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Even before Billie Eilish took home five Grammys on Sunday, she had already won the night, at least as far as the game of super one upmanship that is the red carpet was concerned. She did it not by opting out, like Alicia Keys (who also wore four different looks in her role as host, plus a fifth one to perform) or the presenter Cynthia Erivo. She was perfectly willing to play the game: to show up relatively early in the parade, to pose for the paparazzi, to enlist a big brand (Gucci). But in doing so, she also changed the rules and thus swept the field much as she does with her music and her approach to stardom. It was a fitting choice (no pun intended) on a night that took place in the shadow of Kobe Bryant's death, and in an arena that, as Ms. Keys said in her opening speech, "Kobe built": the Staples Center in Los Angeles.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
new video loaded: What to Tell the Kids About Pot?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
"Hey, Chris, can we open these?" she asked Chris Bordeaux, an aptly named manager of Uva, a cozy wine and spirits store in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood. Ms. Danler, a petite blonde with a heart shaped face dominated by piercing ice blue eyes, pointed to two bottles of wine chilling in a bowl. On a sunny afternoon late last month, the Los Angeles resident (she moved there from Brooklyn in January) had cause to celebrate at one of her old neighborhood haunts. Her first novel, "Sweetbitter," published on May 24, was generating excitement in both literary and foodie circles. (It cracked The New York Times's hardcover fiction best seller list at No. 14 on June 3.) A bildungsroman about a naive young woman who gets an advanced education in eats, drink, sex and drugs after landing a job at an elite Manhattan restaurant, "Sweetbitter" is the first of a two book deal that Ms. Danler, now 32, signed with the publisher Alfred A. Knopf for a high six figure sum in late 2014. The novel offers a dishy but acutely observed insider's view of the goings on behind the scenes at a temple of fine dining, one Ms. Danler freely acknowledges is modeled on the estimable Union Square Cafe. She worked there as a backwaiter (essentially a backup to the waiters) for a year after moving to New York in 2006, following her graduation from Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Later that evening, she would head to BookCourt, an independent bookstore in Brooklyn's Cobble Hill neighborhood, for her first public reading and a Q. and A. with Gabrielle Hamilton, the chef and owner of Prune and a best selling author. ("She's one of my idols, in food and in writing," Ms. Danler said nervously, adding that when she was still looking for restaurant jobs, she'd twice sent resumes to Prune.) At BookCourt, Ms. Hamilton praised "Sweetbitter," saying, "It's so damned good!" (She would call it "the 'Kitchen Confidential' of our time" in a review of the book in The New York Times.) But why, she asked Ms. Danler, did she choose to write a novel rather than a memoir. Ms. Danler, who divorced in 2015, replied that fiction gave her the freedom to knead and reshape her experiences rather than merely recounting them. "I used a lot of facts from my real life, so I didn't have to research anything," she said, "but the liberty of writing it as fiction was so amazing. It got to be this rich composite." But back to the wine store. Ms. Danler's visit there was a homecoming of sorts. She worked at Uva on weekends a few years back while earning her M.F.A. in creative writing at the New School and writing "Sweetbitter." Before that, the shop had been her go to wine store when she first moved to Williamsburg. "Uva had affordable wines, between 10 and 15," she said. "And since I had a job now at Union Square Cafe, I wanted to keep up." She did more than keep up. Her post Union Square Cafe resume includes certificates earned from the Wine Spirit Education Trust at the International Wine Center and stints at Tinto Fino, a wine store now closed, and as beverage director and then general manager of Tia Pol, a well regarded tapas bar in Chelsea. (She also worked as a waitress at Buvette.) Not bad for a girl who, to borrow Ms. Danler's own line from "Sweetbitter," once selected her wines by the animals on the label. "In college, I drank Yellow Tail like everyone else," she said, referring to the inexpensive Australian wine with a kangaroo on its bottles. "Jordan!" she hollered over to Jordan Rodman, a Knopf publicist who was escorting Ms. Danler to publicity events. "She just got me to admit to drinking Yellow Tail. This is a disaster."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Matthew Broderick, Mary Louise Parker and Tavi Gevinson will appear at the Williamstown Theater Festival this summer in plays by Douglas Carter Beane, Adam Rapp and Carson McCullers. The Massachusetts festival announced its upcoming season Monday, with the news that it will include four world premieres. From June 26 to July 14, theatergoers in the Berkshires will have the opportunity to be the first to see Mr. Beane's "The Closet," a play inspired by the French comedy film "Le Placard" by Francis Veber. Mr. Broderick is set to play Martin O'Reilly, an unlucky man whose life is shaken up by a charismatic stranger, and Mark Brokaw will direct.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
When the white mob advanced, the murderous frenzy of their assault prompted the Black men to raise a flag of surrender, but the berserk marauders ignored it. They set fire to the courthouse roof and slaughtered almost every freedman who emerged from the flaming building to surrender. Those who remained inside were burned alive. The exact number of victims was never determined. The Colfax massacre was ghastly, and so was its aftermath. A young, white New York lawyer named J.R. Beckwith had recently been appointed U.S. attorney for Louisiana; he got the job of prosecuting the Colfax murders. Beckwith's 150 pages of indictments listed 32 counts and named 98 defendants. After six months, with no help from the federal government he represented, Beckwith had managed to arrest only seven of the defendants. The first trial, in March of 1874 in New Orleans, featured an eloquent and capable Beckwith doing battle against an all star team of white supremacist trial attorneys. It resulted in a hung jury. In the retrial a few months later, a federal jury found just three defendants guilty of conspiring to violate the civil rights of the victims. A U.S. Supreme Court justice, Joseph P. Bradley, who opposed the abolition of slavery and despised Reconstruction, had participated in the first days of the retrial as a second judge while riding circuit, as justices did in those days, then departed. But three weeks after the trial was over, he came back to New Orleans and overturned even the minimal conspiracy verdicts. The split decision sent the case, U.S. v. Cruikshank, to the Supreme Court. In March 1876, Bradley and his fellow Supreme Court justices decreed that he was correct in rescinding the convictions of William Cruikshank and the other white defendants, ruling that although the 14th Amendment gave the federal government authority to act against violations of civil rights by state governments, it did not apply to acts of racist violence by private citizens against other citizens. Furthermore, the court ludicrously declared, the prosecution failed to show that crimes against the murdered Black men were committed "on account of their race or color." All 98 defendants escaped accountability, emboldening white supremacists across the land. The Cruikshank decision reinforced a grotesque judicial precedent that severely limited the power of the federal government to prosecute violent crimes against the formerly enslaved. Given free rein by the Supreme Court, white supremacists continued their coordinated campaign of terror against Black people, hastening the demise of Reconstruction. By 1877, every Southern state had been "redeemed," and they would remain under the control of their white redeemers for decades. By eviscerating crucial protections of the 14th Amendment, the Cruikshank ruling ensured that the most basic constitutional rights of Black citizens would be denied well into the 20th century. The crabbed, inhumane logic of Cruikshank provided legal cover that allowed systemic racism to flourish and denied civil rights to millions of Americans, perpetuating what John Lewis called a "soul wrenching, existential struggle." A straight line can be drawn from Colfax and Cruikshank to the race riots in East St. Louis in 1917 and in Omaha, Chicago and other cities two years later; to the abhorrent crimes committed in the 1921 Tulsa race massacre; to the criminal brutality unleashed on African Americans in Selma and Birmingham, Ala., in the 1960s; to the present day instances of police and white nationalist violence in Ferguson, Mo., Charlottesville, Va., and now Kenosha, Wis.; to the shameful, plain sight attempts to suppress the Black vote in the 2020 elections. Lest we forget that white supremacy and racial injustice are still endemic in America, we need to remember Colfax and the lasting harm it wrought. William Briggs is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado, Denver, and author of "How America Got Its Guns: A History of Gun Violence in America." Jon Krakauer is the author of numerous books, including "Into Thin Air" and "Missoula." 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
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. Harvard and its president on Monday made their first public comments on the university's searching of staff members' e mail accounts, and offered a qualified apology for keeping the searches secret from most of the employees involved. The episode has angered faculty members and refocused attention on Harvard's largest cheating scandal in memory, which involved a take home final exam in a government class last spring. After an investigation, about 70 students were forced to take a leave of absence. In September, when confidential information about cheating cases appeared in news reports, administrators ordered searches of the e mail accounts of 16 resident deans, to find the source of the leaks. In an online statement posted Monday morning, university officials acknowledged the searches and explained their reasoning. The statement eased the concerns of some faculty members but did not alleviate them completely, and professors said they expected that e mail privacy would be the topic of a full throated discussion at the next faculty meeting, in early April. In her first comment on the matter, Harvard's president, Drew Gilpin Faust, said that she did not know about the searches at the time, but that having been apprised, "I feel very comfortable that great care was taken to safeguard the privacy of all concerned." Faculty responses revealed a gap between expectations in academia, where privacy is often seen as integral to academic freedom, and the corporate world, in which employees are often told to assume that workplace e mails are not private. Some professors wondered aloud whether they had been naive to think that things would be different at a university, and said they were forced to re examine assumptions about confidentiality. "It's disturbing because I don't know what it means about whether they could look at my own e mail," said Oliver Hart, an economics professor. "We need to have a discussion and a better understanding of the policy." He and other professors said the searches would prompt him to conduct more business through private e mail accounts outside of Harvard's reach. Most professors who agreed to discuss the matter on Monday insisted on anonymity, not wanting to run afoul of the administration. Several of them, conceding that the university had a legal right to conduct the searches, said the problem was, as one put it, that "we never thought they would we never thought about it at all, and we probably should have." But the statement posted Monday, attributed to Michael D. Smith, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, and Evelynn M. Hammonds, dean of Harvard College, said administrators were more troubled by another leak, recounting closed door discussions by the Administrative Board. "The disclosure of the document and nearly word for word disclosure of a confidential board conversation led to concerns that other information especially student information we have a duty to protect as private was at risk," the deans wrote. Resident deans live among students in Harvard's residential houses and act as student advisers, and they are also lecturers, meaning that they teach courses but are not on a tenure track to professorship. Each one generally has a personal Harvard e mail account and one specifically for the job of resident dean. The deans' statement on Monday emphasized that the search was conducted only of the resident dean accounts, not personal ones, and only for the subject line on each message, to determine whether the confidential e mail had been forwarded. The search determined that one resident dean had forwarded the e mail to two students who were accused of cheating and had sought the dean's advice. Deans Hammonds and Smith wrote that the resident dean who had forwarded the messages did so in good faith and was not punished. The statement did not say whether administrators determined how the e mail found its way to the news media, or who was responsible for the other leak, of the Administrative Board's deliberations. That resident dean and one other were told about the e mail searches shortly after they took place, administrators said, but the other 14 resident deans were not told until last week, after The Boston Globe inquired about the matter. They were not told to protect "the privacy of the resident dean who had made an inadvertent error," Deans Hammonds and Smith wrote. "We understand that others may see the situation differently, and we apologize if any resident deans feel our communication at the conclusion of the investigation was insufficient." On his blog, Michael Mitzenmacher, a computer science professor, wrote that he was satisfied with some parts of the administration's explanation, but "in my opinion, the administration made an error in judgment" in not telling the resident deans of the search. Wilfried Schmid, a mathematics professor, said he still wanted to know more about what happened. "I certainly get the sense that many of my colleagues will be upset, and so there will be a discussion," he said. But he urged the faculty not to lose sight of what he considered the bigger issue, the cheating episode itself.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
BUENOS AIRES The Teatro Colon, a stately Belle Epoque building, presides over the Avenida 9 de Julio here like a grande dame, elegant and imposing. The century old building fills a city block, rising four stories and extending three stories below ground, with studios and workshops beneath the avenue and the Plaza del Vaticano. It is one of this city's most important landmarks, a reminder of a more prosperous era, when artists like Toscanini, Caruso and the Ballets Russes routinely performed there. On a recent July afternoon, three couples were positioned across a large studio. The men rested the tips of their fingers on their partners' temples as the women hovered on one leg, the other leg extended in an arabesque. The gesture, from Frederick Ashton's 1952 ballet "Sylvia," surprising in its intimacy, reads both as a caress and as an ingenious partnering move. "In every Ashton ballet there is a climax," said Susan Jones, a longtime ballet mistress with American Ballet Theater who had traveled here to teach "Sylvia" to members of the Ballet Estable del Teatro Colon. "And this is it," she continued, "not the fish dive or the big lift" that had come before. "It's subtle, not in your face." The dancers struggled to master the timing and exact placement of the hands. Then one couple the petite and delicate Nadia Muzyka and the long limbed Federico Fernandez got it. Ms. Muzyka seemed to float for an instant, then melted back into her partner's arms. Maximiliano Guerra, the new director of the Ballet Estable del Teatro Colon. "Sylvia," a mythological ballet based on a play by the 16th century poet Torquato Tasso, is to be performed by the Colon for the first time in a weeklong run starting Aug. 23. It is part of the final season sketched out by the company's former artistic director, Lidia Segni; its style, detailed, charming and almost fussily classical, is new to these dancers, who are more accustomed to the epic classicism of "Swan Lake" or the ghostly romanticism of "Giselle." In February, in one of the abrupt changes that have characterized the theater's recent history, the company was taken in hand by Maximiliano Guerra, a former Colon star who went on to join the London Festival Ballet and La Scala, among other companies, and to found his own troupe, the Ballet del Mercosur. Interviewed in his unglamorous subterranean office, Mr. Guerra said he hoped to lead the company in a more contemporary direction, with an eye toward the European dance scene. Next year he hopes to present a bill with works by Nacho Duato, William Forsythe and Sasha Waltz, all new to the dancers. "We need to introduce them to our company so that perhaps in the future they'll make new works for us," Mr. Guerra said of the mixed program. Mr. Guerra is a contemporary of Julio Bocca, an even bigger Argentine star who has been at the helm of Uruguay's Ballet Nacional Sodre since 2010. Over the years, Argentina has produced a steady stream of exceptional ballet performers stretching all the way back to Maria Ruanova, who danced the lead in a new work for the Colon by George Balanchine, "Concierto de Mozart," in 1942. There are varying explanations for this distinguished lineage. One has to do with the wealth and relative stability of Argentina during the first half of the 20th century, when Europe was rocked by wars, revolutions and economic strife. Companies and choreographers traveled to Buenos Aires; in 1913 and 1917, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes presented full seasons at the Colon. (It was here, on a day off, that Vaslav Nijinsky married Romola de Pulszky, much to Diaghilev's chagrin.) Russians helped to establish the Colon's first ballet company in 1925. There were visits by Bronislava Nijinska, Michel Fokine, Balanchine and Antony Tudor. Dancers came from across Europe, later setting up schools to train the next generation. Mr. Bocca's teacher was from Czechoslovakia, and Mr. Guerra's from Bulgaria. The most determined students combined free instruction at the official arts academy, the Instituto Superior de Arte, with private lessons, often from a teacher specializing in a different approach to ballet technique. "The main characteristic of Argentine dancers is their adaptability," Mr. Guerra said. "My teacher, Wasil Tupin, taught French technique, with lots of small jumps and beats, and at the school they taught Russian technique. So when I arrived in London, it was easy for me to dance Bournonville. And when I was invited to the Bolshoi, I had the strength and muscle mass to dance slowly, the way the Russians did." This adaptability had a collateral effect: Many of the best dancers end up leaving. Argentina's political and financial troubles over the last four decades have inevitably left their mark on cultural institutions. The ballet season has shrunk from about 15 ballets per season in the 1960s to just five now. At times directors have come and gone at a disquieting pace. In 2007 the theater closed for extensive renovations. The public areas were resplendent upon its reopening in 2010 it is one of the most beautiful opera houses in the world but less prominent parts of the renovation remain unfinished. Diego Levy for The New York Times The fourth floor, intended for the ballet school, is still closed off, and classes are held around town and in the downstairs studios after hours. On rainy days, water leaks into storage areas where set pieces are kept. (The Colon is one of the few opera houses in which most sets, costumes and painted backdrops are still made in house, in a labyrinth of workshops that employs 400 specialized artisans.) Add to this national laws that set retirement age at 65, even though most dancers quit the stage before reaching 40. Of 103 people on the company's roster, 39 are described as "jubilable," or "retireable," in other words, past their dancing years but still receiving paychecks. Nor is the company a stranger to labor strife. For months the dancers, who are represented by several unions, have been working on a reduced schedule, rehearsing three hours a day instead of six. At times during rehearsals for "Sylvia," Ms. Jones seemed pressed for time. "The dancers are good, and they do their homework," she said, "but they need to dance more." Still, the performers' pride in the theater is strong. "The stage is fantastic," said the ballerina Karina Olmedo, a veteran of almost three decades (and countless administrations). "It has the perfect proportions." The 2,487 seat hall, with smoky tea rose colored walls and glowing lamps, is both majestic and inviting, and the acoustics are legendary. The company continues to bring in strong dancers. At 22, Macarena Gimenez, one of four women vying for a chance at the role of Sylvia , shows enormous promise, with plush arm movements and a natural, easygoing approach to the steps. "As in every company," Ms. Jones said, "there's that special group of dancers, the 'hot 20.' Macarena is one of them." She may well represent the next chapter in the story of ballet in Argentina, if only the Colon can keep her close to home.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Each week, technology reporters and columnists from The New York Times review the week's news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here. Hi, I'm David Streitfeld, reporting from a very quiet week in Silicon Valley. The venture capitalists were at their vacation homes or exotic resorts, dreaming of riches to come. Entrepreneurs also must have taken time off, because I made it to San Jose in less than two hours, a personal record. There wasn't even a new data privacy scandal to occupy the pundits. Amazon, however, never lets up. Chances are, something under your family Christmas tree or at your Hanukkah or Kwanzaa celebration was from the retailer. Perhaps everything was. Amazon's 210th and final press release of the year summarized the company's holiday season: best ever. If history is any guide, more than half those sales were made by third parties shops big and small that are in essence renting a stall in the Amazon bazaar. With millions of marketplace sellers battling for a piece of the lucrative Amazon action, competition is fierce. Exactly how tough I didn't realize until I read a piece called "Prime and Punishment: Dirty Dealing in the 175 Billion Amazon Marketplace," by Josh Dzieza on the tech site the Verge. Almost as an aside, the article mentions that some unscrupulous sellers were taking an established competitor's product, setting it on fire and then posting photos saying it exploded. Amazon would go nuts and pull the product as a safety hazard, leaving a clear field for the shady new arrival. Another common move, the article says, is to get a competitor's product reclassified as a sex toy, suppressing it from ordinary search results. This happened to a seller of childproof locks and outlet covers, whose sales dwindled to zero because absolutely no one was searching for "sexual childproof door lock." At Amazon, the customer reigns supreme, which means sellers who are accused of doing something wrong need to confess to something, anything, even if they are the victim of another seller's sabotage. It's so difficult to mount a successful appeal that many merchants hire professional advisers to get them out of Amazon jail. Amazon also turns up in a new story in Wired, which asks: Whatever happened to the Future Book? That is the writer Craig Mod's term for the immersive, interactive, highly connected thrill ride that would finally kill off the traditional boring physical book by, oh, 2015. It didn't happen. "My Kindle Oasis one of the most svelte, elegant and expensive digital book containers you can buy in 2018 is about as interactive as a potato," Mr. Mod writes. One possible reason: Amazon had little competition for the Kindle, so innovation in e readers ground to a halt. Both the Wired and the Verge stories might seem to be about how Amazon is overextended, can't be all things to all people and needs to do what it already does better rather than keep expanding into new fields. But they're really about how Amazon wins even when it loses. Mr. Mod's point is that while Kindles never killed physical books, there has nevertheless been an explosion of activity around the book. For instance, it is much simpler and much cheaper to publish yourself than it was 20 years ago. There has also been an explosion in recorded books that will only grow as smart speakers in the home become ubiquitous. And who owns the leading home speaker company, the leading recorded books company and the biggest by far physical and digital bookstore? You guessed it. As for the Amazon Marketplace sellers who are undermined by bad guys, Amazon has an answer: protection, for a price. "When sellers get in trouble for customer complaints or attacks from counterfeiters," Mr. Dzieza writes, "the solution is often to more fully meld with Amazon to enroll in its fulfillment program, to purchase Amazon's labels to make sure product isn't being diverted or even make their brand exclusive to Amazon, which brings special protections." A look inside Amazon. An examination by The New York Times into how the pandemic unfolded inside Amazon's only fulfillment center in New York City, known as JFK8, found that the Covid crisis exposed the power and peril of Amazon's employment system. Here are our major takeaways: Employee churn is high. The company conducted a hiring surge in 2020, signing up 350,000 workers in three months offering a minimum wage of 15 an hour and good benefits. But even before the pandemic, Amazon was losing about 3 percent of its hourly associates each week meaning its turnover was roughly 150 percent a year. Buggy systems caused awful mistakes. Amazon's disability and leave system was a source of frustration and panic. Workers who had applied for leaves were penalized for missing work, triggering job abandonment notices and then terminations. Strict monitoring has created a culture of fear. The company tracks workers' every movement inside its warehouses. Employees who work too slowly, or are idle for too long, risk being fired. The system was designed to identify impediments for workers. Though such firings are rare, some executives worry that the metrics are creating an anxious, negative environment. There is rising concern over racial inequity. The retail giant is largely powered by employees of color. According to internal records from 2019, more than 60 percent of associates at JFK8 are Black or Latino. The records show Black associates at the warehouse were almost 50 percent more likely to be fired than their white peers. Read more: The Amazon That Customers Don't See. A wrinkle about the third party sellers that the Verge doesn't tackle is the way Amazon makes them sign what is called a most favored nation or M.F.N. clause, which stipulates they cannot sell on another site cheaper than they sell on Amazon. British and German regulators investigated the retailer's use of these clauses a few years ago, with the result that Amazon dropped the practice in Europe. But they're still in use in the United States. In May, two law professors detailed the case against the M.F.N. restrictions as harmful to consumers in a Yale Law Journal article, "Antitrust Enforcement Against Platform MFNs." A few days before Christmas, Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut picked up on the issue and wrote a four page letter to the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department saying he was "deeply concerned" that Amazon's M.F.N. contracts could stifle market competition and artificially inflate prices. For instance, Mr. Blumenthal wrote, a competitor to Amazon might try to gain an edge by charging merchants a smaller commission. If those merchants also sell on Amazon, however, they could not pass along those savings to their customers, because of the M.F.N. clause. That would be bad for consumers while reinforcing Amazon's dominance. Amazon declined to comment. It used to be that only a few cranks criticized Amazon, but that is rapidly shifting. Still, I was surprised at the take no prisoners tone of David Heinemeier Hansson, the programmer who writes and tweets as DHH, in an open letter to Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, on Medium. "I think you're currently making bad decisions that you're going to regret. Maybe even decisions that we as a whole society will come to regret," DHH wrote. He added that Mr. Bezos still had time to shape his legacy "into something more than the man who killed retail, extracted the greatest loot from its HQ cities, and who expanded the most monopoly holdings the fastest." DHH wrote his piece in November, but Medium surfaced it in its daily digest just last week. What makes his criticism especially noteworthy is that Mr. Bezos is a shareholder in DHH's software development company, Basecamp. DHH notes that he and his co founder have not talked to Mr. Bezos for at least seven years but that "if we get another chance, this would be the most pressing topic." One last new Amazon development, which might be the biggest of all: unionization. Workers at Amazon's biggest warehouse in Spain began a two day strike on Thursday. Warehouse employees on Staten Island are calling for unionization, following the lead of colleagues in Minnesota. Here is a good wrap up from the Guardian. Amazon has successfully stymied unionization efforts since the company began, so this shift is momentous. In non Amazon news, it appears that the answer to the eternal question of whether the world can have too many iPhones is: Quite likely. Thanks to Apple's news, the stock market as I write is again plunging. But there's a silver lining for tech companies: They are big, and getting bigger, and a recession might only help them against the competition.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
John Coltrane's creative flame was burning at its brightest in 1964. The saxophonist had recently let go of his fixation on complex, layered harmonies, and he would soon pioneer a dry, squalling approach to group improvisation nearly abandoning Western harmony altogether, and changing the course of jazz history. Amid the transition, that year he recorded what would be his two most potent albums, "Crescent" and "A Love Supreme." These works thrive at the crossroads: They are in touch with the driving, cohesive sound that his so called classic quartet had established, but push into a blazing beyond. Yet history is not this simple. Even for Coltrane a symbol of tireless creative momentum, who is said to have never stopped hurtling forward detours came up. That spring, Coltrane was approached by Gilles Groulx, a young Canadian filmmaker at work on his first feature, "Le Chat dans le Sac." Groulx asked his musical hero to record the film's soundtrack, and to his surprise, Coltrane said yes. Between the springtime recording dates for "Crescent" and the "Love Supreme" sessions in late fall, Coltrane's quartet the pianist McCoy Tyner, the bassist Jimmy Garrison and the drummer Elvin Jones found an afternoon to record four originals from his back catalog and one jazz standard, the Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer ballad "Out of This World." (Coltrane retitled it as "Blue World", most likely out of copyright concerns.) "Blue World" is taken from a 1964 session for a film soundtrack. Groulx inserted three tracks into "Le Chat dans le Sac," which won the Grand Prix at the Montreal International Film Festival that year and remains a cult favorite, but the session tapes quickly fell into history's dustbin. When they came to light recently, Impulse! Records still catching its breath from the success of last year's "Both Directions at Once," a revelatory "lost" Coltrane album from 1963 that has sold the equivalent of over a quarter of a million copies worldwide, according to the label decided to compile the tracks into an album. It will be released on Friday as "Blue World." Calling this a full on LP is a stretch: Without the two alternate takes of "Village Blues" and one of "Naima," it would feature just five tracks, clocking in at roughly 25 minutes. (Alternates included, it runs 37 minutes.) And what do we want with a detour, when the creative seeking that Coltrane was doing in these years felt so rich and so pure? Well, there's something alluring about this odd little gift of a session, which for Coltrane must have landed somewhere between "just a gig" and "just a favor." Supporting someone else's low budget film, obligingly revisiting items at Groulx's request that he no longer even played live, the saxophonist sounds as if he was carrying a generous spirit and a relatively easy air into the studio that day. That isn't to say the group's sound is not dark and deep, just as it was on "Crescent," which the quartet had finished recording only weeks before. In the late 1950s Coltrane defined a swirling, "sheets of sound" approach, and when he did hold long notes he played them in a beaming, silvery tone. By 1964 that had all changed; he was using fewer notes, and each one took up more space, stating its case with subtlety but commanding greater attention. Even on the relatively brief pieces here particularly "Like Sonny" and the three versions of "Village Blues" the quartet doesn't hurry, and Coltrane plays beautifully carved lines over Jones's sturdy, polyrhythmic strut. As on "Crescent," Coltrane's solos are defined by the weight and steady vision of his playing, as much as by the phrases themselves: a variety of long tones, pendulum swinging repetitions and zigzagging runs. Garrison's bass is turned up rather high, giving the entire session a pulpy, magnetic aura. And the band is having fun. On the two versions of "Naima" especially Take 1 Mr. Tyner savors the piece's strangely colorful harmonies, dancing and skipping in the buoyant style he often brought to ballads (and which he used in live renditions of this tune, the only one on "Blue World" that was still in the quartet's stage repertoire). It is not as haunting a performance as the original, but it conveys how renewable this piece had become for Coltrane. Written for a soon to be ex wife, it was no longer just a love song; "Naima" lived on as a prayer, and perhaps an issuance of gratitude for a partner who had done so much to help shape and support his creativity. Like the rest of "Blue World," these takes on "Naima" might first seem like a light touch aberration from the work Coltrane was doing in that consequential year. But these performances are, in fact, deeply entrenched in Coltrane's moment: He's issuing a warm valediction to his old catalog, full of his characteristic seriousness and serenity, before charging even further ahead.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
A year by year economic history of the Roman Empire might seem as impossible to reconstruct as the lost 107 books of Livy's history of Rome. Yet something close to such a record has now been retrieved from the unlikeliest of places a glacier in central Greenland. The record is written not in Latin but in lead. Lead emissions generated by mining operations in Northern Europe reached Greenland and were washed down in snowfall. The snow accumulated, turned into ice, and preserved a record that stretches back thousands of years. Ice cores from Greenland have long been used to track global climate change, which is recorded in the frozen water's oxygen isotopes. The project to measure ancient lead emissions in ice cores was initiated by Andrew I. Wilson, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford who studies the Roman economy. A French team tried this in the 1990s but Dr. Wilson believed new technology might allow a more comprehensive approach and reached out to Joseph R. McConnell, a leading expert in ice core analysis at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev. Deep Greenland ice cores are hard to obtain because it can take three or four years to drill to bedrock. But Dr. McConnell knew of a core that had to be abandoned when the drill got stuck at the 6,500 foot level. Still, the core recorded 40,000 years of annual snowfalls, and the Danish custodians of the core let Dr. McConnell's lab use a section of some 1,400 feet from its upper portions, corresponding to the years 1235 B.C. to 1257 A.D. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. In the lab the ice core was cut into rods just over three feet long that were stood on a heating pad and melted from the bottom. Grooves in the pad directed water from the central and purest part of the core to instruments known as mass spectrometers that continuously measured the quantity of lead down to one hundredth of a picogram, which is one trillionth of a gram. When the ice core was set to melt at the rate of two inches per minute, Dr. McConnell's team found they could take 12 measurements per year throughout the Roman era. The dates of these ice years were verified by synchronizing them with other chronologies, such as those derived from tree rings and volcanic eruptions. The continuous record of lead pollution is not as good as having figures for Roman gross domestic product, which no one knows, but it does seem to reflect the general economic health of the Roman state. The results, published in Monday's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show a fluctuating line whose peaks and troughs correspond to salient events in Roman history. Lead emissions rose in periods of peace and prosperity, such as the Pax Romana, which ran from 27 BC to 180 A.D. and dropped during the civil wars that preceded the Pax and the rise to power of the emperor Augustus. There were also dramatic drops that coincided with the Antonine plague of 165 180 A.D., thought to have been small pox, and the Cyprian plague, cause uncertain, of 250 270 A.D. Lead was widely used in the Roman economy for making water pipes and sheathing the hulls of boats. Its production was also a proxy for a central economic activity, the use of silver in the Romans' standard silver coin, the denarius. Silver occurs in lead ores, and the process of separating the silver from lead at high temperatures was a major source of airborne lead. In the early Roman Empire the denarius was 100 percent silver. But under the emperor Nero, starting in 64 A.D., the proportion of silver was reduced to 80 percent and the state made a tidy profit by recycling the all silver denarii into debased ones. These changes coincided with, and perhaps were caused by, a drop in silver production, and just such a fall in lead emissions is recorded in the Greenland ice core shortly after 60 A.D. Under the emperor Trajan there was a brief return from 103 to 107 A.D. to making coins from newly mined silver and this historical event too is reflected in a brief spike of lead pollution that ends in 107 A.D. Lead emissions, as reflected in the ice core, dropped to an absolute low during the Imperial Crisis of 235 to 284 A.D., when the empire nearly collapsed under the stresses of internal discord, barbarian invasions and the Cyprian plague. Thereafter the economy, to judge by lead levels, recovered a little but entered a final period of decline marked by the withdrawal of Roman legions from Britain in the early 5th century A.D. and the collapse of the western Roman Empire in 476 A.D. Economic historians have tried to reconstruct the Roman Empire's gross domestic product but have to make too many assumptions, Dr. Wilson said. "I wouldn't say the lead pollution graph is a close reflection of GDP but it's probably the best overall proxy for economic health we've got," he said. He and Dr. McConnell are now working to see if the lead isotopes (lead atoms of different weight) in the ice core will help identify the geographic sources of lead production and thus make allowance for the fact that nearby sources of lead, such as in Britain, would have contributed more heavily to the Greenland pollution than distant ones such as the Rio Tinto mines in Spain.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The decision by ABC News to hire George Stephanopoulos in 1996 tripped alarms throughout American journalism. Mr. Stephanopoulos, a top aide to President Bill Clinton, was so fresh from the political battlefield that he still had blood on his shoes. Would he track it into newsrooms and broadcast studios, leaving a trail for others to follow? "Government to press switcheroos do not bode well for news objectivity," The Los Angeles Times television critic Howard Rosenberg wrote at the time. In The New York Times Magazine, Max Frankel called Mr. Stephanopoulos's move another step in "the progressive collapse of the walls that traditionally separated news from propaganda," which had been erected "to guard against all kinds of partisan contamination." Network news executives brushed it off as sanctimony from graybeards who didn't get it. Their hiring of political operatives who were becoming telegenic stars in their own right continued apace. Well, here we are. This week brought the news that CNN had cut ties to Donna Brazile, the interim chairwoman of the Democratic Party and a longtime paid political analyst for the network. They parted ways after leaked emails indicated that she had shared with Hillary Clinton's campaign some possible questions for CNN sponsored candidate events during the primaries. It took 20 years, but the warnings have come true the contamination has spread and the patient is looking sickly. The mess with Ms. Brazile draws to a close a campaign season that tore at the foundation of the wall Mr. Frankel wrote about. It started with news that Mr. Stephanopoulos had donated 75,000 to the Clintons' family foundation; went on to include CNN's hiring of the former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowksi as an analyst, even as he continued to be paid a "severance" from the Trump campaign; and saw Sean Hannity of Fox News (who famously intoned "I'm not a journalist") emerge as an informal adviser to the Trump campaign. But Ms. Brazile's entanglement took it all to a newly scandalous level. As Jeff Zucker, the CNN president, told his journalists in a conference call on Tuesday morning, the disclosure of Ms. Brazile's assist to the Clinton campaign threatened to undercut all their hard work this year. Worse, for the industry at large, it played into Donald J. Trump's accusations that the mainstream media was colluding with Mrs. Clinton to deliver her to the White House. The whole thing stinks. But the moment will be wasted if it does not prompt the networks to reset the boundaries between their newsrooms and their paid political operatives, if not end these arrangements altogether. Not all networks abide by the same arrangements with political analysts. For instance, on Tuesday, the NBC News and MSNBC managing editor for politics, Dafna Linzer, told me that they would not have abided, for instance, with an arrangement like that of Mr. Lewandowski, who continued to collect money from Mr. Trump's campaign while working for CNN (severance or otherwise) and was also constricted by a nondisclosure agreement. "We don't see why you would ever put yourself into that ethical conflict zone," she said. CNN declined to discuss its policies for hiring analysts. The network has tried to distance itself from Ms. Brazile's actions, saying it did not provide her any questions or material in advance. But the network has not helped with its handling the matter, showing a surprising lack of transparency for a news organization dedicated to conveying the truth. Ms. Brazile became the Democratic Party's interim chairwoman in July, after WikiLeaks published internal party emails showing that the chairwoman at the time, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, conspired to undermine Mrs. Clinton's primary rival, Bernie Sanders. Ms. Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign, and Ms. Brazile and CNN mutually agreed to suspend her contract while she took over the party. After other WikiLeaks emails showed that Ms. Brazile had sent a question from a planned forum to Mrs. Clinton's aides, Ms. Brazile resigned from CNN altogether, nullifying her contract. What happened on Day 2 of Elizabeth Holmes's testimony. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. But CNN did not report the end of its relationship with Ms. Brazile indisputably a big story until Monday, more than two weeks later. And it did so only when yet another trove of emails showed Ms. Brazile had again shared a potential debate question with Mrs. Clinton's campaign. The Brazile affair has generated a host of questions: What else might she have shared with the Clinton campaign that could have come from the CNN newsroom? Was she privy to any sensitive stories CNN might have been pursuing about Mrs. Clinton and, if so, is CNN satisfied that she had not shared those with the campaign? More immediately, what does the network know about how Ms. Brazile obtained the questions in the first place? ("From time to time I get the questions in advance," she wrote the campaign in one email). Ms. Brazile has denied she shared any inside information with Mrs. Clinton's campaign, or that CNN ever shared debate questions with her. Speaking with my colleague Michael M. Grynbaum on Monday, she refused to discuss what's contained in emails that were disclosed through hacking. That may make sense politically, for her, but it leaves a journalistic mess for CNN, which has a pressing interest in being as clear as possible about what Ms. Brazile did and did not do. But CNN officials declined my request to publicly discuss the particulars of Ms. Brazile's apparent infractions, and whether there could have been others. In a statement released on Monday, the network said it was "uncomfortable with what we have learned about her interactions with the Clinton campaign while she was a CNN contributor." As The Huffington Post first reported on Tuesday, Mr. Zucker said on his staff conference call that Ms. Brazile's actions were "disgusting." In a new email disclosed on Monday, Ms. Brazile told two senior Clinton aides that at the debate scheduled for Flint, Mich., "a woman with a rash" would ask Mrs. Clinton what she would do for families like hers that were suffering from lead poisoning because of contaminated water. Brian Stelter, the host of CNN's "Reliable Sources," reported on Monday that he had seen Ms. Brazile participate in a network sponsored effort to hand out bottles of fresh water to Flint residents the day before the debate. He speculated Ms. Brazile may have come across the questioner then, which would mean she didn't learn about the question from within the CNN newsroom.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
A 10 to 15 year lease is available for a 3,664 square foot space, which could be used for retail or for light manufacturing, on the ground floor of this new seven story mixed use rental building in the Dutch Kills area of Long Island City. The building, completed in March, offers 93 feet of wraparound frontage, and features a facade in shades of gray that evokes the industrial feel of the area.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
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. Tame Impala Kevin Parker playing everything he can in the studio aligns multiple eras, but mostly the 1970s, in "Patience," his first single since 2015. "Has it really been that long?" he sings. Pounding major seventh piano chords like Todd Rundgren, using conga drums to punch up and punctuate synthesizer arpeggios, and hinting at Michael Jackson in his melodies, he comes to the realization that he's "growing up in stages/living life in phases." It's an honest part of a long term evolution. JON PARELES Cowbells clink, the wah wah guitar cackles, synthesizer lines wriggle and horns punch terse little riffs in the latest single from Ibibio Sound Machine, a London band whose lead singer, Eno Williams, is from Nigeria; the band releases its album "Doko Mien" on Friday. "Wanna Come Down" is a snappy funk track that owes more to Prince than to Nigeria's own Afrobeat or juju. Williams splits her lyrics between English and the African language Ibibio but the video clip, alas, offers no subtitles. PARELES The Last Poets, 'For the Millions' It makes some sense that the Last Poets who, in the late 1960s, did more to augur the rise of hip hop than any band of their generation would find relevance today by looking back. This group was always guided by ancient practices, and the last few years have demonstrated that America's troubled racial history remains close at hand. On "For the Millions," from an album due in May, the bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma offers a buoyant accompaniment that recalls the poets' 1972 record, "Chastisment." And Abiodun Oyewole reaches further back, rapping a remembrance of black lives lost over the years, and a call to continue the fight. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO Justin Vernon of Bon Iver has been citing Bruce Hornsby as an influence since the beginning of his career, and over the last few years, the two performers have been inching toward each other. This jagged but soothing collaboration was recorded at Vernon's Eau Claire studio. Vernon's singing is characteristically pastel, while Hornsby's has a heavy, urgent grounding. Their hymnal give and take owes something to folk and roots music, and something to jazz, and it's surprising, given how different their vocal approaches are, just how much their words appear to be hugging each other, balms in an emotional storm. CARAMANICA Nature abhors a vacuum, so with Ed Sheeran largely missing in action, the Australian singer Dean Lewis has stepped into the void. Last year, Lewis's single "Be Alright" was a savvy slice of mournful folk pop. He's just released his debut album, "A Place We Knew," which includes "Stay Awake," an impressively dynamic number about the hope of love that nods to both Sheeran's crisp melodies and his irrepressible urge toward rhythm. CARAMANICA A breezy cross generational Mexican American love song featuring two of the most prominent and long running Chicano rappers MC Magic, from Phoenix, and Lil Rob, from San Diego and Cuco, the rising indie soul pop singer from South Los Angeles. "Search" moves slowly and with warmth, in the manner of the slow jam oldies played for decades on Los Angeles radio by Art Laboe, whom MC Magic name checks here. Like those molasses thick grooves, this song is almost guilelessly sweet: In the video, the two young protagonists don't even so much as kiss. CARAMANICA The Doobie Brothers of nu trap play tug of war with unexpected sweetness over light piano and lighter drums. Nav, as ever, is a font of melancholy and mistrust, and Young Thug ... well, Young Thug remains a master of free associative madness, concluding with a flirtatious riff that begins, "You look just like my rich auntie" and goes on to express sentiments that, for most, would be verboten, but which in his signature wail sound like vivid confession. CARAMANICA Burrow into "Hungry Ghost," the new album by the guitar bass drums trio Typical Sisters, and you might start to notice what isn't there. This is improvisation driven music, right at the corner of jazz and post rock, but there are none of the showy, full band misdirections that have become so typical of jazz today. And while the album's title refers to Chinese Buddhism, these aren't slow, numinous, incantatory sounds, either. Instead, what you get is happily in the middle and something increasingly rare today: group exploration with little flexing or hurry, electric guitar melodies that sound like open promises a reminder that it's O.K. to listen with no expectation of a payoff. RUSSONELLO	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The reigning conceit of the author's tragicomic play by play of Neumann's misadventures is that of a cult masquerading as a real business. Central to this theme is the sustained involvement of Neumann and his wife, Rebekah Paltrow (Gwyneth's cousin), in the Kabbalah Center. What exactly is taught there is elusive to nonmembers some sort of Jewish mysticism, allegedly, dating back to the 12th century but repackaged for affluent New Age consumers with yoga bodies and Instagram but it has attracted stars and luminaries since the '80s, including Madonna, its premier disciple. The center encouraged its devotees to wear lucky red strings around one wrist, which Neumann did for quite a while, until a more sober minded business person warned him to lose the item or risk confirming his burgeoning reputation as a flake. For readers, Neumann is a flake from Wiedeman's opening paragraph. Citing an interview from April 2019, not long before WeWork's unraveling, Wiedeman describes Neumann as engaged in a belated campaign to polish his image and raise one of many rounds of outside cash to replace the vast sums he'd already dissipated. "He no longer had the punching bag, the gong or the bar that occupied his previous suite," Wiedeman writes, "but this version had a private bathroom with a sauna and a cold plunge tub." The surrounding offices were comparably exotic: "Beneath a kitchen canopy draped with hanging plants, several water coolers were stuffed with a rotating orchard of fruit ... and a dozen taps serving beer, cider, cold brew, seltzer, Merlot, Pinot Grigio and kombuchas, plural. A placard helpfully explained to the company's fresh faced workforce, where 30 year olds felt like senior citizens, that tilting your glass while dispensing a beer would lead to a smoother pour." The smoothest pour of all at WeWork was the frothy utopian verbiage continually streaming from Neumann's mouth. This river of bombast, initially intoxicating to investors and employees alike but ultimately stale and rank to all, included numbers representing tired old concepts such as earnings and expenditures. Its chief concern, however, was the wonderful futuristic world of We. What the letters "Mc" are to McDonald's, "We" was to Neumann. WeLive, for example, was the name he gave to an ostensibly world altering initiative to extend his kingdom from commercial real estate to residential. Beginning with two buildings, he shrank apartments to dorm room size and fluffed up the surplus square footage with social amenities. Game rooms. Party rooms. As Wiedeman dryly notes and his is a book that calls constantly for dryness, lest the reader drown in its absurdities Neumann's analysis of New York's tenant class had led him to conclude that what the city's renters coveted were smaller living quarters buffeted by louder noises. WeLive remained a two building operation. All of which presents a mystery: How on earth did Neumann and his WeThing attract an almost unprecedented level of private investment capital during his decade long tenure as its head shaman? The answer is never stated explicitly, but lives in the margins and between the lines on almost every page: because the private equity community had Neumann like magical thinkers of its own. Merlins recognize Merlins, and Wiedeman's finest feat of reporting and double portraiture is his evocation of Neumann's relationship with his financial savior (for a time) Masayoshi Son, the big picture, long term, positively cosmic founder of the Japanese tech conglomerate Softbank. To delve any further into their relationship would be to give away the plot of "Billion Dollar Loser," which, like the most engrossing nonfiction stories, has a plot indeed, one that only reality could contrive. To fully appreciate its twists and turns, the reader should understand, or be willing to study on the fly, the customs, manners and vocabulary of contemporary investment banking. The sure reward for this effort is utter horror, unless the reader is herself a banker, in which case profound embarrassment might be more appropriate. The global pool of capital on which free market societies float like inflatable rubber ducks is a virtually bottomless reservoir of folly, vanity, mania and caprice. The accounting standards that purport to measure it and regulate its tidal flows are as fluid and foamy as WeWork's tap kombucha. What was Neumann's company worth in its grand heyday, when its employees numbered in the thousands, its holdings and offices spanned the globe, and a gong still hung in its leader's office? Ten billion dollars? Forty five? Or was WeWork's value potentially as Son and Neumann both foresaw at one point, before a disastrous, aborted I.P.O. curbed the madness a nice round trillion? All of the above, and none. What can be reliably calculated, however, is the ransom paid to Neumann for turning over his ghost ship to new officers. A billion dollars.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
