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For a dancer turned choreographer, there are pros and cons to having danced for someone as famous as Mark Morris for 14 years. The label "former Mark Morris dancer" will trail you for a long time as you try to chart your own creative path. On the upside, though, your former boss is very well connected. It's thanks to Mr. Morris that his former dancer John Heginbotham met Alan Pierson, the artistic director and conductor of the 20 member ensemble Alarm Will Sound. Mr. Morris introduced them in 2010, perhaps knowing that they shared a fascination with electronic music pioneers like Edgard Varese and Raymond Scott and contemporary descendants, including Aphex Twin and Tyondai Braxton. If you judge from the results of "Twinned," a one night collaboration between Mr. Heginbotham and Mr. Pierson at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that featured the music of those four composers, it was a successful act of artistic matchmaking. Alarm Will Sound is not new to the Charles Engelhard Court, the vast, regal hall that housed Thursday's performance. The ensemble has been in residence at the museum since the fall, surprising visitors with adventurous shows, like a flash mob version of Aphex Twin's "Cliffs," performed while lying on the floor. In "Twinned," a similar rendition of "Cliffs" and an unconventional staging of Varese's "Integrales" (credited to Nigel Maister, staging director) were meshed with excerpts from Mr. Heginbotham's "Twin" (2012) and the world premiere of "Fly By Wire," which was performed to a thrilling new score by Mr. Braxton. Instrumentalists danced, and, in Varese's "Poeme electronique," the members of Dance Heginbotham picked up instruments, equal contributors to the brassy, immersive noise.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
From the moment Gladys Green opens her mouth which is the moment that the curtain rises on Kenneth Lonergan's wonderful play "The Waverly Gallery" at the Golden Theater it's clear that for this garrulous woman, idle conversation isn't a time killer. It is a lifeline. An octogenarian New Yorker, former lawyer and perpetual hostess for whom schmoozing and kibitzing have always been as essential as breathing, Gladys operates on the principle that if she can just continue to talk, she can surely power through the thickening fog of her old age. That she has clearly already lost this battle makes her no less valiant. That it's Elaine May who is giving life to Gladys's war against time lends an extra power and poignancy to "The Waverly Gallery," which opened on Thursday night under Lila Neugebauer's fine tuned direction. Long fabled as a director, script doctor and dramatist, Ms. May first became famous as a master of improvisational comedy, instantly inventing fully detailed, piquantly neurotic characters who always leaned slightly off kilter. Her partnership with Mike Nichols is still considered the gold standard for such quick sketch portraiture. And their appearance on Broadway together in the early 1960s is recalled by those who saw it as if they had been divine visitations, blazing and all too brief. One can imagine Gladys Green having attended "An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May," and saving the program. She might even have perceived a glimmer of her own vivacious self in that couple's determined loquacity. In any case, the Gladys we meet in "The Waverly Gallery" the title comes from the small rented Greenwich Village space where she shows art of dubious distinction is conducting what might be called extreme improvisation. She's bluffing, fabricating, groping for a direction in what must often seem like a void. Trying to convince her family and herself that she's still capable of navigating the flux of urban life, Gladys always fills in the verbal gaps that confront her, even with words that may not be the right ones. At 86, Ms. May in her first Broadway appearance in more than 50 years turns out to be just the star to nail the rhythms, the comedy and the pathos of a woman who's talking as fast as she can to keep her place in an increasingly unfamiliar world. First staged Off Broadway in 2000, with a very fine Eileen Heckart as Gladys, "The Waverly Gallery" was inspired by the final years of Mr. Lonergan's own grandmother. It is a memory play in both its structure and its subject. What's new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter Rendered through the retrospective gaze of Gladys's grandson Daniel (a first rate Lucas Hedges), who lives down the hall from Gladys it recalls Tennessee Williams's guilt drenched "The Glass Menagerie." But Mr. Lonergan's lens on the past is sharper and harsher. He is trying to capture, with almost clinical precision, the patterns of speech of a willful woman sliding into senility. At the same time, he is assessing the impact of such disjointedness on the helpless members of her family, who without even being aware of it sometimes find themselves adopting Gladys's fragmented worldview. In other words, "The Waverly Gallery" is very much a group portrait, in which everyday life is distorted to the point of surrealism by the addled soul at its center. And Ms. Neugebauer has assembled a dream cast to embody the collective madness that seems to descend on those closest to Gladys. They include Gladys's daughter (and Daniel's mother), Ellen (Joan Allen, who wrenchingly combines filial devotion and resentment); her psychoanalyst husband Howard (an impeccably tactless David Cromer); and Don (Michael Cera, doing confident but clueless), a young painter from Massachusetts who stumbles into Gladys's gallery one day and winds up showing and living there. Part of the painful pleasure of "The Waverly Gallery" is listening to how these characters listen to Gladys, and how, in responding to her, they come to question the reliability of their own words. As a screenwriter ("You Can Count on Me," "Manchester by the Sea") and dramatist ("This Is Our Youth," "Lobby Hero"), Mr. Lonergan has always portrayed human communication as an imperfect compromise. "The Waverly Gallery" is his most literal presentation of that inadequacy. Gladys crams all silences with increasingly disconnected bits of autobiography and with peppy questions and catchphrases that she has probably used for decades. ("Got any coffee lying around?") She's so convinced that Daniel writes for a newspaper (he's a speechwriter) that he no longer bothers to correct her. By the end, the identities of those around her blur with those of people long dead. But that doesn't stop Gladys talking, even in her sleep. Daniel's crystalline monologues of recollection aside, "The Waverly Gallery" often has the ostensible waywardness of recorded conversations. But no word is randomly chosen here, starting with Gladys's opening line: "I never knew anything was the matter." She's talking about the end of Helen's first marriage, to Daniel's father, but it comes to suggest a more willful oblivion. And when she whimsically describes the loneliness of Ellen's dog, who just wants a little attention, you know exactly what Gladys really means. Always stylishly dressed (Ann Roth did the costumes), Ms. May's Gladys retains her coercive hostess's charm. She ends most of her sentences with a practiced winning smile that now seems to be searching anxiously for affirmation. All the cast members function beautifully as quotidian detectives, looking for the patterns in the pieces. In a shattering moment, a teary Daniel hugs his mother tight, and you know that he's wondering if his relationship with Ellen might one day mirror that of Ellen's with Gladys. As near perfect as the performances are, the physical production occasionally lets them down. David Zinn's urban set, with its vistas of the city beyond, weighs heavily on the playing area. And the intervals between scenes which feature vintage street photography projections (by Tal Yarden) feel ponderously long. Such objections dissolve as soon as Gladys and her clan reassemble into groupings that convey both claustrophobic intimacy and tragic, unbridgeable distance. Mr. Cera's homey painter may be no Picasso. But in describing his domestic portraits and local landscapes, he sums up the essence of the play. "I tried to get the details right," he says, "because that's what you remember when you think about something, so I tried like hell to get them the way they are." So did Mr. Lonergan. That's what makes "The Waverly Gallery" a work of such hard, compassionate clarity.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
SAN FRANCISCO In the face of mounting investigations, subpoenas and lawsuits, Juul Labs has insisted that it never marketed or knowingly sold its trendy e cigarettes and flavored nicotine pods to teenagers. As youth vaping soared and "juuling" became a high school craze, the company's top executives have stood firm in their assertion that Juul's mission has always been to give adult smokers a safer alternative to cigarettes, which play a role in the deaths of 480,000 people in the United States each year. "We never wanted any non nicotine user and certainly nobody underage to ever use Juul products," James Monsees, a co founder of the company, testified at a congressional hearing in July. But in reality, the company was never just about helping adult smokers, according to interviews with former executives, employees and investors, along with reviews of legal filings and social media archives. "They had yet to see the fruits of their investment, given what the opportunity was, and it was unclear for how long vaping was going to be lightly regulated," said Scott Dunlap, the chief operating officer at the time. "They were excited and pushing hard." The Juul, which looked unlike any other e cigarette and delivered a far more powerful nicotine punch, was supposed to be the hit product for the company, then named Pax Labs, but a few months in, it appeared to be a bust. Convenience stores and vape shops were not getting their orders because of supply chain problems. Manufacturing defects left some customers with bad batteries, or worse, a condition nicknamed JIM juice in mouth with no one at the company quite sure how much of the toxic nicotine substance could be safely ingested. In a meeting in San Francisco in the fall of 2015, the board of directors decided to remove Mr. Monsees as chief executive, dismiss other senior leaders and effectively take over the company. It would be 10 months before they named another C.E.O. "I was in that first meeting where you tell the board, 'We aren't going to hit the numbers. There are issues; there are problems in the supply chain.' Not a lot of good news," said Mr. Dunlap, who said he had advised the company to slow down and take the time needed to fix the problems. He was fired the next day. The board meeting, which has not been previously reported, was a turning point for the company. Over the next few years, the company which became Juul Labs after splitting from Pax in 2017 would reignite the stale e cigarette business, grabbing more than 75 percent of the vaping market and tallying more than 1 billion in sales in 2018. At the end of last year, it was valued at 38 billion, more than the Ford Motor Company. From 2016 to 2018, the years Juul's growth became astronomical, the number of adult nonsmokers who began using e cigarettes doubled in the United States, according to an analysis of federal survey data by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease. The study estimates that six million adults were introduced to nicotine via e cigarettes. "There were hundreds of activation events, and it was in seeing the photos and social usage that followed that I would catch myself saying, 'Wow, they look really young'," he said. "But you don't really know. It's social media after all, where everyone is their younger, idealized selves. All you know is that you are seeing the early signs of a viral brand taking off." Two former executives, one from marketing and one from sales, said in interviews that the thinking inside the company was that by showing young and hip people using Juul, they would also draw in older smokers who imagined themselves as, well, young and hip. Bailey Legacki was one of the high school students drawn in by the Vaporized campaign and she is now weighing a lawsuit against Juul. She began using Juul during the 2015 16 school year, she said, as a 15 year old in South Florida. "It was everywhere," she recalled. "Everyone had one." Ms. Legacki, now 18, said she was influenced by her friends but also by the ubiquitous advertisements and social media posts on Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. "They were young people and it looked like they were having fun," she said. "Or, it would just be the device that was shown, but not really explaining anything about it, just, 'Try this.'" She said she did not realize there was nicotine in the pods. Mr. Raffel, the Juul spokesman, confirmed that in the early days the packaging mentioned nicotine only in tiny type in the ingredients list and did not have the warning labels it does now. The call, which has not previously been reported, did not go well, especially when Grant Woods, the former attorney general for Arizona, who had worked on the master settlement with tobacco companies in the 1990s, told Mr. Burns to dump the company's flavored nicotine pods because of their appeal to youths. "They just refused to do it," said Mr. Woods, who dropped out of the advisory group after the initial call, convinced that the company was insincere. "I said on the call, 'I would sue you.'" Mr. Woods said the Juul C.E.O., Mr. Burns, took the position "that they were not marketing to minors, and so the flavoring wasn't an issue." Mr. Burns declined to comment on the phone call. Mr. Burns's recalcitrance in the face of growing pressure would soon be on display again in the company's weekly executive meeting in September 2018, after the F.D.A. seized thousands of pages of documents from the company's San Francisco headquarters, a former executive said. "Kevin Burns said, 'Do not give me anything in writing if it is sensitive, anything the F.D.A. could get,'" recalled the former executive, who was at the meeting but asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. "He said, 'Pick up the phone and call me if you have to.'" In a statement emailed to The New York Times, Mr. Burns said, "That is a mischaracterization of a meeting where I was clear that our employees should fully cooperate with any regulatory authority and that I expected them to bring any concerns to me directly to make sure important issues were addressed promptly and with no room for misinterpretation." Now Juul is facing an ever growing pile of lawsuits from parents, school districts, counties and states, including two new ones filed this month by California and New York. In addition to the F.D.A., the Federal Trade Commission, the United States attorney's office in Northern California and several states are investigating the company. And it is still waiting for federal health officials to completely clear its devices and nicotine pods from the mysterious vaping related illness that emerged this summer, making almost 2,300 people seriously ill and killing 47 others. Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that the likely culprit is THC vaping liquids, which Juul does not sell, that include vitamin E acetate, but cautioned that health investigators had not exonerated nicotine products. All of this means that the F.D.A. is likely to make it very challenging for Juul to obtain the necessary clearance to stay on the market, according to two former F.D.A. commissioners: David Kessler, who served in the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations; and Scott Gottlieb, who ran the agency for President Trump until resigning this spring. Juul's application is due in May, and the F.D.A. must decide whether the products are appropriate for the protection of public health. The agency will weigh the number of people likely to become addicted to nicotine via Juul, against the number who might use it to quit combustible cigarettes, and will also assess the safety of the products. In early 2017, the tobacco giant Altria, maker of Marlboro cigarettes, reached out to Juul, and in the spring of that year the two began confidential discussions in earnest, according to documents obtained from Altria by Senator Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois. It would take 20 months to work out, but on Dec. 20 of last year, Altria announced it would pay 12.8 billion in cash for a 35 percent stake in Juul. Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission showed that the vast majority of the cash went into executives and investors' pockets. Less than 1 billion was required to stay on the company's books. Under the terms of the deal, Altria said it would use its vast distribution channels to sell Juul products and, after four years, Altria would be allowed to make a takeover offer for Juul Labs. Some employees were unsettled by the fact that they were now in business with Big Tobacco. And regulators? They were irate. The F.D.A. had initially been supportive of e cigarettes, and Dr. Gottlieb had served on the board of Kure, a chain of vaping lounges, before he was tapped to run the agency. In July 2017, a few months after taking office, Dr. Gottlieb made a much criticized decision to push back by four years the deadline for Juul and other e cigarette companies to submit applications to stay on the market. Juul contended it had a virtuous health mission, but by fall of 2018, the F.D.A. was no longer buying it. In October, Altria had agreed to stop selling its own e cigarette products, after acknowledging that they were driving the youth vaping problem. The notion that Altria would now help Juul expand its market infuriated Dr. Gottlieb. He summoned executives from Juul and Altria to his office in March of this year, for what several people who were there (and not authorized to speak publicly on the matter) described as a tense, unpleasant meeting with him, his chief of staff, Lauren Silvis, and the head of the agency's tobacco division, Mitchell Zeller. When news about their difficult meeting leaked out, Altria's stock fell 2.5 percent. According to several people present, Dr. Gottlieb condemned Juul's lobbying of Congress and the White House. "We have taken your meetings, returned your calls and I had personally met with you more times than I met with any other regulated company, and yet you still tried to go around us to the Hill and White House and undermine our public health efforts," he said angrily, according to three people who were there. "I was trying to curb the illegal use by kids of your product and you are fighting me on it." In September, Juul's ties to Altria further strengthened when Mr. Burns resigned under pressure, and the board replaced him with an Altria executive, K.C. Crosthwaite. A former president and chief executive of Philip Morris USA, Mr. Crosthwaite has spent his entire career in the tobacco industry.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
IS the gold rush ending just as all the prospectors finally arrive? That is a question cautious analysts may have been asking as the Auto China show opened in Beijing last week with two days of press previews and hundreds of new models on display. Automakers American, Asian and European all rushed to meet real or perceived consumer demand with models in market segments that have been largely overlooked. Seen among the offerings were Dragon 88 Limited Edition versions of several Aston Martin models, a Maybach pretender Viano van by Mercedes Benz and a lavishly appointed S.U.V. from Lamborghini called the Urus. As has been the case for more than a decade, rosy projections were being made about how much profit there is yet to be made in China's growing market. Automakers, especially luxury brands, seem unable to add new models, or the dealerships to sell them, fast enough. Audi's head of sales, Peter Schwarzenbauer, lamented to Reuters that of 304 Chinese cities with more than a million inhabitants, his brand had dealerships in only 187. But recent numbers are sobering. Sales rose in China by a slim 2.5 percent for 2011, after a dozen years of growing by double digits annually, according to official figures. Sales shrank by 1.3 percent in the first quarter compared with the year earlier quarter.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Julian Andrews, a geochemist at the University of East Anglia in England and the lead author of a paper in the journal Marine and Petroleum Geology about the work, said that the area was a "cold seep" where methane in deep formations moved upward through faults and then through sediments in the seabed. Those sediments contain bacteria that consume methane for energy. All that consumption of methane, Dr. Andrews said, changed the chemistry of the seawater that saturated the sediments. That caused dissolved minerals to precipitate out of the water as a rock called dolomite. And the dolomite cemented the sediment particles in place, forming concretions. The columns and other shapes resulted from the methane spreading in different ways through the sediments as it flowed upward. Dr. Andrews said the researchers' analysis suggested that the concretization might have occurred several million years ago deeper in the sediments and that the objects had been exposed over time as the seabed eroded.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
LIVE FROM LINCOLN CENTER 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Leslie Odom Jr. won a Tony for portraying Aaron Burr in "Hamilton," where he flaunted a creamy falsetto, a jagged howl and a pristine rap flow. Since then he's been far less of an M.C. than a crooner, focusing on elegant interpretations of the American songbook. ("He has a sterling voice, and in his music he is much more comfortable with his upper register than in 'Hamilton,'" Jon Caramanica wrote in The New York Times.) There's hardly a better setting for his lush arrangements of standards than Lincoln Center's Appel Room, where this concert was filmed. You might not even mind not being in the room where it happened. DAVID BOWIE: FIVE YEARS (2013) 10 p.m. on BBC America. The title of this documentary refers not to the apocalyptic scenario of the David Bowie song but rather five crucial years across his career. Footage starts with 1971 when he released that song and unleashed his Ziggy Stardust persona and also examines 1975, with the emergence of the Thin White Duke, and 1983, when "Let's Dance" hit the top of the charts in both America and Britain. Like the current exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, this documentary dips into Bowie's personal archive of costumes, set designs, lyrics and memorabilia to illuminate his life.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The lifting of sanctions on Iran last month has resulted in a surge of bookings, tour operators say, many from Americans undeterred by a State Department warning laying out the risks of taking trips there. Tour operators say the demand has been so acute that they are racing to add new departures and selling them in record time. "It's similar to Cuba in my mind where suddenly it's both O.K. to go there officially but also with travelers thinking this place is going to change," said Barbara Banks, director of marketing and new trip development at the Berkeley, Calif. based Wilderness Travel, which sold out its spring trip to Iran and is planning a fall trip focused on the saffron harvest. "They want to experience the destination before it gets watered down by lots and lots of people going." Tourism in Iran is already popular with Europeans. Iranian officials told The Associated Press last fall that about five million foreign travelers visited Iran in 2014, and that the country aims to attract 20 million tourists, spending 30 billion, by 2025. Among growth signs, Air France recently announced that it plans to start three flights weekly between Paris and Tehran beginning in April. Already Iran is a one stop destination from New York via Istanbul, Dubai or Doha on Turkish Airlines, Emirates or Qatar Airways. Iran hosts some of the world's oldest cultural monuments, including 19 Unesco World Heritage Sites, and its varied terrain ranges from desert locales to ski resorts. "It's just extraordinarily beautiful, and the sites are as magnificent as any you can find in the world," said William O. Beeman, a professor and chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Minnesota and an expert in Iran. "Isfahan is comparable to Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat. These are major centers of civilization that have been lovingly restored." He plans to take 14 travelers to Iran in June on a sold out trip organized by Iran Luxury Travel, a two year old company in North Carolina. Steve Kutay, a former importer, founded Iran Luxury Travel in his retirement "as a good thing to do," he said, in terms of encouraging people to people diplomacy (trips start at 2,995 a person, double occupancy for eight days). "One of the biggest surprises about Iran is that they love Americans," he said. "They hear you speak English and assume you're British, and when they learn you're American they want to have their picture taken with you and invite you to eat. I've never been so popular." The State Department warning, however, says that travelers should be wary, noting, "Various elements in Iran remain hostile to the United States." Last month, Iran freed four Americans of Iranian descent, including a reporter from The Washington Post but the State Department still warns that people with both Iranian and American citizenship in particular risk detention. Intrepid travelers are booking tours anyway. In response to an increase in inquiries, the Seattle based Mir Corporation, which has been operating in Iran for 15 years, has added new train trips and small group departures in the country this year, for a total of about 10 different trips. "We'd seen it for a while but as people become comfortable with Iran on the world scene, they think it may be a good time to do something they may have wanted to do for a while," said Annie Lucas, vice president at Mir. "We feel there's pent up demand on the part of intrepid travelers." This year, Britain based Golden Eagle Luxury Trains, which has run tours via sleeper trains in Iran since 2014, reports that Americans account for 88 percent of its passengers in Iran, compared with about 50 percent in previous years. The company has added a 2016 departure between Moscow and Tehran over 18 days in addition to its 14 day Heart of Persia tour that includes Isfahan, notable for its Islamic architecture; Shiraz, known for its gardens; and Persepolis, ancient ceremonial center of the Achaemenid Empire. Mountain Travel Sobek has run two trips to Iran each year for the last three, and has more recently added private departures. (Those include trips for Times Journeys, which is operated independently of the New York Times newsroom.) Some operators who waited for political clearance to go into Iran are now organizing departures. Norman Howe, president of the luxury tour operator Butterfield Robinson, said inquiries about Iran began spiking the last few months. The company is organizing several private trips and hopes to run a small group trip in November, to be regularly scheduled come 2017. His clients "were waiting for Iran to normalize and they want to get there before the crowds," he said. Where to lodge the growing numbers of travelers may pose a challenge to the country even though Iran's PressTV reported a dozen new hotels had been built in the past two years, and AccorHotels opened two hotels in Tehran in October. "The issue now for us as a tour operator is there aren't enough hotels," said Ms. Lucas of Mir, who noted that some of the hotels in areas beyond the big cities are worn out. "There's overdemand and not enough supply." It is still difficult to arrange a trip. American travelers must obtain a visa before traveling to Iran, a fairly straightforward process, according to tour operators, but a slow one that can run to months, limiting spontaneous travel. Americans in Iran must also be accompanied by a guide. Banking restrictions, which largely bar the use of credit cards and A.T.M.s, force travelers to bring cash. In keeping with Islamic rules, women must cover their hair and dress conservatively, in loose long sleeved tunics that go at least to the knee. Men, too, cannot wear shorts. There are other inconveniences, Ms. Lucas said: "The infrastructure is not perfect, but it's pretty good.The roads are decent. No alcohol can be roughing it for some people. The public bathrooms are not on par with what people would like. But the caliber of attractions and guides balance it out."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
