, they are revered and well paid, but then return to menial employment the rest of the year. Theyyem is just one astonishing example of India's dance sociology. A more archetypal image of India, but now receding into history, is the female temple dancer. For ballet people, the bayadere temple dancer is their central idea of Indian dance: in particular Nikiya, the heroine of Marius Petipa's 1877 Romantic classical ballet "La Bayadere," and the corps de ballet of Shades. (It returns to the repertory of American Ballet Theater at the Metropolitan Opera House, June 1 to June 6.) The historic truth of bayaderes, however, arises from the centuries old Indian tradition of devadasis: women dedicated to the temple from childhood, some as dancers and/or musicians, some as prostitutes, some as all of the above. They were outlawed in 1984, after decades of reform. This March, many were fascinated to read The New York Times's obituary of Sashimani Devi, 92, the last temple dancer at the Jagannath Temple in Puri, Odisha (the devadasis of that state bore the name maharis); Ms. Devi was initiated into temple service at 7 or 8. At a 1994 conference, in her early 70s, she danced a dance that she had been taught at the temple and that had its roots 5,000 years before.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
I was in a CVS in Harlem when I first heard the news. My friend James, who rarely, if ever, talks about sports, had sent me a one word text message: "Kobe?" He said people were saying that Kobe Bryant had died. I shrugged it off. I figured it was just a false alarm or a joke. But then I asked myself: Why would he joke about Kobe dying? Kobe had come into the league just in time to step into the gap created when Michael Jordan retired, for the second time, in 1999. Growing up, I wasn't a Jordan fan. Year after year, it was the same thing. Every June, the announcers Bob Costas and Marv Albert would utter the same eight words: "The Chicago Bulls are the 19 N.B.A. champions." Just insert the year. At some point after the 1996 finals, when the Bulls dominated a really talented SuperSonics team and Jordan won his fourth title, I finally conceded: I don't like this guy, but he's surely the best I've ever seen. During his playing career, the heirs apparent were many but none ever quite panned out. Kendall Gill, Jerry Stackhouse, Harold Miner and so many others didn't live up to the hype but were good players in their own right. The teenager straight out of high school. The N.B.A. couldn't have asked for someone better. Kobe was brand friendly, cookie cutter, global and he avoided issues of race. Not only did he mimic Jordan's game on the court but he also borrowed from his playbook in life and the media. He was the natural progression from Jordan. He was the heir. But I couldn't relate to him. Kobe was a guy who looked like me and was my age but definitely didn't grow up like me. I didn't like him. I was the kid from the hood and I could smell that he was the kid who was not from there at all. His dad had played professional basketball in Italy. And then he went to a good high school on the outskirts of Philadelphia. But as I looked around CVS in Harlem that Sunday, everything had come to a standstill. When I stepped outside onto 125th Street, one of the busiest stretches in New York City, it was as if all of the air had been sucked out of the sky. It was quiet. Everyone was looking down at their phones. Not just African Americans but people of all races. Tourists. Residents. Everyone. And the first thing I thought about besides questioning how Kobe could die was how negatively I had been texting about him just a few days earlier with my friend Eric. Isn't Kobe retired? Why is he always on TV? Can't he just do like most retired players and get out of the spotlight? Kyrie Irving is now annoying because he's friends with Kobe. He wasn't like this before. If you listen to Kyrie you hear a lot of Kobe in him. Jayson Tatum is playing better this year because he got away from what Kobe taught him last summer. Kobe took a year of his career. And why does Kobe have an ESPN show that no one watches? No one is that pressed to watch Kobe analyze someone else's game. I recognized his talent, but I just didn't get him as a person until he retired. And neither did many other young black men. That's why, with as many Lakers fans as there may have been, so many people rooted for the Philadelphia 76ers and their superstar Allen Iverson in the 2001 finals against the Lakers. They saw themselves in the small but brash Iverson. Think about it the same way many young black men viewed Duke and how many in the '90s instead loved the Fab 5 or U.N.L.V. But despite all of this, despite all of the critiques, whenever I stepped on a concrete court, I would always try to play like Kobe or Jordan. Love them or hate them, you understood their greatness. When my friends and I would hate on Jordan or Kobe, it was just our small circle. Whether it was on basketball courts uptown or at our high school lunch table, we didn't have phones to text or even reliable computers to chat on. Our debates would be handled with our mouths, not a keyboard. I never hated Kobe, though I hated on him. But on the day he died, as the shock of the news morphed into an unexpected pain, I realized that I had grown up with Kobe even if I had never met him. The hurt I felt that day made me aware of the grip he had on me and his impact on my life, no matter how I may have viewed him. The air had been sucked out of Harlem; some of the air had been sucked out of me, too. We wear our sports fandom very close to the chest. When I talk about my favorite team, the San Antonio Spurs, winning titles I will say, "We have five titles." We. As fans, we feel like part of the team and as though we should have a say in what athletes do with their lives. When I saw the news that Kobe had died, I wondered how we had gotten here. In 1997, we could have never envisioned what Kobe would become on and off the court. When I saw him shoot air ball after air ball in a crucial game against the Utah Jazz in the playoffs that year, I was so happy because I felt that an arrogant guy had gotten what was coming to him. What I've felt this past week was the exact opposite. Kobe dedicated his life to being better. I'm not going to pretend that I will never again dislike an athlete or talk trash about a player. It's hard to not do that as a sports fan. But what I can do is learn to be better. And Kobe embodied that: In the end, when we thought he couldn't let basketball go, he did. He found other avenues for his competitiveness. Kobe started realizing that no matter how seriously we take sports we in the end, it's all just a game. It's time for some of us to realize that as well.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Each time I've come to Yerevan in the past decade the city has surprised me with its evolving elegance and cultural richness. The downtown has an energy that is a long way from the sleepy Soviet city I first visited in the 1980s. Walking the shady avenues off Republic Square on a recent visit, I found the city has become a hip place, with wine bars, microbreweries, cafes, art galleries, boutiques selling crafts and carpets, an ever new array of restaurants, as well as upscale hotels and clothing stores. The new mood is defined by the millennial generation's role in the velvet revolution of this past spring. After weeks of peaceful protests, the civil society has pushed from power an old regime that much of the nation viewed as dysfunctional and corrupt, representing a continuation of old Soviet mentalities. When Nikol Pashinyan, a prominent journalist, activist and former parliamentarian became prime minister on May 8, a sense of a new era enveloped the country. In June I sat in a vine trellised courtyard restaurant and art gallery on Abovian Street with Armen Ohanyan, a young fiction writer, and Arevik Ashakharoyan, a literary agent. I was hearing Armenia's new voices of optimism. "Soviet minds are a thing of the past," Mr. Ohanyan said. Having written about Armenia for decades, their words resonated. I am a poet and nonfiction writer of Armenian ancestry and have been to Armenia five times in the past decade. My trips are often connected to my work a translation of one of my books, a lecture tour, a symposium. I started the day grazing on a classic Armenian breakfast spread at the Armenia Marriott Hotel Yerevan, an elegant hotel on Republic Square with fine local cuisine: bastermas (spicy, cured beef); paper thin or thicker warm lavash; local cheeses; jams with strawberries or apricots or walnuts; thick yogurt; cherries, apricots, blackberries and melons from local orchards; fruit nectars and orange, red and brown rolls of thick grape molasses stuffed with walnuts (sujuk); and black tea from a samovar. The presentation was beautiful and the Caucasian sun poured through the windows. Like its cuisine, the country has a long, rich history. Armenia, which became an independent republic in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union, is a small, landlocked nation in the southwest Caucasus, at the crossroads of Europe and Asia. The country today is what remains of a once ancient empire that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea in the first century B.C., before it was conquered by the Romans. It was the first nation to make Christianity its state religion, in 301. Conquered by Byzantines, Persians, Mongols and Seljuks, then colonized by the Ottoman Turks in the 16th century, Armenians were subject to large scale massacres in the 19th century, during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, and were the victims of what genocide scholars regard as one of the first genocides of the modern era, by the Ottoman Turkish government in 1915. (Turkey denies that the killings were genocide.) Armenia became a Soviet Republic in 1920, endured Stalin's purges and repression, a massive earthquake in 1988 and a war with neighboring Azerbaijan in the 1990s that has flared up again in recent years over the province of Nagorno Karabakh. By all rational odds, Armenia should not be on the map today. Having survived such a harsh history, Armenia has emerged as a democracy that cherishes the many layers of its past. Today, the capital, Yerevan which dates to the seventh century B.C. and was founded on the walls of the Urartian city of Erebuni is a blend of ancient culture, artisan tradition, modern architecture and high tech, postmodern style, exemplified by the new condominiums and high end shops on the pedestrian Northern Boulevard. On Sept. 29 and 30, Yerevan will celebrate its 2,800th anniversary, making it one of the oldest cities in the world. In the ruins of the ancient fortress on Erebuni Fortress Hill, fragments of murals with images of sacred animals evoke the late Bronze Age. The Erebuni museum has a fine collection of artifacts, including a huge wine storage container that documents Armenia's winemaking tradition from the Bronze Age. Those amphoras prompted me to visit the Ararat Brandy Factory, an imperial monument to the Armenian passion for the grape, set on a perch overlooking Victory Bridge, which spans the Hrazdan River. I love walking the beautifully lit cavernous halls filled with Caucasian oak barrels. Ararat Brandy has been a major export for more than a century, and its velvety depths were made legendary by Winston Churchill, who drank it daily for decades. I left with a glow of delight after the brandy tasting that concludes the tour. I always head first for the intimate museums dedicated to major figures. The Saryan museum, for example, has two floors of works by the avant garde landscape and modernist painter Martiros Saryan (1880 1972). In a stately stone house, the Sergei Parajanov Museum is a celebration of the great 20th century filmmaker and visual artist's work: mixed media collages, paintings, conceptual installations and miniature drawings on matchbooks and bottlecaps from the time he was imprisoned by the Soviet authorities for "decadent" art and homosexuality. I always get a good workout climbing the 572 steps of the Cafesjian Center for the Arts (also known as Cascade). It's a dramatic complex rising up from the tree shaded, cafe abundant Tumayan Street in five monumental limestone tiers of fountains, topiary gardens and sculptures. If you tire of the climb, you can slip inside and take the escalator, and soak up one of the most important collections of modern glass in the world, as well as paintings, drawings and sculpture. No one should come to Yerevan without visiting the extraordinary Armenian Genocide Museum and Memorial, also known as the Tsitsernakaberd (meaning swallow's fortress) Memorial Complex. It is situated on a hill that overlooks the city and Mount Ararat, Armenia's national symbol, just across the border in Turkey. Built of sleek gray basalt, its elegant new wing was designed by the museum's director, Hayk Demoyan, and his wife, the designer Lucine Matevosian. The wide circular exhibit halls wind from a top floor down to a second floor. Photographic images, maps and documentary footage on various screens accompany text that explore the history of the horrific events that took the lives of more than a million Armenians in 1915. From the museum visitors walk the stone walkway to the dramatic Memorial towering twin obelisks (a symbol of eternity) and 12 20 foot high stone pillars to lean over a large circular area where an eternal flame burns and sacred music plays. Back in Yerevan for the evening, I dined with friends and found the cuisine more inventive than ever. Restaurants blend the traditions of the Armenian Caucasus with the Middle East as refugees from Syria and Iraq make their impact. At Sherep, one of the hottest new places, with a chic open kitchen and late night jazz, I had mountain sorrel soup; tender stuffed grape leaves; eggplant sauteed in olive oil and rolled up with minced walnuts, dill, garlic and yogurt; and succulent baby lamb chops. At Vostan, in a beautiful old Russian period stone building on Abovian Street, I feasted on pink, succulent, wood grilled Lake Sevan trout. My travels frequently take me beyond Yerevan. Wherever you go in Armenia, you are journeying through an open air museum where churches and monasteries, even a Hellenic temple, are built into the cliffs or perched at the edges of canyons or green gorges, with searing vistas framed by the ever blue sky. Thousand year old lace like carved stone crosses (khatchgars) emerge from fields of roadside poppies. For a small country Armenia has an amazing diversity of flora and fauna; about 240 species breed in Armenia and nearly 400 move through the country, making Armenia a birder's paradise. On a sunny morning, I headed east from Yerevan in a minivan with my superb guide, Katar Taslakyan, and a driver, Raphael Hovakimyan, whose musical selections jazz and R B filled the van. About 40 minutes later, we stopped at Charents Arch, an impressive monument to Armenia's great modern poet Yeghishe Charents (1897 1937). From there, we got a stunning view of the glistening, grassy highlands and snow capped Mount Ararat. In another 15 minutes, we were at Garni, a beautifully proportioned Greco Roman temple believed to have been built by King Tiridates I to the sun god Mihr. The vistas from Garni, which is perched at the lip of a gorge, are spectacular. We drove on until the conical dome of Geghardavank (the Monastery of the Spear) emerges from behind a stone wall. A Unesco World Heritage site (like many monasteries in Armenia), the medieval church was built partly out of the side of a mountain. Monks' caves adorned with stone crosses and arches dot the cliff face. I walked into a chapel and stared at the animal carvings on the wall as light fell through the round opening in the dome, a feature in Armenian medieval churches that creates a mysterious dark light and a heightened sense of the cosmic. A stream from the mountain runs through a wall, and pilgrims and tourists pass their hands through it. At Geghard, as with most Armenian medieval churches, you enter a distinctive organic architecture, in which building and carvings flow with the contours of nature. Unlike the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, these churches are smaller in scale and designed as intimate spaces. Here, you feel the stones are speaking to you, the light grazes you. The next day we drove south from Yerevan into the fertile Ararat Valley. In June, the apricot orchards are popping with Armenia's bright yellow national fruit and the vineyards are green. On this clear morning, Mount Ararat rose from a bank of clouds and the hot sun was mitigated by cool breezes. Farther south, in Vayots Dzor province, our van climbed the road to Noravank, a complex that includes two medieval churches, one of which was designed by the architect and artist Momik. Again, I'm blown away as monks' caves appear in jagged red cliffs that remind me of Arizona, and the milky tan limestone of the Myrig Adzvadzeen church glistens in the sunlight against a brilliant blue sky and rising mountains. The chapel at Noravank is luminous with light pouring through the windows. Gazing out those windows to green hillsides, red cliffs, blue sky, I felt the shimmer of the sublime. Four miles from Noravank, I went from spiritual to chthonic, as I walked up the steps of a craggy cliff to the Areni cave where, in 2007, the earliest known clay amphoras (karases) some 6,100 years old were discovered. Armenia is considered the birthplace of winemaking. Archaeologists are still working there, and the Copper Age karases are well displayed in the cave where they were once used. Heading north past potato fields and farmlands, meadows of poppies and royal blue delphiniums, we drove up the western shore of Lake Sevan, one of the largest high altitude lakes in Eurasia. Its turquoise water is a resort for bathers and fishermen, and an important source for fishing, irrigation and hydroelectric power. At a lakeside restaurant called Dzovadzots, I had a perfect whitefish soup. A half hour north, the ninth century Sevanavank monastery, with its two small beautiful, earth colored churches on a peninsula, is worth the climb up the steps from the shore below. Just north of Lake Sevan, we crossed into the alpine mountain region of Tavush where streams and hiking trails wind through the lush forests of Dilijan National Park. The stunning monastery of Haghartsin is nestled on a forested mountain. The spa town of Dilijan, situated in the park, is an atmospheric place out of a Chekhov story. Its chalet style buildings with gable tiled roofs, open air theater and mountain views made it a popular vacation spot for wealthy Russians in the 19th century; today it is a retreat for artists. One of the creative entrepreneur and philanthropist James Tufenkian's four unique hotels is housed in a complex of restored 19th century houses. From there, we drove to Avan Dzoraget, another Tufenkian hotel, beneath the mountains on the Debed River. Sleek and imaginative, and appointed with Tufenkian carpets, its spacious rooms have lovely views. The restaurant overlooking the river offers a sumptuous repertoire: sauteed local greens and onions with yogurt; smoky eggplant dip blended with tahini; spelt with wild mushrooms; a tongue melting sou boreg (thin flat noodles layered with Armenian cheeses), chicken cooked with dried plum and pomegranate sauce; superb dry white wine. Back in Yerevan the next evening, I walked through an arch onto an old cobblestone street off bustling Amirian Street and found Anteb, a Syrian Armenian restaurant, where we had spicy, crepe thin lahmajuns (Armenian pizza); a piquant muhamara (walnut, pomegranate molasses and red pepper dip) that you scoop up with hot, puffy lavash; and kuftas, crisp shells of cracked wheat bursting with lamb and herbs. The next night my friend Ashot took me to Babylon, an Arabic Iraqi restaurant where our feast included crispy boregs (phyllo dough wrapped around cheese), meatless stuffed grape leaves and the most tender lamb kebabs I've had outside my mother's kitchen. I never leave Yerevan without meandering through the Vernissage, the open air market in a park along Aram and Buzant streets where there are stalls and stalls of ceramics, folk and contemporary art, rugs, textiles, jewelry and more. I bought two small antique Caucasian kilims before I wandered back to Republic Square, where I end most evenings. At night the Square, with its monumental rosy tufa stone buildings, is lit up; the fountains spew through colored lights, music plays, people dance. It's a nightly ritual in Yerevan in the warm weather months a down home celebration to end a day, and a resilient response to the harsh history of this new nation that has emerged from an ancient civilization.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Researchers also say the same tools used in previous Lazarus attacks on banks and media companies in South Korea in 2013 were used in the WannaCry ransomware episode. Those tools have evolved, but are what researchers call "variants" of the same tools used in the other attacks. Researchers also said they saw heavy crossover between the computer code in the earlier attacks and WannaCry. That crossover provided what Mr. Chien said was yet another "hard link." Other digital crumbs linking the North Korean group to WannaCry include a tool that deletes data that had been used in other Lazarus attacks. The hackers behind WannaCry also used a rare encryption method and an equally unusual technique to cover their tracks. "We don't see that used anywhere else," Mr. Chien said. In the February WannaCry attacks, Symantec's researchers said the hackers spread from server to server the same way the Lazarus hackers had in their previous attacks. In May, another group of hackers that call themselves the Shadow Brokers published the details of National Security Agency hacking tools that the WannaCry hackers were able to use to add muscle to their attacks. They used a leaked N.S.A. hacking tool to automatically spread from server to server, eventually infecting hundreds of thousands of machines around the world, most notably in Europe and Asia. Some computer security experts have said it is too soon to accuse North Korea, and North Korean officials have denied involvement.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The choreographer William Forsythe in Boston.Credit...Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times The choreographer has recently made an abrupt change in creative direction back to ballet. In "Full on Forsythe," Boston Ballet will show off his new moves. BOSTON "Give me a little booty! Show off! Glissade, glissade, tombe, ballonne, pique, yessssss!" William Forsythe called out ballet steps, bouncing through them on sneakered feet. "Let's go, let's go!" sang Barry White as "Sha La La Means I Love You" played over the speakers. A large group of dancers at Boston Ballet swayed their hips and shoulders to the infectious rhythms, as they watched two principals whirl through a sequence that Mr. Forsythe had just choreographed part of a new piece he is creating here for "Full on Forsythe," an evening devoted to his work, March 7 March 17. At 69, Mr. Forsythe has been finding ballet delightful since he first went to a class at 17. But he took an almost 20 year hiatus from what he describes as "working within the academy." Widely considered one of the most important choreographers working today, Mr. Forsythe is a New Yorker who made his career in Europe. First in Stuttgart, Germany, then for two decades as director of Frankfurt Ballet, he took the genre in new directions by both ignoring and exploring its conventions taking positions out of classical alignment; testing limits of balance, extension and strength; inventing strategies to generate movement; adding text, film and innovative lighting. Even before Frankfurt Ballet closed in 2004, Mr. Forsythe had headed into more theatrical and improvisational terrain, which he would continue to investigate with the Forsythe Company, a smaller ensemble founded in 2005 . Two works created for the Paris Opera Ballet in 1999 were more or less his farewell to the extensions of balletic form that had put him on the map. Audiences craving more of the unblinking modernity that Mr. Forsythe had brought to classical dance had to content themselves with older works. But Mr. Forsythe has come back to making ballet. Since leaving the Forsythe Company in 2015 he has created two pieces ("Blake Works 1," "Playlist Track 1, 2 ") for ballet companies and one ("A Quiet Evening") for a small group of his own longtime dancers joyous, detailed riffs on ballet technique and tradition, danced to pop music, Rameau and in silence. ("Quiet Evening" will come to The Shed in New York in October.) His new work for Boston Ballet, "Playlist (EP)," will be his first for a North American ballet company in almost 30 years. It shares a program with "Blake Works 1" and "Pas/Parts 2018," a revised version of one of the 1999 Paris pieces. (His last North American commission, "Herman Schmerman," created for New York City Ballet's 1992 Diamond Project, was revived there this season and is currently being performed.) Without the responsibilities of running a company, free to choose where he would like to work, and with time "to practice a lot" at his home in Vermont, Mr. Forsythe who also has a growing presence in the art world seems newly invigorated by the joy of working with ballet dancers. "I knew I wanted to move back to strict ballet after the Forsythe Company ended," he said in an interview after a long day of rehearsal here. "When you look at the great works of Bournonville, Petipa, Balanchine, you realize that the possibilities are endless. It is up to you to find the recombinations that turn the academy into a form of vital communication." In the early part of his career, as resident choreographer with the Stuttgart Ballet and then director of the Frankfurt Ballet, Mr. Forsythe created ballets that established him as a groundbreaking and often divisive experimental artist in a field that is by definition a historical genre. Mr. Forsythe's pre 1999 work like George Balanchine's asked why ballet couldn't be as representative of our time as any work of contemporary art. He pushed Balanchine's expansion of ballet vocabulary the elongated extensions, the tensions of weight and balance, the stripped down aesthetic into even more extreme terrain. He played with conventions; abandoned ballet's traditional gender roles; used electronic music (frequently by the Dutch composer Thom Willems); designed his own innovative lighting; and brought text and film into his work, often inspired by philosophical or theoretical writings and ideas. Broadly speaking, European audiences adored it; American critics with some exceptions hated it. As a result, until 1998, when the Frankfurt Ballet first began to occasionally perform at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, dance audiences in the United States saw little of his work apart from a few early pieces that began to percolate into ballet companies. But Mikko Nissinen, the artistic director of Boston Ballet, said he was not daunted by that history. "For me, he is the person who has moved the art form forward after Balanchine," he said. "Our art form is in need of genius and here we have a profound, strong American voice. It baffles me that some people are blind to this." Fulfilling a long held desire for his company, Mr. Nissinen entered into a five year partnership with Mr. Forsythe in 2016; Boston Ballet will acquire at least one of his works each year. If Mr. Forsythe's earlier ballets were explorations of the outer limits of the genre, his post 2014 work seems to be digging ever deeper into its core, looking hard at ballet's history to bring it into the future. In "Blake Works 1," set to seven songs by the English musician James Blake, he mined the rich technical heritage of the Paris Opera Ballet dancers, incorporating combinations that have been passed down by generations of teachers, and emphasizing the beaten footwork and refined arms that are French stylistic hallmarks. He has done something analogous in "Playlist (EP)," which begins with two sections created for English National Ballet and adds another four songs. "I'm looking at all the interesting cross disseminations you get when you have a company made up of dancers from all over the world," Mr. Forsythe said, noting that the Boston dancers come from Russia, South Korea, North America and Europe, all with different training. "Playlist," he added, quotes classroom combinations he remembered from teachers and from ballet classes seen while working in Paris, London and Boston. The new work is also sprinkled with ballet history. "Paquita!" called out a dancer, when Mr. Forsythe asked the group if they recognized a sequence he gave them. "It's the 'Paquita' cha cha now," Mr. Forsythe laughed, referring to the 19th century ballet choreographed (in part) by Marius Petipa. "I keep watching the ballet on YouTube," he said later. "The combinations, the complexities of the choreography, are just genius." Mr. Nissinen said he was initially a little surprised by Mr. Forsythe's musical choices. "Then I thought, why not?," he said. "I think it's his reaction to being back in America. He wants to connect with people, bridge to broader audiences." Working to music "you would listen to on a train," said Chyrstyn Fentroy, a second soloist, has allowed the dancers to loosen up and find "a swing" to their technique. "It forces you to rethink how you do a tendu or use your epaulement," she said, referring to the complex relationships between head, shoulder and hips that are vital to ballet. "I love the challenge of ballet," Mr. Forsythe said one day as he constructed a complicated, overlapping ensemble sequence. "It's like inventing a knot. You have the rope or cord, and you have to find the right relationships. It's much harder than people think!" Now and again, that was evident in the studio. Stymied one afternoon by a difficult passage in a pas de deux, Mr. Forsythe got out his phone: "Siri, what's the next step?" he asked. "You don't appear to be heading anywhere," she answered. Laughter all around. Mostly, though, he seemed to know exactly what he wanted, reeling off strings of ballet steps as he demonstrated, the dancers picking up the movements with uncanny speed. (Once he went to consult photographs of M M candies, lined up in color coded formations that represented different stages of a section.) Mr. Forsythe maintained he wasn't aiming for anything groundbreaking or revolutionary. "I like being part of the big ballet conversation," he said. "This is a celebration of everything ballet has brought to me in life. It's just another way to love ballet and there are so many ways."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
BUDAPEST What would happen if Jewish people suddenly disappeared? That is the question asked by "The Chosen Ones," a new production by Golem Theater which had its premiere last month in Budapest. Golem, a Jewish theater company, describes the show as a political cabaret, with topical jokes and live music, that aims to lampoon hatred using dark humor. On opening night last month, a handful of players performed on a white revolving stage set against a shimmering curtain. An early number proclaimed, "Now the bank, the factory and the lawyer's office will close/Because the you know whos are gone, but we don't know where." The evening unfolded in a succession of sketches and musical numbers presenting a cross section of Hungarian society as they reacted to the news of the missing people: an orchestra suddenly lacking most of its players; a family eating a meal without the grandmother; a middle class household discovering that the neighbors have vanished. Despite the absences, the players carried on. They sang and danced, swapping roles and guises. But in this show, the audience of about 150 rarely laughed. "I was very glad to see that one can feel sadness in a cabaret," said the production's director, Andras Borgula, who studied theater in Israel and founded Golem Theater in Budapest in 2005. "Our intention wasn't to make a play about anti Semitism, but about hatred in general, of which anti Semitism is just one type," he added. Hatred has been high on the agenda in Hungary since Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who began a third consecutive term in office this year, set out to establish an "illiberal democracy" in the country. Government funded billboard campaigns, as well as television, radio and online advertisements, have presented threatening messages about migrants, the European Union and the Hungarian born Jewish financier and philanthropist George Soros. The prominence of hate speech in the country has caused concern internationally, and alarmed many in Hungary, a country which lost over half a million Jews in World War II and where anti Semitism has been endemic throughout modern history. When billboards appeared across the country last summer, showing a smiling Mr. Soros with the line, "Don't let Soros have the last laugh," anti Semitic graffiti soon appeared on many of them. Andras Heisler, leader of the Federation of Hungarian Jewish Communities, addressed an open letter to Mr. Orban at the time: "This campaign, while not openly anti Semitic, clearly has the potential to ignite uncontrolled emotions, including anti Semitism," he wrote, calling for an end to "this bad dream." In a phone interview this week, Mr. Heisler said that there was more public animosity in Hungary toward the Roma minority and refugees than toward Jews. But, he said, "our historical experiences suggest that it is never good to have strong hatred in a country." As the audience entered the venue for "The Chosen Ones," the director and some assistants greeted them from a stand, like agents conducting a survey. They sized up each person and categorized them in groups including "cultural Jew," "Soros Jew" or "self hating Jew" labels taken from public speech and online forums in Hungary. Later, a young woman performed a musical litany of hate against everyone, across the whole political and social spectrum. "Doesn't matter why, doesn't matter who, everyone's a filthy something," she sang. Political cabaret is a popular genre in Hungary with a long tradition that survived through the country's Communist dictatorship. Some characters in "The Chosen Ones" suggest real life figures one is "the prime minister," for example others bring to mind archetypes, such as "liberal protester." Mr. Borgula said the anti Semitic slurs heard onstage "fly around in public life so much that we need to talk about them," adding, "This is therapy, we need to laugh at it." And plays that deal with current events are more popular with audiences than other productions in Golem Theater's repertoire, he said. Golem Theater is a Jewish company to the extent that it deals with topics from a Jewish perspective, Mr. Borgula said, adding that he was always open to working with artists from outside the community. For this production, he invited a diverse group of writers to create the script, including Borbala Szabo, a practicing Roman Catholic who describes herself as conservative but is critical of Mr. Orban's government. In an interview, Ms. Szabo said that theater audiences in Hungary were sharply divided along political lines and tended to see plays that reinforced their worldview. "They come as if they were coming to Mass, knowing exactly what they want to hear," she said. Ms. Szabo said she had friends, family and colleagues in both conservative and liberal circles, which helped her offer fresh perspectives. "This show attempts a kind of bubble bursting," she said. "It shows the situation from several directions." One sketch features liberal activists self importantly trying to find an adequate response to the disappearances. In a later scene, the prime minister is shown listening to ministers and advisers as they discuss how to find a new group that they can "love on the surface but hate deep down." Ms. Szabo said she hoped that liberals and conservatives would come and see the show. "I think the way to defeat this type of regime, moving toward dictatorship, is to realize that in fact we are together as a country, and those above us manipulate us with this hatred," she said. At the end of "The Chosen Ones" there have been no consequences of the mysterious disappearance that is the show's central conceit. In real life, of course, there are still Jews in Hungary, but other elements of society have vanished since Mr. Orban took office: Universities have been closed and national newspapers which once had circulations of tens of thousands are gone. Mr. Borgula said he wanted to highlight how "we wake up the next day and carry on with our lives." "My biggest fear, as a Jew and a Hungarian citizen," he added, "is that this is what would really happen namely, nothing."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
THE CHAMBERMAID (2019) Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. Mexico's entry in the best international feature category at the Academy Awards centers on a maid at a high rise hotel in Mexico City. The movie follows that maid, Eve (Gabriela Cartol), through her day to day life, including a friendship; a romance; and a window into the lives of guests, who leave behind pieces of themselves in the form of books, bloodstains and more. The film was directed by Lila Aviles, and is a "quietly stunning debut feature," A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times. "Aviles approaches Eve's inner life with frank and tactful sympathy, and depicts her circumstances with unsentimental clarity," he added. "The film's style is austere there are few camera movements and no musical score but its visual wit and emotional sensitivity lift it above the minimalist miserablism that drags down so many well meaning films about modern workers. After you've seen it, the world looks different." MARADONA IN MEXICO Stream on Netflix. Earlier this year, the famous Argentine footballer Diego Maradona was the subject of an HBO documentary that chronicled his storied career. A different side of Maradona can be found in this docuseries, which follows the athlete during a recent period when he was coaching the Dorados de Sinaloa, a team based in Culiacan, Mexico.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The new coronavirus disease has a name now: COVID 19. That took a while. The virus's genome was sequenced within two weeks or so of its appearance, but for many weeks more, we didn't know what to call it or the disease it causes. For a time, in some quarters, the disease went by "Wuhan pneumonia," after the city in central China where the first human infections were detected. But guidelines from the World Health Organization, which christened COVID 19 recently, discourage naming diseases after locations or people, among other things, to avoid "unintended negative impacts by stigmatizing certain communities." Indeed. On Jan. 29, an Australian tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch featured on its front page a red face mask stamped with "Chinese Virus Pandamonium": The emphasis on "panda" was the paper's doing, so the misspelling it highlighted presumably was deliberate, too. A Chinese student in Melbourne protested in an op ed in another paper, "This virus is not 'Chinese.'" Of course, the virus isn't Chinese, even if its origin eventually is traced back to a cave in China; nor is the disease that it causes. Epidemics, on the other hand, are often societal or political much like famines are usually man made, even though droughts occur naturally. As far as the current outbreak goes, two cultural factors help explain how the natural occurrence of a single virus infecting a single mammal could have cascaded into a global health crisis. And now for the controversial aspect of this argument: Both of those factors are quintessentially, though not uniquely, Chinese. The first is China's long, long history of punishing the messenger. A doctor who had flagged on social media the risk of a possible viral outbreak was among several people summoned by the police in Wuhan in early January and warned not to spread rumors. He died recently after being infected with COVID 19. Similarly, the epidemic of SARS which is caused by another coronavirus that broke out in southern China in late 2002 was covered up by local authorities for more than a month, and the surgeon who first sounded the alarm was held in military detention for 45 days. In 2008, a scandal erupted over tainted baby formula, after major Chinese producers were found to have added melamine to milk powder. (Six infants died; 54,000 had to be hospitalized). Four years later the whistle blower credited with first exposing the problem was stabbed to death under mysterious circumstances. These are recent examples, but that doesn't mean they should be pinned solely on the Chinese Communist Party: The practice of punishing whoever brings embarrassing truths has been the order of the day since at least the time of Confucius, in the sixth century B.C. The sage took a page from an even more ancient tract, "The Classic of Poetry" (also known as "The Book of Songs"), a collection of songs and poems dating to the 10th century B.C. or before, and adopted a rule from it: "To Manifest the Way, First Keep Your Body Safe." (Ming Zhe Bao Shen ) That may sound innocuous enough, until you consider the fate of one of Confucius's beloved students, Zi Lu (Zi Lu ), also known as Zhong You (Zhong You ), after he ran afoul of the precept: For trying to rebuke a usurper in a power struggle between feudal lords, he was killed and his body was minced. (It is said that Confucius never ate ground meat again.) In the third century, the maxim took on some literary flair and a cynical didactic twist in an essay on fate by the philosopher Li Kang (Li Kang ): "The tree that grows taller than the forest will be truncated by gales" (Mu Xiu Yu Lin ,Feng Bi Cui Zhi ). This, in turn, eventually gave rise to the more familiar modern adage, "The shot hits the bird that pokes its head out" (Qiang Da Chu Tou Niao ). Admittedly, China's rulers occasionally solicit honest views from their subjects but only of a certain kind or usually for a limited time. Mao Zedong, in his "Hundred Flowers" or "Big Voices, Big Gripes" (Da Ming Da Fang ) campaign of late 1956 and early 1957, called for the facts and critical opinions to be freely proffered. A few months later came the Anti Rightist Movement (Fan You Yun Dong ) during which hundreds of thousands of educated people who had spoken out were sent to jail, forced into exile or subjected to years of mistreatment, their careers and families destroyed. Punishing people who speak the truth has been a standard practice of China's ruling elite for more than two millenniums and is an established means of coercing stability. It is not an invention of modern China under the Communists although the party, true to form, has perfected the practice. And now, muzzling the messenger has helped spread the deadly COVID 19, which has infected some 75,000 people. A second cultural factor behind the epidemic are traditional Chinese beliefs about the powers of certain foods, which have encouraged some hazardous habits. There is, in particular, the aspect of Chinese eating culture known as "jinbu," (Jin Bu ) meaning, roughly, to fill the void. Some of its practices are folklorish or esoteric, but even among Chinese people who don't follow them, the concept is pervasive. For men, it is most important to fill the energy void, which is related to virility and sexual prowess; for women, the stress is on replacing blood, which improves beauty and fertility. Rare plants and animals from the wild are thought to bring the best replenishment, especially when eaten fresh or raw. Winter is said to be the season when the body needs more "jinbu" foods. (Could that help explain why both SARS and the current epidemic broke out during that time of year?) Hard core believers in "jinbu" seem to buy into this notion, too: "Like shapes eaten strengthen like shapes" (Yi Xing Bu Xing ), with the word "shapes" sometimes referring to human organs and their functions. Adherents count as favorites a long list of exotic foods whose methods of procurement or preparation can be outright cruel, with some simply too revolting to describe here. I've seen snakes and the penises of bulls or horses great for men, the theory goes on offer at restaurants in many cities in southern China. Bats, which are thought to be the original source of both the current coronavirus and the SARS virus, are said to be good for restoring eyesight especially the animals' granular feces, called "sands of nocturnal shine" (Ye Ming Sha ). Gallbladders and bile harvested from live bears are good for treating jaundice; tiger bone is for erections. More mundane yet no less popular is the palm civet (Guo Zi Li ), a small, wild quadruped suspected of having passed on the SARS virus to humans. When stewed with snake meat, it is said to cure insomnia. Less wealthy people might turn to dog meat preferably a dog that has been chased around before being slaughtered, because some people believe that more "jinbu" benefits are reaped from eating an animal whose blood and energy ran high. Similarly, it is thought that animals killed just before serving are more "jinbu" potent, which is one reason the more exotic offerings in wet markets tend to be sold alive also making them more potent vectors for any virus they might carry. Eating exotic wildlife has long been endorsed by scholars and elevated to mystical heights, including in the medical treatise "The Inner Bible of the Yellow Emperor" (Huang Di Nei Jing ), written some 2,000 years ago and still revered by many health conscious Chinese today. Beliefs surrounding the health benefits of certain wildlife foods which are discussed in newspaper columns and on numerous dedicated internet sites, as well as taught in China's medical schools permeate the culture.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