SAN FRANCISCO Since the 2016 election, when Russian trolls and a tsunami of misinformation turned social media into a partisan battlefield, Facebook has wrestled with the role it played in President Trump's victory. Now, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times, a longtime Facebook executive has told employees that the company had a moral duty not to tilt the scales against Mr. Trump as he seeks re election. On Dec. 30, Andrew Bosworth, the head of Facebook's virtual and augmented reality division, wrote on his internal Facebook page that, as a liberal, he found himself wanting to use the social network's powerful platform against Mr. Trump. But citing the "Lord of the Rings" franchise and the philosopher John Rawls, Mr. Bosworth said that doing so would eventually backfire. "I find myself desperately wanting to pull any lever at my disposal to avoid the same result," he wrote. "So what stays my hand? I find myself thinking of the Lord of the Rings at this moment. "Specifically when Frodo offers the ring to Galadrial and she imagines using the power righteously, at first, but knows it will eventually corrupt her," he said, misspelling the name of the character Galadriel. "As tempting as it is to use the tools available to us to change the outcome, I am confident we must never do that or we will become that which we fear." In a meandering 2,500 word post, titled "Thoughts for 2020," Mr. Bosworth weighed in on issues including political polarization, Russian interference and the news media's treatment of Facebook. He gave a frank assessment of Facebook's shortcomings in recent years, saying that the company had been "late" to address the issues of data security, misinformation and foreign interference. And he accused the left of overreach, saying that when it came to calling people Nazis, "I think my fellow liberals are a bit too, well, liberal." Mr. Bosworth also waded into the debate over the health effects of social media, rejecting what he called "wildly offensive" comparisons of Facebook to addictive substances like nicotine. He instead compared Facebook to sugar, and said users were responsible for moderating their own intake. "If I want to eat sugar and die an early death that is a valid position," Mr. Bosworth wrote. "My grandfather took such a stance towards bacon and I admired him for it. And social media is likely much less fatal than bacon." The post by Mr. Bosworth, a former head of Facebook's advertising team, provides an unusually candid glimpse of the debates raging within Facebook about the platform's responsibilities as it heads into the 2020 election. The biggest of those debates is whether Facebook should change its rules governing political speech. Posts by politicians are exempt from many of Facebook's current rules, and their ads are not submitted for fact checking, giving them license to mislead voters with partisan misinformation. Last year, platforms like Twitter and Google announced restrictions to their political advertising tools ahead of the 2020 election. Facebook and its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, have faced heavy pressure from Democrats and Republicans, including Mr. Trump's campaign, not to restrict its own powerful ad platform, which allows political campaigns to reach targeted audiences and raise money from supporters. But other politicians, and some Facebook employees, including a group that petitioned Mr. Zuckerberg in October, have argued that the social network has a responsibility to stamp out misinformation on its platform, including in posts by politicians. Mr. Bosworth said that even though keeping the current policies in place "very well may lead to" Mr. Trump's re election, it was the right decision. Dozens of Facebook employees pushed back on Mr. Bosworth's conclusions, arguing in the comments section below his post that politicians should be held to the same standard as other Facebook users. They debated whether Facebook should ban or remove posts by politicians, including Mr. Trump, that included hate speech or forms of misinformation. One Facebook employee warned that if the company continued to take its current approach, it risked promoting populist leaders around the world, including in the United States. A Facebook spokeswoman provided a statement from Mr. Bosworth in which he said that the post "wasn't written for public consumption," but that he "hoped this post would encourage my co workers to continue to accept criticism with grace as we accept the responsibility we have overseeing our platform." Ultimately, the decision on whether to allow politicians to spread misinformation on Facebook rests with Mr. Zuckerberg. In recent months, he has appeared to stand firm on the decision to keep the existing ad policies in place, saying that he believes Facebook should not become an arbiter of truth. But he has also left himself room to change his mind. In November, a Facebook spokesman said the company was "looking at different ways we might refine our approach to political ads." Among those lobbying Mr. Zuckerberg is President Trump himself, who claimed on a radio show on Monday that Mr. Zuckerberg had congratulated him on being "No. 1" on Facebook during a private dinner. Mr. Bosworth said he believed Facebook was responsible for Mr. Trump's 2016 election victory, but not because of Russian interference or the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which millions of Facebook users' data was leaked to a political strategy firm that worked with the Trump campaign. Mr. Bosworth said the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica revelations uncovered by The Times, working with The Observer of London and The Guardian rightly changed the conversation around how Facebook should handle user data, and which companies should be given access to that data. But, he said, Mr. Trump simply used Facebook's advertising tools effectively. "He didn't get elected because of Russia or misinformation or Cambridge Analytica," Mr. Bosworth wrote. "He got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I've ever seen from any advertiser. Period." Mr. Bosworth, a longtime confidant of Mr. Zuckerberg's who is viewed by some inside Facebook as a proxy for the chief executive, has been an outspoken defender of the company's positions in the past. In 2018, BuzzFeed News published a memo Mr. Bosworth wrote in 2016 justifying the company's growth at all costs ethos, in which he said the company's mission of connecting people was "de facto good," even if it resulted in deaths.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Residents of the Bay Area will have the opportunity to see the Go Go's musical "Head Over Heels" before it comes to Broadway. The Curran Theater in San Francisco will host the production from April 10 to May 6 to start off the theater's first full season after being renovated. Set to the music of the Go Go's, including hits like "We Got the Beat" and "Vacation," "Head Over Heels" tells the story of a royal family trying to prevent an oracle's prediction from coming true. The show's producers plan to open on Broadway after that, but further details of the run have not been released. It had an initial production at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2015. A new play by David Henry Hwang, the author of the Tony winning "M. Butterfly," will follow "Head Over Heels" in the Curran's 2018 lineup, which was announced Wednesday. Featuring music by Jeanine Tesori, Mr. Hwang's "Soft Power" examines Chinese American relations in the present and future. Leigh Silverman will direct the production, which is scheduled to run from June 20 to July 8 after a premiere in Los Angeles at the Center Theater Group in May. In the fall, the performance artist Taylor Mac will bring the holiday version of his "A 24 Decade History of Popular Music" project to the Curran from Nov. 21 to Dec. 1. "Taylor Mac's Holiday Sauce" reimagines the music of the season to explore the conflicted feelings many have about that time of the year.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
WASHINGTON Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, tried to get ahead of a week of intense scrutiny for him and his company by visiting several top lawmakers in Washington on Monday and reiterating how sorry he was for the social network's failings. Mr. Zuckerberg, in a dark suit and tie and accompanied by an entourage of aides, held several meetings with leaders of the Senate Commerce and Judiciary Committees. He also posted testimony apologizing for Facebook's role in false news, data privacy leaks and foreign interference in elections, as his company announced that it would form an independent commission of academic researchers to study social media's impact on elections. The blitz of actions preceded Mr. Zuckerberg's facing lawmakers for the first time over Facebook's role and influence on society, set off by revelations that the data of up to 87 million Facebook users was improperly harvested by a British political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica. Lawmakers, furious over the reports, called on Mr. Zuckerberg to explain himself. He is scheduled to testify before congressional committees on Tuesday and Wednesday, when he is set to be publicly grilled. The prospect that Mr. Zuckerberg, a 33 year old billionaire, will be taken to task on Capitol Hill has created intense interest and a media circus. On Monday, he was trailed by more than a dozen television cameras and numerous reporters when he exited the office of Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida and a Senate Commerce Committee leader. Mr. Zuckerberg said nothing as he strode out of an Senate office elevator, accompanied by Joel Kaplan, Facebook's vice president for global public policy, who is based in Washington, and Brian Rice, a leading Democratic lobbyist for the social network, among others. Mr. Nelson, who met with Mr. Zuckerberg for an hour, said the chief executive was taking the situation "seriously." "He knows regulation could be around the corner," Mr. Nelson said, adding that Mr. Zuckerberg was forthright and answered questions to the best of his ability. Among the topics the two discussed was Russia's interference in the 2016 election, when Russian agents used Facebook to spread divisive messages to the American electorate, Mr. Nelson said. But when asked whether the meeting helped assuage his concerns about Facebook's privacy violations, Mr. Nelson said, "Count me as skeptical." He also said it was to be determined whether Facebook would be able to stave off more foreign disruption in the American midterm elections this fall. "I think he's trying," Mr. Nelson said of Mr. Zuckerberg, "but I think if we don't get our arms around this, none of us is going to have any privacy anymore." Staff for Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, said Mr. Zuckerberg and the senator were scheduled to meet on Monday. In addition, Mr. Zuckerberg met with the Judiciary Committee leaders, Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, according to a person briefed on the visits, who asked not to be named because the information was not public. Senator Grassley did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Thune's and Ms. Feinstein's offices confirmed the meetings with Mr. Zuckerberg but declined to elaborate. Facebook described Mr. Zuckerberg's interactions with lawmakers as "courtesy meetings" and pointed to Mr. Zuckerberg's prepared testimony that was released on Monday. In those comments, which were posted by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Mr. Zuckerberg reiterated how Facebook needed to do better in data privacy and other matters. "We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake," Mr. Zuckerberg said in prepared testimony. "It was my mistake, and I'm sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I'm responsible for what happens here." Mr. Zuckerberg added that Facebook must do more to protect its users' personal information and summarized some of the measures the Silicon Valley company is taking to lock down the data privacy of its more than 2.2 billion members. Those include blocking app developers from gaining access to the data of users who have been inactive for three months, restricting the ability of users to inadvertently share information about others in their networks and adopting stricter permissions guidelines and search features. On Monday, Facebook also began notifying the 87 million people whose data may have been harvested by Cambridge Analytica by posting a notification that they would see when they logged into the social network. In addition, all Facebook users will see a new feature highlighting which apps they use and which information they have shared with those apps. In recent days, Facebook also suspended two data analytics companies for inappropriately gathering data from their platform. AggregateIQ, a Canadian firm associated with Cambridge Analytica, was suspended on Friday, Facebook said. The company was accused of using data inappropriately harvested from Facebook to support the "Vote Leave" campaign for Britain to exit the European Union. AggregateIQ did not respond to a request for comment about its suspension, which was earlier reported by The Financial Times. According to a statement on its website, "AggregateIQ has never managed, nor did we ever have access to, any Facebook data or database allegedly obtained improperly by Cambridge Analytica." Facebook also said it had suspended CubeYou for inappropriately harvesting data, using tactics similar those of Cambridge Analytica. The company collected information on Facebook users through quizzes. CNBC, which earlier reported the firm's suspension, said people had been misled into believing the quizzes would be used for nonprofit academic research; instead, the data was sold to marketers. "Our apps and activity on Facebook have been subject to regular audits and reviews with the company," a CubeYou spokeswoman said. She added that the company was in compliance with Facebook's data policy and rules and that CubeYou's terms informed users that their data would be used for academic and business research purposes. Yet even as Facebook suspended data firms and took other actions over data privacy, worries about what can be posted on the social network continued. Facebook confirmed on Monday that it had removed a popular Facebook page with nearly 700,000 followers that was associated with the Black Lives Matter movement after it was discovered to be inauthentic. A Facebook spokesman said the individual who started the page was not who he claimed to be on Facebook. The inauthentic page was earlier reported by CNN. In a separate post on Facebook on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg addressed how the social network was misused by Russians in the 2016 presidential election and said that Facebook would create the commission of researchers to study social media's impact on elections. The commission's goal, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote, "is both to get the ideas of leading academics on how to address these issues as well as to hold us accountable for making sure we protect the integrity of these elections on Facebook."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
If much of fashion operates at hectic warp speed a mad dash for a new look or a new collection Emily Adams Bode of Bode (pronounced BOH dee) is the slow going exception to the rule. She is 28, but an old 28. While many of her peers, including those showing alongside her this week during New York Fashion Week: Men's, are scrambling, Ms. Bode's pace is slower. Five floors above Clinton Street, in her warrenlike studio and apartment, Ms. Bode has her stockpiles and her scissors, and operates more like a midcentury dressmaker than many of her fellow designers. Her business, only a year old, is still heavily weighted toward private clients; she has, at the moment, designs in two stores in Japan (including one of the best, United Arrows) and one in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has to keep her reach small, she explained: Her collection is built around vintage, antique and deadstock fabrics that she finds, from heirloom family quilts to African country cloths, and they are not infinitely extensible. "This is an early 1900s quilt," she said, taking one jacket by the sleeve. "This is it. It's just one. People love that. There was not a machine stitch in this quilt before we put it together." There is not much that Ms. Bode won't consider as raw material for her collection: bed linens and vinyl upholstery, quilts and tapestries. For her new collection, which she will present on Thursday, she road tripped through the south of France, stopping at flea markets and country houses along the way, with a scavenger's eye to anything and everything that might be alchemized. "We ripped mattress covers off," she said, pointing to a pair of striped jackets. "They had all the filling in them the feathers and everything. It was a nightmare, it went everywhere. But they have this beautiful weight to them." She has become an expert on the art of fabric cleaning and mending, haunting internet forums about enzymes and stain release. Ms. Bode grew up antiquing with her mother and aunts, and she has been using vintage fabrics since her days as a student at Parsons. While many of her classmates pushed the envelope of design, she began exploring the simple shapes she still uses: work jackets, boxy shirts and wide leg pants. "I had a meltdown moment: I'm the most wearable out of my class," she said. "Every other person was doing these really conceptual, drape y, crazy, feather boa things. My professors were like, 'No, no, no, you're going to be the one who actually has a company." That company is built on a deeply personal attachment to cloth and to individual items, heirlooms remade into new heirlooms. "I'm making things that people are supposed to have for 50 years or longer," she said. She has begun using the clothes to tell family stories. Her new collection takes up the life of an 83 year old great aunt in the south of France, whom she visited in her country home, staying in the attic, whose long held memories suffuse the whole. Her first presentation, in February, reimagined a long gone family home on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, sold after a father's death: a memory older than her own, incarnated. (Ms. Bode, too, spends summers on the Cape.) "I have aunts that call me the family archivist," she said. They were startled, seeing her February presentation, to hear her models, mostly friends, ambling easily and lazily through the space with its old furniture, rugs and flowers, calling out their names.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
American Realness, a small scale annual performance festival of the Abrons Arts Center, began just after 7 on Thursday evening with the audience seated onstage at the center's playhouse. In a 45 minute solo show titled "Wonder," a naked woman, Michelle Boule, briskly paced a figure eight pattern around the space with a fixed smile for several minutes, to some mild rock music. Later she donned dancewear and, at one point, a full length blue gown and matching wig. Then, at 8:30 in the Abrons Experimental Theater, Adrienne Truscott's 60 minute " ...Too Freedom ... " started, putting a literal spotlight on latecomers. An usher eventually sat down onstage and poured tea into a cup (nonstop a trick cup and pot were Thursday's highlight). Workmen constructed a wooden hut while a dancer wearing headphones sketched a handful of steps around the space. The final opening event I attended on Thursday night was a 10 o'clock show, nearly an hour long, in the Abrons Underground Theater: "13 Love Songs: dot dot dot," created and performed by Ishmael Houston Jones and Emily Wexler, with half the audience members lying onstage and being told to fall in love with their neighbors, starting with their hair, while pop music played. American Realness Michelle Boule in "Wonder," opening this festival at the Abrons Arts Center. Do these sound as silly and inconsequential as they were to observe? I hope so. American Realness presents itself as a festival of the cutting edge and interdisciplinary. But much of it is twee, stale, labored and amateurish, with various kinds of anodyne music as accompaniment. Those hoping to find the subversive and the challenging are instead confronted with the slack, the coy, the mimsy. To greet this stuff as interestingly experimental is to clap your hands because you believe in fairies. Ms. Boule's "Wonder" was a celebration of her own limited range. She changed gears several times, sometimes dropping her rictus to do modern dance moves to silence, in one passage propelling herself along the floor, face up, while stuffing her dress into her tights. The freshest section involved a hula hoop: While keeping it circling around her waist, she managed to execute (several times) a dance phrase involving a double pirouette and a grand jete. In the dullest sections, she stood and gazed at individual members of the audience while making small movements. It was much better to read about "13 Love Songs" than to live through Mr. Houston Jones and Ms. Wexler's performance. In print, it emerges that they think that the pop love song is corrosive. There is, of course, nothing original about this view: Choreographers, like other artists, have been reacting with satire or scorn to love songs for decades. But, as performed, it was seldom clear and never stimulating to think about how Ms. Wexler and Mr. Houston Jones felt about love songs or love. Some sections of the audience came primed and fell into obliging laughter during several sections of speech and song, while the rest of us sat there befuddled. Mr. Houston Jones, an enthusiastic if coarse performer, staged a slow physical collapse to "You've Lost That Loving Feeling"; in another number, he threw himself repeatedly sideways to the floor, a move so widespread among European dancers over 20 years ago that it used to be known as the Eurocrash. Ms. Wexler was at her best in a dance solo that began on half toe, with her face turned to the ceiling. But the piece was, at best, a loose collage of effects. No expressive focus was ever evident. Ms. Truscott's "...Too Freedom ...," the most deliberately absurd event, was also the most entertaining, though nothing matched the incessant outpouring of that teapot into that teacup. At the start, she behaved as if she were an usher before stripping down to dancewear and, with her headset on, stepping and kicking, mostly as if she were privately rehearsing and oblivious to the audience. At one moment, she looked out toward the spectators while very slowly descending into a split on the floor. Meanwhile, her co usher was joined at the tea table by colleagues who together ate most of a chicken. As an example of the harmlessly nutty, "Too Freedom" passed the time pleasantly enough, but there's nothing novel or memorable here. It's possible that other Realness offerings will be better. Two other productions were unfolding in other Abrons spaces; over all, American Realness is presenting 52 performances of 14 productions in 11 days, most of them in the three Abrons spaces. (For two days next week, the Museum of Modern Art will be the location for Ezster Salamon's "Dance for Nothing," an hourlong production based on John Cage's "Lecture on Nothing.") But Thursday's events strongly recalled the insider campiness that characterized too much of last year's festival. There's room in the world for the trivial, the silly, the daft, and often there's room in my heart for them, too. But American Realness too often hunts down examples that are unoriginal and clique ish. Rather than enlarging the world of New York performance, it shrinks it. Since this is a harsh judgment, I hope to be given cause to withdraw it in the days to come.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Credit...Ryan Shorosky for The New York Times Wild Horses and the Inmates Who 'Gentle' Them There's a term in the horse world known as "gentling." It refers to working with a wild horse until it becomes responsive to a trainer's commands, meaning that it no longer wants to kick you in the face. If handled properly, it even bonds with its trainer. Gentling happens every day at the Silver State Industries ranch in Carson City, Nev., a 1,100 acre property east of the Carson Range in the vast, harsh high desert south of Reno. Up to 2,000 wild horses are corralled there at any time; a good number are trained for adoption. The ranch is part of the Northern Nevada Correctional Center, a medium security prison that also houses minimum security inmates. Twelve to 15 inmates, most of whom have little or no experience with horses, work under the instruction of a cowboy named Hank Curry. It is the inmates who do the gentling. John Harris, an inmate who is taking part in the program, grew up on a family farm in Northern Iowa, so he wasn't a stranger to livestock. A mustang is not a barn horse, however. Often they are terrified, skittish and incredibly strong willed from having survived in the wild. "One time I fought with a horse for two hours to get him to walk three feet to a post," Mr. Harris, 38, said, "I was worked up. The horse was worked up." When he started in the Wild Horse Program at the prison two years ago, "I was a lot more aggressive with my training," Mr. Harris said. "I wanted something done now. That don't work. You have to take your time." He credited Mr. Curry for his softer approach: "Hank had to kind of gentle me." Mr. Curry, who is 67, no longer sees his job as strictly horse trainer, as he once did. Instead, he said, "I'm a counselor, a teacher, a horse trainer. You establish pride in the guy and pride in his job, he's going to be a lot more successful when he gets out of here." Everyone involved in the program recognizes the symbolism: the way the horses and the inmates are both penned up and how through the training process they rehabilitate one another. It was this aspect that appealed to Ryan Shorosky, a photographer who spent a week this spring documenting what he called "the beautiful parallel between the inmates and the horses, using each other to get to that next point." Wearing dusty Levi's, work boots and hand me down chaps, the inmates clean stalls and repair gear. They water and feed the horses and undertake the slow process of earning a wild animal's trust. It's dirty, bruising work in blazing heat. The men enjoy the sense of freedom, the fresh air and the camaraderie that develops among them and with the mustangs. "To take this horse that don't want nothing to do with you and you get to a point where you can walk up, touch it, pet it, put a halter on it it's a pretty good feeling," Mr. Harris said. The Wild Horse Program at the prison isn't unique. There are programs like it in Arizona, Colorado, California, Kansas and Wyoming. It's one of the ways the Bureau of Land Management is dealing with a population of mustangs and wild burros in the Western states that, after the 2017 foal crop, could be as high as 86,000. That is more than three times what the bureau deems a sustainable level, said Jenny Lesieutre, who, as the Wild Horse and Burro Public Affairs Specialist for the Bureau of Land Management in Nevada, promotes the program at the ranch.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Could a Merger of Men's and Women's Tennis Come Out of This Hiatus? When Roger Federer, with time on his hands in the midst of tennis's shutdown, floated the prospect this week of merging the men's and women's tours, Billie Jean King saw potential for her 50 year dream to come true. "I'm thinking, 'Yes! Maybe there's still hope,'" she said in a telephone interview. "I'm 76, but I'm hoping before I die that the men and women are together. It's the right thing for our sport." King, a 39 time Grand Slam champion and a longtime crusader for women's rights and women's sports, founded the Women's Tennis Association in 1973 after failing to persuade the men to create a joint venture. "It was really rough times, really rough, and I kept trying to get us all together, and the men just rejected us," she said. "But I think this is a new generation of men, and they are probably second or third generation of the women's movement." She added: "I think the men today are so different. I think they are uplifting. You look at the basketball players, what Kobe was doing with women's basketball. These guys want their daughters to have the same as their sons. That's not the way it was in the old days. It used to be all about the boys." Combining the tours a complex and ego imperiling task that is far from fruition could create more leverage for unified deals with sponsors, broadcasters and data companies. It could also provide a more coherent experience for fans, who now typically need multiple cable and digital subscriptions to follow the men's and women's games. Plus it might streamline the calendar, even if some separate men's and women's events remain, and eliminate differences in the rules. (The WTA, for example, allows in match coaching; the ATP does not.) There is still strong resistance to a merger from some male players, including the outspoken Nick Kyrgios, who remain convinced that their tour, which generates more prize money and attendance, should continue to go it alone. But Federer's pondering on social media "Am I the only one thinking that now is the time for men's and women's tennis to be united and come together as one?" hardly emerged from the blue. For now, the Grand Slam events operate independently, even of each other. "If you only talk about the WTA and ATP together, it's probably one plus one equals four," Gaudenzi said in a telephone interview from London this week. "But if you add the Grand Slams into the equation, it's probably one plus one plus four equals 20." Before the coronavirus pandemic, Gaudenzi presented his ideas to all of tennis's leaders, emphasizing a report from SportBusiness Consulting that estimated the value of global sports media rights for 2018 at about 49 billion. Professional tennis accounts for less than 1.5 percent of that figure, said Gaudenzi, who considers that far too low in light of the sport's international reach, its collective star power and a fan base that is about equally balanced between men and women. "Most of the sports are mostly male dominant in terms of audience," Gaudenzi said. "So it's a big advantage for tennis, because in today's world both the broadcasters and the sponsors want to reach both the men's and women's audience." The financial pain generated by the pandemic has intensified the tennis world's debate about and interest in teaming up. Both the ATP and WTA have shut down their tours for at least four months, postponing scores of events with no certainty of when they might be rescheduled. Wimbledon was canceled for the first time since 1945. Two of the other Grand Slam events, the French Open and United States Open, are still on the 2020 calendar, but in doubt. Unlike Wimbledon, neither the French Open nor the U.S. Open has pandemic insurance to help cushion the blow of a cancellation. Tony Godsick, Federer's longtime agent and the president of the agency Team8, said players and leaders tend to have little time to wrestle with large issues in the sport because they are often traveling. "Maybe because of the Covid 19 pandemic, for the first time in so long you have time although you don't know how much time and you also have incentive," Godsick said. "A merger might not work, but in the end of the day tennis would be shooting itself in the foot if it didn't give it a really hard try." The male stars Rafael Nadal and Stan Wawrinka have joined Federer in expressing support for exploring a merger. So have leading female players such as Simona Halep, Petra Kvitova and Garbine Muguruza. "Tennis has suffered from there being so many separate organizations in the past, and I believe that we would be stronger together," the second ranked Halep said in an email. "This global crisis gives us time to think and plan, probably an opportunity that won't come along again, so I'm interested to hear more about these conversations." Kvitova said in an email: "Of course, we hope that WTA players can be part of those discussions, too, because it has to come from both sides." Kvitova's comment reflects the fear that the men's tour would essentially absorb the women's tour and dominate any new partnership. "If you structure it well, you can protect against that," said Mark Ein, who owns the Citi Open, a combined men's and women's event in Washington, D.C. Others have said it will be critical to agree on a formula that accounts for the current disparities in the two tours' revenues and that aims to share future gains equitably. Micky Lawler, the WTA's president and its second ranking executive behind Steve Simon, the chairman, has been a public proponent for united governance. Simon has yet to express views as clear or detailed as Gaudenzi's, but the WTA will be facing a significant financial shortfall if it is unable to stage its season ending finals in Shenzhen, China, this year. The finals were placed in that location last year as part of a decade long deal that was significantly more lucrative than its predecessor and that allowed the WTA to double the event's prize money to 14 million. The WTA does have limited reserves, estimated to be approximately half of the ATP's. "Even before this virus, they were struggling," Chris Kermode, a former ATP chairman, said about the WTA. "You can say it's a good idea to merge, but in reality how does this work? It would have to be 50 50 voting rights and 50 50 revenue split. Otherwise, politically, it's worse than now. Basically a case has to be presented as to how this benefits both sides. If that's achieved, then it could happen." As Gaudenzi acknowledged, "the devil is in the details," just as it has been since the 1970s. In 2007 and 2008, the former WTA chief Larry Scott, who had previously been the No. 2 executive at the ATP Tour, made a serious effort to bring the tours together with King's support. He had extensive contacts, deep knowledge and ample ambition, and he commissioned a detailed analysis of the costs and benefits. The ATP was not swayed, and though there have been joint efforts since then, including a global data deal and a digital media agreement, they have not led to more. At the moment, the tours operate distinctly, despite sharing the same business model and customer base. King is optimistic, particularly with someone like Federer driving the debate. No male player of his stature has lobbied for such a merger in the past, and he has support from Nadal as well.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
SAN FRANCISCO Facebook said on Monday that it had recently found and taken down four state backed disinformation campaigns, the latest of dozens that it has identified and removed this year and a sign of how foreign interference online is increasing ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Three of the disinformation campaigns originated in Iran and one in Russia, Facebook said, with state backed actors disguised as genuine users. The campaigns were aimed at people in North Africa, Latin America and the United States, the company said. The posts crossed categories and ideological lines, seemingly with no specific intent other than to foment discord. Some of the posts touched on conflict in the Middle East, while others pointed to racial strife and some invoked Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, a Democratic congresswoman from New York, according to examples provided by Facebook. One of the campaigns focused more on the 2020 election. In that campaign, 50 accounts linked to Russia's Internet Research Agency a Kremlin backed professional troll farm targeted candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, according to an analysis from Graphika, a social media research firm. Roughly half of those accounts claimed to be based in swing states. The Internet Research Agency was also responsible for targeting the American electorate during the 2016 presidential election. Facebook said that it did not allow "coordinated inauthentic behavior" and said it would be more transparent about where posts were coming from and would better verify the identities of those putting up messages and ads. Among other measures, the company rolled out new features on Monday to label whether posts were coming from state sponsored media outlets. The revelations of the new disinformation campaigns highlight the difficulties that Facebook faces with its stance on free expression, a position that its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, emphasized last week. In a speech at Georgetown University on Thursday, Mr. Zuckerberg extolled the virtues of unfettered expression and how everyone should have a voice on the social network. But that approach has opened the door for foreign operatives and others to spread conspiracy theories, inflammatory messages and false news through Facebook. In a conference call on Monday about the disinformation campaigns and election security measures, Mr. Zuckerberg said his company was better equipped to handle false information on the site now. "Elections have changed significantly since 2016, but Facebook has changed too," he said. "We've gone from being on our back foot to now proactively going after some of the biggest threats that are out there." Facebook has been under pressure amid a near daily torrent of criticism from American presidential candidates, the public, the media and regulators around the world, many of whom argue that the company is unable to properly corral its outsize power. Ms. Warren, a front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, recently accused Facebook of being a "disinformation for profit machine" because it allowed false information from political leaders to circulate under its free speech stance. The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department are investigating Facebook's market power and history of technology acquisitions. To combat the critics, Mr. Zuckerberg has ramped up his public appearances. He recently gave several interviews to conservative and liberal media outlets, in addition to his robust defense of his company's policies at Georgetown University. On Wednesday, he will again be in the spotlight when he is scheduled to testify before congressional lawmakers about Facebook's troubled cryptocurrency effort, called Libra. In the conference call on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg said Facebook had become better able to seek out and remove foreign influence networks, relying on a team of former intelligence officials, digital forensics experts and investigative journalists. Facebook has more than 35,000 people working on its security initiatives, with an annual budget well into the billions of dollars. "Three years ago, big tech companies like Facebook were essentially in denial about all of this," said Ben Nimmo, head of investigations at Graphika. "Now, they're actively hunting." The company has also embarked on closer, information sharing partnerships with other tech companies like Twitter, Google and Microsoft. And since 2016, Facebook has strengthened its relationships with government agencies, like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and those in other countries outside the United States. But as Facebook has honed its skills, so have its adversaries. Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of cybersecurity policy, said that there had been an escalation of sophisticated attacks coming from Iran and China beyond the disinformation campaigns from Russia in 2016 which suggested that the practice had grown more popular over the past few years. "You have two guarantees in this space," Mr. Gleicher said. "The first guarantee is that the bad guys are going to keep trying to do this. The second guarantee is that as us and our partners in civil society and as our partners in industry continue to work together on this, we're making it harder and harder and harder for them to do this." Facebook does not want to be an arbiter of what speech is allowed on its site, but it said it wanted to be more transparent about where the speech is coming from. To that end, it will now apply labels to pages considered state sponsored media including outlets like the broadcaster Russia Today to inform people whether the outlets are wholly or partially under the editorial control of their country's government. The company will also apply the labels to the outlet's Facebook Page, as well as make the label visible inside the social network's advertising library. "We will hold these Pages to a higher standard of transparency because they combine the opinion making influence of a media organization with the strategic backing of a state," Facebook said in a blog post. The company said it developed its definition of state sponsored media with input from more than 40 outside global organizations, including Reporters Without Borders, the European Journalism Center, UNESCO and the Center for Media, Data and Society. The company will also more prominently label posts on Facebook and on its Instagram app that have been deemed partly or wholly false by outside fact checking organizations. Facebook said the change was meant to help people better determine what they should read, trust and share. The label will be displayed prominently on top of photos and videos that appear in the news feed, as well as across Instagram stories. How much of a difference the labels will make is unclear. Facebook and Instagram are home to more than 2.7 billion regular users, and billions of pieces of content are shared to their respective networks daily. Fact checked news and posts represent a fraction of that content. A wealth of information is also spread privately across Facebook's messaging services like WhatsApp and Messenger, two conduits that have been identified as prime channels for spreading misinformation. Renee DiResta, the technical research manager for the Stanford Internet Observatory, called Facebook's new measures at fighting disinformation "commendable." But she also said it was "incongruous" for Facebook "to reiterate a commitment to fighting misinformation" even as it has permitted political leaders to put false information in posts and ads.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
In the half century since it first appeared under the hood of production cars, the turbocharger has gone from a silver bullet amplifier of horsepower to a device so widely used it seems on its way to becoming a fixture of every new model. In truth, the old dog has learned impressive new tricks, schooled in part by 2014 rules changes in Formula One racing that mandate smaller, less thirsty engines. In its new job description, the turbocharger is also a producer of electrical power for potent hybrid systems. The basics have not changed: Turbochargers still harvest the energy of the hot exhaust stream to pump air into the engine under pressure, increasing horsepower. For everyday use, this technology lets carmakers install downsized, highly efficient engines that can still produce the power required for highway driving. There are limits to how far the technology can be pushed. In Formula One racing, where turbocharged 1.6 liter V6 engines are used in place of the naturally aspirated 2.4 liter V8s of recent years, those limits also prove to be opportunities. Because an engine can stand only so much pressure in its cylinders, and because a turbocharger should spin only so fast to assure reliability, engine designers add a valve that can open to dump some of the exhaust gases before they reach the turbine section of the turbocharger. This device, called a waste gate, is a necessary sacrifice, throwing away some of the combustion heat in trade for engine longevity. Grand prix cars in the Class of 2014 effectively double dip by using the turbo shaft to also turn a motor generator unit. The obvious benefit is generating electricity for the racecar's hybrid drive system good for a maximum of 160 horsepower under the new rules but there's more to it. The generator's output can be dialed up as engine speed rises, and the increased load limits the turbocharger pressure, a more efficient solution than using a waste gate. It gets better still: The unit can shift functions to become a motor, spinning the turbo in, say, a low speed corner, to make sure boost pressure is instantly available when the driver floors the gas for the straightaway. The lag that plagued early turbo engines becomes a distant memory. All this, and the cars will complete each race consuming about one third less fuel than they did last year. Automakers are not saying exactly when this technology may reach family cars, but the notion of racing improving the breed is not lost on participants like Mercedes Benz, Renault, Ferrari (owned by Fiat) and, starting next season, Honda. Work is well underway to bring some of the principles to mass production cars. The V6 hybrid systems that power the Formula One field now called power units instead of engines may be on the leading edge of development, but the concept of driving a generator from a turbine is at least 130 years old. Turbo generators were first used on a large scale in the 1880s to generate electricity from water power or steam, and they saw widespread use on railroad locomotives for heat and lighting. Formula One's path to greater efficiency employs a turbo generator, known as the MGU H or motor generator heat, and a motor generator kinetic, or MGK K, which recovers kinetic energy from braking. Together, the systems deliver twice the power of the energy recovery system called KERS that was used before 2014. This year's electric one two punch brings the output of the V6 engines back to the level of last year's V8s, the teams say. The MGU H is essentially an electric motor connected to the turbocharger's impeller shaft. As engine r.p.m. rises, and the hot exhaust gases spin the turbo up to its 100,000 r.p.m. peak, this motor can operate as a generator, converting heat energy from the exhaust gas into electricity. That electrical energy is then sent directly to the MGU K to provide a burst of acceleration, according to demand, or to the lithium ion battery pack for use later. "The new Formula One energy recovery systems go hand in hand with the direction of the automotive industry, particularly as it applies to the U.S. market," said Mark Christie, vice president for engine engineering at Ricardo, an engineering consultancy in suburban Detroit. Combining electric motors with turbochargers, superchargers or both, is a promising solution for road cars. As in the racecars, using an electric motor to drive a turbo or supercharger makes it possible to build pressure quickly so the engine can produce high levels of torque even at low r.p.m. Without electric muscle, devices that increase power by pumping air have inherent performance limitations, Mr. Christie explained, because of the wait for pressure to build as engine r.p.m. increases and brings the internal components up to speed. One workaround is to use smaller turbos, which have less low speed lag because they spool up more quickly, but they can quickly run out of breath. A supercharger driven by the engine is excellent for delivering air at low speeds, but its efficiency diminishes at high r.p.m. "Traditional boosting devices present a balancing act how to ensure good low to high speed transient response while still being able to meet the power target," Mr. Christie said. Among the possible solutions are compound systems like the Volkswagen TwinCharger and Volvo Drive E. Such arrangements use a conventional belt driven supercharger at lower speeds and shift over to a turbo for higher r.p.m. operation. Ricardo chose to use a compound design in its recently unveiled HyBoost concept engine, but with an electric twist. HyBoost pairs an electrically driven supercharger with the conventional turbocharger. Accelerating from low speeds, the electric supercharger kicks in briefly to force additional air into the turbo's compressor section to eliminate lag. Electricity for the motor comes from a 12 volt starter generator. Tailoring the turbo or supercharger to the electrical power on board the vehicle is one of the challenges, according to Dan Ouwenga, an engineering manager at Eaton, a supercharger manufacturer. "The major limitation is related to how much electric energy is required versus how much air flow you need from the supercharger," he said. Eaton's solution is being evaluated by automakers. It uses a 12 or 48 volt electric assist and a variable speed supercharger that is pressed into service according to load and demand.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Andy Warhol was not just an artist; he was a giant evolving sensibility that angled itself through a great portion of the late 20th century, absorbing everything in its passage and altering it, often permanently. He affected painting, film, fashion, partygoing, record keeping, packaging, branding and a very large manifest of items that fall under the heading of self presentation. His corpus includes everything from major paintings and epic films to Mylar balloons and generic business portraits to monosyllabic interview responses and the standard italic font that became wholly identified with his rubber stamped signature. You can't really appreciate anything Warhol did without having some idea of its place in his evolution. Consequently Warhol, more than even van Gogh or Picasso, endures not as a mere collection of works but as a narrative, one that gets more complex the more closely you look. Conveying that narrative, coherently and comprehensively, was the task faced by the art critic Blake Gopnik as author of the first true doorstop biography (there have been earlier efforts, but none on this scale). He had to account for how a shy, "effeminate" child of Carpathian immigrants in working class Pittsburgh came to occupy a central position in American and even global culture, while reinventing his artistic practice again and again, often radically, from the 1950s to his death at 58 in 1987, and also turning his unprepossessing self his bad skin, his passive and recessive personality, the toupees and wigs he wore to disguise his baldness, even his lifelong abject loneliness into an internationally recognized and respected trademark. Having interviewed more than 260 people and consulted some 100,000 documents, Gopnik succeeds in establishing the chronology and tracing the fine lines of Warhol's many succeeding interests, decisions, departures, whims and relationships of all sorts. Few artists' biographies can have recorded so many changes in style, stance and social milieu occurring often on a week to week basis for some 35 years, amounting to a density of information more akin to, say, military history. We will all find our favorite Warhol avatar, of the hundreds on offer, somewhere within these pages. Mine is 33 year old teeny bopper Andy, who worked accompanied by loud pop 45s played on repeat. After the artist Ray Johnson visited the studio, he wrote in a letter the phrase "We saw his recent paintings of Liz Taylor as we heard 'That Little Town Flirt'" over and over for a page and a half. That period didn't last long Warhol was never much attuned to music, despite his association with the Velvet Underground but it resonates because his paintings of the early '60s share many qualities with the girl group records of the same era: brass, grit, immediacy, not to mention the impression that both are at once throwaways and for the ages. Gopnik excels at disentangling the strands of the narrative and correcting common lore. Even someone who has been actively aware of Warhol's career for more than half a century may forget that there were four separate Factories over 25 years and that the many famous superstars did not all coincide; Edie Sedgwick did not share a timeline with Candy Darling. (There is a way in which Warhol's career resembles successive iterations of a long running TV franchise.) Gopnik's patient chronology brings a sense of proportion to the outline of the life. The Campbell's Soup cans lasted only a couple of years (with commercial reprises much later), and Warhol's body of work as a film director a mere five. By the same token, there are many generally overlooked pockets of his career, such as "Raid the Icebox" in 1969, when he compiled a touring collection of 404 objects from the storage rooms at the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, including "closetfuls of antique shoes"; such retrieval shows are common now, but were unknown then. And Gopnik gives the "Time Capsules" their due. These boxes (1974 87, and perhaps beyond), into which were thrown everything from junk mail to reels of film, were a natural progression from such earlier cataloging projects as the "Screen Tests," but represented a leap of conceptual logic nevertheless. "'It'll all get so simple that everything will be art,' Warhol had predicted back in 1966. ... Now he was finally making that prediction come true in full." 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. Gopnik's research turns up many testimonials by people who witnessed Warhol dropping his mask of robotic blankness and revealing the discerning intelligence within (few direct quotes, sadly), and he presses the case for Warhol remaining an "Old Radical" even while superficially resembling a "New Conservative." That does not prevent him from second guessing his subject at every turn. He makes Warhol seem vaguely imitative for incorporating silk screening into his paintings in 1962 a pioneering move, although he himself never made the claim because an employee of his alma mater was doing something like that in Andy's student days. He chides Warhol for his failures artistic and otherwise, and suggests he is being a conformist when he catches him coinciding with a general trend. He even scores Warhol for the angular signature logo of Interview magazine, "the scrawl of an artist too confident, too busy and above all too important to take care of his writing." There are several odd features to the book. Gopnik seems to think that too many proper names will confuse the reader, so that quotes are attributed to "one famous critic," "a convert to Warhol," "a hotshot young writer in New York," "one of the founders of Dada," "the same British critic who coined the term 'Pop Art'" and so on, like so many blind items. When Gopnik cites a "book of French film theory that had links to his Marilyns. ... Its inside front cover lined up 10 images of a gun toting Marlon Brando that were perfectly echoed in Warhol's line of Elvises," he is obviously describing Edgar Morin's "The Stars," so why not just say so in the text? (The book's endnotes appear online and in its e book edition.) "Warhol" throws off such mixed signals that it is difficult to determine what kind of reader it was intended for. It is a 900 page brick that evinces much studious research, and yet it is pitched as if it were a feature in a newsmagazine, or as if its readers were primarily serial consumers of celebrity bios. Not expecting the reader to identify Marcel Duchamp or Robert Rauschenberg on first appearance may be standard practice, but Gopnik doesn't trust you'll remember them from one time to the next. As a consequence, only a handful of people ever appear without epithets. Any elder who exerted an influence on Warhol will have his or her name preceded by "hero"; contemporaries are tagged as "friend" or "rival." Gopnik has no confidence in the reader's attention span, so recapitulations are constant; every point is made, made again, recast slightly, made yet again. Any foreshadowing that occurs early in Warhol's life or its reverse, the echoing that happens later on is liberally signposted, no matter how tenuous the connection. In 1967, a book by Warhol is published by Random House, "a big, mainstream firm recently acquired by RCA, itself a major 1950s client of Warhol's that had also acquired Hallmark, the patron for Warhol's Christmas tree." The writing is often lazy and reductive in ways that suggest the book is meant for immediate consumption rather than durability. Someone is said to be "blown away" by a nightclub; a gallery is described as "uber hip." Gopnik writes, "It's not clear how entertaining the plotless 'Lonesome Cowboys' could really have been for a moviegoing public accustomed to the adventures of Herbie the Love Bug" could he have chosen a movie less likely to share an audience with a Warhol production? He hits the soup can air horn again and again: "Presley ... had a genuine importance that made him more Cordon Bleu than Campbell's Soup"; Warhol "was canned soup, not eel bisque finished with smoked cotton candy." And when Gopnik takes off on a literary flight, the vessel is likely to crash: "At his best, Warhol didn't think outside the box. He thought outside any artistic universe whose laws would allow boxes to exist." All those things make the book much more difficult to read than it ought to be. Warhol made extraordinary work and led an equally extraordinary, unprecedented life that carried with it a significant budget of pain. He bridged the chasm between high and low as no one had before, and repeatedly found new ways to tilt the balance between art and life. He initiated or anticipated so many ways that people would later use communication and imagery that he could pass as having predicted Twitter and Instagram. He was gay, and presented himself to the world as a metonym of gayness (which did not prevent him from employing women as beards at times, nor his mother from trying to get him married off). He realized the social art that many had merely theorized before him; wherever he was, he turned his milieu into a spectacle, with every routine occurrence qualifying as an action, accruing documentation as it went. He played with the idea of business art as a kind of parody, then found himself ensnared in the real thing and dragged ever further into its depths, to the point of signing limited edition prints of Superman, Mickey Mouse, Santa Claus and other characters who by then were sub Pop. Gopnik gives the reader all the pertinent facts of Warhol's life, yet his ever present lecturer's whiteboard obscures all but the occasional fugitive glimpse of Warhol's soul.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Meet the Jamaican rock iguana. Its scaly body stretches around two feet long, tail not included. Slate blue spikes stick up along its spine, and a saggy sac of loose skin wraps around its head like a hoodless cowl. When cornered, it strikes with its front claws one reportedly ripped an eye from a dog. Once common in Jamaica, this iguana is now among the most endangered species in the world. And without the hard work of many conservationists, it would probably be extinct. Now those conservationists are hopeful that a decision that appears to have been made about the construction of a seaport in Jamaica could make restoring this lizard to the wild a little easier. Despite its armored appearance and tenacious lizard traits, the Jamaican iguana has barely survived a variety of threats: hunters, predators like mongooses (but also feral dogs, cats and pigs) and more recently habitat destruction for charcoal production. In fact, it was thought to be extinct until 1990, when a hog hunter's dog sniffed out a living, breathing animal in the forests of Hellshire Hills in Jamaica.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Saving the oceans is key to fighting the climate crisis, according to Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a Brooklyn born marine biologist and activist, who is a rising figure in the climate movement. Dr. Johnson, 39, is the founder of Ocean Collectiv, a conservation consultancy, and of Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank, and speaks frequently at TED Talks, climate rallies and her salons at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. Protecting the ocean is crucial for people at all economic levels, she said, not just bicoastal elites who look down their noses at plastic straws. You have talked a lot about how the oceans are crucial in the fight against climate change. How so? When people talk about the destruction of the Amazon, and how forests in general are the lungs of the planet, I always want to jump in and say the ocean is a huge part of that, too. Phytoplankton these tiny little plants in the ocean produce a huge percentage of the oxygen we breathe, and the population of phytoplankton is declining. That should be a cause for concern for every single person. You hear a lot of talk about plastic straws. Is that issue really a big deal or is it greenwashing? Straws are not the biggest problem facing the ocean, but they are an opportunity to think about what else we can do to reduce our impact on the planet. It really cracked me up the other day. I was walking down the street in Fort Greene, the neighborhood where I grew up and where I live now, and I saw this guy looking super stylish carrying an iced coffee in a plastic to go coffee cup with a plastic lid, and I turned to look, and he's got a metal straw in the cup. Part of me wanted to just hit it out of his hand and be like, "Dude, you're totally missing the point! If you're going to bring a straw, just bring your own cup!" Some of those straws, I guess, can end up in the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch." Are there any steps we can take to tackle that? I kind of recoil at this question, to be honest, because I feel like this has been done a million times: carry your own water bottle, carry your own grocery bags. But I think there is a harder answer, which is that it does actually require some sacrifice. Like I'll be walking down the street and I want to get a Juice Press because I'm hungry and I didn't bring enough snacks for the day, and I don't. There is an element of: "Don't buy the thing that's in plastic." There's no cute answer, right? Nothing that is disposable can be sustainable. The United Nations says that 93 percent of commercial fish stocks are being fished at or beyond capacity. What kind of fish should we avoid eating? Pending changes which could come at any moment, the U.S. still does a very good job of managing our fish population. So eat U.S. seafood and support your fishermen who are doing it right. And eat lower on the food chain. Instead of tuna, eat sardines and anchovies those little ones that are reproducing super quickly. Because tuna is so far up the food chain, if we were eating the land equivalent of tuna, it would be like eating whatever kind of dragon eats a lion. It's this incredible beast, and we will never be able to have sustainable tuna fishing at scale. But ocean farming of shellfish oysters, mussels and clams and seaweed is super sustainable, and we should all be eating more of those things because they actually just live off of nutrients in the water and sunlight. In fact, eating shellfish like oysters can be more sustainable than being totally vegan, because it's just such an efficient and low carbon way to make protein. Shellfish are absorbing carbon as they're making their shells. And seaweed is absorbing tons of CO2, because they're plants. Some people think ocean conservation is an elitist issue for people with beach houses. Why does it matter for people across the economic spectrum? It's no coincidence which communities bear the brunt of sea level rise, pollution and strengthened storms. Along the coasts, it's poor communities and communities of color who are most at risk. It's those who already have the fewest resources who are most in danger, not people with vacation homes and yachts. Ocean conservation is a social justice issue. Climate change deniers like to paint conservation as a pet cause for limousine liberals. It's so easy to think about the typical environmentalist as this stereotype of a fit white guy stepping out of a Prius, looking out into the mountains wearing a Patagonia jacket. But I've looked into the polling data, and that's completely false. It's young people, and it's people of color, and it's women who disproportionately care about environmental and climate issues, and are most supportive of stronger government policies to address them. Sixty eight percent of people of color say they are worried about the impacts of climate change, compared to 55 percent of white people. Do you see the green movement forging stronger ties to the social justice movement? I mean, Black Lives Matter has a part of their platform that's about climate and the environment, because it is a justice issue. If you think about the rates of asthma in inner city communities that are near power plants or exposed to other types of pollution, it's a lot higher. And when we think about immigration, and how a lot of migration is now driven by climate change, whether it's droughts and crop failures or the impacts of storms, that becomes a social justice issue that was triggered by the impacts on communities that did the least to emit the carbon to cause the problem. That's a lot of bad news to take in. What's the biggest reason for hope? Nature is super resilient if we give it a chance, right? If we stop polluting the ocean, it will be less polluted. If we stop overfishing, in most cases, fish populations will recover. The ocean has already absorbed about 30 percent of the excess CO2 that we've trapped by burning fossil fuels. And the ocean has already absorbed 93 percent of the heat that we've trapped. And so the ocean is trying its best to buffer us from our worst, right? We need to return the favor. This interview has been edited and condensed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'BOBBIE CLEARLY' at the Black Box Theater in the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater (in previews; opens on April 3). Eleven actors crowd into Roundabout Underground's cramped basement space for Alex Lubischer's comedy drama of truth, reconciliation and snacks. Bobbie committed murder. Bobbie is out of prison. A town of Nebraskans are asked to apportion guilt and innocence. Will Davis directs. 212 719 1300, roundabouttheatre.org 'THE EDGE OF OUR BODIES' at 59E59 Theaters (previews start on April 4; opens on April 10). Mostly a monologue, this metatheatrical coming of age tale from Adam Rapp ("Red Light Winter") starts with a girl and a train and a secret. In Jacqueline Stone's production, Carolyn Molloy stars as a high schooler who has ducked out of class and gone to visit her boyfriend. 212 279 4200, 59e59.org 'FEEDING THE DRAGON' at the Cherry Lane Theater (in previews; opens on April 3). The actress Sharon Washington's childhood was not exactly a fairy tale, but through the words of fairy tales, she understood life with her parents and grandmother in an apartment above a New York Public Library branch. Primary Stages presents Ms. Washington in this autobiographical solo show about books and burning. 866 811 4111, primarystages.org 'THE LUCKY ONES' at the Connelly Theater (in previews; opens on March 31). Let's hope the Bengsons never need to undergo a painful divorce just to generate more material. The husband and wife songwriters, who last gave us the courtship show "Hundred Days," now offer a semi autobiographical story, written with Sarah Gancher, about their teen years. Anne Kauffman directs. 866 811 4111, arsnovanyc.com 'MS. ESTRADA' at the Flea Theater (in previews; opens on April 2). There are not too many rap songs about celibacy, but that may change when the Brothers Q ("Othello: The Remix," "Funk It Up About Nothin'") premiere their adaptation of Aristophanes's "Lysistrata," a raunchy pacifist classic. Under Michelle Tattenbaum's direction, the members of the Bats acting company play the women and men of Acropolis U. 866 811 4111, theflea.org 'PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE GIRL' at the Doxsee (in previews; opens on April 2). Perhaps this Target Margin show, the first in its Sunset Park space, won't run for 1,001 nights, but it does have some stories to tell. Directed by David Herskovits, it stars Caitlin Nasema Cassidy, Deepali Gupta, Anthony Vaughn Merchant, Samy el Noury and Lori Vega in a riff on "Arabian Nights." 866 811 4111, targetmargin.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