This lovable creature from "The Mandalorian" is officially called "The Child." But the internet hath dubbed him Baby Yoda and he may well grow up to be our master. First, a confession. I have not yet written about Disney Plus's "The Mandalorian" the biggest new TV show from the big new platform of the biggest media conglomerate, set within arguably America's biggest pop mythology because I was not able to figure out what the hell "The Mandalorian" is. It's a Western, kind of? It's a little bit of a buddy comedy, a little bit of a throwback to the fun for all ages adventure anthologies of TV's earliest days. It's sort of a hero's redemptive quest, but one with its hero shielded and obscured, and not just by the helmet that perversely keeps us from ever seeing the face of the charismatic and beautiful Pedro Pascal. But for all its expense and big screen legacy, there's little to dig into. In an age of massive streaming sagas with encyclopedic plots and marathon run times, it runs a crisp 40 minutes or less. It's nearly plot free. Mando and his little olive drab carry on land somewhere, they get in a scrape, they get out of it, bingo bango we're done. It's almost perfectly watchable. It's ridiculously predictable, but that's part of the pleasure. If you didn't know, early in the first episode, that the tough, laconic bounty hunter's quarry would turn out to be a vulnerable creature that would introduce a moral dilemma, then I would submit that you have never watched a TV show or movie. But of course that's the miracle of it. The show invites you to return to that state when stories were new to you, when you hadn't seen it all, when you hadn't seen any of it, when you didn't try to solve or defeat stories but just let them wash over you and amaze you. And I do. I gobble every "Mandalorian" the day it's posted. It's a joy. And then it's gone. Unlike a "Game of Thrones" or "Succession" or "Mr. Robot," there's no vast mythology or subtext to engage with. Grapple with it, and it evanesces like smoke clutched in a mailed fist. It's like the show never existed, until Friday comes and it does again. Baby Yoda, all week on my social media and news feeds. Baby Yoda GIFs and Baby Yoda memes. Baby Yoda messing with the control panel of Mando's spaceship. Baby Yoda raising a tiny hand to summon the Force. Baby Yoda, berobed and enigmatically sipping broth, the cup digitally altered to say, "My house / My rules / My coffee." Baby Yoda's attraction, like that of "The Mandalorian," seems all there on the surface. Just look at that punim! If you're an adult, you want to nurture him; if you're a child, you want to play with him. He is vulnerable we are biologically wired to protect that tiny form and those big eyes but also, from all we know of the Force and his look alike who wielded it, almost unimaginably powerful. His appeal is rooted in the "Star Wars" myth, and even deeper. An infant of mysterious parentage imbued with the life force of the universe: It's almost Christmas, and I don't need to connect the rest of these dots for you, but other people already have, putting the foundling and his hover cradle into cosmic nativity scenes. He is not, barring some time bending twist, actually Yoda. He may or may not be a baby who knows the biology of whatever the hell species it is but the script identifies him, quasi religiously, as "The Child." He is curious and rascally, a wizened little Pixar character. Where his elder forebear was all twisted syntax and '70s '80s self help speak actualize yourself, you must the little guy doesn't speak. This seals the emotional deal. The "Star Wars" galaxy is full of creations R2 D2, the jawas, the porgs that endear themselves by speaking unintelligibly or not at all. (Jar Jar Binks's greatest sin was opening his mouth.) I am not made of beskar. I see those floppy ears and jawbreaker eyes and I'm a puddle of hot bone broth, like anyone else. But we must also face the other half of Baby Yoda's appeal not the baby part but the Yoda part. Yes, The Child is vulnerable, adorable, whimsical, cuddly but what made him an instant celebrity was that he was all those things in the form of a decades old character that you already recognized and loved. And of course, "Thing that you already recognize and love" is the animating force in entertainment today, particularly the movies, where Disney has made or bought a vast stable of superhero and sci fi icons, and rakes in billions by deploying their intellectual property "I.P.," like the name of a model line of battle droids into theaters everywhere. Avengers, jedi, princesses presold, prerecognized and preloved. Disney Plus is barely a month old, but it suggests a vision of streaming TV much like Disney's multiplex strategy, based on already familiar brands. Besides "The Mandalorian," there are or will be series based on "Toy Story 4," the Marvel universe, "Monsters Inc.," "High School Musical" and, again, "Star Wars." If you are old enough to remember the original "Star Wars" trilogy, you remember a stretch of over a decade when the idea of any more story beyond those three movies was just a cruel tease. Now you can get more of it as easily as you get tap water you will get more, whether you think it's a good idea or not. And at the head of all this comes Baby Yoda, defying you to have a problem with that. Yes, this is a corporate entertainment hegemon, encroaching to conquer TV as it did the movies but look at how it sips its little soupy cup! How can you be mad at that? "The Mandalorian" is a delightful and artful entertainment. It's also Disney saying, yes, we will re gift you your childhood, over and over but it will also be new, and cute, and genuinely inventive, and tweaked just an acceptable amount. It will gainfully employ brilliant people like Werner Herzog and Amy Sedaris. It will use the talents of visual artists who will combine the best of popcorn movies and art film, within the parameters of the franchises we need them to work in. And you will help create it! Part of what made Baby Yoda a phenomenon was that he did not feel imposed from above "Baby Yoda" is our name, not Disney's and his character, his place in the year's pop vocabulary, was created as much by the fans smithing online memes as it was by the show itself. Amazingly, Disney was not prepared with a mountain of Baby Yoda merchandise for the holidays, leaving it to play catch up. (Equally amazingly, Baby Yoda GIFs were briefly purged from the internet, though it proved not to be Disney's doing.) This appears to be simply an uncharacteristic business screw up. But seen another way, it was an act of devious marketing genius. It meant that Baby Yoda, at least at the outset, was not something you could buy. You had to find him for yourself. You had to engage in the act of creation, and therefore feel that you had ownership in the viral guerrilla success of a piece of one of the largest entertainment franchises that ever existed. Baby Yoda, in this conception, was not some vulgar character to be licensed. He was a quest, a divine path. If TV had a Person of the Year for 2019, Baby Yoda would be it. He is lovable and terrifying. He may well grow up to be our master. But not, I hope, our only one. I want more from TV than what I already know. And maybe because I was a child raised on "Star Wars" which was once, hard as it now is to remember, a risky new creation I'm still an optimist. It does feel as if we're beginning another era of television, one in which the boundaries between TV and movies are dissolving not just formally but also commercially, so that streaming era TV might become as franchise dominated as the summer blockbuster season is. But television is also big, in a way even the movies can't be, distributed across hundreds of channels and increasingly the internet. For now, at least, it's still growing; more intellectual property based TV doesn't have to mean less novel and idiosyncratic TV. (And as shows like "Watchmen" demonstrate, every now and then intellectual property based TV can also be novel and idiosyncratic.) Think one more time about where Baby Yoda came from. "Star Wars," in all its eras and forms, is about a galaxy so vast and unruly that even at the apex of mighty empires, there are untamed, free and lawless zones. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm trying to talk myself out of a hard truth because it's more comforting and more fun to stop worrying and just love the little green guy. Maybe Disney and its competitors will prove more all conquering than even the Empire.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Ian Whitcomb at a recording session in 1967, two years after his song "You Turn Me On" which he called "a piece of piffle" reached the Top 10. Ian Whitcomb, who had a rock 'n' roll hit in 1965 with "You Turn Me On" before becoming a celebrated historian and performer of forms of popular music that peaked decades before rock, died on April 19 in Pasadena, Calif. He was 78. His wife, Regina Whitcomb, said the cause was complications of a stroke he had in 2012 that had left him in declining health. From the time he was a boy in Britain, Mr. Whitcomb was deeply enamored of ragtime and other older styles of music. After playing blues, jazz and skiffle music, he found widespread (if short lived) fame with "You Turn Me On," released while he was still a college student. "I was ready to contribute to American popular culture: some finely wrought yet unpretentious work that might appeal to the masses," Mr. Whitcomb wrote in "Rock Odyssey: A Chronicle of the Sixties" (1983), a memoir laced with history. "And what happened? The American people elevated me to fame with a trifle, a piece of piffle knocked off in a fit of absence of mind." On the strength of that single's success, Mr. Whitcomb traveled to the United States and France, appeared on television shows like "American Bandstand," and was billed alongside the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, the Kinks and Sonny Cher. But, as he told The Los Angeles Times in 1992, the rock 'n' roll lifestyle did not suit him. "My heart wasn't in rock 'n' roll. It wasn't my line," he said. "I didn't like the drug scene and the attitude. ... I wanted to write books and do theatrical things." So Mr. Whitcomb returned to other musical idioms. His "N E R V O U S!," a tongue in cheek, stuttering blues song, peaked at No. 59; he then recorded a version of "Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go With Friday on Saturday Night?," a song popularized in 1916 by Al Jolson. He wrote about music and culture for newspapers and magazines. He also wrote two memoirs, "Resident Alien: The Hilarious Adventures of a Public School Man in California" (1990) and "Rock Odyssey," which Stephen Holden called "the best written personal chronicle we have of the period" in The New York Times Book Review. Mr. Whitcomb wrote several insightful histories of popular music as well, including "Irving Berlin Ragtime America" (1987) and "After the Ball: Pop Music From Rag to Rock," published in 1972 in Britain and a year later in the United States, as well as a novel, "Lotusland: A Story of Southern California" (1979), which he adapted into a jazz and ragtime musical in 1992. Mr. Whitcomb disputed the criticism that performing old fashioned music was nothing more than a history lesson. "Nobody says to a blues musician, 'Why are you playing this old style?'" he told The Los Angeles Times that year. "It's accepted as a legitimate form of music." Ian Timothy Whitcomb was born on July 10, 1941, in Woking, England, to Patrick and Eilene (Burningham) Whitcomb. His mother was a homemaker and his father served in the Royal Air Force before starting a building materials business. Ian grew up in London and began performing old fashioned songs a cappella as a boarding school student. His musical experimentation continued at Bryanston School in Dorset and then at Trinity College Dublin, where he studied history. He started recording music in Ireland and released "This Sporting Life" and other singles before "You Turn Me On," which he first recorded during an impromptu jam at the end of a session with his band, Bluesville. After his flirtation with rock stardom and his graduation from Trinity, Mr. Whitcomb settled in Southern California and released recordings of older forms of music, often accompanying himself on the ukulele or accordion. He produced an album by the 1930s movie star Mae West, "Great Balls of Fire" (1972), a collection of rock classics and new songs. He also recorded "Titanic: Music as Heard on the Fateful Voyage" (1997), a collection of songs said to have been played aboard that ship. The album won a Grammy Award for packaging; Mr. Whitcomb's liner notes were also nominated. In 1989 Mr. Whitcomb married Regina Enzer, with whom he lived in Altadena, Calif. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a brother, Robin, and a sister, Suzanne Tyler. He died at a care facility in Pasadena. In the introduction to his book "After the Ball" Mr. Whitcomb, referring to himself in the third person, wrote that he had mused about what attracted him to history while riding on a rowdy tour bus during his brief bout of stardom: "He remembered that once the college postman had asked him: 'What d'ye want to study history for? It's all happened and there's nothing ye can do about it.' He had puzzled over this for years, but now he realized that there was something he could do about it: He could write it himself and in so doing he could find his place in the scheme!"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
As states continue to lift restrictions that were put in place to curb the coronavirus outbreak and as Americans start going out in public again, recent surveys suggest that gender, political affiliation and education level are factors that have a bearing on who is wearing a mask, and who isn't. Public health officials have recommended wearing masks in public when social distancing measures are difficult to maintain, such as in grocery stores and pharmacies, and at least a dozen states have required them in those circumstances. And most businesses that are reopening are doing so with restrictions: fewer customers, social distancing and face masks. According to a Gallup poll that was conducted in mid April, only a third of Americans said they always wore a mask or cloth face covering outside the home. Another third said they sometimes wore a mask in public, and a third reported that they never did. Here is what some of the research shows about who is covering up. Women are more likely than men to wear masks. About 67 percent of women said they had worn a mask outside their home, compared with 56 percent of men, according to the Gallup poll, which was based on a random sample of 2,451 adults in the United States and had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
JENNIFER KOH AND DAVONE TINES at Advent Lutheran Church (Dec. 2, 7:30 p.m.). Part of the adventurous Music Mondays series, this concert pairs a violinist and bass baritone pioneers both in music that ranges from Bach and Beethoven to Julia Wolfe and Missy Mazzoli to a hymn and a Korean lullaby. Oh, and the premiere of a new version of "Give Me Back My Fingerprints," by the Pulitzer Prize winner Du Yun. All that for free. musicmondays.org Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC at David Geffen Hall (Nov. 29 30, 8 p.m.; Nov. 30, 2 and 8 p.m.; Dec. 3 and 5, 7:30 p.m.; through Dec. 7). A busy week for the Philharmonic is taken up mostly with subscription concerts that pair Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5 with Scriabin's Piano Concerto. Daniil Trifonov is at the keyboard, except for the concert on Saturday afternoon, when the pianist takes a break, and the Scriabin is replaced by Mozart's Wind Serenade in E flat. (Trifonov is in action on Sunday at 3 p.m. at the 92nd Street Y, though, when he joins the New York Philharmonic String Quartet for his own "Quintetto Concertante";Mozart and Ravel are also on the bill.) Come Thursday, there's another subscription program, with Steve Reich's Music for Ensemble and Orchestra bookended by Beethoven's Symphony No. 2 and Piano Concerto No. 4, with Yefim Bronfman. Jaap van Zweden conducts. 212 875 5656, nyphil.org 'THE QUEEN OF SPADES' at the Metropolitan Opera (Nov. 29 and Dec. 2 and 5, 7:30 p.m.; through Dec. 21). Lise Davidsen, the next great dramatic soprano, is the star of this revival of Elijah Moshinsky's production. Vasily Petrenko conducts a cast that includes Yusif Eyvazov as Hermann (except on Dec. 18), Elena Maximova as Pauline, Larissa Diadkova as the Countess, Igor Golovatenko as Yeletsky and Alexey Markov as Tomsky. 212 362 6000, metopera.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Budget conscious automotive enthusiasts who worship at the altar of performance know the Subaru WRX STI is an answered prayer. Let the other guys worry about self steering cars, blind spot beepers and onboard Wi Fi connections. Even many German sport sedans have become distracted along with their pilots by a technological arms race. But the Subaru WRX reminds us of what one special soldier can do if he is unencumbered by digital oversight and focused on the mission. If the mission is to deliver unmitigated driving pleasure at a relatively affordable price, the 2015 WRX deserves a medal. High speed reconnaissance has been the WRX's stock in trade since its 2002 debut its United States debut, that is. The WRX had been honing its legend in Japan and elsewhere since 1992, driven by winners of multiple world rally championships. The 2015 version takes a significant leap forward, even if the gains have little to do with brute strength. Instead, Subaru focused on the WRX's more pressing deficiencies. The interior, which used to scream "econobox," now announces itself with just a whisper. And though the WRX is still wild, its woolier elements have been tamed, including excess body roll, a raucous cabin and middling steering. The WRX's fan base must deal with some regrets. There's no longer a hatchback, only a sedan. And while there is still a higher priced track ready STI version, it stands pat on power with a carried over engine. The STI's familiar 2.5 liter 4 cylinder boxer makes 305 horses, just 37 more than the base model. Yet Subaru conservatively cites the STI's 0 to 60 time at 5.2 seconds. Anyone who thinks a car that quick is underpowered is welcome to tinker with it himself and indeed, many Subaru owners are active in the tuner hobby. The bigger disappointment is the bait and switch of the WRX concept car that Subaru unveiled at the New York auto show last year. After teasing the public with perhaps the most physically attractive Subaru in history, the company put little of that muscular design into production. Though the WRX has dropped the Impreza name, the physical connection to that frumpy budget sedan remains clear. But the Impreza's gym rat cousin flexes some muscle: There are slanted LED headlamps and a gaping hood scoop that sends fresh air to the turbo's intercooler. Looks aside, this WRX is much more than an Impreza with a big motor, a firmer suspension and all wheel drive. Subaru says the chassis is 40 percent more rigid than before, a fine starting point for precise handling and body control. The new WRX also benefits from a fresher cabin design. Rear legroom grows by nearly two inches, and trunk space is up as well. The seats are more stylish and better bolstered, with leather and Alcantara trim in the STI that I tested. A flat bottom three point steering wheel looks and feels good, and there are strips of faux carbon fiber trim across the dash and center console. Buyers are welcome to skip the WRX's available navigation and infotainment system, a maddening hodgepodge of Atari level displays and tiny, hard to operate touch screen buttons. All models get a new 4.3 inch LCD display screen and backup camera. But a real time fuel economy gauge serves up nonstop distraction in direct view of the driver. The standard WRX gets the all new engine that fans of its acclaimed BRZ sports car have been dreaming of: a turbocharged version of the BRZ's 2 liter boxer 4, with 268 horses and 258 pound feet of torque. Its pistons are laid horizontally in opposition hence the boxer name in a balanced, distinctive sounding layout that only Subaru and Porsche continue to use in cars. The regular WRX scoots from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in about 5.4 seconds. The brakes are larger and stronger, though the pedal still feels squishy when the brakes first bite. A 6 speed manual transmission replaces a 5 speed. New electric assisted steering ranks among the best of such systems: Subaru credits its natural, lively feel to lessons learned from the system in the BRZ. It's all hard to beat at a starting price of 27,090, or 29,290 for the Premium version I tested. And that, to me, feels like the sweet spot in price. The WRX now performs so well there is less reason except for track drivers, or those who live to challenge Mitsubishi Evolutions to spend thousands extra on the STI. Leadfoots may not care, but the standard model's 2 liter engine also saves an estimated 650 a year on fuel, with a federal rating of 21 miles per gallon in town and 28 on the highway with the manual gearbox, versus 17/23 m.p.g. for the thirsty STI. (The WRX automatic splits the difference at 19/25 m.p.g.) I didn't drive a car with Subaru's new continuously variable automatic transmission, a type of gearbox usually associated more with saving fuel than posting lap times. But the Subaru C.V.T. does feature modes that let drivers mimic the operation of a conventional paddle shifted automatic. Making no concessions to those wedded to automatics, the STI comes with a 6 speed manual, take it or leave it. With a rear wing so tall it reminds you of St. Louis's Gateway Arch, the STI is the kind of car that the police assume is carrying Vin Diesel and a trunkful of illicit cash. And like a rangy hound, this version lives for regular exercise, whether on a track or through the orange cones of an autocross course. The STI's base price has been held to 35,290, the same as the departing version. I drove a 38,190 STI Launch Edition, limited to 1,000 units. It comes in one signature color, a screaming metallic blue with gold painted 18 inch BBS alloy wheels. The STI Limited tops the charts at 39,290, with features like an eight way power driver's seat and a premium audio system. For the STI, Subaru further bolstered the chassis and suspension and added Brembo brakes. One caution: Both WRX models ride more stiffly than ever. The STI's sturdier, largely handbuilt manual gearbox rows smoothly through the six forward speeds. A special short throw shifter, standard on the Launch Edition and optional otherwise, is simply the best yet on a WRX. A new torque vectoring system blips individual front brakes to help the car rotate through turns. Drivers can toggle the all wheel drive system to vary power between front and rear wheels, and can lock the center differential for a full time 50 50 split.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
On Fox News, Bret Baier broke out his reading glasses. On CNN, Jake Tapper read a website U.R.L. aloud. On NBC, the legal correspondent Pete Williams brandished a three ring binder stuffed with freshly printed pages, holding up a sheet covered almost entirely by black bars of redacted text. Journalists received their copies of the Mueller report all 448 pages at the same time as the general public on Thursday. Except they had to explain it all on live TV, and the sooner the better. The result, for television viewers, was a halting, if ultimately educational glimpse at the tedious mechanics of real time reporting: sifting through documents, puzzling over footnotes. "We're all going to law school here today," the anchor Savannah Guthrie told NBC viewers. Catherine Herridge of Fox News, speed reading (and speed analyzing) on camera, asked her colleagues for patience. "I'm going to take a break here, continue reading, and flag headlines as we get them," she said. MSNBC kept its legal analyst, Ari Melber, sequestered at a small desk on set, occasionally throwing to him for updates.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Jeff Fager, the executive producer of "60 Minutes," took over the writing of a book on the CBS show's 50 year history after objecting to the direction of the original author's research, according to three people familiar with how the book came to be. The assignment originally went to Richard Zoglin, a former editor at Time magazine and the author of a 2014 biography of Bob Hope. After having completed roughly a dozen interviews in 2015, however, Mr. Zoglin was summoned to meet with Mr. Fager, who told the writer that he was focusing too much on the negative. Specifically, Mr. Fager expressed concern that Mr. Zoglin had asked his interview subjects about the treatment of women in the "60 Minutes" workplace, according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal matters. Mr. Fager also asked Mr. Zoglin why he had brought up the rocky tenure of Katie Couric, a onetime correspondent for the show and former CBS News anchor who left the network on bad terms. Jeff Fager, the executive producer of "60 Minutes," took over the job of writing a book celebrating the show's 50 years after the original writer, Richard Zoglin, had conducted about a dozen interviews. The men agreed that Mr. Zoglin should leave the project. In October, when "Fifty Years of '60 Minutes'" was published under Mr. Fager's name, the 400 page book included scant mention of the issues raised by Mr. Zoglin. The winner of 145 Emmy Awards, "60 Minutes" remains vital to CBS, regularly attracting a weekly audience of more than 12 million viewers and generating more than 100 million in annual advertising revenue. The network marked the show's 50th anniversary with an hourlong retrospective clip fest on Sunday night, celebrating the correspondents (Mike Wallace, Morley Safer, Ed Bradley) and the big interviews (the Clintons, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bob Dylan) that have helped make it the longest running newsmagazine program. But concerns about sexual harassment at "60 Minutes" have emerged over the years, dating back to the era before Mr. Fager succeeded the show's mercurial creator, Don Hewitt, as executive producer in 2004. In 1991 seven years after the show hired its first female correspondent, Diane Sawyer "60 Minutes" dropped Meredith Vieira from its roster of on air reporters after she became pregnant with her second child. "I need someone who can pull his or her own weight," Mr. Hewitt said in an interview with The New York Times at the time, adding that Ms. Vieira's performance had been subpar. "She never made anybody sit up and take notice." Ms. Vieira's exit is not ignored in the anniversary book, but it is treated gently. "In retrospect," Mr. Fager writes, "I think Don made a mistake not allowing Meredith Vieira more flexibility. But he was also a creature of his generation. Don had many strong women around him, especially in the producer ranks." 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. The treatment of female co workers by Mr. Wallace, the show's signature correspondent, was also often insensitive. "What would now be called sexual harassment was par for the course back in the '50s and early '60s," Mr. Wallace said in a 1996 Playboy interview. "And I would indulge in it." In the same interview, he admitted that he had once had a habit of "snapping a bra" in the "60 Minutes" office. A 1991 Rolling Stone article also described instances of inappropriate workplace behavior, including by Mr. Hewitt. The former executive producer denied that he had made unwelcome sexual advances on those who worked at the show but admitted he had made a pass at the journalist Sally Quinn in the 1970s while they were covering a British royal wedding for CBS. "You're damn right I did!" Mr. Hewitt told the author of the Rolling Stone piece, Mark Hertsgaard. In an interview last month, Mr. Hertsgaard recalled an incident that took place in a "60 Minutes" hallway during the time he spent reporting the Rolling Stone article. As he was speaking with a female producer, the reporter saw Mr. Wallace approaching with a rolled up magazine in hand. "As he passes by," Mr. Hertsgaard said, "she puts her hands behind her, like a little kid would to ward off a spanking. And, sure enough, as Mike's walking by, he swats her on the butt with this rolled up magazine. I said to her, 'Does that happen often?' She said, 'You wouldn't believe.'" The anniversary book does not address the issue of a possibly toxic workplace environment, and it skips any mention of inappropriate behavior by Mr. Wallace, who died in 2012, or Mr. Hewitt, who died in 2009. Instead, Mr. Fager describes Mr. Wallace as "tough, edgy, fun, bighearted, occasionally mean, full of life, and difficult to work with," adding, "Mike was a troublemaker, and he loved that role, on and off air." The publisher of "Fifty Years of '60 Minutes'" is Simon Schuster, a subsidiary of the CBS Corporation. The original author, Mr. Zoglin, is now at work on another book on Elvis Presley's Las Vegas years for the same publisher, which had previously put out his Bob Hope biography. He declined to comment for this article. In a statement, Simon Schuster said: "After working on the project for a short while, Richard decided he didn't like being a writer for hire. At the same time, Jeff Fager, who had been with '60 Minutes' for decades and lived through some of its most dramatic moments, was asked to be the author for the project." CBS News has fallen under scrutiny since the firing of Charlie Rose, one of the network's morning anchors and a "60 Minutes" correspondent from 2008 until his forced departure last month. Before joining the Sunday night show, Mr. Rose was a star of "60 Minutes II," which had Mr. Fager as its executive producer during its six year run. CBS cut ties with Mr. Rose in the wake of allegations of sexual misconduct lodged by women who worked at his PBS talk show, and subsequent complaints later surfaced concerning his behavior at CBS. Last month, to promote the "60 Minutes" book, Mr. Fager appeared on Mr. Rose's PBS show in a segment taped days before the host was fired. "I'm so pleased to have as good a friend as a man can have back at this table," Mr. Rose said in welcoming Mr. Fager. Mr. Fager told Mr. Rose that with "Fifty Years of '60 Minutes,'" he had sought to create a guide for people coming up in the news business. "I really hoped that this could be a book for journalism students," he said. "All of the different things that we do, all of the practices and values that we adhere to for all these years, I tried to get that in there."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. 'POLYESTER' at IFC Center (Sept. 5, 7 and 9:15 p.m.). Only John Waters could yoke a movie to a gimmick called Odorama in which viewers, cued by what's on the screen, could scratch a card to experience the same olfactory sensations as the characters and still have that film viewed as the start of a mature period. In "Polyester" (1981), Divine plays a Baltimore housewife who finds out her husband (David Samson), the operator of a pornographic movie theater, is cheating on her; she looks for love in the arms of a man played by Tab Hunter, a bit older than he was in the 1950s melodramas on which Waters is riffing. At the 7 p.m. movie, which is currently sold out (there will be a standby line), the director will introduce this new restoration, and after everyone has seen (and smelled) the movie, he will participate in a Q. and A. 212 924 7771, ifccenter.com 'LE RAYON VERT' at the Metrograph (Aug. 30 Sept. 5). This mid 1980s Eric Rohmer picture became something of a cult hit at the Metrograph when the theater revived it two years ago. "The premise one woman's attempt to go on summer vacation is almost laughably banal," J. Hoberman wrote in The New York Times on that occasion, adding that the film "may be Rohmer's most mysterious." The title, which translates to "The Green Ray," comes from an ethereal solar phenomenon that graces the movie's haunting, enchanting finale. 212 660 0312, metrograph.com 'VERTIGO' IN 70MM at the Alamo Drafthouse (Aug. 30 Sept. 1, 12:30 p.m.; Sept. 2, noon). Can you ever say you've seen too much of the greatest film of all time? That's how Hitchcock's 1958 feature ranked in the 2012 edition of Sight and Sound magazine's venerated decennial poll. While watching "Vertigo" is always fruitful, seeing it in different versions is also interesting. This 70 millimeter restoration from 1996 captured the richness of the original VistaVision (a process offering increased image area that Hitchcock used in the mid and late 1950s), even as it was criticized for what purists perceived to be an overzealous reconstruction of some of the sound effects. Bernard Herrmann's score still sounds great. 718 513 2547, drafthouse.com/nyc	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The remaking of Pennsylvania Ballet is continuing. With the appointment of 17 new dancers on Wednesday including Sterling Baca and Sara Michelle Murawski, who are joining as principal dancers the company's artistic director, Angel Corella, has now overseen the departure and replacement of more than half of its dancers since his arrival in 2014. And the reign of Mr. Corella, a former star with American Ballet Theater, has been lengthened: The company said that his contract had been extended by five years, and would last through the 2021 22 season. The reinvention of Pennsylvania Ballet has been in process since Mr. Corella arrived and began to broaden its repertoire and attract new dancers from around the world. It has raised questions about the company's changing identity and how closely it intends to stick to its roots as a Balanchine troupe. But under a union contract, which protects dancers for a time after a change in artistic directors, Mr. Corella could not make wholesale changes right away. Now he can. All told, since Mr. Corella's arrival, 22 dancers have left the company, with some retiring, some joining other companies and others simply not being re engaged. With Wednesday's appointments of dancers from around the United States, as well as from Russia, Cuba, Japan and South Korea Mr. Corella has now brought on 29 of the 43 dancers on the company's roster.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