were married June 30 at Queen of All Saints Roman Catholic Church in Brooklyn. The Rev. Joseph A. Ceriello, a Roman Catholic priest, performed the ceremony. The couple graduated from Yale, she cum laude. They also received degrees from Harvard, he a Master of Urban Planning, she a Master in Public Administration that was part of a dual degree program in which she also received an M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. In January 2019, Ms. Liu, 30, who goes by Susan, is to begin working as a strategy consultant at the Boston Consulting Group. She is the daughter of Huimin Wang of Toronto and Sen Liu of Beijing. The bride's father is the manager of administration, including human resources, technical support for customers and logistics at Pason Pharmaceuticals in Beijing. Her mother is a pathology technologist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
LOS ANGELES Two summers ago, Legendary Entertainment was the belle of the Hollywood ball. Thomas Tull, who founded Legendary, a boutique studio, in 2000, finding hits like "Godzilla" and "Pacific Rim," strutted across a stage at the Comic Con International fan convention and touted two coming films, "Warcraft" and "The Great Wall," as surefire blockbusters. Behind the scenes, Legendary was working to tap into Chinese money flowing to Hollywood. That resulted in Dalian Wanda's purchase of Legendary in January 2016 for what seemed like a large price, 3.5 billion. Now, in a reflection of the volatility of the film business and the precariousness of deal making with Chinese companies, Legendary is facing uncomfortable questions about its future. Legendary has been bruised at the global box office; "Warcraft" and "The Great Wall" flopped. The studio has been without a chief executive since Mr. Tull left in January. (He said that was his plan all along; Wanda publicly indicated otherwise.) And Legendary suddenly finds itself operating amid uncertainty something that Hollywood loathes as Beijing clamps down on Wanda and other conglomerates, scrutinizing balance sheets and reviewing loans from state owned banks. The studio, which employs about 300 people, has ample money to make movies, including announced sequels to "Godzilla," "Kong: Skull Island" and "Pacific Rim." Over the last six months, the studio has secured cash investments of nearly 580 million. Legendary also has a 700 million line of credit with JPMorgan Chase that extends through 2021. This information was provided by a Legendary executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss financial matters. Melissa Zukerman, a Legendary spokeswoman, confirmed the numbers on Tuesday but declined to comment beyond a statement released last week. It said, in part, "Legendary is well capitalized with liquidity to fund its film and TV slates and operate its business as usual." Whether Legendary has the ability to pull off its ambitious growth plans is less certain. Its expansion goals include taking more control of its North American film distribution (it relies on Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. to release its movies) and increasing output from a couple of movies a year to six or more. With the right support from Wanda, financially and politically, Legendary could also build a film distribution system in China, one that could be rented to other Hollywood studios, which are now required to use a state owned distribution system. In many ways, Legendary finds is in the usual Hollywood spot: crossing its fingers that film bets pay off and a corporate parent comes through with promised backing. In May, Jack Gao, Legendary's acting chief executive, told Variety magazine that Wanda had committed hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding. Legendary has also been caught in the old Hollywood game of perception versus reality. Chinese conglomerates like Wanda, Anbang Insurance Group, HNA Group and Fosun International are being reined in because they have used cheap debt provided by state banks to spend lavishly, in some cases seeming to overpay for acquisitions. Just last week, Wanda tore up a 9.3 billion agreement to sell a portfolio of hotels and theme parks to the property firm Sunac China Holdings, instead selling it just the theme parks, a move that lessened Sunac's debt level. (Wanda reached a deal to sell its hotels to another Chinese company, R F Properties.) Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Because of write downs from movie misfires, spending on fast tracked film and television projects, and the accelerated vesting of stock options in anticipation of a sale, Legendary lost 343 million in 2014 and 462 million in 2015. The losses were disclosed in filings with the Shenzhen Stock Exchange related to a subsequent effort by Wanda to merge the studio with a publicly traded subsidiary, Wanda Cinema Line, which owns theaters. Wanda abandoned that maneuver, citing changing market conditions. Those details were not mentioned when Wanda's chairman, Wang Jianlin, barnstormed through Hollywood in October to promote Legendary as a jewel at the center of an expanding entertainment empire. Soon, he said then, Wanda's assets would include the purchase of a small TV company, Dick Clark Productions, for 1 billion, and an 8.2 billion studio and theme park complex being built in Qingdao, a city north of Shanghai. Wanda also owns AMC Entertainment, the No. 1 theater chain in North America. But Wanda soon abandoned the Dick Clark deal and "The Great Wall" was a debacle, costing at least 250 million to make and market and taking in 332 million worldwide. (Theater owners keep roughly 50 percent of ticket sales.) The misfire led to the departure of Peter Loehr, the chief of Legendary's China operation and a "Great Wall" producer. Lately, however, Legendary has shown signs of resurgence. The studio's last release, "Kong: Skull Island," was a hit, collecting 566 million worldwide in March against a production budget of 185 million. DVD sales were also strong. As a result, Legendary expects to turn a profit for 2017 of roughly 30 million. As the hunt for a successor to Mr. Tull progresses, Legendary's highly regarded production chief, Mary Parent, who joined the company last year, ("Kong: Skull Island" was her first film), has hired lieutenants and started to assemble new films. Legendary executives, agents and producers affiliated with the company say that Ms. Parent's team has put more checks and balances in place to ensure that the company is not overspending on production, as had sometimes happened. Legendary's next release, "Pacific Rim: Uprising," which will arrive in February, cost about 150 million to make, for instance. Its 2013 franchise predecessor cost an estimated 190 million. Ms. Parent's lineup also includes a sequel to "Kong: Skull Island" that will find Godzilla battling the giant ape; "Skyscraper," a disaster thriller starring Dwayne Johnson; "Detective Pikachu," a live action film based on the Pokemon character; and a reboot of the science fiction classic "Dune," with Denis Villeneuve in the director's chair.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
In the '90s, We Had 'Friends.' Now They Call It Co Living. Tuesday was family dinner at WeLive Wall Street: vegetarian meatballs and grilled chicken, black truffle gravy and green peas. Thursday was a "craft jam" terra cotta pot painting amplified by rose and salty snacks at Node in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. A few weeks earlier, I had made a terrarium at Jersey City Urby bromeliads, plastic critters and rum punch, with the Marshall Tucker Band on the Sonos and joined a bar crawl through the Lower East Side with a group from Quarters, open since mid June on Grand Street. I slept in an adorable plywood cubby on Wall Street and on the 68th floor of the tallest residential building in Jersey City, in a flashy model apartment from which you could see all the way up the Hudson River to the George Washington Bridge, a view so vertiginous I dropped to my knees and crawled into bed on my elbows, special ops style. (Happily, at such a height, there were no neighbors to see me do so.) These were some of my adventures in co living, a housing model that draws inspiration from the single gender residence hotels of the early 20th century and postwar intentional communities, along with modern co working spaces and hacker hostels. Conventional developers are starting to play with the idea, bringing a swankier gloss to what had been homespun group housing. Newer iterations seem more akin to the millennial focused, hipster amenitized luxury rental developments that are sprouting countrywide (with design tropes that include raw wood shelving, vintage board games, Dutch bikes and picture books like "The Selby Is In Your Place" strewn about the common areas). More prosaically, co living can simply mean roommates and common rooms, like a dorm. For some developers, it's a form of adaptive reuse: many co living sites, like WeLive at 110 Wall Street, are leased, in this case from the landlord of what once was an office building, drained of its tenants by Hurricane Sandy. There are still co living evangelists, like Brad Hargreaves of Common, who has promised that "the genuine and organic relationships our members build with each other," as he wrote in a post for Medium, would not be tainted by allowing journalists to sleep over at Common properties (though they were welcome to tour). With over 23 million in financing, Common now operates in five cities, including out of eight houses in New York City. Some co living ventures have collapsed under the weight of their ideals, like the utopian Pure House, started by Ryan Fix, now 42, in his Williamsburg loft in 2012. "It was an experiment that grew out of control," he said the other day, speaking by WhatsApp audio from his computer in London. "I was curating incredibly talented creatives and entrepreneurs committed to social impact as roommates," a mission that does seem a tad overwhelming. Eventually, Mr. Fix added 25 Brooklyn apartments to his Pure House portfolio. He recalled organizing dinner parties and morning raves, weekend jaunts to upstate New York and Burning Man, and the overall emotional cost of being a mentor to 65 people, some of whom fell in love, went traveling and started new businesses, he added juicy alliances he is proud to have overseen. Worn out by so much connectivity, Mr. Fix turned over the Pure House leases to his tenants. Now, he is a co living consultant. With a colleague in Paris, he started Pure House Lab, a nonprofit "do tank," as he put it, offering workshops, research and other services to the co living movement, about which he remains bullish. "Loneliness and anxiety are still on the rise," he said. "The opportunity is to build environments with more points of collision. Creating nurturing spaces where people can share and connect is transformative for the planet." Somewhere, no doubt in the middle of some celestial agora, Holly Whyte is rolling his eyes. With a design by Concrete, a Dutch firm, the 69 story Jersey City Urby, the second in a portfolio of new urbanist rentals by Ironstate Development, is a step up, architecturally, for its bland waterfront neighborhood. Its stacked glass volumes rise like elegant Legos over the Hudson. Inside, an armada of common areas stretch out with the sort of design flourishes and perks you'd see in Facebook's campus in Menlo Park, Calif.: a coffee bar; an AstroTurf lawn; a fire pit; an enormous outdoor swimming pool; and a living room with vintage board games, comfy sofas and, laid out, gallery style, on slim wood shelves, tongue in cheek book titles that include the Dr. Seuss parody "Oh the Meetings You'll Go To!" along with small batch magazines like Oh Comely and Hole Corner. In the sky lighted mailroom, bright blue metal mailboxes look like mini high school lockers; above, ferns and vines erupt from canvas bags. Though Jersey City Urby, like its sister property on Staten Island, is not quite co living it is, essentially, a conventional apartment building with 762 units that rent with conventional leases its community features are right out of the co living playbook. (Rents start at 2,500 for a studio.) The building has both an artist and a scientist in residence. The Staten Island Urby has its own farmer. In June alone, there were all sorts of socially sticky events: wine tastings and ice cream socials; a farmers' market tour; movies on the pool patio; and terrarium night, held in the Urby Lab, a one bedroom model apartment on the 68th floor, all of which were overseen by Jo Rausch, 32, director of culture and events for the Urby properties (the newest just opened in nearby Harrison) and all overbooked. We were a full table that evening, passing acid hued moss and tiny plastic creatures to tuck into our globe shaped terrariums. There was Akshata Puri, a 31 year old senior data analyst; Bea Walter, 22, a photographer who had just graduated from New York University; and Meghan Kershaw, 31, a nutrition science and policy researcher who works out of the one bedroom she shares with her husband, Josh, a technology associate at JPMorgan Chase. Ms. Kershaw said that by evening, she is more than ready to leave their apartment. "I'm always looking for community," she said. You won't find much of that outside the building, which is why this Urby is essentially a vertical and interior neighborhood. Though the place is 85 percent rented, I was terrified alone in my posh, helicopter high apartment, missing the street, empty though it was, far, far below. And I marveled at the stamina of my fellow terrarium creators, who after a long day at their nonprofits and their finance and tech companies could still muster conversation and fine handiwork. Four attendees appeared at poolside yoga early the next morning, seemingly fast friends, chatting and cheerful in their downward dogs. (In my own faraway youth, after 18 hours or more at work on the equivalent, then, of a start up a poorly funded local print product I could do no more than fill a plastic tray with sesame chicken at the Vietnamese salad bar on Bleecker Street and shuffle home, alone, with a beer.) Kahshanna Evans is the community manager at Quarters, run by the Medici Living Group, a co living company in Berlin. Ms. Evans, a former Girl Scout and model, said it is in part her intuition (and a background check) that organizes roommates into salubrious arrangements in this brand new, seven story brick building on the Lower East Side. From the ceiling of the living room and open kitchen, bulbs hung from dangly cords. There were leather beanbag chairs, a wide plank table and a bulletin board featuring miniature Polaroid portraits of the tenants. Rents start at 1,749 for rooms in three to five bedroom units. Sally Lyndley, a fashion stylist, is paying 3,499 for a 212 square foot room, which comes with a terrace and four roommates, none of whom she met before moving in, so the background check was a perk. "I wanted to make sure it wasn't a frat house," said Ms. Lyndley, 38, "because Mama's grown out of that. Or you meet a nice roommate, but she's a heroin addict. I've been down that road." Up on the roof (squashy canvas beanbags), we could see a gaggle of yoga practitioners who swayed and dipped a few buildings away. "Is this 'The Matrix'?" Ms. Evans wondered, before clapping her hands and gathering up the group. "Should we say hello to our future selves?" At Mr. Purple, a bar on top of the Hotel Indigo on Ludlow Street, we drank beer out of cans and I babbled on about the place's namesake, Adam Purple, the community garden activist and tie dyed, purple clad eccentric I recalled riding his bike through the city of my past self. It seemed more than gauche that his memory should be evoked by a slick boutique hotel. But never mind. I met a co living couple, Derek Pankaew, 29 and a start up entrepreneur, and Wenxi Zhao, 23, a jewelry designer. They had fallen in love at Founder House Broadway, a co living establishment devoted to those in tech, but when the place lost its lease, they came to Quarters. They live separately there, so as to create more space in the relationship, Mr. Pankaew said later, adding that the couple took a 10 day break recently. "That just meant that we weren't making out, though we were seeing each other every day," he said. Regular apartment life is boring, he continued, but there are challenges to co living. "People getting drunk and hooking up, there's more potential for drama to happen. And in a normal apartment you don't have 30 people who know what's going on in your relationship. If we have a fight," he said of Ms. Zhao, "everybody wants to know what it's about." "Scooby, scooby, guys," said Ms. Evans, "come along!" It was time for the next port, the bistro Dirty French across the street, followed by one more: Max Fish, the beloved, art inflected 1990s era hangout on Ludlow Street that closed there in 2013 and reopened a year later on Orchard. I decided to skip that stop. I'd been there before, after all. WeLive is run by the seven year old WeWork co working behemoth, now with a valuation of 20 billion and with offices in 49 cities in 15 countries. There are 200 fully furnished apartments on Wall Street, from studios (about 3,000 a month) to three bedrooms outfitted with housewares and towels. You can stay as long as a year, or for one night only ( 296), which is what I did a week or so ago, checking into a "studio plus": a cunning rectangle with a full size bed built into a plywood cupboard, like a Swedish bed in a Carl Larsson painting imagined by a Brooklyn furniture maker. There's a galley kitchen, and a sleek white laminate cabinet hiding a Murphy bed from Resource Furniture, for those who want a roommate or a houseguest. Plywood pegboard shelves were accessorized with quirky objets (chrome cactuses, an origami bird) and curated books (Heidi Julavits, Tom Perrotta, Mick Fleetwood's memoir). I liked my cubby bed, but apartments tucked into office buildings can be grim, despite the ferry terminal outside this one, the literary embellishments and the free coffee. Floors are organized into "neighborhoods," with open staircases and unifying decorative schemes. There's a B.Y.O. whiskey bar, a library, and common kitchens are stocked with coffee and fruit water. The laundry room has a pool table. You can buy snacks there with the WeLive app, which also alerts you to group events, like family dinners, "Game of Thrones" nights or kickboxing classes. It's all a bit bro themed: On a blackboard panel were chalked the words "Do You Have Ur Keys." Rob Stamm, 22, and Cody McClintock, 25, had been in the building barely five hours (it was move in day). They had met after Mr. McClintock, a software designer and developer who loves photography, had found Mr. Stamm's work on Instagram. The two friends were sharing a studio plus, with Mr. McClintock on the Murphy bed. "I took one for the team," he said, pointing out that they had made a pact to spend as little time as possible in the apartment, and in the building. "To be honest, I don't want to be that guy that's networking with all the people here," he said. Blaine Ford, WeLive's community manager, said he encourages tenants to not join the WeWork offices in the building, but pick a location that's at least a few blocks away. "It's good for people to have a bit of a commute," he said, "and just go outside." On a scruffy block on Eldert Street in Bushwick, a renovated brick townhouse built around 1900 gleamed like a showplace in Brooklyn Heights. Inside, a parlor room was swathed in Brooklyn toile; there were vintage photographs of the neighborhood, and on the shelves, the requisite board games and other accouterments of the internet weary. The apartments, fully furnished in a gender neutral, post West Elm manner, have plump blue Smeg refrigerators in their open shelved galley kitchens. The backyard is propped with Brimfield finds seats made from rusty milk cans, vintage signs and above, a web of industrial light bulbs. On this night, nearly all of the building's 13 tenants had gathered to paint pots for tiny succulents, an activity led by Paivi Kankaro, 34, whose company, CraftJam, runs D.I.Y. events around New York City. "Craft is yoga for your brain," Ms. Kankaro said. "And people want to do other things than go to a bar." (There was ample wine, however.) I observed the impressive efforts of Peter and Gena Cuba, both 33 and graphic designers originally from the Midwest. They had moved to Node from Brooklyn Heights, as it happened, because they felt that the comforts of that neighborhood had become a trap. Ms. Cuba also had a hankering for a bathtub. Rents start at 2,800 for a one bedroom. You can bring your own roommates, or Jeanette Dobrowski, Node's 28 year old community curator, will fix you up. "We target global citizens who want to live with people from all walks of life," said Dorothea Avery, Node Brooklyn's 36 year old co founder, and a former Wall Street trader. Node tenants include a Blue Man Group member from London, a French wine consultant and a public affairs specialist from North Carolina who is just 22. Ms. Avery noted the boons to a developer for charging a premium for well appointed spaces four more Node Brooklyn buildings are nearly complete and also the health advantages of group living.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Q. I am trying to conserve space on my Mac, and I read about the storage optimization tools on the Storage tab in the About This Mac box. However, when I open the box and click the Storage tab, I don't have a Manage button to click and start the cleanup process. Why? A. Apple added the Optimized Storage feature to its macOS Sierra (10.12) update. If your operating system is older than last year's release, you will not see the Manage button on the Storage tab that leads you to the new space saving utilities.