A payment for a pair of drawings by Newman showed up in his bank account then vanished a few days later. When the 12,000 showed up in John Newman's bank account from someone who had bought a pair of his drawings online, his first thought was relief. But five days later, the money was gone. The check was fraudulent. His bank reversed the payment. And now the New York artist was out both the cash and the drawings, which he had already shipped. Mr. Newman had been swindled by a fake check scam, in which fraudsters take advantage of the lag between when banks show funds are available in a seller's account and when a check actually clears. "I was furious," said Mr. Newman, whose sculptures, drawings and prints are found in institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern in London. "I realized I got screwed, and there was nothing I could do." Fake check scams have become more common in recent years and are responsible for some of the highest losses of any type of fraud, according to the Federal Trade Commission. People reported losing more than 28 million in more than 27,000 fake check scams in 2019, according to the organization's fraud network. "The fact that the funds are available does not mean that the check is good," said Susan Grant, the director of consumer protection and privacy at the Consumer Federation of America, a nonprofit advocacy group. A common tactic is for scammers is to buy an item online and "accidentally" send a check for a higher amount. They then ask the seller to refund the overage. At this point, the funds may have showed up in the seller's account that typically happens a day or two after the deposit is made. But it may take the bank a week or more to uncover a bogus check. When the check bounces, the bank may then reverse the deposit, leaving the seller on the hook. Mr. Newman is known for his sculptural assemblages of disparate objects and materials, like bronze and tulle. The New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote in a review of a 2003 gallery show that his "contorted, discontinuous forms have an outrageous, ebullient, disorienting energy, like art in drag." Mr. Newman said he was initially wary of completing such a high dollar transaction online. This was the first time he had sold work through his website he would previously have referred inquiries to his gallery, but he no longer has one, he said. But the buyer, who identified herself as "Tracy Pearl" in emails that Mr. Newman shared with The New York Times, seemed sincere. He quoted her a price 7,500 for one drawing; 12,000 if she bought two. She'd take both, she wrote; her husband would send a check in the mail. The check arrived, Mr. Newman deposited it at his bank, HSBC, and the funds showed up in his account. Still skeptical, he said he went to a branch on Second Avenue the next day to confirm the deposit before he shipped the drawings. "Is there any chance the funds could be taken away down the road?" he said he asked the teller. "No," he said she told him several times. He shipped the drawings to Ms. Pearl, who gave an address in Houston, later that day (property records show that the address is the site of a three story townhouse). But then things took a turn. He received an email from Ms. Pearl saying that her husband had accidentally overpaid Mr. Newman, and made the check out for 14,000. She asked him to send her two 1,000 money orders to cover the overage. Mr. Newman was confused the check was for 12,000, the amount they'd agreed on. "It shows you how stupid they are," he said in an interview. "I'm a sweet guy, so if she would have sent 14,000, I probably would have sent 2,000 back." He responded that the amount was correct and that he had shipped the drawings. Then she started pleading with him: Her husband had just tested positive for the coronavirus, and she needed the money as soon as possible. "I fear some foul play here," he wrote back. "I am really uncomfortable with all of this. I am sorry to hear about your husband but ... we had an arrangement. And I feel we should just keep to it." She sent him one final email in September her husband was in quarantine; she needed the money. And Mr. Newman stopped responding. About five days later, he said, he checked his bank account, and the 12,000 was gone. He said HSBC notified him that the check had been fraudulent and debited his account for the full amount. He went to the branch to complain. But Mr. Newman said the manager told him there was nothing the bank could do. "Sorry, that's just how it is," he said the woman told him. "The bank treated me like dirt," he said. Though, he added, HSBC at least dropped the 10 processing fee it had charged him for the bounced check. (HSBC did not respond to a request for comment.) He filed an intercept claim with the post office to try to stop the delivery, but the drawings had already arrived. Mr. Newman said he had filed claims with the F.B.I. for internet fraud, the District Attorney in Houston for theft, and the United States Postal Service for mail fraud. He has also retained a lawyer to try to help him recoup the 12,000 from HSBC. Ms. Grant said that despite Mr. Newman's attempt to verify the deposit, a teller cannot make the distinction between when a check shows it has cleared and when the funds have actually been withdrawn from the other bank. "The only way your bank knows that the check you deposited is bad is when it is notified by the supposed drawer of the check's bank that it's bad," she said. Mr. Newman hopes his story serves as a cautionary tale. "I doubt I'll get the drawings back," he said. "But I hope sharing my story prevents other artists from falling victim to this scam."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
People used to tell Linda Celeste Sims that she looked like an Ailey dancer. She didn't have a clue what that meant. "I knew it was a modern thing," she said, "but I didn't know the grandness." When her roommate found out that the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was holding an audition for a female dancer, she dragged Ms. Sims, then 19 and a member of Ballet Hispanico, along. "I had a very disturbing dream the night before," Ms. Sims, 38, said in a recent interview. "There was a little box, a present with a bow, and it was hopping around. It kind of exploded, like fireworks." At that audition, 144 dancers showed up; Ms. Sims, still green enough to ask the artistic director, Judith Jamison, what her name was, got the job. "I didn't know who she was," Ms. Sims insisted with nervous laughter. "A smack of humility, I guess. She said, 'Well, my name is Judith Jamison, not JAME ih son, JAM ih son.' I knew by the way she said it, she was kind of upset." But that was nothing compared with the way Tina Ramirez, Ballet Hispanico's founder, reacted the next morning. "She said, 'I heard!' " Ms. Sims recalled. " 'You're fired.' She was so upset. I was like her daughter. I was the first protegee to go from the school to the company." Much has changed since 1996, though the subtle power of Ms. Sims's dancing at Ailey, which performs at City Center beginning on Wednesday, has only deepened. With a face that could only be described as angelic, she is one of the group's most soulful dancers, and not because she takes choreography to a melodramatically spiritual place. Slight and supple, Ms. Sims possesses the kind of silkiness that allows music to run through her. Her dulcet purity always comes as a happy jolt. Her longevity in all her time at Ailey, she's suffered only a sprained ankle is mind boggling. "It's ridiculous," said Glenn Allen Sims, an Ailey dancer and her husband of nearly 14 years. "But I see all the work she puts in after. She ices every night, she rolls out her body on the foam roller. It's not like, 'O.K., it's 7 p.m., and we're done.' " Masazumi Chaya, the company's associate artistic director, recalled: "Alvin always said, 'Use my step and show yourself.' She's a good example of a dancer who does that." "She would stick her foot in your stomach and say, 'Contract!,' " Ms. Sims recalled. "She knew she could pull way more out of you than you thought you were giving." Ms. Sims flourishes on that kind of tough love. As a dance student growing up in the Bronx, she struggled. "My parents worked three jobs sometimes," she said. "They know nothing about dance, but they knew I needed those ballet slippers that cost 50. Better make those ballet slippers last for two years." A graduate of Fiorello H. La Guardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts, Ms. Sims is half Nicaraguan and half Dominican; it was her Nicaraguan grandmother, a housekeeper at a Hilton hotel, who enrolled her in classes. At Ballet Hispanico, she began with flamenco. "We only had live music," she said. "That's why I don't count to this day. You can't be free dancing and counting." She lowered her voice. "There are a lot of people that do that," she added. "It's so disturbing. The eyes are the mirrors of the soul. That's from my teacher Madame Darvash." Ms. Sims credits the ballet teacher Gabriela Darvash with preserving her body. In her first class eight years ago, she was told to straighten her knee all the way. "In my mind, I'm like, 'It is straight,' " Ms. Sims said. "And then I did it. The next morning, Glenn looked at me and said: 'What did you do? Your legs look long.' My legs just instantly started taking a different shape. In one class. I swear to you, I'm not lying." Her staying power also comes from the uncanny ability to grow within roles. Her rendition in "Revelations" of "Fix Me, Jesus," which she often dances with her husband, is spellbindingly quiet. "I really enjoy whenever I can share a moment onstage with her, because what we're actually doing is highlighting our relationship," Mr. Sims said. "We're showing you who we are. If I had my way, I would only dance with her." In rehearsals, Ms. Sims's intensity is the opposite of her playful offstage persona; you get the feeling that she could dance through a tornado. Her focus helps her stay open, she explained. "As dancers, we are selfish, we are insecure, we are sometimes a bit conceited, and that clogs your arteries," she said. "You clog yourself to the point where you can't breathe, and you can't bring life into anything." Later, she added: "I was never a hater. I got a lot of hate, but you can't be a hater." In her early days with the company, she faced jealousy from some of the other women. "But I'm from the Bronx," Ms. Sims said with a smile. "That means if you have a problem with me, that's your issue. I got a lot of that, but what I ended up doing was creating a shell: When I was at work, I was at work." For her, the new generation of dancers that has recently entered the company has been a breath of fresh air. "I feel their intelligence," she said. "They don't seem to be caught up in that whole: 'I'm in Ailey right now. Now I'm an Ailey diva.' The less people that are in the company who think like that, the better." As she sees it, there's more at stake. "I want to move people because I'm moved," she said. "It means that in everything I do, I make sure I've investigated it to the point where it's in me. Every time I do 'Fix Me,' I do something different. How can you make something that you do every day taste, look, feel different? That's what separates a dancer and an artist. I want to be an artist."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
"The Guermantes Way" at the Comedie Francaise sets contemporary concerns aside to carve out a place in the theater's repertory. PARIS Who isn't yearning for lost time right now? Surely a new stage production inspired by Marcel Proust's sprawling, seven volume saga, "In Search of Lost Time," will nod to our current circumstances, you might think, as venues reopen and play catch up with audiences. Yet the director Christophe Honore, known internationally for films including 2007's "Love Songs," has resisted the urge. "The Guermantes Way" ("Le Cote de Guermantes"), his highly anticipated adaptation for the Comedie Francaise of the novel's third volume, is about little other than the world it creates and it's impressive enough to outlast immediate concerns and carve out a place in the storied troupe's repertory. Not only does it takes chutzpah to tackle Proust's magnum opus, whose meandering style has wrong footed many film and stage directors, but Honore ups the ante by dispensing with the first two books. "The Guermantes Way" opens in medias res, with the grown up narrator, Marcel, already obsessed with Oriane, the Duchess of Guermantes, and surrounded by characters whose back stories are only hinted at. Its setting alone is a stroke of genius. Since the Comedie Francaise's main stage is closed for renovation until January, the company has temporarily taken over the Theatre Marigny, a venue near the Champs Elysees. Improbably, the back of its stage opens directly onto a garden with a fountain, and the set designers, Alban Ho Van and Ariane Bromberger, constructed the decor the front hall of the aristocratic Guermantes family around large doors that lead outside. The result makes for a whimsical throwback to late 19th century Paris, with characters stepping out into the chilly night air to head to elegant dinner parties. "The Guermantes Way" is a class conscious piece of the Proust puzzle: The divisions between aristocrats, bourgeois families like Marcel's and servants are as clearly delineated onstage as they are in the book. The nobility's anti Semitism is also laid bare, though the debates about the Dreyfus affair (a political scandal involving a Jewish artillery officer) are occasionally hard to follow. Elsewhere, "The Guermantes Way" shuns realism, and not just when sound technicians follow the actors around holding boom mics. Memories, in Proust's work, have a life and shape of their own, and Honore treats them with a fantasy and immediacy familiar from his previous stage work. Take the opening scene, in which Marcel, played with restrained seriousness by Stephane Varupenne, sings Cat Stevens's "Lady d'Arbanville" as the Duchess of Guermantes (Elsa Lepoivre) walks in from the garden outside. It is an oddly perfect introduction to their non relationship: Marcel worships her from afar for the duration of his family's stay with the Guermantes in Paris. Nearly all the key characters get a moment in the spotlight. Sebastien Pouderoux is quietly superb as Saint Loup, an army officer attracted to his friend Marcel, while Serge Bagdassarian chews the upholstered scenery with irresistible bravura in the role of the flamboyant Baron de Charlus. Lepoivre veers between flashes of vulnerability and conceit as the Duchess. The unspoken love between her and Charles Swann, a central Proust figure who makes only a fleeting appearance here, is striking; as Swann, Loic Corbery deserves awards for the finest 15 minute performance in the repertoire. To ensure social distancing, one seat is left empty between each group of attendees at the Theatre Marigny, and there is no intermission, two rules that Paris theatergoers are getting used to. Since many French venues reopened in September, attending performances has felt like a race against the clock: Coronavirus infections are rising again, with new restrictions imposed seemingly every week in major cities. Theater has been spared for now, but there is no guarantee that won't change. In the meantime, a number of venues hastily rescheduled pre pandemic productions that had their runs curtailed last season. Two clearly deserved to be seen more widely: "The Dock of Ouistreham" and "And the Heart Is Still Steaming," which both delve into complex social trauma. "The Dock of Ouistreham" ("Le Quai de Ouistreham"), which was performed at the Theatre 14, is a one woman staging of a 2010 essay by the French journalist Florence Aubenas. To understand the reality of precarious work, Aubenas registered as an unskilled job seeker in the city of Caen, in northern France, accepted every job that was offered her and found herself cleaning ferries and offices at all hours. What initially sounds like a gimmick turns into a harsh look at the lives of many workers who tend to go unnoticed, and the director Louise Vignaud found a no nonsense, charismatic performer in Magali Bonat to match Aubenas's text. The rather obscurely titled "And the Heart Is Still Steaming" ("Et le Coeur Fume Encore") is also a work of documentary theater. Created by Margaux Eskenazi and Alice Carre, this bold ensemble production weaves a large number of stories into a wide ranging look at the legacy of the Algerian decolonization war, fought against France in the 1950s and '60s. To understand the conflict, which split the local population and left a heavy death toll in its wake, Eskenazi and Carre studied literary works of the time and other records. They provide context for both the French and the Algerian sides, with fully fleshed characters of all political allegiances. Still, "And the Heart Is Still Steaming" is at its best when it gets personal. Some of the cast members have family who fought in the war and play their own relatives, as they explain onstage early on. The seven actors never falter, yet as in "The Dock of Ouistreham," I found myself occasionally overwhelmed with the harrowing nature of certain details. This year has been so challenging for most of us that some productions, for all their strengths, may be more difficult to process than usual.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Jones Day, one of the nation's largest law firms, faced a harsh spotlight this year when six female lawyers filed a class action complaint saying they had faced gender and pregnancy discrimination while working there and had been subjected to a "fraternity culture." Now the glare has intensified, with a couple formerly employed at Jones Day charging in a federal lawsuit that the firm discriminated in its parental leave policies and that the husband was fired after he questioned the practice. The complaint, filed Tuesday, maintains that the firm and some of its partners promoted crude stereotypes about gender roles, with a prominent male partner asking rhetorically, "What would a man do on parental leave watch his wife unload the dishwasher?" The same partner, the suit claims, teased a male associate for taking parental leave to care for a child. The plaintiffs are Mark C. Savignac and Julia Sheketoff, who worked in the firm's elite appellate practice in Washington. Their lawsuit asserts that Jones Day's policy unlawfully denied Mr. Savignac the full leave he was entitled to after their son was born in January and that it unlawfully fired him when he complained about the policy. "I was shocked; we truly never considered that they would fire me," Mr. Savignac said. "We thought the law was so obvious." Under the firm's policy, biological mothers who seek to be a primary caregiver receive 10 weeks of paid family leave plus eight weeks of disability leave, while biological fathers who seek to be a primary caregiver receive 10 weeks of family leave. The firm also awards new adoptive parents of either gender 18 weeks of paid leave if they seek to be a primary caregiver. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has held that employers can award biological mothers eight weeks more paid leave than biological fathers if the additional time is tied to their recovery from the physical toll of childbirth. But in their legal complaint, Mr. Savignac and Ms. Sheketoff argue that Jones Day awards mothers eight additional weeks of paid leave without regard to whether their physical condition warrants it. The plaintiffs write that the policy gives "female associates more time to enable their husbands to prioritize their careers over child care" and "reflects and reinforces archaic gender roles and sex based stereotypes." Cynthia Thomas Calvert, who advises employers about family leave policies, said the claim's fate would hinge on determining whether the policy was intended to provide greater accommodation to recovering mothers or more time for bonding with a child. If meant to foster bonding, the time is supposed to be equal for fathers and mothers. Advocates argue that policies making it easier for fathers to assume domestic responsibilities help overcome an assumption that mothers are less devoted to their careers. Ms. Calvert said that the fact that adoptive parents receive the same amount of paid leave as biological mothers supported the plaintiffs' argument that the leave was for bonding, but that this fact was not decisive. A policy like Jones Day's does not appear to have been tested in court, but in 2015 CNN settled an analogous case with a biological father. David Lopez, a former general counsel of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, said Mr. Savignac appeared to have a strong claim that his firing was unlawful. Mr. Savignac was fired three business days after he and Ms. Sheketoff said in an email to the firm that the leave policy was discriminatory, and he had previously earned strong performance reviews, according to the complaint. 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. Jones Day defended its policy, saying it grants birth mothers eight weeks of paid disability leave to avoid having to ask for medical evidence that they are still recovering from childbirth. The firm said the firing of Mr. Savignac had not been in retaliation for criticizing the leave policy, which it said he and Ms. Sheketoff had done in 2018 without repercussions. Rather, it said, it fired him because he had shown a "lack of courtesy" to colleagues and an "open hostility to the firm," citing his email. The firm also said its adoption leave policy reflected the unique demands that adoptive parents can face, like foreign travel and legal proceedings. Jones Day's policy is at odds with a trend in which companies are increasingly eliminating the distinction between fathers and mothers or primary and secondary caregivers. They award all employees the same amount of family leave for a new child, though women who give birth can sometimes receive additional time to recover through disability leave. Jones Day has risen to prominence in recent years thanks partly to its ties to President Trump, whose campaigns it has represented. Several lawyers joined the administration from the firm, including Donald F. McGahn II, Mr. Trump's first White House counsel. Mr. Savignac said he had been on parental leave for a few weeks when the firm emailed to say that he was fired, effective that day. He said that he asked Ms. Sheketoff to sit down and hand him their infant, for fear she might drop the baby upon hearing the news. According to the lawsuit, after Jones Day fired Mr. Savignac, it refused to allow two partners who had worked closely with him and previously praised his work to recommend him to prospective employers. Mr. Savignac said he had applied to dozens of firms without receiving an offer before accepting an offer in June. Ms. Sheketoff left the firm while pregnant last year to work for a public defender's office, where she took a substantial pay cut. Separately, the couple contends that the firm paid Ms. Sheketoff less than it would have paid a man because of her gender. The complaint says that Ms. Sheketoff received a smaller raise than she otherwise would have in 2017 after a negative evaluation from a male partner who scolded her for being insufficiently deferential. The partner did not scold male associates who failed to defer to him, according to the complaint. Jones Day denied that it had discriminated against Ms. Sheketoff and said that "her reviews from multiple partners were mixed." Ms. Sheketoff was at Jones Day for almost four years, and Mr. Savignac was there about 20 months. Their allegations echo those in the class action complaint against Jones Day, filed in April, that spoke of a "fraternity culture." That lawsuit, pending in federal court, contends that women who give birth face obstacles to advancement at the firm and that women who have a second child are often asked to leave within a few months of returning to work.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
The soccer megastar Megan Rapinoe captains Seattle Reign FC, helped the U.S. women's soccer team to World Cup victory in 2015, and will lead the national team as co captain in France for the 2019 World Cup, which begins June 7th. Based in Seattle, Ms. Rapinoe flies around the country for games during the National Women's Soccer League season. When the team travels together, there's fun "Somebody is always yakking about something. Usually it's me, to be honest" but Ms. Rapinoe prefers to opt out of the group reservations to better access the perks her frequent flier status affords her. "I'm generally out of the group and further forward on the plane. I do not suffer for the sake of camaraderie, ever," she said. Ms. Rapinoe also has national team duties and estimates that she flies at least two or three times a month for soccer. When she and her girlfriend plan vacations, it's during her short off season, usually mid November to early December. "The last few years we've been going to the Caribbean," she said. "I'm eyeing San Jose del Cabo for our next vacation. Not, like, Senor Frogs Cabo, but nice bougie Cabo." Does she exercise on vacation? Not if she can help it, expressing a sentiment familiar to most people who ambitiously plan to work out on holiday. "I try to time my vacation with that three week period that we really just need to be off our feet and not doing anything other than wading in the pool. Otherwise I just feel like it takes over I wake up and the only thing I can think about is my workout until I get it done, and that's just kind of annoying. So it's nice to be able to kind of let loose and not have to think about it." Here's what she can't travel without. "I'll always have a few bars in the bag for sure. As soon as you get on the plane, it's like you haven't eaten in 12 days I don't know what happens, I'm starving every time. I really like Clif Bars and Luna Bars, those are probably my favorite. And I'll travel with my protein powder and my protein shaker." "If I'm gone for a week, it's five tights, five shirts, five sports bras, five pairs of underwear, five socks, five, five, five, five, five of everything. My bag has not been under 50 pounds since 1982 and I don't even try." "I usually have CBD drops of some kind so I can just relax with all the travel. I use it as an overall health benefit. I usually take it at night or I definitely will take it if I'm going on a long flight. We have to be kind of careful with how much THC is in those. Sometimes, at a competition they don't really test for it, but then they will. So you have to be careful. Select is a good one; they have just a pure CBD line." "I take three multivitamins in the morning, I take three fish oils, I take two vitamin D, an iron, a turmeric and a probiotic. And then at night, I'll take three multivitamins as well. "I never claim to be an iron woman. With the amount that we travel and everything, I need all the help I can get to stay healthy. If it's going to give me just a little gain, I'll try it." "I want to look like a human being and not like I'm walking off the sports field, so I always have a scarf with me. I always try to look, like, decently cute." This interview was condensed and edited for clarity. 52 PLACES AND MUCH, MUCH MORE Follow our 52 Places traveler, Sebastian Modak, on Instagram as he travels the world, and discover more Travel coverage by following us on Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: Each week you'll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to photos from all over the world.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Chrysler announced Thursday that it was recalling 33,433 trucks and sport utility vehicles in two actions in the United States because the tire pressure monitoring system could display a false low tire pressure warning. The recalls cover 23,000 Ram ProMaster vans from the 2014 model year and 10,390 Jeep Wrangler S.U.V.s and Dodge Caravan and Chrysler Town Country minivans. The automaker said it was not aware of any accidents or injuries related to the defect. (Reuters) Ford said Thursday that it was issuing a regional recall of 204,448 Ford Edge and Lincoln MKX crossovers from the 2007 8 model years in the United States and Canada because of a potential fire risk. A fuel tank bracket is prone to corrosion and can cause fuel leaks and lead to fire, the automaker said. Ford said it was not aware of any accidents, injuries or fires related to the defect. In the United States, the recall covers 186,024 vehicles originally sold or currently registered in Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia and Wisconsin. (USA Today) Hyundai said this week that it would release a gasoline electric hybrid car aimed at competing with the Toyota Prius. Although the automaker did not provide further details, Kim Choong ho, Hyundai's chief executive, said at a press event that the company would build competitive hybrids, plug in hybrids and fuel cell vehicles in the future. (Reuters) Ford announced Wednesday that it would unveil an updated version of the Ford Explorer at the Los Angeles auto show next month. Automobile Magazine predicted that the 2016 model would receive a skin deep makeover, but retain the same engine and drivetrain components. (Automobile Magazine)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
This Sunday is the Big Sur Marathon, which I signed up for with my husband and father last July and have been training for since ... and I'm not doing it. I got my long run up to 17 miles, but then it all went south, with searing pain in my left iliotibial band and aches in both knees. I took two weeks off running, diligently doing the daily exercises prescribed by my physical therapist. Upon return I managed two easy short runs and a 10 miler, but the pain came back. Part of me knew it was time to quit, but the rest of me didn't want to believe it. All of the articles I found on running websites talked about how to come back from injury and cross that finish line, not how to stay away. But I finally gave myself permission to give up and realize it's very much in keeping with the rest of my life right now, as I am learning the lost art of quitting. I'm not talking about the spectacular epicfail stories that are so in vogue, with successful entrepreneurs sharing their crash and burn experiences as a rite of passage at FailCons around the world. I'm talking about quitting before the going gets tough. Leaning out. Not pushing yourself beyond what you think you can do. And yet. Last year I walked away from what, on paper, was the dream job I had been striving toward for most of my career: I had been working in corporate social responsibility for 15 years, and got the chance to lead that function for Amazon. But it turned out not to be the perfect fit, not least because during my 22 month tenure in the role my twins morphed from speechless baby lumps into wondrous compelling little people. (They're now 5.) My hours were manageable, but I wasn't as present as I wanted to be when I was home. Could I have "had it all"? Sure: I had a supportive stay at home husband, a corporate salary, and plenty of working parent role models in friends, colleagues and my own upbringing. Nor have I ever quit anything. Ever. I've always been all in, a "Completer Finisher," someone who sets ambitious goals and achieves them. I ran my first marathon while writing my first book the year after I had twins, for goodness sake. But when I paused to really pay attention and stopped busily managing logistics and proverbially running through the pain I knew it wasn't right. It pained me to walk away from the team I had built and what we might have achieved together, but the quality and quantity of time I've had with my family and for myself since then has far outweighed my regrets. Turns out my quitting didn't stop there. For the first time, I've walked away from half finished drafts of writing that didn't flow. I've turned down consulting projects that I could have done with my eyes closed because I don't want to do anything with my eyes closed anymore. I know that it is an enormous luxury to be able to choose not to work for even a short period of time. But I also realize that it is a necessity to hit the pause button once in awhile. Wayne Muller, the author of "Sabbath," has written about how cultures throughout history have recognized the importance of stillness and rejuvenation: The creation of the world was complete after God rested on the seventh day, not before. Mr. Muller pointed out to me that cycles of rest and activity aren't optional in the natural world. "The bears don't go, 'Oh, man, I gotta hibernate, I don't have time! I'm a little too busy to go dormant this year, but I'm sure I'll do it next year.'" Plants and animals do not defer dormancy until they cross off just one more thing on their to do list; they have to shut down in order to live another season. Our hyperactive culture is starting to acknowledge the importance of getting enough sleep and unplugging from our devices. I am working on finding the right balance between literally and metaphorically sitting on the couch, and honoring my need to stay active and channel my energy. I took an art class; I stepped up my fiction reading. I returned to the Coming Into Your Own women's retreat, which I've found helpful in the past for structured reflection. The retreat's co founder, Barbara Cecil, practices one day of silence every month, dedicated to "listening from the inside out, rather than fulfilling what's on your list." Maintaining what Ms. Cecil calls a "steady diet of spaciousness" is particularly important for people (like me) who find themselves at a crossroads, and might be tempted to think and plan their way into what's next. "You can't plan your way into a life where the externals what you're doing and who you're with and where you are match up with your soul," she said. "That congruence is only accessible by deeper listening. Planning precludes a certain level of listening, because the answers come usually when there's some spaciousness. A plan often isn't alive." Mr. Muller also writes about the ancient Greeks' notion of kairos, roughly translated as the right or opportune moment: "They had an understanding that there was a difference between clock time and the experience of living in time," he told me. "Clock time had its own kind of military pushing through, in spite of whatever showed up; whereas kairos is the time willing to be stopped by the unripeness of that subject at that moment." To butcher the concept of kairos in modern parlance: knowing when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em. The job probably would have been right at a different stage of my life; another day I will take on a marathon and cross the finish line. Am I still angry about bailing on Big Sur after months of prep, and experiencing regular waves of doubt about quitting that and everything else that I've quit in the past year? Of course.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
Whether a painful strep throat turns into a fatal case of heart disease depends not just on prompt antibiotic treatment but also on the patient's genetic makeup, according to a new study led by Oxford University scientists. The discovery could help the long fight to find a vaccine against Group A streptococcus bacteria, which cause strep throat, scarlet fever and rheumatic heart disease. (Antibiotic resistant versions of the same pathogen that get under the skin can rot muscles away and are sometimes called flesh eating bacteria.) About 15 million people around the world have rheumatic heart disease, scarring of the heart valves that can lead to early death unless the valve is surgically repaired or replaced. The disease is mostly a relic of the past in rich and middle income countries, where pediatricians quickly treat strep throat and rheumatic fever in children, which causes the joint pain once called childhood rheumatism.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Abby Guido is dreading the winter. The cold will force her family back into the same kind of lockdown they faced in the early days of the pandemic. "It's constantly on my mind," said Ms. Guido, 41, an assistant professor of graphic and interactive design at Temple University. Ms. Guido's husband, Chris, has lymphoma, so the family needs to be particularly careful. He's in remission, but since chemotherapy has weakened his immune system potentially elevating the risks of Covid 19 the family stayed in lockdown until the weather grew warmer in late May, allowing safe outdoor activities. At last they could ride bikes with their two children, explore the park and picnic with friends. Soon this will end. The isolation will return. Ms. Guido recently began taking the antidepressant Lexapro to calm the looming anxiety, "kind of in preparation for the feelings I know will be coming this winter." Millions can relate. The summer brought relief for many outdoor brunches, rambling walks, beers on the stoop yet in the latest of 2020's cruel twists, the plunge in temperature may cause a surge in infections and stress. "This is going to be brutal. I think it's unprecedented on every scale," said Kim Gorgens, a professor of psychology at the University of Denver. The stress of heading back indoors does not exist in a vacuum, Dr. Gorgens said, but is part of a bleak mix of concerns anxiety over the presidential election, economic uncertainty, wildfires, protests over racial inequalities and that all of this, collectively, is "reaching a kind of fever pitch." This is especially true for underprivileged and marginalized communities, where large multigenerational families are often crammed into one home, said Dagmawi Dagnew, a psychologist with the Department of Veterans Affairs and co founder of a volunteer organization providing mental health resources to the Ethiopian American community in Philadelphia. "Some of us have the luxury where space is taken for granted," said Dr. Dagnew, but for low income people, the stress is "related to basic needs" such as ventilation, child care or helping older parents. And all of us, in every circumstance, are dealing with the cumulative toll of six plus months of the pandemic. "We're moving from sprint mode to marathon mode," said Bethany Teachman, a University of Virginia psychologist specializing in anxiety. She added that since stressors tend to pile up over time, we'll be "going into winter feeling depleted and exhausted." So how can we handle the stress of heading back indoors? What are the best strategies? Dr. Teachman recommends a three step approach: Acknowledge, find alternatives and then make a plan. Start by recognizing that it's OK, and even helpful, for people to "grieve what they have lost," said Dr. Teachman, "because there are real losses." This kind of acceptance is crucial for "emotional regulation," explained David Rosmarin, the founder of the Center for Anxiety in New York, and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "Accept the fact that it might be a crappy winter. Don't try to fight it. Let the emotions come. It's a wave. It crashes over you, and then it passes." Once we've acknowledged the hardship, "the critical piece is to not stay stuck there," Dr. Teachman said. "We can recognize that things are hard, without wallowing." Identify what we have lost (such as socializing), and then find alternatives maybe online meet ups, a pod with another family or simply bundling up. "If you have the opportunity, invest in a really good winter coat," Dr. Teachman said. "Look into a little heater to put on a patio." Planning ahead is important. "Plan now before it gets very cold," Dr. Teachman said. This is partly for practical reasons that heater might be on back order and partly for psychological ones, as "it's actually much harder to make and implement plans once you're already feeling anxious and stressed." Dr. Dagnew noted that uncertainty is a key reason we feel stress, so "having a plan is the antidote for uncertainty." Every therapist emphasized the importance of social connections. "We are social creatures, and we can't fight the pandemic by socially isolating ourselves," said Stefan Hofmann, a professor of psychology at Boston University, and the author of "The Anxiety Skills Workbook." "Very few people are able to weather the storm by sitting in the room and meditating." This will likely mean, yes, more of the dreaded Zoom calls. "You might roll your eyes and hate every minute of it," Dr. Gorgens said, but we should think of it as "taking your medicine." Other basics we shouldn't overlook: eating healthfully, exercising regularly, following routines (to maintain a sense of control), limiting alcohol and especially getting plenty of sleep. "That's where you'll get the biggest reward, as sleep is the common denominator across every mental illness," said Dr. Gorgens. She also recommended that we "limit exposure to the 24 hour, inflammatory, incendiary news cycle, that will only get louder in advance of Nov. 3." Consider discrete times for news consumption (such as blocks in the morning and evening), as opposed to an IV drip throughout the day. As we're nudged back indoors, we'll be making constant calculations about what is an acceptable level of risk, which varies for each person: Can a friend swing by for a brief indoor visit if you both wear masks? Can you then offer a cup of coffee, which would mean taking off the mask? Is that OK, if you stay six feet apart? And if you decide that's allowable, can you just let them stay for lunch or to watch the game? To lower the stress of that never ending Covid 19 Math, Dr. Teachman suggested having "some kind of system, so it doesn't feel overwhelming every time." You might make decisions based on checking the test positivity rate from your local health department or guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Teachman said she uses the online risk calculator at MicroCovid.org, which uses estimates from Covid 19 studies to help users quantify the risks of various scenarios. (CovidCanIDoIt.com offers a similar tool.) Also, don't underestimate the power of a simple phone call, reaching out and asking for help. "It's really basic, and it's still very dependable," said Nicole Davis, clinical director of crisis services at Seattle's Crisis Connections hotline. Ms. Davis added that crisis call centers (such as the national suicide prevention hotline, at 800 273 8255) are excellent resources for anyone experiencing acute anxiety and that you don't need an emergency to call. Finally, Dr. Hofmann suggested that our end game should be to flip adversity into opportunities. "For anybody who wants to be more resilient, this is the magical thing to do," Dr. Hofmann said. He advised focusing on meaningful projects and connections; in his case, he has spent more time bonding with his 17 year old son. Maybe it's a new career goal, new hobby or new creative outlet there's at least a bit of truth in those tired memes reminding us that Shakespeare wrote "King Lear" during a plague. Positive mind sets matter. Goals give purpose. "We cannot change the pandemic. It is here. We have to accept it," Dr. Hofmann said. Instead, he advised: "Find where you want to go with your life, and go in this direction."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
The list of carry on limits airline passengers can carry in their cabin baggage on international flights which currently includes liquids, gels, aerosols and creams will soon include powdered material, the Transportation Security Administration has announced. The limit on powders to 350 milliliters, or roughly 12 ounces, the size of a can of soda, has been enforced since last summer on domestic flights when the agency began enhanced security screening procedures, including requiring fliers to place all personal electronics larger than a cellphone in a separate bin for screening. Beginning June 30, it will ask international screeners to adopt the limits on powders for fliers coming into the United States. "These measures are part of T.S.A.'s efforts to stay ahead of threats, keep passengers safe and constantly increase capabilities through a layered approach to security," Mike England, a spokesman for the agency, wrote in an email. He identified powders including fentanyl and pepper powder "that could be used to irritate or harm aircraft passengers and aircrew if released during flight."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Every time you look at a stage these days, it seems as if yet another sensitive plant has sprouted there, glowing with eager crushability. You know the types those socially challenged, thin skinned, easily rattled adolescents like the self appointed, agoraphobic detective of the Tony winning "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" or the stammering, fabulist high school student in the hit musical "Dear Evan Hansen." Joining their rarefied company this season is 17 year old Luke Browst, who lives online under the screen name of Kid Victory. That's also the title of the unresolved new musical by Greg Pierce and the fabled Broadway composer John Kander that opened on Wednesday night at the Vineyard Theater. It's a name that would seem to promise an upbeat story of a plucky young hero battling and vanquishing steep odds. But no. Luke a child of devout small town Christians who is portrayed with fully committed anguish by the appealing newcomer Brandon Flynn has problems that the lads of "Night Time" and "Evan Hansen" couldn't dream of, or not without having nervous breakdowns. This, after all, is a boy whom we first see (in a flash image prologue) handcuffed to the wall of an airless basement with a single mattress on the floor, the kind of place that regularly shows up in episodes of "Law and Order: SVU." And though the story of "Kid Victory" begins after Luke has been rescued from what turns out to have been a year of drugged captivity in thrall to a deranged former history teacher, he never really leaves the dungeon he once called home, not in his mind. Clint Ramos's single set keeps that mattress, and those handcuffs, in full view of the audience throughout this small, uneasily assembled production, which is directed by Liesl Tommy. Mr. Kander, it seems safe to say, is not afraid of the dark. The settings for his earlier works mostly created in tandem with his longtime partner, the lyricist Fred Ebb, who died in 2004 have included a Nazi infested Berlin nightclub ("Cabaret"), a cellblock for Jazz Age murderesses ("Chicago") and a dying European town held economic hostage by a rich, vengeful and macabre woman scorned ("The Visit"). Even given such a rich history of singing in the shadows, the subject of "Kid Victory" feels especially unpromising for any musical that doesn't aspire to grim, grand (guignol) opera or creepy camp. And this latest teaming of Mr. Kander and Mr. Pierce (who previously collaborated on "The Landing") definitely has other aspirations, toward a laudable but elusive psychology delicacy. You can imagine the artfully brooding songs that such a boy might give voice to, especially from a past master of musical neuroses like Mr. Kander. Yet Mr. Flynn is the only one of the show's nine ensemble members who never sings a note. Presumably, this silence is to suggest that Luke has been stripped of his identity and hence his own song. And it would seem that the melodies that percolate throughout the show often as underscoring or sung fragments as opposed to full numbers are meant to summon the world as Luke hears it, a social choir of sorts in which he cannot participate. This perspective comes across best in hymns performed by members of the church to which Luke's parents belong, in which tunes of sweet uplift are tugged by an ominous undertow. But Mr. Kander mines a number of musical veins, including the jaunty jazz and vaudeville pastiches for which he is best known, with results that are scattered, a bit bewilderingly, among the characters. Similarly confusing is the use of the supporting cast to shift, in a single song, between whomever they're playing and the accusing voices of recrimination in Luke's head. It's a perfectly fine idea, but you won't understand what a lot of the repeated lyrics in the early numbers mean until late in the show. The cast includes some first rate performers, including the excellent Karen Ziemba and Daniel Jenkins as Luke's uncomprehending parents. Dee Roscioli is a crowd pleaser as the eccentric shop owner and town misfit who gives Luke a job. Blake Zolfo and Laura Darrell do nicely as two possible romantic interests for our sexually conflicted hero. And Jeffry Denman is unnervingly intense as Michael, the clean cut tyrant who becomes Luke's self appointed mentor, father and (possibly) lover. The specter of Michael keeps showing up in Luke's waking dreams, interrupting his work and everyday social encounters. But like much of this musical, the scenes in which he appears have a muddled fuzziness, as if everybody involved had drunk of that opiate laced root beer with which Luke was drugged by his captor.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