In 2007, fishermen living along the lower Congo, the deepest river on Earth, brought Melanie Stiassny a fish. It was six inches long, ghostly white and eyeless. Like most fish held out of water, it was dying. What surprised her was what was killing it. "There were nitrogen bubbles forming under its skin and gills," said Dr. Stiassny, an ichthyologist with the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It was a clear sign of decompression sickness, an often fatal ailment that results when animals are rapidly depressurized. In humans, the buildup of nitrogen bubbles in the blood during a rapid ascent from deep water is called the bends. "I thought, could this thing really be dying of the bends?" she said. "And if that was the case, how deep is the water here?" The Congo River runs for 2,500 lazy miles through Africa's equatorial basin, coiling like a snake through the jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Then, 186 miles from the ocean, it drops into a dangerous series of gorges, sinking 12 feet every mile. The swirling waters of the Kongo Central province, bordering the Republic of Congo and Angola, contain 30 percent of the river's fish diversity and have long attracted ichthyologists. Dr. Stiassny works with The Congo Project, a partnership among the University of Marien Ngouabi in the Republic of Congo, University of Kinshasa, in the D.R.C., and the A.M.N.H. that studies the unique fish and environment of the lower river. Their research, presented in January at the American Geophysical Union, has revealed a river landscape more bizarre than previously imagined. Its hostile currents and depths of more than 700 feet are an incredible natural laboratory for studying convergent evolution, or how diverse species develop similar environmental adaptations. The initial clue to the river's depths came from the dying fish. According to Victor Mamonekene, an ichthyologist with the University of Marien Ngouabi, the fish known locally as mondeli bureau, or "white man in an office" had long been known to the residents of Bulu village, where the scientists first saw it. The species was originally described in 1976 as a cichlid, part of the family that includes tilapia and peacock bass. But the animal is quite different from its relatives: very small, eyeless, and pale as a cave fish. To find out where a potential deep water fish might have come from, Dr. Stiassny said, the Congo Project partnered with the National Geographic Society and the U.S. Geological Survey. In 2008 and 2009, they dispatched a team of "crazy white water kayaker dudes," she said, to run the rapids during low water season. Their kayaks carried echo sounders and depth measurement equipment. The river gorge is inaccessible and sparsely populated. Its rapids carry five times the amount of water of the Mississippi River down a channel less than a mile wide, and it is practically nonnavigable by boat. "The strong current that reigns there makes it a very dangerous area for working on water," Dr. Mamonekene said. Luckily, all of the kayakers returned in one piece. The data gathered by the white water team revealed a harsh underwater landscape: huge towers of rock, stripped bare of sediments and plants by fast currents that run both upstream and downstream. "Almost as if you've got two rivers in the same channel," Dr. Stiassny said. The complexity and power of the currents are the key to the evolutionary richness of the lower Congo, she said. This hostile environment keeps breeding populations of fish separated in isolated pockets of water, and resulted in the evolution of new species. "We'd get populations diverging on either side of a rapid," Dr. Stiassny said. "Maybe they're only separated by a kilometer, yet it's as if they're 50,000 miles apart." Interspersed with shallow rapids are canyons deep enough that the team had to use measuring equipment designed for the deep ocean to study them. Parts of the Congo River measured around 720 feet deep, almost as far down as the twilight zone of the ocean. Immense vortices of water plunge up and down the canyon walls like underwater waterfalls. Dr. Stiassny's team suspects that the mondeli bureau live in these deepwater canyons, and are occasionally plucked up by the currents that churn along the rock walls. They are rocketed hundreds of feet up to the surface, the nitrogen bubbling out of their blood. The same bends that kill them make their diets a mystery, bursting their swim bladders and pushing out the contents of their guts. The mondeli bureau is one of six fish in the lower Congo to develop elongated forms, lose their pigments and shrink their eyes. The others from families as diverse as catfish, elephant fish and spiny eels are found in the shallower waters along the riverbanks. That suggests that the mondeli bureau's strange adaptations may not be dictated just by living in the depths, but by the currents of the lower Congo itself. Unrelated species sometimes arrive at remarkably similar anatomies through a process called convergent evolution. Many species of fish and salamanders have independently slowed their metabolisms and lost their eyes to survive in deep caves. But while such convergence has long been recognized as a phenomenon, researchers are still trying to discover more about how it works in shaping animals. That's why this project is significant, according to Kirk Winemiller of Texas A M University, an evolutionary biologist who was not involved in the research. "It seems like there are certain optimal solutions to problems," he said. "Melanie's work shows multiple species adapting to an extreme environment with fairly predictable patterns." The next step, Dr. Stiassny said, is to find the fish elsewhere in Congo most closely related to the mondeli bureau, so they can compare them with their more anatomically specialized cousins. They're also investigating the genetics and physiology of other blind fish in the river, to work out whether they're using similar genetic mutations to adapt to the river currents. "There are many questions," Dr. Mamonekene said. "Almost everything remains to be discovered about these species, hence the need to continue this research."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
SANTIAGO, Chile To anybody visiting this prosperous Andean capital, it is hard to overlook the potholes along the path of Latin America's economic development. Chile is a stellar performer by almost any standard. Income per person has grown fourfold over the last quarter century. Today, many Chileans, rightly, see their nation as within shouting range of the advanced industrial world. Yet for all its economic success, the shanties sprawling outside of town are a sharp reminder that Chile has still not shaken the curse that has plagued Latin America for centuries: an immense gap between the haves and the have nots that is virtually unparalleled in the rest of the world. According to data from the World Bank, the richest 10 percent of Chileans capture 42 out of every 100 worth of disposable income, far in excess of the industrial countries Chile would like to see as its peers. In Spain, where the median income is roughly 30 percent higher than in Chile, the comparable figure is 25. In the United States it is 30. "Why is it that when we grow we cannot improve the distribution?" asked Juan Carlos Feres, president of the Overcoming Poverty Foundation here. "We have not managed to break the growth model that produces dynamics of exclusion." But while vast disparities continue to exist, Chile, like much of Latin America, is practically the only place in the world today where the income gap is actually shrinking rather than widening. "Latin America is experiencing a pervasive decline of inequality when in many other regions it is rising," said Nora Lustig, an economics professor at Tulane University who has been closely following the trends. "The decline in the 2000s was bigger than the increase in the 1990s, so it's not insignificant." Using the "Gini index," research by Professor Lustig, Luis F. Lopez Calva of the World Bank and Eduardo Ortiz Juarez of the United Nations Development Program found that income inequality was lower in 2012 than it had been in 2000 in 16 of the 18 Latin American countries for which there was data to track the trend. The index ranges from 0 in an impossibly egalitarian utopia where everybody earned exactly the same, to 100 where every last penny was hogged by a single person. While scholars can point to individual programs contributing to the narrowing gap in some countries the sharp increase in Brazil's minimum wage, for instance, or the expansion of pensions in Argentina to cover nearly all women over the age of 65 nobody quite understands what is driving the regionwide dynamic. "It's the million dollar question," said Augusto de la Torre, chief economist for Latin America at the World Bank. "The question is generating a new wave of research in the region and in my office." Even before there are more definitive answers, Latin American leaders have started to pat themselves on the back about the accomplishment. Trouble is, the improvement might be a symptom not so much of policy success but of deeply rooted economic vulnerability. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. Government redistribution appears to have played some role in reducing the Latin American income gap. Government programs, like the cash transfers under the Oportunidades program in Mexico or the Bolsa Familia in Brazil, have increased the income of poor families. Still, Professor Lustig and her colleagues concluded that new government transfers and changes in pensions accounted for only 30 percent of inequality's decline. Most of the action appears to have happened in the job market before taxes and government spending kicked in. Something, it appears, has flattened the distribution of wages. Whether this is good or bad news depends on what that factor is. It could be a result of Latin America's substantial increase in the supply of university educated workers, shrinking their wage premium compared with their less educated peers. "I do think that the return to a college education has declined," said Jaime Ruiz Tagle of the University of Chile. "It has declined because college education has become massive." The narrative isn't entirely convincing, though. Mr. de la Torre notes the educational wage premium widened in the 1990s before starting to shrink in the early 2000s. This doesn't fit the trend of educational attainment, which has been increasing steadily since 1990. Other potential explanations don't tell such an optimistic story. For one, perhaps Latin America's new college graduates are inferior in some way. Latin America's education boom has driven the proliferation of private colleges, some of which are of lower quality. The students may be of lower quality too coming from families that received poorer elementary and high school education and are less prepared for college. Together, these dynamics would reduce the skill level of newly educated workers, shrinking the wage premium they could command over those without a college education. This story has a lot of traction here, where the government of President Michelle Bachelet this year passed an ambitious tax reform aimed at increasing government revenue by 4 percent of its gross domestic product, which it hopes to invest mostly to improve the quality of education. Mr. de la Torre fears, however, that this is not the entire story, either. The declining return to education, he worries, is not simply about the supply of educated workers. It also has to do with a decline in the demand for skill. From soybeans to copper, China's insatiable demand for Latin America's raw materials pushed up the value of currencies across the region even as its cheap manufactured exports undercut Latin American countries' rickety industrial base, reducing their demand for skilled workers. "In this case, the fall of inequality would be bad news over the long term," Mr. de la Torre told me. "We would be specializing in sectors that require less knowledge." What this augurs for Latin Americans' future growth is hard to tell. But with Chinese growth slowing, there are increasing signs that the overall prosperity of a region that has long relied on commodity exports is now threatened. A slowing China might also put an end to the shrinking income gap. The World Bank argues that the only viable long term path for Latin American economies is to increase productivity growth, investing in more skill intensive industries. That makes a lot of sense. But in doing so, it may have to join the rest of the developed world in confronting the challenge of achieving growth without widening the income gap even further.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
What the implements found with the body of Otzi revealed about the Copper Age. A showcase reflects a reconstruction of Otzi's skull, center, and his body at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy. Dmitry kostyukov for The New York Times In 1991, scientists in the Italian Alps came across a frozen, caramel colored corpse face down in the melting ice. They named him Otzi, or the Iceman. And since that time, researchers have been learning more and more about the Iceman's life in the Copper Age in Europe some 5,300 years ago. The latest findings, published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One, are focused on the tools he carried with him. A small dagger, a couple of arrowheads and a few other prehistoric possessions made of stone, wood and deer antler, provide insight into their owner's mysterious final days before he was shot with an arrow and died. Ursula Wierer, an archaeologist from the provincial Department of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape in Florence, Italy, used high power microscopes and a CT scanner to examine Otzi's dagger and arrowheads. Other items in his ancient tool kit included a small, sharp flake for cutting reeds; an oval shaped stone called an end scraper; a jagged looking rock used for making holes in leather and wood called a borer; and a wooden block with a deer's antler called a retoucher. All of the items had been recovered in the glacier gully near Otzi's body. They included a quiver containing just two arrowheads and a dozen unfinished arrow shafts, several antler points and a bundle of sinew, or animal tendons. Otzi must have been in some sort of rush, said Dr. Wierer, as he did not have the time to construct a working bow or complete his other dozen arrowheads before his death. She thinks that he could have finished that task over the course of several hours if he had wanted. Otzi's dagger was unusually small with a blade that was barely a couple of inches long. Its tip was also broken, so it lacked a sharp point. The blade was made of a hard, dark rock called chert that is similar to flint. To sharpen it, Otzi would have had to apply pressure and flake off its edges, rather than scrape it against another rock. The chert that Otzi used was mined from three different areas, which were as far as 40 miles away, Dr. Wierer said. And in his final moments, the Iceman ran out of chert to fix his tools. The team also analyzed the wooden retoucher, which had a deer's antler stuck inside it. This tool was used to sharpen the stone tools by flaking off new sharp edges. The shape of the end scraper, a long rounded stone most likely used to cut plants and strip animal hide, suggested that it was used by someone who was right handed. It had been recently sharpened, based on its glossy appearance, Dr. Wierer concluded. "It's really surprising how many re sharpenings and how many modifications we can see on this tool," she said. "The Iceman did a last re sharpening and perhaps wanted to use it again, but there was no time." Researchers have learned a lot about Otzi, including his dapper wardrobe, stomach parasites, and how he may have died. The new findings add just a touch more detail to the attempts to reconstruct his final itinerary. About 33 hours before he died, the 46 year old Otzi ate a meal in the mountains. Then, in the next nine hours before death, he descended the mountain, sharpened his end scraper and borer and probably worked on his bow and arrow shafts. A little while later, he got into a skirmish and was stabbed on his right hand. Some 12 hours before he died, he ate another meal in a valley, and then climbed nearly two miles up the mountain again, which was a hike of about a day or two away from his community. Five or four hours before death, he had a third meal and perhaps a little later a fourth. Then an arrow shot by a Southern Alpine archer struck the Iceman from behind, shattering his scapula and severing an artery.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Xiojanni Badillo embraced her aunt, Daysi Mendoza, who was recovering from Guillain Barre syndrome which leaves patients unable to move at a hospital in Cucuta, Colombia. A new study of 42 cases of Guillain Barre syndrome in French Polynesia offers the strongest evidence to date that the Zika virus can trigger temporary paralysis, researchers reported on Monday. But experts cautioned that more evidence from other locations was needed to be conclusive. Since last year, doctors have noticed an unusual increase in Guillain Barre cases in several countries with Zika outbreaks, including Brazil, El Salvador and Venezuela. But as the World Health Organization reported on Friday, a large number of those patients have not yet been confirmed through laboratory testing to have Zika. Guillain Barre leaves patients unable to move, in extreme cases forcing them to depend on life support. While most patients eventually regain full movement, the condition can be fatal. In the patients studied in French Polynesia, none died, but 38 percent went to an intensive care unit and 29 percent needed help breathing. This study, published in The Lancet, used a number of tests to try to determine whether the group of 42 patients who contracted Guillain Barre during a Zika outbreak in 2013 and 2014 also had the Zika virus. Thirty seven, or almost 90 percent, of the patients in the study reported Zika like symptoms four to 10 days before they started to notice neurological problems, like an inability to walk or general muscle weakness. But determining whether the patients in fact had Zika was challenging. By the time they arrived at Centre Hospitalier de Polynesie Francaise in Tahiti during the 2013 2014 outbreak, none of them still had active Zika in their blood. The virus stays in the bloodstream for only about a week. So researchers used a gold standard test to look for Zika antibodies. It entailed adding serum from each patient to live Zika virus in a culture, and then seeing whether the patient had antibodies to destroy the virus. All 42 patients had antibodies that killed the Zika virus. By contrast, only half of a control group of 98 people matched for age, sex, and residence had the antibodies. "That's huge, because it's the first case control study to establish a potential relationship between Zika virus infection and Guillain Barre," Dr. Gorson said. Dr. David W. Smith, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Western Australia, cautioned that finding antibodies that neutralize Zika is not enough to prove an infection of Zika. To do that, the test also must show that the concentration of Zika antibodies was four times higher than for dengue, also known as dengue fever, which is common in Tahiti, said Dr. Smith, who was one of the authors of a commentary that accompanied the new study. Only one of the 42 cases met that standard. Dr. Arnaud Fontanet, one of three senior authors of the Guillain Barre study, explained the results by pointing out that researchers had used blood samples taken in a three month checkup, so the concentration of antibodies would have gone down. The scientists also looked for another type of antibody, called IgM, to see if patients had recently been infected with Zika. Thirty one patients, nearly 74 percent, had IgM antibodies against Zika, but none against dengue. By contrast, only 11 percent of a control group did. "If you put all this evidence together, for me, as an epidemiologist, I'm satisfied that Zika virus caused Guillain Barre in those patients," said Dr. Fontanet, head of the Epidemiology of Emerging Diseases Unit at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Other experts said the study fell short of proving causation. "More studies are needed to demonstrate if Zika virus can really cause Guillain Barre syndrome," said Dr. Bart C. Jacobs, a professor of immunology and neurology at Erasmus MC in the Netherlands. Still, Dr. Jacobs, who was not involved with the study, said it provided "convincing evidence for a link." The researchers were able to show that having had the dengue virus in the past did not enhance the severity of Guillain Barre. A second control group of patients who had acute Zika in their blood, but no neurological complications, was recruited. When researchers compared the 42 paralyzed patients with both control groups, they found that pre existing dengue immunity did not vary significantly between the three groups. They found that roughly two out of 10,000 people infected with Zika virus developed Guillain Barre in French Polynesia. Even though the condition is rare, Dr. Fontanet said, if two thirds of a population is infected with Zika, as in French Polynesia, then a substantial number of patients may become paralyzed. Patients in the study both deteriorated and recovered more quickly than typical patients with Guillain Barre. It usually takes one to two weeks for a patient to progress from the first symptom to intensive care, but in these cases Dr. Fontanet said it was four days. Doctors are now being asked to be aware of the quick progression, and to test for the Zika virus in addition to other pathogens. "The point is, you have to watch them much closer," Dr. Gorson said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Many universities are asking students to wear masks and avoid parties and to report on peers who break the rules. It could backfire. Hundreds of American colleges and universities have opted to begin the fall semester at least partly in person, allowing some or all of their students onto campus to live and study. These schools are going to great lengths to impress upon students that their behavior determines whether campuses can stay open or whether they will have to head back to their parents' homes by October. In many cases, schools are requiring students to sign "social contracts" in which they promise not to party, have overnight dorm guests, walk across campus without masks or otherwise conduct themselves as college students normally do and often attaching strict penalties if students violate the rules. In addition to agreeing to conduct themselves according to these rules, students are also being asked to police one another for violating them. College campuses have long monitored their students' behavior to enforce various expectations, from attending class to completing assigned readings to sticking around at football games. In the age of Covid 19, these forms of monitoring are intensifying and students are being tasked with becoming surveillors themselves. New York University, for example, implores students to "politely urge" the noncompliant to wear masks and social distance and if they don't listen, to report the fellow students to higher ups. Tulane University urges students to "hold your friends and peers accountable" for having parties. The University of Nebraska at Omaha asks students to commit to "discouraging large in person group gatherings" to help fight the virus. Other schools are recruiting students as "health ambassadors" to "utilize peer to peer influence" and training them in bystander intervention techniques. Many schools are setting up tip lines where students can anonymously report those who fail to wear masks or social distance, or asking students to use hotlines that were originally created to report issues like harassment and other misconduct. And if students eventually test positive for the virus say, after attending an illicit social gathering contact tracing protocols may require them to report others who broke the rules. In many ways, it makes sense that universities are relying on students to be the eyes and ears of public health management. Students are much more likely than a dean or provost to know about what's really going on in the dorms and frat houses. And providing an anonymous way for students to whistle blow about unsafe conditions can certainly be a good thing, since it is unreasonable to expect all students to come forward publicly. But there's a risk that these peer reporting systems may not be effective in controlling the spread of Covid 19 on campus because they put students in very tough positions. Of course, many students understand the high stakes of a coronavirus outbreak and have a desire to help keep their communities safe. Some students may feel a sense of civic duty to participate in policing their classmates' behavior. But others may be loath to report on their friends, especially when doing so could result in harsh penalties. And students risk being socially ostracized if they are branded with the stigma of being a "narc" by their peers. Students may find themselves weighing the complex burdens of playing a role in preserving public health against the potential personal costs of reporting. We've seen this play out time and time again on college campuses, when students' refusal to snitch on one another has impeded investigations of hazing practices and sexual violence. And we've already seen similar dynamics unfold in the current pandemic local officials have had to resort to subpoenas to get infected individuals to comply with contact tracing, and people have been targeted with threats and harassment for "snitching" to officials about noncompliant business practices. In many cases, university messaging encourages students to de escalate and educate in their interactions with noncompliant peers but tensions are high, and even adults don't always handle these conflicts well. Another risk is that peer reporting systems may have unintended consequences especially when people use them for their own purposes. Consider the VOICE hotline run early in the Trump administration, ostensibly for the reporting of information about crimes committed by individuals with "a nexus to immigration." People who called VOICE were motivated by a wide variety of family, neighborhood and business disputes. One caller reported a family member who would not let her see her granddaughter. Another reported his wife, who he said was falsely accusing him of domestic violence in order to obtain legal residency. Still others targeted spouses who had committed adultery or abused their children. Another reported an employee of her ballroom dance studio, who was allegedly trying to lure away customers to her own competing studio. People report on one another (truthfully or falsely) for a number of personal reasons, including competition, revenge, leverage and everyday aggravations. There's every reason to assume that these motivations will bubble up in the college context, too. Students have their own loyalties, broken hearts, rocky roommate relationships and fraternity codes of silence. Some commentators have already questioned whether the N.C.A.A.'s Covid 19 tip line to be used to report on schools endangering the health of their student athletes may be exploited for competitive advantage, if students snitch on their rival schools or backup players tattletale on starters. Schools should also not assume that these burdens will be equally borne by all students. Community policing often leads to rampant racial profiling and recent events have snapped into sharp relief just how easily reporting can be weaponized against minority groups. Fighting the coronavirus is, to be sure, an all hands on deck problem, but pitting students against one another in a high stress time carries real risks, and colleges should be exceedingly careful about casting their students in the role of undercover coronavirus cops. Deputizing students to police their peers threatens to disrupt the interpersonal dynamics of student life, while also creating conditions to displace blame onto students should outbreaks occur. Universities need to be mindful of how peer surveillance systems might be misused, how they might burden different groups of students and the damage they may do to community trust. Karen Levy ( karen ec levy) is an assistant professor in the department of information science at Cornell University, where Lauren Kilgour ( l kilgour) is a doctoral candidate. 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
The Ebola epidemic that tore through West Africa in 2014 claimed 11,310 lives, far more than any previous outbreak. A combination of factors contributed to its savagery, among them a mobile population, crumbling public health systems, official neglect and hazardous burial practices. But new research suggests another impetus: The virus may have evolved a new weapon against its human hosts. In studies published on Thursday in the journal Cell, two teams of scientists report that a genetic mutation may have made Ebola more deadly by improving the virus's ability to enter human cells. The researchers do not yet understand exactly how it works, but several lines of evidence suggest it helped expand the scope of the epidemic. One alarming finding: Patients infected with the mutated version of Ebola were significantly more likely to die. "It's hard to escape the conclusion that it's an adaptation to the human host," said Dr. Jeremy Luban, a virologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and an author of one of the new studies. Normally, Ebola circulates among animal hosts, probably African bats. Scientists suspect that the West African epidemic began when a bat infected a boy in a village in Guinea in December 2013. As reports of the outbreak surfaced, Dr. Pardis C. Sabeti, a computational biologist at Harvard, and her colleagues started a collaboration with doctors in Sierra Leone. The researchers quickly sequenced the genomes of 99 Ebola viruses isolated from 78 patients there. Their analysis showed that Ebola was moving quickly from one victim to the next, and that the virus was gaining new mutations along the way. One worrying possibility was that those mutations somehow sped up Ebola's replication. But it was also possible these changes didn't mean anything at all. "We know that viruses mutate," Dr. Sabeti said. "There was nothing revelatory in that." Each of Ebola's seven genes encodes a protein. Even if a gene is altered with a mutation, it may end up making precisely the same protein as before, or one that works exactly the same way. Last year computer simulations by Dr. Simon C. Lovell, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Manchester, and his colleagues did not find any important difference in Ebola's proteins caused by the new mutations. But that work was based only on what scientists knew about the molecular biology of Ebola at the time. There was still a lot left to learn, it turned out. Dr. Sabeti and her colleagues went on to analyze 1,489 Ebola genomes, tracing the virus's development over the course of the epidemic in an evolutionary tree. The tree showed that one mutation arose at a crucial point in the outbreak. Known as GPA82V, it was first observed in viral samples collected from a patient in Guinea on March 31, 2014. Ebola viruses carrying GPA82V exploded across all three countries. The original version of the virus, by contrast, sputtered on at low levels in Guinea before disappearing in a couple of months. The GPA82V mutation alters the gene that directs production of Ebola's surface proteins, called glycoproteins. The tips of these proteins contact human host cells, opening a passageway by which the virus enters. To judge the effects of the mutation, Dr. Luban created a form of HIV studded with Ebola's surface proteins and observed as these hybrid viruses infected human cells. One set of hybrid viruses contained the GPA82V mutation; the other contained the original version of the Ebola gene. The mutation, the scientists found, made the viruses much more successful at attacking human cells and those of other primates. Compared with the older gene, the mutated form infected four times as many primate cells. But the mutation did not help the hybrid viruses infect the cells of other species, such as cats and dogs. In a parallel study also published on Thursday, Jonathan K. Ball, a virologist at the University of Nottingham, and his colleagues analyzed 1,610 Ebola genomes and arrived at the same conclusion as Dr. Sabeti: The GPA82V mutation arose early in the West African epidemic and spread like wildfire. Dr. Ball's team also created hybrid viruses instead of HIV, they used mouse viruses and found that GPA82V made them twice as infectious to human cells. The scientists also tried infecting cells from fruit bats, including an African species thought to be Ebola's natural host. The mutation actually made the viruses worse at infecting the bat cells. Dr. Lovell said he and his colleagues had completed a study of their own, now under review at a journal, that produced similar findings. As a result, he is no longer a skeptic. "Now it seems there is a change," he said of the Ebola virus. "What we don't know yet is the effect on people." Dr. Sabeti and her colleagues have discovered some frightening clues in patient medical records. Among 194 cases, they found, people infected with mutated Ebola were significantly more likely to die than those with the older strain. Collectively, Dr. Luban said, the evidence points strongly to the conclusion that Ebola's mutation helped it spread more effectively in people. "It looks like a duck, and so I think it probably is a duck," he said. It is not clear what role the mutation played in West Africa's epidemic. Perhaps it was only minor, compared with geography and the poor state of region's public health systems, Dr. Ball said. But the fact that Ebola did gain at least one advantage that made it better at infecting human cells worries him anyway. We will almost certainly face another outbreak. "You will see that virus trying to adapt to its new host," he said. "And the longer you let that spillover take place, the more chance it has to become better adapted."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