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The violinist Michael Commandeur, a member of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, in his Amsterdam home. The ensemble, which has members from across Europe, can't perform together during the lockdown. Michiel Commandeur, a Dutch violinist, sounded surprisingly upbeat when he said his income had fallen to zero since the coronavirus pandemic began. He wasn't earning anything from concerts, he explained in a telephone interview from his home in Amsterdam, and, because of a loophole, he didn't qualify for support for lost income in the Netherlands, either. "I'm counting the number of cigarettes I have," he said. But, Mr. Commandeur said, he was in good spirits because he was lucky compared with others. He lived in a house owned by his mother, so he didn't have to pay rent, and while his bank balance was "going flatter and flatter," things were OK for now. "Call me back in about two months and see if I'm still that optimistic about life," he said. Mr. Commandeur, 50, is a member of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, a group that has plenty of acclaim, but no home concert hall or rehearsal space. Though it has an office in Berlin, the musicians only meet to go on tour, usually rehearsing when they arrive in the first city of each trip. "We're people from about 20 different countries," Mr. Commandeur said. "We have to travel from all of them to play concerts." Most of the Europe's orchestras and opera houses have been thrown into turmoil by the coronavirus. Even in countries where lockdowns look set to be lifted soon, concerts are unlikely to be allowed for some time. On Monday, Denmark said it would reopen schools on April 15, but that large gatherings would be banned until August. Many orchestras across the continent, like the Berlin Philharmonic or the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, receive state funding, so are in a relatively good position to deal with the crisis. But the Mahler Chamber Orchestra is different. It was formed in 1997, when members of the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra decided they wanted to keep playing together after they reached the ensemble's age limit. The conductor Claudio Abbado took them under his wing and almost immediately secured the orchestra slots at major festivals. In a telephone interview, Ms. Uchida said the orchestra's problem was "its name," adding: "Where the heck do they belong? If they had a name like the Berlin Chamber Orchestra, the city of Berlin might step in." Over 90 percent of the ensemble's income comes from ticket sales, Michael Adick, the orchestra's managing director, said in a telephone interview. It will lose 2.5 million euros, or about 2.7 million, in earnings if it doesn't play before the summer, he added. (One of the orchestra's canceled engagements was an appearance at Carnegie Hall that had been scheduled for March.) The orchestra's members are now reliant on the governments of their home countries to make up their lost income. Several said in telephone interviews that what was on offer was sufficient, for now. Philipp von Steinaecker, a cellist who lives in Italy, said the government there had stopped mortgage payments for self employed people whose income had fallen by at least a third. It was also giving some 5 million self employed and seasonal workers 600 euros, around 650, a month. (He didn't meet the requirements or need the money, he said.) Matthew Truscott, a London based violinist, said he had felt a wave of relief when Britain's government announced at the end of March that it would pay freelancers the equivalent of 70 percent of their average earnings over the past three years. A similar scheme was introduced last week in Spain, said Jose Vicente Castello, a French horn player who lives in Barcelona. Anna Matz, a German violinist who lives in Berlin, said she applied for a EUR5,000 grant from the city government on March 31 and received the money in her bank account within two days. All the musicians interviewed said they were concerned about the length of the lockdown. Mr. Castello, who had been in isolation for over three weeks, said he was hopeful that things would go back to normal just as quickly as the crisis began. "If everybody has the intention, it will come," he said. Others were less optimistic. Mr. Commandeur said he could not see the orchestra playing together "before Christmas." Mr. von Steinaecker said he couldn't even guess. Last week, he read in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that schools were unlikely to reopen until September but when the children return, they may have to maintain social distancing measures. "I read that, and it made me think, 'When and how are we going to be able to have concerts?'" Mr. von Steinaecker said. "When will people want to sit in a room next to someone and listen to music? It's going to change the whole scene." He might be able to work in Italy, he said, but if borders don't reopen, it will be impossible to play with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Even with the uncertainty over the ensemble's future, its members were still making sure to meet up. They have been checking in on one another every Saturday morning, at first using Zoom then other apps, and sharing their experiences of the crisis. On a recent hangout, one of the orchestra's bassoonists described being shut in a room by himself for seven days after getting the virus. When another spoke about her anxious mood, she cried. "It's been a little bit like therapy," Mr. Castello said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Opening a new front in the campaign to dominate digital entertainment, Amazon is investing hundreds of millions of dollars into becoming a leading creator and distributor of video games. The internet giant said it intended to release its first original big budget game, an ambitious science fiction shooter called Crucible, in May after several coronavirus related delays. It is also developing a full fledged cloud gaming platform under the code name Project Tempo. And it is working on new casual games that broadcasters on its popular Twitch streaming service can play alongside viewers in real time. The push is Amazon's most significant investment in original entertainment since it became a major producer of streaming series and films over the last decade. Amazon is also aiming at strategic rivals like Google and Microsoft, which have expanded their video game offerings. In a demonstration of Amazon's commitment to video games and the imprimatur of its founder, Jeff Bezos, the company has bestowed the name Relentless Studios on its flagship game operation in Seattle. Mr. Bezos originally considered naming his company Relentless.com and personally registered the domain, which still points to Amazon. "The big picture is about trying to take the best of Amazon and bringing it to games," said Mike Frazzini, Amazon's vice president for game services and studios, who is largely directing the games strategy. "We have been working for a while, but it takes a long time to make games, and we're bringing a lot of Amazon practices to making games." The Irvine studio is also developing a massively multiplayer game based on the "Lord of the Rings" franchise. John Smedley, a former president of Sony Online Entertainment, joined Amazon in 2017 to start a third internal Amazon game studio in San Diego, but his new project has not been revealed. With these in depth online games, Amazon is going after hard core players, who are typically the most demanding in the world. If Crucible and New World succeed, Amazon will not only build a consumer games business but also show the potential of its technology tools. The company has developed a game processing engine called Lumberyard and hopes to harness the power of its cloud computing services to deliver innovative online experiences, such as huge multiplayer battles in New World. Mr. Frazzini, Amazon's game chief, transferred from the company's book division to its retail game segment in 2009. He quickly spotted an opportunity for Amazon to start marketing cloud computing services to game developers and begin the journey toward making top end games of its own. He said persuading Amazon to lean into video games hadn't been difficult. "It was very clear to everyone that people, customers, love video games," he said. "It was so obviously important to customers that we need to be doing something." Crucible, a team based combat game, borrows elements from "battle arena" games like League of Legends and Dota 2 to give the typical shooter formula more strategic depth. Louis Castle, a longtime games executive hired by Amazon to run Relentless, said Crucible had been redesigned many times since its inception in 2014, coming to focus on competitive online play and live streaming on Twitch. "It's the active involvement of hundreds and hundreds of people over very long periods of time that gets to a great product," Mr. Castle said, crediting Amazon's deep pockets for underwriting patience with the Crucible team. "Thankfully, we're with a company that has the resources to let this new team fully gel and get a great expression out there." Crucible was scheduled to be revealed early last month and released on March 31. After coronavirus travel restrictions interfered with marketing plans, the start date was pushed to April 14. On March 23, Mr. Frazzini, Mr. Castle and other executives convened a videoconference from their homes on Amazon's internal Chime conferencing system and decided to delay Crucible again, to May. "We just don't know where the world is going to be in a couple of weeks," Mr. Castle said. The executives decided to delay the game, he said, "rather than put a ton of pressure and onus upon a team that's worked very hard for many years of their lives when they might be going through some pretty difficult times with themselves or loved ones."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
GERMAINE ACOGNY AND MIKAEL SERRE at the Ellen Stewart Theater at La MaMa (Sept. 26 28, 7 p.m.). Referred to as the "mother of contemporary African dance," Acogny has been a formidable force on that continent for decades, in particular through the establishment of an influential school in her native Senegal. She is also a commanding and mesmerizing presence onstage. In the coming week at French Institute Alliance Francaise's Crossing the Line Festival, Acogny, now in her 70s, presents a solo called "Somewhere at the Beginning," created with Serre, a theater director. The work weaves tropes from Greek tragedies into Acogny's personal journey from Africa to Europe and back, while tracing the arc of African history. 212 352 3101, lamama.org IVY BALDWIN at Manitoga, the Russel Wright Design Center, in Garrison, N.Y. (Sept. 21 22, 12:30 and 4:30 p.m.). About 50 miles north of New York City sits Manitoga, a lush, wooded estate that was owned by the industrial designer Russell Wright, who died in 1976, and whose minimalist, ecological home illustrates his views on living in harmony with nature. In her site specific work, "Quarry," Baldwin takes inspiration from Wright's ideas and designs, as well as the landscape, to encourage audience members to reconsider and repair their relationship with the environment. She enlists seven performers in the effort, who dance among trees, on mossy roofs and in the titular quarry. Saturday's performances have sold out, but tickets are still available for Sunday. visitmanitoga.org MARIA BAUMAN MORALES at the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance (Sept. 25, 27 and 28, 8 p.m.). Yards of taut string create a weblike installation that becomes something of a character in Bauman Morales's new work "re(source)." Navigating that knotty set, which she created with the interdisciplinary artist Nontsikelelo Mutiti, and surrounded by the audience, Bauman Morales sings, speaks and dances throughout the space, sharing the story of her own family as an entry point to an exploration of race relations in the United States during the Trump presidency. This performance is presented by the Chocolate Factory and the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. 718 482 7069, chocolatefactorytheater.org JEROME BEL at Florence Gould Hall (Sept. 25, 7:30 p.m.). Since 2004, Bel, an experimental choreographer, has created several biographical works based on the lives of living dancers. "Isadora Duncan," debuting in the United States at the Crossing the Line Festival on Wednesday, is his first dance portrait of a historical figure. Drawing from her autobiography, Bel explores Duncan's art, politics and persona. The work is performed by Catherine Gallant, a New York based dancer and historian who has also researched Duncan extensively. Together they paint a moving, breathing picture of the free spirited woman who paved the way for modern dance. 212 355 6160, fiaf.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Credit...Cayce Clifford for The New York Times Netflix started with sending DVDs remember them? through the mail, but now the streaming pioneer sits atop a Hollywood it has thoroughly upended. Reed Hastings Had Us All Staying Home Before We Had To Does it feel good to be the man who killed Hollywood? "No," said Reed Hastings, who nurtured Netflix into the Godzilla of the entertainment world. "But, of course, we haven't killed Hollywood." At 59, the slender, gray haired Mr. Hastings remains a mystery in the industry he dominates. "He's a complete cipher here," one Hollywood macher said. You won't find Mr. Hastings hanging with the stars at the San Vicente Bungalows. He doesn't bellow at the pool at the Hotel du Cap or swan around at premieres. He may show up in line at Sundance, but he's not cutting the line. He started a delivery system for movies, and now his company is one of the most powerful forces in movies. In the capital of drama, Mr. Hastings is, without drama, ripping out the infrastructure and replacing it with his own. Studio bosses are toppling, agents are scrambling, golden parachutes are disappearing, Disney is reeling, Covid is wreaking havoc on theme parks and movie theaters and MeToo is still reverberating. Amid these tectonic plate shifts, Netflix has blotted out the sun. Streaming, resisted for so long by the old clubby powers, is now absolute king. R.I.P., Louis B. Mayer. Ben Smith, the New York Times media columnist, wrote an obit recently for old Hollywood. And Janice Min, the former co president of The Hollywood Reporter, agrees that Netflix is "winning the pandemic," siphoning viewers from broadcast and cable. "They were all asleep to it during the early ascendance of Netflix," Barry Diller said of his fellow Hollywood moguls. "Now they've woken up to it, and it has slipped away from them and is never to be regained. They lost hegemony over an entire industry." As Mr. Diller notes, businesspeople ordinarily gravitate to Hollywood for status and glamour, but Mr. Hastings is that rarest of creatures "who will never be seduced" even though he is "playing the game there like a pitch perfect violin virtuoso." So how did a self described "math wonk" whose favorite pastimes are walking and thinking, a man who trained for a time with the Marine Corps before switching to the Peace Corps, teaching math in Swaziland, render old Hollywood irrelevant? Mr. Hastings said that his mother was a Boston debutante from a Social Register family who married a lawyer who later worked in the Nixon administration. She was repulsed by the world of high society and taught her children to disdain it. So young Reed grew up thinking that it was a good thing to distance yourself from elites and avoid pretensions. The new overlord of the land of artifice and playacting hates artifice and playacting. "Probably it all comes down to, you know, your mother or your father," he murmured. The height of his flashiness was posing on a Porsche in 1995 on the cover of USA Today, when he was a tech executive. He said he put aside that kind of "superfun" immaturity and sold the Porsche in favor of a Toyota Avalon. (Now he drives a Tesla.) "The heart and soul of our content," is how Mr. Hastings describes Mr. Sarandos, who grew up glued to the TV and dropped out of community college in Arizona to work in a video store. Mr. Hastings, who recently moved over to share his C.E.O. role with Mr. Sarandos, describes their partnership as "a positive, low ego thing." Ms. Min notes that "there are all sorts of ways people have tried to hate the company," for not getting their calls returned or not being able to schmooze their way into a big production deal with a friend or not getting cushy back end deals. People whisper about the Netflix culture being arrogant and cultlike, a culture of fear. "But now," Ms. Min said, "they're too big to hate." The Stream That Became a Flood Netflix is like the British Empire at its height, expanding across the globe. Indeed, in addition to all the royals in "The Crown," Netflix now has its very own prince. The company this week signed Harry and Meghan to a multiyear deal. They join the Obamas; Ryan Murphy; Shonda Rhimes; Kenya Barris; Ava DuVernay, who is teaming up with Colin Kaepernick for a Netflix series; and the erstwhile lords of HBO, the "Game of Thrones" showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, who are adapting a Chinese sci fi epic by Liu Cixin called "The Three Body Problem," about humanity's first contact with alien civilization. After a long period when the club of mostly white, supposedly liberal men running Hollywood secured the power in a lockbox, keeping a death grip on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and acting shocked anew every time a movie with Asian or Black or female leads did great box office, Netflix is swiftly democratizing things. But operating a global empire is not without its hazards. Mr. Hastings took heat last year for bowing to Saudi censors and pulling an episode of the comedy show "Patriot Act," starring Hasan Minhaj, which was critical of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Challenged, the Netflix chief spurred more criticism when he said, "We're not trying to do truth to power. We're trying to entertain." He told me that he used "an awkward phrase" and that the company sometimes has to make "hard choices" and compromises where "it definitely gets squirmy and makes us feel unsettled." But he said Netflix kept that episode on YouTube and that "Queer Eye" is available in Saudi Arabia, so "real positive stuff comes out of that." When I asked him where Hollywood will be in 15 years, Mr. Hastings said: "I see producing stories and sharing them as bigger than ever. But those stories will be produced in Atlanta, in Vancouver, in London, all over the world as opposed to strictly in Hollywood." Could the new Hollywood, which often feels ruled by algorithms, not capricious tastemakers, ever create a star like Grace Kelly? Yes, he replied, but she would need a social media component in addition to being a performer. I told Mr. Hastings that, while some may be weirded out by the Netflix algorithm that figures out what you want to watch next, I love it. I simply type in "betrayal," "revenge," "lives ruined," and it brings up everything I want to see. He said his taste runs to independent films, "dark, difficult things." Mr. Hastings, who was, he said, "a pretty average kid with no particular talent," has a master's degree in computer science from Stanford. He founded a software company, Pure Software, before pioneering DVDs by mail with Marc Randolph. (There is a split about the company's origin story, with Mr. Randolph saying the two founders came up with the idea while driving, and Mr. Hastings saying it was a light bulb moment after he had to pay a 40 late fee on a VHS rental.) In our interview, Mr. Hastings was uncommonly self effacing for a billionaire. He told me that Elon Musk is "100 times more interesting a person" than he is. "I'll, like, do the basic core, traditional stuff very well," Mr. Hastings said. "And he is a maverick in every dimension. He's just, like, amazing." Mr. Hastings noted: "I'll never be Steve Jobs, the creative, brilliant person." And he praised the Disney chairman of the board. "I'm an Iger wannabe. He's such a statesman." I told Mr. Hastings that, given all the poaching that the big spending Netflix does, I'm surprised that some Disney executive hasn't thrown a drink in his face at a chichi restaurant, "Appointment in Samarra" style. "Sounds like a good storytelling device," he said dryly, though he conceded that Disney bosses do get mad when he steals executives and talent. For our Zoom interview, the Netflix mogul looked comfy in a checked shirt, khakis and bare feet in his "Covid hide out": his son's old bedroom, in the house in Santa Cruz, Calif., he shares with Patty Quillin, his wife of 29 years. "It was great sport making fun of this bedroom on our earnings call four months ago," he said, smiling. "I don't want to really set up a home office because I want to believe that the pandemic is going to end soon. So, month by month, I stay here without fixing it up out of kind of stubborn hope." Because he believes "any locked area is symbolic of hidden things," he does not have an office or even a cubicle with drawers that close, even at his headquarters. He writes that he might grab a conference room if he needs it but prefers walking meetings. "He makes his own cappuccino at machines, and we have no private dining rooms in our Hollywood office," said a Netflix colleague. "He and Ted get food in the cafeteria like everyone else." Has the pandemic altered Mr. Hastings's perception of the competition? It's the "sideways threats" that bite companies, he said. "If you think of Kodak and Fuji, competing in film for 100 years, but then ultimately it turns out to be Instagram." Netflix pays top dollar and wants what it calls High Talent Density, which means only stars, no average people. Some of the rules of the Freedom and Responsibility workplace sound rigid. "Adequate performance gets a generous severance," one rule says. Managers use The Keeper Test to figure out which employees are merely average and to weed out complainers and pessimists. How hard would you fight to keep someone? If the answer is "not that hard," that employee should go. As one former executive frets in the book, they are more like penguins, who abandon those in the group that are weak or struggling, than elephants, who nurture the weak back to life. Employees are also encouraged to use The Keeper Test Prompt, to ask bosses if they would fight hard to keep them. Maxing Up Candor, getting rid of the "normal polite human protocols," is a part of daily life at Netflix with a daily Circle of Feedback and annual written and live 360 Assessments, in which you meet with the team to get ripped apart. Mr. Hastings, who grew up in a house where emotions were never discussed, said he got the idea for more transparency after going to marriage counseling. By making things less hierarchical, Mr. Hastings believes the company can be more nimble. Employees are encouraged to critique those above and below them at any time. (This does not seem to apply to top talent, like Shonda Rhimes or Ryan Murphy.) Staff members must Farm for Dissent and Socialize new ideas. Failures should be Sunshined, talked about openly and frequently. Mr. Hastings does not think of his employees as family, but as a sports team and one that has to win trophies. "For people who value job security over winning championships, Netflix is not the right choice, and we try to be clear and non judgmental about that," he writes. Mr. Hastings writes of his managers: "To feel good about cutting someone they like and respect requires them to desire to help the organization and to recognize that everyone at Netflix is happier and more successful when there is a star in every position." Mr. Hastings even demoted Mr. Randolph, who described his own reaction to his co founder's radical candor: "There is no way I'm sitting here while you pitch me on why I suck." And Mr. Hastings canned one of his best friends and original employees, Patty McCord, who helped create the Culture Deck and who drove to work with him, from her H.R. job. "It's not easy, just like you said," he acknowledged. "There's a conflict between the head and the heart." He added that sometimes you just have to tell someone "you're not as engaged, or we needed someone who's got these additional skill sets as we grow and face new challenges." He said it's "very much a joint conversation" and "it's not like 'The Apprentice' or something." Helen Mirren, who last year told a convention for theater owners what Netflix could do with itself, is on your Dead to Me list. No. Everyone is traditionally against us. Bob Iger should have bought Twitter instead of Fox. That's a very playful and interesting one. I'd say false. Remember in Michael Eisner's days, they bought Go.com, and then it was just too different and they killed it. Twitter, you've got all that user generated content, all that controversy. So I think Iger made the right set of decisions to go big and buy Fox. You send John Malone and Greg Maffei a thank you note every year on the anniversary of the Starz deal. I would say that's not literally true. The person you never got involved in Netflix that you wish you had is John Malone. Yeah. He's close to Bill Gates in terms of who I admire. As a kid, when your father worked in the Nixon administration, you spent a weekend at Camp David and saw Nixon's gold colored toilet seat. In 2010, when he was C.E.O. of Time Warner, Jeff Bewkes scoffed at the idea of Netflix taking over Hollywood, saying, "Is the Albanian Army going to take over the world?" So now, every two weeks, you text Bewkes, "How do you like them apples?