In the fall of 2015, Nina Lorez Collins, a former literary agent, writer and mother of four young adults, including a pair of twins, was experiencing a fairly typical middle aged malaise. She had a complicated second marriage, and her body was betraying her textbook perimenopausal stuff, awaking most nights at 3 a.m., heart pounding, soaked in sweat. When she Googled "perimenopause," it amused her to read that one of the symptoms was "impending sense of doom," and she noted her discovery in an uncomplicated (until recently) manner: a Facebook post. Friends wrote back, half seriously, suggesting she start a group for their cohort, but what to call it? Black Cohosh (for the herbal remedy)? How about What Would Virginia Woolf Do? one friend joked darkly, because of course what Woolf did, at 59, was kill herself. Within a week or so, Ms. Collins, now 48, had created a secret Facebook group with just that title, inviting her friends into the internet era's version of a consciousness raising group, where women of a certain age could talk about things they didn't want to share with husbands, partners or children. That would be everything from the peevishly quotidian (complaints about dry skin or men not shutting cabinets) to the truly harrowing (suicide ideation; job loss at middle age; bad marriages; domestic abuse; and children suffering from drug addiction). And sex. There would be lots of chatter around sex: requests for tips on technique; concern about "the handful of limp" of an older boyfriend; vaginal atrophy; dry vaginas; sex toys; bad sex; no sex; anal sex; the viability of hiring a male prostitute; who has an orgasm first during sex: weird places to have sex; obligatory sex; sex with an ex; tantric sex; group sex; and many, many posts about coconut oil (see "dry vaginas," above). Ms. Collins, who lives in Brooklyn Heights in a modish duplex apartment overlooking the East River, is emblematic of a certain demographic: mostly white though Ms. Collins is half black expensively educated and housed liberals. You would assume that group would mirror itself online and stay small and homogeneous. But within a year of its founding, WWVWD, to use its colloquial abbreviation, had more than 1,300 members; the week after the presidential election there was an increase of another 1,000, Ms. Collins said, with many seeking a way to marshal themselves for political action. The original group, which Ms. Collins changed from "secret" to "closed" (meaning it can be seen by the public), begot subgroups, for those who wanted to focus on philanthropy, activism, business networking and writing. Woolfers in New York City began meeting in person, as Ms. Collins led field trips to Toys in Babeland, the sex accessories emporium on the Lower East Side, and hosted Scrabble tournaments and clothing swaps. There are now more than 7,600 Woolfers across the country, from New York City, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles, as you might expect, but also from Arkansas, Chicago and Maine. And Ms. Collins, who spent a few weeks last month on a cross country road trip with a new boyfriend meeting Woolfers in Memphis and Telluride, Colo., among other spots, has a new book, out in April, called "What Would Virginia Woolf Do? And Other Questions I Ask Myself as I Attempt to Age Without Apology." It is a sometimes wince inducing primer on fashion, sex, marriage, divorce, money and health gleaned from her experience as Woolfer in chief, and with contributions from her Woolfer sisters. It also has memoirish elements: Ms. Collins details her adventures in the orgy tent at Burning Man (she and her ex brought their own sheets, and kept to themselves), her struggles with depression and her adherence to an expensive beauty routine that involves fake eyelashes and Botox. She also cops to divorce envy, and notes the benefits of prenups, long term care insurance and pharmaceuticals like Xanax. In its breezy candor, the book is as appealing and appalling as the conversations of the Woolfers online, though it lacks the tartness and invective that occasionally erupts there, turning a you go girl group of self affirmers into an unruly scrum. Because when thousands of women get together on social media, what could possibly go wrong? "We do fight sometimes," Ms. Collins said. "We're talking about super candid things, and people have strong opinions. If you're talking about whether or not to let your 16 year old have sex or whether to have an affair or how to tell your colleague at work that she's a jerk, people will have strong responses." When one long married woman wrote about the heartache she was feeling because her lover of five years had broken up with her, many Woolfers were upset by her adultery, Ms. Collins said, and she had to step in to remove comments that were aggressive, moralistic and vitriolic. When a white Woolfer reported that a black man in a park had exposed himself to her, many in the group were inflamed that she had noted his race. At first, Ms. Collins read every post herself, to steer the conversation and defuse tension. But when the group swelled to 3,000, she asked some of the early Woolfers to help her moderate; now, about 20 women have oversight of what's posted. Politics, race and infidelity are topics that reliably lead to problems. "I'll be out somewhere and I'll get a text from someone saying basically there's a huge fight in Aisle 6 and what do we do?" Ms. Collins said. Jenny Douglas, an early Woolfer and moderator, said, "If there's a post you don't like, we say, 'Scroll on by.' You don't need to pick a fight with everything or anyone you disagree with. When we are meeting online and tackling subjects that are so nuanced, you can lose that nuance. Those tender subjects are tricky to tackle in any form." Just a few weeks ago, a moderator quit the group after a discussion of moderator practices how they vetted posts, for example left her feeling bullied, she said. There are over posters, and drunk posters; there are angry, cursing posters whose words are promptly removed, Ms. Collins said and posters who are a tad self righteous. And there are the lurkers and the hate readers, along with those who are repelled or bored or disappointed by the particular window into women's lives that the group affords them. "I always think that Virginia Woolf would be mortified at having her name associated with this group," said Daphne Merkin, the memoirist and cultural critic, who is a member of the group but does not post anything. "At first I thought it was going to be some kind of literary meeting of the minds. That there would be some interesting comments about Jean Rhys. Instead it's, "What do you do with your dildos?" Or this sort of subclinical despair about no longer having a flat stomach. "It's not like that stuff is beneath me," Ms. Merkin went on. "I mean, I once wrote a story on buffing up the vagina, but these revelations are very cosmeticized. There's little wit, but maybe wit takes more time than social media allows. This is more like the stuff you tell your girlfriend at the end of the day, the eye glazing end of intimacy. There's intimacy that's thrilling, but this isn't." Conversations have leaked outside the group, like the time one woman wrote of her son's bad behavior, and another Woolfer told her own child, who happened to know the son, who then told the son of his mother's revelations about his conduct. "It was pretty easy to figure out who it was," Ms. Collins said of the offending member. "I reached out and said, 'This is super uncool,' and we removed her from the group. The way we dealt with it was to write about it, so everyone knew what had happened. Ironically, and because I'm a bigger personality, I've probably suffered more than others for this." Ms. Collins is indeed not only confessional, but also confrontational. In 2013, in an article for Elle magazine, she wrote about being arrested three times: for assaulting her first husband, for assaulting his girlfriend and for violating an order of protection he had taken out against her, by overturning a coffee table. A recent Page Six item reported that her second husband had broken her nose during a fight last September. "What does it mean to be 'too much,' as a woman?" she said. "We talk about this a lot in the group." Ms. Collins is happy to share her labial regimen (see "coconut oil," above), the minutiae of her sex life and the unraveling of her second marriage, which ended in part because of the meddling of a Woolfer, as it happens. "The marriage was strained, and I had been wanting a second dog for a while," Ms. Collins said. "My husband didn't, but like most women I do most of the work around the house and pay my fair share." She asked the Woolfers, in essence, "Am I a jerk if I just go ahead and get the dog?" "I thought it would be a throwaway thread," she said. "But suddenly there were like 600 comments," evenly divided in opinion. (She didn't get the dog.) It turns out that one Woolfer who read the thread was an old friend of Ms. Collins's husband, and the woman told him about his wife's query. "He came home pretty angry, and the marriage ended pretty much the next day," Ms. Collins said. A revenue model for the Woolfers has yet to emerge, though Ms. Collins is working on it. She has built a website to promote her book, created a newsletter and recorded five sample podcasts called "Raging Gracefully" which she plans to release in April. As Ms. Collins has told the group, she received a 75,000 book advance, which she split with an editor and researcher who worked with her. She is as candid about her entrepreneurial behaviors and aspirations as she is about more intimate matters. Lesley Jane Seymour, the editor in chief of More magazine, which folded in 2016 after publishing for 19 years and was reintroduced as an online magazine for millennial women, has spent the last two years working on Covey Club, "an online club for women 40 who want to continue learning, growing and expanding their world by making new friends and deeper connections," which went live this past Valentine's Day. Ms. Seymour was promoting the site at the South by Southwest festival a few weeks ago, joining the stage with Tausha Robertson, creator of Ms. X. Factor, a digital space for Gen X women of color. "I know there's a business here," Ms. Seymour said. "The question is how to do it. We can't just sell content online, it has to be something else. What is clear is that women who are a little bit older feel disenfranchised. They feel no one is listening to them, and they feel invisible." Ms. Collins said of her group, "I see it as incredible content potential and, though this sounds a little grandiose, possibly culture shifting. These women are powerful, and they have made me feel more powerful." There's a continuing conversation about whether the group is getting too big and how or if to control for privacy. When the news of Facebook's breaches broke last week, the moderators again discussed restricting new members or moving to a different platform. "Maybe one day we'll have an app or some other platform for more intimacy," Ms. Collins said. "But for now, here we are, basically addicted and not budging." Dina Seiden is a Brooklyn based writer and performance artist, a committed Woolfer and, now, a moderator. The group's foibles, she said, are part of the draw. "They make aging so much fun. We're not all saints no, we're perfectly human, and that is ultimately good for the group, too." Last Christmas she participated in a Secret Santa gift exchange. In a "cheeky nod," she said, to a topic the group seems to hold dear, Ms. Seiden sent her recipient a vintage vibrator: a formidable, Machine Age relic called the Vitilator she'd bought on eBay for 15, the price cap the group had set. "I mean, kismet!" Ms. Seiden said, truly delighted by her find. Unfortunately, the recipient was a germophobe, and was horrified to have received such an intimate, secondhand device, as she explained. Did Ms. Seiden want it back? If so, she'd leave it with her doorman. "But it was a schlep and I just wanted to put the incident behind me, so I never did pick it up," Ms. Seiden said. "My dream is that the doorman gave it to a woman in his life, or that a slightly awkward exchange ensued in which the doorman had to return the vibrator to its recipient, passing it clumsily to her and in my dream, by the time she gets up to her apartment, she can't resist, transcends her putative germophobia, and gets herself off like a rock star."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
HONG KONG Is China's economy in trouble, too? As the American economy appears to teeter on the edge of another recession, Europe struggles with a financial crisis and emerging markets like Brazil and India show new weaknesses, China may appear to be in better shape than most countries, economists say. But "better" is relative. On the surface, economists at the International Monetary Fund and most banks are still estimating China's growth rate to be over 9 percent this year. China continues to run very large trade surpluses. New construction starts have soared with a government campaign to provide more affordable housing. And yet, the country's huge manufacturing sector is starting to slow and orders are weakening, especially for exports. The real estate bubble is starting to spring leaks, even as inflation remains stubbornly high for consumers despite a series of interest rate increases and ever tighter limits on bank lending. Because China's mighty growth engine has been one of the few drivers of the global economy since the financial crisis of 2008, signs of deceleration could add to worries about the global outlook. A survey of Chinese purchasing managers, just completed by HSBC and Markit Economics, shows a third consecutive month of contraction in the manufacturing sector. The release of the survey results on Thursday contributed to a global slide in stock markets that day. Meanwhile, huge loans that Chinese banks have made to state owned enterprises and local governments over the last three years could cause trouble if the economy does slow. What's more, there are further signs of trade hostilities from Washington, where the impulse is to blame China's cheap exports, at least partly, for America's continued high unemployment. On Thursday, a bipartisan group of senators announced that they would pursue legislation requiring the Obama administration to confront China more directly on currency policy. They want the White House to push harder for China to allow its currency, the renminbi, to appreciate. If China does allow its currency to rise more quickly and if its trade surplus narrows, that could help economies elsewhere. But too much of a slowdown in China could simply add to the world's financial gloom. Nicole Huang, the sales manager at the Dongguan Lianyi Sport Goods Company, a maker of beer coolers, diving suits and other products in the industrial hub city of Dongguan, said the number of orders had dropped 5 percent so far this year, and the average size of each order had also begun to shrink. And instead of the labor shortages that plagued many manufacturers last year as workers sought better jobs elsewhere, more people now seem willing to accept assembly line tedium. Short term, that could help exporters. But it could be an early sign of looming unemployment problems. "At least it is easier now for us to hire workers who come into our factory looking for work, after seeing our job notices posted outside," Mr. Huang said. "Before, no one would respond to these notices." The sentiments of investors and economists inside and outside China have taken a bearish turn in recent weeks. As global stock markets have tumbled, the Shanghai A share stock market has fallen 14.7 percent since July 15. That includes a further decline of 0.4 percent on Friday. The most worried economists are those who follow China's manic monetary policy. The central bank oversaw a huge stimulus effort in 2009 and 2010 in response to the global economic slowdown, rapidly expanding its issuance of money and then encouraging banks to lend and relend it. Broadly measured, the money supply surged 53 percent in two years. The extra cash has sent inflation at the consumer level surging to more than 6 percent even by official measures, which tend to understate true inflation for methodological reasons. With inflation now running at more than twice the regulated interest rate paid by banks for deposits, millions of Chinese have been betting their savings on real estate. That frenzy had been sending property prices through the roof, at least until the last couple of months. But this year, to fight inflation, the Chinese financial authorities have veered in the other direction, setting strict administrative quotas on new loans. And they have ordered the mostly state owned banks to park more than a fifth of their assets at the central bank, which further limits the banks' ability to lend and businesses' ability to borrow. Orchid Chen, the sales director of the Fujian Yuandong Electric Motor Group, which makes motors in Fu'an in southeastern China's Fujian Province, said that banks were strictly following Beijing's instructions. "The smaller enterprises have found it difficult to secure any type of lending from banks," she said. "We are a good sized company and still have support from the banks, though our loan rates have been adjusted upward two to three times this year already." Diana Choyleva, a Hong Kong based economist for Lombard Street Research, predicted that the combination of tighter monetary policy with a likely slowdown in foreign demand for China's exports would result in the Chinese economy's growing at an annualized rate of only 5 percent in the second half of this year and the first half of next year. "Just as the authorities are managing to hammer down demand growth, the rest of the world is not looking healthy, so there's going to be an export shock," she said. Despite the gloomy purchasing managers survey issued Thursday by HSBC and Markit, Donna Kwok, an economist in the Hong Kong offices of HSBC, noted that the survey also showed shrinkage in companies' inventories of finished goods. So at least short term, companies may need to maintain production to fill orders, instead of meeting them from existing stockpiles. China has been highly successful in creating jobs and shifting unemployment to other countries through its intervention in currency markets. This has kept the renminbi weak and made Chinese exports very competitive in foreign markets, even as it has kept imports expensive for Chinese consumers. That policy, though, could be increasingly hard to continue as high unemployment persists in the West, and Washington lawmakers demand a White House response. Hong Lei, a spokeswoman for the Chinese foreign ministry, said at a news briefing on Friday in Beijing that appreciation of the renminbi was not the answer to American trade deficits with China. Many large American companies rely heavily on imports from China and are lobbying against the legislative push. Within China, domestic demand is starting to weaken slightly. China's auto market, the world's largest by number of vehicles sold, looks fairly strong at first glance, with family vehicle sales up 6 percent in August from a year earlier. But that is a significant slowdown, coming after a decade of almost continuous double digit growth. More worrisome, the growth in August occurred mainly among Japanese manufacturers in China that were finally filling orders as they recovered from the parts shortages created by the earthquake and tsunami last March. Price discounts have begun to spread, even among multinational brands. And many Chinese automakers, which have tended to sell the least expensive and often lowest quality cars, had sharply lower sales in August particularly of small minivans and pickup trucks, for which government incentives expired at the end of last year. Then there are real estate prices, which have been soaring in China for more than a decade. A government survey released on Sunday showed that prices had fallen in August compared to July in 16 cities, notably Chongqing in western China. And prices stayed flat in 30 cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, although they did continue rising in 24 other cities. The hardest question to answer in China is whether slower economic growth and continued inflation could lead to more social tensions, which in turn could damage the economy through weaker investment and more cautious spending. Though blue collar wages have surged over the last decade, tripling in some coastal provinces, the salaries for many white collar workers, particularly recent college graduates, have been trailing inflation. The central government banned local taxes and fees in rural areas six years ago. And it has been talking for years about whether to start assessing property taxes instead; so far it has experimented with that approach in only a few cities, notably Chongqing and Shanghai. Without a broad base of property taxes, local governments across China raise much of their money by seizing land from peasants with minimal compensation based on the value of recent harvests, rezoning it for industrial or commercial use and then selling the land for far more to developers. Roy Prosterman, the founder and chairman emeritus of Landesa, a rural development policy group based in Seattle, said in a speech in Hong Kong on Thursday that the group's surveys in China had found that peasants typically receive only one fifteenth of what developers pay for land in these deals. The news media have reported a spate of protests in recent months in rural areas, including riots this week in the southern province of Guangdong. But protests have erupted periodically for years and there are no reliable national statistics on whether the overall number of protests is rising or falling.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Shortly after New York University honored David Hollander, an assistant dean, with the college's highest faculty honor in March 2019, he turned his attention on fine tuning the syllabus for a new class that he had wanted to teach for 15 years. Hollander, 55, viewed the world as broken. Having identified deep fissures within politics, culture and commerce, he explained to his bosses that his ideal course would explore all these elements through the prism of a game. "I want to elevate the study of basketball to the same plane as a science or history course," he said. Hollander named the course "How Basketball Can Save the World," and posited that the sport, through its easy accessibility and global reach, offered distinct antidotes for modern issues. In all, he compiled 13 principles a tribute to James Naismith's 13 original basketball rules for his proposed philosophy. Hollander's tenets included, for example, applying basketball's values of cooperation and balance to real world issues like the evolving global economy and systemic racism. Hollander, a quirky academic who wears black Chuck Taylors in the classroom, believed he had captured the zeitgeist of 2020, but he did not envision himself lecturing about his thoughts over Zoom amid a pandemic. When the N.B.A. suspended its season on March 11, Hollander watched as society followed the league's lead after it shuttered to protect players, coaches and fans. College learning went remote, and New York City removed rims from the basketball courts at public playgrounds to enforce social distancing. As scores of N.Y.U. students largely uprooted from Greenwich Village for their hometowns, whether in New Jersey or China, Hollander doubled down on his belief that basketball could be instrumental in reshaping the way the world worked. "Here we are in this moment, and, my God, the world needs saving," he said. "Every piece of life is being disrupted, reconfigured. Nobody knows what this will look like on the other side." When he looked at the future of work, he saw the value basketball places on players being "positionless" and its relevance in a gig economy. When he thought of urban planning, he saw the need for better spacing, highlighting basketball's ability to thrive in city, suburban and rural settings. Above all, he saw basketball as a solution to isolation because of its low barrier to entry. "Whatever remedy you have to save the world, it must be accessible or it cannot work," Hollander said. "It cannot be elitist. James Naismith did not want basketball to be a country club sport or a hyper commercialized sport. He didn't even want coaches. He wanted it to be a sanctuary for the outsider." 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. In 2020, Hollander saw parallels to the chaotic era when Naismith invented basketball in 1891 amid the Gilded Age. He did not foresee the pandemic, which forced him to adjust quickly. He had his class watch the director Dan Klores's short film on Magic Johnson and his impact on the public's understanding of the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s from "Basketball: A Love Story." He spoke about race and culture, agency and ownership, showing the students "High Flying Bird," a movie about an agent negotiating his way through a professional basketball lockout. He cued up songs like Kurtis Blow's "Basketball" to demonstrate the sport's cultural impact. The guest list included Big East Commissioner Val Ackerman and the N.B.A. deputy commissioner Mark Tatum. The former Nike marketing executive Mark Thomashow helped guide an exploration of culture and commerce, as well as the grift and graft of the sport's grass roots scene. Walt Frazier, a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and a Knicks broadcaster, appeared via Zoom, welcoming the opportunity to engage with others while Manhattan was locked down. "I haven't gone out in five weeks!" Frazier said when he appeared. "I had to spiff myself up for class." One guest was fresh off serving 90 days in federal prison: Emanuel Richardson, the former University of Arizona assistant coach who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery during a prospect's recruitment. After a discussion about the merits of amateurism and the role of Black assistant coaches in college recruiting, one student asked him about his relationship with basketball after incarceration. "Did I fall out of love with it? Yes," Richardson said. "I hated basketball, but it wasn't basketball. It was people. Because basketball is still pure. Basketball is still one of the sweetest joys." "Basketball in its highest form is a balance of self interest and self expression in service of the collective," Hollander said. "It does not surprise me that it has been a leader in so many areas of social impact and social change." But while the N.B.A. returned to play in a bubble, the professional form of the game was far from utopia. Though the N.B.A. had shown some progressiveness when the Nets signed Jason Collins, the first openly gay athlete in major American sports, and Commissioner Adam Silver dismissed the Clippers owner Donald Sterling for racist remarks, the delicacy of its business partnership with China came into view last October. After Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, posted support for pro democracy protesters in Hong Kong on Twitter, Chinese sponsors cut ties with the league, and China Central Television, the state run television broadcaster, refused to air games. A few months later, ESPN reported that coaches at NBA China academies complained of player abuse. Hollander maintained that all levels of the game should abide by the principles of equality and equity in order to maintain Naismith's ideals. The conversations are continuing, though still not exactly how Hollander originally planned. Many N.Y.U. students were back in the city by late August. Others stayed home, like Alessandro Gherardi, a student in Hollander's class, who was in Bologna, Italy, when he signed in via Zoom for a scheduled talk. It was an hourlong discussion with Nets wing Kevin Durant. After questions about his recovery from his Achilles' tendon injury (he's doing fine, he said), Gherardi asked Durant about how he used basketball to better understand the world and what "epiphanies, opportunities" he experienced because of the sport since growing up in Prince George's County, Maryland. Durant considered the way basketball had shaped his life experience as he traveled from game to game as a youth. "I started to crave more and more of those experiences and I realized they were tied to the game," he said. "I understood it was a way for me to learn more, see more and have more friends. Once I played the game for that small reason, the world started to open up for me. I'm just craving more and more experiences, more and more perspectives."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
AT T announced on Wednesday that it would bring in the former head of Hulu to lead WarnerMedia, the news and entertainment division that includes HBO, CNN and the Warner Bros. movie studio. Jason Kilar, the founding chief executive of the streaming platform Hulu, will take over for John Stankey, a veteran AT T executive who has run WarnerMedia since June 2018, when AT T assumed control of the WarnerMedia properties as part of its 85.4 billion purchase of the Time Warner media empire. Mr. Kilar will report to Mr. Stankey, who will remain as AT T's president and chief operating officer. "It was always in the back of my mind that if there were ever a way to get him to work at AT T in the right way, I'd jump at it," Mr. Stankey said in an interview on Wednesday. The announcement of the change, which goes into effect May 1, comes a month before the scheduled introduction of HBO Max, the company's 15 a month streaming service that will be the exclusive online home of "Game of Thrones," "Friends" and the Harry Potter films. Mr. Kilar, 48, was early to streaming. Hulu began as a joint venture among Comcast's NBCUniversal, the Walt Disney Company and 21st Century Fox in 2007, two years after the start of YouTube and the same year that Netflix unveiled its digital video service. Adopting a strategy that ran counter to the model favored by Netflix paid subscriptions, no commercials Mr. Kilar instituted an ad supported plan for Hulu. WarnerMedia plans to unveil an ad supported digital platform next year. The service will be distinct from HBO Max. The appointment of Mr. Kilar will allow Mr. Stankey to focus on his role as AT T's second in command while auditioning to succeed Randall L. Stephenson as chief executive. A self described "Bell head," Mr. Stankey was elevated to his current role at AT T in September. AT T started looking for a new WarnerMedia chief executive at the time of Mr. Stankey's promotion, according to three people with knowledge of the search. Robert Greenblatt, who leads entertainment at WarnerMedia, was a candidate, as was Jeff Zucker, the head of CNN, the people said. In addition to Mr. Kilar, outside candidates included Randy Freer, who departed Hulu as chief executive in February, and Tom Staggs, the former chief operating officer of Disney, the people said. Mr. Stephenson, who once flirted with the idea of stepping down some time in 2020, has committed to staying on as AT T's chief executive through this year, adding that the company's board has not set a retirement date for him. On the likelihood that Mr. Stankey would succeed him, Mr. Stephenson said that he "obviously has to be one of the primary candidates on the list." In many ways, the memo was as a plea to the media industry to take better advantage of the internet. People wanted fewer commercials and more control over when they watched a show, Mr. Kilar wrote, laying out his thoughts years before binge watching was a common pastime. "History has shown that incumbents tend to fight trends that challenge established ways and, in the process, lose focus on what matters most: customers," he wrote. "I think it holds up well and I believe it deeply," Mr. Kilar said of the blog post in an interview on Wednesday. He described it as "an exercise in listening to the customer." Long simmering tensions between Mr. Kilar and his Hulu bosses led some observers to suggest he had published it in an effort to get the boot. Now the incendiary memo may well serve as a blueprint for WarnerMedia. "Oh, I knew about the memo," Mr. Stankey said. "Having anyone willing to articulate a well thought out and well argued point of view is someone I want in the organization." A background player in the WarnerMedia drama has been Elliott Management, a hedge fund with a 3.2 billion stake in AT T. Upset with AT T's stock performance, the hedge fund has criticized the company's attempts to leave its telecommunications comfort zone and become a major player in the news and entertainment industries. In September, days after the elevation of Mr. Stankey to AT T president, Elliott Management went public with a scorching 24 page letter questioning AT T's handling of WarnerMedia. The hedge fund, led by the billionaire businessman and Republican donor Paul E. Singer, expressed concern over whether Mr. Stankey had been right to allow the departure of Mr. Plepler.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Re "With U.S. in Grip of Virus, Trump Puts On a Show" (front page, July 4): In a time of crisis, President Trump used his Independence Day ceremony at Mount Rushmore to make a promise to the nation. The nature and context of that promise tell us a lot. The president did not promise to use his authority and power to defend the people of this country from the virus that has already killed 130,000 of us. He did not promise to protect the families of millions of adults who have lost their jobs this year. He did not promise to defend U.S. troops from enemies who might be paid to kill them. He did not promise to defend our elections from foreign interference. Instead, the president promised to defend monuments, including testimonials to military leaders who oversaw massacres of U.S. troops during the Civil War. He could not have made his priorities any clearer. Now each of us must ask what our priorities are. No, Mr. President, those whom you call "far left" fascists and the "cancel culture" are not America's enemies. They are your fellow Americans who are disturbed by the continued celebration of those who thought it appropriate to enslave human beings, and they want police officers to stop killing Black people.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
A svelte eight room simplex that blends classic Museum Mile elegance, European elan and the open ended entertainment flow of a luxury downtown loft is poised to enter the market at 13.5 million. Six years ago, the Extell Development Company completed the conversion of the former Stanhope Hotel, a 1926 Rosario Candela jewel box at East 81st Street opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to 26 luxurious condop apartments maintenance charges include rental fees for the building's 150 year land lease. The three bedroom three and a half bath residence, No. 6S, which has monthly carrying costs of 18,173 and shares the sixth floor and a private elevator landing with just one other unit, underwent a further two year renovation and personalization once the current sellers, Robert and Cecile Rosner, bought it as a sponsor unit in 2009 and commissioned the architect David McAlpin to customize it. After spending the previous decade in Paris, Mrs. Rosner said, the couple had wanted to return to the Museum Mile neighborhood, where they had lived before their stint in Europe, but preferred a pristine setting. "We wanted a new apartment in a timeless building," she said of their desire to create "a chic and sleek downtown sensibility in an iconic uptown setting." The former Stanhope provided a perfect 4,357 square foot blank canvas framed by the classical architecture they favored.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Amar'e Stoudemire was inspecting art at Christie's in Rockefeller Center on a sweltering afternoon in June. He was drawn to a tall piece by David Hammons, an influential artist whose work is in the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was a smoky cloud scape created by bouncing a basketball covered in graphite and dirt on paper. Mr. Stoudemire, who wore a drapey black T shirt, ripped black jeans and a gray bandanna around his head, offered commentary as a member of his entourage recorded video on her phone. "Art can be expressed in many different ways," he said. "The great thing about it is that it relates to basketball." A woman from Christie's lobbed an assist: "It's called 'Throwing Up a Brick.' I'm not sure that's a good thing in your world." But Mr. Stoudemire's world is changing. After 14 seasons as a professional basketball player, including four and a half seasons with the New York Knicks and six All Star Game appearances, he recently announced his retirement from the N.B.A. He now plays in Israel for Hapoel Jerusalem, a team in which he had an ownership stake. His life beyond the hardwood already includes fashion. He has scrunched front row next to Anna Wintour at runway shows, collaborated with Rachel Roy on a women's athletic wear line, and was named one of Sports Illustrated's 50 best dressed athletes. More recently, he has appeared in films (including Amy Schumer's 2015 comedy "Trainwreck"), co written a kosher cookbook after declaring himself "culturally Jewish" and purchased a 185 acre cattle farm in Hyde Park, N.Y. But his most ambitious endeavor may be as an art curator and dealer. Already an avid collector, with works by Jean Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol and other blue chip artists in his personal stash, Mr. Stoudemire now hopes to parlay his reputation as a cultural tastemaker into art world clout. His plan is to act as a conduit between emerging artists and professional athletes with wads of disposable income. He has advised former Miami Heat teammates like Udonis Haslem and Justise Winslow on their collections. The actress Gabrielle Union called when she was looking for a piece to give her husband, Dwyane Wade. Chandler Parsons of the Memphis Grizzlies reached out to inquire about pieces he spotted on Mr. Stoudemire's Instagram feed. And last week, he completed a deal to become a brand ambassador for Sotheby's, where he will host dinners and act as a liaison to high net worth athletes. "It's amazing to see someone of his athletic prowess so genuinely curious and interested in art and objects," said Saara Pritchard, a vice president at Christie's, after the meeting. "His reach is beyond the conventional circles of the art world." Mr. Stoudemire did not grow up around art. He was raised in a troubled household in Lake Wales, a small city in central Florida. His father died of a heart attack when he was 12; his mother struggled with addiction and was incarcerated. His older brother, Hazell, whom Mr. Stoudemire describes as a "guardian angel," died in a 2012 car accident (Mr. Stoudemire has memorialized him with a teardrop tattoo on his right cheekbone). "We really couldn't afford any pieces of art on the wall," Mr. Stoudemire said. "I wasn't exposed to any galleries or events until I got into the N.B.A. Not at all." His interest blossomed after he signed a five year, 99.7 million contract with the Knicks in 2010 and moved to New York. Living in a terraced penthouse on Jane Street in the West Village, he began visiting galleries and befriended artists like Rob Pruitt, Mr. Brainwash and Retna. "He's like a thirsty sponge, in terms of being open to all different types of art," said Mr. Pruitt, an art world social fixture known for his glittery panda paintings, flea market installations and other provocative pieces. The pair was introduced through Mr. Pruitt's gallery, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, after Mr. Stoudemire asked about his work. They quickly became friends, and Mr. Stoudemire's family (he is married with four children) visited Mr. Pruitt's South Brooklyn studio to make art. "He was immediately attracted to a pop culture sensibility, which made sense to me, because he had become a pop icon himself," Mr. Pruitt said. Mr. Stoudemire took his newfound interest in art on the road, visiting galleries and museums during the basketball season. He discussed art with teammates like Carmelo Anthony as well as Darrell Walker, who was then an assistant coach. He reached out to Gardy St. Fleur, an art adviser from Brooklyn who consults with many basketball players. "I started studying, reading magazines, having extended conversations with friends about it, for about a year or so," Mr. Stoudemire said. Another source of guidance was Kasseem Dean, the hip hop producer who performs as Swizz Beatz, who entered the art world via entertainment. "I gave him advice to collect from his heart and not to worry about who's important or who's the No. 1 artist at the time," Mr. Dean said. Mr. Stoudemire's collection, which he has named the Melech Collection (meaning "king" in Hebrew), now includes around 70 works. It is largely composed of '80s pop art, street art and works by contemporary artists like Eddie Martinez and Bradley Theodore, who gave Mr. Stoudemire a "Black Jesus" painting at his retirement party in August. "I buy from friends who are artists or from word of mouth," Mr. Stoudemire said, describing his taste as "positive vibes." He has a growing interest in classical European art, but is less comfortable with abstract art. "Paintings that look very simple, I haven't really gotten into that yet," he said, smiling. "It's tough. You're not sure. It seems like you can do it, anyone can create that painting." He is making his presence known in the art world, as he has done with the fashion scene. He attended his first Art Basel Miami Beach last December, where he was a guest of honor at a Surface magazine luncheon, visited the Scope art fair, spoke at a panel discussion about athletes who collect art, hosted a dinner with Bloomberg Pursuits, and bought a Hebru Brantley painting at Mr. Dean's No Commission fair. And he was, of course, chatting up his art consultancy. As a respected and well liked basketball star, Mr. Stoudemire believes he can bring nontraditional art buyers into the fold. His appeal relies on his reputation. "He's held in high esteem amongst other players in the league," said Mr. Winslow, a second year small forward on the Heat who is a collector of street art. During the basketball season, the two discussed African art and analyzed pieces in hotel lobbies. "He's traveled the world, lives in New York and he's surrounded by some of the top artists and influencers," Mr. Winslow said. "It goes back to trusting who's schooling you on art," Mr. Stoudemire said. "My word and character is on the line. I want to keep that golden." After the meeting at Christie's, Mr. Stoudemire hopped into a giant black S.U.V. (he sat in the third row, with his feet nearly touching the back of the passenger seat). Thumbing through Instagram, he chuckled at a post comparing the appearance of Golden State Warriors guard Klay Thompson to the '90s R B star Jon B. "That's funny," he said. "They do look alike." The car sluggishly headed downtown to a crowded stretch of Broadway, south of Canal Street. Mr. Stoudemire emerged, towering a full head above the teeming humanity. Joined by his wife, Alexis Welch, who wore a floral print head wrap and a distressed denim jacket and carried a turquoise Fendi handbag, Mr. Stoudemire's swelling entourage piled into an elevator for a meeting at Artsy, a website that helps users discover art. ("It's literally Wiki for art," said his publicist and brand manager, Tammy Brook. "You can type in 'Daniel Arsham' and it will show you everything.") The group settled into a white walled conference room with small desks. "It reminds me of in school suspension," Mr. Stoudemire said. Artsy staffers filled the remaining seats. After Carter Cleveland, the suave founder of Artsy, briefly introduced himself ("I don't know what we're going to work on, but I'm sure it will be something great," he said), one of Mr. Stoudemire's representatives gave a presentation about "influencers" and "first movers" as he nodded in silence. After the meeting, Mr. Stoudemire and his cohort wedged back into the idling S.U.V. The next stop on this whirlwind day of art gatherings was Sotheby's. As the vehicle moved through leafy TriBeCa, he was reflective about the future. Along with art, he said, there was filmmaking, sports broadcasting, even player management. "The N.B.A. is a temporary thing," he said. "What's your next passion?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Masazumi Chaya, the associate artistic director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater since 1991, will retire on Jan. 5, 2020, after the company's annual City Center season. But he'll still be involved with the organization: After he steps down, Mr. Chaya, 72, will be in charge of a licensing project that will assist in the restaging of Ailey's works. Matthew Rushing, a veteran dancer and the company's rehearsal director, will take over as associate artistic director, while Ronni Favors, a former Ailey member, will become the company's rehearsal director. Clifton Brown, a current dancer, will join Linda Celeste Sims as an assistant to the rehearsal director. Mr. Chaya or Chaya, as he is known is a former dancer with the company, which he joined in 1972. He has devoted his life to Ailey's legacy, both in preserving repertory and in training generations of dancers. He is confident about the succession. "Every time somebody asked me, 'Are you ready?,' I was not quite ready and not because of what I'm doing," he said. "I enjoy it, but I was not sure if I had a group of people that could continue. I think these young people should have this opportunity to enjoy my job. I felt it shouldn't be just mine."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Legoland, the Lego toy company's flagship theme park, draws some 2 million visitors annually to the tiny town of Billund, Denmark, where the company has its headquarters. Now, there's a new attraction on the block. Lego House, which opened in late September in Billund, is a brick shaped behemoth in the center of town that is both a shrine to the toy and a place to let loose. Every part of 130,000 square foot building has been designed with Lego in mind, from the climbable exterior of yellow and blue Lego bricks (scaled up to human size) to its "tree of creativity," a nearly 50 foot tall, 6.3 million brick centerpiece built as a homage to Lego's roots as a wooden toy. Although it's been some years since I've had a serious Lego encounter, Lego House drew me in as easily as it did my boyfriend's nieces and nephews, ages 9 and 7, whose romps through the four play zones uncovered new building opportunities and challenges at every turn. "My vision with this house is to create the ultimate Lego experience which truly unfolds the endless possibilities there are with our bricks and our Lego system of play," said the Lego Group's majority owner, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, at the house's opening, "and have together all these experiences in one house, the home of the brick." A climb up the spiral staircase at the center of the building deposits visitors at the Masterpiece Gallery of Lego creations, where the possibilities of the brick are highlighted in sculptures including three, 10 foot tall dinosaurs. Visitors then make their way into one of the zones designed to stimulate creativity, communication, emotion and cognition. Employees stationed in each zone offer suggestions and help small hands find the perfect piece for their creations among some 25 million bricks. In the Blue Zone's Race Track activity, a niece and her engineering minded stepdad grazed through a trough of Legos in search of an aerodynamic addition to their cars, then raced them against the family and other builders. In the Robo Lab, they practiced programming skills to navigate robots across an Arctic terrain. The Duplo Train Builder playscape encourages toddlers to become conductors using interlocking tracks and moving trains. In the Green Zone we whiled away an hour sifting through bricky body parts to piece together minifigures, then moved on to the Story Lab, where we use preconstructed props and stop motion cameras to film our own Lego movie. The Yellow Zone takes visitors to a Lego jungle, a field of flowers, and under the sea. Highlights include a Fish Designer activity with digital aquariums wall sized screens populated by Lego fish. Visitors can piece together a fish and have it scanned and digitized at an iPad station and then see it come to life as it swims on the screen. iPad scanners at activities are linked to visitors' wristbands, so each creation can be stored and revisited from home through the Lego House app. Tickets to the experience zones (199 kroner per person, about 31) grant entry at specific time blocks, though once inside the house, visitors can stay as long as they like. But even without a ticket, visitors to Billund can still visit the Lego House, its terraces, Lego Store and three restaurants. The building's nine rooftop playgrounds, ground level atrium and surrounding parks are free and open to the public, and designed around the idea of Lego House as an indoor town square for the people of Billund and visitors alike, the architect Bjarke Ingels said. In addition to the experience zones and public playgrounds, the house also includes Mini Chef, the world's first Lego restaurant. Orders are taken and food is "prepared" by Lego minifigure chefs "living" in iPad boxes at each table, our hostess explained. The chefs, she said, speak only in brick: to get it right, we must first build our meals in Lego form. Upon seating, each diner is given a packet of red, green, blue and black bricks, which correspond to items on the menu. To order, we picked one of each color block, snapped our meals together, then slotted them into a special tray attached to the iPad. The orders were then scanned and "read" by the minifigure chefs. A Lego animation entertained us as we waited, and the illusion was thrilling: the minifigures sorted and prepared the food, traipsing along conveyor belts and shifting bricks as they made our meals. As a bonus and stopgap against the longer than expected interval between brick to plate despite its cafeteria like simplicity, this is not fast food everyone at the table had 21 blocks to play with in the meantime, and take home as a souvenir. Our meals (169 kroner for adult, 98 kroner for children) eventually arrived via conveyor belt from a hidden kitchen in giant blue Lego bento style boxes. There are no traditional waiters meals are picked up at a counter staffed by two animatronic Lego robots though human "helpers" stationed throughout the restaurant serve alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks and answer questions. The food is surprisingly upscale and relatively health conscious: adult friendly ingredients like glazed beetroots and marinated kohlrabi, alongside crispy fries or fried organic chicken for the kids, who each received a minifigure chef toy with their meal. Two other restaurants are on site: The Brickaccino cafe, featuring coffee, light bites and smoothies, and Le Gourmet, an upscale eatery open for lunch and dinner that serves Lego inspired multicourse meals of New Nordic fare. "We really try to take the Lego brick into everything we are doing in the house," the Lego House general manager, Jesper Vilstrup, said. Even the Lego House shape, seen from above as visitors fly in to the Billund Airport which is walking distance from the attraction gives the illusion of being constructed entirely of Lego bricks. Mr. Ingels, the architect, described the house as a scalable mountain. "Lego is not a toy. Rather, it's a tool that empowers the child to actually imagine and create their own world, and then to inhabit that world through play," Mr. Ingels said at the opening. "And I think architecture, when it is at its best, it is the same thing. As architects and as people, we can imagine what kind of a world is it that we want to live in, then we can design and build that world, and then we can actually go and live in it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
I LOVE YOU, NOW DIE: THE COMMONWEALTH VS. MICHELLE CARTER (2019) 8 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO platforms. This two part documentary examines a story so unusual it could have been plucked from a "Black Mirror" episode. In 2017, teenager Michelle Carter was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for using text messages to encourage her boyfriend, Conrad Roy, to kill himself. The director Erin Lee Carr, the daughter of the late New York Times columnist David Carr, asks: Were Carter's actions criminal? The first half of the film deals with the prosecution's case; the second half focuses on the defense and presents Carter as a troubled young woman who truly believed she could help Roy. LOVE ISLAND 8 p.m. on CBS. The original version of this reality show debuted in Britain in 2015. It has since amassed a huge following, but has also garnered sharp criticism of its promotion of hookup culture and, in some cases, what has been seen as normalization of gaslighting and emotional abuse. Now, for better or worse, a new version of the series has washed up on American shores . It follows the same premise: Eleven attractive, single 20 somethings are marooned in a glamorous villa in Fiji and forced to couple up. Nearly every second is saucy, especially when producers present the "islanders" with challenges. (Some have tested their pole dancing and kissing skills.) Viewers can vote off their least favorite contestants, and the last couple standing wins a cash prize. If this spinoff isn't to your liking, the first four seasons of the British series are available to stream on Hulu.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
"The Prom," a musical comedy about four u nderemployed New York actors who try to get some publicity by promoting acceptance for an ostracized high school lesbian in Indiana, will close its Broadway production on Aug. 11. At the time of its closing, "The Prom" will have played 23 preview and 310 regular performances at the Longacre Theater. The stage producers are planning a national tour beginning in 2021, and the television producer Ryan Murphy has said he wants to adapt the show as a "movie event" for Netflix. The musical opened in November to strong reviews in The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green called it "a joyful hoot." He said, "With its kinetic dancing, broad mugging and belty anthems, it makes you believe in musical comedy again." The show was nominated for seven Tony Awards, including best new musical. But it came away empty handed and has consistently struggled to break through in a competitive theatrical marketplace.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Today would have been the 96th birthday of Dr. Rene G. Favaloro, who is commemorated in today's Google Doodle. Here is the full Times obituary from Aug. 1, 2000. Dr. Rene G. Favaloro, a pioneer in heart bypass surgery and a revered figure in Argentina, was found dead on Saturday at his home in Buenos Aires. He was 77. The police said his death appeared to have been a suicide. Dr. Favaloro, who left a successful career in the United States to create a top level teaching clinic in his home country, was distraught over his hospital's financial problems. The son of a carpenter and a dressmaker from a small town in Argentina, Dr. Favaloro achieved renown on Nov. 30, 1967, when he performed an operation at the Cleveland Clinic on a patient with a potentially deadly coronary artery blockage. After stopping the heart, Dr. Favaloro took a section of vein from the patient's leg and sewed one end to his aorta. Then, much the way a driver might use a side road to go around a traffic jam, Dr. Favaloro attached the other end to the blocked artery, beyond the blockage. That was not, as it turned out, the first time for the procedure. After Dr. Favaloro, a little known surgeon, had announced his results, two prominent surgeons said they had already performed the procedure. One, Dr. David C. Sabiston Jr. of Duke University, performed the first, in 1962. Two years later, Dr. H. Edward Garrett, an associate of Dr. Michael DeBakey, performed another. Those operations had been done in response to deteriorating conditions on the operating table. Dr. Favaloro's procedure was planned. It was also the first to be reported in a medical journal. He went on to refine the method. In one year, the clinic had performed 171 bypasses. "He's really the person who should get credit for introducing coronary bypass into the clinical arena," said Dr. Robert H. Jones, a professor of surgery at Duke who was a friend of Dr. Favaloro. Before Dr. Favaloro's operation, doctors had few reliable tools to treat heart disease. Some surgeons tried to attach muscle to the heart, in the hope that the veins would graft and improve blood flow. Other physicians opened the artery and tried to scrape out the blocking material. Dr. Favaloro received numerous honors. But he took pains not to overstate his accomplishment, telling anyone who asked that he had simply built on the work of others before him and that in any case he had not acted alone. "I do not talk in the form 'I,' " Dr. Favaloro said in an interview in 1992. "At the Cleveland Clinic, we were a team." Dr. Favaloro did not remain to cash in on his fame. Four years after the operation, he returned to Argentina. Rene Geronimo Favaloro was born on July 14, 1923, the son of Juan B. Favaloro and Ida Y. Raffaelli. The lone member of the family to have a university education, according to The Times of London, was an uncle who was a doctor, and Rene was inspired to follow his path. After graduating from medical school, he agreed to fill in for several months for an ailing country surgeon in Jacinto Arauz, an impoverished village 300 miles west of the capital. Twelve years passed before he made his way to the Cleveland Clinic where, despite lacking some credentials, he was taken on as, essentially, an apprentice, according to Dr. Delos M. Cosgrove, co chairman of the heart center at the clinic. The lessons of his rural practice were never lost on him. He once told The San Diego Union Tribune that he thought that all doctors in Latin America should be required to work among the poor. "They would be able to see the combination of dirt and fumes," he said. "The people have only one room where they cook, they live, they make love, where they have their children, where they eat." When Dr. Favaloro returned to Argentina, he set to work raising money for a 55 million heart clinic. After it was completed in the early '90s, he treated thousands of patients, often for no charge, and trained hundreds of surgeons.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
W, the hefty fashion bible known for publishing the adventurous work of top tier photographers, had long been one of the magazine industry's most august titles. While it costs less to run than Vogue, it is nevertheless expensive. Now, it appears to be in serious trouble. "The bottom has dropped out of the luxury market," Marc Lotenberg, the chief executive of W's parent company, Future Media Group, said on Wednesday evening. This, he said, has put the title in "survival" mode. On Monday, the magazine's editor, Sara Moonves, called her staff to tell them that many were being furloughed. Those who work on online content are staying on at reduced salaries. Mr. Lotenberg blamed the economic upheaval caused by the new coronavirus pandemic for much of the magazine's troubles, though he did not deny that payments to vendors have been late since January, acknowledging that numerous independent contractors have not been paid for their services. (He blamed this in part on the launch of a Chinese edition of W, which was scheduled for January and has now been moved to September.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