David Letterman's new talk show comes to Netflix, while new adaptations of Philip K. Dick stories come to Amazon. MY NEXT GUEST NEEDS NO INTRODUCTION WITH DAVID LETTERMAN on Netflix. David Letterman's Santa Claus beard, which he sprouted after leaving "The Late Show" two years ago, seemed to be a clear symbolic gesture that his days of thoughtful interviews with cultural dignitaries were over. "The beard is a good reminder to me that that was a different life," he said in an interview with The New York Times. But after a well deserved break, Mr. Letterman will return to the screen. And although he's no longer on network TV, his interviews will still pack a wallop: His first guest is Barack Obama, with later episodes to feature George Clooney and Malala Yousafzai. THE POLKA KING on Netflix. In the films "Nacho Libre" and "Walk Hard," Jack Black rolled out Mexican and British accents that were so bad they actually became endearing. He tries an exaggerated Polish accent in this movie, in which he stars as the real life polka star Jan Lewan, who ended up in jail for running a Ponzi scheme (perhaps unknowingly). As with all of his best roles, Mr. Black imbues his character with a mixture of manic glee and tragedy. Jenny Slate plays his wife, while Jason Schwartzman plays his best friend. PHILIP K. DICK'S ELECTRIC DREAMS on Amazon. The worlds of Philip K. Dick seem to be multiplying. An adaptation of his novel "The Man in the High Castle" rolls along on Amazon, while the bleak cityscape of "Blade Runner 2049" arrived in theaters in October. Now, more of his hallucinatory and terrifying visions arrive on Amazon, with 10 stand alone adaptations of his short stories. These episodes explore future scenarios both distant and very close, from parallel universes to global warming; plenty of stars show up, from Bryan Cranston to Steve Buscemi to Janelle Monae. But the critic James Poniewozik of The Times was mostly unmoved: "This license and talent, plus lavish scale of production, add up to little that feels freshly imagined or newly provocative," he wrote in his review. HELL'S KITCHEN 8 p.m. on Fox. Gordon Ramsay hosts this furiously paced cooking competition. In this episode, contestants must use their senses to re create a dish, and whip up a meal with mystery ingredients. TONY BENNETT: THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS GERSHWIN PRIZE FOR POPULAR SONG 9 p.m. on PBS. As music's attitude and center have frantically shifted from decade to decade, one of the few constants has been Tony Bennett since 1950 he has been relentless in his charm, gravitas and commitment to the American Songbook. (He remained steadfast even in an extended collaboration with Lady Gaga.) The Library of Congress honors him in this star studded event, which includes appearances by Stevie Wonder, Josh Groban, Gloria Estefan, Chris Botti and more.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
On her tour for "The Rest of the Story," which debuts this week at No. 2 on the Y.A. list, "I've had a lot of young women tell me my books were a friend in high school when they didn't have many," the novelist says. "Man, I know that feeling. I got dumped by my first love just as senior year began. I spent months carrying around Stephen King's 'It,' much preferring that horror story to my own current one. It kind of saved me. The thought that my books might be doing that for someone else is a great honor." One of the reasons teenagers connect to Dessen's novels is that they feel so authentic. "I just wasn't very happy in high school. I had a lot of anxiety and sadness and dealt with it in not so ideal ways," Dessen says now. "It's a long way behind me, but you never really forget. There's something about those sad, hard years. It's very easy for me to put my mind there." It helps, she says, that she still lives in her hometown, Chapel Hill. "I drive past my high school at least once a week. The memories are never very far, even when I want them to be. It's hard to not think about your teen years when you catch a glimpse of your 10th grade crush two pumps over at the gas station."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
A TRAITOR TO HIS SPECIES Henry Bergh and the Birth of the Animal Rights Movement By Ernest Freeberg In March 2019, drivers near Yankee Stadium were startled to find themselves sharing the expressway with a reddish brown calf. Police officers trussed and tranquilized the terrified animal in front of rolling cameras, and the scene went viral on social media. The calf had escaped from a nearby slaughterhouse. Its bid for freedom reminded city dwellers that tens of thousands of animals die in New York each year. It was once utterly impossible to ignore this fact. In 19th century New York, cattle were driven through the streets to the stockyard on 40th Street, stray dogs were drowned by the hundreds in wire cages in the East River and trolley horses fell dead in their tracks. P. T. Barnum's menagerie on Broadway burned to the ground three times, killing hyenas, big cats and hundreds of other animals. The trapped creatures screamed in a "horrible chorus" of "mortal agony," The Times reported. One man did more than any other to change the way New Yorkers and Americans overall treated their animals. In his vivid and often wrenching new book, "A Traitor to His Species," the historian Ernest Freeberg tells the story of Henry Bergh, a wealthy New Yorker who braved ridicule, assault and death threats for over two decades as he sounded the alarm about animal suffering. Among Bergh's many achievements, the most consequential was the founding in 1866 of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. "A Traitor to His Species" is not a conventional biography, intriguing as its central figure is. The book is above all a compassionate, highly readable account of the 19th century plight of animals, especially urban animals and of those who tried to come to their rescue. Bergh began his crusade late in life. In his 50s, he was posted as a diplomat by the Lincoln administration to Russia, where he was horrified by the cruelty he saw carriage drivers inflicting on their horses. One day he chided a violent driver, who ceased his abuse. Heartened by this episode, Bergh began to cast about for a way to draw attention to the suffering of animals in an age when many people thought that they couldn't feel emotion or even pain. Back in New York, Bergh assembled a group of fellow elites and secured a charter from the State of New York to create the A.S.P.C.A. Remarkably, Bergh and his A.S.P.C.A. agents were empowered to make arrests when they witnessed animal cruelty. 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. Bergh flexed his new muscles immediately, marching onto a docked schooner and arresting the captain. His hold was stacked with starving and thirsty green turtles. They were immobilized on their backs, their flippers bleeding from the ropes threaded through them. Turtle flesh was highly prized on dinner tables, in taverns and at "turtle clubs" devoted to this delicacy. The ensuing court case drew national attention, just as Bergh had hoped. "Notoriety is wanted," he insisted and he got it. He was ridiculed for trying to protect lowly turtles, but he had made his point. Every creature, Bergh believed, deserved humane treatment. In the end, the schooner captain was declared innocent. Yet Bergh had made himself and his cause instantly famous. Americans who had never thought about the question before were suddenly debating whether animals had rights. Bergh's crusading compassion aligned him with the great reform movements of his age. All around him, men and women were creating institutions meant to improve child welfare, education, hospitals, prisons and the plight of the formerly enslaved. Bergh found allies as well as inspiration in these efforts. If people had learned to stop thinking of human beings as property, couldn't they be taught to stop thinking of animals as property, too? Bergh pointedly called animals "our speechless slaves." No less a figure than Frederick Douglass put the same argument to an audience in 1873. Farmers should be kind to their horses, he said, because even though they can't speak, they have senses and can feel affection: "A horse is in many respects like a man." But how to change minds and behavior? Animal advocates disagreed on the best strategy. Some of Bergh's milder allies sought to encourage respect for animals not through the strong arm of the law but through sentimental education. Adults organized essay contests for schoolchildren on the subject of "Kindness to Animals." A prominent Bostonian named George Angell arranged for the American publication of Anna Sewell's "Black Beauty," introducing readers to the novel idea that a horse could both suffer and rejoice. Louisa May Alcott contributed to the genre as well, writing a short story in which an abused horse told her own sad tale mentioning Bergh along the way. Bergh's own approach was fiercer; he had less faith in human nature. He thought the fear of arrest was a stronger deterrent than moral suasion. He strode like an avenging angel through the streets of Manhattan, on the hunt for suffering animals and harsh masters. Freeberg's writing is at its liveliest when he is following Bergh on these daily rounds. One mesmerizing scene has Bergh climbing with a policeman to the roof of a bloody dogfighting den run by a Five Points gang leader. The policeman lowers himself through the skylight, catching the perpetrators in the act. Bergh's passion for animals thickened his own hide. Whenever he encountered a mistreated trolley horse, he swooped onto the tracks in front of the horsecar, halting traffic for blocks as he rescued the animal. He pioneered an ambulance in which to transport sick horses an innovation soon adapted, Freeberg writes, for the transport of sick New Yorkers. Bergh made enemies of the horsecar drivers and their powerful bosses. He hectored one of the latter, the formidable Cornelius Vanderbilt, about his bloody profits, made from "the cruel sufferings of a dumb, speechless servant." Bergh attacked another famous American, P. T. Barnum, for abusing wild animals to entertain humans. Barnum relished the fight with Bergh; it brought him more publicity and bigger audiences. (It was only in 2017 that the Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey Circus closed down, after a long campaign by animal rights activists.) No possible site of animal cruelty escaped Bergh's attention the Erie Canal with its straining, bleeding mules; vivisection laboratories where dogs were pinned down and sliced open in front of medical students; city slaughterhouses where cattle were clubbed to death after enduring horrific privation on railroad cars left to bake in the sun while the animals gasped for air and water. When "iced meat" emerged as a partial alternative to the transport of live animals, Bergh embraced the innovation both because of the relief it would bring livestock and because it removed the morally corrupting sight of abused animals from the view of all but those who worked in the industry. Today, when a desperate creature manages to break loose and run through New York City, it reminds us of the hidden cost of our tastes. As Freeberg shows, Bergh rankled many Americans with his insistence that individual liberties must sometimes bow to the common good. But even some of Bergh's targets came to respect him deeply for his convictions. When Bergh was buried at Green Wood Cemetery in 1888, P. T. Barnum was in attendance.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Wherever I go these days I'm peppered with questions about who is most likely to win the Democratic nomination for president and who is likely to win the presidency. I will always say that I don't know, that there is no way at this point of knowing, but they often respond: Well, you know more than me. Yes, I know enough to know that predictions at this point are meaningless and irresponsible. There are so many moving parts that could have a direct and significant impact on the race, and we have no idea how they will pan out, like cases working their way through the courts and the impeachment trial. But, there are also the things we can't predict, like a national or international crisis. Last week, Donald Trump demonstrated the incredible power the president has to create such a crisis with the assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani in Iraq. There is no way to know as of yet what prompted Trump to take such an action. The administration has said that there was an imminent threat from Suleimani, who was actively planning attacks on American interests. However, as CNN reported, "The lack of evidence provided to lawmakers and the public has fueled lingering skepticism about whether the strike was justified." That combined with the fact that this president lies constantly, and indiscriminately, and is currently clinging to his lies about his efforts to extort the president of Ukraine, and it's hard to believe anything he says. Whatever Trump's reasoning, he has, at least for the moment, shifted the narrative. Impeachment talk recedes a bit as newspaper column inches and television news analysis adjust to include coverage of the attack, fears of Iranian retribution and the broader question about what this all means for our interests and allies in the Middle East. Democratic candidates on the trail are now discussing the Iranian episode in addition to health care, an issue that has come to define the contest. And as all this happens, voters see candidates through a different lens. The candidates deemed strong on domestic policy may not enjoy that same favor on foreign policy. These unexpected crises can completely upend a presidential campaign. Remember, for instance, how the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the onset of the financial crisis completely altered the presidential race in 2008. People were terrified; there seemed to be more bad news in the financial sector every day, each account worse than its predecessor. This fear and panic became part of the electorate's calculation, and calm under pressure Barack Obama benefited. While John McCain suspended his campaign to fly back to Washington, a move that read as more showy dramatics than prudent stewardship, Obama refused to do so, saying, "I think it is going to be part of the president's job to be able to deal with more than one thing at once.'' Voters, and the media, saw the difference in the way the two men responded to the crisis, and their fortunes shifted. "Pew Research Center data analyzing the tone and focus of media coverage through the final stretch of that election showed how that coverage shifted dramatically in mid September 2008 to focus on the financial crisis and the media narrative grew increasingly critical of Republican candidate John McCain. During this same period, our public opinion survey data indicate that what had essentially been a deadlocked contest between McCain and Obama before the Lehman meltdown turned into a solid lead for Obama in the weeks that followed." President races can turn on a dime, or a 10 trillion dollar loss in American household wealth. The financial crisis happened relatively close to the election in 2008. This year, there are still 10 months to go. There will be so many twists and turns that an electoral outcome is unknowable. For instance, there are at least five major Supreme Court decisions that will arrive by June. According to The New York Times's Adam Liptak, they involve weighty questions that could completely change the conversation, and, I would submit, cause a cultural crisis. They are cases that will decide whether the court will restrict abortion rights and possibly revisit Roe v. Wade, whether Trump can strip protections from Dreamers and whether civil rights laws extend to the protection of L.G.B.T. people. Furthermore, we can't predict the severity of the next mass shooting or who will be its targets. We don't know which natural disasters are on the horizon or how Trump or his Democratic opponents will respond to them. We can't know any of this. As such, we can't be sure of which candidate would be the best counterpoint to Trump dealing with these issues. So, here is my advice to Democrats: Stop fretting. Worry about what you can control and make choices with the knowledge you have when you cast your vote. The future will take care of itself as it always does. A solid, well rounded candidate should be capable of responding to any crisis. That's the nature of the presidency. 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 and Twitter ( NYTopinion), and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Who elects the president of the United States? In a democracy, that shouldn't be a trick question. Thanks to the Electoral College, it seems like one. The American people cast their ballots on a Tuesday in early November, but on a national level that vote is legally meaningless. The real election happens about six weeks later, when 538 presidential electors most of them average citizens chosen by local party leaders meet in their respective state capitals and cast their ballots. Nearly always, the electors vote for the candidate who won the most popular votes in their state. But do they have to? That's the question that the Supreme Court has agreed to answer in two related cases it will hear this spring. The cases one from Colorado and one from Washington raise an alarming prospect: Can presidential electors vote for whomever they please, disregarding what the voters of their state said? More than 160 "faithless electors" have chosen to go this route since the nation's founding, a tiny fraction of all electoral votes in history. But the issue has become freshly relevant because of a concerted effort to persuade dozens of Republican electors in 2016 to switch their votes to prevent Donald Trump from taking the White House. In the end, 10 electors voted or tried to vote for someone other than their state's popular vote winner the most in a single election in more than a century. (In 1872, 63 electors went against their pledge to vote for Horace Greeley, the Liberal Republican candidate, but that was because Greeley died shortly after Election Day.) Even though faithless electors have never come close to changing the outcome of an election, more than two dozen states have passed laws requiring their electors to vote for the state's popular vote winner. Some punish those who don't, while others replace faithless electors with ones who will do the job they pledged to do. Last May, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that the state had the power to impose a 1,000 fine on its four faithless electors, on the ground that the Constitution gives the states total authority to decide how to appoint their electors. Three months later, a federal appeals court in Denver went the opposite way, ruling that the founders clearly intended for electors to act independently and vote according to their consciences, not to the dictates of any political party. Once a state appoints an elector, the court said, its power over that elector ends. They cannot punish someone, or replace him or her, for voting a certain way. The Constitution doesn't include any explicit guidance on the matter. So who's right? In a way, they both are. The framers of the Constitution, and the states that ratified it, clearly expected electors to vote as they pleased. In Federalist No. 68, Alexander Hamilton wrote that electors would be men "selected by their fellow citizens from the general mass" and "most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations." And yet, the Electoral College has almost never worked that way in practice. Less than a decade after the Constitution was drafted, the framers' idea of an independent elector was effectively kaput. As soon as national political parties took shape, elections became a partisan competition, and it was only logical that electors would start to take sides. In the election of 1796, electors were already pledging themselves either to John Adams, the sitting vice president and Federalist, or to Thomas Jefferson, the former secretary of state and Democratic Republican. When one elector pledged to Adams changed his mind and voted for Jefferson, Federalists were outraged. One wrote, "Do I choose Samuel Miles to determine for me whether John Adams or Thomas Jefferson shall be President? No, I choose him to act, not to think." That's been the operating assumption ever since, and it is almost never questioned. Even the term "faithless" is revealing: What faith is an elector who votes his or her conscience breaking? Didn't the founders intend electors to be faithful above all to the country? Yes and yet they are not now and essentially never have been. For this reason, however the Supreme Court resolves the issue, which it will do by early summer, little will change in practice. Political parties and their candidates, who currently choose their own slate of electors in each state, are already careful about selecting people for their partisan loyalty. That selection process will only become stricter if the court rules that states may not interfere in any way with electors' votes. And faithless electors are unlikely to affect the outcome even if the Electoral College tally is very close, as it was in 2000, when as few as three Republican electors could have broken their pledges and handed the presidency to the Democratic nominee, Al Gore, who won the most votes nationwide. None did. That makes sense. Americans would rightly revolt if a handful of people they'd never heard of ignored their votes and decided the election for themselves. It's almost as if we believe that we, the people, should be voting directly for the president the only official whose job it is to represent all of us equally, wherever we live. Which raises the question of why we still have an Electoral College at all.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
The men of Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo and in this troupe, that means everyone are comedians and dancers. But perhaps even more essentially, they are aficionados of their art. Their sendups of ballet conventions show the close attention of true fans and are rendered with such love that, while they are always entertaining, they aren't always especially comic. The comedy can be a mask for serious aspiration and ballet nerd connoisseurship. In the 40 years since the company was founded in New York, as its technical standards have risen and the culture of the country around it has grown less rigid about gender and sexuality, this enacted fandom has distinguished the Trocks from your average drag act. At the Joyce Theater on Tuesday, the company celebrated its anniversary true to form, with the debut of a 19th century curio. This was "La Naiade et le Pecheur," originally choreographed by Jules Perrot and staged here by Raffaele Morra after a Bolshoi version. Mr. Morra, in his alter ego of Lariska Dumbchenko, takes one of the title roles, the water nymph who falls in love with a Sicilian fisherman, Matteo (Ihaia Miller, as Mikhail Mypansarov). The comedy, such as there is, arises from gentle exaggeration: the silly head tilt added to Matteo's skipping entrance. Mainly, though, this is one of the less parodic pieces. Its mild pleasures are the well rendered period details, especially in the ensemble sections, and the light and clean dancing of Matteo's girlfriend, Giannina. This role is played by Nadia Doumiafeyva (Philip Martin Nielson), who despite her name needs no favors: She has technique and grace aplenty.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Fewer Americans are living in poverty, but for the first time in years, more of them lack health insurance. About 27.5 million people, or 8.5 percent of the population, lacked health insurance for all of 2018, up from 7.9 percent the year before, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday. It was the first increase since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, and experts said it was at least partly the result of the Trump administration's efforts to undermine that law. The growth in the ranks of the uninsured was particularly striking because the economy was doing well. The same report showed the share of Americans living in poverty fell to 11.8 percent, the lowest level since 2001, and household incomes edged up to their highest level on record. "It's very frightening in that if this is happening now with unemployment at 3.7 percent, then what's going to happen when the employer coverage situation gets worse?" said Eliot Fishman, a senior director at the consumer group Families USA and a top Medicaid official in the Obama administration. "There's a fear we could see really dramatic increases in the uninsured rate if that happens." Surveys consistently show that health care is one of the top concerns for voters heading into the 2020 election. And candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, several of whom have promised to extend health insurance to all Americans, are sure to use Tuesday's figures as evidence that the current system is not working. Several of them, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., blamed President Trump's health care policies for the higher uninsured rate on Tuesday. The Census Bureau report also had good news for the White House. Poorer households experienced the strongest income gains, a significant reversal after decades of rising inequality and a sign that the recovery is at last delivering income gains to middle class and low income families. The report is the latest evidence that the strong job market is creating opportunities for a wide array of workers, said Michael R. Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "You're seeing improvements in employment outcomes for people with disabilities. You're seeing improvements in employment outcomes for the formerly incarcerated," Mr. Strain said. "These workers who are potentially more vulnerable, you're seeing the recovery reach them." Democrats, however, are likely to highlight evidence that income gains have slowed since President Barack Obama's final years in office. Median income grew 5.1 percent in 2015 and 3.1 percent in 2016, compared with less than 1 percent last year. And while Tuesday's report showed the benefits of what now ranks as the longest economic expansion on record, it also highlighted the limitations of that growth. Median household income is only modestly higher now than when the recession began in late 2007 and is essentially unchanged since the dot com bubble burst in 2000. David Howell, a professor of economics and public policy at the New School in New York, said economic growth in recent years had helped families recover from recession, but had done little to reverse the longer run stagnation in middle class incomes. Democrats and Republicans alike, he said, have tapped into the sense among many voters that the economy is not working for them. "If you look at the long run trajectory from 1979, it's pretty disastrous," Mr. Howell said. Income gains have slowed substantially as the economic expansion has matured. But the tepid progress in top line numbers hides positive trends under the surface. "You continue to see some progress for households in 2018, especially in the bottom of the income distribution as they benefited from a tighter economy," said Jason Furman, who was chairman of Mr. Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. "But the pace of that progress seems to have slowed relative to past years." Median household income, the level at which half of households make more money and half make less, rose to about 63,200 in 2018 from 62,600 the year before. The change was so small that it was not statistically important. The Census Bureau made major tweaks to its methodology in 2013, making comparisons to earlier years difficult; by some estimates, household incomes remain below their 1999 peak. Some of the pullback in income gains was to be expected. Increases earlier in the recovery were driven by people returning to work; for example, households where only one person worked outside the home might have become two earner homes. Pro worker policies are "unleashing the private sector and achieving historical gains for the most disadvantaged Americans," Tomas J. Philipson, acting chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in a statement. But a broader measure that is often preferred by economists tells a less positive story. The headline poverty figures count the number of people living in households that earn below a certain threshold: about 20,000 for a family of three in 2018. A supplementary poverty rate, which takes into account regional differences in the cost of living and government benefits such as housing assistance and the earned income tax credit, was 13.1 percent in 2018, little changed from 2017. More seniors and fewer children are poor under that measure. Government programs, particularly Social Security, the earned income tax credit and the nutrition assistance program formerly known as food stamps, kept tens of millions of people out of poverty, the report noted.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