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Two doses a year of an antibiotic can sharply cut death rates among infants in poor countries, perhaps by as much as 25 percent among the very young, researchers reported on Wednesday. Their large study of nearly 200,000 children in three African countries raises the exciting possibility that deploying antibiotics as doctors do vaccines could rapidly reduce deaths among newborns and infants. Death rates in this age group have remained stubbornly high in poor countries even as deaths among all children under age 5 have dropped by half, thanks to vaccines against childhood diseases. As a result of the study, the World Health Organization is considering whether to recommend routinely giving antibiotics to newborns. "Our independent expert panel says this holds a lot of promise," said Dr. Per Ashorn, a W.H.O. expert in maternal and child health. "But we will review it with very rigorous procedures." The agency will make a decision "as soon as possible, latest in 2019," he added. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which paid for the study, "is optimistic that this will be a new tool to help prevent childhood mortality," said Dr. Rasa Izadnegahdar, deputy director of global health at the foundation. "It's an exciting time." But wider use of antibiotics would raise some serious concerns. Would handing out tens of million of doses in poor countries speed the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria? And could it be done without the drugs being stolen or misused? The study's authors from top American, British and African medical schools, and the Atlanta based Carter Center argue that those risks are small and much outweighed by the greater good of saving children's lives. "At one time, people said you couldn't give out H.I.V. drugs in Africa because it would create drug resistance," said Dr. Thomas M. Lietman, an ophthalmologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and the study's lead author. "That implied that we should just let Africans die so we could keep giving out the drugs in the U.S." About 35 million youngsters, Dr. Izadnegahdar said, live in the countries most likely to be targeted those where a child now has a 1 in 10 chance of dying before age 5. In the study known as the Mordor trial and published in the New England Journal of Medicine 190,238 children under age 5 in 1,500 villages in Malawi, Niger and Tanzania were given one dose of azithromycin or a placebo every six months for two years. Overall, there were 14 percent fewer deaths among children getting the antibiotic; the reduction was strongest in Niger, where infant mortality is highest. The protection appeared to be greatest for infants aged 1 month to 5 months; the antibiotic prevented one in four deaths in this group. The researchers could not say definitively why it worked. Azithromycin, made by Pfizer and sold as Zithromax in the United States, kills many species of bacteria that cause pneumonia and diarrhea, which are major killers of newborns. It also kills malaria parasites. The new trial grew out of a 2009 study of ways to prevent trachoma, a blinding eye disease, in 18,000 Ethiopian children. The group of children there who got one dose of azithromycin as part of their regimen suffered about half as many deaths as other children. "That was groundbreaking, just quite amazing," said Kelly Callahan, who runs the Carter Center's trachoma program and helped oversee the Ethiopia study. "It was beyond saving sight it was saving lives." Other small studies have shown similar benefits. A 2014 study of Gambian women given one antibiotic dose during labor showed that both they and their babies had fewer overall infections and less often harbored the bacteria responsible for lethal neonatal sepsis. Some experts argued that distributing antibiotics could hasten the appearance of drug resistant bacteria. The W.H.O.'s panel would look hard at that, Dr. Ashorn said, "because this would be broadening rather drastically the way we use antibiotics." Sabiha Essack, director of antimicrobial research at the University of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa, said it was "unclear whether the benefits will outweigh the costs" and noted that the study did not look at the effects on the infants' microbiomes, or bacterial makeup. But other experts said they considered the risk relatively low, for several reasons. The drugs would be given only to youngsters, only infrequently and probably only for a few years. Dr. Charles Knirsch, vice president for clinical research at Pfizer, said his company had donated more than 700 million azithromycin doses to the International Trachoma Initiative, which gives them to people of all ages. No permanent resistance mutations have emerged in any bacteria. Such mutations "are more of a concern in I.C.U.'s in New York City than in places like Niger, where's there such low access to antibiotics," he said. Each year, when azithromycin is given out, some pneumococcal bacteria resistant to it appear, said Paul Emerson, the trachoma initiative's director. But those strains fade out within weeks or months, he said. Also, he noted, the resistance is only to macrolides, the drug class to which azithromycin belongs. Macrolides are not heavily used in Africa, where W.H.O. guidelines still recommend penicillins and even older sulfa drugs because they are cheap and effective. Pharmaceutical supply chains in some poor countries are plagued by theft, and antibiotics are tempting targets because they cure sexually transmitted diseases and other ills. But less than 1 percent of Pfizer's donations have been lost to theft or expiration, Dr. Emerson said. For enhanced security, azithromycin is distributed in special purple packaging saying it is to be used only for trachoma. Also, he noted, pediatric doses are liquids, which adults do not normally take. Dr. Emerson said his initiative would be happy to handle distribution if the W.H.O. approves routinely giving antibiotics to infants. "How many times do you get an offer to help save tens of thousands of lives?" he said. Although azithromycin is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration for children under 6 months old, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends it for infants of any age with whooping cough. The trial's gloomy nickname, Mordor, comes from J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, in which it is the shadowy land of Mount Doom. The initials stand roughly for "Mortality Reduction Through Oral Azithromycin." (In French, "Macrolides Oraux pour Reduire les Deces avec un Oeil sur la Resistance" "Oral Macrolides to Reduce Deaths With an Eye on Resistance.") The acronym was coined before the initials were chosen, authors said, because the 2009 trial was done in Ethiopia's Gondar region. In Tolkien's trilogy, Gondor, the land of men, battles Mordor. (Some readers think Tolkien used Ethiopian place names, Dr. Izadnegahdar said; according to a biographer, he denied consciously doing so.) "Some team members thought the name was creepy, but the study is about death," Dr. Lietman said. "It took on a life of its own, and we never looked back." The study's name, Dr. Izadnegahdar said, might be changed to Reach, for "Resilience Through Azithromycin for Children."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Jared Porter owns four championship rings from his 17 seasons as a baseball executive. The Mets, who introduced Porter as their new general manager on Monday, have won two rings in their 59 seasons. Porter keeps his rings locked away, he said, and never wears them. But the lessons he learned in winning them could help the Mets get their third. Early in his career, as an assistant in player development for the Boston Red Sox, Porter sat in a suite with Theo Epstein, the team's architect. This was 2007, and the Red Sox were on their way to their second title in four years. But the Yankees had signed a skinny pitcher with a dazzling changeup, Edwar Ramirez, from an independent team in Texas called the Edinburg Coyotes. They had found a major leaguer in a place the Red Sox had missed. "We need to do a better job in the independent leagues," Epstein told his staff, as Porter recalled in a news conference conducted via video call on Monday. "Why aren't we on these guys? Why aren't we more aggressive? We need to figure out a process to improve this." That winter, Porter spent 1 to sign Daniel Nava, the best hitter on the independent Chico (Calif.) Outlaws. In 2013, Nava hit .303 as a regular for the Red Sox and helped them win their next championship. Players like Nava similar to the misfit toys Billy Beane found for the "Moneyball" Oakland Athletics do not carry teams to World Series glory. Superstars usually matter most, and they are grown in a farm system or acquired in trades or through free agency. The Mets did not hire Porter simply to spend the fortune of their new owner, Steven A. Cohen, on obvious targets; anyone could do that. They hired him to work with team president Sandy Alderson on finding the smartest way to use Cohen's money. "I think what the fans want is not that we win the off season, but we win the season, and there are several different ways to achieve that," Alderson said. "If we have 'X money' to spend, we'll probably spend it, but we have to make decisions about how we do that. So we're trying to be judicious, but we're definitely talking and we're definitely in the market and we definitely have the capacity. What we really have to do, then given all of those things, resources and so forth is to make good judgments." None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. Porter's teams have done that. After 12 seasons with the Red Sox, he joined Epstein in with the Cubs as pro scouting director. After Chicago won the World Series in 2016, Porter moved on to Arizona as an assistant general manager. The Diamondbacks reached the playoffs in his first season. The Mets, meanwhile, had three winning records in their last 12 years under Fred Wilpon's ownership. "What we've talked about the most is just a cultural shift, for one, adding good people to the organization, adding depth to the roster," said Porter, who repeatedly emphasized the final point. "Having a setup where it's really hard for teams to prepare against you because you have a good layer of players coming behind them is critical." To that end, Porter said, there would be no excuses: if pitchers get hurt, if position players slump, it is on the front office to gather enough talent to withstand it. As for Cohen's declaration that he would be disappointed to not win a championship within five years, Porter said he loved it. "Hearing comments like that motivates me," he said. "It really excites me. It shows a strong commitment from ownership who wants to win, who wants to put a winner on the field for the fan base in New York, and I completely align with that. I want those expectations." Alderson said he had never dealt with Porter directly before the interview process, but found a connection quickly. "I was taken immediately by his personality," Alderson said. "His history in the game stands on its own, but from my standpoint, it was important that we find somebody who was personally committed to the job and enthusiastic about it, and secondly, somebody that I felt that we could all work with not because all of his thoughts and vision is perfectly consistent with ours, but because I think he would drive the organization to a higher level." Former colleagues describe Porter, 41, as creative and collegial, valuing both traditional scouting viewpoints and modern metrics. Jim Duquette, the former Mets general manager who now works for SiriusXM and SNY, said a broad range of baseball people reached out to him to praise the move, underscoring Porter's facility in all phases of the game. "He and Sandy are more aligned than they might even know," Duquette said. "Sandy is very practical and methodical in his decision making, and that's what it sounds like Jared is, too. When he makes a recommendation, it's thorough, it's thoughtful. "We always talk about guys in the front office: do you have a feel for people, and a feel for evaluation? He has that feel, from a makeup side of things, to make sure a player fits into the equation. All of those things are skills that are not easily learned." Porter, a Minnesota native, was captain of the baseball and hockey teams at Bowdoin College in Maine. He started in baseball as an intern for the Brewster Whitecaps of the Cape Cod League, then interned for the Red Sox at their spring training site in Fort Myers, Fla., before making his way to Boston and beyond. "The best thing about Jared is his ability to listen, his ability to hear what I was saying," said Diamondbacks Manager Torey Lovullo, who called Porter one of his best friends in baseball. "Whether he wanted to or not, he always applied what I was saying. As crazy as my suggestions may or may not have been, he would always accept it, and that meant a lot to me." Now, Porter's voice will have more influence than ever as part of a collaboration that could help him add an "N.Y." ring for his thumb.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
It's no big surprise that in the thriving genre of autofiction, in which the "auto" means based on the writer's own life, we're most often shown the world through the perspective of a fiction writer. The narrator of Rachel Cusk's Outline novels is, like Cusk, a novelist. The same is true in Jenny Offill's "Dept. of Speculation." Ben Lerner's novels are told by men who, like Lerner, are poets and novelists. A slight but crucial difference in Maria Gainza's appealing and digressive "Optic Nerve" is that the narrator, named Maria, is, like Gainza, an Argentine art critic. This area of expertise means that she dilates on something other than herself. Maria's store of information about painters and their lives can make reading the book feel, delightfully, like auditing a course. In many notable works of autofiction, we don't get to know the narrators very well. (This is ironic or predictable, depending on your views about the nature of self knowledge.) We learn about them sideways, at best in many respects, being locked inside some combination of these characters and their creators makes them far less comprehensible than characters in more traditional fiction. We're closer to these narrators, but not more familiar with them. (This elides the large question of how reliable the mappings of autofiction are anyway: In a recent interview with Literary Hub, Gainza said her own life story provides "just a drop of color" to the novel.) We learn about the narrator of "Optic Nerve" in brief mentions of vital details: She's married, she got "rusty on my history of art" while pregnant, she has received a cancer diagnosis. A brother living in California has suddenly died. We know she is anxious and embraces ambivalence. ("To ever feel that you understand anything only means that your mind has turned rigid.")	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
David Lee Roth performing with Van Halen in 2012. This year, Acura is using a classic Van Halen song in its Super Bowl 50 ad for the 2017 NSX sports car. Fleetwood Mac's "Landslide" served as the perfect soundtrack for Budweiser's heartwarming 2013 ad where a Clydesdale reunited with its former trainer. The composer John Williams' "Imperial March" from "Star Wars" added just the right touch to Volkswagen's humorous 2011 spot about a junior Darth Vader trying to use "the Force." On the other hand, Nissan's selection of Harry Chapin's melancholy "Cat's in the Cradle" last year felt too dour for many viewers. When it comes to Super Bowl ads, the use of well known songs can be a high risk, high reward proposition, said Tristan Clopet, creative director of the Sussex Music House in Brooklyn. Done right, music can be a highly effective branding tool. Done wrong, viewers remember not the product, but the song (and not always fondly). This year, the luxury carmaker Acura is gambling that its use of Van Halen's hard driving rock n' roll classic "Runnin' With the Devil" will make its 30 second spot for the 2017 NSX high end sports car stand out during CBS' broadcast of Super Bowl 50 on Feb. 7. The spot, by the ad agency MullenLowe U.S. in Los Angeles, contains no dialogue. Instead, the familiar sound of the singer David Lee Roth's voice is set against images of the car, which will become available this spring for the sum of 156,000. Acura and MullenLowe considered a variety of songs from different genres before settling on Van Halen. "Ultimately we knew that we wanted this to be a rock song," said Leila Cesario, the national advertising manager for American Honda's Acura division. "The Super Bowl is a big American platform. It needed a big American band that screams excitement." An image from Acura's Super Bowl 50 ad for the 2017 NSX sports car. This will be Acura's first Super Bowl spot since 2012, when the comedians Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno dueled over the first NSX to come off the production line. MullenLowe deliberately shot NSX in shades of red, white and blue to highlight that the two seater is designed and built in the United States. Van Halen won't be the only rock and rollers on Super Bowl Sunday. Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, for example, will star in a spot for Skittles candy. Pepsi is also planning a commercial featuring well known songs. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Choosing the right music for an ad is not simple. Many marketers hire advisers like Tena Clark, founder of DMI Music Media Solutions in Los Angeles, to pick songs that they think will resonate. "It's a perfect storm in the wind when you've really done your homework and that piece of music matches with the story line and the visuals you've shot," said Ms. Clark. Agencies license songs a variety of ways. The most expensive is to license an original version, like Acura did. An alternative is to use cover versions. The cheapest way is to use the music of relatively obscure artists. Licensing a classic song by a popular band like Van Halen or Aerosmith can cost six figures for one time use during the Super Bowl, said Josh Rabinowitz, director of music for the Grey Group in New York. (Acura did not say how much it paid.) If the agency wants to use the song for a monthslong campaign, the cost could run into the millions, he said. Savvy music labels also raise the price when they know an agency badly wants a certain song for a Super Bowl spot. The good news for advertisers? With major changes in the economics of the music industry, more artists are willing to work with Madison Avenue than ever before. Long after bands' records stop selling, or the musicians stop touring, "advertising is the gift that keeps giving," Mr. Rabinowitz said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Say you're a choreographer and you want to make a dance about gun violence not a polemical piece but a mournful one. How might you express a grief that's personal and public, and whose source shows no sign of stopping? An obvious option: bodies on the ground. And sure enough, those appear in Jamar Roberts's "Ode," which had its premiere at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at City Center on Tuesday. "Ode" isn't obvious, though. It's delicate, daring and heartbreaking. Pitfalls of maudlin cliche surround the subject, but Mr. Roberts has skirted them, above all through his bold choice of music. Don Pullen's 1975 solo piano improvisation "Suite (Sweet) Malcolm (Part 1 Memories and Gunshots)" begins and ends as a jazz ballad, tenderly ruminative and soulful. But in the middle it goes way, way out into cats pouncing across the keyboard territory. Whether or not you think of that section as a shootout, you will probably experience it as an assault. In a sense, the work becomes about how the cast of six dancers get across it, how they get over.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