MOSCOW The Bolshoi Theater is a behemoth, an immense cafe au lait colored columned structure that fills a city block across from Red Square here. Since 2002, it has been complemented by a second, smaller theater just up the hill. Those theaters house the largest and possibly the most contentious ballet company in the world, a place of titanic personalities and deep history. (It is here that Sergei Filin, then director of the company, had a jar of battery acid flung in his face in 2013.) The Bolshoi's very size allows it to stage multiple versions of some repertory works, including, since last fall, "Romeo and Juliet." The company's standard production is by Yuri Grigorovich, the iron fisted director and choreographer who led the company for three decades under Soviet rule, until 1995. Now there is a new version, by the Russian born choreographer Alexei Ratmansky, whose home base for the last decade has been New York. Mr. Grigorovich's was last performed in February on the big stage. Mr. Ratmansky's had its premiere in November, on the smaller one. It is this more recent production that will be broadcast live worldwide on Sunday, as part of the Bolshoi Ballet in Cinema series. This new version of "Romeo and Juliet," originally created for the National Ballet of Canada in 2011, will be both familiar and unfamiliar to those acquainted with Prokofiev's cinematic 1935 score and the multiple ballets it has inspired. In each case, story details vary, as does the tone and the style of dancing. Mr. Ratmansky's is poetic and human scaled, focusing more on the young lovers' attraction than on the oppressive circumstances of 14th century Verona. Personal suffering is emphasized over hatred and revenge. Mr. Grigorovich's ballets embody the hyper dramatic performance style for which the Bolshoi was once famous (and to which many are still attached). "It is old and tired, like a dress you have worn a lot," the Russian critic Leila Gouchmazova, of Rossiyskaya Gazeta, said last month of this emphatic style. "Maybe Grigorovich's version of 'Romeo' will remain a year or two years, but then it will be out, I think," she added. (It will be performed again in April.) Mr. Grigorovich is the figure most closely identified with the Bolshoi, but Mr. Ratmansky is no stranger here, having served as the ballet company's artistic director from 2004 to 2008. The day to day management of personalities and factions was a struggle "a war, almost," he has said and, when he was given the opportunity to become artist in residence at American Ballet Theater in New York, he left, seemingly without regret. "At first it was so weird to be back," Mr. Ratmansky said on a rainy November afternoon, as he rushed through the Bolshoi's labyrinthine corridors, "but since then, I've just been with the dancers, working." In the studio with Mr. Ratmansky, the dancers appeared eager to try a different approach to their characters and to master his tricky, fast moving phrases. "He is a maximalist!" Makhar Vaziev, the Bolshoi's current director, said. "For one movement, he can give 10 recommendations." Mr. Ratmansky pushed the dancers to be swifter, more detailed, more physical. "Don't wait for the music, just go" Mr. Ratmansky instructed Ekaterina Krysanova, a highly dramatic ballerina who, along with the limpid Vladislav Lantratov, danced on opening night. (They will also play the leads in the live broadcast.) Mr. Ratmansky wanted them to be almost ahead of the music, to give an impression of spontaneity and freshness. Despite his demands, he was soft spoken, even formal, an approach that had not served him well when he was director, the critic Ms. Gouchmazova recalled. Back then, "he was so tactful in rehearsals that everybody decided he wasn't strong enough to be at the top." But now, as a visiting choreographer, the calm, focused atmosphere seems to suit everyone just fine. The company is a different place than it was 10 years ago. "All these people, either I hired them, or they were in the corps when I was director," Mr. Ratmansky said. "I gave them their first roles, and we worked together many times. So now there is no resistance, nothing negative. Despite his history with the Bolshoi, Mr. Ratmanksy had been away for seven years. It was Mr. Vaziev, hired two years after the acid attack, who brought Mr. Ratmansky back into the fold, commissioning him to stage his "Romeo and Juliet" for the company. The two have a long history in the late 1990s, when Mr. Vaziev was the director of the Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg, he was one of the first to commission a large work from Mr. Ratmansky. Mr. Vaziev has made no secret of his desire to freshen up the repertory. Some in Russia see this new "Romeo" as the first salvo in a larger strategy of phasing out Mr. Grigorovich's ballets. "We should not forget in which time period he worked in this theater," Mr. Vaziev said of Mr. Grigorovich. "It was difficult, the political ideology was very dominant. As to his work as a choreographer, some I like very much, some less, which is normal. He did what he could." As for Mr. Ratmansky, he may be on the cusp of a comeback at the Bolshoi, where some of his older ballets, like "The Bright Stream," are still popular. "Romeo and Juliet" was well received in November, with the leading Moscow critic, Tatyana Kuznetsova, describing the production in the daily Kommersant as "strikingly musical and sensitive to psychological details." The Bolshoi is, after all, the place that put him on the international map as a choreographer. "I would dream to do something with him every year," Mr. Vaziev said (and not for the first time). For now, he and Mr. Ratmansky are in talks about a possible premiere for the fall of 2019. Russia calls.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
PARIS There is an indelible truth about A.P.C., the willfully anonymous French fashion label that has been quietly going about its business for three decades, one that is both right and not quite right. It concerns the clothes that A.P.C. makes, and also its ambitions, the A.P.C. epithet and albatross: "This eternal thing: 'They do basics,'" said Jean Touitou, the A.P.C. founder, sitting at his dining table, battling back his bugbear of decades. "This has been for 30 years." Because Mr. Touitou, 65, is a gravelly philosopher of bearish proportions, given to lengthy digressions on his pet causes, and because, though he is thoughtful, he can also be fierce, you might, with a nervous twinge, cast your eye down to the dark indigo jeans you are wearing (which you acquired in 2006), or think back to the powder blue oxford shirt at home in your closet, unshowy but unfailingly appropriate, and think to yourself, "Well ... don't they?" They do and they don't. A.P.C.'s clothing is defiantly normal regular, needful, closet filling and has been since it was founded, so modestly that originally it did not even have a name. (Mr. Touitou tagged it only "Hiver 87" that is to say, winter 1987.) The journey of 30 years, chronicled in a free ranging scrapbook and history Mr. Touitou has compiled and which will be published next month as "Transmission," has in some ways not taken it far from that original ideal. In a business like fashion, where surface appeal can be a kind of sorcery, and surrealism is often mistaken for genius, to make simple clothes is to invite being overlooked. But as upstarts have flamed out and even historic houses faded, A.P.C. has soldiered along. Go into one of the cooler neighborhoods of the cooler cities in the world New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Tokyo and there is not one A.P.C. store, but several. Together, they set the course for A.P.C.: Mr. Touitou is the inspiration and ideologue, Ms. Touitou the day to day manager of the studio and the creative direction. (They met at A.P.C., where Ms. Touitou started working in 1996, after studying business and then politics at the prestigious university Sciences Po in Paris, to help Mr. Touitou run the company. He was, somewhat inconveniently, in a relationship at the time.) From the earliest, A.P.C. was an outpost for reliable standards and, especially, jeans. Its ramrod stiff Japanese selvage jeans are and have long been the label's best seller, to Mr. Touitou's occasional irritation. ("You're the Stones? Sing 'Satisfaction.' You're A.P.C.? You're good at jeans.") They have been quietly influential. Hedi Slimane, before creating the Dior Homme jeans that became the highest status denim of the denim mad early aughts, consulted with Mr. Touitou. ("He asked me for some information about the denim," Mr. Touitou said. "He would've found out anyway.") But all A.P.C. pieces have a kind of suave, shrug of the shoulders appeal. Slim blazers, trench coats, silk blouses, "classic but not average" in the words of Vogue. "French girl style" has become such a trite marketing conceit that it's easy to forget that brands like A.P.C. helped to pioneer it: French clothes by and for French women, and those who wanted to look like them. Fashion insiders were early adopters, wise to the power of the just so blouse or skirt of jeans, whose brand was unburdened by over the top branding, but remained recognizable to those in the know. A.P.C. "is the closest thing that the fashion troops have to a barracks," The New York Times wrote back in 1994, one year after Mr. Touitou opened a store on Mercer Street in Manhattan. "Stylists roaming SoHo stop, unwind, buy something and go back into the fray again." They still do and sales are up, 7 percent this year, and an average of 10 percent year over year for the several years before, according to the company. "It very easily became part of my uniform," said the actor Waris Ahluwalia, who went from being a fan of the label to becoming a friend of Mr. Touitou's, and who collaborated with him one season on a collection of lapel pins and jewelry. "It's always the stuff you underestimate that you should watch out for." A.P.C. is easy to underestimate. Its scale remains relatively small: The company is on track to reach 62 million euros in sales (about 73 million) for the year 2017, said Francois Cyrille de Rendinger, its chief executive. It eschews big shows, red carpet dressings, overweening ad campaigns and hysterical logomania. But it does have celebrity placements, and big ones. Mr. Touitou struck up a friendship with Kanye West, and worked with him to put out two capsule collections. Catherine Deneuve, an icon of Mr. Touitou's youth ("'Belle de Jour' when you're a young boy is a big discovery"), is now a private client, with clothes made to order. "You should never take him too seriously," said Arnaud Faeh, the former creative director of Carhartt, who worked with Mr. Touitou on a series of A.P.C./Carhartt collaborations. "You know he doesn't take himself too seriously, either. A lot of things he says may be really misunderstood, but if you know him, you smile." (It must be said that there were very few smiles when Mr. Touitou used a racial slur at a men's wear presentation in 2015, adapting a song title by Mr. West and Jay Z, resulting in a public outcry and subsequent apology.) Yet A.P.C. struggled to be taken seriously as fashion, despite Mr. Touitou's protestations that it has been from the very beginning. The fashion establishment tends to elevate those designers who play up the artistry and high minded theatrics of what is, on some level, the rag trade. Creating clothes to make and sell is thought to be vulgar, Mr. Touitou said: "You're a merchant. You're dealing with merchandise. You sell. Whereas you should be a genius, creating concepts." Here enters the class consciousness that runs through the A.P.C. story. "Karl Marx was milk," Mr. Touitou said. He did not set out to be basic, or to be a merchant. He set out to foment the revolution. Born in Tunisia, Mr. Touitou immigrated to Paris at 9, in 1960. At the Sorbonne, he grew obsessed with Trotskyist politics, becoming a practicing member of the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste. "In those days, my point was, 'Man, we have to redesign everything, we have to destroy the whole city,'" he said. He was a firebrand in American surplus store corduroys and Shetland sweaters, peddling revolution door to door. "When you come from politics, you want to change the world totally," he said. "Then you can realize this is not going to happen. You go at 5 o'clock in the morning to factories to try to sell your ideas, they don't want that. You're just a romantic. They don't want revolution. Period. Communism was maybe just a good idea for books." Instead, Mr. Touitou turned to rock music (he idolized '60s garage rock bands) and, eventually, found a job with the fashion label Kenzo, in Paris. He began in shipping, worked his way up to overseeing the department, decamped for Agnes B. and, finally, began A.P.C. (Atelier de Production et de Creation) in a tiny studio on Rue Princesse in 1987, as a new outlet for the same fixations. "To be frank, I wanted to be the continuation of what I always did: radicalism," he said. "A very strong statement against almost everything." These days, Mr. Touitou is not exactly the picture of the grizzled radical. He and Ms. Touitou live with their daughter, Lily, 12, in the Seventh Arrondissement, among the haute bourgeoisie. (He has two children, Haydee, 28, and Pierre, 24, from his previous relationship.) He is spending his summer vacation cruising the Peloponnese on his boat. Still, he said, A.P.C. makes the same kind of corduroys and sweaters he used to rabble roused in. His cousin, the novelist Guillaume Dustan, who died in 2005, once joked to him that he had more influence on the French than the Socialist Party. "It's a funny thing to say," Mr. Touitou said. "But I think it's true." What hasn't changed is A.P.C.'s independence. Mr. Touitou owns the entire company, and there is a family spirit that pervades, mentioned by many who come into its orbit. Invitations to the Touitou home are frequent for collaborators and friends including not only Mr. West and Mr. Ahluwalia, but also the gathered fashion press who descend for fashion week and A.P.C.'s board meetings are held around the dining room table. (One or the other of the Touitous cooks.) Around A.P.C., luxury groups have bloomed, buying up labels and consolidating power. A.P.C.'s price point is not technically luxury by industry standards it benefits from hitting at an attainable sweet spot above the likes of J. Crew but below much of designer fashion but Mr. Touitou and Mr. de Rendinger said there has been interest from investors in coming on board. "They let us know, gently," Mr. Touitou said. "It's nice to be desired." But the Touitous do not, on the whole, have much interest in corporatized fashion. Labels show extravagant clothes, but many are never produced for sale, or produced in quantities so small as to be impossible to find. "We say 'fashion industry,' but it's the bag industry," Mr. Touitou said. A.P.C., unusually, makes only 25 percent of its revenues in accessories (though it did recently open its first all accessories shop in Paris). What clothes there are on the luxury racks are not often the clothes Mr. Touitou prefers. "The bourgeois don't know how to dress anymore," he said. "With women, it's just a disaster. I think the group luxury brands have a huge responsibility into that culture of vulgarity." He recalled a recent visit to Cannes: "You're seated by the pool, and everybody looks like he's just found a hooker." Under the Touitous, A.P.C. seeks to offer a lesson and a corrective; in its way, it is even budding into a small group of its own. Mr. Touitou finds little latitudes to extend to talented employees: His co designer, Louis Wong, has a small line of high end jackets, Louis W., under the A.P.C. umbrella; and when Vanessa Seward, a veteran of the Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel studios, joined A.P.C. in 2012, she was given first a capsule collection, and then eventually her own women's wear line, which has grown to support four stand alone stores in Paris and London. Mr. de Rendinger didn't rule out other labels being developed in the A.P.C. laboratory, though he did caution that they would go slowly. So the revolution, such as it is, continues. A.P.C.'s basics are edging toward the less basic. Ms. Touitou has enlisted Charlotte Chesnais, the jeweler and longtime Balenciaga designer, to consult on the A.P.C. women's collection. "It's a moment where we want to be different from ourselves," she said, "which is strange." Nevertheless, the cardinal rules still apply. Your clothes should make you feel like you. A little bad taste can be good. A touch of ugliness can be nice. The clothes A.P.C. makes will never be other than what its stewards would wear themselves. "It's nice to be loved when " Ms. Touitou began. " when you're not lovable," her husband supplied. But that wasn't quite it. "When you're not trying too hard," she said. A.P.C. isn't luxury fashion. It's probably closer to the Atelier de Laissez Faire. "I think it's really hard on people," Ms. Touitou said. "At a dinner party, they will look perfect, but if it's a promise they can't fulfill in everyday life, it's really sad."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
OUR TIME IS NOW Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America By Stacey Abrams In 2018, a black woman arrived at her polling place to cast her vote for Stacey Abrams in the Georgia gubernatorial race. When she arrived, she was refused a ballot because records showed that she had already voted absentee. Such snafus were rampant, and not just in the state of Georgia. Scores of voters were purged from the rolls and others were forced to wait in lines for hours. This woman was educated, prepared and determined to participate in the democratic process. Eventually the situation was sorted and the woman, Stacey Abrams, cast a historic vote for herself as the first black woman to represent a major political party as a gubernatorial candidate. "Our Time Is Now" is not a political memoir or a long form resume; rather, it is a striking manifesto, a stirring indictment and a straightforward road map to victory. Abrams is not governor of Georgia, and she begins her speeches reminding audiences of this stinging matter of fact. Nevertheless, she considers her campaign to be a success. After all, "winning doesn't always mean you get the prize." If the "prize" is the quantifiable electoral majority, the victory she embraces arose from her campaign's activation of the "New American Majority that coalition of people of color, young people and moderate to progressive whites." Voters of color, the identifiable face of this new power bloc, were targeted on Election Day. Abrams painstakingly details the "toolbox for effective disenfranchisement" that includes such dirty tricks as the policy of "exact match," which disqualifies voters because of small typographical inconsistencies between their registration card and state ID. (When explaining how newly married women were purged from the voter rolls because of hyphenated names, Abrams uses "Tanisha Hagen Thomas" as a hypothetical, rather than, say, "Jane Doe Smith.") Other tactics include closing of convenient polling places and rollbacks of early voting. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 declared open season on likely Democratic voters. These distressing facts are well known to most viewers of MSNBC and perhaps readers of this book. Read an excerpt from "Our Time Is Now." Every good politician is a storyteller, and Abrams is a novelist with several titles under her belt. She portrays her constituents and their concerns in such a way that they feel more actual than symbolic, more individual than indicative. When she turns her gaze onto her family, her narrative gifts are in full flower. To illustrate the emotional and psychological effects of voter suppression, she draws a vivid, affectionate and insightful portrait of her grandparents, working class Mississippians. In 1968, her grandmother was slated to vote for the first time, yet she was choked with fear of violent retribution. She whispered to her husband, "I don't want to vote."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
One ballerina, in particular, grasped every opportunity with skill, pride, musicality and heart: Isabella Boylston. Who today save Joseph Gorak, her partner in "Beauty" has feet to match hers for springing elan? For her sake, I wish Ballet Theater would rid Odile's choreography ("Swan Lake") of its tiresome Soviet cliches and restore its more intricate steps, both in her solo variation and after the fouette turns. What she lacks, as yet, is heroic grandeur, especially in adagio; and without it, "Swan Lake" misses the tragic dimension. At present, Ms. Boylston dances as the lark sings: which, in many roles this spring, lifted the heart time and again. Marcelo Gomes has long been Ballet Theater's central artist, the most natural dance actor, the greatest of all partners. In the Socrates role of Alexei Ratmansky's new "Serenade After Plato's Symposium," he shows all his depth and easy authority, and in "Sylvia," his virile charm was at its most effortless. I'm sorry, therefore, that in the season's final weeks, he showed a loss of freshness, not just in dancing but also in stage manners. His Prince Siegfried spent part of the ballroom act of "Swan Lake" in merry conversation with one of the princesses: hardly the model of pining Romantic love this character should be. His playing of two drag characters Widow Simone in "Fille," Carabosse in "Beauty" was enjoyable but not exemplary: Simone was too malicious, Carabosse too generalized. Although not all the supporting roles of Kenneth MacMillan's "Romeo and Juliet" are played with enough flair by all casts, the company's acting is frequently superb. Alexei Agoudine; Victor Barbee (the company's associate artistic director, now departing); Kate Lydon; Nancy Raffa; Keith Roberts; Aaron Scott; Roman Zhurbin among others kept turning supporting roles into vivid characters of depth and consequence. Ms. Abrera and Mr. Scott like Ms. Boylston, the marvelous newcomer Jeffrey Cirio and the nonpareil Herman Cornejo are among the many company artists in whom acting and dance impulses often seem indivisible. In the dance suites of "Swan Lake," Ballet Theater's performers are lucid and lovely, but bland, without dance chiaroscuro. In those of "Sleeping Beauty," the lucidity and loveliness acquire a quite different grace: Every dancer looks motivated, focused and animated. The difference must be Mr. Ratmansky, who staged this "Beauty" last year and who choreographed two weeks of this season's other repertory. In the case of "Sleeping Beauty," we're shown a whole new concept of classicism, from head to toe. There's much to take in. These dancers reveal it like believers. The mixture of 19th , 20th and 21st century choreography made this season fascinating, important, rewarding. (O.K., I admit that I skipped "Le Corsaire"; my patience has limits.) Those who cherish Ballet Theater as a backing group for foreign guest stars may have been disappointed. But not since Mikhail Baryshnikov's artistic directorate (1980 89) has the company done more to set standards for the rest of the world.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
For people living in Paradise and other towns in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada mountains, the morning of Nov. 8, 2018, was full of portents. The sun was a red blur in an eerie, yellow brown sky, and roadside pines were coated in ash. One man woke to find his lawn covered with burned leaves. A high school student looked up to see a stream of birds flocking en masse out of town. The winds were strong and strange not gusts, but a "sustained, jet engine roar," Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano write in "Fire in Paradise: An American Tragedy," their gripping account of the massive blaze that became known as the Camp Fire and which killed 85 people and destroyed 90 percent of residents' homes. "Fire in Paradise" grew out of Gee and Anguiano's reporting on the Camp Fire for The Guardian. Anguiano also had a personal connection to the story; she once lived 20 minutes from Paradise, and her cousin's house burned down on Nov. 8. The authors begin their book with a brief history of the region, from its Indigenous communities to its Gold Rush boom to its current role as a refuge for middle and lower income people priced out of the rest of California. Gee and Anguiano have a clear affection for the area's "sun speckled, dirt road lifestyle" and its idiosyncratic inhabitants. The heart of the book, though, is the individual stories of bravery and tragedy that played out in Paradise and its neighboring communities as the Camp Fire raged: Adult children try to persuade stubborn parents to leave town before it's too late; first responders attempt to make sense of a blaze that seemed to be coming at them from all directions; doctors and nurses scramble to evacuate 67 patients from the Feather River hospital, including a woman who had given birth only hours before. (She and her infant evacuate with the hospital's maintenance engineer, her IV fluids hanging from his rearview mirror and her catheter bag resting at her feet.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
It's always daunting to be the second designer at any brand: the one tasked with following the founder and walking that narrow tightrope between staying true to the original identity while also remaking it in a new image. This is especially true when it comes to Marni, a house known for its carefully cultivated kooky/conceptual art gallerist appeal as defined by the founding creative director, Consuelo Castiglioni, and one that occupies a special, almost sui generis place in the fashion universe. In his debut women's collection, Francesco Risso, the house's new designer, did his game best. He did so much, in fact, he tripped and flipped a bit over his own evolution.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
In fighting a lawsuit filed by the former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, Gawker Media lost nearly everything the verdict, its founder, its independence but it maintained its resolute conviction that it would win on appeal. On Wednesday, however, Gawker capitulated, settling with Hulk Hogan, whose real name is Terry G. Bollea, for 31 million, according to court documents, and bringing to a close a multiyear dispute that stripped the company of much that once defined it. Faced with a 140 million judgment in the invasion of privacy lawsuit brought by Hogan over the publication of a video that showed him having sex with a friend's wife and the later revelation that Peter Thiel, the billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur, was financing the lawsuit and others against the company Gawker filed for bankruptcy in June and ultimately sold itself in August to Univision for 135 million. The sale brought an end to the company's independence, and Nick Denton, its founder and chief executive, left. Univision took down other Gawker articles that were involved in litigation. Gawker.com, which was at the center of the Hulk Hogan lawsuit, was shut down. Gawker Media even lost its name the sites that Univision acquired are now part of the Gizmodo Media Group. All of these developments were viewed by some as the end of an era, and journalists not just those who had worked at Gawker published articles that often read like obituaries for a media company that had ushered in a certain style of irreverent, no holds barred journalism online. Still, those at the company held on to a steadfast belief that it was in the right and that it would be vindicated on appeal. The fight became a symbol of press freedom, pitting a wealthy individual against a take no prisoners news organization. But that fight ultimately proved too difficult to sustain. "After four years of litigation funded by a billionaire with a grudge going back even further, a settlement has been reached," Mr. Denton said in a blog post on Wednesday. "All out legal war with Thiel would have cost too much, and hurt too many people, and there was no end in sight," Mr. Denton added. "Gawker's nemesis was not going away." Mr. Denton did not respond to a request for further comment. In May, Mr. Thiel, a founder of PayPal and one of the earliest investors in Facebook, acknowledged in an interview with The New York Times that he was providing financial support for Mr. Bollea's lawsuit, saying he was financing cases against Gawker because it published articles that "ruined people's lives for no reason." Mr. Thiel was outed as gay by Valleywag, one of Gawker's now defunct blogs, nearly a decade ago. In a statement issued on Wednesday, Mr. Thiel said, "It is a great day for Terry Bollea and a great day for everyone's right to privacy." David Houston, a lawyer for Mr. Bollea, said in a statement of his own, "As with any negotiation for resolution, all parties have agreed it is time to move on." 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. Some Gawker employees struck a more ominous tone and expressed outrage over what the decision could represent. "This entire sorry spectacle spells doom for anybody who aspired to do what we aspired to do," said John Cook, the executive editor of Gizmodo Media Group. Gawker Media was not the only casualty. Mr. Denton, who was also a defendant in the lawsuit, filed for personal bankruptcy in August, saying, "I don't have that kind of money lying around." Mr. Bollea's lawyers also pursued money from another defendant, Albert J. Daulerio, the former editor in chief of Gawker.com. The debtors have had settlement discussions with Mr. Denton though they have not reached a final agreement, according to the court documents filed on Wednesday. Gawker Media also settled two other lawsuits, according to the documents with Shiva Ayyadurai over a 2012 article about a claim that he invented email, and with the journalist Ashley Terrill over a 2015 article about her efforts to uncover information about a former Tinder executive. Those articles, as well as the one involving Mr. Bollea, will be removed from the internet as part of the deal between the sides. Ms. Terrill will receive 500,000 from Gawker Media, and Mr. Ayyadurai will receive 750,000, according to the court documents. It is not clear if Mr. Thiel was supporting those lawsuits. Charles J. Harder, a Los Angeles based lawyer who represented Mr. Bollea, also represented Ms. Terrill and Mr. Ayyadurai. "History will reflect that this settlement is a victory for truth," Mr. Ayyadurai said in a statement. If the settlements are approved by the bankruptcy judge, the money would come from the proceeds of the sale to Univision. Founded in 2002, Gawker became a go to site for New York media gossip and a magnet for young journalists who would later go on to work at places like The New Yorker, The Awl and Time. Mr. Denton was widely known for saying journalists shared their most interesting stories at the bar after work, and his mission was to guide those stories onto his sites to entertain and surprise their readers with information that traditional news organizations often shied away from. There had been murmurings for months of a potential settlement between Gawker and Mr. Bollea, but even in the weeks leading up to its sale to Univision, Gawker maintained its typical swagger, hosting parties one at a burlesque club in Lower Manhattan and publishing articles as part of a "senior week" in August that seemed both to be a collection of pie in the sky stories and a reminder of its brashness. On Wednesday, employees were angry but melancholy. Some wondered why the settlement had come now, after so many months. "Obviously, the way that we ran this, we suffered the maximal possible damage and gained the least from it," said Tom Scocca, the executive features editor of Gizmodo Media Group. "A settlement at this point does nothing to repair any of the harm that was done." One longtime employee, Hamilton Nolan, had a more cursory response over email: "Ugh."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Warren Berlinger, whose career as a character actor spanned more than six decades and featured myriad roles in film and television dramas and comedies, died on Wednesday at the Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital in Santa Clarita, Calif. He was 83. Mr. Berlinger's daughter Elizabeth Berlinger Tarantini said the cause was cancer. On television in the 1960s, '70s and '80s, his roles included appearances on "Operation Petticoat," "Too Close for Comfort" and "Murder, She Wrote." He also appeared on "Friends," "Columbo" and "Charlie's Angels." Mr. Berlinger was in several episodes of the sitcom "Happy Days" in the 1970s and '80s, in roles including Dr. Logan, Mr. Vanburen and Army Sgt. Betchler. His most recent television credit was from 2016 on "Grace and Frankie."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The Audi team had to build another car overnight after Loic Duval destroyed the Audi entry in a practice session crash Wednesday. LE MANS, France Authorities here are expecting a potential record crowd possibly approaching 300,000 people for the start Saturday of the 82nd running of the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race. "They announced a crowd of 255,000 here last year, and they expect to beat that significantly this year; I expect them to be close to 300,000 this year," John Hindhaugh, a radio announcer for Le Mans, said in an interview Thursday. "We put a pop up hotel in the infield this year, with 200 rooms, and they were all sold out by December. Up to 85,000 people will be coming to the race from England alone." Large contingents of spectators are also expected from Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the United States, Japan and, of course, France. National Geographic lists the Le Mans 24 hour endurance race, which has been going on since 1923, at No. 1 on its list of the world's top 10 sporting events. "Le Mans is fantastic, spectacular like nothing else I've ever seen or felt," Allan McNish, a driver who retired last year after winning the race for a third time, said in an interview here Thursday. "It's the most daunting place I've ever driven." The appeal of speed, skill and stamina seems to provide an increasingly irresistible lure for racing fans. "This year, it is possibly the most important race here in a generation," Hindhaugh said. He cited a three way battle between the Audi, Toyota and Porsche factory teams as a special draw. "This race has become more relevant, thanks to Audi," Hindhaugh added, "because they've made it relevant." Over the last 15 years, the implementation of innovations such as turbocharged diesel engines, modular drivetrain components, regenerative hybrid electric systems and advanced lighting have added new technology to be tested on the endurance circuit. "The technologies they have introduced at Le Mans have gone directly into their road cars," Hindhaugh said. "A guy who looks at an Audi Le Mans racer can truly say, 'What's in that is what is in my A6,' or whatever Audi he might drive. The R8 road car is a direct descendant of the Le Mans R8s." And it is not just Audi that brings racing technology to road cars. Things like windshield wipers, disc brakes, even tire sizes, compounds and treads have been perfected at Le Mans. This year, organizers have felt compelled to alter the rules in an effort to neutralize Audi's hegemony, which is going for its 13th victory in the last 15 years. The fuel allotment for Audi's diesel hybrids has been cut significantly vis a vis their gasoline powered rivals from Toyota and Porsche. "They are being expected to maintain efficiency, power and reliability, while making do with 25 percent less fuel," Hindhaugh said. "Despite that, I expect them to have higher top speeds, faster lap times and to break their race distance records." Still, the Audi teams seem to be running closer to the ragged edge of control to try and keep up. While Toyota has won both contests in the World Endurance Championship leading up to Le Mans, Audi has destroyed two cars. A third, driven by Loic Duval, one of McNish's teammates on last year's winning car, was added to the Audi junkyard Wednesday when Duval lost control and flipped his car into a concrete barrier. A backup chassis was permitted to replace it and was rebuilt overnight, but Duval was ruled medically unfit to compete. That leaves only Tom Kristensen, who has won this event as a co driver a record nine times, in competition from last year's winning entry. "All three of them have got something to prove," McNish said, referring to Audi, Porsche and Toyota. "The Le Mans trophy is the one that is missing from Toyota's cabinet. Porsche is not subtle about their desire to win this race and show up Audi; signing driver Mark Webber away from the Red Bull Formula One team is an indication of that. And Audi wants to prove that at Le Mans it is still at home."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
LAST week, General Motors began its press introduction for the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, which is scheduled to be in dealerships next month. The program included detailed engineering and marketing presentations, and journalists drove the cars about 200 miles on Michigan roads. Predictably, reports on the much anticipated car along with a bit of uproar about its operational details began to ricochet around the Internet. Amid praise for the Volt's innovations and barbs at its 41,000 price tag, writers and readers expressed confusion over just what the car is or isn't. When the Volt made its debut at the 2007 Detroit auto show as a design study and a technology showcase, it was hailed for its unconventional approach to green motoring. Later, as the economy slid into recession and G.M. went into bankruptcy, the Volt became a symbol of hope for the automaker's reinvention, a blueprint for a new approach to vehicle design. G.M. engineered the car to drive up to 50 miles purely on electricity from a large lithium ion battery, producing no tailpipe pollutants. Yet unlike other electric cars, the Volt concept car had a small gasoline engine that would start when the battery ran down, powering an onboard generator to produce the electricity needed to keep the car moving. In one stroke, it seemed, G.M. had dismantled the argument that electric cars were impractical because of their modest driving range. Though the show car's styling was toned down for production, the drive system remains largely true to the original idea. Nearly four years later, that powertrain still defies a simple label. On short commutes, the Volt burns no gas. On a full battery charge and a full tank of gas, the car can travel up to 350 miles, G.M. says, so it can be a family's primary car, not just a local runabout. A full evaluation will appear in this space in a few weeks. Meanwhile, here are answers to basic questions about the car: Q. Is the Volt an electric car or a hybrid? A. G.M. has consistently called the Volt an electric car "purely electrically driven" was the wording in materials distributed to the press basing its terminology on the fact that there is electricity driving the front wheels whenever the car is moving. The company insists it is not a hybrid. Certainly the Volt takes a different approach to automotive drive systems, perhaps best described as a new variation of the layout known as a series hybrid. Similar to the operation of diesel electric railroad locomotives, the series hybrid's combustion engine is used solely to produce electricity for an electric drive motor. Q. So what's all the fuss about? A. Information obtained ahead of the press introduction, in contrast to what G.M. had previously maintained, made it clear that under certain conditions (at highway speed with the battery depleted) the 4 cylinder gas engine does provide some assist to the drive wheels. Hybrid systems in which a gas engine works in tandem with electric drive in this way the Toyota Prius's, for example are known as parallel hybrids. G.M. says it concealed the Volt's operational details while the car was under development for competitive reasons, protecting its intellectual property until the patents were approved. Also, until this week G.M. was adamant that the gas driven generator could never charge the battery, only maintain its charge as the car was driven. The company now says that the generator can send some power to the battery to replenish what it calls a buffer. G.M. points out that it's best to recharge by plugging in because the grid is a less expensive source of electricity. Not surprisingly, when bloggers noted the discrepancies, charges of deception flew, even from publications that found the car to be thoroughly competent and smartly conceived. Q. How is the Volt different from the Prius? Is it more like the Prius plug in hybrid that Toyota is developing? Toyota has said that it will offer a plug in version of the Prius in 2012, with a lithium ion battery large enough to drive about 13 miles on electric power. Q. How does the Volt compare with the Nissan Leaf, then? A. The Leaf is a pure electric car, running only on the energy stored in its battery. Nissan says it has a range of 100 miles, after which it will need eight hours to replenish the battery using a high voltage charger. Q. Which of these types of cars Prius, Leaf or Volt is right for me? A. If you own another car for extended trips, don't have a long commute and want a car with no tailpipe emissions, the Leaf is a good solution. Drivers who want their around town errands and daily commutes to be petroleum free can choose the Volt without losing the ability to make long trips. The Prius makes the most sense for drivers who cover many miles, though it will cost somewhat more to drive on short trips than a Leaf or Volt would. Q. Why was the Volt designed this way? A. The engineers set out to build a car that would offer the benefits of an E.V. zero emissions and cheap "refueling" at home among them for the local driving and short trips that most people do every day. To achieve maximum efficiency, the basic layout of an electric car was chosen as the starting point. But in a concession to practicality to eliminate owner concerns about being stranded with a depleted battery G.M. added the onboard generating system as a way to extend the car's range. This compromise added cost, weight and complexity, but was thought to make the car appealing to more buyers, at least until a public charging infrastructure is in place. Q. What are the early reviews? A. The reaction from journalists who drove the car in Michigan was quite positive, with high praise for the car's performance and how well its electric and gas drive systems are integrated. Lindsay Brooke, who wrote for The Times the first reports of how the Volt performed with its gas engine running, offered this appraisal in an e mail after spending a long day driving the car at the press program: "The Volt works extremely well. We hammered our car yesterday, including a bunch of wide open throttle runs to 100 m.p.h. The car returned a 52 miles per gallon average for the day and we got 44.5 miles in E.V. mode. For what G.M. set out to achieve with this program, they nailed it." Q. How does the Volt's fuel economy compare with conventional hybrids? A. There's no simple answer, but this much is certain: it will not get the 230 m.p.g. that G.M. once said it expected in city driving. The Environmental Protection Agency's fuel economy certification is not finished. In addition, new fuel economy labels are still in the works as regulators try to develop a meaningful rating for mixed drive vehicles. The numbers are expected soon, G.M. says, as the cars cannot be shipped from the factory without fuel economy stickers. We know this much: G.M. says the car will go 25 to 50 miles on a fully charged battery about 1.60 worth of electricity, according to Car and Driver's Volt test and perhaps 310 miles farther with the gas engine drawing fuel from the 9.3 gallon tank. A simple calculation says the car is getting 33 m.p.g while in "extended range" mode. But to be fair, the fuel economy should at least be averaged over the total range, adding in an energy equivalent for the electricity used while driving on battery power. This part of the mileage calculation has not been completed by the government; for comparison's sake, a 2011 Toyota Prius is rated at 51 m.p.g. in town, 48 on the highway. Q. Why does it require premium gas? Can it use E85 like a flex fuel vehicle? A. To extract the necessary power from a small high efficiency 4 cylinder, engineers designed the engine with a high compression ratio. Premium fuel is required to prevent engine damage with such high internal pressures. The Volt engine will not be compatible with an E85 ethanol blend until 2013, though the original concept car was said to be. Q. Is the Volt made in America? A. Chevrolet will assemble the Volt at its Detroit Hamtramck plant in Michigan. Like all modern vehicles, its components come from many sources. As production begins, the battery cells will come from South Korea. The electric motors (there are two) are made in Mexico. The gas engine is from Austria. Q. How clean is the Volt? A. The car has been certified as a Super Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle, the same level as gas only cars like the Chevy Malibu and some BMW 3 Series models. G.M. says it intends to seek certification as a Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle, a more stringent level that carries a longer warranty and allows no evaporative emissions, which will be needed in some states for access to special high occupancy vehicle lanes on freeways. Q. What are the areas where G.M. might make improvements in the future? A. The Volt is quite heavy for a 4 passenger compact sedan nearly 3,800 pounds because it carries a 435 pound battery in addition to a gas engine. Changing the iron engine block to aluminum would be a start. And while G.M. says the aerodynamic drag coefficient, first reported at 0.28, is Chevy's best ever, it is not as smooth in the wind tunnel as a Prius, which has a Cd of 0.25. Q. Why did G.M. go to all the trouble of developing something new instead of improving its previous electric car, the EV1? A. G.M. has plenty of reasons for choosing to let memories of the EV1 fade. That car, of course, was entirely experimental, and even if it had the range and seating capacity needed to make it appealing to consumers, it did not have a logical path to production. The Volt, on the other hand, shares underpinnings with a mass market model, reducing costs and simplifying production while taking advantage of advances in battery chemistry and electric motor design over the last decade.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
"The first principle," said Richard Feynman, "is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool." When it comes to pundits and politics this year, I'd revise the great physicist's admonition as follows: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself that Bernie Sanders can't win not just the Democratic nomination, but also the presidency itself." The warning applies to me as much as to anyone else who has spent the past months, or years, insisting that the senator from Vermont doesn't have a chance. What it comes down to is this: We don't want Sanders to be elected, so we tell ourselves he can't. According to the theory, Sanders's support has a hard ceiling: It may be intense, but it's also cultlike and off putting. Too many Americans know enough about socialism to want a president who wears the term proudly (even if he insists it's of a more benign variety). He embraces nearly all of the same policies, like Medicare for all, that raised Elizabeth Warren high in the polls but are now dragging her down. And then there are those clips of him saying nice things about the Soviet Union, or defending the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, or finding the silver lining in the Castro dictatorship in Cuba. Didn't Jeremy Corbyn, whose ideological affinities run in the same direction, just lead Britain's Labour Party to disaster? It all sounds superficially convincing and eerily familiar. It's what many conservatives kept saying about Donald Trump around this time four years ago. As with Sanders, Trump was seen as being way outside his party's mainstream: a protectionist in a party of free traders; an isolationist in a party of interventionists; a libertine in a party of moralists. As with Sanders, Trump barely belonged to the party whose nomination he sought. As with Sanders, Trump's message was that he was fighting a "rigged system." And as with Sanders, the ideological distaste for Trump among conservatives was matched to the conviction that he couldn't possibly win. "Let's Elect Hillary Now," was the title of one conservative lament about the popularity of supposedly unelectable Republicans, written toward the end of 2015. I know the article well because I wrote it. Trump won because he was willing to say loudly what his supporters believed deeply; because, in his disdain for what politicians are supposed to be and do, he exuded authenticity; because he was hated by the people his base found hateful; because he had an opponent who, in the minds of his supporters, epitomized corruption and self dealing; and because he offered radical cures for a country he diagnosed as desperately ill. Despite being the oldest man ever elected president, he seemed (to his voters) fresh, true, bold, and sorely needed. So it is, and would be, with Sanders. Depth of conviction? Check. Contempt for conventional norms? Check. Opposed by all the right people? Check. Running against a "crooked" opponent? Check. Commitment to drastic change? Check. Like Trump, too, he isn't so much campaigning for office as he is leading a movement. People who join movements aren't persuaded. They're converted. Their depth of belief is motivating and infectious. The strength of Sanders's movement is reflected in his blowout fund raising numbers nearly 100 million for 2019 which only rose in the wake of his heart attack. If Sanders wins Iowa (where polls have him in a dead heat for first), and New Hampshire (where he has a slight lead), then the argument about his supposed non electability will begin to crumble including among older black voters, who have so far been among Joe Biden's most important pillars of support. But even if Sanders won the nomination, how would he win the election? Perhaps more easily than people suspect. Intensity among Democratic leaning voters will never be greater. There will likely be no third party challenger like Ralph Nader to shave his margin, or an influential "NeverSanders" wing among liberal pundits. He will find crossover support from former Trump voters in places like Ohio and Michigan, just as Trump found it from former Obama voters. To energize African American support, he could choose Eric Holder or Stacey Abrams as his running mate. Nor will scare tactics work any better against Sanders than they did against Trump. Overwrought comparisons with Hugo Chavez will wear thin, just as comparisons between Trump and Benito Mussolini did. The easiest move in American politics is to show yourself to be less scary than your caricature. Ronald Reagan's devastating "There you go again" line against Jimmy Carter can be a Sanders quip, too. I write all this as someone who thinks a Sanders presidency would be ruinous on many levels: by turning the Democratic Party into a socialist one; by turning the American economy into a statist one; and by turning America's position in the world into a feeble one. I'd hate to see him win the nomination, just as I hated seeing Trump win it in 2016. But wishes aren't facts. 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
"There are no seasons anymore," Joseph Abboud said one recent weekday morning as he prepared for his fall 2017 men's wear show. "Fashion has become one long run on sentence." Mr. Abboud, 66, understands better than most the vagaries of a notoriously fickle business. After spending much of the 1980s at Ralph Lauren, where he rose to associate director of men's wear design, he started his namesake label in 1986 and introduced his first men's wear line the next year. Although he was named the men's wear designer of the year two years in a row by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, he never quite joined the ranks of household name American design stars like Calvin, Donna, Ralph or Tommy. Still, he staked a durable claim on the landscape of men's fashion. His run of success was interrupted by some bumpy years when the designer waged a prolonged legal battle with the Italian conglomerate that manufactured his clothing and owned the rights to his name. Reunited with his brand in 2013, Mr. Abboud inaugurated an online business, opened a Madison Avenue flagship and wholeheartedly dove back into the fray with full scale fashion shows. One of the few widely recognizable names on the roster of New York Fashion Week: Men's whose fourth installment will kick off Monday night with Mr. Abboud's runway show the designer shared his views of men's fashion over a cup of English breakfast tea and an English muffin at Hamburger Heaven, an old school Midtown coffee shop that is a landmark purveyor of unpretentious, quality fare, not unlike the designer himself. Q. At the recent men's wear shows in Europe, designers like Donatella Versace and others signaled a return to the suit, which many have pronounced dead. Yet you never really abandoned it, did you? A. When I started out in the business, for example, every guy you saw on Metro North would be in a suit and tie. Then, when we went through all those years of casual Friday and all that, when you couldn't tell the C.E.O. from the guy delivering food, the pendulum was inevitably bound to swing back. Is it almost as if, for millennial men, a suit holds the fascination of an "aha" moment? I see a lot of young guys going back to the suit, but they're doing it in a way that's less of a uniform. I have two daughters in their 20s and I use their boyfriends as my focus group. What I see happening with them is that they're into the heritage aspect of what custom tailoring is, of what Savile Row was. Guys who grew up on the internet are really into researching everything, every element, learning it for themselves. Whereas, in previous generations, information about dress was, in a certain sense, passed down from father to son. I come from a blue collar family. My father worked at the American Can Company as a mechanic. He broke his back and was disabled, and the first memory I have of him is in the hospital. My mother was a working mother she had two jobs. Everybody in the house had to help out. I was the first in my family to go to college and so, growing up, I thought that dressing well opened doors. For me it did. I've always loved fashion and I started working at the Boston haberdashery Louis Boston when I was 16. Later I went into the management training program and began to learn the business there. Already in high school, though, I'd been voted best dressed, so the interest was always there. One irony is that, in my yearbook photo, I'm wearing a fawn colored corduroy jacket with a black turtleneck and I'm still wearing a black turtleneck now. Is it accurate to say your approach to design is that of a traditionalist who is fashion forward, though not so much as to scare off consumers? When I got into the business, there was a very preppy point of view: saddle shoes and pink button down shirts. There wasn't a sophisticated American option. My goal was always to dress American men and make them feel better. Of course, at the time you had Armani, with the softer form of silhouette. Armani was a big thing in my world. He defined the '80s and the '90s. He was the standard bearer. But on Wall Street at the time, if you wore Armani to work, they'd say, "Go home and take off your pajamas." So you found an opening between what Armani and others were doing and the man in the gray flannel suit? You have to know your place in the universe. Preppy hung on so long, and I felt it tended to make American men look provincial. I thought, what can I add? How can I make a suit a little more fluid, sexier, less schoolboy? How can I get the natural shoulder Ivy League guy to move a little bit? I found my white space there. I was one of the few designers who were anchored in tailoring. So if Armani was Europe, and Ralph Lauren was the United States, I was in the middle of the Atlantic. Look, the battle is won or lost at retail, not on the cover of magazines. So many press darlings have disappeared over the years. Where are they now? Men's wear is much more exacting, much less romantic, than women's wear; there is much less room to be creative. Some might argue otherwise. Look at Dries Van Noten or Raf Simons and the fact that the growth of men's wear has outpaced that of women's wear for years. Still, it always comes down to, "Are you creating fantasy or creating reality?" Women can get a scent of an idea and know how to interpret what they're seeing, no matter how wild it looks on a runway. It's different with guys. They need to be hit on the head. In men's wear, small changes are huge: An eighth of an inch on a lapel is like an earthquake. So if you send a model onto a runway with no shirt and wearing war paint, the guys on Metro North don't know what's going on. They can't make that leap of faith. True, but for a generation inured to fashion by social media, there seems to be a greater latitude for the outrageous, for stuff like Gucci's fur lined mules. Yes, though sometimes in fashion we're talking to ourselves. You get these moments where everyone is putting out an uber skinny silhouette which feels a little old now or suddenly things reverse and get too oversized. Do you mean the business becomes hermetic? There's a guy in our factory in Massachusetts named Salvatore Mellace. He does all the paper, all the Joseph Abboud patterns. I've been working with him building our silhouettes for 30 years. And my very favorite part of what I do is sitting in the workroom with him, taking whatever ideas I have and interpreting them as practical realities. So you see yourself as a romantic pragmatist? For me, the most beautiful part of a man starts with the shoulders. If you lose the shape, you lose the body, and I like to track the body in my designs. I'm also someone who sees beauty in age, which is why I use models like Alex Lundqvist in my shows. I go back to pictures of Alex from the '90s and I love seeing the way he has aged. I never wanted to play to the boy clothes market. I've fought my whole life trying to get boys to dress like men.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