At the Museum of Modern Art's annual spring benefit last June, Helen Mirren could be spotted near one of the artists being honored that night, Brice Marden. A few feet away was Marilyn Minter, squiring another honoree, Mark Bradford. Yet the longest line of acolytes and well wishers formed not in the vicinity of these cultural heavyweights plus the Swedish pop star Robyn but led, instead, to a 100 year old man perched by the stage: David Rockefeller. One by one they went up to say hello, to pay tribute, to chat. Because of various physical ailments, he was in a wheelchair. Yet friends noted that he remained as curious and social as ever. In February of this year, on vacation in the Bahamas with the philanthropist Patty Cisneros and the MoMA director Glenn Lowry, Mr. Rockefeller "talked about wanting to go to Paris in the fall, wanting to see common friends," Mr. Lowry recalled, adding, "He was still projecting forward." In March, back in New York at the home of his friend Peter G. Peterson, an investment banker and onetime commerce secretary, he was planning another trip. So when Mr. Rockefeller died in his sleep on Monday, the tributes that followed rightly recalled his giant presence in the business, cultural and social life of New York. But few commented on what was one of the most significant and ultimately wrenching roles Mr. Rockefeller played in his later years: the frequent companion and protector of the equally fabled Brooke Astor. His championing of Mrs. Astor, the "aristocrat of the people" who died in 2007 at age 105, occurred during a time when charges were swirling that her son was abusing her and stealing from her, accusations that were aired in a trial that gripped high society and the city's tabloid readership. The friendship between Mrs. Astor and Mr. Rockefeller was one of New York's great mergers. She was saucy and tart, a society doyenne who served as the unofficial queen of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the Animal Medical Center and New York Hospital. They were introduced amid the East Coast social whirl. "I think the first time I met her was in 1958, on a boat off Providence, R.I.," Mr. Rockefeller told the journalist Meryl Gordon, for her 2008 book "Mrs. Astor Regrets." Admittedly, Mrs. Astor looked more glamorous than he in her pearl necklaces and Oscar de la Renta suits, but both had a deep awareness of the mores of their social class. He was fond of saying things like "the two most expensive things a Rockefeller can do are run for public office and get divorced; Nelson did both" referring to his brother. She was fond of quoting Anthony Trollope, the 19th century Victorian author whose 1875 novel "The Way We Live Now" contains the following remonstrance: "Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it." Mrs. Astor's third husband was Vincent Astor, the son of John Jacob Astor IV, who died in the Titanic disaster after supposedly quipping, "I asked for ice, but this is ridiculous." Following Vincent's death, in 1959, which left her with a great fortune and the Vincent Astor Foundation to watch over, the member of the Rockefeller clan she saw most frequently was David's older brother Laurance. The two grew so close that people talked, as they will. She was also friendly with David Rockefeller in those years. In 1985, he donated 2.5 million in her honor to the New York Public Library, which Vartan Gregorian, president of the library, said at the time was one of the largest gifts ever given to the institution. "I have never done anything like this before," Mr. Rockefeller said at the ceremony. "Through this gift, I wish to honor Brooke Astor as a very special friend and a wonderful individual. Brooke has set an extraordinary example in terms of the enrichment of New York's most exciting and important resource the minds of its people of all ages." Over time, Mr. Rockefeller became a consistent presence in Mrs. Astor's life. There he was, alongside Jacqueline Onassis, Henry Kissinger and 1,500 of Mrs. Astor's other friends and acquaintances, cheering as confetti was shot out from a cannon at her 90th birthday party, held in 1992 at the Park Avenue Armory. There he was again, at the Carlyle for her 95th, with just as glittery a guest list. But in 1996, his brother Laurance had grown frail, and David found himself a widower, with Peggy, his wife of 56 years, having died at age 80. "When David's wife died, I actually think Brooke believed she had a chance to marry him, because she never stopped looking," Liz Smith, a columnist and friend of both for many years, said in a telephone interview. "There were not a lot of rich, powerful men around, and he was the ultimate catch. But David wasn't about to marry her or anybody else." So he became her close friend and adviser. When Mrs. Astor grew too frail to step into the carriage, Mr. Rockefeller bought her a two step lift. This, he told Ms. Gordon, "made it easier for her," an "elderly lady with a tight skirt." "Maybe it was a generational thing but they were brought up with a Protestant Calvinist inclination to help others," said Louise Grunwald, the society doyenne who served with Mrs. Astor on the board of the New York Public Library and knew Mr. Rockefeller socially. "They were fortunate, and there was a sense of duty that came with that. Today it's ego, ego, ego." Mr. Rockefeller seemed always to be there for his fellow philanthropist, cheering her on from the sidelines and sometimes lending her more than just moral support. They were, to quote the society writer and novelist Billy Norwich, "twin pillars of society," personifying as well what it meant to be "an elegant survivor." And when Mrs. Astor's centennial approached, it was Mr. Rockefeller who offered to open Kykuit his family's 249 acre, 40 room Sleepy Hollow estate to 100 guests. With Mr. Rockefeller and Mrs. de la Renta behind him, Philip filed a civil suit against his own father, Mr. Marshall, aided in part by an affidavit filed by Mr. Rockefeller. Mr. Rockefeller was also instrumental in arranging for his friend to move back into Holly Hill. In 2006, a judge granted temporary guardianship of Mrs. Astor to Mrs. de la Renta. Mrs. Astor returned to the Westchester estate she had always loved and was able to spend her last days tending to her dogs, watching Fred Astaire movies and enjoying visits from guests like Mr. Rockefeller. Following Mrs. Astor's death at Holly Hill in 2007, Mr. Marshall was indicted and found guilty on criminal charges of having swindled millions from his mother after she was stricken with Alzheimer's. The ruling was upheld on appeal, and Mr. Marshall died in 2014. Mr. Rockefeller who would happily never have seen his name in the papers aside from at birth, marriage or death would surely have preferred the whole episode not to have taken place, but it was also not his way to lament what was done. His side won, and he spent his final days surrounded by Picassos, Matisses and Calders, collecting Chinese antiquities and admiring the MoMA headquarters that had been built on the very block where he had grown up (with his money, no less). Mr. Rockefeller also took great joy amassing what some of his friends said was the world's largest beetle collection, which was meticulously maintained at Kykuit, where the beetles, embalmed in glass cases, were taken out and shown off to newer and younger friends, who oohed and ahhed (and occasionally squirmed) as introductions were made. "He just carried on," Mr. Lowry said, speaking generally about Mr. Rockefeller's roaring nineties, a time that was barely interrupted by medical issues. "He didn't concede a thing."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Less than a month after the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl, a group of Massachusetts lawmakers has proposed a bill that would ban organized youth tackle football until after seventh grade. The bill, which moved to the Massachusetts legislature's Joint Committee on Public Health this week, follows unsuccessful attempts by legislators in five other states to pass similar measures to protect growing brains from traumatic injury. The bipartisan bill, known as No Hits, would impose financial penalties for any school league or other entity that does not comply. "There is significant science detailing repetitive head impacts have long term neurological consequences, especially when they occur during brain development," one of the bill's sponsors, Representative Paul A. Schmid III, a Democrat, said in a statement. Although some medical professionals and former N.F.L. players have signaled their support for the measure and public opinion could buoy its prospects, the bill is already facing headwinds. Two representatives who initially supported the measure have withdrawn their names from the bill, and a few other legislators said they would not support it. "Should we ban youth soccer too?" asked Representative David Nangle, a Democrat who opposes the bill. "Or youth hockey? When do we stop legislating into areas that we shouldn't be?" None Week 11 Takeaways: Here is what we learned this week. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Jets Lose Again: Falling to the Miami Dolphins, the Jets' receiver Elijah Moore offered consolation. 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. A spokeswoman for U.S.A. Football, which governs youth football, said in a statement that the organization believes that decisions on allowing children to play football are "best left to parents." To that end, she said, it has created a set of guidelines developed by leaders in athlete development and football. The executive director of Pop Warner, Jon Butler, said in a statement that the organization had worked to improve player safety by eliminating the three point stance and removing kickoffs for younger athletes. "Banning football is not the answer, but we do agree that we should continue our efforts to make the game safer for our kids," he said. Studies by Boston University and other research centers have shown that children who began playing tackle football before the age of 12 were at greater risk for cognitive, mood and behavioral issues later in life, as well as conditions like chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated hits to the head. But there has been opposition to those findings from the N.F.L. and even from well intentioned parents, said Michael Kaplen, a lawyer who teaches a legal course on traumatic brain injury and tracks legislation governing youth tackle football. Mr. Kaplen said that there was no such thing as safer tackling and that a youth league's promoting safer tackling would be similar to big tobacco companies' offering low nicotine cigarettes. "People don't understand that even a minor blow to the head has risks," he said. "It may take years for these problems to become unmasked." Steve Dembowski, 49, an executive board member of the Massachusetts High School Football Coaches Association, said parents, rather than the state, should be able to make choices for their children. "Considering that kids at that age get concussions playing soccer and baseball and any other sport where they can fall and hit their head on the ground," he said, "it seems like an overstep of authority." Damon Stanton, 43, has two sons who play football, and he coaches youth football in Hanson, Mass., about 25 miles south of Boston. "I understand the concern," he said, citing the Boston University study. But he said more attention should be paid to the work that is being done to make the sport safer since the "knuckle dragging days" when "you would hit hit hit, and run until you were puking" during practice. He said his team had invested in new equipment, like foam tires that minimize player contact during practices, and introduced shoulder tackling techniques developed by U.S.A. Football. Mr. Stanton acknowledged that he might not be as influential as the Patriots' head coach, Bill Belichick, adding that he is not "a political guy." "But," he said, "I'll definitely be calling my rep to let him know how I feel." In recent years, tackle football has lost some of its luster among middle and high schoolers, and their parents. In 2017, about 2.4 million athletes from ages 6 to 17 regularly played the sport, down slightly from the year before, according to the Sports Fitness Industry Association. Rugby is gaining popularity because its tackling techniques appear less risky, which increasingly appeals to coaches who are leery of concussions. There have been moves in some parts of the country to further address player safety for tackle football at the high school level. This month, the New Jersey State Interscholastic Athletic Association adopted new guidelines intended to sharply reduce the amount of contact allowed during high school practices. But several efforts last year to pass statewide legislation governing youth leagues were quashed by grass roots movements led by parents and coaches. When Assemblywoman Valerie Vainieri Huttle of New Jersey proposed banning tackle football for children under 12, parents, coaches and players threatened to vote her out of office, she said in an email.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Some spy thrillers are as scrupulously functional as their protagonists. "The Operative," directed by Yuval Adler, doesn't offer much distinctive, but it does deliver a few suspenseful sequences, some interesting nuts and bolts details of espionage work and a good lead performance en route to an unsatisfying ending. The intrigue begins when Thomas (Martin Freeman), who worked for the Mossad, receives an unexpected call from Rachel (Diane Kruger), a former operative he used to handle. What she is up to and why the Mossad trusted her her international upbringing and loose ties to Israel made her a valuable asset, even as they threw her loyalties into question come under the microscope.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
At the only Grand Slam tournament where marathon matches are still allowed to drift endlessly into the unknown, Lorenzo Giustino and Corentin Moutet took more than six hours to finish Monday what had started a day earlier at the French Open. Giustino, an Italian qualifier ranked 157th, prevailed, 0 6, 7 6 (7), 7 6 (3), 2 6, 18 16, over the 71st ranked Moutet of France. The match started Sunday but was suspended after nearly two hours because of rain, with Giustino leading by 4 3 in the third set. It resumed on Monday and ultimately lasted six hours five minutes, split between the two days. After rule changes instituted at the Australian Open and Wimbledon last year, each of the four Grand Slam tournaments now ends deadlocked final sets in its own fashion. The U.S. Open holds a first to seven tiebreaker at 6 6. The Australian Open has a first to 10 tiebreaker at 6 6. And Wimbledon waits until 12 12 to play a first to seven tiebreaker. At the French Open, however, no such finish line has been drawn onto the powdery red clay surface: Final sets of main draw singles matches continue beyond 6 6 until a player has a two game lead. Giustino, who played his first Grand Slam main draw only earlier this year in Melbourne, did not realize the unique rule at Roland Garros until he was watching a first round match Sunday between Jurij Rodionov and Jeremy Chardy, which Rodionov won, 10 8, in the fifth set. "I said, 'No, there is no tiebreaker in the fifth?'" Giustino recalled asking his coach. "I said, 'No, way, man.' And so my coach said, 'You know that you will go like 12 10, something like that, in the fifth.' I always do like this in my matches and look what happened." Giustino indeed went long in qualifying even though tiebreakers were used. He won in a final set tiebreaker in his first round qualifying match, and 7 5 in the third set of his second round qualifying match. Monday's match, perhaps surprisingly, did not break any records, coming in as the fourth longest match in Grand Slam history, and the second longest at the French Open by elapsed time. It did equal the mark for most games in the fifth set of a French Open match, tying the 34 games in which Paul Henri Mathieu beat John Isner in 2012, and in which Facundo Bagnis defeated Julien Benneteau in 2014. Both those matches also featured French players, each packing thousands into the stands. But in this pandemic era Grand Slam event, where the French government has capped spectators at 1,000 per day, Moutet was not able to even have his relatives who live near Roland Garros in attendance. "I am used to sharing it with my loved ones every year; it wasn't possible this year," Moutet said. "It's a shame, but hey, it's for the good of all, and it's necessary. There are things that are more important than our well being as tennis players." As word of the interminable fifth set spread around the grounds, however, a decent contingent of people flocked to Court 14 to watch the conclusion. "It was really cool they came to see me, to encourage me, despite the small audience," said Moutet, who spent some of his free time during the coronavirus hiatus writing and performing moody piano driven rap music. "Frankly, there was everything for me to win this game, finally. Everyone did everything to make me win this game. I failed to win," Moutet said. "It sure hurts." Giustino, who is part of a deep crop of rising talent in Italian men's tennis, said he thought he spotted some of his compatriots urging him on from the stands of Court 14, but he couldn't be confident who was behind every mask. "I saw people who were trying to give me energy, and I thought, OK, this guy is not French for sure," he said. After the longest match of his career, Giustino joked that he was ready for more. "Perfect," he said. "Tomorrow I'll go run a bit because I think I'm too fresh."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Credit...Nathan Bajar for The New York Times Accessible. Inclusive. Welcoming. If you're the leader of an arts nonprofit in the 21st century, chances are you promote these values, or you try. Two years ago, Performance Space New York, formerly known as PS122, opened its renovated doors with "an ambition to be relevant and accessible to all of New York," as Jenny Schlenzka, its new artistic and executive director, said at the time. Now this storied East Village institution, a home for experimentation in live performance since 1980, seems to be examining what that really means and how such a goal might be realized in more than a superficial way. In an unusual scrambling of institutional power dynamics, Ms. Schlenzka has taken a step back from her curatorial position, while a cohort of artists loosely guided by the choreographer Sarah Michelson has assumed a collaborative leadership role. The yearlong project, "02020," seeks to reimagine what Performance Space might be; a refusal of the status quo, it puts the vision of artists at the center of an organization that professes to care deeply about art and the people who make it. They all have keys to the building, office space and the support of Performance Space's staff. Also at their full disposal, including to pay themselves, is the annual 500,000 programming budget. So what are they up to? Not even Ms. Schlenzka entirely knows. "It's so much giving up of control," she said in an interview across the street from 122 Community Center, where Performance Space is located. "Like, I'm sitting here with The New York Times, and I don't even know what's going on in my place for the next year." I can't pretend to fully know either. As a writer who typically asks questions and receives answers when working on a story like this, I found myself in an unfamiliar situation when, one day last month, I arrived at Performance Space for an interview with members of the cohort. As I stepped into a sunlit office, I was met by eight people seated around a conference table in masked black hooded sweatshirts, their zippered eye and mouth openings pointed vigilantly in my direction. (Later I noticed a ninth, Ms. Michelson, slumped in a chair in a far corner of the room.) I asked if they would start by sharing their names. Their reply: "We would prefer not to." Over the next half hour, the cohort members read from a text they had prepared in advance, at times echoing one another in a refrain that can't be printed here, but that made clear their desire to thoroughly dismantle the inner workings of Performance Space New York. As they took turns speaking, or overlapped, other phrases came up again and again: "There is no consensus," "Welcome is a warning," "Did we miss anything?" Their tone could be matter of fact or militant. "We know that the current operational state of the institution doesn't actually fit," one speaker said. "It doesn't always actually support radical care or the elevation of all people regardless of their brand." "We produce value for institutions, companies and governments, not the other way around," another said. "We're coming at this from a place of abundance, not scarcity, and collaboration, not competition. Artist exceptionalism upholds empire." "When we abolish museums and galleries as gate kept spaces of beauty and truth," someone posited, "what new forms of power will develop in their place? How can we break this cycle?" Disrupting the traditional artist journalist relationship was, evidently, a start. (This article, I should add, began in a traditional way, with a publicist for Performance Space pitching it to me.) When the group told me now was my chance to "state" any questions, I read the ones I had prepared. For example: "How did you all come to be here together?" and "What can the public expect to engage with here?" They responded by scribbling illegibly, saying "excellent questions" and returning to their script. This made my job more difficult, but the underlying message resonated: the insistence on reallocating power. We don't need institutions (mainstream press included), the artists seemed to be saying; institutions need us. When they asked me, "Do you feel welcome?" I reflexively said yes, though I didn't, at least not in the way I usually do when institutions ask me to write about them. And that, I think, was the point: to destabilize who is customarily let in, welcomed, and how. Earlier that day in a one on one interview, equally unconventional, Ms. Michelson spoke about her frustrations with "the world that treats artists as pets in every way." Known for challenging institutional norms in her own work of the past 30 years including the role of the press; she often asks not to be reviewed she invited me to sit by her side as she read from her laptop and occasionally bellowed "Back up!" ("Every now and then I might yell," she had warned me.) "I'm encountering the purveyor and the voyeur over and over," she said, "and I'm wondering why I'm so lonely, and how does any real work get done?" "02020," as far as I can tell, is an answer to that question. The project grew out of conversations between Ms. Schlenzka and Ms. Michelson, who has a long history of presenting her work at Performance Space, including as part of Ms. Schlenzka's inaugural season, in 2018. (A 2019 MacArthur fellow who rose to art world stardom in the 2010s, Ms. Michelson has no doubt benefited from the kind of artist exceptionalism that upholds empire.) Ms. Schlenzka said that as she was considering how to honor the institution's 40th anniversary, she wanted to focus more on the future than on the past. She sought advice from Ms. Michelson, who offered a not totally serious idea: "'Why don't you give the keys and the budget to a bunch of artists and see what they would do?'" "She was laughing, of course," Ms. Schlenzka said, "thinking that would never, ever happen, and I was laughing, too." But the idea stayed with her. "Even though we've gotten great feedback from artists we worked with over the last two years," she said, "I perceive a certain frustration, especially from artists of color, that they don't feel served by institutions." She began to realize, she added: "Maybe as someone who is white, middle class, from a certain position, I have all these blind spots. Maybe you really have to invite artists in deeper, and they could show you the way of doing things differently." She and Ms. Michelson convened a "think tank" of about 15 artists from a range of backgrounds, who gathered over three days last spring to discuss the idea. (At Ms. Michelson's request, Ms. Schlenzka attended only briefly, so that participants could speak freely and not worry about pleasing someone in a position of power.) Ultimately, Ms. Schlenzka said, everyone agreed that the "02020" concept was worth pursuing. Among the think tank participants was the veteran choreographer Ishmael Houston Jones, who has known Performance Space since its beginnings as an abandoned school building taken over by a group of artists. (He is now on the board of directors.) He said in a phone interview that while he doesn't feel nostalgic for the grittiness of the early PS122 the lack of heat in the winters, the boombox as a sound system those years had a certain artistic electricity. "It would be interesting to see if we could revisit the excitement of that time with the resources we have today," he said. Since moving into Performance Space in January, the "02020" cohort has been gradually rolling out its plans. One of its first initiatives, Open Movement, recalls a PS122 tradition in both name and intent. Two days a week, theater space is free for use; anyone can come to work on anything, no reservations necessary. In late March, rotating teachers and facilitators will offer "permission slipping," a series of workshops in "movement and mental practice," open to all, according to Performance Space's email newsletter. Brujas has started what it calls "an experimental union for cultural producers" Brujas World Syndicate, also open to all and a radio station, Radio Bonita, which streams from the newly decked out Performance Space lobby. The cohort will hold its first public news conference on March 16. "The space feels alive," Ms. Schlenzka said. She is still at work organizing the 2021 season and the annual gala, which will go on as usual in May, hosted this year by the playwright Jeremy O. Harris. She said she hopes that by the end of the year the board will restructure Performance Space's mission statement, informed by the presence of the "02020" cohort.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Jake Rabinowitz and Marie Axen are native New Yorkers. He grew up on the Upper West Side and she in Park Slope, Brooklyn. When they met two years ago, Mr. Rabinowitz, a graduate of Tulane University, was renting a studio in Kips Bay, paying around 2,000 a month. For the first time, he could walk to work at an advertising agency where he is a creative director. Ms. Axen, now 29, was renting on the Upper East Side with a friend from New York University. She paid 1,300 for her half of a tiny, noisy two bedroom. "The girl upstairs was like a tap dancing elephant," Ms. Axen said. "I feel it was domestic terrorism. I don't know how I lived there." Last winter, the couple went on the hunt for a rental of their own. A two bedroom would be best or a one bedroom where the bedroom didn't abut the living room. Some kind of outdoor space was important, too. "Any time the sun is out," Ms. Axen thinks "we should be outside," said Mr. Rabinowitz, who himself, in the past, had gazed enviously upon neighboring roof decks. With a budget of 3,400, the couple began the hunt three months before their leases were up, to learn what was available. They tried South Harlem, where they could get more space for their money. They liked a 2010 condominium building on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, with a shared roof deck. A large one bedroom for rent there was 3,200. "The refrigerator had a window so you could see inside," Mr. Rabinowitz said. It was too early to move, however. "I was enamored with this building so we kept an eye on it," he said. A few weeks later, another one bedroom appeared there. This one had its own roof deck with a gas grill. It was 3,400. Mr. Rabinowitz arrived early for the open house, but another couple was already there. He was worried. They later learned the apartment went to someone the other couple? who offered a year's rent upfront. "I had been refreshing StreetEasy every hour for weeks," Mr. Rabinowitz said. Most places turned out to be small, dark and pricey. His lease expired. He temporarily returned to his childhood bedroom on the Upper West Side. The two decided against South Harlem. "We were embittered about the neighborhood and we weren't finding much," he said. So they shifted focus to the Upper West Side, where they saw a two bedroom duplex on West End Avenue in the 70s with a great roof deck but a scary spiral staircase. The interior was worn. The rent was 3,350. They declined. "I was getting numb to this process, and Marie started to pick up the pace because she could sense I was downtrodden," Mr. Rabinowitz said. Via StreetEasy, Ms. Axen contacted David Marciano, an agent at Guidance NY, which specializes in the Upper West Side. He took them to a handful of prewar rentals. "I was not seeing the charm in any of them," Ms. Axen said. "They were old and stinky, and the windows were in weird places." But Mr. Marciano contacted them immediately when one more arose, a two bedroom duplex with a private roof deck, at the top of a walk up building. This one, with a sunken living room, was utterly charming. The price was 3,600 a month, plus a broker fee of 12 percent of a year's rent, or nearly 5,200. "We had been on such an arduous search, and it was so unique we just couldn't pass it up," Mr. Rabinowitz said. They arrived in the spring, needing to acquire furniture for the second bedroom and outdoor space. Big boxes were delivered to the lobby. They wrestled them up the stairs.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Not just any bar in New York City will offer you corn nuts in a coupe de champagne that took six artisans to craft from fine crystal. But that is how things are done in The Bar at Baccarat Hotel. With its prismatic glass facade and 114 light filled suites (Champagne on speed dial, flutes at the ready), the entire property was created as a 21st century embodiment of a French crystal brand founded circa 1764 by the royal decree of King Louis XV. "I mean, listen, the name is worth 100 million bucks," said Barry Sternlicht, the chairman and C.E.O. of Starwood Capital Group. Years after creating W Hotels named after W Magazine, his target audience the developer bought Baccarat as part of a French conglomerate. "The thought was we could grow this brand and make it relevant again." So in 2015, he turned it into a hotel, "making it 3 D," he said, and "fun." Mr. Sternlicht, who recently signed deals for sister properties in Bordeaux, France, and Doha , Qatar, is not the only one building hotels based on brands people love. Fashion labels from Armani to Versace have been dabbling in hospitality for years. And Nobu has spun its Japanese fusion restaurant empire into an overnight experience in eight locations (expect 20 by 2020). Whether in Manila or Marbella, Spain, guests are welcomed with Oshibori towels and Ikaati tea, and can order the chef's signature dishes, along with his riffs on local classics, via 24 hour room service . But lately, there's been a critical mass of companies getting into hospitality, from fitness clubs (kicking off next year in New York: Equinox Hotels) to film companies (Paramount Hotels Resorts is bringing chiaroscuro lighting and Hollywood themed suites to Dubai and beyond). "Hotel brands are not overbuilt, but under demolished," said Chekitan Dev, a professor of marketing at Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration and the author of "Hospitality Branding." "Too many hotel brands exist that do not have a compelling and defensible point of view," he said, adding that millennials "love a unique point of view." They also love traveling, already surpassing boomers in trips , according to Nielsen, the global market research company. The generation's disruptive rise has come with that of Airbnb and Amazon, causing some angst among traditional hotel and lifestyle businesses. As the former do some soul searching and the latter seeks new ways to engage customers, more of them are teaming up. " They call their store managers 'shopkeepers' and I call our G. M.s 'innkeepers' I think this sealed the deal," said the owner of Salt Hotels, David Bowd, also a co founder of the hospitality management firm DDK and now principal of West Elm Hotels. Opening in Indianapolis by 2020, they'll have local staffers trained at the new West Elm Academy, and buyable furnishings designed with regional makers. Meanwhile, Restoration Hardware has been curating RH Design Galleries, where collections are showcased amid wine bars and rooftop parks, blending home retail and hospitality. The next one is scheduled to open in September in New York City's Meatpacking District. Also coming to the neighborhood: the first RH Guesthouse. "The hotel business is becoming a lifestyle business," Professor Dev said. Having consulted with everyone from Bulgari which just opened its sixth jewel like hotel, in Shanghai to InterContinental Hotels Group, he noted, "It is a lot easier for lifestyle brands to extend into hospitality" than the other way around. As millennials prioritize experiences over things, it's a way for these companies to keep themselves in the picture, ideally via Instagram feeds. A nd of course, guests might want to prolong their experience beyond a stay or a Snapchat story, and buy the brand's products. Hence this December, near its factories in Detroit, Shinola is extending its homegrown craftsmanship into a hotel: 129 rooms with American white oak furnishings, Shinola leather pillows and Bluetooth speakers, and bathroom fixtures inspired by the casebacks of its watches like the one specially designed for hotel staff, to be sold exclusively on site. But according to Shinola's creative director, Daniel Caudill, "It's not just about retail, it's about creating a space that speaks to the local community." With the Detroit based real estate firm Bedrock and the hotel operator Mac Lo, the brand is revitalizing an entire block of Woodward Avenue, the Motor City's "Main Street," where the country's first concrete highway was built in 1909. Now, they're building bike lanes better for riding Shinola's handcrafted cruisers, all for rent not to mention a walkable Shinola Alley with local shops and beer gardens. And Vipp Denmark's family run trash can manufacturer turned modernist design company has unveiled lodgings of its own, staging its "tools for living" in two one room venues : the window walled Shelter, near Sweden's Lake Immeln, and the art studded Loft in central Copenhagen. While the Vipp Hotel is growing northern Copenhagen's Chimney House opens soon co owner Sofie Egelund said, "We will not be the new Marriott chain." Although it's worth noting that another major hotel brand, AccorHotels, created a Lifestyle division, and has been looking for fresh concepts. Their latest find: Lola James Harper. What began with Rami Mekdachi 's scented candles inspired by memories of places that Mr. Mekdachi, who is the founder, loves has grown into a kaleidoscope of the Parisian's creations, collaborations and favorite things: sun drenched photos from family travels; perfume, coffee and music made with friends; basketball. Mr. Mekdachi describes the brand as a "holistic project about art, friendship, family, slow life and sunshine." And so later this year, the first Hotel Lola James Harper is set to open in Paris. It recently had a three month, 3,230 square foot lobby "activation" at Le Bon Marche Rive Gauche, with Mr. Mekdachi's candles, prints and "pic shirts" displayed around a bamboo bar serving the label's coffee and tea blends, and with Acapulco chairs, palm trees and a music studio. The hotel will complete the immersion with a room screening comedies all day (nodding to Lola James Harper's patchouli tinged TV Basement of Jonet scent), and, in lieu of a gym, "a pink room with a hoop and a blue basketball," designed with Mr. Mekdachi's friends at the Venice Basketball League. Each floor will have a different fragrance, while LPs will play from the lobby cum vinyl store; when the album changes, a new spray will be spritzed. "Newness is not the point," Mr. Mekdachi said. "The point is to stimulate imagination and poetry. Hotels are not anymore places where you go just to sleep and eat and shower. People want meaning." According to the travel marketing organization MMGY Global, he's right: For the first time in 12 years, American travelers plan to take fewer vacations, but to spend more on "meaningful" ones. Thus, Accor is looking to spread Lola James Harper's meaning far and wide. Still, Mr. Mekdachi said, "Little by little with joy this is my motto." It's also the name of one of his eau de toilettes, which, with notes of orange blossom, will be made into bar soap exclusively for the hotel bathrooms. Both will be available for purchase at checkout.