When Salvatore Di Vittorio and Santa Maria Pecoraro met nearly 20 years ago at Orvieto Musica, a music festival in Italy, he was splitting his time between New York and his hometown, Palermo, Italy, and she was living at home in her native San Diego. Shortly before they married in 2008, she moved east. The couple rented a one bedroom, of a little more than 700 square feet, at the Impala, a 2001 condominium on East 76th Street. The location was great for Mrs. Di Vittorio, now 40, a viola player who also studied chemistry and is the administrator of the Laboratory of Virology and Infectious Disease at Rockefeller University. Mr. Di Vittorio, 48, is a published orchestral composer and the music director/conductor and composer of the Chamber Orchestra of New York, which performs at Carnegie Hall. The couple intended to buy a condo in the neighborhood, which they loved, and started hunting a year or so after they moved in. They kept their eyes peeled for vacancies in their building, which they were also very happy with, although their rent climbed over time, approaching 3,000 a month by last summer. Assorted fees were due each year when they re signed the lease. Their budget for a one bedroom was around 600,000. "If you go below that, you are basically looking at a studio," Mr. Di Vittorio said. Their deal breaker was a washer dryer. But a one bedroom with a washer dryer almost certainly meant a new condominium building and a price approaching 800,000. They were interested in two units at the Impala. One, on their floor, was 749,000, with monthly charges of around 1,900. "The Impala was more on the dream side," Mrs. Di Vittorio said. They also liked Chartwell House on Second Avenue, another 2001 condo building, farther north near 92nd Street. It was like the Impala in many ways, and they particularly admired the window in the kitchen. But, again, prices were a deterrent. "The expectations within Manhattan are so different for how far a dollar goes compared with everywhere else," Mrs. Di Vittorio said. Busy with work and traveling, the couple hunted off and on for several years. Because Mr. Di Vittorio does some work in Italy, they also spend time at a home they own in Palermo. They were planning to have a baby, so they considered hunting for a small house in the New York suburbs. "We felt we did not need to sleep in the city anymore to work in the city," Mr. Di Vittorio said. One day in 2013, visiting a violin student of Mrs. Di Vittorio's who lived in Larchmont, N.Y., they encountered the sales office of the Cambium. At that point, the building was just floor plans and renderings. They liked the model unit as well as Larchmont, which they thought was idyllic. Each condo at the Cambium came with a washer dryer and a parking space. A storage unit was available, and Mr. Di Vittorio, who has a large music archive, liked that. The price was appealing just under 475,000 for a one bedroom, with monthly charges and taxes working out to less than 1,000. The Di Vittorios signed the contract three years ago. They then began waiting for construction to be completed. Mrs. Di Vittorio became pregnant with Giuseppe, now 2. "Once you wait for a year, you start having two different feelings," Mr. Di Vittorio said. "One is ah, the heck with it, let's just get something else. The other is we've been waiting a year, so we had the best chance to have a better value because we got it at the pre construction price." They could have backed out at the two year mark, but decided to proceed. At last, this summer, their apartment was ready, and the Di Vittorios were able to move in. The first phase of the Cambium, to ultimately have about 150 units, is more than 50 percent in contract or sold, said Susan Joyce, the director of sales and a saleswoman at Douglas Elliman Real Estate. The couple's apartment, a one bedroom with 827 square feet, is big enough for three, at least for now. The large hallway in their place is like "its own little nest area" for Giuseppe to play in, Mr. Di Vittorio said. The commute on Metro North is 40 minutes or less to Grand Central Terminal. "The biggest thing for most people like us is not the time on Metro North, but the time walking from home to the station," Mr. Di Vittorio said. "For us, it's a block and a half." On the Manhattan end, Mrs. Di Vittorio, who was used to walking to work, has an additional subway trip. If the weather is bad, "I think about the fact we are not renting anymore, and it all goes away," she said. "It's beautiful, it's new and it's ours."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Don Shula owns some of the most hallowed records in N.F.L. history: the most wins by a coach, the most games coached, the league's only perfect season. Despite all the victories and accolades Shula was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1997 he was proudest of how his teams won. They were consistently among the least penalized in the league, which he considered a sign of his players' discipline and preparation. "I always said there was no such thing as a small mistake or insignificant error," Shula told The New York Times in 2016. "If it happened in a critical part of the game, it could be part of the outcome of the game." His approach, as evident in two Super Bowl titles and all those wins, worked. For decades. Shula, who died on Monday at 90, took over the Baltimore Colts when John F. Kennedy was president and retired from the Miami Dolphins during the Bill Clinton administration. He was the same relentless taskmaster throughout his 33 seasons as a head coach, an innovator who found ways to win with stars and unsung stalwarts, like the so called No Name Defense of the early 1970s. He drove his players hard in practice and demanded they prepare so thoroughly that they could adapt to any situation during games. Then there were the workouts in the South Florida sun and humidity that every Shula coached Dolphin can recall. Among his many ways of inflicting pain on a generation of Dolphins, Shula would have the players run a 12 minute drill around two football fields at the team's training camp at St. Thomas University. They ran past coaches and scouts who carried stop watches, screaming out splits. The wide receivers and defensive backs had one set of targets, the linebackers and running backs another. For the linemen, the bulkiest of the bunch, the drill was pure agony. "It was an annual ritual and if you didn't make the target time, he'd call out your times in front of all your peers," said Richmond Webb, an offensive tackle who broke in with Shula's Dolphins in 1990. "He was tough, but you see the camaraderie with the guys who played in the '70s and '80s. He was the same guy, it seemed like." None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. Shula amassed a record 347 wins as an N.F.L. coach and led the 1972 Dolphins to the league's only perfect season. That team, which this year was voted the greatest in N.F.L. history, led the league in both offense and defense. Shula's teams remained competitive for decades; in his 33 years as a head coach, he had only two losing seasons, a dozen years apart. His teams made it to the playoffs 19 times, with six Super Bowl appearances. Some of his records may be broken the New England Patriots' Bill Belichick is the closest active coach in wins, 43 behind Shula's total. But Shula's openness to change, his ability to trust talented assistant coaches, no matter their age, and his imprint on the rules of the modern game may be as important as his statistics. Shula won with an assortment of quarterbacks. In Baltimore, he coached the great Johnny Unitas and the steady but unflashy Earl Morrall. In Miami, his Super Bowl bound teams were led by two more Hall of Fame quarterbacks, Bob Griese and Dan Marino, but also by the unheralded David Woodley, and, during that magical 1972 season, by Morrall again. In an era when teams rode one primary running back, Shula leaned on a trio of them Larry Csonka, Mercury Morris and Jim Kiick who rotated into the game based on the situation. To confuse offenses, Shula's defensive linemen would line up like linebackers, and the linebackers like linemen. "He won with the running game, he won with the passing game," said Upton Bell, who was the director of player personnel with the Colts during Shula's tenure in Baltimore. "If you put aside the records, he would go against the grain. He was willing to change because he could see the effects on the game." The best example came in the 1970s, when Shula's teams were built around a formidable offensive line and a grinding running game. A member of the league's competition committee, Shula saw that defensive backs could push and shove receivers all over the field, stifling the passing game. Though it wasn't in the best interests of his Dolphins at the time, Shula pushed for the introduction of a five yard penalty on defensive backs who hit receivers more than five yards from the line of scrimmage. Within a few years, the league was dominated by pass first offenses that have been the model ever since. And one of the most celebrated pass first offenses appeared in Miami, where Dan Marino became the first quarterback to throw for 5,000 yards in a season. When he retired in 1999, Marino held dozens of passing records, most of which have been eclipsed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
"My Father's Wake" is at heart a memoir, chronicling a childhood spent between Edinburgh and remote Achill Island off the western coast of Ireland's County Mayo, where his parents were born. When Toolis is 19, his brother Bernard dies of leukemia. He is his brother's keeper, a bone marrow donor, but the transplant fails. The trauma sends Toolis as a young reporter out into the world, from Somalia to Afghanistan, in search of death, disease, famine and war. "I was grieving," Toolis writes. "Not for my dead brother but for the young man who died with him and lost his mortal innocence. Me." The contrast between young Bernard's death (in the city, in the care of what Toolis calls the "Western Death Machine") and his father Sonny's death (at home in old age on Achill) sets up Toolis's castigation of modern medicine and death rites. But it is Toolis's fine skill at showing the means and aftermath of death rather than his prescription for how to improve dying that most animates "My Father's Wake." "Under the greenish light of a fluorescent tube, Eliza's hands writhed involuntarily at her wrist as if seeking to escape their dying host," he writes of a 20 year old Malawian girl who dies in the middle of the night of AIDS. In the local dialect, Toolis tells us, the disease is known as matantanda athu omwewa, "this thing we all have in common." Toolis's writing is so visceral and profound when he is near dying bodies that the lessons of such experiences become evident so evident, indeed, that the unfortunate framing of "My Father's Wake" as a how to for urban Westerners feels a bit clumsy and redundant. Early in the book, Toolis implores us to face our mortality by calculating the date of our death, "the end point for you." In the book's final chapter, "How to Love, Live and Die," he offers this advice: "If you can find yourself a decent Irish wake to go to, just turn up and copy what everyone else is doing," and "take your kids along too if you can."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The word "racism" is everywhere. It's used to explain all the things that cause African Americans' suffering and death: inadequate access to health care, food, housing and jobs, or a police bullet, baton or knee. But "racism" fails to fully capture what black people in this country are facing. The right term is "anti blackness." To be clear, "racism" isn't a meaningless term. But it's a catch all that can encapsulate anything from black people being denied fair access to mortgage loans, to Asian students being burdened with a "model minority" label. It's not specific. Many Americans, awakened by watching footage of Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd by kneeling on his neck, are grappling with why we live in a world in which black death loops in a tragic screenplay, scored with the wails of childless mothers and the entitled indifference of our murderers. And an understanding of anti blackness is the only place to start. Anti blackness is one way some black scholars have articulated what it means to be marked as black in an anti black world. It's more than just "racism against black people." That oversimplifies and defangs it. It's a theoretical framework that illuminates society's inability to recognize our humanity the disdain, disregard and disgust for our existence. The African American studies professor Frank B.Wilderson, who coined the term "Afro pessimism," argues that anti blackness indexes the structural reality so that in the larger society, blackness is inextricably tied to "slaveness." While the system of U.S. chattel slavery technically ended over 150 years ago, it continues to mark the ontological position of black people. Thus, in the minds of many, the relation between humanity and blackness is an antagonism, is irreconcilable. Anti blackness describes the inability to recognize black humanity. It captures the reality that the kind of violence that saturates black life is not based on any specific thing a black person better described as "a person who has been racialized black" did. The violence we experience isn't tied to any particular transgression. It's gratuitous and unrelenting. Anti blackness covers the fact that society's hatred of blackness, and also its gratuitous violence against black people, is complicated by its need for our existence. For example, for white people again, better described as those who have been racialized white the abject inhumanity of the black reinforces their whiteness, their humanness, their power, and their privilege, whether they're aware of it or not. Black people are at once despised and also a useful counterpoint for others to measure their humanness against. In other words, while one may experience numerous compounding disadvantages, at least they're not black. So when we're trying to understand how a white police officer could calmly and casually channel the weight of his entire body through his knee on a black man's neck a man who begged for his life for over eight full minutes until he had no air left with which to plead we have to understand that there has never been a moment in this country's history where this kind of treatment has not been the reality for black people. From whips to guns, the slave patrols of the 18th century are the ancestors of modern day police departments. Mr. Floyd's killer just happened to make the news, happened to have video footage documenting his desperate screams to his deceased mother for help from the other side. Mr. Floyd's brutal killing is not an exception, but rather, it is the rule in a nation that literally made black people into things. Black people were rendered as property, built this country, spilled literal blood, sweat and tears into the soil from which we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. The thingification of black people is a fundamental component of the identity of this nation. Reckoning with this reality is significantly more difficult than wrestling with prejudice, racism, and even institutional or structural racism. And it does more than any of these concepts do to help us make sense of over 400 years of black suffering of our unremitting interminable pain, rage and exhaustion. Mr. Floyd's death is the story of our babies, of the numerous black children who grow up literally or metaphorically under the steel heel of a police boot. It is the story of our families, who since the Middle Passage, have had to suffer the unimaginable. But when they kill our children, our mothers and fathers, we are expected to forgive, to be peaceful in the face of horrific violence. We are asked to respect a law that cannot recognize our humanity that cannot provide redress. And when time and time again the law demonstrates it will never protect us, that it will never hold those individuals and systems that harm us accountable, we are expected to peddle a narrative that the system works, that justice will prevail. Mr. Floyd's brother lamented, "I just don't understand what more we've got to go through in life, man." People are in the streets today because years ago we marched peacefully and belted Negro spirituals, hoping they would recognize our humanity. We wore Afros like crowns remembering our beauty. We put our fists in the air demonstrating our strength. We declared that our lives matter in every gorgeous dimension, demanding they stop killing us in the streets and in our homes with impunity. People are in the streets today because despite all of the people who lost their lives literally and figuratively, in this fight for black life, the struggle continues. So let's stop saying racism killed George Floyd, or worse yet, that a racist police officer killed George Floyd. George Floyd was killed because anti blackness is endemic to, and is central to how all of us make sense of the social, economic, historical and cultural dimensions of human life. kihana miraya ross is an assistant professor of African American studies at Northwestern University. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
If the last few months have taught us anything, it's that the time for representation is yesterday and that people are willing to make public calls for change. But undoing years of messaging about the irrelevance of Black lives and voices isn't easy. The TV and film industry, in particular, has been slow to include Black characters that don't fall into racist stereotypes. (Yes, Disney archives, I'm looking at you.) This extends to animated series, which provide younger viewers with some of their earliest glimpses of the broader world. While most have showcased white characters above all, here's a roundup of series that have broken from that tradition, serving up noteworthy depictions of Black people and families. They reflect different styles and tones, and are geared for different ages, listed here from children's to adult series: As if the classic Black New York City institution that is the Harlem Globetrotters wasn't beloved enough, this '70s Hanna Barbera cartoon drafted the team into a sporting animated version that became the first predominately Black Saturday morning cartoon. Capturing the goofy, slapstick tone of the real life Harlem Globetrotter performances, the series showed the talented, if lovably clueless, band of athletes who don the standard stars and stripes, including Meadowlark Lemon, Geese Ausbie and Curly Neal. Following the standard Saturday morning cartoon formula, each episode of the series had the protagonists encounter some new obstacle that they good naturedly overcame with the use of their talents and usually some silly costumes and wigs. Later the Globetrotters joined up with Scooby Doo and friends to help solve some mysteries which is how I first encountered these brilliant ballers as a kid. "Harlem Globetrotters," like the other seminal Black '70s cartoons "The Jackson 5ive" and "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids," is not currently available to stream or buy on the usual platforms. However, the later series, "The Super Globetrotters," and a "Scooby Doo" Globetrotters crossover are both available to rent or buy on Amazon. Before Bill Cosby faced a flurry of sexual assault accusations and a prison sentence, he was known as an essential figure in the world of Black television. After "Fat Albert" and "The Cosby Show," Cosby introduced in the late '90s his "Little Bill" book series, a favorite of mine as a kid. These moral stories were most memorable for their entrancing illustrations, by the artist Varnette Honeywood. Clearly steeped in the tradition of Jacob Lawrence, Honeywood's art featured characters with skin in every shade of black and brown, their bodies often shown in bold, blocky silhouettes clothed in colors and surrounded by scenes that accentuated the complexions. This same sensibility was brought to the preschool "Little Bill" TV series, which was flash animated to create an intentionally flat, two dimensional rendering of the characters and the world around them, as if setting the illustrations from the children's books to motion. The series, which also hosted an impressive voice cast including Gregory Hines, Phylicia Rashad and Ruby Dee, won a Daytime Emmy in 2004 for outstanding children's animated program. Buy it on Amazon, iTunes and Vudu. You wouldn't expect a pint size M.D. who fixes broken toys to have a marked influence on the culture, but "Doc McStuffins" has been widely praised by parents and educators for upending stereotypes and easing young viewers' anxieties about doctors. The physician at work is a round faced, blush cheeked Black girl with tiny braided pigtails that loop upward as though inspired by Pippi Longstocking. But the show's appeal isn't just the fact that it stars a Black girl it's that this Black girl is a confident, self assured doctor (and the daughter of a Black female doctor), creating a positive role model for Black children who aren't treated to many characters who look like them to begin with. Described by its creator as " 'Cheers' for preschoolers," "Doc McStuffins" features a crew of colorful characters usually toys who come alive to help the doc serve her patients (an anxious hypochondriac snowman is a favorite). In one episode, Michelle Obama herself calls on Doc McStuffins to use her skills to patch up a ripped doll. It's just one example of the show's outsize reputation and impact. It's a crime that this stylish, zippy series only got two seasons, but it was fun while it lasted. Andre Benjamin created and starred in the show, and managed to translate his signature Andre 3000 cool into animated form think "School of Rock," but instead of Jack Black, a dandy dressing musician named Sunny Bridges leading a diverse class of misfits at an Atlanta performing arts school. But the most distinct feature of the show was its regular music videos, which showcased more modish animation and the kind of funky, electric tunes Andre 3000 has been known for from his days in Outkast and beyond. This one is tough to find. But you can check out some of the songs on YouTube and Amazon Music, and jams like "Banana Zoo" and "Oh Peanut" yes, trust me on this are worth a listen. When it was released in 2018, "Black Panther" was lauded for bringing Black people into the predominantly white world of comic book heroes. In recent years the small screen has also seen a few more Black heroes. But before T'Challa, Luke Cage and Black Lightning, there was Static. In the series, a Black teen named Virgil Hawkins is exposed to mutagen gas as tends to happen and gets electromagnetic powers. Virgil rocks dreadlocks and surfs through the city via static electricity (a more powerful version than the kind that makes laundry stick together). Along the way, he fights superpowered villains called "Bang Babies" as well as the usual threats faced by a Black teen in an urban neighborhood: racism, bullying, gang violence and more. In this earnest, buoyant series, a young boy named Craig has adventures in his suburban neighborhood, exploring and going on quests in the local creek along with his two best friends. Nerdy, playful and imaginative and teeming with references to action movies, fantasy series, music, board games and anime "Craig of the Creek" is nevertheless most notable for its heartwarming depiction of a close, loving Black family and its casual incorporation of Black cultural norms. Braids and Afros and fades the Blackness of the characters is explicit without being the whole point. Instead, the show is primarily about a Black boy who uses his ingenuity and sense of wonder to see the world anew, using it as a playground for him and his friends. Let's start with the theme song: Disney got Solange and Destiny's Child to deliver the R B jam right at the point that the singers were reaching peak popularity, with that year's "Survivor" album. But it was a fitting way to introduce a show concept that was, unfortunately, still novel: a normal Black family living in the suburbs. The Prouds comprised a Black teen girl, Penny (Kyla Pratt); her tightwad father (Tommy Davidson); no nonsense mother (Paula Jai Parker); gruff grandmother (Jo Marie Payton); and her mischievous twin siblings. Most episodes focused on minor conflicts Penny faced at school, with her friends and with her family, but occasionally the series would jump into surprising, random territory like a "Matrix" spoof episode when Penny gets drawn into the digital world of illegal music downloads. (Remember those?) "The Proud Family" distinguished itself by being unapologetically Black; one episode tackles the civil rights movement and segregation, and another has the Prouds celebrating Kwanzaa. Historically, Disney has been late to break its streak of lily white content, but the Prouds brought a Black family to the channel. A sequel series, "The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder," is currently being developed for the Disney streaming platform. Eddie Murphy animated Black inner city life with this stop motion series about a cantankerous superintendent of a rundown building in the projects. The series, for adults, is shot through with Murphy's signature acerbic, in your face antics, with poor Black communities being the punchline. After the show's premiere, it didn't sit right with some, like Spike Lee, who called it "hateful toward Black people." Many of the jokes about delinquent youth, crackheads and neighborhood violence have not aged well. But the show which won Emmys for animation and voice acting (for Ja'Net DuBois) was notable simply for depicting Black urban life on television at all. My favorite series on the list, "The Boondocks" took an unparalleled approach to sociopolitical satire about stereotypes, tropes and prejudices Black people face in America. Created for adult viewers by Aaron McGruder and based on his cartoon strip of the same name, "The Boondocks" was about the suburban lives of the Freeman family: Robert and his two grandsons, Huey and Riley. "The Boondocks" took insider shots at Black figures and Black culture (BET, Tyler Perry and R. Kelly, in a biting take on his sexual abuse trial), but it also indulged McGruder's love for anime and kung fu flicks. The talented voice cast, which included John Witherspoon and Regina King and unforgettable cameos by Charlie Murphy, Samuel L. Jackson and Katt Williams, anchored the show's comedy with hysterical performances.