A compilation of Brian Williams's television appearances shows how his accounts of a 2003 episode on military helicopters in Iraq gradually became more perilous. For years, Brian Williams had been telling a story that wasn't true. On Wednesday night, he took to his anchor chair on "NBC Nightly News" to apologize for misleading the public. A host of military veterans and pundits came forward on television and social media, challenging Mr. Williams's assertion that he had simply made a mistake when he spoke, on several occasions, about having been in a United States military helicopter forced down by enemy fire in Iraq in 2003. Some went so far as to call for his resignation. In his apology, Mr. Williams said that he had been on a different helicopter, behind the one that had sustained fire, and that he had inadvertently "conflated" the two. The explanation earned him not only widespread criticism on radio and TV talk shows, but widespread ridicule on Twitter, under the hashtag " BrianWilliamsMisremembers." A Fox News analyst, Howard Kurtz, said, "The admission raises serious questions about his credibility in a business that values that quality above all else." On CNN's "New Day," the host Chris Cuomo said that attributing the lie to "the fog of war" wasn't acceptable and the Internet would "eat him alive." Rem Rieder, a USA Today media columnist, wrote, "It's hard to see how Williams gets past this, and how he survives as the face of NBC News." It's unclear at this point whether Mr. Williams will feel compelled to speak again to the issue. What is clear is that the trustworthiness of one of America's best known and most revered TV journalists has been damaged, and that the moral authority of the nightly network news anchor, already diminished in the modern media era, has been dealt another blow. Mr. Williams first reported on the episode when it happened in 2003, though the current controversy erupted last week after he spoke about it on air during a tribute to a retired soldier. Some veterans took to Facebook to complain, and a reporter at the military newspaper Stars and Stripes picked up the thread. In fact, some of the soldiers present in Iraq that day had been quietly fuming about Mr. Williams's reporting for years, and had even tried to alert the news media to it earlier. Joe Summerlin, who was on the helicopter that was forced down, said in an interview that he and some of his fellow crew watched Mr. Williams's initial story and were angered by his characterization of the events. The account that Mr. Williams told of the episode evolved over the years, with his personal involvement gradually growing more perilous. In a 2003 segment on NBC that described it as "a close call in the skies over Iraq," Mr. Williams said, "the Chinook ahead of us was almost blown out of the sky." In 2013, Mr. Williams told David Letterman that he had actually been on the helicopter that got shot down, adding that a crew member had been injured and received a medal. "We figured out how to land safely," he said, "we landed very quickly and hard. We were stuck, four birds in the desert and we were north out ahead of the other Americans." And on the "Nightly News" last week, he described "a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an R.P.G.," a reference to a rocket propelled grenade. Mr. Summerlin said that Mr. Williams's helicopter was part of a different mission and at least 30 minutes behind theirs. His account is supported by two of the pilots of Mr. Williams's own helicopter, Christopher Simeone and Allan Kelly, who said in an interview that they did not recall their convoy of helicopters coming under fire. After the initial piece aired on NBC in 2003, Mr. Summerlin and his crew went looking for reporters on their base in Kuwait to tell them about the inaccuracies in Mr. Williams's reporting. Instead, they wound up leaving notes in several news vans encouraging them to get in touch. Years later, they were still frustrated by Mr. Williams's recounting. "When he was on the air on the Letterman show, I was going crazy," Mr. Simeone said. "I was thinking 'This guy is such a liar and everyone believes it.' " On Thursday, yet another pilot, Rich Krell, gave a different account, telling CNN that he had in fact flown Mr. Williams, and their helicopter had come under attack. Mr. Simeone and Mr. Kelly strongly disputed Mr. Krell's account. Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. NBC has not commented on the controversy, either to support Mr. Williams or to clarify the details of the episode, nor did it make him available for comment. It's also not clear if other people at NBC were aware that Mr. Williams's version of the events was inaccurate. It's not unprecedented for a public figure to exaggerate his or her experiences, especially when it comes to military conflict. In 2008, then presidential candidate Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton acknowledged that she had misspoken when she described having to run across a tarmac to avoid sniper fire after landing in Bosnia as first lady in 1996. While running for Senate in 2010, Connecticut's attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, falsely claimed to have served in Vietnam. But for a journalist and in particular, an anchor to do so has struck many people in the news industry as a very different sort of offense. While most were unwilling to publicly criticize a colleague, few were persuaded by Mr. Williams's explanation. "My inbox is filled today with producers who went to Iraq with me, to Afghanistan with me, to Haiti with me, all kind of wondering how you could mess this up," said Aaron Brown, a former anchor for CNN. "I have no answer for that. I will tell you that getting shot at is not something you forget." Mr. Williams just extended his contract with NBC in December, with the terms reported to be as much as 10 million a year for five years. At the time, Deborah Turness, the president of NBC News, called him one of "the most trusted journalists of our time." The anchor and managing editor of "NBC Nightly News" since 2004, Mr. Williams succeeded his mentor, Tom Brokaw. His broadcast has long been considered a block of stability for the network. On Tuesday, "NBC Nightly News" issued a news release announcing that it was the top evening newscast in total viewers for January for the second month in a row. Mr. Williams is a familiar presence outside the anchor chair, too. He has hosted "Saturday Night Live," and appeared frequently on late night TV shows like "The Daily Show" and "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon," assuming a kind of comedic persona that stands in sharp contrast to his identity as a newsman. Other prominent TV journalists have made big mistakes. Dan Rather of CBS relied on bogus documents for a 2004 story questioning President Bush's National Guard record. In 2013, Lara Logan took a leave of absence from "60 Minutes" for a flawed story about an attack on the American compound in Benghazi, Libya. This is a different situation, though. If it turns out that Mr. Williams intentionally misled the public, it will be an instance not of careless or irresponsible reporting, but of a journalist lying for the purpose of self aggrandizement.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
MISSOULA, Mont. This state is now red. Not the light red it used to be; not a red and blue checkerboard coaxing the eyes to see purple. Just a deep red. Every statewide race in Montana went Republican this week, with record voter turnout: president, Senate, House, governor, attorney general, secretary of state, auditor. And both houses of the state Legislature retained a Republican majority. Come 2021, for just the fourth time since 1921, Republicans will hold Montana's house, senate and governorship. This once proudly nonpartisan state is on the brink of becoming "like North Dakota, South Dakota and Idaho, where Republicans rule everything and there's no question about who's going to be in power," Mike Dennison, chief political reporter for Montana Television Network, told me. Montana has had a Democratic governor since 2004, but he and other veterans of the political scene were not surprised by this year's result. Just before Election Day, Mr. Dennison predicted that the Democrats would be routed. "Republicans have been increasing their strength for the last 30 to 40 years," he told me. The election of Greg Gianforte as governor will have the most immediate effect on Montanans. A wealthy software entrepreneur who spent 7.5 million of his own money to defeat his opponent, Mr. Gianforte is a politician in President Trump's image. He has played down the risks of the coronavirus, derided unions and the public sector and based his policymaking on the Bible. He has also brutalized the media: In 2017, he body slammed a reporter for The Guardian and later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault. In his politics and personality, Mr. Gianforte would seem out of sync with most Montanans. He's a deeply partisan Republican in a place that values ideological independence; he's a brawler in a place that values niceness; and he's an urban newcomer, a transplant from the East Coast, in a place that values rural, multigenerational roots. Montana politics was once known for producing centrist Democrats, like Senators Mike Mansfield and Max Baucus, and pragmatic Republicans like Marc Racicot, a governor who dealt plainly with Democratic legislators and recently said he would vote for Joe Biden. Mr. Gianforte, on the other hand, seems to have made a savvy Trump era wager: that a strongman persona and reputation in business were enough to prevail. He's a tycoon whose policies favor the rich, but still won handily in nearly all of rural Montana, where rates of poverty and unemployment tend to be high. He campaigned on tax cuts and reopening the economy, coronavirus be damned; he also softened his take on health care, vowing to protect those with pre existing conditions. Labor advocates in Montana worry that, when he takes office, Mr. Gianforte will begin to abandon the state's traditional support for social welfare and workers' rights. Like other Western states, Montana has a libertarian ethos, but it also has one of the nation's most impressive socialist histories, a relatively durable union movement and a rising Native American political class. It also has serious problems to solve. Nearly 13 percent of residents live in poverty, but Mr. Gianforte, who is the state's current at large congressman, has shown little interest in helping Montana's low wage workers. Last year, he voted against a House bill to increase the federal minimum wage to 15 even though in his home county a single parent raising two children must earn more than an estimated 30 per hour to cover basic needs. Mr. Gianforte has signaled that he will place restrictions on workers' right to organize. He has endorsed the expansion of charter and religious schools, which the state's unionized public school teachers see as an assault on their jobs. During the campaign, Mr. Gianforte's running mate for lieutenant governor, Kristen Juras, told a crowd of voters that he would not veto a private sector right to work bill. (She later walked back that statement.) Montanans such as Henry Cellmer, business manager of the Plumbers and Pipefitters Union Local 30, in Billings, say the new governor's intentions are clear. Once Mr. Gianforte takes office, Mr. Cellmer predicted, "We'll have a right to work state within 90 days." Mr. Cellmer joined Local 30 more than four decades ago, just out of high school. His union now supports some 400 workers who build and repair piping for things like ventilation systems across the region. At the start of the pandemic, Mr. Cellmer said, 70 percent of his members found themselves unemployed. Later, they began to go out on jobs again and were helped by federal pandemic unemployment relief, he told me, "but I see another tough year coming for our industrial work. Some of these guys are going to be hurting." Although the union tried to explain that Republican policies would likely translate into lower pay, a fair number of the members continued to back Mr. Trump and Mr. Gianforte because "they're worried about people taking their guns," Mr. Cellmer explained. She fears that, as governor Mr. Gianforte will cut back on Medicaid, hurting low and middle income people in the middle of the pandemic. "He hasn't done his job, even in Congress," she said. Ms. Thompson supported Mr. Gianforte's Democratic opponent, Mike Cooney, because of his promises to increase wages for direct care providers, maintain funding for tribal health initiatives, require insurers to cover Covid 19 testing and treatment and standardize workplace infectious disease standards. Montana has one of the highest per capita rates of new coronavirus cases in the country. Yet Mr. Gianforte's "Montana Comeback Plan" says nothing about Covid 19 screening or treatment; it focuses almost exclusively on getting people back to work. In late October, Mr. Dennison, the political reporter, published an internal wish list of the bills Republican lawmakers intended to pass once there was no longer the threat of a Democratic veto. As one legislator put it, the hope was to quickly "capitalize on having a Republican governor." The seven page outline of "top priorities" reads like a document from the Trump White House or the American Legislative Exchange Council: undo statewide health orders related to the coronavirus, reduce property and income taxes, shrink environmental regulations, expand "school choice," eliminate campaign contribution limits, end same day voter registration, tax renewable energy, get rid of prevailing wage requirements on state construction jobs and make it harder for public employees unions to collect dues from their members. The document also lists a number of provisions making it harder to get an abortion. Such bills are nothing new in Montana, but when passed in previous years, they were generally vetoed by a Democratic governor. Mr. Gianforte is unlikely to follow his predecessors' example. In January, he signed onto an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to reconsider Roe vs. Wade, and he has donated millions of dollars to anti abortion causes (as well as to a creationist museum that displays models of humans hanging out with dinosaurs). Fetal rights bills, extreme gun measures, attacks on unions such policies would have once been seen as Republican posturing in Montana. Now, they could become the law of the land. 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
With college acceptance letters out, high school seniors and their families now turn to what has become an annual ritual in the application process: financial aid appeals. A little strategic haggling before the May 1 student decision deadline can cut 5,000 to 10,000 more a year off the tuition bill, says Joel Peck, a certified public accountant in New York who advises families on college admissions. Those who are new to the process might not be aware they do not have to pay the base sticker price, which for private nonprofit colleges averaged 33,480 this year, according to the College Board. To attract top candidates, many colleges are willing to shave money off tuition, even beyond what they have already offered in financial aid, on a case by case basis. "They call it merit aid to deflect from the fact that it is discretionary," Mr. Peck said. Appeals may surge this year because of recent changes in the federal student aid application that allow families to file their paperwork earlier and base it on tax returns from two years ago. The older information leaves families enough wiggle room to appeal on the grounds that the college didn't base its financial aid award on the most up to date financial circumstances. And appeals may gain more urgency in the future if the sharp cuts in student aid programs proposed in President Trump's budget become a reality. Private nonprofit colleges are the most likely to bargain with accepted students, especially ones with strong grades and test scores that will help improve the school's rankings, college advisers said. Mr. Peck says the next few weeks before the May 1 notification deadline are important because as families select their schools, they will free up scholarship and aid money at the schools they do not choose, which will have to be reallocated to other applicants. That is money that is up for grabs. For the 2015 16 academic year, about 88 percent of first time full time private college freshmen and 77 percent of all private school undergraduates were awarded half the cost of tuition and fees, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers. That trend is expected to hold up for 2016 17, according to Ken Redd, the association's director of research, who is busy completing this year's survey to be released in May. The practice of offering discounts on tuition which is practiced by all kinds of private colleges, from nationally recognized schools to regional and smaller institutions has gone up every year since the financial crisis in 2008, Mr. Redd said. But the financial disclosures required of families can be complicated, and some schools ask for more personal information beyond the common federal form everyone uses. Some families turn to advisers to guide them through admissions. Mr. Peck, for example, charges up to 1,300 for a package of services that runs from the application through the financial aid appeal. He also recently began selling a 297 video about college financial aid. The number of full time independent education advisers has exploded in the last decade, to 8,000 in 2015, from 1,500 in 2005, according to the Independent Educational Consultants Association, and about twice as many people dabble in it as a side job, said Mark Sklarow, the association's chief executive. There is no official licensing for these advisers, who charge a median fee for a package of college advising services of 4,600. Many will do financial aid appeals on a per hour basis, Mr. Sklarow said. The typical client is a child attending a large public high school in an affluent suburb who is planning to attend a private college. College acceptance letters and financial aid awards land around the same time, which, during the standard admissions timeline, is in the spring. Advisers have several suggestions for families planning to appeal; the first one is, lose the attitude. "You don't want to bargain like Cuba Gooding Jr.'s character in 'Jerry Maguire,' " said Kalman Chany, an adviser in New York who charges 1,950 for his complete package of college services, and advises on financial aid appeals for 850 to 1,250. "Don't go in and say, 'Show me the money!' " Students who are entering their freshman year and have multiple admission offers tend to have the most leverage at the bargaining table. That is because most successful appeals are argued on the basis that the school did not have the best information about the applicant's true financial circumstances, or that a rival school has made a better offer. A student could be eligible for a tuition discount because he or she falls into a specific demographic group, like being the child of a graduate, having a certain religious affiliation or being eligible through work. A college with declining enrollment might also be more willing to shave down the tuition bill to fill spots. But a college might also consider a specific skill or talent as worthy of a tuition discount to coax the student to enroll. Say a student plays tuba in the marching band, and a college has eight spots for tuba players in its band, with three about to graduate. Being qualified to take one of those spots gives the applicant a selling point. "If the admissions people know they want a particular kid, there will be a note in the file and the financial aid office is going to work with that family," said Ronald Ramsdell, the founder of the Minneapolis based College Aid Counseling Services, who charges 1,150. Families that can document an unusual circumstance that is not reflected on the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or Fafsa, they filed at the start of the application process have a strong argument to appeal for more financial aid. Some reasons could include a bonus that was only paid once but listed on the old tax form, or excessive medical bills, a dislocation because of a natural disaster or a recent job loss. Being able to provide solid proof is an important part of a successful appeal, either in the form of those medical bills or the competing offer from another school. Financial aid awards based on a family's need can come in the form of grants that don't have to be repaid, plus loans or work study programs. Merit aid, on the other hand, is often used to entice certain students. "The better students get the bigger aid packages," Mr. Chany said. "Ask yourself, how do you stack up?" Timing is also important, counselors say, to avoid looking desperate and to maximize leverage. Families should wait a few days after receiving the letters offering of admission and financial aid to start their appeal, and should wait to make their final decision as close to the May 1 decision date as possible.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
A three year stint in downtown Seattle was more than enough for Jean Z. Poh and Giordano Contestabile. They couldn't wait to move to New York. For Ms. Poh, it was a homecoming. She grew up in New Jersey and graduated from Barnard College and Cornell Law School. Mr. Contestabile, who is from Milan, had lived in cities throughout the world, but never in New York. The two met in Shanghai, where she was working in a law firm and he was employed in the video game field. They were married three years ago. Shortly after that, Mr. Contestabile's job took them to Seattle. Ms. Poh began working for her family's fine jewelry business, Jean Alex. She also started writing Deliver Me Diamonds, a jewelry blog. The couple lived in a two bedroom in the Olivian, a high rise rental building with views of mountain and sea, paying a monthly rent in the high 3,000s. Bored, Ms. Poh cooked constantly. They were thrilled when Mr. Contestabile took a new job at Tilting Point Media in New York. "For me," Mr. Contestabile said, "the important thing is to step out of the apartment and be in a place that's fun and with a lot of stuff to do. Seattle downtown is not what you call a happening, bustling scene." Ms. Poh told her agent, Morgan Turkewitz of Citi Habitats, that she was interested in a two bedroom with plenty of entertainment space, an outdoor component and large closets, "because my husband is Italian and the man owns more shoes than I do." And men's shoes are enormous "like boats." They required ample kitchen counter space for their many appliances, including a mixer, a blender, a panini press and a small deli style meat slicer for the whole prosciutto Mr. Contestabile has shipped to him every few months. (In cool weather, they store the prosciutto in the microwave.) Their budget was 6,000 a month. Inventory for two bedrooms downtown was low, Ms. Turkewitz said even lower for places with outdoor space. A 1,000 square foot rental in a small brownstone building on East 10th Street in Greenwich Village, at 5,600 a month, was well situated. It was a fifth floor walk up, but the couple didn't mind. It was sufficiently bright and airy, thanks to a living room skylight. But there was no outdoor space. For 5,500 a month, an apartment on West 26th Street was large, with 1,400 square feet, but the kitchen was dated and the floor sloped. It had a private terrace, but the rectangular space, surrounded by walls on all sides, seemed dungeonlike to Ms. Poh. She didn't like the commercial nature of the neighborhood, sometimes called NoMad, which reminded her of the garment district. One place, in a high rise building, had a second bathroom but a serious flaw. "On my list of no gos is a bathroom door facing the bed with the toilet facing the door," Ms. Poh said. "I'm Chinese and that is terrible feng shui, and I cannot do it." A charming two bedroom with a narrow terrace on East 13th Street near Union Square rented for 5,750 a month. But at 900 square feet, it was relatively small. And Ms. Poh disliked the beams on the ceiling, which she found oppressive. Nothing compared in her mind with a top floor apartment, of around 1,000 square feet, in the heart of Greenwich Village. It had exclusive access to a rooftop deck. Light streamed in from the skylights. The bathroom, which overlooked an interior garden, included a washer dryer. Ms. Poh was charmed by the brick walls and pretty French doors. The long kitchen counter stretched along one windowed wall. She sent photos to her husband. Neither minded the many stairs or the bedroom view of a busy street. "I told them that area is a noisier area," Ms. Turkewitz said, "and they were O.K. with it." Mr. Contestabile gave the go ahead, and Ms. Poh signed on for a rent of 5,800 a month, paying a fee of 15 percent of a year's rent, or a bit more than 10,000. And with that, her day of pounding the pavement in search of a home was over. "Most of the apartments were walk ups," Ms. Poh said. "By the end of the day, I literally could not walk anymore." The couple arrived earlier this spring, adding several free standing Ikea closets for shoes and clothes. The location is even livelier than they expected. Mr. Contestabile was initially puzzled at the ruckus in the wee hours, before realizing that 4 a.m. was last call for bars. The screaming is drowned out, at least sometimes, by air conditioning. The stairs are annoying only when they return from traveling, laden with luggage. Whether or not the stairs are responsible, "we have both lost weight," Ms. Poh said. "It might be because we are in New York and walking a lot, but I feel a difference."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Volkswagen, With New Ads, Wants to Put Its Cheating Past Behind It Volkswagen is sorry. But it's not exactly saying so in a new ad campaign. The world's largest automaker has been on something of an apology tour since 2015, when it was publicly accused of using illegal software in its diesel cars to dupe pollution tests. The company was slammed with criminal charges, lawsuits and billions of dollars in government fines. Volkswagen Group was sorry again in March when its chief executive officer, Herbert Diess, posted an apology on LinkedIn after making remarks that echoed the Nazi era slogan "Arbeit macht frei." The expression, which means "Work sets you free," appeared on the gates of Auschwitz and other concentration camps. With the new marketing push, the company wants to move on from its self inflicted wounds. "We've offered thousands of apologies," said Scott Keogh, who became chief executive of Volkswagen's American unit in November. "For us, this wasn't about the apology we've been doing that. This is the reassessment of the brand, of the company, and how we want to move forward." "It is difficult for Volkswagen to run advertising on the environmental front, because that's exactly where they got into trouble," said Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University. In one of the new commercials, snippets of news broadcasts about the scandal are followed by the strains of Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sounds of Silence" and the appearance of a Volkswagen employee, swathed in shadow, who is meant to represent the company's "soul searching," Mr. Keogh said. Eventually, a glowing Volkswagen I.D. Buzz, an electric minivan planned for production in 2022, cuts through the gloom. The video ends with these words: "In the darkness, we found the light." The "Rebirth" campaign was designed by the agency Johannes Leonardo, which counts Adidas and Google among its clients. The commercials will run a few weeks before giving way to a series of ads meant to hammer home the notion that a company recently caught cheating is now embracing environmentalism and setting aside what it calls "self interest."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
At the end of "The Handmaid's Tale" Season 1, June (Elisabeth Moss) steps into the back of a van. Having rebelled in a small way against Gilead, the future America where she's kept as breeding stock, she's either being carted off for punishment by the state or spirited to freedom by the resistance. The scene is June's last in the source novel by Margaret Atwood, which Bruce Miller adapted in the first season with some expansions and variations. From here on out, we don't know where the van or "The Handmaid's Tale" are going. Very quickly in Season 2, we get the answer: somewhere significant but nowhere happy. June is muzzled and roughly ejected with a crowd of other handmaids into a floodlit Fenway Park, hurried by guards and attack dogs to a mass gallows in the weed strewn outfield. Over this monumental scene, Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work" plays. It's striking and terrifying and mournful. It feels, as a near death scene should, like the end of the world. But it is only the continuation of this world. "The Handmaid's Tale," returning to Hulu with two new episodes Wednesday, sets its terms early. After a first season that started strong, then wobbled as it found its own material, it's become a confident, emotionally rich series but one that, by nature and obligation, is wrenching to watch. I'm going to rule it not a spoiler to tell you that June does not die in the opening minutes of the season. Because "The Handmaid's Tale" is a series, it tests out both possibilities of the novel's ending destruction or salvation while putting off a resolution. Instead much of the new season focuses on how Gilead, a fundamentalist Christian tyranny that arose after a worldwide fertility crisis, keeps its hold in large and small ways. June, carrying a child for Commander Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes) and his wife Serena (Yvonne Strahovski), is called "Offred," taking her name from the family patriarch. Her own daughter separated from her but still alive, somewhere is called only "your first pregnancy." June is not allowed her present or her past, and she only matters to the future as a vessel for it. Inevitably, given the feminist anti Trump protests and MeToo movement, "The Handmaid's Tale" will continue to be seen as an allegory of politics today. But you can also take it as less a specific prediction than as a diagram of how systems of oppression work. Born out of fear, Gilead keeps handmaids in line, but also wives, intellectuals and less powerful men, and it thrives by pitting each against another. Given more space (the new season is 13 episodes) the series sketches that system further outward. June's dissident friend Emily (Alexis Bledel) is exiled to the Colonies, a radioactive zone where "unwomen" (among them a new character, played by Marisa Tomei) labor until they die. The Colonies could be another planet, hazy and blasted, the unwomen overseen by guards in masks and brimmed hats that make them look like robot inquisitors. While Gilead's back story remains sketchy, the art direction and costume design make the world feel immediately realized. (While the original director, Reed Morano, has left, her successors have retained her heaven's eye shots and portrait like intimacy.) The first half of the new season back burners the Canadian exile of June's husband, Luke (O.T. Fagbenle), still one of the weaker parts of the series. It has a better handle on its tone now; gone, mostly, are the ironically upbeat soundtrack choices, like Tom Petty's "American Girl." Often, though, "The Handmaid's Tale" feels so determined not to be misread, to treat its subject with gravity, that its storytelling is heavy handed and its peripheral characters stiff. Fortunately, the central performance is anything but. The essential image of "The Handmaid's Tale" is the crimson dress the red of menses and childbirth but its favorite visual is Ms. Moss's face, framed in tight close up. It is mask, shield and vulnerable portal; it shows her defiance and conceals it at the same time. She's wary and tired and seething heroic on a very human scale. Without someone as expressive as Ms. Moss, "The Handmaid's Tale" might not pull off its balancing acts: to be morally urgent but not didactic, harrowing but with flickers of hope and grace. But that may be more challenging as it stretches out, maybe for years, a story of a protagonist sentenced to systematic rape. In the novel, June's entering the van was not the absolute end. In an epilogue, we learn that her memoirs were recovered by "Gileadean Studies" scholars far in the future. The time between the van doors closing and the fall of the tyranny, it suggests, might have been very long. For TV purposes, maybe it shouldn't be. "The Handmaid's Tale" is dystopian sci fi, but it plays like horror, from its constant sense of menace to its ominous score. Horror is a hard genre to sustain in serial TV. Stretch it out too long, as in the very different "The Walking Dead," and you create an endless circuit of frying pans and fires that becomes desensitizing or unendurable. Not knowing the producers' plan, I can't say if the right length for "The Handmaid's Tale" is two seasons or five or more. But sometimes the best testament to a story's effectiveness is that it makes you hope for it to end.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
For the second straight week, the N.F.L. is grappling with the fallout from positive coronavirus tests, an existential threat to the league's adherence to playing the season according to its schedule. As most of the league practiced, as usual, on Wednesday, more discouraging developments surfaced in New England and Tennessee. The Patriots' star cornerback, Stephon Gilmore, the league's defensive player of the year in 2019, was revealed to have tested positive just four days after a positive test by the team's quarterback, Cam Newton, was confirmed. In Nashville, three more members of the team tested positive this week, running the Titans total of players and employees who are known to have contracted the virus since Sept. 24 to 23. The positive tests were announced two days after the league put into place new measures meant to halt the spread of infections, protocols added after the N.F.L. scrambled to push back two games in response to new cases. "We just have to continue to close any loopholes," Dr. Allen Sills, the league's chief medical officer, said Wednesday on NFL Network. "We've said all along, 'We know this is going to be hard.' This virus is a relentless opponent. It needs only a small crack. And even 90 or 95 percent with our protocols is not enough. That's not a passing grade because that still leaves us a bit vulnerable." The N.F.L.'s grappling with the virus has been made tougher by its decision not to play the regular season in a closed community, or bubble, to reduce the risk of infection from the coronavirus that it anticipated for months. Its heightened measures in light of the outbreak include video surveillance of players and team personnel to ensure mask wearing, a prohibition against traveling during bye weeks and limiting the number of free agent tryouts. Gilmore's infection forced the team to cancel practice Wednesday and jeopardized the Patriots' home game Sunday against the Denver Broncos, the second time New England would have a game moved, after their meeting with the Kansas City Chiefs was delayed a day in the wake of positive tests from Newton and a Chiefs practice squad quarterback, Jordan Ta'amu. "Just trying to show respect to a great football player who I hope is getting better very quickly," Mahomes said Wednesday, "and I'll try to keep away from that and try not to do it again." 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. Mahomes added that after Ta'amu tested positive last week, he started sleeping in a different bedroom from his pregnant fiancee. With no new positive tests emerging for either the Chiefs or the Patriots on Sunday or Monday and after the league took the additional step, Sills said, of reviewing video from the Patriots' facility to confirm compliance with wearing masks and tracking devices the league went ahead with the game. The Patriots chartered two planes to fly to Kansas City, Mo., on Monday morning: one for players who had been in contact with Newton, another for those who hadn't. While the Patriots have so far reported only two confirmed cases, the Titans are dealing with a much less contained outbreak. The team must now return two consecutive days of negative tests before it can be cleared to re enter its facility. The Titans have not been permitted by the league to hold in person practices since playing the Minnesota Vikings on Sept. 27. The Titans' initial outbreak, reported after that game, caused the N.F.L. to reschedule the team's Week 4 game against the Pittsburgh Steelers for Oct. 25. The latest round of positive tests this week imperils their home game on Sunday against Buffalo. But even as the league has chastised teams for their lax adherence to health protocols and threatened increased penalties for violations, some players have been vocal about maintaining their regular season routines. Rodger Saffold, a Titans offensive lineman, defended his teammates on social media after a report that several worked out together last week at a private school, in violation of league rules. For now, neither the league nor its players have moved to adjust or delay the regular season schedule beyond moving games on an ad hoc basis rather than canceling games, expanding the length of the season or putting teams into quarantine between games, something the N.B.A. and other leagues have done. The juggling act is likely to continue because even players and coaches who follow the league's protocols to the letter are still at risk once they leave their team's facilities. "Once players go home or walk into Chipotle or go to their chiropractor, they are at risk because Covid is everywhere," said David Canter, an agent who represents more than two dozen N.F.L. players. "The best way to get through an entire season would be to consider individual bubbles for every team." Even as the league punishes teams, players and noncompliant coaches for violating coronavirus safety measures, a growing number of franchises are planning to increase the number of fans in their stadiums on game days. The Steelers said this week that it would allow as many as 5,700 fans at their game against the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday, following the lead of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Carolina Panthers and others who have opted to allow spectators after beginning the season without them.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
"I hope you felt suitably nauseous," the personable Richard Egarr said to his audience at Weill Recital Hall on Thursday, after playing Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck's "Fantasia Chromatica." But nausea is a relative thing, and there was no obvious wave of gastric distress, if only because Mr. Egarr had demonstrated beforehand what he was up to. He had tuned his harpsichord not to the relatively smooth, equal temperament of modern times, he explained, but to a "severe" mean tone temperament used in the early 17th century. And so, in addition to Sweelinck's queasy downward slithering tunes, there were acerbic harmonic juxtapositions and clashes. Mr. Egarr amplified those with bodily winces, but the effect was merely astringent rather than sick making. And his tunings, geared in the program's first half to Thomas Morley and William Byrd but later carried deeper into the 17th century for John Blow and Henry Purcell, were just one way he kept listeners off balance. The very title of the program, "Clogg'd in the English Vein," took no account of that "bit of Dutch ness," as he called the opening Sweelinck segment. And he set that off symmetrically with a bit of German ness, Johann Jakob Froberger's "Lament on the Painful Loss of the Royal Majesty Ferdinand IV," offered as an encore and a tribute to a mentor, the early music specialist Gustav Leonhardt, who died five years ago.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Russia's attempt to overturn its four year ban from international sports this month turned to a familiar courtroom weapon: emotion. At a private hearing held over four days in the first week of November, Russian sports officials set aside their denials and their phalanx of lawyers pushed back from their papers, allowing six Russian athletes to take a starring role. The athletes spoke not of what Russia had done in pursuit of victory, but about what they stood to lose, and they all had the same message: Please do not punish us for something we had no part in. But the stakes of the case for Russia, for antidoping regulators and for global sports could not be higher. If Russia cannot get its ban lifted, it faces several more years in the sporting wilderness, with its athletes, its flag and even its name barred from high profile events like the Olympics and the World Cup. But it is the other outcome that worries antidoping officials. If Russia succeeds in overturning its ban the first blanket punishment issued to an entire country under new regulations drawn up by WADA, the global antidoping regulator a yearslong effort to have Russia pay a price for one of the most sophisticated and brazen cheating schemes in sports history will be seen to have failed. 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. "It's a test of the system," said Michael Ask, the chief executive of Denmark's national antidoping agency. "This is after a long time, years we've had this, and now it seems like we've come to the end and the final chapter is being written now," he added. "Of course, in all good novels the end is often the most interesting part." Those present at the hearing Nov. 2 5 described an overwhelming show of force by Russia, with a horde of sports lawyers deputized to act for Russia's Olympic committee or parties like the International Ice Hockey Federation, all of whom oppose the ban. As many as eight different legal teams spoke on Russia's behalf, according to a person present at the four day hearing. Much of the focus was not on whether Russia had manipulated testing data WADA produced evidence last year that it did but whether the punishment fit the crime, and whether the antidoping agency had overreached by issuing an all encompassing ban that will affect athletes, sports officials, politicians and other Russian government agents. That the antidoping agency could issue such a punishment at all was the result of a change to its rules as global sports organizations sought to punish Russia for its doping activities. Those activities are believed to have corrupted dozens of major international competitions, including, most notably, the 2014 Sochi Winter Games. Before the rules change, individual sporting organizations were left to determine their own punishments. Even after the scope of Russia's state sponsored doping program was laid bare before the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, few did. In Brazil, only track and field and cycling issued blanket bans to Russian athletes after the International Olympic Committee refused to impose its own broader sanctions. More than a year after the Rio Games, Russia was finally barred from the Olympics by the I.O.C. But to many in the athlete and antidoping community, the punishment which barred Russia's flag and anthem but allowed its athletes to take part did not go far enough. Russia arrived at the Pyeongchang Games with a large team, its biggest since Sochi. WADA's ban, announced last December, is the toughest yet. All Russian athletes, except for those in a vetted group who can prove they had no connection to the country's doping program, will be barred from all top level international sporting events for four years. Those cleared to perform will only be able to do so as neutrals, and in uniforms that will denote them as such. At the hearing this month, according to two people present at the hearings, Russia's lawyers argued that WADA had gone beyond reasonable limits with its punishments, and even beyond what it legally could do within the scope of its statutes. WADA's legal team countered by describing its efforts as something akin to a bureaucratic housekeeping, an attempt to bring in house and standardize the sanctioning powers that had been left to individual sports federations. But they also pointed out the dire consequences of failing to punish Russia for its actions. The country had not only undertaken a doping program that used state resources, including the successor agency to the K.G.B., to accomplish its goals, the lawyers said, but it then used the same forces in a cover up its actions. If WADA is not allowed to police those who break its rules, the lawyers argued, then it will be rendered powerless to stop industrial scale doping in world sports. WADA declined to comment on the hearing, or its legal strategy. The sheer number of interests represented at the hearing gave a hint at the stakes. A lawyer for the I.O.C., for example, sought clarification on the ban on Russian government officials solely as a practical matter. According to a lawyer representing one of the groups backing Russia's cause, the question was hypothetical but important: Might the I.O.C. face punishment if Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, attended a major competition like the Olympics as a guest of the host country's head of state? Would other governing bodies potentially face the same risk at other events? Most of the interested parties, though, seemed to be participating as part of a show of force backing Russia's case. In addition to the six athletes who made personal pleas to the court, lawyers representing 50 other Russian athletes argued on their behalf, saying it would be wrong to punish them for the crimes of others. Those emotional appeals for clemency were followed by another from a longtime ally of Russian sports, ice hockey's global governing body. Throughout its years defending itself from the cheating charges, Russia has always found a reliable backer in Rene Fasel, the International Ice Hockey Federation president. Fasel has long argued against banning Russia's colors and symbols from sporting events.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Billie Eilish has returned to No. 1 on the latest Billboard album chart, and Beyonce landed two titles in the Top 10, thanks to her new live album and the wide release of her three year old "Lemonade." Eilish, the 17 year old pop star whose album "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?" (Darkroom/Interscope) opened at No. 1 three weeks ago, returns to the top spot after two weeks at No. 2, with the equivalent of 88,000 sales in the United States. That number included 91 million streams and 19,000 copies sold as a full album, according to Nielsen. Khalid's "Free Spirit" is in second place, BTS's "Map of the Soul: Persona" is No. 3, and Beyonce's "Homecoming," the live album of her 2018 appearance at Coachella, is No. 4, up three spots from its opening at No. 7, after a midweek arrival on April 17. Beyonce's "Lemonade" also re entered the chart at No. 9, after "Lemonade" was released to all major streaming services following three years on Tidal, the streaming service in which she is a partner. Ariana Grande's "Thank U, Next" rounds out the No. 5, and Lizzo's "Cuz I Love You" opens at No. 6.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
This season, defying the predictions of some operagoers, the Metropolitan Opera managed to tame its technologically temperamental Robert Lepage production of Wagner's "Ring" cycle, and to largely quiet its mammoth set of rotating planks, designed by Carl Fillion. So it was something of a surprise on Friday when, citing "unanticipated technical demands," the Met announced that it was pulling the plug on the revival of another video heavy Lepage Fillion production it had announced for next season: Berlioz's "La Damnation de Faust." Instead of its planned run of seven staged performances of the "Faust," the Met now plans to give four concert performances of it between Jan. 25 and Feb. 8, featuring the same cast, led by the mezzo soprano Elina Garanca, the bass Ildar Abdrazakov, with the tenors Bryan Hymel and Michael Spyres dividing the title role. It will be conducted by Edward Gardner. In its announcement, the company said, "The decision to present Faust in its more usual concert version is driven by the unanticipated technical demands of reviving the Met's staged production, impossible to accommodate within the company's crowded production schedule."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
If you decided to skip health insurance this year, consider this: Unless you can prove you have a valid excuse, you will be liable for a penalty during the coming tax season and the time to start making your case is now. That's not all. People who bought subsidized insurance through one of the marketplaces may have new tax forms to complete, while paying the penalty itself may demand some serious number crunching. The Internal Revenue Service is gearing up to answer questions, but it warns that only half of the callers may get through and those who succeed may have to wait a half hour or more. "There are quite a number of moving parts that taxpayers have not had to deal with," said Kristin Esposito, technical tax manager for the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. The Obama administration's Affordable Care Act including its penalty provision is in effect for the first time this year and will be reconciled through a person's tax return. For most taxpayers, this will simply mean checking a box on a tax return indicating they had insurance for the full year. But millions of others will have to grapple with new tax forms and calculations that may generate unexpected results. For instance, most of the 6.7 million people who bought insurance through the exchanges received subsidies, which reduced their monthly premiums. But those subsidies were based on previous years' income so people whose incomes have changed will inevitably have to pay some of that money back, while others may receive fatter refunds. Paying the penalty may also deliver some surprises. People who were uninsured for more than three consecutive months may owe something. (And since the penalty will double next year, now is the time to determine how much that might cost, before it is too late to buy a health policy through a federal or state run marketplace for 2015.) "This is a learning experience for everyone involved," said Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. "When you combine that with all of the problems with the exchanges, there will be a lot of confusion and people will be sorting it out. I am sure the I.R.S. will be inundated with calls." But be prepared to hit redial. John Koskinen, the Internal Revenue Service commissioner, admitted in a recent speech that because of budget constraints, the agency may be equipped to answer just over half of the phone calls it receives. Many will get a "courtesy disconnect." The tax filing season will also serve as yet another big test for the federal government, since it will require several government entities the state and federal marketplaces and the I.R.S. among them to share data and send out new tax forms with accurate information in a timely manner. Here are some of the biggest ways the new law may affect taxpayers: EXEMPTIONS Consumer advocates said they were concerned that some taxpayers might not realize that they needed to apply for certain exemptions, and, in some cases, substantiate their circumstances. (An estimated 23 million people will qualify for an exemption in 2016, while many others will be granted a pass because of a hardship, according to a federal analysis.) Some exemptions must be applied for through the exchanges, while others can be claimed only on income tax returns and some can be granted through either channel. (The I.R.S. and Healthcare.gov have lists of where to apply for each). For instance, people who cannot find affordable coverage costing 8 percent of household income or less must claim that exemption on their tax returns. But the most time consuming exemptions require mailing a signed paper application to the exchanges: These are processed manually, which can take a couple of weeks. Those exemptions include several hardships, such as foreclosure, the death of a family member, unpaid medical bills and eviction, as well as religious reasons for not using insurance. "Do it now because it's a cumbersome process," advised Mark Steber, chief tax officer at Jackson Hewitt Tax Service. TurboTax, the tax preparation software brand, has a free exemption check tool that can determine if taxpayers qualify and help them apply. PENALTIES Uninsured people who cannot qualify for an exemption will be required to pay a penalty, also known as the individual shared responsibility payment. Even people who went without insurance for more than three months may have to pay something. The penalties will rise sharply over the next couple of years, so taxpayers contemplating paying the penalty instead of buying insurance for the coming year should run those calculations soon: Open enrollment on the health care exchanges runs from Nov. 15 to Feb. 15. For the 2014 tax year, individuals pay whichever is more: 95 or 1 percent of the portion of their modified adjusted gross income that exceeds the federal income tax filing threshold: 10,150, for example, for those with single filing status. But payments are calculated on a monthly basis for each household member. Those figures are about to double. A family of four earning 100,000 who skipped coverage in the last year would owe just shy of 800 in 2014, but it would need to pay nearly 1,650 in 2015, according to the Tax Policy Center's calculator, which can determine how much a taxpayer might pay. There is some question about how aggressive the I.R.S. will be in collecting the penalty in its first year. But in 2016, an estimated four million people will pay penalties, according to a federal analysis. The agency will not be permitted to resort to its usual collection tactics, such as using levies like wage garnishment or liens. It cannot criminally prosecute those who do not comply, either. But the I.R.S. can deduct the penalty from any refund due. And if a taxpayer isn't owed a refund and fails to pay the penalty the amount will accrue interest and roll over into the following tax years. The I.R.S. could continue to deduct the growing amount from any refunds due for 10 years, which is how long the agency is allowed to collect payments. RECONCILING People who bought subsidized insurance on the exchanges received what is actually an advance on a tax credit. Since the amount of help taxpayers received was based on 2012 income, it will need to be reconciled against what they actually earned in 2014 particularly if they earned more or less and did not update their income data on the exchange. Some people will be surprised that they must pay some of that money back, or at least have it deducted from what they would have received in a refund. Conversely, people who earned less money in 2014 and who received subsidies that were too small may receive money back. Changes in life circumstances a divorce, marriage, a new child can also affect those numbers. "This is the part that can be very complex," said Kathy Pickering, executive director of the Tax Institute at H R Block. "People think of the tax credit as a discount on their premium. But realizing it can be something you repay a portion of is going to be a surprise." Taxpayers may be comforted that there are caps on the amount that must be paid back, though a family of four with a household income exceeding 94,200 would have to pay back the full amount if it received too much in premium subsidies. But some taxpayers who are on the edge of losing premium subsidies may be able to reduce their incomes enough to qualify for the credits. For instance, people can contribute to a retirement account like a 401(k), 403(b) or traditional I.R.A. (and I.R.A. contributions for 2014 can be made by April 15 for the 2014 tax year), tax experts said. "This is the perfect time to look at their income," Ms. Pickering added, "because they still have time to make a change."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