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The cackling can sound like a chicken who is facing his certain death; the eye rolling suggests that vaudeville is not dead. Whenever unlikely lovers pair up, onlookers are rarely without an opinion or the kinds of noises you would expect from third graders shown videos of childbirth. It doesn't matter if the couples' unlikeliness is based in their disparate ages, their levels of attractiveness, status, physical size or race: Show them a Rupert Murdoch or a Madonna, and the world goes all Joan Rivers. We've grown inured to many of these responses. It seemed only inevitable that the British gossip website Popbitch would invoke the phrase "Gruesome Twosome" to the recent marriage of Rupert Murdoch, 84, to Jerry Hall, 59, and we saw an equally measured response to US magazine's reporting on Thursday that Mr. Murdoch's former wife Wendi Deng Murdoch, 47, is dating Vladimir V. Putin, 63, the president of Russia. But it's slightly bizarre when your otherwise hip and socially liberal friends make the same kind of comments, particularly when the couples in question are not on the child producing or child rearing path. What's going on here? How is this any different from racism or homophobia? "It's absolutely not different in almost all ways but one: It is tolerated in our society," said Ben Michaelis, a clinical psychologist. "Unfortunately when people don't understand certain other people, they tend to place them as an out group, psychologically. Then one of the ways they bring their psyches back into balance is to lower these out groups, and the other way is to attack them." Celebrity couples are, of course, particularly susceptible to this kind of scrutiny and biliousness. Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist at Oxford University, said: "Celebrity watching has to do with making sure the famous are not breaking the rules too much. We pay for them to be up there." For some fans it's even more personal. Elaine Lui, a Canadian gossip maven, a reporter for CTV's "etalk" and a host of the talk show "The Social," said: "When a celebrity gets together with someone who fans perceive is not on his level, it's almost an insult. You're like: 'I cast you in this glorious light. If you pick someone who is close to me in status or looks, then why did I put you on a pedestal?'" Thus the tabloids' fascination with lithe male actors and their zaftig, or conventionally shaped, wives. But when the couple is not famous, the motive behind the cattiness is less clear. Dr. Dunbar has written that gossip is often a form of social order, a way to cement bonds with your own tribe and to assert values with them. He said, "In most small scale, traditional, hunter gatherer societies, typically the word for your tribe is simply the word meaning human, and anyone else belongs to a category that includes all the other animals." To joke with a friend about a millionaire chief executive dating an impecunious graduate student is to acknowledge that the society we both live in is one in which magazine articles titled "Who Makes What" are not considered vulgar. Indeed, the inappropriate comments aren't necessarily derived from intolerance. Victoria Binda, a teacher in New York City who is a white woman married to a black man, said that when she and her husband introduce themselves to new acquaintances, "almost everyone asks if we plan to make beautiful mixed babies, since mixed babies are, as apparently decreed by some higher authority on infantile beauty, the most beautiful. My husband and I do not plan on having children, a decision that inevitably disappoints our audience and all of the human race. Some have suggested we are refusing to contribute to a better and more blended society." But that's not the only thing on people's mind when they meet Ms. Binda and her husband. "Many other women feel it's acceptable, even clever, to comment on our sexual relationship," she said. "They assume that my husband is well endowed and that we engage in a lot of wild extracurricular activities." David Gilmore, a photographer and graphic designer, recounted riding on Amtrak in California in 2010 with his boyfriend, who was 21 years Mr. Gilmore's junior. Mr. Gilmore said: "A conductor recognized me from a previous trip and said: 'Hey, welcome back. Is this your boy?' To which I shot him a stern look, and he got it. He said: 'Oh, he's your boy! Got it.'" Mr. Gilmore said of the incident and his partner: "I think it hurt our relationship. He already had his mother being homophobic and ageist." Certain anxieties seem more justified than others. To be sure, uncharitable comments leveled at older men who repeatedly throw over their wives for increasingly age inappropriate mates are of a different order from other kinds of deprecations, given the lack of originality on these conquistador husbands' part. Ditto the instances in which one partner is very young: that Eugene O'Neill disinherited his daughter, Oona, after the 18 year old married the 54 year old Charlie Chaplin is understandable in the same way that the public's bafflement about Woody Allen taking up with Soon Yi Previn was. Even Mr. Gilmore, who is in a relationship with a man 23 years his junior, has sympathy for the woman who's been dumped by her husband for a trophy wife. "My first thought is: 'Poor woman. How could you not see it coming?'" he said. "Then, 'Hope you have a good divorce lawyer.'" Snarky comments made about other unlikely alliances, however, often bespeak a callousness or a lack of esprit. When you marvel or jeer at the fact that one of the stars of TV's "Nashville," the petite actress Hayden Panettiere, is with the hulking boxer Wladimir Klitschko a man 16 inches taller, 14 years older and unknown tons heavier than she is are you unintentionally asserting the values of your culture, or are you broadcasting to the world the impoverished dimensions of your imagination? The world's oldest story rarely fails to rattle. Dr. Dunbar, the Oxford anthropologist said: "I suppose the question is, 'Which is more surprising, Rupert Murdoch marrying Jerry Hall, or if Jerry Hall married a 20 year old?' One look at Rupert Murdoch, you shake your head and think, 'What on earth is Jerry Hall thinking?' But if it were the other way around, you'd be absolutely astounded." Many would. But to be so would be to make the world a smaller and meaner place. A place where the paradigm of romance and love is the crowded and smelly Noah's Ark. A place where ultimately the joke may be on you. "I'll look at a couple walking down the street and think, 'He's on his third marriage and she's a gold digger,'" Ms. Lui said. "But even if that were true, she's getting hers and he's getting his. Sure, I'm being mean about it, but I'm the only person being hurt by it because I'm not getting mine."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Out in the world, the coronavirus is upending the economy and global politics, tearing at the social fabric, and also, by extension, brutalizing the arts canceled performances, delayed releases, gig economy workers left to fend for themselves. But art itself persists, especially music, which can be made and distributed on the cheap. The last couple of weeks have seen a glut of live stream performances, and the release of many new albums and songs. Sometimes the collision of good intentions and free time can lead to missteps, like the Gal Gadot organized celebrity round table singalong of "Imagine" that unified social media in resistance. Sometimes you get Cardi B's "Coronavirus (Remix)." This week's Popcast includes conversations with pop music critics about how to do their work when the world is in tumult. What might you hear in music under these circumstances that you wouldn't otherwise? Is it possible to hear music without framing the experience through the lens of the current circumstances? Is it ethically correct, or worthwhile, to write negative reviews while the world is in upheaval? None Lindsay Zoladz, who writes about music for The New York Times, Pitchfork, Vulture and others	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Silent Discos Let You Dance to Your Own Beat Just after sunset on a recent Friday night, what looked like a silent flash mob or a mass game of charades was taking place in a cordoned off cobblestone square in the South Street Seaport: some 300 people dancing wildly, sans music. Or so it seemed. There were actually three D.J.s dueling for the crowd's attention, but their tunes could be heard only through wireless headphones, which glowed red, blue or green depending on which channel the reveler chose. It was a silent disco, a phenomenon that has taken off at music festivals (Coachella, Bonnaroo), bars and weddings as a way to party without running afoul of noise ordinances and curfews or in the case of universities, studying students (U.C.L.A. recently held one in the library rotunda in the run up to finals). This is clubbing for people who don't want to be subjected to the will of one D.J. for the evening and, because the wearer controls the volume, clubbing for people who don't want ringing ears and sore throats the next morning. "I used to go to clubs, but the music is too loud," said Andre Coppedge, 38, who drove with seven friends from Allentown, Pa., to the South Street Seaport. "Here you party the whole time, and if you don't like the song, you just change the frequency." Joshua Diamond, 30, who came with his fiancee and another couple, said the silent discos are "more PG than regular clubbing." In fact, in deference to the under 13 attendees, of which there were a few, House of Pain's "Jump Around" was edited to remove offensive lyrics. "We didn't used to do that, but we got bombarded with emails from parents when we tried to make these events over 21," said Castel Valere Couturier, founder of Sound Off Experience, which ran the disco. Those who stumbled upon the event (as many did, because there was no booming music to draw them over) may have thought it was a pop up garden party, a cult, or the en masse equivalent of the guy who runs on the gym treadmill singing aloud to a song only he can hear. To an onlooker with no headphones, it sounded like an impromptu a cappella battle of the bands, with a bunch of people pogoing up and down singing Kriss Kross's "Jump" while others yelled the words to Montell Jordan's "This Is How We Do It." Whether the experience is isolating or integrating depends on whom you ask. "This is what we've been reduced to: dancing with ourselves," said Bernadette Gay, 56, who, hips shaking and white iPhone headphones snaking out of her pocket, could have been the classic ad for iTunes. Ms. Gay, who works for a health care company, tried the silent disco channels briefly, but returned the big black wireless headphones, deciding she herself was the best D.J. (Her pick: the Colombian singer Carlos Vives.) She added: "I remember when Walkmen came out. It's isolating. Where's the connection?" But Chanez Baali, 31, a media technology company director in Woodside, Queens, said that she frequently goes alone to silent discos. "You're in your own little world," she said. "You stop thinking about what you look like, and so you're not as shy about striking up conversations." It helps that the silliness factor makes everyone more approachable, she said. The first major silent disco was in England at Glastonbury in 2005, whose organizers were battling noise restrictions. "You'd never lose yourself in the music because the minute it would hiccup or crackle, you'd go out of it," said Ryan Dowd, formerly a tour manager for bands like Widespread Panic and Drive By Truckers, and now founder of Silent Events, which has organized noiseless festivities for clients including Bonnaroo and Gawker Media. (They now use short range radio frequency headphones, which don't present the same problem.) There are more than a dozen companies orchestrating silent parties, with names like Hush Concerts and ZEROdB (as in decibel), most of whose founders stumbled on the concept while abroad. Mr. Valere Couturier tried it beachside in Israel. William Petz, founder of Quiet Events, based in Astoria, Queens, spotted it four years ago while on a cruise with family to Bermuda. "My girlfriend and I were like, 'This sounds really stupid, but what else is there to do on a ship?' " He conceded it was fun and promptly invested in 350 pairs of headphones, planning to sell them on eBay if the business failed. He now has more than 6,000 pairs, bookings as far away as China and a standing night at the beer garden at Bohemian Hall in Astoria, which draws up to 1,000 people. The bar's manager Andrew Walters said the disco is indeed an attraction. "He has his own list of people and they come out just for this," he said. "You get calls from people trying to do these very cool destination weddings like Maui and the Cayman Islands where you rent these villas and you think it's carte blanche, but they're going to shut you down at 9," Mr. Dowd said. He also recently received a call from a well known production studio requesting a silent disco for a scene in an upcoming film. "They're not making fun of it, so we're going to do it," he said. The newest frontier for these silent companies is fitness: yoga, boot camps and spin classes, where headphones mean the instructor doesn't have to shout and no one needs earplugs. At a silent version of a high intensity interval workout called Shakedown Fitness, held at Black River Studios in Harlem, students from the ballet class downstairs popped up asking if the class had been canceled, because they were used to complaining about the D.J.'s hip hop tunes drowning out their Tchaikovsky. Mr. Petz has even tried silent comedy, which pits two entertainers against each other. "If you see the other guy has all the listeners, you have to be very visual to get people to switch over," he said. "Like taking a shirt off." Kim Scolaro, 31, otherwise known as DJ Kharisma, said working silent discos is more challenging than any other party. "When you're the only D.J., you can do what you want, take it easy sometimes," said Ms. Scolaro, who worked the Seaport event. "But here you have to constantly give it your all. You're getting instant about what songs people like and don't like." (At some music festivals, there is just one channel because organizers don't want to subject the talent to battle. But Mr. Dowd said that happens infrequently.) "I couldn't have enough fun with them on," she said. (Thanks to the headphones, earrings were actually the most removed accessory.) Ms. Loney, who is from Trinidad, added: "When I'm home, people tell me I have no rhythm. But I can do anything here." In other words, who can tell if it's bad rhythm or she's just dancing to a different beat? Nearby, Nicole Lancia, 34, and her friend Kelly Washburn, 33, alternately laughed, danced and people watched. "It's hysterical," said Ms. Lancia, who happened on the event after a sushi dinner a block away. "It feels like you're singing in the shower." She and Ms. Washburn watched a woman dancing with her two sons belt out Whitney Houston's "I'm Every Woman." "I want to be on the same station as her," Ms. Lancia said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
"Naked Athena." Have you heard of her? She's the woman who was so christened after she strolled into a recent Portland protest one that was ostensibly, crucially, about Black lives stark naked, save a mask (kudos to that) and skullcap. She sat down with her legs wide, and proceeded to do some yoga poses. Some say she was putting herself between protesters and police, that she was turning the cultural sacredness of a white (or at least a white passing) woman's body into a shield against rubber bullets and tear gas. Naked Athena whose friend describes her as a light skinned person of color and outspoken feminist said nada during her demonstration and hasn't been interviewed, so I can't know her intentions. What I can say with confidence is that what she did was aligned with the "weird" that Portland espouses in its beloved slogan: "Keep Portland Weird." What I can say with reasonable assurance is that, were she a Black woman, she would've reaped a different public reaction than the ample awe and admiration I've seen on social media. And what I must say is that no matter her intentions, for a moment at least, she might've upstaged the movement, and not in a way I could discern as connected to its stated objectives. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate Naked Athena, and the white Navy veteran whose passivity exposed the bellicose bent of federal agents. I'm thankful for the passion and courage of other white allies during this movement. But I've also been musing on the subject of weirdness how that quality requires freedom, or at least the belief that one possesses it. How the ability to express passion and courage and weirdness is a product of that privilege; how a sense of utopianism of the sort that exists for white people in Portland, my hometown, leads to a certain audacity when it comes to both self expression and political radicalism; how that audacity can make a city into a tempting target for a federal government that's determined to look tough against a purported paragon of eccentric liberalism. Let's be clear: Oregon was intended as a white man's Zion. And since its admission into the union, it has remained one. That isn't intended to distract from, or in any way excuse, the ongoing state violence there; it's just that there should be no serious discussion of my home state or what's happening in my home city that excludes or forgets its founding ethos. Oregon Country's provisional government passed a law excluding Blacks from the territory and, though it voted against slavery, thanks to a member of its first provisional government a former slave holder from Missouri it amended this law to disallow Blacks from remaining within its borders beyond a three year residence. You wouldn't know unless you Sherlocked that Oregon once boasted the largest KKK chapter west of the Mississippi, that it waited over 100 years after the Civil War to ratify the 14th Amendment; it took almost 90 years to ratify the 15th. In the years since, Oregon's largest city has done a bang up job of marketing itself as a bastion of lefty quirkiness as well as a place for great food, beautiful landscapes, formidable cultural scenes and, of course, Just Doing It. But the laws keeping black people out? Oregonians didn't vote to scrub them from the state's books 'til 2002. Per the latest U.S. census statistics, Oregon is 86.7 percent white, and 2.2 percent Black. Portland itself is 77.1 percent white and 5.8 percent Black. That's why the Black Lives Matter protests there look like they do white. They have to; that's who lives there. But in a monolith, it's even easier for white people to center themselves at the expense of those they claim to support. That must make it harder to know where the line is between amplifying a voice and becoming the voice, between ardent allyship and white saviorship, between the values of a cause and the culture of a city. But the difficult thing, the complicated thing, is this movement can't afford to be distorted by "weird." My beloved City of Roses made a great showing at the outset of the Black Lives Matter protests; you might've seen them gathered in a thousands strong die in on the Burnside Bridge, a preponderance of white faces turned downward in an apt symbol of George Floyd, pinned and pleading, under the knee of Derek Chauvin. It made me proud to witness my city's collective conscience over the tragic death of a Black man in far off Minneapolis. But I've felt a bit more ambivalent about the past 50 some days of protests since. A small few have employed anarchist tactics, and/or seem to have lost the vision of a unified agenda. And I've seen nary national coverage of the smaller marches or activism led by Blacks and other people of color out in the Numbers: what we call the part of the city that Black people were dispersed to when whites gentrified my old neighborhood. And now, the feds are there. When I hear Keep Portland Weird, it always sounds to me a lot like Keep Portland White. But I imagine for the 76.3 percent of Americans who still claim white alone on the census, it sounds like Keep Portland a Symbol. Portland is Portlandia. Portland is the new frontier for migrating Brooklyn hipsters. Portland is Bush Sr.'s "Little Beirut," the same place where almost all white Antifa activists once battled neo fascist Proud Boys. Portland whiteness: It leans way left but stretches far right. It's the opposite of ironic, isn't it? A president who has defended white supremacists and championed white power esque policies sent federal agents to a notable bulwark of liberal whiteness, a place engaged in brazen support of a movement pursuing Black freedom. The footage has been straight terrifying: Agents instigating violence, abducting people into unmarked cars, providing more evidence of an administration trooping double time toward totalitarianism. Can you imagine if Trump dispatches these tactics to Chicago and Albuquerque, to blacker and browner cities elsewhere? Let me back up: This ain't me arguing that whiteness always leads to weirdness; that weirdness is necessarily connected to anarchy, and, hell, even anarchists don't excuse fascism. People ringing the alarm about what's happening in Portland are right. But Portland's racial dynamics aren't a distraction from the real story of what's happening there; they're at the heart of it. And what bothers me is that, amid the naked woman, the brave white veterans, the heroic wall of lullabying white moms, the tear gassed mayor, and the unidentified federal agents, we've once again stopped discussing the fight against institutional racism and state sponsored violence against Black people in this country. Those objectives were on my mind in mid June when my homeboy forwarded me a clip of Portland protesters toppling a statue of Thomas Jefferson at his eponymous high school the Oregon high school with the largest share of Black students, and where I graduated in 1993 (One time for the Demos!). Go figure, white men were part of the small crowd that cheered and tugged the statue on the ground and bashed it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
As Aid Workers Move to the Heart of Congo's Ebola Outbreak, 'Everything Gets More Complicated' Aiming to squelch an Ebola outbreak that has infected 54 people, killing almost half of them, aid workers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have begun giving an experimental vaccine to people in the rural region at the epicenter of the outbreak. Epidemiologists working in the remote forests have not yet identified the first case, nor many of the villagers who may have been exposed. Investigators will need to overcome extreme logistical hurdles to reconstruct how the virus was transmitted, vaccinate contacts and halt the spread. "For an epidemic to be under control, you need a clear epidemiological picture," said Dr. Henry Gray, the emergency coordinator for Doctors Without Borders. "If you don't know the stories of the people involved who their families were, what their jobs were, where they went to weddings and funerals then you don't know the epidemic." Almost 500 people received the experimental vaccine, VSV EBOV, last week around Mbandaka, a riverfront city of more than 1.5 million people where four Ebola cases have been confirmed. Mbandaka is a priority because it is a traffic hub. The Republic of the Congo lies just across the Congo River, and Kinshasa, Congo's capital of 10 million, is less than 500 miles downstream. Aid workers are using the ring method: The vaccine is given to groups of people in contact with each Ebola case, such as family caregivers, as well as the contacts of those contacts. About 7,500 doses are available to vaccinate 50 rings of 150 people each, according to Dr. Peter Salama, the deputy director general for emergency response at the World Health Organization. An additional 8,000 doses will follow. "This is where everything gets more complicated," said Chiran Livera, the operation leader in Congo for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. The villages surrounding Bikoro and Iboko are among the most isolated and densely wooded pockets of Congo. Aid workers must use motorbikes to navigate cratered dirt roads that flood during the rainy season. Maps of some regions are incomplete, and vast gaps in cellular service thwart efforts to report data to central operations. "Following the virus's narrative may sounds easy to do on a suburban street outside Chicago," said Dr. Salama. "But when you're traveling hundreds of kilometers in a forest by motorbike to find each person, that's very different epidemiological work." If the outbreak worsens, a second vaccination may be offered to health workers. That vaccine, developed by Johnson and Johnson, requires two doses and would take longer than VSV EBOV's seven to 10 days to become effective but may protect health workers for several years. The Congolese Ministry of Health is planning to deploy up to five experimental treatments, though the two most highly recommended by the W.H.O. may prove impractical in a remote setting. ZMapp, a cocktail of three antibodies used in West Africa, must be given in multiple doses and must be refrigerated. Remdesivir, a drug developed by Gilead Sciences, requires intensive monitoring of liver and kidney function nearly impossible for treatment centers without electricity, running water or standard equipment. Another option, called MAb114, began safety trials earlier this month. Made from the antibodies of an Ebola survivor, it can be crystallized and reconstituted with saline like fluids in the field. "These are all investigative products," Dr. Salama said. Vaccine makers have struggled to show efficacy without live Ebola cases in which to test their drugs. "Many consider this outbreak their chance to prove themselves," he said. Drug companies are not alone in that mission. The W.H.O.'s emergency committee gathered 10 days after the Congolese government notified the organization of an Ebola case, a stark contrast to the West African epidemic in 2014, when the group did not convene until almost 1,000 people had died. Since May 8, the W.H.O. has sent 156 technical experts to the region. A mobile laboratory has been set up to expedite case confirmations in Bikoro; another is planned for Mbandaka. A cellular tower has been erected in Mbandaka to help workers trace people who may have been infected throughout the region. The W.H.O. has more than doubled its budget request to 56 million from 26 million to account for the possibility of the virus may reach an urban setting. "The biggest problem of 2014 was that there had never been an Ebola epidemic before," said Ron Klain, the White House's Ebola response coordinator for West Africa. "This time, there is an intensity, a focus, a pace. No one is underestimating the risk, and that alone is a big advantage."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
SAN FRANCISCO Microsoft's co founder Paul Allen said Wednesday that he was pumping an additional 125 million into his nonprofit computer research lab for an ambitious new effort to teach machines "common sense." The money for the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence will about double the lab's budget over the next three years, helping to fund existing research as well as the new effort, called Project Alexandria. In the years and decades to come, the lab hopes to create a database of fundamental knowledge that humans take for granted but machines have always lacked. "To make real progress in A.I., we have to overcome the big challenges in the area of common sense," said Mr. Allen, who founded the software giant Microsoft in the 1970s with Bill Gates. Today, machines can recognize nearby objects, identify spoken words, translate one language into another and mimic other human tasks with an accuracy that was not possible just a few years ago. These talents are readily apparent in the new wave of autonomous vehicles, warehouse robotics, smartphones and digital assistants.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
According to an I.R.C. spokesman, Welcome Home is focused on New York and Northern California because they're areas that see a high number of refugee arrivals, compared with other places in the United States. This isn't the first time that TripAdvisor has teamed with the I.R.C.: the company initially got involved in the refugee crisis in 2015 by sending an email plea to its more than 100 million members for donations to help refugees and offering to match these contributions in 48 hours, the initiative raised 1.4 million for the I.R.C. as well as for the global humanitarian organization Mercy Corps. In 2016, the company committed 5 million to the crisis, and a large portion of these funds went to the I.R.C. While Welcome Home is a commendable program, said Dr. Bjorn Hanson, an adjunct professor at the Tisch Center for Hospitality at New York University, it's also one that's a creative marketing campaign for TripAdvisor. "The company is part of a very crowded market of online travel agencies, and making a push to get the message out there that it's aiding refugees is a way for it to stand out more to the general public," he said. Whether it's a good marketing tool or not, Dr. Rummy Pandit, the executive director of the Lloyd D. Levenson Institute of Gaming, Hospitality and Tourism at Stockton University in New Jersey, said that TripAdvisor's tours are valuable. "Helping refugees resettle with jobs and by teaching them the local language is critical, but it's also important for them to feel comfortable in their new surroundings," he said. "Sightseeing tours are one way to do that." TripAdvisor is among a handful of large hospitality brands to support refugees. Marriott International, for one, began supporting the I.R.C.'s Hospitality Link program in 2016 initially as Starwood Hotels Resorts, which Marriott later acquired that year. Hospitality Link is an eight week program in various cities that trains resettled refugees in hospitality skills and helps them find careers in the field. Marriott International supports Hospitality Link in San Diego and Dallas, and in 2018, helped expand it to Elizabeth, N.J. Part of the training involves refugees shadowing existing employees in the company's hotels, said Melissa Flood, Marriott's vice president for social impact and public affairs. Since the collaboration began, around 650 refugees have enrolled in the Marriott supported programs, with nearly 100 now employed at various companies, including some of Marriott International's hotels, Ms. Flood said. Internationally, the Munich based Motel One, a budget design chain with 65 hotels in Europe, launched an integration project in 2016 in Munich where refugees receive a six month work placement and have the option to do a two year apprenticeship with the company. They also get state subsidized language courses, a mentor from Motel One and workshops to strengthen intercultural skills. In 2017, Motel One expanded this program to include Berlin.