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has moved one step closer to mandatory admission fees: It filed a formal proposal with the city this week to charge admission to out of state visitors, a lawyer revealed in a court hearing on Friday, a controversial idea given that the Met is in part supported by tax dollars and currently has only a "suggested" entrance fee. The suggested fee would be "only for residents of the City of New York and New York State," Bruce R. Kelly of Arnold Porter, a lawyer for the Met, said in New York Supreme Court Friday. "For everyone else, the admission would be mandatory." The proposal must be approved by the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio administration because the city owns the Met building. Asked for his reaction, Tom Finkelpearl, the city's commissioner of cultural affairs, said in a statement: "We will review it carefully. The city is committed to working with the Met to ensure that its unrivaled collection and programming remain accessible to all New Yorkers." The hearing before Justice Shirley Werner Kornreich was held to approve a settlement reached last year over the Met's admissions policy; two lawsuits had asserted that the wording on signs at the admissions desks was deceptive and pressured visitors to pay 25 even though, under the museum's policy, they could pay whatever they wished.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. "Christmas Tree Farm" celebrates childhood memories Taylor Swift grew up on a farm from an adult's distance. In the intro, she croons about grown up stress over 1950s style strings. But then a modernized wall of sound whisks her into happier thoughts and also into Mariah Carey's (and Phil Spector's) seasonal territory. Behind the sleigh bells and chimes, it turns out Swift is only wishing she could be back on the farm, but a euphoric final refrain "Baby, baby, Merry Christmas!" sweeps any misgivings away. PARELES Macklemore takes the conceit of the Christmas song seriously enough to deliver clever, dense, unexpected rhymes on familiar tropes: "The belly's tubby, but the reindeer are strong." But he's winking, too: In the video, kids drink egg nog from one of his Grammys, and late in the song, he raps, "I want to take a second and shout out my dead dog/Toby/He's dead." It's ... funny. Honestly. CARAMANICA Blink 182's punk pop skills are on full display in "Not Another Christmas Song," which goes barreling forward with lyrics about being "burned out like lights on a tree" and "Why can't we get divorced for Christmas?" All the sullen belligerence arrives in neat, peppy verse chorus verse, with a bridge that sneaks in a drum solo. PARELES Aretha Franklin joined the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra onstage in 2015 to perform a solo rendition of the German Christmas classic "O Tannenbaum," accompanying herself with rolling gospel piano chords and singing in both German and English. This casually rousing rendition appears on the orchestra's live album, "Big Band Holidays II;" it's the only track without the full band, but even at 73, the Queen of Soul needs no help. RUSSONELLO "Loneliest Time of Year" plunges deep into holiday angst. In a ballad that leaves her ample room for vocal display, Mabel works herself up to all out tearful melismas as she bemoans the way Christmas can "have you thinking of all the things that you don't have." She does seek solidarity: "If I'm feeling lonely I can't be the only one," she reasons. But it's no consolation. PARELES The guitarist Dave Stryker trades melody duties with the vibraphonist Stefon Harris on this cover of Donny Hathaway's modern day Christmas classic. Rounded out by the organist Jared Gold and the drummer McClenty Hunter (doubling on jingle bells), Stryker's Eight Track Band plays the tune at the same sauntering, medium tempo that Hathaway used; even without Hathaway's munificent voice or the boisterous horn section of the original, the tune's infectious, syncopated melody and the low key virtuosity of this quartet's members are enough. RUSSONELLO It takes a very special hubris for Pink Sweats to posthumously overdub Donny Hathaway's own version of his durable Christmas standard: grabbing the first verse for an Auto Tune assisted lead vocal, replacing Hathaway's richly organic studio band with programmed sounds, yet still keeping enough of Hathaway's original vocals and piano to remind listeners of less artificial times. No one thought this was a bad idea? PARELES	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Working Out With Charles Glass, a Trainer to the Stars VENICE, Calif. Remember the episode of "Seinfeld" that features Elaine trying to return a dress to Barneys after she takes it home and realizes that it doesn't look nearly as good as it did when she was at the store, surrounded by mirrors that made her appear skinnier? Well, it's the opposite at Gold's Gym in Venice, Calif., the longtime bodybuilding mecca frequented by Arnold Schwarzenegger and three subsequent generations of herculean he men. Here, lifters get stretched out horizontally not just by pushing heavy weights and ingesting supplements of varying legal statuses, but also through their own reflections on the walls. And for those with a real interest in getting huge and 225 an hour to burn, one trainer stands at the front of the pack. He is Charles Glass, a bespectacled, beanie wearing and dreadlocked former bodybuilding champion who got his start competing in gymnastics at the University of California, Berkeley. He won the middleweight championship with the International Federation of Bodybuilding in 1983, before giving up the sport professionally to train others. His celebrity clientele, as listed on his website, has included the actor and former wrestler Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a. The Rock; the four time Arnold Classic champion Kenneth Wheeler, known as Flex; the 2008 Mr. Olympia winner, Dexter Jackson; and big name athletes such as Magic Johnson, George Foreman and Jose Canseco. YouTube and Instagram have turned Mr. Glass into something of a national fitness celebrity. And here at home, in this land of thick necks, turbo tans and tattoo parlors, he is a tourist attraction unto himself. On a recent Friday afternoon, bodybuilding legends like Kai Greene, a three time runner up in the Mr. Olympia contest, ambled over with camera crews for impromptu interviews. People with day passes took selfies with Mr. Glass. Mr. Glass moved to a private area with Lionel Brown, a 5 foot 8, 240 pound competitive bodybuilder, and watched him practice his stage poses. "This is what we call classic shape, nice form," Mr. Glass said, after instructing Mr. Brown to take off his shirt. "Show your abs. Do a double bicep. Squeeze your lats." "See the separation there?" Mr. Glass said. "That's the difference between a professional and an amateur." Most bodybuilding trainers emphasize low repetition with free weights and extreme poundage. Mr. Glass, who is in his 60s ("old," he said), makes essential tweaks to that, emphasizing form over maximum overload and unapologetically using machines often in strange new ways that take handlebar and seat placement as mere suggestions. There is also an earthy gracefulness about him, from the inconspicuous dark green sweatshirt and matching green cargo pants he wears to the way he avoids barking cliches like "come on, baby" and "let's go, cowboy" at his clients. (Among his favorites is an 80 something grandmother who works out with him nearly every day and is, he says, "one of the hardest working people in the gym.") The first day, we did an intense pec workout in which he moved me around to a variety of chest press and fly machines. The weights we used were significantly lower than what I do on my own, but the workout was considerably more focused. And difficult. Putting a rectangular block behind my back on the incline press pushed back my overdeveloped shoulders, forcing me to isolate my chest in ways I'd barely felt before. The next day, we worked legs, where even the ordinary hamstring curl machine exercise was made exponentially harder by having me put my hands at the front of the pad and arching up slightly, as if I was doing a back extension. Mr. Glass also had me do one of his signature exercises, a single leg press movement that is done by stepping into a horizontal leg press, turning the body to the side, and going one leg at a time with the other suspended in midair. It was not only one of the most intense quad exercises I'd ever done, but also felt sort of like being forced to take a calculus test at the same time. "Before we had a lot of machines, we all used free weights because that's what we had," Mr. Glass said. "But now, you can't get certain angles from free weights than you can get machines. They put a different kind of stress on the muscles. I try to work around what I have." The way Mr. Glass tells it, he gave up his own bodybuilding career in the 1980s because of the toll it was taking on his body. "At my heaviest, I was 262 pounds," he said. "I was taking health risks, and I didn't want to do that. I couldn't walk without breathing like a madman. I thought, 'Do I really want to do this?' And that's when I realized I was done." He's not about to voice blanket opposition to performance enhancing drugs. "I'd be a hypocrite," he said. He acknowledges the role steroids play with bodybuilders competing at the highest levels. But he does want clients using them to start making choices that factor in their health, including going to a doctor regularly and getting blood work done. As I worked out, a pair of lifters who are big enough to snap Chris Hemsworth like a twig screamed through dead lifts.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
PARIS Moliere has long been the patron saint of French theater. His plays, from "Tartuffe" to "The Misanthrope," are studied in schools here; the country's most prestigious theater awards are named the Molieres. But nowadays, high profile French theater makers are reluctant to tackle his plays. One reason is that Moliere is widely considered lowbrow. The distinction between publicly and privately funded theater is still stark in France (the Moliere Awards have different categories for the two), and domestic comedies the playwright's favored genre are perceived as too crowd pleasing and unchallenging for state funded institutions. They are consequently often left to the private sector, or steered toward a more "sophisticated" directorial vision. These contrasting approaches Moliere as entertainment versus serious Moliere have been on display over the past month in Paris and Versailles. While Ludovic Lagarde's "L'Avare" ("The Miser") took some dark turns at the Odeon Theatre de l'Europe in the capital, young companies didn't shy away from pure farce in Versailles, where an annual "Moliere Month" celebrates the playwright. Mr. Lagarde's production thoroughly updates "The Miser." The decor is a modern warehouse, which we learn is run by Harpagon, the play's penny pinching antihero. As the performance starts, a character is rummaging nervously through boxes with a flashlight, looking for money. When his daughter, Elise, stumbles out of a large box with her lover, Valere, shortly afterward, they are half naked, and have clearly gone beyond 17th century courtship. It's not a bad premise: When Elise and her brother, Cleante, lament their father's stinginess, clad in the hip Parisian's uniform of skinny jeans and neutral colors, they sound like millennials unable to get on the property ladder without a parental leg up. Harpagon, meanwhile, upgrades to surveillance technology to keep an eye on the cash box he has buried in the garden, with a camera trained on the spot. Mr. Lagarde had a very talented cast to work with. Christele Tual grabs every opportunity for physical comedy as the drunken, washed up Frosine, a go between tasked with arranging Harpagon's wedding to the much younger Mariane, who is also Cleante's beloved. Myrtille Bordier deftly toys with expectations as Mariane, portrayed here as a moody, sullen quasi teenager instead of a dewy bride. The overall direction goes awry when the miser joins the fray, however. With his tic ridden, repressed manner and impressive timing, Laurent Poitrenaux has the makings of a great Harpagon, but in lieu of Moliere's witty satire, Mr. Lagarde opts for heavy handed violence. When La Fleche, a servant, crosses Harpagon's path, he is required to strip and submit to a (simulated) anal cavity search. Master Jacques, the cook and coachman (played by a woman, Louise Dupuis), is punished for an infraction by having his hand burned on a stove. The obsessive nature of Moliere's "Miser" has always had a dark undertone, but the treatment of the other characters in this production is downright sadistic: Throughout, Harpagon wields his rifle a little too dementedly for comfort; at one point, he even bites off a piece of his son's ear. (One wonders why the members of the household staff haven't run away.) In an interview for the program, Mr. Lagarde says he was inspired by Ingmar Bergman, and any laughter here certainly comes from a very somber place. But he is only half listening to Moliere's text. Ominous background music comes on at some of the most comically charged moments, as if to actively undercut them. The final image Mr. Poitrenaux dipping into his oversize cash box and emerging covered in gold glitter is striking, yet this "Miser" takes detours to get there. Versailles' "Moliere Month" might as well have been happening on another theatrical planet. The festival, which brings together professional and amateur theater makers, was established 23 years ago by Francois de Mazieres, then Versailles' deputy mayor. He became the city's mayor in 2008 and still introduces the performances. That's what happened for "Les Femmes Savantes" ("The Learned Women"), directed by Jean Herve Appere. The company, Comediens Cie, took the change of plans and the makeshift stage in stride. Unfortunately, the result belied Mr. de Maziere's characterization of the play in his introduction as a timely take on womanhood. It's a tricky play to perform today: The "learned women" are actually in thrall to a phony scholar and poet, Trissotin. Philaminthe, the mistress of a large household, attempts to marry him to her daughter Henriette, who rejects intellectual pursuits for domesticity. The happy ending has Henriette wedding her beloved, Clitandre, who states that he likes nothing more in a woman than meekness. The play often trades women's dignity for laughs, and Mr. Appere's production, set in the 1920s, did nothing to mitigate its outdated aspects; clumsily acted, with some music and dance thrown in, it was intermittently entertaining, but ultimately a bit cheap. They are moving away from the director led model to invest in texts, and that approach paid off in "Scapin." The five member cast mined Moliere's lines for momentum; they were respectful of the dialogue's logic yet injected it with fresh energy. Cut down to about an hour, the play still worked, with vivid physical comedy manga like expressive postures to match the sheer ebullience of Moliere's comedy. As Scapin, one of the playwright's greatest characters, Mr. Besnault was appropriately sly and deadpan. The sack in which he traps and beats the curmudgeonly Geronde was transformed into an oversize canvas cover, deployed over the audience as Geronde hid among us. Children and adults delighted in the trick. Was it lowbrow? Highbrow? Who cares? It's high time French theater abandoned the distinction: At the end of the day, good, coherent direction is all that matters.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
As "Hamilton" goes, so goes "Spamilton." The spoof show (that would be "Spamilton" if you don't know, now you know), which has been running on the Upper West Side since last summer, is moving to Midtown, just down the street from the Richard Rodgers Theater (the room where it happens "Hamilton," that is). And that's not all. A second production of "Spamilton" is already running in Chicago, where "Hamilton" opened in October. And a third "Spamilton" is preparing to open in Los Angeles, where "Hamilton" is to begin performances in August; this "Spamilton" is to tour, as "Hamilton" is doing. "We're having fun, and making people laugh," said Gerard Alessandrini, the creator and writer of "Spamilton," and before that of "Forbidden Broadway." "I had done 'Forbidden Broadway' for 30 years, and had a great time, and we were touring it around, and then 'Hamilton' came along," he said. "It's the biggest hit show since I came to New York, and it's not only exhilarating, it's also a good target it's very parody able."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Days From Its Delayed Football Opener, Cal Is Stalled Again by the Virus None Gloria Kaci, the director of stadium event operations at Cal, led a Zoom meeting on Monday to organize logistics for the football team's season opener on Saturday night. She directed about 60 employees from across the athletic department. A major college football game during regular times is a complex puzzle, with a stadium full of fans, but places like Cal have held them for decades. The game day process has embedded itself into institutional muscle memory. Hosting a football game during a pandemic means rethinking almost everything. "Hold on to your hats, because it's going to be a very bumpy ride," Kaci told the group. The ride came to an abrupt end on Thursday. At noon, Kaci sent an email to the athletic department. "It is with disappointment that we must announce that Saturday's game vs. Washington has been canceled," she wrote. An unnamed Cal player had tested positive for the coronavirus earlier in the week. With the required isolation of those in contact with him, including his entire position group, Cal could not stage the game. The game was declared a "no contest" by the Pac 12 Conference on Thursday. There are no immediate plans to reschedule it. Coach Justin Wilcox declined to say how many players were required to isolate in accordance with local health guidelines, but it extended beyond one position and included non players. All have continued to test negative, Wilcox said. The university, set in Berkeley, is negotiating with health officials there to determine when each isolated member of the football program may return to team gatherings, since extended isolations could jeopardize the Nov. 14 game at Arizona State, too. "We are confident that we have made the right decision," Jim Knowlton, Cal's athletic director, said. "As we have seen across the country, we knew that there would be Covid 19 challenges, and we will continue to follow our protocols to support the health of our student athletes." With its first games on Saturday, the Pac 12 will become the last major college conference to start its football season and to try to squeeze in a condensed schedule before the end of the year. It feels a bit as though the league is arriving late and sober to a party full of tiring drunk people. Other conferences including the Southeastern and the Atlantic Coast have been playing games since September. But dozens of games have been postponed or canceled because of coronavirus outbreaks, and no one seems to be getting a better handle on limiting the spread of the virus. Top coaches and players have had to sit out of games. Coach Nick Saban of Alabama nearly missed a game after a positive test, and Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence will miss this Saturday's game against Notre Dame. At least six games this weekend have been canceled, including Wisconsin versus Purdue (a week after Wisconsin canceled its game with Nebraska) and Air Force versus Army. Conferences everywhere are trying to make order from battered schedules and scrambled standings, while insisting that playing college football this fall is a wise and necessary endeavor that has nothing to do with making money. The gambit may face a grave reckoning as the numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths in the United States climb steadily. Cal, coming off an 8 5 season, has hopes for a league title behind quarterback Chase Garbers. The Times has highlighted some of these challenges through the experience of one big time athletic department Cal, the flagship campus of the University of California system, with 30 sports and a 100 million annual budget. Like hundreds of other colleges, Cal faces the challenge of maintaining a bustling sports academy within the structure of an academic institution. Cal, like the rest of the Pac 12, initially said it would wait until 2021 to play games and postponed all its fall sports. In October, nudged by the availability of daily testing and the growing sense of peer pressure to join the party, the Pac 12 decided to start football after all. The league created a conference only seven game season, beginning the first weekend of November. There would be no time for bye weeks, because the Pac 12 wanted its champion to be eligible for a four team national playoff starting on Jan. 1. Cal, coming off an 8 5 season, has hopes for a league title behind the experienced quarterback Chase Garbers. Practice began last month. Cal tested athletes before each workout, required masks at all times and preached the importance of avoiding the virus. But on Wednesday, Wilcox revealed that a player had tested positive, though he had experienced no symptoms. By Thursday, the game was off. Wilcox expressed frustration that one positive test could cancel one or more games, when he has seen teams in other parts of the country continue playing. "I absolutely agree that there are different interpretations of contact tracing," he said in a call with reporters on Thursday afternoon. During the staff meeting on Monday, when the game was still scheduled, Kaci pressed for answers on all the unusual conditions: There would be no fans, no cheerleaders, no family members. How would they keep would be tailgaters and curious fans away? What if high powered boosters or families of players beg to come or just show up? How many people could be in the press box? How and where would they conduct the mandatory pregame coronavirus testing for the teams? "I don't think I've ever sat on a game day Monday with so many questions," he told the group. Days later, it was all a moot point. Kaci's email summed it up. "Our next home game will be on November 27th vs. Stanford The Big Game," she concluded.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