SAG HARBOR, N.Y. It was a cliffhanger ending out of silent film era two reeler. Just days before the anniversary of the fire that partly destroyed the Sag Harbor Cinema last December and weeks ahead of the deadline to purchase the theater from its longtime owner, word came of a grant that more than met the fund raising goal and saved the day. "Personally, I had been trying to avoid hoping for it," April Gornik, a painter and vice president of the nonprofit Sag Harbor Partnership wrote in an email when the news was announced. With a 1.4 million Empire State Economic Development grant, the partnership was brought within easy reach of the 8 million needed to purchase the remains of a historic theater, a move that advances plans that just months ago seemed all but fanciful that is, to transform what had been the only art house cinema on the East End of Long Island into a multiuse center for film and the arts. The cinema was always an anomaly. Moldy smelling in summer and freezing in winter, it played art movies that sometimes drew an audience of five. It sat in the middle of Main Street in this town that, in Herman Melville's time, was one of the primary hubs of the global whaling trade (New Bedford and Nantucket, Mass., and Lahaina in Hawaii were the others); in John Steinbeck's time was a thriving working class community; and, in recent years, had become a second home boomtown whose real estate prices skyrocketed so steeply people sometimes referred to it as the Williamsburg of the Hamptons. The sign was saved and, though there were no injuries that night, there was one potential fatality. For many in this year round community, the loss of Sag Harbor Cinema potentially signified the end not just of obscure art house film on the East End of Long Island but of a burnished and prideful image Sag Harbor holds of itself as a haven for creative people. The fire threatened the identity of an important segment of the village, said Robert Stein, former deputy mayor and a trustee of Sag Harbor. "Suddenly, people were like, Hey, wait a minute!" he said. "We're at risk of becoming just another restaurant capital." In January 2017 a group of locals mobilized not only to buy and restore the theater but to transform it. Spearheaded by Ms. Gornik, the Sag Harbor Partnership negotiated purchase of the site and what remained of the building from the real estate developer Gerald Mallow, 80, who had bought the theater in the 1970s. They aimed to accelerate the plans first conceived in 2009 for transforming the theater into a multipurpose hub for the arts. "If I see something wrong, I just want to fix it," Ms. Gornik said. If the initial fund raising hurdle of 8 million still seemed far off as recently as last week with 6.6 million in the coffers and a cliffhanger deadline of Dec. 31, board members remained uncommonly sanguine. "This kind of money is a lot of money, and when we talked to professional fund raisers they said it's a two year campaign," Susan Lacy, director of the HBO documentary "Spielberg" and a member of the partnership's advisory board. "But we'll get there. I was at PBS for 35 years and I've never seen fund raising like this." Nearly 80 percent of the millions raised came in the form of modest donations, Ms. Lacy said: "It was everyone from the butcher to the candlestick maker to the fire department and shop owners." These being the Hamptons, though, that roster also included an Emmy winning director, a cinematic legend and a Piano Man. Rob Marshall, Julie Andrews and Billy Joel are among the deep pocketed locals committed to protecting Sag Harbor from an unwelcome fate as another seasonal resort town, or else a seaside boutique rialto. "I did a film on Judy Garland, and I think of this as being like Judy saying, 'Hey, let's put on a show,'" Ms. Lacy said. She was referring to a trope made famous in 1930s films, but there was also something of an actual show. Among the improbably folksy fund raising efforts put forth by the partnership is "American Values," a film program running throughout the winter and featuring the documentary filmmakers Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker; the director William Friedkin; the Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein; the artist and composer Laurie Anderson; and Ms. Andrews screening their favorite films and sticking around afterward to talk about them. The Coen brothers' 2010 adaptation of "True Grit" was first in the series. Selected by the "Wonderstruck" composer Carter Burwell, it was screened at the local high school. "We want people to relate to Sag Harbor and Main Street as a year round cultural destination, as opposed to a high end retail strip that's open eight weeks year," said Nick Gazzolo, president of the Sag Harbor Partnership. One key to that goal is restoring the emblematic sign. "Not seeing the facade and the sign there is what got people emotional," Lisa Field, president of the Sag Harbor Chamber of Commerce and proprietor of the Sag Harbor Variety Store, said. A gaping hole remains in the middle of Main Street, all that was left after construction crews using heavy equipment tore away the wreckage of the historic theater last December. In what was inevitably characterized at the time as a Christmas miracle, the Art Deco neon sign was pulled almost literally from the ashes "It was attached to the facade, which was leaning and about to cave in," Ms. Gornik said and plucked from the structure with a backhoe and taken for storage by the owners of a local moving company. The mangled letters were pounded and welded together again by a Bridgehampton metalsmith quietly working for free. "On a certain level, the fire left a particular kind of scar that people need to heal," Mr. Stein, the village trustee and, as he noted, a practicing psychoanalyst said. "There is this feeling that people don't want to see a new face there. They want the old face back."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Paul Plishka in his dressing room at the Metropolitan Opera before a performance of "La Boheme." He is retiring after 50 years with the company. The voice is a fragile thing, and few singers end up with 50 year careers at the Metropolitan Opera. The bass Paul Plishka is one of them. He has sung dozens of small comprimario parts the character roles of opera but also starred in Mussorgsky's "Boris Godunov" and Verdi's "Falstaff." Some roles, including Raimondo, the chaplain in Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor," he has done at the Met more than anyone else. He was onstage for the first "Live From the Metropolitan Opera" telecast and the company debuts of both Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo, who will celebrate his own 50th anniversary next season. But on Saturday, after singing what will be his 1,672nd performance at the Met, Mr. Plishka, the ninth most prolific performer in the company's history, will call it a day. While Mr. Plishka, 76, tried to retire once before, in 2012, it didn't stick. But he said that this Saturday evening's revival of "La Boheme" in which he is singing the small, scene stealing comic roles of Benoit and Alcindoro would really, truly be his last. In a conversation in his dressing room, he reflected on his half century at the Met. Here are edited excerpts. Not many people have 50 years under their belts here. Certain types of voices can pull it off a lot easier. Those really high tenor voices once you're up there, doing all those major tenor roles, it's hard to come back to Parpignol a bit part in "Boheme" . But for a bass, there are a lot of roles right up the ladder that get you up to the top, and then there are ones on the way down. For a soprano, you're either the maid, or you're Tosca. As human beings we all deteriorate I don't want to use that word, but our bodies don't do what they used to do when we were in our 20s. The voice can't do what it used to do. But at that point, you are able to start to move into this character repertoire, this buffo comic repertoire, because you don't necessarily need this beautiful instrument. You need stagecraft. You need to be a character, to let go and be silly or make a fool of yourself. It added 10, 15 years to my career. What were some of your favorite roles? When I finally got to do Verdi's "Don Carlo" as Philip at the Metropolitan Opera, in a televised version, that was the top of the hill. Where else can you go? But then, years later, "Boris Godunov" came along. I had sung Pimen, I had sung Varlaam both other bass characters in the opera but I had aimed for Boris later on because Boris is a dangerous part for your voice. It's a great acting part. You don't even need the great instrument you can just act the whole thing. I'm exaggerating, but there's a lot of truth in it. That was my next top of the hill. Until "Falstaff," when I would go home at night after doing the role, and by 4 o'clock in the morning I'd miss him. I'd miss being him. This guy just didn't give a damn what anybody else thought. He gave me a freedom. What were some of the challenges? I don't care what any singer tells you, you do not hear yourself. It really helps to have another pair of ears out in the auditorium that can tell you when you're singing correctly and when you're not. And I had that in my first wife, and my teacher, Armen Boyajian. I would get into something like Leporello in Mozart's "Don Giovanni" , and it doesn't go high. I t stays kind of low. The more rehearsals you do, it gets darker and darker, and they would come to the final dress and come back after the first act and say, "What are you doing?" And I'd know immediately. It's a trap a bass can fall into very easily: You try to listen to yourself and make it sound good to you, but it's only going just past the orchestra pit a little bit, and it dies out there. It's too thick, too woolly a sound. And then, when I would do the second act, I would change it, sing more what sounds to me like a tenor very bright, very pointed and they'd come back at the end and say, "Why didn't you do that in the beginning?" The theater can pick up the sound and it becomes the sounding board, like the body of your cello. That can take the very pointed sound and make it sound more luscious. I saw that you had tried to retire a few years ago, but you failed at it. I did retire in 2012. And a few years ago a colleague of mine, John Del Carlo, who was supposed to be doing Benoit and Alcindoro, passed away, and they called and asked if I would come back and do them. Benoit and Alcindoro, that's a part I could teach you to do, and you could do it next week! I think you might be a little too modest. It's not that difficult vocally. If you wanted to hear me right now sing Philip, you'd go running down the street, saying "Don't do that! Don't do that!" But this is kind of fun to do.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The waterfront along Greenpoint in Brooklyn is rapidly changing, as construction crews work full throttle along West Street on several large residential projects that will bring thousands of new residents to the area. The developments include condominiums and rentals, and they range from a 14 unit building to a 40 story waterfront tower. At 50 Greenpoint, where sales are expected to begin in mid November for 44 condominium units, one main selling point for the building was its views of the Manhattan skyline. Now another is access to the G train, said Brendan Aguayo, the managing director of Halstead Property Development Marketing, which is handling sales. "I think some people who have been looking to buy a home on or near the L train line will now look in Greenpoint," Mr. Aguayo said, because of the tunnel repairs between Manhattan and Brooklyn that will disrupt L train service to Williamsburg for 18 months starting in 2019. Prices at 50 Greenpoint, which is set to open early next year, will range from 699,000 for a one bedroom to nearly 1.9 million for a three bedroom penthouse with a terrace, according to Mr. Aguayo. At the Greenpoint on India Street, condo units will start on the 28th floor and have unobstructed views. Twenty eight units will have private outdoor space, and building amenities will include bike storage, a pet spa, a gym and a common rooftop terrace. Four out of the 23 parking spots will come with charging stations for Tesla electric vehicles. "People are being priced out of Williamsburg and are looking for alternatives," said Oren Evenhar, the chief executive of the Pine Builders Corporation, the developer of the building. Greenpoint and Williamsburg have been described as the city's most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods by New York University's Furman Center. The population is expected to surge, with the area gaining more than 3,000 apartments by the end of 2019, according to CityRealty, a real estate data and listing company. "I jokingly call Greenpoint the Dubai of the East River," because development has happened so rapidly, said Daniel Levy, the chief executive of CityRealty. "But fast forward five to 10 years, and you can see a waterfront area that's connected through parks, which is a positive change." Sales for new condominiums go relatively quickly in the area because there is little supply, Mr. Aguayo said. There was one penthouse left for sale as of Oct. 13 at the Gibraltar, at 160 West Street, a new 14 unit condominium that is scheduled to be finished early next year. (The price: 2.25 million.) According to Bryan Atienza, a Nest Seekers International agent who has been handling sales along with Ryan Serhant, a broker there, most buyers have been in their early 30s to their mid 50s. Residents are moving into 7 Bell Slip, a building with 93 rental units, while construction on 33 Eagle Street, with 98 apartments, has been completed. The last building, 5 Blue Slip, will likely open with 103 units early next year. This portion of the complex is developed by the Park Tower Group and L M Development Partners. Construction on two nearby rental towers, a joint venture between Park Tower and Brookfield Property Partners, and a public waterfront open space has also begun, according to a spokesman for Greenpoint Landing. At the East River ferry stop is the Greenpoint, the waterfront's first tower, at 21 India Street. The 40 story building, originally called 10 Huron and developed by the Mack Real Estate Group, Palin Enterprises and Urban Development Partners, will have 287 rental units and 95 condos. The condominiums, ranging from studios to three bedrooms, will start on the 28th floor, offering unobstructed views of Manhattan. Another 81 rental units will be built in a five story building that will be connected to the tower through an interior corridor, a parking garage and a large courtyard. The Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group will likely begin sales for the condominiums in early 2017, a spokesman for the developers said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
AOL Instant Messenger, the chat program that connected a generation to their classmates and crushes while guiding them through the early days of digital socializing, will shut down on Dec. 15, a decision its parent company announced in October. Released in 1997, the program had largely faded into obscurity over the last decade, replaced by text messages, Google Chat, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and on and on we go. But at its height, AIM, as it was known, served as the social center for teenagers and young adults, the scene of deeply resonant memories and the place where people learned how to interact online. "AIM tapped into new digital technologies and ignited a cultural shift, but the way in which we communicate with each other has profoundly changed," Michael Albers, vice president of communications product at Oath, the parent company of AOL, said in a statement on Friday. The news of its official demise was met with cries of nostalgia, especially from those who were coming of age as AIM rose to prominence. For many people now in their 20s and 30s, learning to talk online coincided with learning to communicate like an adult, said Caroline Moss, 29, a writer and editor in New York who for years paid tribute to AIM with the parody Twitter account YourAwayMessage.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
AUSTIN, Tex. As at most tech start ups, the fridge was stocked with green juice and cold brew coffee. Unlike at most tech start ups, there was not a single man present. Instead of buzzwords like disruption and market share, the agenda items for that day's meeting included ghosting (ceasing contact with a romantic partner without an explanation), shirtless selfies and unsolicited photos of male genitalia. Specifically, how to eradicate all three. "Let's think of it in terms of product," said Whitney Wolfe, 27, perusing the office bookshelf and pulling down a book called "Date Onomics." Around her, young women were squeezed onto couches and seated cross legged on the floor, tapping on their laptops. A giant honeybee logo loomed above them. "If the problem is ghosting," Ms. Wolfe continued, "then how do we reward people who don't ghost? How can we remind people what it's like to be on the other side?" This is the headquarters of Bumble, the two year old dating app created by Ms. Wolfe, in which women must make the first move, nudity is verboten and kindness is part of the company mission. If you are the millennial version of a Sensitive New Age Guy, to quote Christine Lavin or a woman who wants to date one you're on Bumble. Ms. Wolfe, a founder of the better known rival dating app Tinder, which was the subject of a damning Vanity Fair article suggesting that it promotes hookup culture disadvantageous to women, left the company in a tangled manner stemming from her relationship and subsequent breakup with another founder, Justin Mateen. She later sued for gender discrimination, accusing her ex of publicly calling her a "whore," charging that the chief executive had dismissed her complaints as "dramatic" and that her male colleagues had stripped her of her founder title because having a woman on the founding team would "make the company seem like a joke." The case was settled out of court, with Ms. Wolfe receiving a reported 1 million and company stock. "I think everyone in this room has had terrible dating experiences or been in an emotionally unhealthy relationship," Ms. Wolfe said carefully. It is no secret her relationship with Mr. Mateen fell into that category, in part because dozens of their text messages were published on gossip blogs like Valleywag and TMZ. "But I've thought long and hard about this," she added, "and I think a lot of the dysfunction around dating has to do with men having the control. So how do we put more control in women's hands?" Most heterosexual women who have played the online dating game have cringed or worse on occasion. Accounts like Tindernightmares, detailing the most horrific pickup lines, and ByeFelipe, which calls out men who turn hostile when rejected, don't have millions of followers for nothing: They are snapshots of what it is to be a woman swiping online, for whom harassment is a rite of passage. There are men who won't swipe a woman above a certain age (often 29), unrequested crotch shots, that notorious OKCupid report about racial preferences and all sorts of other depressingly archaic behaviors, as detailed in pop psychology studies and books like "Dataclysm," by Christian Rudder, the founder of OKCupid. According to a study from the American Psychological Association last year, Tinder users report lower self esteem, self worth and dissatisfaction with their looks, with women more affected. And the tolerance for nastiness is low. After a female user sent screenshots to Bumble of a conversation with a guy named "Connor," in which he ranted about "gold digging whores," the company barred him, detailing its thinking in an open letter that ended " LaterConnor." Another man was barred for fat shaming. Users regularly receive notifications to "bee nice," sometimes with saucy emojis. But its main innovation may be that it lets women be the hunters, not the hunted. "I always felt that for me as a woman, I always had to wait around," Ms. Wolfe said. "In all other arenas, I was ambitious and a go getter, but when it came to dating, I wasn't supposed to go after what I wanted. And so I essentially said, O.K., here's what we're going to do: Women make the first move. And they're going to do so in 24 hours or the match disappears, so she feels encouraged to do it. "Much like Cinderella, if she waits, the carriage is going to turn into a pumpkin." Of course, not every woman wants to make the first move, or feels comfortable doing it. "It strikes me as just another thing that we as women have to do," Meredith Fineman, a digital strategist in Washington, said with some weariness. And if you're one of those people who still subscribes to "The Rules: Time Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right," the 1995 self help book that advised women to act elusive and demure, wait for the guy to make the first move and thus end up with a wedding ring, Bumble may seem radical. But have we really moved on from the old school rules of attraction? Ms. Wolfe thinks technology turned the traditional mating dance into more of a rumble. "I'd read a lot about the psychology around rejection and insecurity, and I had noticed that when people feel insecure or rejected, they behave aggressively, erratically," she said. "Especially when you can hide behind a screen name or a profile picture. So I thought, how can we reverse engineer that?" Her solution: Men have to wait for a woman to reach out they can't initiate the conversation so rather than feeling rejected if a woman doesn't reply to their pickup line, they feel flattered if she reaches out to pick them up. Emily Witt, the author of "Future Sex," which documents her experience as a single person in her 30s trying to understand dating and courtship today, thinks the app helps clear up confusion. "A lot of contemporary dating, a lot of the kind of sense of unease," Ms. Witt said, "comes from people not knowing how they're supposed to ask and roles they're supposed to play, because so many of the dating rituals are so patriarchal. Yet even so, a lot of women are still reluctant to ask a guy out. So I think the revolution of Bumble is taking that uncertainty completely out." Ms. Wolfe did not initially plan to change the dating game. She was 23, unemployed and living with her mother when she took a trip to Los Angeles to visit a fellow alumna of Southern Methodist University. The hot water went out, so they went to another friend's house to use the shower. That friend was Mr. Mateen. That night, they had dinner with his buddy Sean Rad, who was working at a tech incubator owned by IAC, which would eventually become the birthplace of Tinder. He needed someone to run marketing, and Ms. Wolfe was available. She didn't have a career plan, exactly, but she had had plenty of jobs. In college, she sold tote bags to raise money for animals affected by the BP oil spill. Later, she volunteered in orphanages in Southeast Asia, excitedly phoning home to tell her parents she was going to start a travel website. "They were like, 'Can you just focus on not getting malaria?'" she said. After college, she spent a month in a photography program in New York and worked a few odd assistant jobs before moving back in with her mother. At Tinder, Ms. Wolfe said, she took the app to S.M.U., got sorority women to sign up, then immediately crossed the street to the fraternities and told them all the hot girls were on the app. When she started Bumble, she did much of the same, taking it to universities, signing up college women and assuming as good marketers do that where the women went, the men would follow. It was a crowded market, but Bumble now claims 800 million matches and 10 billion swipes per month. It ranks second in top grossing Apple downloads in the Lifestyle category, second only to Tinder. It was a condition of Ms. Wolfe's settlement with Tinder that she not discuss its terms. But she made it plain that leaving the company came at considerable cost, not all monetary. Almost overnight, she became what one reporter called the "Gone Girl" of Silicon Valley. To some, she was a heroic survivor of toxic male start up culture. Others felt that she had manipulated her way to power and that the text messages showed her to be as volatile as any angry ex. "For a good amount of time I didn't feel like me," she said. "And I think eventually my subconscious just said, 'Go to work. Just go to work.'" She eventually began working on a social network for teenage girls called Merci, focused on compliments (the tagline: "compliments are contagious"), and it became the basis for Bumble. The Russian entrepreneur Andrey Andreev, of the European dating behemoth Badoo, stepped up to invest. The company, which now has 35 employees globally (including two former Tinder colleagues), has added Bumble BFF, a matching service for platonic female friendships; is preparing to roll out Bumble Bizz, a networking app; and has acquired Chappy, an app for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. All of this expansion, however, has not been without hiccups. Recently, Bumble introduced a subway campaign in New York that used the slogan: "Life's short, text him first" only to realize that not every woman is looking for a him, and some "hims" now identify as "hers" or something else. "We really regretted that," Ms. Wolfe said, noting that Bumble users will soon be able to choose from a number of gender identities. Now the slogan reads: "Make the first move," which also happens to be the working title of the memoir meets dating guide Ms. Wolfe recently signed up to write for Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin. The company is also offering webinars for college users in which experts advise on subjects from "how to do your taxes" to "how to recognize sexual assault," and getting ready to roll out a Siri like character called Beatrice, which will call you during a date to make sure you're fine. Ms. Wolfe also said users would soon be able to chat with an on call gynecologist (her own). "Look, are we solving the world's problems by allowing women to make the first move on a dating app? No," Ms. Wolfe said. "But I do believe we are helping to change some very archaic norms." As if on cue, the doorbell rang. It was a delivery man with a bouquet of flowers for Bumble's head of college marketing, from a guy she had met on the app. It had been going well they had been on a half dozen dates until her friends found a video of him engaging in a lewd act online. She didn't want to ghost him. But for the moment, she wasn't responding to his texts.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
After a four month pandemic pause to the N.H.L. season, the Rangers and the Islanders find themselves at the same point with a berth in a play in round in the league's expanded playoffs, which begin this weekend. That did not seem likely way back when the regular season was still in progress, with the two teams going in opposite directions. The Rangers won 12 of 15 games from Jan. 31 to Feb. 27, which vaulted them into the chase for their first playoff berth since 2017. The Islanders had slid into wild card territory before play was halted on March 12, winning two of their previous 10 games. Those results now amount to ancient history for the rivals, who face each other in an exhibition game on Wednesday in Toronto as they work their way into playoff shape. The 11 seeded Rangers (37 28 5) will play the sixth seeded Carolina Hurricanes (38 25 5), and the seventh seeded Islanders (35 23 10) will meet the 10th seeded Florida Panthers (35 26 8), in best of five series that begin Saturday. What to expect in terms of the caliber of play is anyone's guess in this unusual postseason, but after months of planning for this phased return, Coach Barry Trotz of the Islanders said he thought the first playoff games would be a cathartic, if frenzied, release. "It probably will be a lot of chaos in that first 10 minutes of Game 1, exciting bad hockey and emotional hockey,'' Trotz said on a conference call with reporters last week. The major challenge now for the 24 playoff teams 16 of which are competing in the qualifier round will be revving up to postseason level intensity from the layoff. Teams had two weeks of training camp before traveling to Toronto and Edmonton to acclimate to the playoffs' two host cities. "It's kind of like trying to jump on a speeding train in a lot of ways,'' Rangers wing Chris Kreider said last week. "But it's like that for everybody." The Rangers will rely on Artemi Panarin, a Hart Trophy finalist with 95 points in his first season with the team, and Mika Zibanejad, who scored five of his team leading 41 goals on March 5. Coach David Quinn has said he will not name a starting goaltender until Friday or Saturday, when the series starts against the Hurricanes, whom the Rangers defeated four times in the regular season. It seems very likely that Igor Shesterkin, 10 2 0 in his rookie season, will be the team's top goaltender to start the playoffs. But Alexandar Georgiev and Henrik Lundqvist could vie for playing time in a condensed schedule. For the Islanders, who reached the second round of last season's playoffs, their first year with Trotz behind the bench, the difference between a standard postseason and the new format will be the first hurdle to clear. "This is going to be a challenge mentally,'' Anders Lee, the Islanders' captain, said. "Going to a hub city, staying in a hotel and having that bubble and quarantine life none of us have been through that. The hockey stuff will fall into place." Forward Cal Clutterbuck, who recovered from surgery after his left wrist was sliced by a skate blade in December, said the difficulty of the task ahead is apparent. His team will have to win 19 games over five rounds to be champion. The Stanley Cup finals are expected to begin Sept. 20. "I know for a fact the guys who win the Stanley Cup will feel an immense sense of accomplishment because this, in a lot of ways, is more difficult,'' he said. "You're trying to get to that level after a standstill of three and a half to four months, and you have to play an extra series. It was already the hardest trophy to win. It just got a little bit harder." Gary Bettman, the N.H.L. commissioner, said that even bringing these unorthodox playoffs to fruition amid a pandemic was a victory unto itself.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
WASHINGTON A Federal Reserve governor on Wednesday outlined the central bank's approach for rewriting rules that govern lending to poor communities, laying out a plan that differs significantly from one floated by fellow industry overseers last month. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation issued a joint proposal in December for the first major revamping of the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act in a quarter century. The Fed, concerned about the changes and the rushed process, declined to sign on. Instead, a Fed governor, Lael Brainard, set out the institution's own alternative one that would explicitly prevent big banks from satisfying requirements simply by funding a few big dollar projects, a point of concern that community groups have raised about the other regulators' proposal. In a speech in Washington, Ms. Brainard voiced hope that the Fed's design would be included alongside the one already aired, "in order to seek public comment on a range of options." She made a veiled allusion to the other agencies' process, noting that "major updates to the C.R.A. regulations happen once every few decades." "So it is much more important to get reform right than to do it quickly," she said. Banks have long called the Community Reinvestment Act's requirements, which mandate that they do some of their business in less wealthy areas, burdensome. Yet ignoring them is not an option. Banks that do not meet the requirements face heavy regulatory scrutiny and can have difficulty getting approval for mergers or expansions. The F.D.I.C. and O.C.C.'s December proposal, which covers more than 200 pages, would give banks credit for making loans to hospitals and other large institutions that do not currently qualify. It would also allow banks to take credit for lending to relatively poor individuals, small businesses and borrowers in rural places even when they do not have a branch nearby. The proposal would also do away with a detailed rubric for assessing banks' activities, instead taking their total C.R.A. related spending amounts as the starting point for evaluating their fulfillment of the law's requirements. Regulators would then use other, smaller tests to determine whether each bank had met its overall requirement. 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. The Fed's approach differs substantially. Retail banks would be evaluated under one test that would assess their record of providing loans and retail banking services in their area. Larger banks would be evaluated under both a retail test, if they have retail activities, and a separate test, which would evaluate their record of providing community development loans, qualified investments and services. "An approach that combines all activity together runs the risk of encouraging some institutions to meet expectations primarily through a few large community development loans or investments rather than meeting local needs," Ms. Brainard warned. She said it was hard to standardize the value of providing basic banking services, such as checking and savings accounts, to communities where they are hard to come by, as well as the value of things like small business loans and partnerships with community groups. Those things can have different monetary values in different communities. Ms. Brainard said the Fed wanted to "ensure that small scale, high impact community development activities are rewarded, along with a bank's responsiveness to local needs and priorities." The central bank's analysis was built on extensive data. The Fed's research staff created a database based on more than 6,000 written public C.R.A. evaluations from a sample of some 3,700 banks of varying asset sizes, business models, geographic areas and bank regulators, Ms. Brainard said. Should the O.C.C. and the F.D.I.C.'s changes be enacted without the Fed's support, they would create two sets of rules: one for those overseen by the central bank and one for those overseen by the other two agencies. That is an outcome that regulators at the central bank hope to avoid. "We continue to believe that a strong common set of interagency standards is the best outcome," Ms. Brainard said. "By sharing our work publicly, we hope to solicit public input on a broader set of options for reform and find a way toward interagency agreement on the best approach." Jeanna Smialek reported from Washington, and Emily Flitter from New York.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
In the race to develop the West Side of Manhattan, Hell's Kitchen can seem the tortoise to the Hudson Yards hare. Yet if Hudson Yards suddenly seems to be going up all at once, its neighbor to the north has been moving ahead in slow, deliberate steps, year after year. About a dozen residential projects are in the pipeline for the neighborhood some finished, some underway and some in the planning stages. They include Gotham West, a rental complex with more than 1,200 apartments that recently opened on West 45th Street; 540West, a 114 unit condo under construction on West 49th Street; and, on West 50th, Stella Tower, a 51 unit sister building to the Walker Tower in Chelsea. The Chelsea version was named for its architect, Ralph Walker, and the one in Hell's Kitchen for his wife. These projects are being built in the area running from West 42nd to West 57th Street, and from Ninth Avenue to the Hudson River. When the name "Hell's Kitchen" gained currency in the 1800s, the neighborhood ran from 59th Street down into the 30s, west of Eighth Avenue, and was known for its gang violence and squalor. Various parts of the loosely defined area have since been called Clinton, Midtown West and Chelsea North. But despite the neighborhood's 21st century respectability, Hell's Kitchen appears to have sticking power as a name. And for the most part, longtime residents have met the changes with tolerance. "We're really that melting pot they talk about in New York, lots of different ethnic groups, different incomes," said Elke Fears, who has lived in a stoop fronted brownstone since 1983. "It makes it interesting, and it makes it fun." Although Midtown next door is growing ever taller, Hell's Kitchen has preserved much of its low slung look. Special zoning put in place in the 1970s prevents most buildings from rising more than seven stories on side streets, and more than 15 on the avenues, including Ninth, 10th, 11th and 12th. So to put up lucrative skyscrapers, developers generally went elsewhere. As a result, many Hell's Kitchen blocks have a 19th century vibe. Trees shade intact four story rowhouses, with corbels bracketing their roofs, and facades the color of chocolate frosting. Along other blocks, the skyline is at ground level: For decades, Hell's Kitchen was known, for better or worse, for its parking lots, like the one on 10th Avenue, from 47th to 48th Street, that today is home to Hell's Kitchen Park. Whatever the lots favored by Broadway bound suburbanites in the past, chances are they have been taken over by new construction. A sizable part of the neighborhood is made up of affordable housing, some resulting from the rehabilitation of abandoned rowhouses. Among the large public projects are Manhattan Plaza on 42nd Street and Ninth Avenue, largely inhabited by artists; and Clinton Manor, on 51st Street near 10th Avenue, which has 241 apartments for Section 8 tenants. Some developers included below market units in exchange for being allowed to erect bigger buildings. Retailers have taken an interest, too. Shops are planned for the Windermere, a shuttered 1881 apartment building at 9th Avenue and 57th that may, after years of delays, become a 200 room boutique hotel, said Mark Tress, the New Jersey developer who has owned it since 2009. These days, Ninth and 10th Avenues are a thicket of bars and restaurants, many of which cater to a gay clientele. On sidewalks where crack was once dealt openly, cafe tables are crammed in front of plate glass windows or wide open French doors. This month Gotham West Market, a supercharged food court at Gotham West, will open with eight mini restaurants. All those beer taps may turn the area into a party zone on some evenings, but neighbors seem to understand that a certain amount of carousing comes with the territory. "Yes, it's edgy; yes, it's gritty, but it's on the cutting edge of the city," said Elliott Joseph, a principal of the Property Markets Group, which is developing Stella Tower with the JDS Development Group, the team that delivered the Walker Tower. "But as gentrification takes over the entire city, you have to look for neighborhoods on the cutting edge." But it's not as if Hell's Kitchen's commercial legacy, which includes lumberyards, auto dealerships and recording studios, had disappeared. Verizon, an occupant of the Stella building, will retain several lower level floors, just as it does at Walker Tower, also a former Verizon building. Views from the 18 story Stella Tower will sweep across some of those protected low slung blocks, and 40 percent of the apartments will have outdoor space. Wood burning fireplaces will grace some residences, as will concrete kitchen counters and radiant heat master bath floors. But although the Walker Tower recently set what could be a downtown record for a condo when its penthouse went into contract for around 50 million, Stella Tower's pricing will be lower. The offering plan for the 80 million project probably won't be approved until the end of the year. But it looks as if its listing price will average 2,500 a square foot, as opposed to 3,400 at Walker Tower, which developers say is one of the benefits that a transitional area offers buyers. Evidence of the gritty past is harder to find at other projects, like the 95 unit Griffin Court, which opened in 2010 at 10th Avenue and 54th Street as one of the first large from scratch condominiums in the neighborhood, replacing Sony recording studios. Developed by Alchemy Properties and Jamestown Properties, it has only one unsold unit remaining, a 3.5 million three bedroom penthouse, said Kenneth Horn, Alchemy's president. Suggesting that no lot will be left unexcavated in Manhattan's current land rush, developers have also been sniffing around way out west, even in areas adjoining the busy West Side Highway. A pair of buildings near the highway, at 57th Street, will attempt to give the neighborhood an entrance rivaling one of the wonders of the ancient world. The building on the north side of 57th will be a soaring pyramid but steel, not stone housing 711 rental units. The project, from the Durst Organization, is to open in 2015. The Dursts were pioneers in Hell's Kitchen; on the same block is their 2005 Helena, an eco conscious rental. Not to be outdone, TF Cornerstone is planning a 42 story, 1,000 unit rental across the street, with a shape that recalls a stack of children's blocks, but glassier. As the site, which has a Toyota dealership, is zoned industrial, a zoning change will be required before ground can be broken. Faced with height caps, other developers are thinking wide, not tall. At 540 West 49th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues, the Fortis Property Group and Wonder Works Construction Corporation are putting up two adjacent seven story buildings with a total of 114 condo units. Called 540West, the complex will be united on its block through site by a 6,000 square foot courtyard, which will feature an outdoor movie theater. Sales began last month, with prices starting at 665,000, for studios, or about 1,500 a square foot. Offers have been accepted for 20 of the units, said Jonathan Landau, Fortis's chief executive. Living near Manhattan's edges often means enduring a lack of public transit, and 540West is no exception. The closest subway, a gateway to the A, C and E lines, is on Eighth Avenue, more than two long blocks away. Mr. Landau says remoteness is relative: "Frankly, a lot of people who live in New York like to walk a couple blocks in the morning." Many residents of 540West will work in Midtown anyway, he pointed out, and won't care so much about catching trains. So ingrained are car dealerships on Hell's Kitchen's western fringe that one development decided to embrace them. Mercedes House, Two Trees Management Company's 2011 rental building at West 54th Street and 11th Avenue, takes its name from the car showcased on the ground floor. In 2013, Invesco Real Estate bought the top 11 floors of the zigzagging building, whose units were built as condos, and turned them into 162 rental units, two of which remain available, according to leasing agents. The one bedroom is priced at 3,995 a month, with a free month as an incentive; on the West Side as a whole, one bedrooms average 3,422 a month, according to Douglas Elliman's rental report for October. Crime has dropped significantly in the neighborhood, as it has in the rest of the city. In the Midtown North precinct, which stretches across Midtown from the Hudson all the way to Lexington Avenue, 4 murders occurred in 2012, down from 11 in 1993, according to police statistics. All other crime categories were down, too; robberies fell to 123 in 2012, from 1,388 in 1993, the statistics show. But Hell's Kitchen has also had growing pains. There are 923 bars in the two ZIP codes that cover Hell's Kitchen, as opposed to 733 in the two ZIP codes that make up the East Village, and noise complaints are on the increase. This month, a task force was convened to try to persuade the local community board to deny future liquor licenses, though it is the state that ultimately makes any licensing decisions. And there is some talk about how nice a park would be on a blocklong parcel at 10th Avenue between 48th and 49th, now a staging area for a new water tunnel. Residents are grateful that schools are at least trying to keep pace with the area's popularity. A larger, airier Public School 51 opened on West 44th Street in September, for instance, and a new home for the Beacon School, an alternative public high school now housed in an overcrowded building on West 61st Street, is being created in an old library warehouse on West 43rd. Few are arguing these days, though, about the neighborhood's name. Residents, developers and community leaders say it's not Clinton. It's not Chelsea North. And despite the claim to the contrary in at least one glitzy ad, it's definitely not Midtown West. The name Hell's Kitchen, beloved by old timers and gleefully adopted by bars and bistros, is here to stay. That's why the takeout joint at 641 10th Avenue is not called Midtown West Chicken, but Hell's Chicken.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
A quiet shift is taking place in how women obtain birth control. A growing assortment of new apps and websites now make it possible to get prescription contraceptives without going to the doctor. The development has potential to be more than just a convenience for women already on birth control. Public health experts hope it will encourage more to start, or restart, using contraception and help reduce the country's stubbornly high rate of unintended pregnancies, as well as the rate of abortions. And as apps and websites, rather than legislative proposals or taxpayer funded programs, the new services have so far sprung up beneath the political radar and grown through word of mouth, with little of the furor that has come to be expected in issues involving reproductive health. At least six digital ventures, by private companies and nonprofits, including Planned Parenthood, now provide prescriptions written by clinicians after women answer questions about their health online or by video. All prescribe birth control pills, and some prescribe patches, rings and morning after pills. Some ship contraceptives directly to women's doors. "At first I didn't believe it," said Susan Hashem, 24, an auditor in Dearborn, Mich., who wanted to restart birth control pills without missing work for a doctor's appointment. She noticed an app called Lemonaid. For 15, a doctor reviews a woman's medical information and sends a pill prescription to a local pharmacy. "I thought it was just a setup to get money," she said. But after she answered the health questions one evening, "a doctor actually contacted me after office hours," and the next morning, she picked up three months' worth of pills. With nearly 40 percent of all pregnancies in the United States unintended, birth control is a critical public health issue. Experts increasingly encourage long acting contraceptive methods, like intrauterine devices, but usage, while growing, remains low. For short term methods, visiting the doctor for a prescription can be time consuming and sometimes costly. For some, like teenagers, it can be intimidating or embarrassing. Efforts to eliminate hurdles to contraception including the Obama administration's controversial requirement under the Affordable Care Act that all health plans pay for prescription birth control have often been met with emotional political and religious opposition. Leaders of the new ventures are aware of their potential for controversy. Peter Ax, chief executive of Prjkt Ruby, started by Kwikmed, an online pharmacy, said his company has received some "inflammatory" letters. "We know groups target us," posing as customers, lying about their age or other information in attempts to catch the service making mistakes, he said. Many health experts consider hormonal contraceptives safe enough to be sold over the counter. But efforts to make that happen have stirred opposition from some conservatives. And pursuing over the counter sales would entail manufacturers undertaking the yearslong application process to the Food and Drug Administration. Women's groups and others would also seek guarantees that nonprescription birth control would be covered by insurance. Some states are trying other ways to broaden access, led by California and Oregon, which recently implemented laws allowing pharmacists to prescribe contraceptives in drugstores. But the new websites and apps could reach many more women. They require no legislative approval since clinicians still write the prescriptions. The ventures must follow telemedicine regulations, which vary by state, and can only prescribe in states where their clinicians are licensed. But they are expanding rapidly (some handle nonreproductive health issues too), and now women in most states can use one or more of them. "This kind of access is certainly an improvement for some women who have access to the web and a smartphone," said Dr. Nancy Stanwood, the chairwoman of the board of Physicians for Reproductive Health, who had been unaware of these services. "Look, if I can order something on Amazon and they're going to drone deliver it half an hour later to my house, of course we're going to think of better ways for women to get birth control." Sara Montoya, 21, a student at California State University at Fullerton, said she felt uncomfortable visiting a doctor because at 15, she and her mother had asked her pediatrician for contraception and he had discouraged them, saying, " 'Oh, you don't want to be doing that. You're too young.' " Recently, after a hiatus from birth control pills, she was unsure how to go about getting them again. "It's so untalked about, like a taboo thing," she said. While in her geology class, Ms. Montoya checked out Nurx, a web based app that offers prescriptions for various contraceptives, obtains them from pharmacies, and ships them to California and New York. The next day, a doctor from Nurx, which accepts insurance, messaged that her chosen brand was not covered by her plan and recommended alternatives. Within three days, her pills arrived. Virtuwell writes prescriptions in 12 states, but only to 18 to 34 year olds because prescribing to women older than that can involve more complex health considerations. Lemonaid, available in seven states, insists that women 35 and older receive pills containing only progestin, since pills containing estrogen may increase heart risks for some women in that age group. "We are being especially conservative by choice," said Dr. Jason Hwang, Lemonaid's chief medical officer. He said Lemonaid's minimum age is 18, "not based on clinical grounds; it was a political decision. We didn't want people who might be under 18, who might still have parents who would get upset if we were making decisions for them." Planned Parenthood, whose every move is scrutinized by anti abortion activists, has also introduced an app, Planned Parenthood Care, which requires video visits with doctors or nurse practitioners. About two thirds of the roughly 19,000 users to date were new to Planned Parenthood, said Jill Balderson, the organization's vice president of online health strategy. While users of nonvideo apps appreciate the anytime anywhere aspect, she said some Planned Parenthood Care clients like video encounters because, beyond contraception, they want "an in depth consultation with an expert." Planned Parenthood Care currently serves Hawaii, Idaho, Minnesota, Washington State and also Alaska, where women in remote locations get the contraceptives delivered by float plane. But many live in urban areas, and Ms. Balderson said the most common place women conduct the video doctor's visits is "their parked car" during work lunch breaks. (Planned Parenthood Direct, a nonvideo version that sends prescriptions to women's pharmacies, recently began in California). Some experts committed to expanding contraceptive access, like Dr. Mark DeFrancesco of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, sounded a few cautionary notes. Dr. DeFrancesco, the immediate past president of the group, which endorses making contraceptives nonprescription, praised the services' convenience, but said he worried that women participating in the brief digital interactions with clinicians might think, "Now, I don't have to go to a doctor" at all. He added that, since some services do not take insurance, customers may pay fees they would not incur if they had received a prescription during a doctor's appointment. Some services that do not take insurance have charitable components. Maven, available in most states, charges 18 for 10 minute video appointments with midwives or nurse practitioners, and 35 for appointments with doctors. It donates 1 per visit toward appointments for women with low incomes. Prjkt Ruby donates 25 cents from each 20 pack of pills to a nonprofit providing contraception in developing countries. Some digital customers later decide to visit doctors, as did Kristina Campbell, 31, a mother of two, who used Lemonaid after moving to Lancaster, Pa., "a conservative area where to find a doctor that I even agree with about using birth control was a little bit tough," she said. Ms. Hashem in Michigan scheduled a face to face physician's appointment because the pills caused her uncomfortable side effects. But for Jill Atilano, 39, a mother of two in Menifee, Calif., who works in a winery, the goal is saving time and costly co payments. Her general practitioner said for contraception she would need blood work and a visit with a specialist. "It's been, for years, going through these nonstop hoops of fire to get birth control," said Ms. Atilano, who now uses Lemonaid. She said its only option, pills, is not her preferred method, "but if I went through my normal physician and the referrals, I would be six months pregnant before I would get my hands on it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
WYATT CENAC'S PROBLEM AREAS 11 p.m. on HBO. The first season of this late night show from Wyatt Cenac, an alum of "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart," had a bevy of idiosyncrasies that helped it stand out: There was no studio audience. No laugh tracks. Cenac presented each episode from a groovy '70s set. And the season repeatedly returned to an overarching topic: police reform and misconduct. The second season shifts its focus to education issues. In the footsteps of Cenac's fellow "Daily Show" graduate turned HBO presenter, John Oliver (also an executive producer of "Problem Areas"), "Problem Areas" mixes commentary with field pieces. Not following in the footsteps of most late night hosts: Cenac's more casual style, which extends to both his demeanor and dress. "If the idea of my show is to be a little more curious about things, it felt like stepping away from that newsy look would be key," Cenac told The New York Times last year. "I don't know if I convey that same sort of gravitas. For me, it was like, lean into what you are, which is a sleep eyed guy who rambles."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
"We're all becoming filmmakers," Annie B Parson told me in May. She was speaking for her fellow choreographers, and in the months since, her generalization has proved prophetic. With theaters closed, dance companies and dance makers accustomed to stage performance have been rushing to channel their work into a form you can stream. Live dance is dormant, but filmed dance has been busting out all over. Many of these new dance films, made in less than ideal circumstances, look like first efforts. But, of course, there is nothing new about dance on camera. The Dance on Camera festival has been surveying the field since 1971. This year, for the first time, the festival is happening online, July 17 to July 20. (Tickets and a schedule are at Danceoncamerafestival.org.) "It's never been about putting cameras on dancers," Liz Wolff, a curator of the festival, said. "It's really about films that put dance into a filmic narrative or structure." In other words, where many dance films of recent months are films by necessity, the ones in the festival are so by design. Rather than trying to reproduce theatrical experience virtually, they aim to take advantage of the medium. Since most of this year's selections abstract and narrative, short and feature length, documentary, animated were conceived and created before the pandemic, they serve as reminders of the possibilities of filming dance in a less panicked state. And at a time when dance on camera is almost the only kind of dance, they provide a chance to consider what matters in such a film. First, as so much footage of people dancing in cramped apartments has lately brought into relief, setting makes a huge difference. Take "Kieli Bi" ("Sacred Dance"), a short in which Dana Mussa returns to her homeland of Kazakhstan to dance like a goddess amid the arid majesty of the steppe. Or David Bolger's "How to Sink a Paper Boat," beautifully shot in and around an Irish lighthouse that's a big clue to the film's hidden subject the repressed memory of a World War I maritime disaster. In both, the surroundings tell more than half the story. In Claire Marshall's 30 minute "Shift," it's the rotation of location that signifies. We see a man and woman whom the credits call a "discordant couple" grappling in a backyard, then suddenly in a pool, a playground, a bar, a tunnel. The artful editing, combined with the obliviousness of peripheral figures, conveys the self absorption of a sexual unit and their pattern repetition wherever these two may be, they're still tussling in bed. Yet as visually striking as these three films are, the dancing in them isn't very distinguished or memorable. It's when filmmaking and choreography are equally expressive that these movies gain full power, as in Susan Misner's "Bend," the most potent nine minutes of the festival. "Bend" is also about a couple. We first see them naked in bed together: Troy Ogilvie, a white woman, and Jeffery Dickerson Duffy, a Black man. Together, they go to see her son play in a night game of high school football. When the national anthem starts, Mr. Duffy's character takes a knee. Ms. Ogilvie's character notices. The dance is intercut with naturalistic flashbacks of their budding relationship, the relationship now under pressure. And that pressure has a sound: police radio, James Baldwin's voice, protesters chanting "I can't breathe." As the tension mounts, she seems, at one point, to pledge allegiance to him and, at the next, to pin him to the ground, police style. The setting and cinematography are crucial here, as are the believable performances, but it's Ms. Misner's choreography that brings us inside the woman's painful reckoning with white guilt. Also strong, in a different way, is "Welcome to a Bright White Limbo," directed by Cara Holmes. "Welcome" is apt, because this 10 minute film is essentially an introduction to the remarkable Belfast choreographer Oona Doherty. It situates her in her working class habitat of cul de sacs and dart boards, samples some of her pugnacious solo "Hope Hunt" and lets us hear her thoughts in voice over. As in "Bend," the elements are in balance: the honesty of Ms. Doherty's dancing in harmony with the honesty of the filmmaking and the honesty of her words. A show is a failure, she says, if a viewer's body doesn't know what her body means, if her audience doesn't feel it in the stomach. By that measure, this short dance film is a success. The feature length selections of this year's festival are dominated by documentaries. And these longer films share a fault: Too much talking, not enough letting dance speak for itself. In a few, the imbalance seems somewhat justified, a deliberate choice of form. Both Peter Vulchev's "A Monologue in the Intermission" and Edoardo Gabbriellini's "Kemp: My Best Dance Is Yet to Come" are rage against the dying of the light monologues: the first by Vesa Tonova, a cigarette smoking, Bulgarian ballerina on the edge of forced retirement; the second by the flamboyant mime Lindsay Kemp, dropping names and making faces at 80. With the primary focus on such personalities, the performance footage becomes acceptably secondary, a photo album flipped through while listening. But while "Dancing Darkness," by V. Tony Hauser and Ellen Tolmie, chronicles the creation of a work by the Canadian choreographer Peggy Baker, and illuminates the collaboration among Ms. Baker, the dancers and Sarah Neufeld (the violinist for Arcade Fire), it's too behind the scenes. The film's reason to exist Ms. Baker's dance is chopped into incoherence and presented as if it were no more than visual accompaniment for all the verbiage. That's less of a problem with "Maguy Marin: Time to Act," about the French experimentalist choreographer. Directed with sophistication and love by her son, David Mambouch, it covers her career, her revolt against conventional beauty, her love of the awkward and grotesque, her political principles and struggles. A maker of grim art turns out to be charming, and if Mr. Mambouch too often lets everyone talk over the archival evidence, at least he gives us large enough chunks of his mother's work to sense directly what it is. In not trusting dance, Khadifa Wong's "Uprooted The Journey of Jazz Dance" might be the worst offender. As it strives to encompass a vast and neglected subject, tiny fragments of bodies in motion are overrun by an army of talking heads. But in much of the chatter, important issues buzz. Except for "Bend," no film in the festival is more urgent. More than halfway through, after the interviewees have established the African American roots of jazz dance and dwelt on the mid 20th century achievements of Matt Mattox, Luigi, Gus Giordano, Jack Cole and Bob Fosse, the so called founding fathers, Melanie George throws a wrench. The most cogent of the commentators, she smilingly suggests that these white men were merely the codifiers of jazz dance not, as often claimed, the chief inventors. They are more famous because they were white, but also because what is codified is easier to legitimize and explain, easier to talk about in documentaries. In "Uprooted," this powerful idea seems to prompt a midcourse correction, a choice that helps give Ms. Wong's film its air of discovery. I wish she had corrected further, though, asserting a more forceful authorial point of view. Her film does begin to rectify history, mostly by name checking undersung Black men and women. But I wish she had given us more of their dancing, letting us feel it in the stomach, uncodified and self explanatory. It may seem odd for a critic to call for less commentary. But if the products of the pandemic show that merely putting cameras on dancers isn't sufficient to make a great dance film, this year's festival reminds us that dance on camera is what makes a dance film great.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Back in 2004, Craig Thompson was coming into his own as a serious graphic novelist. His intimate "Blankets" an autobiographical tale of first love, brotherly failure and lost faith had won a number of awards, and his success was helping to move the graphic memoir into the American mainstream. He was also, though, slightly adrift: His girlfriend had just left him, and he wanted to get out of Portland, Ore., which was full of memories of her. Thompson's French publisher organized a book tour, and when other publishers in other countries piled on, the trip turned into an odyssey. To stay productive and to connect to a tradition popular with other artists, Thompson committed to recording a travel diary or "Carnet de Voyage" as he went, sketching every day. The result is a swiftly compiled record of his travels in Europe and Morocco (where he researched his long gestating graphic novel "Habibi"). The sketchbook cum travelogue is quite a dreamy object it doesn't use many separated panels, and drawing often fills the page, black crosshatched edges feathering and dissolving into the ragged white surround. Like others of its type, the book encourages the eye and mind to wander. This is travel in its exploded view. Close ups of French friends jostle alongside wide screen landscapes; little notes and arrows carry us along Thompson's stream of consciousness; there's a page on how to wind a turban, complete with steps. Thompson's other work can be overwrought; "Habibi," for instance, is a claustrophobic experience, with self consciously exquisite decoration and Orientalist fantasy crowding the pages, like vines grown too big in the hothouse. "Carnet de Voyage," though, was made at such incredible speed it was already at the publisher while he was still touring that it corrects for some of that laboriousness. Thompson's drawings are still lush and considered, flowing across the pages from his Pentel brush pen, but the book is looser, sweeter, more suggestive than his other pieces. Yet it's not all sweet. He often hates the trip: He's torn about his exchanges with people in Morocco, especially when they demand money from him or he's made to realize that they consider his portraiture intrusive. It's clear that his subjects believe that allowing him to draw them entitles them to something and this leaves Thompson deeply uncomfortable.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Now Lives In a three bedroom apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which he shares with a freelance designer and a yoga instructor. Claim to Fame is a fashion retailer and designer behind Elkel, an upstart boutique that features up and coming designers with a distinctly queer sensibility. The cutting edge items have gotten the attention of some celebrities, too, including Bjork and Will.i.am, who bought a high concept shirt with detachable arms by the gender blurring brand MLTV ( 299). Big Break An avid internet shopper, Mr. Goncalves would go online to buy avant garde brands like Julian Zigerli from Zurich and Dusty from Finland, because he couldn't find them for sale in New York. "I realized: 'Oh. Here's a business opportunity. There's a niche there,'" Mr. Goncalves said. Inspired by his father who opened a bakery in Brazil, he started Elkel in 2015 as an online boutique devoted to new, gender bending brands. To generate buzz, he opened a tiny pop up on Stanton Street with a window display created by the transgender artist Bizzy Barefoot. "It can't be just a store," he said. "It needs to be an experience and needs to be visually interesting."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Canal Street Market, a new food hall and multivendor retail space, opens on Nov. 3. It will include Yori Nori, a new restaurant concept from the owners of the Korean taco truck Korilla and the Chelsea Market ramen shop Mokbar; more than 27 artist and brand booths, including Fox Fodder Farm Flowers; and a newsstand curated by Office Magazine. At 265 Canal Street. The Proenza Schouler designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez will be at Bergdorf Goodman on Thursday at 4 p.m. to help shoppers customize the woven Hava chain shoulder bag ( 1,850) and cross body ( 1,690) with leather straps that have contrasting edge paint. That evening, hit up three store parties in SoHo. Cuyana, a San Francisco based label offering "fewer, better" things, will host a fall happy hour from 5 to 7:30 p.m. at its recently opened pop up. There will be fall hero pieces: a soft wool cashmere coat ( 495) and an Italian leather work satchel ( 395). At 266 Elizabeth Street. Nau, a line of performance clothing made from sustainable materials, like a down jacket with 650 fill recycled down insulation ( 485), will host an opening for its holiday pop up from 6 to 9 p.m. At 262 Mott Street.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