A year after "Bad and Boujee" helped to cement a moment for digital streaming by hitting No. 1, the rap trio Migos is at it again. With 225 million streams in its debut week, the group's new album, "Culture II" (Quality Control/Motown/Capitol), easily topped the Billboard 200, tallying the best streaming week for an album since Kendrick Lamar's "DAMN." last April. The release also counted 38,000 in traditional sales for a total of 199,000 units by the industry's current metrics, according to Nielsen data. That was enough to best the first "Culture" album which debuted with 116 million streams and 131,000 total units last year despite the lack of another chart topping single. The song "MotorSport," featuring Cardi B and Nicki Minaj, has hovered around the Top 10, while its follow up, "Stir Fry," has lived mostly in the second half of the Hot 100.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Social Security Runs Short of Money, and Ideas Fly on How to Repair It We've long heard warnings that the Social Security program that 52 million Americans rely on for their retirement benefits could one day run out of money. Analysts say that's not going to happen if only because older people are such a powerful voting force but this year the system has hit a worrisome milestone: the Social Security Administration reported that the retirement benefits paid out each month exceeded the tax revenues and interest that fund the program. That necessitated the first dip into the Social Security Trust Fund in 35 years. By 2034, the agency estimated, it will have depleted those reserves, and its revenues will cover only about four fifths of its promised benefits. "There's a problem, but not a crisis," said Andrew Eschtruth, a researcher at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. "It's something policymakers have acted on before, and the program has always paid full benefits." Making adjustments to keep Social Security solvent, crucial as that is, represents only one of the issues confronting Congress. It could also correct outdated aspects of a program that serves nearly 90 percent of Americans over 65. "It's a good time to step back and try to make Social Security more effective," said Richard Johnson of the Urban Institute, author of a new report on raising the program's retirement age. The fixes will likely include changes designed to bring more money in and pay less out. Imposing a higher payroll tax or raising the level of earnings subject to Social Security taxes (as of January 1, they will apply to the first 132,900, already an increase) would bolster revenues. Money saving measures could include reducing benefits for high earners and trimming the number of years that workers collect benefits by raising eligibility ages. Typically, such changes phase in for younger workers, not those already receiving Social Security or on the cusp of qualifying for benefits. The demographic imperatives underlying these options are evident. With baby boomers retiring, the system has more beneficiaries to support. Longer life expectancies about five additional years over the past several decades and improved health have meant that "people can certainly work longer than they could in 1960," Dr. Johnson said. Social Security now allows workers to claim benefits at age 62, though they'll receive bigger checks if they wait until their full retirement ages (66 to 67) or beyond. The average monthly payment this year: 1347.46. Working longer and claiming benefits later trends already well underway pay off in ways that extend beyond Social Security itself. "It's good for people, it's good for government tax revenues and it could fuel economic growth," Dr. Johnson said. But as his report points out, living longer doesn't always mean people can work longer. Higher income professionals may opt to stay on the job, he said, but "health problems are increasingly concentrated among less educated workers and they're falling further and further behind" economically. Moreover, even those who could work often discover that "employers don't seem eager to hire 62 year olds." By their early sixties, his analysis of national survey data found, a quarter of high school graduates and 37 percent of those without a high school diploma report work limitations related to their health. Many say their jobs require substantial physical effort. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' The Urban Institute report suggests raising the early entitlement age to 65 and the full retirement age to 70, but building in safeguards for those who can't work, perhaps through Social Security's other programs. The agency could provide a safety net by fattening benefits for the very low income. It could expand its Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, restructure the way its disability insurance works or provide partial benefits for workers who aren't totally disabled. While some think tanks and congressional staffs are exploring ways to strengthen Social Security financially, others are looking into outmoded provisions that penalize beneficiaries, primarily women. Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, has introduced legislation intended to help widows, widowers and divorced spouses qualify for higher payments and receive benefits earlier if they're disabled. "This bill would boost the incomes of Social Security recipients who are most likely to be living in poverty, the majority of whom are women," Mr. Casey, ranking member of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, said in a statement. Speaking of women and Social Security, another effort would award work credit for those who temporarily leave the labor force because of caregiving responsibilities. In the 1930s, when the Social Security Act was passed and then amended, policymakers assumed that women stayed home while men worked. Spousal and survivors benefits represented an attempt to provide for wives (and minor children) who had no work histories of their own. "Major demographic changes over 80 years have led to fewer women qualifying for spousal benefits," said Mr. Eschtruth, co author of a recent international survey of caregiver credits. The researchers found that 23 percent of Social Security dollars went to spousal and widows' benefits in 1960, compared to only 11 percent in 2016. That's partly because a growing proportion of women no longer marry, or have marriages that don't last 10 years, the threshold to qualify for divorced spouse benefits. It also reflects the fact that as women have poured into the work force, they may qualify for Social Security retirement benefits based on their own work histories. But because women earn less and are more likely to have spent uncompensated years as caregivers, their retirement benefits can still suffer.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
A new exhibition in San Francisco makes art out of the Patagonia vest, the former prime minister of England and ... Salesforce? The death knell of the Patagonia vest, at least as a symbol of utopianism co opted by the tech and venture capital world and transformed into shorthand for a certain kind of unbridled corporate power, was much predicted last summer. That is when the outdoor recreation company put its puffers where its principles were and said it would no longer make vests branded with its own name and the names of companies that did not share its environmental commitments. "Woe to the bros!" cried customers and commentators alike, in both glee and horror. The prophesies of doom turned out to be somewhat overstated. But they may soon be heard again in the land, thanks to an unexpected source: Simon Denny, a New Zealand born artist who lives in Berlin. Mr. Denny is the man behind a new show at the Altman Siegel gallery in San Francisco, "Security Through Obscurity," that combines (of all things) Patagonia, Salesforce (the customer relations digital behemoth) and Margaret Thatcher. The result is a visual treatise on income inequality, global capitalism and the digital world built on shared fashion references. Also proof positive that clothes are part of the currency of our times, no matter where you look. After all, Patagonia and Margaret Thatcher are not two names most people would put in the same sentence. Their heydays are separated by decades; their power bases across an ocean; their philosophies of life even further apart. Yet both Patagonia and the former British prime minister have one thing in common: They each gave the world items of dress that transcended their origins to become emblems. In the case of Mrs. Thatcher, the silk scarf, which, along with the skirt suit and pussy bow blouse, became signifiers of the Iron Lady, the woman who put on her absolutely appropriate clothes like armor in her battle to liberate the markets and bring "tough capitalism" to Britain. Combining both, Mr. Denny, 37, found the shape, literally, of an idea. Mr. Denny is known for work that explores the culture of technology and its effects on society. He grew up in New Zealand and moved to Germany in 2007 to attend art school. After graduating, as he began developing his signature, he started "following" individuals he saw as paradigm changers: reading their press, their speeches and books; checking in as their careers progressed. Peter Thiel was one. Mr. Denny's 2019 exhibition, "The Founder's Paradox," held in Auckland, New Zealand, featured Mr. Thiel (for one), the billionaire tech venture capitalist who is known for buying up swaths of land in that country, as a figure called Lord Tybalt, in art inspired by fantasy board games. Dominic Cummings, the architect of Boris Johnson's electoral victory, is another. Ditto Mrs. Thatcher. "She was very visible in the 1980s, shaping a new kind of politics that emphasized the individual, deregulation and global neoliberalism," Mr. Denny said, speaking on the phone from Berlin a few days before the opening. Though Mr. Denny has previously had exhibitions at MoMA PS1 and the Serpentine in London, and represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, this is the first time he has used fashion in his work, and it is partly because of the former prime minister. In early 2019, a Christie's auction catalog crossed his desk that included a group of Mrs. Thatcher's scarves. "There were a number of things being sold," Mr. Denny said, "but many were quite expensive." There were suits, jewelry, silver, decorative vases. The scarves, however, were a more accessible story. "I thought, 'Wow, these could be quite potent material for me,'" he said. "I knew I really wanted to work with them." He ended up winning 17 of them from two different lots after "quite fierce competition." The estimate for one lot was 400 to 600 pounds, and it ultimately went for PS3,250 ( 4,218.82); the other was PS500 to PS800, and the final price was PS3,000 ( 3,894.30). They include a Nicole Miller scarf with a Forbes print, dollar bills and slogans like "Forbes capitalist tool" and "No guts, no story"; a leopard print that made Mr. Denny think of England's colonial past; a Chanel design; and one from Liberty of London. "To me, they represent an era of dress the feminine but power business look," Mr. Denny said. "Also the Thatcher policies, which have accelerated global inequality." Combine that with the offer of a show in San Francisco, home of both the tech elite and a growing divide between rich and poor that is painfully visible, and Mr. Denny's thoughts turned to another kind of dress: the vest. The result is four Nano Puff power vests made from a variety of Mrs. Thatcher's scarves with a repurposed Patagonia label taken from an actual Patagonia garment and pasted over one breast, displayed in shallow glass vitrines like collector's memorabilia, and two Patagonia sleeping bags, which are references to the homeless in San Francisco. Standing up, the sleeping bags resemble nothing so much as sarcophagi, likewise made from the scarves. All of the pieces are filled with repurposed down stuffing from sleeping bags sourced in resale stores around the city. The exhibition also includes collages made from 3 D printing Salesforce patents (the kind that Wired magazine suggested could be potential foreign tax havens). Prices range from 7,500 to 60,000. None of the individuals or brands involved were contacted before the show; this is not a collaboration, like the Louis Vuitton handbags done by Yayoi Kusama or Takashi Murakami, but a commentary. And its implications are hard to avoid. "The Patagonia vest is something people here will relate to right away," said Claudia Altman Siegel, the owner of the gallery. "I don't know if they will like it or find it too close to home. But I really hope Marc Benioff will come." (According to Mr. Denny, Mr. Thiel did come to see his show in New Zealand.) Mr. Denny is not by any means the first artist to use the visual representations of luxury and fashion as a material way to confront cultural dissonance. Tom Sachs did it in the late 1990s when he used luxury brand signifiers to explore consumerism and branding. (Remember the Tiffany Glock, Chanel Guillotine or Hermes Value Meal?) Wang Guangyi, a Chinese artist, did it with his "Great Criticism" series of paintings, which superimposed brand logos on Mao era Communist propaganda posters. "More and more artists like to use fashion as a way to help deliver a message because it's an accessible point of entry for so many people," said Stefano Tonchi, the former editor of W and now the creative director of L'Officiel Group. "It's a way of talking not to a niche, but to a larger audience." None of this has escaped fashion itself, which as a rule has attempted to embrace artists who use its products as material, thus defanging the critical potential of the work. "I don't think he's the kind of artist who, if Dior called and said, 'Let's do a bag!' he would want to say yes," Mr. Tonchi said of Mr. Denny. Though Mr. Denny has many artist friends in Berlin who are close to Demna Gvasalia, the designer for Balenciaga, and though Mr. Denny himself has been featured in L'Uomo Vogue and the magazine of the Canadian retailer Ssense, he has no plans to parlay his current dalliance with clothing into a sideline. He seemed taken aback by the suggestion that he collaborate with a brand though he does hope the show has an effect on how we dress.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
When Peter D. Barbey bought The Village Voice in 2015, he vowed to invest in the storied alternative weekly, saying it would "survive and prosper." But last August he shuttered the print edition, and on Friday he closed the operation altogether. The end of the left leaning independent publication was an anticlimax, given the many empty red plastic Village Voice boxes that have been scattered like debris across the sidewalks of Manhattan in recent years. "This is a sad day for The Village Voice and for millions of readers," Mr. Barbey said. "The Voice has been a key element of New York City journalism and is read around the world. As the first modern alternative newspaper, it literally defined a new genre of publishing." Staff members said they were not surprised that the end had come. The paper's last editor in chief, Stephen Mooallem the third top editor to serve under Mr. Barbey during his three year tenure as owner left in May and was not replaced. Some staff members will stay on to make the paper's print archive digitally accessible; the rest will be out of a job at a time when the local news industry finds itself in crisis. Tom Robbins, a former longtime investigative journalist at The Voice, said, "It's astonishing that this is happening in New York, the biggest media town in America." Now on the faculty at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, Mr. Robbins added, "I think it really helped so many people sort of figure out everything they wanted to know, from where to find an apartment to what show to see to what scandal they wanted to dig into." The Voice was founded as a nickel weekly in 1955 by three New Yorkers, Dan Wolf, Edwin Fancher and Norman Mailer. They assembled a crew of writers who engaged readers with their wit and provoked them with their penchant for argument. Later owners included Rupert Murdoch and the pet food magnate Leonard Stern. The paper gave a start to the theater critic Hilton Als and the novelist Colson Whitehead, both recipients of the Pulitzer Prize. Its resident muckraker, Wayne Barrett, took aim at New York developers and politicians for nearly 40 years, and his obsessive work on Donald J. Trump has become a resource for reporters covering the president today. It gave a home to the investigative reporters Jack Newfield and James Ridgeway, and the music critics Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, Ellen Willis and Greg Tate. Nat Hentoff focused on jazz and First Amendment issues from 1958 to 2009, and the nightcrawling columnist Michael Musto wrote on celebrities, drag queens and club kids, with wisecracks thrown in, for more than 30 years. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Steven Wishnia, who has freelanced for The Voice on and off since 1994, said he stayed up until midnight on Thursday, putting the final touches on an article about the return of residents to their building on the Bowery after they were ordered to vacate it because of safety hazards. On Friday, Mr. Wishnia received a link to his article along with a note from his editor, Neil DeMause. "So the good news is that you have the honor of having written the last news article ever for The Village Voice," Mr. DeMause wrote. "The bad news is also the good news." Mr. Barbey is an heir to a Pennsylvania retail fortune. With a net worth estimated at more than 6 billion by Forbes, the Barbey family has a stake in brands like North Face, Wrangler and Timberland. For generations the family has also owned The Reading Eagle, a Pennsylvania daily newspaper. Mr. Barbey has been its chief executive since 2011. He first read The Voice as a boarding school student in Massachusetts and was drawn to its coverage of the mid 1970s New York rock scene and the film criticism of Andrew Sarris. On Friday he became the media mogul who was shutting it down. "I began my involvement with The Voice intending to ensure its future," Mr. Barbey said in the statement. "While this is not the outcome I'd hoped for and worked towards, a fully digitized Voice archive will offer coming generations a chance to experience for themselves what is clearly one of this city's and this country's social and cultural treasures." The death of The Voice occurred in a bleak economic climate for local journalism. Print circulation has plummeted for two surviving New York tabloids, The New York Post and The Daily News. In July, Tronc, the owner of The News, laid off half the paper's editorial staff, which had already been severely reduced. Turning a profit in the digital realm is a code not many news organizations have cracked. DNAinfo and Gothamist, two news sites in New York, were shut down last year by their owner, Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade. Gothamist has since re emerged under new ownership. On Friday, it broke the news of The Voice's closing. The film critic Bilge Ebiri said that Voice staff members were not anticipating Mr. Barbey's announcement, but were "prepared for the worst" after his decision to eliminate the print publication. Mr. DeMause, who wrote for the paper for 20 years before becoming one of its top editors two years ago, said, "I'm deeply saddened as a consumer of media and a little bit scared as a New Yorker and an American that we are losing all these journalism outlets at a time when we need them more than ever." Before Craigslist and other online services shoved printed classified ads into irrelevance, The Voice was thick with apartment listings that helped fund the work of its argumentative reporters and editors. For years, the weekly's pages also included advertising for phone sex and escort services, a practice that came to an end under Mr. Barbey. Mr. Musto said The Voice was unique in the latitude it allowed its writers. "Each writer was given their beat and allowed to run with it and inject their personal style in every syllable," he said. Hired in 1984 and laid off in 2013, Mr. Musto returned when Mr. Barbey took over in 2015. He said he still felt the freedom he knew from the days when he was starting out. "We can't afford to lose an important media outlet," Mr. Musto said. "It does leave a hole, but on the bright side, this sort of idiosyncratic rebellious spirit of The Voice has been subsumed, in a way, by the mainstream. It's sort of everywhere."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media

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