"I've never made a bad decision," said William Greenblatt, chairman of SterlingBackcheck, which does employment screening. "I've just had bad results." That confidence enabled Mr. Greenblatt, 58, to take the company, which he founded to administer lie detector tests in 1975, when he was still a college student looking for extra money, to a global business with 3,900 employees. "We're going to do 500 million in revenue this year," he said. "That's a lot of work when you're doing things at 8, 10, 12 a pop. It's an enormous operation." Small business owners are generally focused on the day to day, if not the minute by minute, to keep their enterprises moving forward. But they still have to make decisions to professionalize the business, put systems in place and have a plan that allows them to do longer term planning. Those decisions can make the difference between being a small business owner and a business executive with significant wealth. Of course, which of those decisions matter most is generally clear only in hindsight. "There is no bright line test when a company gets to a certain size or age to do these things," said Kevin M. Harris, head of the family business group at Northern Trust. "It is based on where the company wants to go." Determining which decisions were the ones that made the difference is sometimes not an easy task, and the stories that are retold are often the ones that turned out well. Yet it is worth considering what can go wrong. Entrepreneurs who failed to find success were often resistant to change, said David Reimer, chief executive of Merryck Company, which uses former chief executives as coaches. "The reason tends to boil down to self awareness," he said. "A lot of C.E.O.s and entrepreneurs develop a Teflon coating in order to cope. That's not a bad thing. The bad thing is when there is no longer a distinction between your Teflon coating and who you are, and you can't take on any other input." So from the vantage point of hindsight, what were crucial decisions for a selection of business people whose wealth was tied to the businesses they started or inherited? The decisions were generally of an operational nature, rather than part of a great innovation, these business owners said: a way of propelling their company forward and their net worth up. Boot strapping, the term given to starting a business with an idea, passion and little else, is as much a necessity as a badge of honor for many entrepreneurs. And part of that do everything ethos is a desire to run the business cheaply, with an awareness that lack of cash has killed many small businesses. Fourteen years ago, when Tom Bernthal got the idea for a market research firm that is today Kelton Global, he and his partner, Gareth Schweitzer, expected to crisscross the country from their base in Los Angeles. "All of a sudden we realized what we had as a business was our people, and it was all we had to sell," Mr. Bernthal said. "So we went out there and started being willing to pay for this really top notch talent." The firm now has 70 employees, he said. In addition to increasing the founders' overhead, that decision in 2010 to make those hires freed Mr. Bernthal, 42, and Mr. Schweitzer to focus on the higher level projects that would expand the business. "If you don't hire those types of people, the client always wants you," he said, joking that this insight came after his 14th overnight flight for a meeting in three months. For Mr. Greenblatt, the growth of his background checking company had been steady but slow. He credited the company's faster growth to hiring a president in 1999 to help him expand. To afford it, he was prepared to halve his own pay. "I never had to take that cut because he was so good," he said. "That's when I realized every single person you hire has to be amazing." But such leaps can be daunting because they lock the entrepreneur into a higher payroll, which in many new economy businesses is the largest cost. Charles R. Barrett, president and managing direct of FZ Media Design, a digital marketing company outside Philadelphia, said he faced such a prospect in 2009. He had been doing projects for various small companies and relying mostly on freelance designers when extra work came in. But after doing a small job for CareerBuilder.com, he was given the opportunity to do a lot more work for the jobs site. "It was that first 'put up or shut up' moment," he said. "I just saw tremendous opportunity there. The door was open. How could I kick this door down? I needed bodies." He took the chance and began building a full time team, which is now eight people. It paid off. More and more jobs came in from CareerBuilder.com, including the recent introduction of the worldwide jobs portal for Hilton Hotels. He has also been able to step back and focus on the larger strategy. "I'm really proud of the life it's afforded me," Mr. Barrett, 48, said. "We have a nice house that I've rebuilt and a beach house in New Jersey that my wife loves. I bought a new Mustang and a 1967 Mustang coupe that I've completely rebuilt. You carry the stress load of everything, but it also gives you the freedom to reap the reward." Mike Cagney, 45, a co founder of Social Finance Inc., also known as SoF, an online lender focused on student loan refinancing, personal loans and mortgages, said he wanted to make the company's customer service the best it could be. When he looked into setting up a call center in Sonoma County, Calif., an hour north of San Francisco, the going wage for such work was 12 an hour. "I looked at that and said there is no way I can pay 12 an hour," he said. "No one can live on 12 an hour." He considered the decision an investment. "You can't have the front line of your business talking to your members worrying about making rent that month," he said. "I said we needed to pay people a living wage. I committed to paying 20 an hour, and some members of my board said, 'Why are you doing this?' " The result has been low turnover rates for workers and high satisfaction scores from customers. The company, which started four years ago with 80 million in financing, recently raised 1 billion and is now valued at 4 billion. It has been profitable for two years. Larry Perkins, 38, applied three times for a job at Alvarez Marsal, a top corporate restructuring firm, before he was hired in its Los Angeles office in 2006. "That was a huge achievement in my life to get the job there," he said. But 15 days into his dream job, he said, "I was on a jog and I said, 'What am I doing here?' " It wasn't the restructuring business, which he loved, that bothered him, but the job itself. So in 2007, at 29, he decided to start his own firm. Three years later, his company was bought by another restructuring firm. A year into that arrangement, he was miserable all over again. "I got into a position that is not my favorite one," he said. "I was working for someone, trying to do all the right things, but at the end of it I didn't feel like I was building the thing I wanted to build." So with five core members, he bought the firm back, a long, messy process that cost him most of the money he made on the initial sale. Since becoming independent again in 2013, the firm has grown to 20 people and business has increased sixfold, he said. "The challenges I had as a small firm were the same problems I had at a big firm," he said. "A big chunk of the problem I was having was with the guy in the mirror." Mr. Cagney said he had a similar revelation about his leadership skills. In his first venture, a wealth management technology firm he started in 2000, he thought he was a great chief executive. "No one left the company, which I took as an endorsement of my management style," he said. "I didn't realize there weren't any other jobs out there. Then my board sat me down and said, 'You're the worst C.E.O. ever.' " To his credit, he listened and came to agree with the board. So when he started SoFi, he brought in a former colleague 10 years his senior to handle management and other technical roles. "It was a great thing to do because I wouldn't have to worry about that stuff," he said. "I could worry about other parts of the business." No account of wealth accumulation can ignore tales of risk taking. But these entrepreneurs who built wealth did what could be called responsible risk taking. For Paul Darley, 53, it was a mathematical problem: The business could not support the people in the next generation of his family if they joined the company at the same rate as his generation. So after nearly 100 years of focusing on the firefighting business, he decided that W.S. Darley Company should expand into military contracting. "The driver was making the company big enough to support the next generation," he said. "I didn't know anything about the defense business when we went into it, so we had to surround ourselves with good people." It worked, though not without fits and starts. But he said he listened to advisers and was willing to modify his strategy. Blaine Vess, who 16 years ago founded StudyMode, a college note sharing site, in his dorm room, ran it as a hobby business until 2005, he said. Then, five years after starting the company, he switched it from an advertising model to a subscription model. He was worried that it would lose customers, but almost at once its revenue spiked, going from 60,000 a year in 2004 to more than 1 million a year in 2007, with just Mr. Vess and his co founder involved. A third partner they took on in 2008 pushed them to expand internationally. Last year, they hired a chief operating officer. "We could have kept running this thing the way we were running it even a year ago and get it to higher levels by asking more questions," Mr. Vess, 34, said. "But getting someone in who's been through it before and getting comfortable that this person is doing an awesome job and better than I could do, this has been great." For those risks, the company has pushed its annual revenue to more than 20 million today.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Stacked books arranged like city blocks fill the diminutive stage of Joe's Pub at the Public Theater. The book covers are white; there are no titles. Instead, the names of writers are projected against the back wall as a voice reads aloud: Samuel Beckett, Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair, Grace Paley. A feather slim woman, Mei Yamanaka, winds around the stacks with nimble plies and razor sharp turns until her legs and arms turn deadly, and she demolishes the literary landscape. (Make way for e readers.) Mark Dendy's "NewYorknewyork Astor Place," which opened on Wednesday, isn't too cryptic, but it is site specific. The Public Theater building was originally the Astor Library. In this multilayered dance theater production, presented by DanceNOW (NYC), the Joe's Pub stage serves as a gateway for a cast of historical and contemporary characters from the area, including Mr. Dendy as William Backhouse Astor II. Seated in a chair for the duration, Mr. Dendy is amusing, playing Astor as a cross between a lifeguard and Alistair Cooke. "This bawdy nightclub we find ourselves in this evening was once the great Astor Library," he says, "as you see by the columns, the molding, the ceiling work." Mr. Dendy calls his cast "shape shifting time travelers," but aren't we all? Even though we can all agree that rents are too high, and that the only equalizer is death, Mr. Dendy's premise grows increasingly tedious.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The World Trade Organization ruled on Tuesday that the European plane maker Airbus received improper subsidies for its 13 billion A380 superjumbo jet and several other airplanes, hurting Boeing, its American rival, industry officials in the United States and Europe said. The ruling affirmed the organization's interim findings last September in response to a longstanding complaint by the United States over European support for Airbus. Boeing has contended that the subsidies helped Airbus vault past it in 2003 to become the world's largest plane maker. Boeing hopes that the ruling could help it catch up once its new 787 Dreamliner jet hits the market. The decision was made as tensions mounted over European claims of protectionism in the Pentagon's competition for a 35 billion to 40 billion contract for Air Force refueling tankers, the latest scrape between the companies. European leaders were upset when Northrop Grumman, which had teamed with Airbus's parent, dropped out of the tanker bidding, leaving Boeing the apparent winner. The Airbus parent, the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, initially said it would withdraw. But it has since asked the Pentagon for more time to consider bidding on its own. For the American side, the most crucial finding was that most of the loans from European governments to help Airbus develop the A380 passenger jet amounted to prohibited subsidies. The loans, called "launch aid," are considered improper if they are provided at below market rates. Representative Norm Dicks, Democrat of Washington, said the trade organization also found that Europe had provided improper subsidies to all of Airbus's large commercial airplanes, including five other series of jets the A300, A310, A320, A330 and A340. In a statement on Tuesday, Airbus confirmed that the panel had found the loans contained "a certain element of subsidy." Airbus said it did not ban the use of government loans in general. But trade lawyers have said launch aid can be legal only if the loans are made at commercial rates. The trade organization also found that the aid for the A380 was aimed at fostering export sales. Under its rules, such subsidies need to be withdrawn "without delay." The Europeans would have more time to halt any aid still being paid on the older models. Airbus may also appeal the ruling, and the case, filed nearly six years ago, is likely to drag on for many more months. Airbus said in the statement that "resolution will finally only be found in trans Atlantic negotiations." Airbus also noted that the trade organization had rejected 70 percent of the specific arguments that the United States had made. But Boeing has said in the past that on crucial points, only one of the various arguments needed to be accepted for the panel to find the subsidies were unfair. Boeing has hoped that a victory in this case would pressure Europe to eliminate subsidies for the A350, a wide body passenger jet being developed to compete with Boeing's most important plane, the new carbon composite 787 Dreamliner. The trade organization's ruling does not formally apply to the roughly 4.3 billion in European pledges of loans to help Airbus develop the A350, since work on it had not begun when the complaint was filed. Airbus said on Tuesday that the ruling would not affect that financing. "It's very difficult to make governments change their ways," said Richard L. Aboulafia, an aviation analyst at the Teal Group. "You can rule against them in one way, and they just find a different way to achieve the same goal." But the ruling could prompt Boeing's supporters in Congress to try to keep the Pentagon from giving the European company more time to bid on the tanker contract. Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington who led efforts to initiate the case, said on Tuesday that, given the ruling, "Now's not the time to delay this competition further." The ruling could mean that Airbus will be required to refinance some of its low interest loans on commercial terms. Under the current terms, Airbus makes repayments as it delivers planes to customers. Brazil, Canada, China and Japan all World Trade Organization members with aircraft industries have been watching to see whether they could be affected by any precedent set in the ruling. So has Russia, which has been negotiating to enter the organization since 1995. All five countries have invested significant public money, and some hope to compete with Boeing and Airbus in the market for 150 to 200 seat jets.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
WASHINGTON Silicon Valley is fuming about President Trump's stance on climate and immigration, but top technology executives still made a pilgrimage to the White House on Monday to discuss a potential upgrade of government technology. Timothy D. Cook of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Eric Schmidt of Alphabet were among 18 tech executives and investors many of whom have criticized the Trump administration who attended the four hour afternoon session to discuss cloud computing and procurement systems run by government agencies. For many, it was the second group meeting with Mr. Trump since the election and another demonstration of the administration's ability to summon top business executives, even amid controversy. "Government needs to catch up with the technology revolution," said Mr. Trump, who strolled in at the end of the meeting to greet the tech titans. "We're going to change that with the help of great American businesses like the people assembled." He later said, drawing laughter, "We have approximately 3.5 trillion of market value in this room but that's almost the exact number that we've created since my election." Few technology specialists from the White House attended. The administration has not filled several major science and technology positions. But the business and economics team closest to the president attended, including Gary D. Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, and Dina Powell, senior counselor for economic initiatives. The event was organized by Jared Kushner, special adviser to the president and Mr. Trump's son in law, and Chris Liddell, the White House director of strategic initiatives and former chief financial officer of Microsoft. Mr. Kushner's Office of American Innovation brought together the executives for 10 workshops on topics such as cybersecurity, analytics and using technology to better connect people to government services. Mr. Kushner opened the event in the White House Indian Peace Treaty room by emphasizing the potential of the companies to improve the government's outdated and inefficient technology systems. "Together we will unleash the creativity of the private sector to provide citizen services in a way that has never happened before," he said. The opportunity for Silicon Valley is enormous. The federal government spends 80 billion a year on information technology, much of it used to maintain outdated technology such as data systems that are decades old and storage that includes floppy disks used at the Defense Department. Federal agencies maintain 6,100 data centers that could be consolidated and moved to the cloud. The meeting occurred as tech company stocks roared back after declining in the last two weeks, pushing the stock market to records on Monday. Apple and Alphabet, the parent of Google, were among the top gainers after three consecutive sessions of declines. The tech industry has walked a delicate line in its engagement with the Trump administration. Some tech workers and customers have called on industry leaders to withdraw from positions as official advisers to the president. Uber's chief executive, Travis Kalanick, resigned as a White House adviser after protests by employees and users. Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, quit the White House business advisory council after the administration withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord. Mr. Musk did not attend the meeting Monday. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, was invited but declined because of a scheduling conflict, the company said. The meeting occurred only weeks after tech executives, including Mr. Musk and Mr. Cook, publicly criticized the withdrawal from the Paris accord. But senior administration officials said they had not encountered any reluctance to participate in the event and had a waiting list for people who wanted to attend. "This is a double edged sword for the tech C.E.O.s because they don't want to be window dressing and used for photo ops," said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor and associate dean at the Yale School of Management. "But on the other side, this is the most business friendly administration since Eisenhower and is much more open than any administration to influence on the spot." Administration officials said that the chief executives had done their homework and were engaged in the workshops and discussions. "I don't think there was any one big suggestion," Mr. Liddell said in an interview. "But there was a large number of small suggestions, all of which are interesting for us to follow up." Several tech executives had a chance to address Mr. Trump in a round table discussion at the end of the day. Mr. Bezos encouraged the president to use commercial technology whenever possible. Amazon's booming cloud services business has become a contractor to the government. The Amazon founder also emphasized the need to retrain workers and said it was "impossible to overstate" the importance of artificial intelligence. Peter Thiel, an early Trump supporter and tech investor, praised the president. "Your administration is doing very well," he said. Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, said on Twitter that the company made the case "for why healthy high skilled immigration and investments in education are good for the country." Two people who were briefed on the tech meeting later said Mr. Trump also voiced support for "comprehensive" immigration reform, a term that was used during the Obama administration to generally describe a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants in the United States. The president made the promise, the two people said, after being told by Mr. Cook that tech employees may worry they are being targeted amid confusion over the administration's immigration policy. It was unclear exactly what the president meant, or if he was using the term to mean something else. White House press aides did not respond to a request for comment on Monday night, and a spokesman for Apple declined to comment. Mr. Trump in February told a group of network anchors that he was considering pushing some form of comprehensive immigration reform package. But he never said it publicly or produced a proposal, and has taken a hard line against it immigration in speeches and public comments.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
How the Pandemic Has Affected Passports, Global Entry, T.S.A. PreCheck and More After three months of travel at a near standstill, restrictions are slowly lifting and travelers are venturing out again. On Sunday, the Transportation Security Administration screened more than 544,000 people, a daily record since traveler numbers plummeted in late March. However, disruptions caused by the pandemic go beyond just airports and travel bans. Nearly two million Americans in need of passports are facing severe delays because of processing center closures. People applying for security expediting services like T.S.A. PreCheck or Global Entry may have had their interviews canceled for similar reasons. Here's what to expect when applying for travel documents and membership in security expediting programs. Can I apply for or renew a U.S. passport now? A backlog of 1.7 million passports has piled up since the State Department shut down most of its consular services to protect its workers on March 19, officials confirmed last week. Fourteen passport processing centers have reopened for limited service as of Monday, June 15. Pending applications will be addressed on a first in, first out basis, beginning with the oldest applications received some going back as far as February. Officials have said they hope to process about 200,000 applications each week, but that it could take up to eight weeks before even starting on the new applications to cut through the backlog. That means if you're applying for a passport now, you should expect delays of at least two months, if not three or more. Unfortunately, expedited services, barring life or death circumstances, have been suspended until the final phase of reopening the passport offices (no timeline has been announced for this). Can I apply for Global Entry? What if my membership is about to expire? Global Entry is a program run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection that lets preapproved members skip customs lines when returning to the United States from abroad. For a 100 application fee, a Global Entry membership is good for five years and includes T.S.A. PreCheck. Global Entry is one of the C.B.P.'s Trusted Traveler Programs, which includes NEXUS, SENTRI and other expedited entry programs. Enrollment centers for Trusted Traveler Programs, including those that process Global Entry applications, have suspended operations until at least Sep. 8. You can apply for conditional approval for Global Entry via the website, but will be unable to schedule an interview until after Sep. 8. Officials advise that the fastest way to get Global Entry now is to apply for conditional approval online and complete the enrollment process upon arrival from abroad at a participating airport. You won't need to pre schedule an interview for this. Conditional approval can currently take between 15 days to more than five months. If you do decide to book an interview after Sep. 8, know that demand will be high and there may be long wait times to get an appointment. Global Entry applicants who are conditionally approved have a year to complete an interview for their enrollment. The C.B.P. recently extended this grace period to 545 days. Members who apply for renewal before their expiration is up will have an 18 month extension to their benefits, instead of the usual six months. New Yorkers are still not eligible to apply for or renew Global Entry membership, because of a freeze by the Trump administration earlier this year. While T.S.A. PreCheck is included in Global Entry, it is 15 cheaper to get the membership on its own, and the application process is generally faster. Run by the Transportation Security Administration, PreCheck breezes you through airport security. You will not need to remove your shoes, belt or laptop. Membership costs 85 for five years. Some enrollment centers have closed or modified their hours during the pandemic, although most are open. If your interview appointment is canceled, you'll be notified and given a chance to rebook. T.S.A. officials recommend making an appointment rather than walking into an enrollment center, so you can know ahead of time of any disruptions and so the center can manage social distancing. Officials said the pandemic has not caused a backlog or delays in processing, and that the approval process should take about two to three weeks. At some airports, PreCheck lanes may be temporarily closed because of low passenger numbers. If you are a PreCheck member not making use of your membership because you're not traveling, the T.S.A. isn't currently offering refunds or extensions. Clear is a private company that allows its members to scan their fingerprints or irises at a designated pod to bypass ID check lines and get to security screening faster. At 179 a year, some members may feel they are not getting their money's worth on a premium service while they can't travel. To address this, Clear is offering a free three month extension for current members and also allowing a three month pause option. There has been no disruption to processing memberships, which can be done on the spot at a designated Clear pod within participating airports, a Clear spokeswoman said. Some Clear lanes may be temporarily closed at the discretion of the airports. Can I still get Real ID? (And ... what is Real ID?) You're not the only one wondering what this is. According to a 2019 survey, most Americans did not have or were confused about Real ID even though it will soon be a mandatory document in order to pass through security for domestic flights. As one response to the 9/11 terror attacks, Congress passed the Real ID Act in 2005. The act was intended to protect national security by establishing a federal standard for issuing driver's licenses and I.D. cards. Basically, it was created to put a stop to the proliferation of fake I.D.s. Real ID compliant driver's licenses will be identified by a star in the top right corner. Because of the pandemic, the enforcement deadline of Oct. 1, 2020 was extended a year to Oct. 1, 2021. The virus is the latest setback in a long and troubled rollout. Adding to the confusion is that states issue driver's licenses, not the federal government. You will need to go to your state's motor vehicles department to get a Real ID. As many D.M.V. offices throughout the country are currently closed or offering limited services during the pandemic, Real ID will be unavailable until in person services have resumed in your state.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
COLONIZED DREAMS: A MIPSTERZ EVENT at the Knockdown Center (March 9, 6:30 p.m.). Mipsterz, a collective whose name merges "Muslim" and "hipsters," is led by the filmmaker Abbas Rattani, the illustrator Sara Alfageeh and the musician Yusuf Siddiquee and promotes the work of Muslim artists across genres. For this showcase, the group has curated a lineup of Muslim musicians, writers and artists who are mostly from New York. Humeysha, the musical alias of the Brooklyn based singer songwriter Zain Alam, blends spacey indie rock with more traditional Indian sounds from instruments like the tabla and puja bells. The D.J. Ayes Cold connects bhangra music with hip hop and R B, while the Lebanese American percussionist Adam Maalouf performs mostly on the pantam, an instrument created from the Trinidadian steel pan and southern India's ghatam drum. 718 489 6285, knockdown.center MATTHEW DEAR at Elsewhere (March 8, 7 p.m.). A founding artist of the trendy electronic music label Ghostly International, Dear is better known as a bandleader, producer and D.J. whose work is steeped in Detroit techno. He has remixed songs for the likes of the XX and Spoon, and as a soloist, his work has long incorporated nearly equal parts electronic effects and live performance. On his latest album, 2018's "Bunny," which features Tegan and Sara and Greg Ahee from Protomartyr, Dear's voice and songwriting give a more personal dimension to his reliably left of center yet dance floor ready beats. elsewherebrooklyn.com LITTLE FEAT at the Beacon Theater (March 8, 8 p.m.). At the half century mark, a number of the musicians behind Little Feat's best known songs are still with the group, including the co founder and pianist Bill Payne, the guitarist Paul Barrere, the percussionist Sam Clayton and the bassist Kenny Gradney. For this celebration of their 50 years onstage, expect a career spanning retrospective that shows the range of this tricky to pin down band, whose work spans country, funk, R B and more. Regardless of what they're playing, though, Little Feat have long been celebrated for their live act. 212 465 6000, beacontheatre.com Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. MEEK MILL at Hammerstein Ballroom (March 12 13, 8 p.m.). This Philadelphia born rapper's rise could hardly be more antithetical to 2019's standard rap narrativeof getting discovered on SoundCloud by a major label, and then steering toward viral fame with the label's help. Instead, Meek Mill took the long way to the top, first gaining credibility as a battle rapper and flirting with mainstream success, which was derailed by protracted legal battles and stints in prison. The strength of the work from the early years of his career, though especially "Dreams and Nightmares," the album cut that has become every underdog's anthem, and the rapper's best known song helped him push through. Finally, he is back in the world and back on the road. Both shows are sold out, but tickets are available through the resale market. 212 279 7740, mc34.com ROBYN at Madison Square Garden (March 8, 7 p.m.). "I was like, I'm not going to write one single sad love song," this Swedish pop singer told The New York Times of her latest album, "Honey." "And then when I started writing, it was sad love song, sad love song, sad love song. But it's in a different way." Robyn has spent over two decades turning those sad love songs into nightclub gold, in iterations that have made her both a Billboard hit maker ("Show Me Love" and "Do You Know (What It Takes)" and a cult favorite ("Call Your Girlfriend" and "Dancing on My Own"). 212 465 6741, msg.com WEEZER AND PIXIES at Madison Square Garden (March 12, 7 p.m.). These joint headliners offer some of the most enduring indie rock of the 1980s and '90s and TV on the Radio, who are opening, will represent the 2000s. Weezer have continued to release albums at a fairly prolific clip and still own a significant chunk of the alt rock canon, from "Say It Ain't So" to "Hash Pipe." Their most recent brushes with the mainstream, though, have been less expected namely, a viral cover of Toto's "Africa." After playing three nights at the comparatively cozy Brooklyn Steel last November, Pixies are bringing their unorthodox noise pop back to one of the city's biggest stages. 212 465 6741, msg.com NATALIE WEINER EZRA COLLECTIVE at Rough Trade NYC (March 9, 8:30 p.m.). Afrobeat from the 1970s, woozy new R B, dub reggae and classic backpacker hip hop all help define the sound of this London based band's new disc, "You Can't Steal My Joy," due next month. They have become something of a sensation, and the album is likely to be one of the year's most talked about releases from Britain's thriving contemporary jazz scene. The group which features the brothers T. J. and Femi Koleoso on bass and drums, respectively; Joe Armon Jones on keyboards; Dylan Jones on trumpet; and James Mollison on saxophone will play material from the coming disc at this Brooklyn rock club. roughtradenyc.com VIJAY IYER AND CRAIG TABORN at Roulette (March 12, 8 p.m.). Two leading jazz pianists in their late 40s, Iyer and Taborn each have their own specific formulas, but both are built on a mix of studious abstraction and propulsive weight. Next week they will release their first album as a duo, the expansive, richly improvised "The Transitory Poems," on ECM Records. The crystalline scatter of Taborn's playing meets Iyer's slightly thicker articulation in a sympathetic repartee; the pair seem to constantly divert their own path. They celebrate the album's arrival at this concert, playing on two grand pianos. 917 267 0368, roulette.org 'IDENTITY: FREEDOM' at the Kitchen (March 7 9, 8 p.m.). The nonprofit organization Arts for Art organized this series of concerts to highlight some of free jazz's most respected elders, all of whom are presenting suite length original works here. The festival begins on Thursday with "Trail of Tears Continuum (1492 2019)," a 90 minute piece composed by the bassist William Parker (a founder of Arts for Art) featuring singers, poets and a five piece instrumental group, as well as a film component. On Friday, the pianist Dave Burrell debuts "Harlem Renaissance," a response to the life and work of the dancer Josephine Baker; Burrell's sextet will play in conversation with two dancers, Marguerite Hemmings and J'royce Jata. The series concludes on Saturday with a presentation of Andrew Cyrille's "Haitian Fascination" project, in which this storied drummer fuses the music of Haiti his ancestral home with avant garde jazz. 212 255 5793, thekitchen.org MIYA MASAOKA at the Park Avenue Armory (March 13, 7 and 9 p.m.). Masaoka's style on the koto, a long, stringed instrument from Japan, bespeaks deep equanimity: She is comfortable allowing vast amounts of open space playing quietly, just a few notes at a time but within that serene composure she strategically builds a feeling of tensile anticipation. You can lie down and stretch out inside her music, but you can't ever get completely comfortable. An eclectic collaborator across the worlds of traditional and avant garde music, at the armory she debuts "The Long Arc of Time," a work inspired by traditional Japanese Buddhist chants and by the poetry of Tracie Morris. The performance will feature Masaoka alongside fellow Japanese and American musicians and the soprano Kamala Sankaram. 212 616 3930, armoryonpark.org OMAR SOSA AND SECKOU KEITA at Merkin Hall (March 9, 7:30 p.m.). Sosa, a Cuban pianist of great percussive power and fluid grace, released a collaborative album in 2017 with Keita, a Senegalese master of the kora (a West African stringed instrument typically used to create spiraling layers of rhythm), and the Venezuelan percussionist Gustavo Ovalles. Here the trio will perform some of the pristine, soothing music from that release. All three of these musicians now live in Europe, so a New York sighting is rare especially featuring all of them together. 212 501 3330, kaufmanmusiccenter.org KAMAAL WILLIAMS at Le Poisson Rouge (March 9, 7:30 p.m.). This young keyboardist crafts tightly woven grooves that are equally influenced by the cosmic soul jazz of the 1970s as they are by the broken beat and nu jazz traditions of his native London. Partly thanks to his work in the short lived but widely acclaimed duo Yussef Kamaal, Williams finds himself at the front of a crowded pack of young keyboardists on the busy British scene. Here he's likely to draw heavily on the material from his debut solo album, last year's Herbie Hancock indebted "The Return." 212 505 3474, lpr.com MIGUEL ZENON at the Village Vanguard (March 12 17, 8:30 and 10:30 p.m.). One of the most casually prodigious alto saxophonists of today, Zenon devotes most of his creative energy to exploring the music of his native Puerto Rico, always through a vigorously intellectual lens. Last year he released a striking album, "Yo Soy La Tradicion," featuring music sourced largely from Puerto Rican folk traditions, retrofitted for saxophone and string quartet. And later this month, he will join up again with his longstanding jazz quartet to record a new album devoted to the music of Ismael Rivera, a heroic popular vocalist in Puerto Rico during the late 1960s and the '70s. At this Vanguard run, the group featuring Luis Perdomo on piano, Hans Glawischnig on bass and Henry Cole on drums will set about breaking in this new material. 212 255 4037, villagevanguard.com GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO LOU REED DRONES at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine (March 13, 6:30 p.m.). Physics and music nerds, unite and rejoice! The moment you have been collectively awaiting has arrived: A handful of Lou Reed's guitars, curated by his technician Stewart Hurwood, will be arranged against a stack of amplifiers and tuned to create a glorious noise that will morph as you wander about in this acoustically splendid cathedral. Holy feedback! It should be glorious. stjohndivine.org/calendar DANIELLE DOWLING	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Uber Says It Will Leave Quebec Rather Than Face New Rules OTTAWA Uber said on Tuesday that it would stop service in Montreal and the Quebec province next month rather than accept new government rules, the second setback in a week for the ride hailing service's international operations. On Friday, the taxi regulator in London announced that it would not renew Uber's license, saying that the ride hailing business had demonstrated a "lack of corporate responsibility." Until recently, Uber appeared to have reveled in ignoring local regulations as it shoved its way into markets. But its aggressive ways, combined with a series of scandals, may be catching up with it. Last month, Dara Khosrowshahi was brought in as chief executive to replace Uber's co founder, Travis Kalanick, who had been forced to step down. Quebec's decision to dictate terms to Uber is another sign that governments and regulators are less willing to back down when faced by intimidation from the company. In Quebec, where Uber has sparked large protests by Montreal cabdrivers who argue that it has eroded their livelihoods by ignoring laws, the ride hailing company has operated for a year under a special authorization while it negotiated permanent rules with the government. Last week, Laurent Lessard, the provincial transport minister, announced conditions he was seeking in exchange for extending the program for another 12 months. Jean Nicolas Guillemette, the general manager of Uber Montreal, said on Tuesday that the company could not accept the government's plan to increase the minimum training for Uber drivers to 35 hours, up from 20 hours. The higher level matches the rule in Montreal for taxi drivers. Unless the government withdraws its plan, Mr. Guillemette said, Uber would quit the province on Oct. 14. "The minister is attempting to impose old rules on a new model," Mr. Guillemette told a news conference. "These are major changes." Uber has about 10,000 drivers in Montreal. Mr. Guillemette said that the increased training would make it difficult to recruit new drivers, particularly those who only want to work part time. Mr. Guillemette added that Uber can provide sufficient training in less time through alternate methods. "We firmly believe that technology allows us to provide what the government wants in terms of training," he said. Uber hopes to continue discussions with the province leading up to the deadline, Mr. Guillemette. But if the government sticks by its 35 hour rule, he added, "we'll need to leave." Mathieu Goudrault, a spokesman for the transport minister, said that the 35 hour minimum would now apply to all taxi drivers in Quebec, adding that the government would not consider a lower threshold for Uber drivers. For licensed taxi drivers, the new minimum represents a considerable reduction from the previous requirement of 150 hours. The province also wants criminal background checks on Uber drivers to be made by the police rather than by private firms. It will also require mandatory, annual vehicle inspections. In London, Uber is appealing the decision by the transport authority to not renew the ride hailing service's license to operate in the city. Mr. Khosrowshahi, Uber's chief, apologized in an open letter on Monday for the company's "mistakes." Georges Malouf, a taxi company owner speaking on behalf of the industry in Montreal, characterized Uber's decision as negotiating tactic.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The second to last song on Phoebe Bridgers's strange and exquisitely moving new album "Punisher" is called "Graceland Too." A restless girl who has lived through something unspeakable ("no longer a danger to herself or others," goes the song's ear pricking opening line) gets in a car without a particular destination in mind, settles on Memphis and "turns up the music so thoughts don't intrude." Of course it doesn't work: She "predictably winds up thinking of Elvis," as you do. Born into a world post everything, where she's grown up being told there are no new ideas under the incrementally dying sun, this girl knows she's not the first lost soul to point a car toward Southwest Tennessee just as Bridgers, a 25 year old singer and songwriter from Los Angeles, knows she's not the first person to write a song about road tripping to Graceland. But Bridgers is the first person ever to write a song about this precise road trip and its attendant mix of feelings, a kind of tattered, post traumatic triumph that, in the warm company of another person, gradually blooms into a panoramic hope. Like the other nine songs on "Punisher," it is a showcase of Bridgers's great strength as a songwriter: weaving tiny, specific, time stamped details (chemtrails, Saltines, serotonin) into durable big tent tapestries of feeling. Bridgers's lyrical talent was evident on her 2017 debut, "Stranger in the Alps," which had a few perfect songs but as a whole sometimes felt muted, languid and downcast. "Punisher," though, moves along fluidly with its eyes to the vast sky. Bridgers's arpeggiated guitar work remains quietly deft, and this album opens it up by placing it within an unobtrusive backdrop of looping synths and eerily groaning strings. That atmosphere sets the scene for Bridgers's evocative, fractured storytelling. The pulsating hums beneath the title track and the excellent first single "Garden Song" evoke a night sky alight with a mysterious glow maybe an airplane or a U.F.O. or the fluorescent lights of a nearby megachurch. Through Bridgers's eyes it's hard to tell the difference, anyway: "I want to believe," she sings on "Chinese Satellite." "Instead I look at the sky and I feel nothing." Bridgers's most frequently cited musical hero is another bard of Big Nothing, Elliott Smith. She shares with him a penchant for multitracking her murmured vocals, and this technique enlivens her music with the tension of mixed emotions; like a detached ironist hiding feelings just below the surface, Bridgers's voice can be both deadpan and yearning at the same time. The title track, she's said, finds her communing with Smith quite literally: "I hear so many stories of you at the bar," she sings to the singer and songwriter, who died in 2003, when Bridgers was 7 years old. "Most times alone and some looking your worst, but never not sweet to the trust funds and punishers." In musician parlance, a "punisher" is a chatty superfan unable to play it cool around their idol; Bridgers likely has plenty of them herself these days, but in this song she grants them empathy by imagining herself fawning over Smith. "What if I told you I feel like I know you, but we never met?" she sings, adding, "It's for the best." Though she moonlights as a member of the all female trio boygenius alongside her peers Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, Bridgers's most explicit influences and prominent past collaborators are moody men a generation or so older than she is: She has a side project, Better Oblivion Community Center, with Bright Eyes's Conor Oberst, who contributes backing vocals to "Punisher"; "Stranger in the Alps" closed with a seven minute cover of Sun Kil Moon frontman Mark Kozelek's violent, haunting dirge "You Missed My Heart." That she identifies so closely with these perspectives gives her music an androgynous, everydude charm. But it also allows her to subtly articulate some nuances of female subjugation that her musical forefathers never quite had access to. Such is the piercing power of "Moon Song," a highlight not just of "Punisher" but of Bridgers's output so far. "You asked to walk me home," she begins, "but I had to carry you." The second verse is a collision of chatty humor and breathtaking pathos, of the dreamlike and the hyperreal: "We hate 'Tears in Heaven' But it's sad that his baby died Then we fought about John Lennon Til I cried and then went to bed upset And now I'm dreaming and you're singing at my birthday And I've never seen you smiling so big It's nautical themed and there's something I'm supposed to say But can't for the life of me remember what it is" "Punisher" often feels like it's taking place on that hazy edge between dreaming and wakefulness, where words stick on the tips of tongues and everyday notions (Halloween, pay phones, stucco) seem suddenly surreal. Maybe that is why it makes a particular kind of sense in this moment, when we're all immobilized by existential dread and only able to travel in our dreams. Those are a few more of the finely specific yet universal feelings Bridgers knows how to put into words. For the quarter century she's been alive, Bridgers, like the rest of her generation, has been numbed with near constant and banal threats of apocalypse in the middle of the album's stirring closer, "I Know the End," she passes a laughably familiar highway sign: THE END IS NEAR. And so in the final moments of this phenomenal record, Bridgers dares herself to stare straight into the void, long enough to see if it's bluffing again this time. The song, instead, erupts: A collective of instruments and voices reach a grand crescendo that eventually gives way to screaming, fiery cacophony. It's as vivid and gruesome and beautiful as Bridgers was promised. For a fleeting moment, she looks up and she believes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
A bad trip "Jesus Christ Superstar," a "Godspell" set to an EDM beat, a paradise that gets very, very lost. This is "Electric Lucifer," Jim Findlay's gonzo staging of two albums by the Canadian electronic music pioneer Bruce Haack, who died in 1988. A children's music artist and the inventor of the Dermatron, a synthesizer activated by the heat of skin, Haack released "The Electric Lucifer" on Columbia Records in 1970 and a follow up eight years later. With their bloops, bleeps and bizarro version of the synoptic gospels, these concept albums ultimately describe an epic battle for the soul of the universe that encompasses Lucifer's fall, Christ's passion and the coming Armageddon. The production, at the Kitchen, begins with a sweet curiosity, a video of Haack visiting "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" and demonstrating a synthesizer. Then the lights pulse, the way out band grooves and a chorus in spandex starts to writhe. There are calls of "Program me!" and shout outs to electricity, alongside a greatest hits version of Jesus's life, which skips from birth to arrest and crucifixion. In a nifty bit of staging, Mr. Findlay has a thorn crowned Jesus (Robert M. Johanson) swaddled in a high tech loincloth and then hoisted several feet above the stage to hover and bleed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
When you think of communities located near major metropolitan airports, you probably think of noise. But Burien, Wash., a relatively affordable suburb just south of Seattle and west of Seattle Tacoma International Airport, avoids such a fate with flight paths mercifully positioned to the east. Charmed with breathtaking access to Puget Sound, snow capped Mount Rainier and the wooded trails of Seahurst Park, Burien now has a downtown in the midst of a serious upswing, thanks in part to several outposts of popular Seattle originals. This multifaceted bakery, now in three locations, consistently ranks among the West Coast's finest. When the owner William Leaman went looking for a facility to expand his chocolate making capacity, he found Burien to be a more affordable option than the West Seattle neighborhood that still houses his popular original storefront. While sweets are the main draw in this year old spot, savory lunch items like stromboli and croque monsieurs are also first rate and you can watch the chocolate being stirred mechanically through a glass floor panel, giving the place a wonderfully Willy Wonka like vibe.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
SAN FRANCISCO Facebook has been under pressure for its failure to remove violence, nudity, hate speech and other inflammatory content from its site. Government officials, activists and academics have long pushed the social network to disclose more about how it deals with such posts. Now, Facebook is pulling back the curtain on those efforts but only so far. On Tuesday, the Silicon Valley company published numbers for the first time detailing how much and what type of content it takes down from the social network. In an 86 page report, Facebook revealed that it deleted 865.8 million posts in the first quarter of 2018, the vast majority of which were spam, with a minority of posts related to nudity, graphic violence, hate speech and terrorism. Facebook also said it removed 583 million fake accounts in the same period. Of the accounts that remained, the company said 3 percent to 4 percent were fake. Guy Rosen, Facebook's vice president of product management, said the company had substantially increased its efforts over the past 18 months to flag and remove inappropriate content. The inaugural report was intended to "help our teams understand what is happening" on the site, he said. Facebook hopes to continue publishing reports about its content removal every six months or so. Yet the figures the company published were limited. Facebook declined to provide examples of graphically violent posts or hate speech that it removed, for example. The social network said it had taken down more posts from its site in the first three months of 2018 than it had during the last quarter of 2017, but it gave no specific figures from previous years, making it hard to assess how much it had stepped up its efforts. The report also did not include all the posts that Facebook had removed. After publication of this article, a Facebook spokeswoman said other types of content had been taken down from the site in the first quarter because they violated community standards, but those were not detailed in the report because the company was still developing metrics to study them. Facebook also used the new report to advance a push around artificial intelligence to root out inappropriate posts. Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has long highlighted A.I. as the main solution to helping the company sift through the billions of pieces of content that users put on its site every day, even though critics have asked why the social network cannot hire more people to do the job. "If we do our job really well, we can be in a place where every piece of content is flagged by artificial intelligence before our users see it," said Alex Schultz, Facebook's vice president of data analytics. "Our goal is to drive this to 100 percent." Facebook is aiming for more transparency after a turbulent period. The company has been under fire for a proliferation of false news, divisive messages and other inflammatory content on its site, which in some cases have led to real life incidents. Graphic violence continues to be widely shared on Facebook, especially in countries like Myanmar and Sri Lanka, stoking tensions and helping to fuel attacks and violence. Facebook has separately been grappling with a data privacy scandal over the improper harvesting of millions of its users' information by political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. Mr. Zuckerberg has said that the company needs to do better and has pledged to curb the abuse of its platform by bad actors. On Monday, as part of an attempt to improve protection of its users' information, Facebook said it had suspended roughly 200 third party apps that collected data from its members while it undertook a thorough investigation. The new report about content removal was another step by Facebook to clean up its site. Jillian York, the director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said she welcomed Facebook's numbers. "It's a good move and it's a long time coming," she said. "But it's also frustrating because we've known that this has needed to happen for a long time. We need more transparency about how Facebook identifies content, and what it removes going forward." Samuel Woolley, research director of the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Palo Alto, Calif., said Facebook needed to bring in more independent voices to corroborate their numbers. Facebook previously declined to reveal its content removal efforts, citing a lack of internal metrics. Instead, it published a country by country breakdown of how many requests it received from governments to obtain Facebook data or restrict content from Facebook users in that country. Those figures did not specify what type of data the governments asked for or what posts were restricted. Facebook also published a country by country report on Tuesday. According to the new content removal report, about 97 percent of the 865.8 million pieces of content that Facebook took down from its site in the first quarter was spam. About 2.4 percent of that deleted content had nudity, Facebook said, with even smaller percentages of posts removed for graphic violence, hate speech and terrorism. In the report, Facebook said its A.I. found 99.5 percent of terrorist content on the site, leading to the removal of roughly 1.9 million pieces of content in the first quarter. The A.I. also detected 95.8 percent of posts that were problematic because of nudity, with 21 million such posts taken down. But Facebook still relied on human moderators to identify hate speech because automated programs have a hard time understanding context and culture. Of the 2.5 million pieces of hate speech Facebook removed in the first quarter, 38 percent was detected by A.I., according to the new report. Facebook said it also removed 3.4 million posts that had graphic violence, 85.6 percent of which were detected by A.I. The company did not break down the numbers of graphically violent posts by geography, even though Mr. Schultz said that at times of war, people in certain countries would be more likely to see graphic violence than others. He said that in the future, Facebook hoped to publish country specific numbers. The report also did not include any figures on the amount of false news on Facebook as the company did not have an explicit policy on removing misleading news stories, Mr. Schultz said. Instead, Facebook has tried to deter the spread of misinformation by removing spam sites that profit from advertisements that run alongside false news, and by removing fake accounts that spread them.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology

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