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Robert Grosvenor is the lone wolf of sculpture. In the late 1960s he was almost a Minimalist, but was disqualified by a growing penchant for working with rough materials, scrappy found objects and his own hands. Since then his career has unfolded in singular surprises. The latest is a show of three large, remarkable objects set in a row at Karma gallery in the East Village. Clearly, two of them were once cars. What they have become is less evident: sculpture, yes, but also, zombies, masks, mysteriously inhabited yet empty vessels, assiduously reworked. Above all, they are things to look at and pore over, inside and out, considering what was there at the start and what was added or subtracted. One, possibly an early Volkswagen Beetle, is from the front a smooth and featureless unpainted shell. It's an undulant relic, almost bronze, with an unsettling resemblance to the quasi nosed Voldemort from the "Harry Potter" movies. At the back the surface turns matte gray and militaristic, evoking the possible Beetle's Nazi past, and a large mocking fin has been added. A second sculpture, which suggests a Studebaker Lark, is stripped and seamless, but with protruding edges. It has been coated in lemon yellow so thick that it denies metal, conjuring carved painted wood or glazed ceramic. You may notice that the smaller vehicle slightly squeezed between these two divas is relatively intact and even has license plates. But with canvas seats and a lustrous wooden floor, it is so eccentric and unfamiliar that it also sustains extended study. It is a French Solyto, a three wheel vehicle bred from motorcycles for deliveries and camping. It's not quite a car, but it may be a ready made. Uptown, the Met Breuer is hosting a broad exhibition of the art of Lygia Pape, Brazil's most restless modernist; downtown, the Whitney is opening a retrospective of the psychedelic Brazilian Helio Oiticica. Both artists appear in Galerie Lelong's healthy introduction to Grupo Frente, the abstract art movement they participated in during the fecund 1950s along with Lygia Clark and seven others, many of whom deserve more renown here. Shortly after World War II, Brazil's dictatorial Estado Novo gave way to a democratic republic, and art production exploded. While artists in Sao Paulo's contemporary Grupo Ruptura advocated exacting geometric abstraction, over in Rio de Janeiro the Grupo Frente members practiced a wilier style that had room for personal invention. Ivan Serpa's wonderful gouaches of the mid 1950s, for example, feature dozens of parallel lines that break at the page's midpoint at irregular frequencies. Rubem Ludolf used graph paper to delineate fractured squares and circles, but also painted cloudy abstractions of white blobs afloat in fields of blue green. Grupo Frente stayed together for four years, and by the end of the 1950s Clark, Oiticica and Pape would go on to embrace viewer participation in the experimental movement Neo Concretism. The relatively hushed works here from Clark (a collage of gray diamonds and triangles) and Oiticica (flat gouaches of circles and rectangles) barely hint at what was to come, but it's illuminating to see their art amid works by their old Carioca buddies, as Rio natives are known. The Dramastics are an all girl punk band that invaded the imagination of the sculptor Nathan Carter in 2014. He hadn't made figurative work before, but the band's members came suddenly to life in his studio as paper dolls with exaggerated, slender proportions, naively drawn faces, and a perfect pop color scheme of Parisian bleu, blanc and rouge. He also constructed friends, rivals and venues, all on display in his latest show, in a busy, eager to please installation; wrote and recorded songs; and made an entertainingly silly animated concert video, which screened at the installation's opening. But the stars of this gallery show, as such, are six wall mounted sculptures more in line with Mr. Carter's earlier work. (Their connection to the band is that they are notionally "fascinators," or decorative hats for the characters.) Made from found aluminum painted in an old school but eye catching palette of pastel and primary colors with latex enamel, these explosive swoops and swooshes balance the fun for fun's sake cheer of the Dramastics project with enough formal rigor to make the immediate hit of optical pleasure more lasting. In "Fascinator for Abby Abstract," a spiral of thin lines is ornamented with half moons of magenta and blue; in "Fascinator for Hyped up Harriet," a small yellow circle perches atop a lavender bow like a diffident moon. The popularity of wood as an artistic medium at last year's Sao Paulo Biennial made clear to this viewer, at least the complicated nature of that material in Brazil. The different types of wood and the value and complex cultural significance ascribed to them is similar to that of gems and quarried stone. Wood is also the basis of the Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira's impressive, immersive installation at Van de Weghe on the Upper East Side. For this show, his first solo exhibition in New York, Mr. Oliveira has constructed a life size, leafless tree in the gallery. Unlike artists including Robert Smithson and Mark Dion, who brought live or dead trees into white cube gallery spaces, Mr. Oliveira has constructed a tree from scratch, using plywood and other materials, as well as wood brought from Brazil. Spanning the windowless space, the tree looks like a gothic, creeping creature or a giant skeleton. Mr. Oliveira has also paneled nearly every inch of the room, creating a wood environment that is simultaneously cozy and claustrophobic. Mr. Oliveira has created a beautiful sculptural object. Where the installation falls short, however, is in registering some kind of meaning. Unlike revelatory works in Sao Paulo last year, where wood was implicated in everything from ancient rituals and slavery to colonialism and globalization, Mr. Oliveira's work feels like a slightly vapid curiosity. It might be, as the news release says, a comment on the "disequilibrium of nature and society." Or it might be a handsome woodworking project that showcases excellent craftsmanship, yet lacks the rigor of ambitious art.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Even as the worst drought in decades ravages California, and its cities face mandatory cuts in water use, millions of pounds of thirsty crops like oranges, tomatoes and almonds continue to stream out of the state and onto the nation's grocery shelves. But the way that California farmers have pulled off that feat is a case study in the unwise use of natural resources, many experts say. Farmers are drilling wells at a feverish pace and pumping billions of gallons of water from the ground, depleting a resource that was critically endangered even before the drought, now in its fourth year, began. California has pushed harder than any other state to adapt to a changing climate, but scientists warn that improving its management of precious groundwater supplies will shape whether it can continue to supply more than half the nation's fruits and vegetables on a hotter planet. As a drilling frenzy unfolds across the Central Valley, California's agricultural heartland, the consequences of the overuse of groundwater are becoming plain to see. Max Whittaker for The New York Times In some places, water tables have dropped 50 feet or more in just a few years. With less underground water to buoy it, the land surface is sinking as much as a foot a year in spots, causing roads to buckle and bridges to crack. Shallow wells have run dry, depriving several poor communities of water. Scientists say some of the underground water storing formations so critical to California's future typically, saturated layers of sand or clay are being permanently damaged by the excess pumping, and will never again store as much water as farmers are pulling out. "Climate conditions have exposed our house of cards," said Jay Famiglietti, a NASA scientist in Pasadena who studies water supplies in California and elsewhere. "The withdrawals far outstrip the replenishment. We can't keep doing this." Cannon Michael, a farmer who grows tomatoes, melons and corn on 10,500 acres in the town of Los Banos, in the Central Valley, has high priority rights to surface water, which he inherited with his family's land. But rampant groundwater pumping by farmers near him is causing some of the nearby land to sink, disturbing canals that would normally bring water his way. In the midst of this water crisis, Gov. Jerry Brown and his legislative allies pulled off something of a political miracle last year, overcoming decades of resistance from the farm lobby to adopt the state's first groundwater law with teeth. California, so far ahead of the country on other environmental issues, became the last state in the arid West to move toward serious limits on the use of its groundwater. Last week, Mr. Brown imposed mandatory cuts in urban water use, the first ever. He exempted farmers, who already had to deal with huge reductions in surface water from the state's irrigation works. Mr. Brown defended the decision on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday, saying, "They're providing most of the fruits and vegetables of America to a significant part of the world." In normal times, agriculture consumes roughly 80 percent of the surface water available for human use in California, and experts say the state's water crisis will not be solved without a major contribution from farmers. California's greatest resource in dry times is not its surface reservoirs, though, but its groundwater, and scientists say the drought has made the need for better controls obvious. While courts have taken charge in a few areas and imposed pumping limits, groundwater in most of the state has been a resource anyone could grab. Yet putting strict limits in place is expected to take years. The new law, which took effect Jan. 1, does not call for reaching sustainability until the 2040s. Sustainability is vaguely defined in the statute, but in most basins will presumably mean a long term balance between water going into the ground and water coming out. Scientists have no real idea if the groundwater supplies can last until the 2040s. "I wish we could do it faster," Mark Cowin, director of California's Department of Water Resources, said in an interview. "I wish we would have started decades ago." But Mr. Cowin noted that the state, after neglecting groundwater management for so long, had a lot of catching up to do. Years of bureaucratic reorganization and rule drafting lie ahead. "This is the biggest game changer of California water management of my generation," Mr. Cowin said. In the near term, as the drought wears on and the scramble for water intensifies, farmers are among the victims of the drilling frenzy, as well as among its beneficiaries. Growers with older, shallower wells are watching them go dry as neighbors drill deeper and suck the water table down. Pumping takes huge amounts of electricity to pull up deep water, and costs are rising. Some farmers are going into substantial debt to drill deeper wells, engaging in an arms race with their neighbors that they cannot afford to lose. "You see the lack of regulation hurting the agricultural community as much as it hurts anybody else," said Doug Obegi, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco. Against this backdrop, water thirsty crops like almonds are still being planted in some parts of the Central Valley to supply an insatiable global demand that is yielding high prices. The land devoted to almond orchards in California has doubled in 20 years, to 860,000 acres. The industry has been working hard to improve its efficiency, but growing a single almond can still require as much as a gallon of California's precious water. The expansion of almonds, walnuts and other water guzzling tree and vine crops has come under sharp criticism from some urban Californians. The groves make agriculture less flexible because the land cannot be idled in a drought without killing the trees. Not even the strongest advocates of water management foresee a system in which California farmers are told what they can plant. As the new system evolves, though, the growers might well be given strict limits on how much groundwater they can pump, which could effectively rule out permanent crops like nuts and berries in some areas. "We want to be careful in dealing with this drought not to go down the command and control route if we can avoid it," said Daniel Sumner, professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis. "It interrupts the flexibility, the creativity and the resilience that people in agriculture have already been using to deal with severe water cutbacks." They were forced to idle only about 5 percent of the state's irrigated land last year, though the figure is likely to be higher in 2015. The farmers have directed water to the highest value crops, cutting lesser crops like alfalfa. They have bought and sold surface water among themselves, making the best use of the available supply, experts like Dr. Sumner say. And the farmers' success at coping with the drought has meant relatively few layoffs of low income farmworkers. Still, costs are up and profits are down for many farmers and the thousands of small businesses that depend on them, spreading pain throughout the Central Valley and beyond. "It's been a tough couple of years, and it's just getting tougher in rural parts of California," said Dave Kranz, a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau Federation, a growers' organization. Because groundwater has helped keep production up, replacing a large proportion of the surface water farmers have lost, the drought has not led to big price increases at the national level, even for crops that California dominates. Max Whittaker for The New York Times Once the drought ends, a growing population and a climate altered by human caused global warming will continue to put California's water system under stress, experts say. A major question is how to manage the groundwater to get Californians through dry years. Meeting that goal may have as much to do with how surface water is managed as with how much is pumped from the ground. Several California experts used the metaphor of a bank account to describe the state's groundwater supply. Deposits need to be made in good times, they said, so that the water can be withdrawn in hard times. Yet for decades, California farmers have been overdrawing many of the state's water holding formations its aquifers even in years when surface water for irrigation was plentiful, the equivalent of overdrawing a checking account. That will need to change, the experts said, with pumping being limited or even prohibited in wet years so that the underground water supply can recharge. Some land may need to be flooded on purpose so the water can seep downward. The need for groundwater recharge may ultimately limit how much water farmers can have from the surface irrigation system, even in flush years the same way that deposits in a bank account limit how many fancy dinners one can eat. Yet in a state where irrigation rights have been zealously guarded for generations, such limitations may not go down easily. "It would be silly to think you are not going to have any fights," said Denise England, the water expert for Tulare County, toward the southern end of the Central Valley. She cited an aphorism of the West: "Whiskey's for drinking, and water's for fighting over."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Follow the OSIRIS REX mission's attempt to collect samples from Bennu asteroid. Launched two years ago, NASA's Osiris Rex spacecraft pulled alongside the asteroid Bennu on Monday. Its mission is to survey the asteroid ahead of retrieving pristine bits of the solar system from the rock's surface and then bringing them back to Earth in the years ahead. With a short engine burn, the spacecraft matched the speed and direction of Bennu. A few minutes after noon, Javier Cerna, a communications systems engineer at Lockheed Martin, which built and operates the spacecraft, announced, "We have arrived." What does NASA mean by "arrive?" Osiris Rex's arrival at Bennu was not like the landing of NASA's InSight spacecraft in one piece on the surface of Mars last Monday. (Happily, it landed flawlessly.) By contrast, Osiris Rex pulled in at a modest speed, and the moment of arrival was somewhat arbitrary. The spacecraft started the approach phase of its mission in August when it was 1.2 million miles from Bennu. On Monday, it was just 12 miles away, although still too far away to orbit the asteroid. There was no drama, just a smooth transition to the next phase of the mission. What happens next? Osiris Rex will make a series of passes over the asteroid at a range of 4.3 miles for an initial survey to better determine its mass, rate of spin and shape. In January, the spacecraft will get closer to Bennu, between 0.9 and 1.2 miles, and be drawn into orbit around the asteroid, which will be the smallest object ever to be orbited by a spacecraft. Osiris Rex will then spend more than a year performing reconnaissance of Bennu, before attempting to bounce off the surface and collect a sample of the asteroid in mid 2020. What can you tell me about Bennu? Bennu, discovered in 1999, is a carbon rich, almost black asteroid, about 1,600 feet wide. (That compares to the Empire State Building, which is 1,454 feet tall including the antenna at the top.) Scientists believe that it is a conglomeration of leftovers from the formation of the solar system, largely unchanged over the last 4.5 billion years. Bennu is categorized as a near Earth asteroid, and scientists say there is a small chance it could slam into Earth, but not until the 22nd century if it happens at all. (It is not large enough to cause planet wide extinctions, but it would be catastrophic at the point of impact.) Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar. What are scientists hoping to learn from Bennu? By studying a primitive asteroid, scientists hope to get a better idea of what was around in the solar system's earliest days. Dante Lauretta, the principal investigator of Osiris Rex, said he was particularly interested in gleaning information about organic molecules like amino acids, the building blocks of proteins found on Earth that are also known to exist in interstellar space. One question is whether Bennu contains higher concentrations of the 20 amino acids used by forms of life on Earth. That would suggest the universe favors these amino acids and not dozens of others, even in nonbiological chemical reactions. Life on Earth also exclusively uses so called "left handed" amino acids and not the mirror, right handed versions. Study of the Bennu material could help explain whether nonbiological chemical reactions in space pushed life toward left handed molecules or whether that shift occurred later when life arose. How will Osiris Rex grab a piece of Bennu? In July 2020, the spacecraft, about the size of a sport utility vehicle, is scheduled to slowly descend and bounce off the surface like a pogo stick at a gentle pace of a quarter mile per hour. A sampling head, which looks like an automobile air filter, will shoot a burst of nitrogen to kick up dirt and small rocks during the three to five seconds it is in contact with the surface. The goal is to collect at least a couple of ounces of material and possibly as much as 4.4 pounds. The spacecraft carries enough nitrogen to attempt to extract material three times if necessary. NASA's Osiris Rex spacecraft will hunt down an asteroid and return a sample to Earth. On September 8, 2016, the Osiris Rex spacecraft will rise on a tongue of fire. Leaving Earth on a seven year mission to snatch part of an ancient asteroid and carry it home. Its target is Bennu, a diamond shaped clump of rubble a quarter mile wide. Asteroids like Bennu were the building blocks of the early solar system, 4.5 billion years ago. Most of these chunks of primordial stuff merged long ago in violent collisions to shape the young Earth and other planets. But Bennu survived, pushed and prodded by the gravity of the planets. Today, Bennu has a regular, 14 month orbit, which swings it close to Earth every six years. But sunlight warms the surface of the asteroid, gradually shifting its orbit in a way that could eventually threaten the Earth. Osiris Rex will take two years to reach Bennu, then spend a year mapping its surface. In July, 2020, the spacecraft will pick a spot, and descend. And try to steal a chunk of the primordial past for humans to study for decades to come. An 11 foot arm unfolds and extends. The spacecraft drops, and briefly touches the asteroid. A puff of nitrogen blows a few ounces of ancient dust from the surface. A cosmic high five, before the spacecraft retreats to safety. The sample is weighed and stowed in a fireproof capsule for the two year cruise back to Earth. As it approaches home, Osiris Rex will jettison the sample. Gravity will do the rest. If all goes as planned, the capsule will fall through the atmosphere, open its parachute, and land in the Utah desert on September 24, 2023. A handful of matter retrieved from the dawn of the solar system. Atoms, separated at birth, returned for study after 4.5 billion years of wandering. Future missions might visit another nearby asteroid. A larger spacecraft with robotic arms and legs could straddle a 20 ton boulder, grapple it and tow it away. Then carry it back to orbit the moon, within reach of Earth and its astronauts. Another step in understanding the birth of our solar system and the world on which we live. And perhaps, a clue to protecting our blue and green planet from an asteroid that may, one day, veer too close to home. NASA's Osiris Rex spacecraft will hunt down an asteroid and return a sample to Earth. After departing Bennu in 2021, Osiris Rex will pass by Earth in September 2023, dropping off a capsule with the samples that will land via parachute in a Utah desert. Haven't other spacecraft explored asteroids already? What's so special about Osiris Rex? Quite a few spacecraft have made flybys of asteroids, beginning with NASA's Galileo spacecraft, which passed within 1,000 miles of the asteroid Gaspra in 1991 en route to Jupiter. NASA's NEAR Shoemaker (NEAR is short for Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous) went into orbit around the near Earth asteroid Eros in 2000. Even though it was not designed to land on the asteroid, NEAR Shoemaker did just that in 2001 and continued operating for two weeks from the surface of Eros. The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa collected some dust samples from an asteroid and returned them in Earth in 2005. A follow up mission, Hayabusa2 is, like Osiris Rex, headed to a carbon rich asteroid and is scheduled to bring its samples back to Earth in 2020.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
How Narwhal the 'Unicorn' Puppy May Have Grown a Tail on His Head None A puppy with a tail on his face gained viral fame this week. "I would die for Narwhal," a number of Twitter commenters pledged. The rescue mutt was named for a marine mammal with a single tusk that sticks out of its face. But instead of a tusk, Narwhal the puppy has a miniature tail flopping between his eyes. Scientists don't agree on how the unusual heart stealer came to exist. A Missouri shelter called Mac's Mission, which specializes in what it calls "janky" dogs, took in the abandoned puppy. Staff were disappointed that Narwhal's extra tail didn't wag. But the appendage didn't seem to bother the otherwise normal, healthy puppy, and a veterinarian said there was no need to remove it. An X ray showed no bones. The likeliest explanation for how Narwhal got his face tail is not all that cute, said Margret Casal, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. The tail is probably Narwhal's parasitic twin. Regular identical twins form when an embryo splits in half very soon after fertilization. Sometimes, this split happens too late in a pregnancy and the halves don't fully separate, leading to conjoined twins. Even more rarely, Dr. Casal said, the late split is asymmetrical, meaning one side of the embryo grows into a fully formed individual and the other becomes an extra body part. Dr. Casal highlighted a little mohawk of backward growing fur above Narwhal's face tail, similar to the crest on a dog such as a Rhodesian Ridgeback. She said this could suggest a twin's rear end on Narwhal's face. David Kilroy's first impression of Narwhal was different. "At first I thought that it was a bit of clever computer work and not real," said Dr. Kilroy, who specializes in head anatomy and development at the University College Dublin School of Veterinary Medicine. But after looking at the photos and X ray, he said, "It looks like some weird outgrowth of skin. Although something so large and strange would be most unusual." Dr. Casal, though, said the bottom of a spine can't develop bones without signals from the top. So if Narwhal's appendage is a parasitic twin, it might make sense that it never grew bones. Unlike in humans, identical twins are very rare in dogs, which are typically born in litters, Dr. Casal said. So a dog with a parasitic twin is "really super, super rare." But it's not unheard of. In one case, a puppy had an extra pair of hind legs growing from its belly. Parasitic twins, like conjoined twins, can occur in humans, too. Animals are sometimes born with more extreme spare parts, like an entire second head. Two headed calves occasionally show up in headlines, though they usually die soon after birth. Snakes, too, can hatch with two heads. In a 2007 paper, a herpetologist, Van Wallach, summarized nearly a thousand reported cases of two headed snakes. The two heads are almost always next to each other, he found, but occasionally stacked. Many factors can lead to two headed snakes, including cold temperatures when eggs are incubating. Most two headed snakes die right away, but a few live to adulthood. Animals are sometimes born with more extreme spare parts, like this two headed California kingsnake. Dr. Wallach had a pet two headed snake named Brady Belichick that grew to healthy adulthood. Both heads ate normally. But the head that finished eating its mouse first would then attack and chew on the other head, as Dr. Wallach described in his 2012 paper, "Two headed Snakes Make High Maintenance Pets." A calf or snake's second head can arise from a parasitic twin. Or an extra head can form when something goes wrong during a single individual's development. For example, certain genes act like stage directors in a developing embryo, making sure everything ends up in the right place. "If you get a mutation in one of those genes then you can get bizarre duplications," like two heads, Dr. Casal said. "Or, what we see every once in a while in dogs or cats is they can have, for example, two penises." Michael Levin, who directs the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University, said that while Narwhal is a cute example of development gone awry, "I've seen a lot weirder." Dr. Levin studies how signals between cells, especially electrical signals, help to organize a whole animal into the correct shape. Researchers in his lab have created worms with four heads, tadpoles with eyes on their backs and six legged frogs. While Dr. Levin thinks a parasitic twin might explain Narwhal, he said it's impossible to know for sure because of the complex processes that organize bodies even in simple creatures, like flatworms. Chemicals and other factors in a developing animal's environment can make these processes go wrong in countless ways. "There are massive gaps in our understanding," he said. Scientists are still trying to answer major questions about how a blob of cells turns into a complete animal of just the right size and shape, with different kinds of parts in all the correct places. "It's a miracle it comes out right most of the time."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Carlos Sousa of Portugal, driving a Chinese made Haval H8, which looks something like a BMW X3, took the victory Sunday in the first stage of the 2014 Dakar Rally, which ran from Rosario to San Luis, Argentina. He was closely trailed by three entrants in all wheel drive Minis. Sousa completed the stage in 2 hours, 20 minutes and 36 seconds, and was scored 11 seconds quicker than Argentina's Orlando Terranova. Nasser al Attiyah of Qatar came in third. The American drivers, Robby Gordon, in a Hummer, and B.J. Baldwin, in a Chevrolet, were well down in the order after early troubles set them back. Honda's Joan Barreda clocked in at 2:25:31, with fellow Spaniard Marc Coma, on a KTM, 37 seconds behind in the motorcycle stage, which was run on a different route. The rally continues until Jan. 18, with stages through Argentina, Bolivia and Chile. Authorities in France said Sunday that they would be interested in contacting a man who said he had inadvertently recorded Michael Schumacher's recent skiing accident on his cellphone camera. Schumacher, the seven time Formula One champion, has been in a medically induced coma since falling and hitting his head on a rock during a ski run on Dec. 29 near Meribel, France. Schumacher, who turned 45 on Friday, is in a hospital in Grenoble, where he is listed in critical but stable condition.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
At the Wednesday matinee came something fresher: the New York debut of the soloist Isabella Boylston. Her Giselle was an American girl and endearingly so, old fashioned but not Old World. From the start, her jumps were excitingly springy, and the gentle abandon of her upper body expressed a happiness that was infectious. In Act II, the jumps increased in height and lightness, so that you wondered if Ms. Boylston might float away. She began her adagio with Albrecht boldly, taking forever to raise a leg into arabesque. The smoothness of that ascent was magical, otherworldly, and though other risks resulted in imperfections, her sustained legato and control were remarkable. It was a debut of real distinction. Unfortunately, that was much less true of her Albrecht, James Whiteside. (Mr. Whiteside, Mr. Hallberg, Ms. Semionova and Ms. Boylston all appear in "Swan Lake" this week.) His jump was explosive and his entrechat six incredibly precise. They were not, however, very expressive. There was little coordination between Mr. Whiteside's dancing and his acting, which was wooden, stiff and almost never believable. At the other end of the scale convincing at every instant, not a single false note or affectation was the performance of Ms. Cojocaru on Saturday. Ms. Cojocaru is decidedly Old World: She seems to come from an earlier century. In technical display, she did the least. Her dancing and her acting alike were generally small in scale, never showy. She smiled to herself; she flirted without being flirtatious. With humility rather than histrionics, she made you feel the seriousness of a young woman's giving a man her heart. Which made it hurt all the more when that heart was broken. Ms. Cojocaru's Giselle was the most affecting. Returning as Albrecht (and filling in for an ill Herman Cornejo), Mr. Hallberg responded beautifully to Ms. Cojocaru's simplicity. What had seemed underdone in his performance on Tuesday seemed artfully understated on Saturday. And the refinement of his acting seemed to free up the refinement of his dancing. This time there was no disfigurement, but the emotion was at once clearer and more intense.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Credit...Joshua Bright for The New York Times READING, Mass. He was supposed to inhale on something that looked like a flash drive and threw off just a wisp of a cloud? What was the point? A skeptical Matt Murphy saw his first Juul at a high school party in the summer of 2016, in a suburban basement crowded with kids shouting over hip hop and swigging from Poland Spring water bottles filled with bottom shelf vodka, followed by Diet Coke chasers. Everyone knew better than to smoke cigarettes. But a few were amusing themselves by blowing voluptuous clouds with clunky vapes that had been around since middle school. This Juul looked puny in comparison. Just try it, his friend urged. It's awesome. Matt, 17, drew a pleasing, minty moistness into his mouth. Then he held it, kicked it to the back of his throat and let it balloon his lungs. Blinking in astonishment at the euphoric power punch of the nicotine, he felt it what he would later refer to as "the head rush." The science about long term effects of the other chemicals and small metals in the vaporized liquids is unsettled, not only because formulations vary widely and are often undisclosed, but because e cigarettes have not been around long enough to study thoroughly. Some research suggests disturbing risks. A joint project between Duke and Yale's Tobacco Center of Regulatory Science, published this fall in the journal Nicotine and Tobacco Research, found that when certain popular flavors are added to a common solvent in the vaping liquids, they produce chemicals that irritate airways and lungs. A 2016 study in the journal Chest said that smoking e cigarettes had an effect on the heart and arteries which, while was not as pronounced as that of combustible cigarettes, was still distinctive. The e cigarettes are extremely discreet, making them particularly popular among high school and even middle school students. Joshua Bright for The New York Times Perhaps what alarms public health experts most about e cigarettes generally and Juul in particular is nicotine which, when vaporized, is absorbed by the body within seconds, much faster than when delivered by chewing gum or patches. Its potent addictive properties, doctors say, can be most pronounced in teenagers. After a few weeks of bumming daily hits from friends (called "fiending"), Matt went on a family vacation out West. On his second day without a Juul, he found he wanted one desperately. On the third, he couldn't take it anymore. He searched Juul's website to find a local store that sold it, and ordered an Uber to get there, mumbling a nonchalant excuse to relatives. Between the cost of the ride service plus the Juul "starter" kit, he spent 100 to sate his need. Soon, he escalated to a daily pod, sometimes more. He was spending 40 a week, draining his Christmas and birthday money, and his paycheck from his part time job at Chili's. It became stitched into his social identity, and bound him to his buddies, who would ride around town hitting their Juuls in one friend's 2002 Volvo. By the time he graduated from high school in 2017, four of his five closest friends were also daily Juulers. He and other athletes noticed they would get out of breath more quickly. "We called it 'Juul lung,' " Matt said. "We knew it lowered our performance but we saw that as a sacrifice we were willing to make." There is an art and artifice to being a teenage Juuler, Matt explained during numerous long conversations, including one over a recent lunch at a local pizza shop. You have to scope out which convenience stores will card you and which will look away, so long as you pay their inflated prices. Near Matt's house in Reading, a middle class Boston suburb, there are two convenience stores on West Street. The first won't sell you e cigarettes unless you are 21. The second was just over the town line in neighboring Woburn, where the legal age until recently was 18. Turned away in Reading, Matt and his friends would simply saunter down the block, where they could pass scrutiny. What he had initially derided as Juul's pitiful wisp of nearly odor free vapor turned out to be a great advantage. Teachers were clueless. If his parents walked into his room five seconds after he exhaled, they wouldn't know. "The Juul was super, super sneaky and I loved it," he said. But by the time he got to college, he began to admit to himself he had a problem. He was majoring in biochemistry at the University of Vermont and feeling overwhelmed by the workload; the Juul was his only stress escape. To limit his use, he kept it in his dorm room rather than carry it with him. But soon, he realized: "All I wanted was to be in my room." He had 40 minutes between classes: Ten minutes, bike to the dorm. Hit Juul, 20 minutes. Ten minutes, bike to next class. Repeat. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. By now his vaping was about maintenance, keeping the craving irritability at bay. He knew things had gotten just ridiculous, but there was nothing to be done about it. He even fixed a Velcro strip on the dresser next to his dorm room bed and stuck the Juul on it, so that as soon as he opened his eyes in the morning he could just reach up for a hit: first, best, only head rush of the day. One girl on his dorm hall sold Juul pods from stock she had bought from a guy who ordered armloads on the internet. Unlike back home in high school, college students vaped in public everywhere in lecture halls, at hockey games, in the dorm common rooms. "Matt was open about wishing he didn't do it," said Tucker Houston, his freshman roommate. "It was a constant battle for him. People would tell him that they'd want to buy a Juul and he'd be like, 'No! You don't want to, it's not cool, it's not fun.' He became known as the juuling anti Juul advocate." "But I knew if my parents caught me, I couldn't do it again, and that represented a future of not doing it," Matt said. "I rationalized that it was better to do without it briefly, than forever." Then he found that the delayed gratification from leaving it at home was fantastic. "If you wait an hour, it feels great. But if you wait five hours, it feels unbelievable." At the end of the day, he would take a long, two second draw, and keep it in his lungs, a practice called "zeroing," because his body absorbed all the vapor, exhaling none. He'd zero it four or five times, feel dizzy, blink about 10 times, and then be fine. One day, Matt's mother walked into his room to collect his dirty laundry. There was his backpack, unzipped, open. The confrontation with his parents was epic. David Murphy, Matt's father, was startled by the extent of Matt's Juul concealment. He hadn't suspected something was amiss. Matt's behavior never seemed appreciably altered. The vaping had to end, Mr. Murphy ordered. "I said, 'Nicotine is a lifelong burden. There's a big company with its hand in your pocket, distracting your thought process continuously. Juuling is a huge undocumented risk. Now, how do we come back together as a family and solve this problem?" Two hours into the tearful conversation, Matt concluded: "I could not justify the addiction anymore. And I realized my parents were my allies. Because I wanted to stop and they wanted me to stop." Because Juul is so new, there is no consensus protocol for how teenagers should withdraw. Matt devised a weaning regimen: every two hours, five short hits. Then longer breaks, fewer hits. One June day he was riding shotgun in the Volvo with his old friends. As he was about to take a scheduled hit, he grew despairing and exasperated. He had tried quitting before but it had never worked; would he always be chained to this gadget? Impulsively, he tried to throw the Juul out the car window, but the window stuck. So he abruptly yanked back the sunroof and heaved it to the street. One friend, sitting in the back, cheered and pumped his fist. But another scowled he would happily have taken Matt's Juul. "I felt strong for five minutes," Matt said. "And then I felt really weak. I only realized the magnitude of my addiction when I stopped." Nicotine withdrawal, he said, was hell. He was overtaken with bouts of anxiety. Who was he without his 11th finger? He would get the shakes, curl up in his bed, overcome with a sense of powerlessness. "When Matt withdrew, he'd flip out a lot, especially when other people had it around him," said Jared Stack, a friend since elementary school. "They wouldn't stop doing it just because he had. They didn't care because they were addicted too." It was the whirring, the purring, the sound of their Juuls firing up, that would trigger Matt. Yet avoiding his friends was inconceivable. After three weeks, the worst of it passed. Even still, Matt can tick off to the day how long it's been since he stopped on June 6: 163 days as of Friday. He transferred to the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, majoring in business and living at home. Whenever he feels the Juul urge now, he tells himself, "I'd have to go through the whole horrible dark time that is being addicted and then quitting." His eyes brightened as he gulped the last of his pizza, long limbs splayed everywhere. Instead, he said, he tries to help friends who want to quit. "They text me all the time when they're trying. They'll say, 'Did you experience this?' "And I say, 'Yes,' because I want them to know I understand," he said. "And then I tell them, 'But it gets better.' Because it does."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
We hear the voice near the start of "Maze," a frustrating dance theater work debuting at the Shed this week. The message is true in several senses. The intended one is thematic. As the program note indicates, "Maze" takes on social issues like "the school to prison pipeline" and "systemic racism in the justice system." Viewed historically, such topics can induce a bitter sense of deja vu. The familiar smell also arises, though, from the many similarities between this production and "Flexn," a show that originated at the Park Avenue Armory in 2015. Much of the talented cast and creative team are the same, as are many of the powerful themes, but so is the central problem: all that talent floundering for want of direction. As in "Flexn," one of the directors here is Reggie Gray, also known as Regg Roc, a pioneer in the Brooklyn born street dance style called flexn and the founder of the D.R.E.A.M. Ring, a crew that serves as cast for both shows. Mr. Gray was one of the first to develop the form's narrative potential to show how its joint testing contortions, otherworldly gliding in sneakers and stop motion pantomime could express the extreme emotional pressures experienced by its dancers.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The best thing about "The 21st Annual Animation Show of Shows," an anthology of animated shorts by students and professionals around the world, is the variety of modes and techniques presented. The opening short, "Kids," directed by Michael Frei and Mario von Rickenbach, communicates its theme of conformity through cookie cutter like figures moving with almost liquid smoothness over a blank field. Another black and white picture, "Hounds," directed by Amit Cohen and Ido Shapira, is rendered in rough pen and ink style with plenty of negative space, the better to create a gritty magical realism for its nature versus nurture allegory. "Daughter," an anxious fever dream about losing a parent from Daria Kashcheeva, uses stop motion puppet animation. The design of the characters suggests the strong influence of the Quay Brothers, but Kashcheeva's persistent use of unusual focal effects brings the piece into a dimension of its own.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Barbara Remington, the illustrator who created the most widely recognized covers for J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy and "The Hobbit" which she quickly executed before she even had the chance to read the books died on Jan. 23 in Susquehanna, Pa. She was 90. Her longtime friend John Bromberg said the cause was breast cancer. Though the covers of the first editions of "The Lord of the Rings" had illustrations by various artists, including Tolkien himself, the ones that Ms. Remington created for the paperback versions published by Ballantine Books were the ones that achieved mass cult status in the 1960s, particularly on college campuses. Ms. Remington, who designed other book covers for Ballantine as well, was asked to illustrate the 1965 editions of "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit" on a tight deadline. "Ballantine was in a hurry to get these books out right away," she said in an interview for the literary journal Andwerve. "When they commissioned me to do the artwork, I didn't have the chance to see either book, though I tried to get a copy through my friends.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
When Jessica Yorzinski chased great tailed grackles across a field, it wasn't a contest to see who blinked first. But she did want the birds to blink. Dr. Yorzinski had outfitted the grackles, which look a bit like crows but are in another family of birds, with head mounted cameras pointing back at their faces. Like other birds, grackles blink sideways, flicking a semitransparent membrane across the eye. Recordings showed that the birds spent less time blinking during the riskiest parts of a flight. The finding was published Wednesday in Biology Letters. Dr. Yorzinski, a sensory ecologist at Texas A M University, had been wondering how animals balance their need to blink with their need to get visual information about their environments. Humans, she said, "blink quite often, but when we do so we lose access to the world around us. It got me thinking about what might be happening in other species." She worked with a company that builds eye tracking equipment to make a custom bird size headpiece. Because a bird's eyes are on the sides of its head, the contraption held one video camera pointed at the left eye and one at the right, making the bird resemble a sports fan in a beer helmet. The headpiece was connected to a backpack holding a battery and transmitter. Dr. Yorzinski captured 10 wild great tailed grackles, which are common in Texas, to wear this get up. She used only male birds, which are big enough to carry the equipment without trouble. Each bird wore the camera helmet and backpack while Dr. Yorzinski encouraged it to fly by chasing it across an outdoor enclosure. Afterward, she broke down the flight videos into stages, from standing and taking off to landing again. She said she saw "clear patterns." While the birds were in flight, their blinks were quicker than when they were on the ground. And just before landing, they barely blinked. "Maximizing the visual input they get during these critical stages of being in flight and landing makes a lot of sense," she said. During rapid flight, colliding with another object could be disastrous. Choosing a landing spot is also risky. Think of a bird alighting on a branch, Dr. Yorzinski said: "If they were off a little, they might be landing on nothing and fall to the ground." She also saw that the birds blinked most often at the moment they hit the ground. This might have been because they needed to blink after holding their eyes open, or to protect their eyes from debris. Dr. Yorzinski plans to do further experiments with birds navigating different environments, such as a forest setting with more obstacles. Graham Martin, an emeritus professor of avian sensory science at the University of Birmingham in England, said the study is "an interesting piece of work." But he pointed out that the flights Dr. Yorzinski observed were only a few seconds long. He doesn't think there's enough evidence yet to say anything broadly about how birds alter their blinks in flight. "I think we need to see samples of blinking behavior during longer flights and in other species before any general conclusions are possible," he said. Although she's only studied the question in one bird species so far, Dr. Yorzinski's findings are similar to those in human pilots. A small 1996 study showed that pilots in simulators blinked more quickly, and less often, while they were in flight, especially while landing. A 2002 study showed that pilots blinked less during the visually demanding parts of a flight. Human pilots aren't exactly like birds, but Dr. Yorzinski said the parallels are interesting. During risky maneuvers, grackles may benefit from keeping their eyes open. "I think it's quite remarkable that they're able to adjust their blinking at this fine scale during times when it's so important for them to be aware of the environment around them," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Fruit Flies and Mice to Get New Home on Space Station, at Least Temporarily A bit of science trivia: Did you know that the heart of a fruit fly beats at about the same pace as yours? That's among the reasons that 400 adult fruit flies and 2,000 eggs are packed to go to the International Space Station, for an experiment on long term weightlessness and how it might affect the cardiovascular health of astronauts. "It's not as weird as you might think," said Karen Ocorr, a professor at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and a co investigator on the experiment. Although the structure of a fly heart is very different than that of a human, the cardiovascular system shares many of the same cellular components in addition to the similar heartbeats. By comparison, the hearts of rats and mice beat about 10 times as fast as those of people. Fruit flies, Dr. Ocorr said, are "actually much closer in some respects to humans than the mouse or rat models are." The fruit flies, as well as 40 mice for another experiment, are waiting to travel on a SpaceX mission that was called off Thursday with less than a half hour left in the countdown because of a nearby lightning strike. The rocket is to lift a Dragon capsule with nearly 6,000 pounds of supplies, equipment and experiments including the fruit flies and mice. The next opportunity is Saturday at 5:07 p.m. If the rocket gets off the ground then forecasters expect more unsettled weather it would arrive at the space station on Monday, when the space station crew will grab the Dragon capsule and attach it to a docking port. After about a month attached to the space station, the Dragon will undock and return to Earth with a splashdown in the Pacific. The fruit fly eggs are to hatch in orbit, while the adults will lay more eggs. The flies will return to Earth in the Dragon. Dr. Ocorr and her colleagues will then study the flies for abnormalities in the skeletal and heart muscles and the shape of the hearts. The researchers have sent flies to the space station before, in January 2015. "We did see cardiac dysfunction," Dr. Ocorr said. There were changes in the expression of genes associated with the cardiovascular system. The mice will help address another aspect of astronaut health: bone strength. Without gravity pulling down, the bones of astronauts turn fragile losing 1 to 2 percent of bone mass each month although NASA has found that exercise can slow down that loss. The researchers want to test on the mice a drug that stimulates bone growth. For long space missions, like a trip to Mars, "we can't have our astronauts breaking a hip or something," said Dr. Chia Soo, a medical researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is the principal investigator on the experiment, during a news conference last month highlighting some of the science headed to the space station. "Preserving bone mass is a critical component of long term space exploration." If successful, the test could point to the use of the same drug to treat osteoporosis in patients on Earth. Half of the mice will also make the return trip to Earth in the Dragon and be delivered to U.C.L.A. "Then we will be able to study these rodents further," Dr. Soo said. The scientists will continue drug treatment and compare the condition of the mice on Earth with those still on the space station. Hundreds of other experiments are underway on the International Space Station. NASA is particularly interested in the health of the astronauts, often using animals as stand ins for people. But the space station has also become a laboratory for testing space technology and studying the behavior of materials and processes like combustion when gravity is removed. Another experiment headed up on this SpaceX mission will look toward distant neutron stars, the burned out cores of large stars. Scientists hope that by looking at the X rays from fast spinning neutron stars, they will get clues about the properties of the ultradense matter the stars are made of. That is not possible on Earth, because the atmosphere blocks out X rays. "They're spinning faster than the blades of a household blender," said Zaven Arzoumanian, one of the principal investigators of the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, or Nicer. The experiment also serves as a prototype for using these fast spinning neutron stars, also known as pulsars, as navigation beacons for spacecraft venturing out in the solar system. "It's an enabling technology that hasn't been demonstrated in space," Dr. Arzoumanian said. The mission will also advance SpaceX's efforts to reuse parts of its spacecraft. This particular Dragon capsule was used during SpaceX's fourth cargo mission in September 2014. After the capsule returned to Earth, SpaceX technicians worked to make it space worthy again. "We refurbished it, inspected it, made sure everything is qualified for the next flight," Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX's vice president of mission assurance, said during a news conference on Wednesday. This is the first time a Dragon is being reused. Some components on the Dragon were replaced, notably the heat shield and components that were exposed to corrosive seawater. But the main structure remains original. "The majority of this Dragon has been in space before," Mr. Koenigsmann said. A reusable spacecraft is not a new concept NASA's space shuttles each flew many times but traditional capsules, like the ones used during NASA's Apollo moon missions and Russian Soyuz launches, are used only once.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
SAN FRANCISCO The blizzard continues: "Frozen 2" is coming to theaters. The Walt Disney Company on Thursday used its annual shareholder meeting to make several movie announcements, the biggest being about a big screen follow up to "Frozen," the animated musical that took in more than 1.3 billion globally in 2013. Disney provided no details about the story or a release date but said the directors and producer of the first film would return for the second. A sequel helps assure the long term viability of what has become one of Disney's most crucial franchises. Sales of "Frozen" related merchandise now total roughly 1 billion annually, and helped power Disney to a record 7.5 billion in profit last year. "Frozen" has also been fast tracked for Broadway, and a Florida theme park attraction is in the works. "We're going back to Arendelle," John Lasseter, chief creative officer for Walt Disney Animation Studios, told the crowd, referring to the kingdom in "Frozen." The film follows two Nordic princesses, one of whom has the magical power not always controllable to conjure snowstorms, and their goofball snowman sidekick, Olaf.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Investors controlling more than 5 trillion in assets have committed to dropping some or all fossil fuel stocks from their portfolios, according to a new report tracking the trend. The report, released Monday, said the new total was twice the amount measured 15 months ago a remarkable rise for a movement that began on American college campuses in 2011. Since then, divestment has expanded to the business world and institutional world, and includes large pension funds, insurers, financial institutions and religious organizations. It has also spread around the world, with 688 institutions and nearly 60,000 individuals in 76 countries divesting themselves of shares in at least some kinds of oil, gas and coal companies, according to the report. "It's a stunning number," said Ellen Dorsey, the executive director of the Wallace Global Fund, which has promoted fossil fuel divestment and clean energy investment as part of its philanthropy. The movement has also received a boost from last year's Paris climate agreement, which set targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The push for emissions reductions underscored the potential for the industry to be faced with reserves of fuels that cannot be burned if the targets are to be met a prospect known as "stranded assets."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
I went to the O'Neill having had two readings of "it's not a trip it's a journey," but without having had the opportunity to really workshop the play. The process at the O'Neill starts with what they call a dream design when designers discuss ideas and questions that came up for them as they read the piece. This session was incredibly helpful to me as it unearthed themes that I had not consciously thought through before. The play is about June, a black woman who convinces three of her friends to embark on a road trip. We see the characters in intimate spaces, in hotel rooms and in a car, and then at real public settings in the wide open United States. Those spaces include Lucy the Elephant, a six story wood and tin elephant replica, in New Jersey; the largest ball of twine in Kansas; and the Grand Canyon in Arizona. This dream session put into words and images some of the tensions that exist between the characters. It also delved into the difficulty of creating the real spaces onstage. Lighting and sound cues could signal whether we were inside the car, or outside, but how would we depict Lucy the Elephant? We brainstormed solutions big and small. Lastly, the session gave me and my director, Nicole A. Watson, insight into how the play wants to work. The next five days were filled with conversations with the cast, director, dramaturge and other supporters and observers we had in the room. I was able to discover which aspects of the play needed more exploration and spent the evenings rewriting. Two public readings were wonderfully executed by the cast and crew, and it was lovely to watch how the audience connected to the characters. The play found firmer ground, coming alive in a way I hadn't seen. There is still work to be done, but I now feel that much of that work will need to happen as the play reaches production, and as the possibilities and limitations of fully staging it come to the forefront. Midway through my residency, there was a Q. and A. with the public, and someone asked me to describe my playwriting process. I answered that my process was to discover a process. I hope it didn't sound ironic I was being completely honest. I'd never written a play before. Cartooning is my profession, and I'd come to the Ground Floor with a plan to adapt my unpublished graphic memoir about suicidal depression, the Great Recession, and millennial malaise into a musical comedy. At this point I should probably mention that I'd never written a song before, either. But that's the beauty of the Ground Floor. Its name isn't a marketing gimmick. The program really did provide me with the space to lay the foundation of a play at its very inception, even though my only prior experience in theater had been selling tickets in the Berkeley Rep box office. (Shout out to box officers nationwide. Put butts in seats and dream big!) Then all of a sudden, there I was as a resident artist, trying to discover a process for my process. I was assigned to the Tony Kushner room. No pressure. Step one: commandeer all of the office supplies I can lay my hands on. Step two: organize the multicolored index cards into neat little stacks. Step three: arrange the pens alphabetically by brand. Step four: write a musical comedy. It probably won't surprise you to learn that for most of the residency I struggled with impostor syndrome. But if there's any place on earth to be racked with profound insecurity, it's the Ground Floor. Everyone was fantastically supportive. There was always hot water for tea, always a moment to chat, always an abundance of office supplies to commandeer and categorize. My graphic memoir was and still is a work in progress, so adapting it into a musical comedy was a bit like trying to walk a tightrope strung between swaying trees. Both projects were in flux. On good days it meant I'd find a new footing on one that also stabilized the other; on bad days it meant I was thrown for a loop. But it's a testament to the serene atmosphere of the Ground Floor that my faltering never felt like failure. I was allowed to tentatively, haltingly, find my process. Cartoons are created in isolation. Theater ain't. By the end of my two week stint, I had a rough outline, a song list, a few sketchy scenes, but most importantly a wealth of inspiration from the other resident artists Alex Borinsky, Dave Harris, Vanessa Garcia Vicky Collado, Shaun Abigail Bengson, Sarah Gancher, Emily Feldman, Julia Izumi, Sanaz Toossi, and Itamar Moses . O. K. so first: we 16 artists sleep in a row of converted horse stables. It's strangely cozy, and there's a thick canvas flap that hangs in the front that you can let down or tie up. Beyond the flap is a looooong wooden table with chairs, candles, wildflowers, and artists. It's a rustic, intimate, co working space in rural Pennsylvania where we talk low and feed off the focus and buzz of the art making right next to us. Nature sounds abound: cicadas, frogs, crickets, rain, thunder, leaves, footfall. Nature seems to embolden one's art. Larissa and I walk the grounds and swat away flies and move through space lush and teeming and suddenly we're uninterested in making our EST/Sloan commission (a play about women pilots and space flight and what it takes to get off the ground) small and tidy; we want to explode it with all the dynamic lifefulness it craves. We dream up cast size and doubling and the movement vocabulary of the playworld. We explore a hundred kinds of human flight in every nonliteral way we can think of. We use our bodies. We chop wood. We wash dishes. We ask other artists the questions our characters are asking: What have you sacrificed to move through this world with fewer obstacles? How do you know whether or not you deserve something? When you succeed, is it more helpful to be thought of as normal or as exceptional? (Why?) FGP has somehow created a space of collaborative reflection and vulnerability. (How?) Cross pollinating with other artists is alchemical. It shakes up one's process to spend a couple hours each day communally exploring someone else's project: glam rock, Google privacy conditions, erotica workshop. Could we create our own structure for cross pollination among our artist friends back home? What form would that take? When I was in grad school, Paula Vogel once told us: As you write, remember the pleasures of the stage. And I've held onto that, but I've forgotten about the pleasures of the process how to invite them, insist upon them. How to do this at home? I don't know yet. But I'm leaving with spaciousness in our playworld, and an effervescence I hadn't realized I'd lost. And I can feel the earth under my feet again no small thing, given how stressy and ungrounded I was when I arrived. We culminated in a reading of new pages with all of us sitting in the grass under the night sky with the actors lit by our flashlights. So fitting and luminous for a play about women pilots fighting to go to space. M, it was magical. And moving. Transient, tender, exquisite. How do we get more of this in our lives? Of the three actors hired to present a reading of my play in progress (then titled) "Untitled Adoption Play," only one Zarah Shejule fit her character description: Sharon is described as a 30 something black or Afro Latina woman married to a 30 something white man named Hairy and living in gentrified East Austin, Texas. When Hairy and Sharon (also known as Sherri) decide to adopt Ryshi, a 12 year old black foster care youth with special needs, they are confronted with the ugly realities of their marriage and "good" intentions. I applied to PlySpace, a new artist residency program in Muncie, Indiana, with only eight introductory pages of what I imagined would be the penultimate scene. Hairy gives his wife an ultimatum: either they abandon their adopted son or get divorced. Little does Hairy know that Sharon has faked her infertility and finds herself now pregnant with Hairy's biological child. Tyler Rainer wasn't 6 feet tall and growing, as Ryshi is described. Unlike Hairy, Jakob Winter wasn't in his 30s and didn't sport a full beard and a man bun. And despite my best outreach efforts, I couldn't find a 50 year old Latina to play a fourth character, a case manager named Vera, so I decided I would read her, along with the stage directions. How did I pitch this project to an arts residency in America's hometown, the Middletown of Mike Pence's Indiana? Very carefully. I had no idea how my work would be received or if I would be able to find actors willing to work with an unknown writer. But such is the scrappy charm of making new theater in a small community: you work really hard with whomever and whatever is available. Zarah, Tyler and Jakob each brought thoughtful questions and feedback to every rehearsal. In my seven week residency, I completed a 103 page draft, culminating in a public reading in PlySpace's gallery. In our post performance discussion, the audience explored the play's themes: performative "wokeness," trauma(s), and the devastatingly underfunded foster care system. Although my play (now creatively titled) "Hairy and Sherri" is very much set in Austin, I love that it now shares history in Muncie. What I knew before I boarded the plane at JFK was that the exhaustion of working 362 days in the last year was hitting me, and that upon my return, I would need to be ready to race toward the exciting new challenges of leading the Repertory Theater of St. Louis into the future. I had no way of knowing how powerfully transformative those next 12 days would be, or the sheer number of potential partnerships that would be birthed. I was one of six international artists invited to the retreat in Arles, France, which unlike most residencies was focused on our artistic lives, and renewal, rather than a specific project. Two of us found each other at a train stop in Lyon. Two more at the next stop in Avignon. The final two fellows met us at the Alyscamps estate that would be our Mecca in this creative pilgrimage. Each day we found ourselves masters of our destinies. Our evenings, curated by Christopher Hibma, who runs Sundance's theater programs, had us watching the sunset over rich conversations about artistic practice, inspiration, the heavy lift of innovation, relationships, possibility, futurism, fatigue and friendship. Across the table dreams were born, tears were shed, irreverent talk shows were imagined. A group of artists from the United States and Syria became family. The retreat coincided with Les Recontres De La Photographie, filling the city with hundreds of photographic exhibitions. I spent hours moving through exhibits, from sculptures of repurposed technologies to the reconstructed ruins of the Syrian war. I sat and studied the work at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, got lost in animated virtual reality worlds, and climbed a giant felted hill to watch dark neo noir films. One of the most inspiring mornings was spent touring the incredible Luma Arles Parc des Ateliers complex. Even while under construction, it emanated invention and inspiration. It was a powerful reminder that the time ahead in St. Louis requires an investment in bold, ambitious ideas and a commitment to democratized access. The Great Work Begins ...	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Thanks to the success of the Netflix show "The Queen's Gambit," chess sets are flying off the shelves. If you can't find one, or just want another pandemic crafting project, why not make your own at home? You don't need a lot of equipment to get started. And unlike with a chess set you'd purchase, if you lose a piece or damage the board, you can simply construct a new piece. As you weigh your options, Joann Jamieson Larkin, a designer for Crafter's Companion, an arts and crafts store, recommends asking yourself how enduring you need your chess set to be. Is it intended to be a lifelong keepsake or simply something fun to do in an afternoon? Knowing the answer ahead of time will guide your next steps, she said. Paper can be a surprisingly sturdy medium. "I have projects that I have created out of paper that I still have four to five years after they were created," Ms. Jamieson Larkin said. In fact, she designed her own 3 D chess set using card stock paper. Not all of us have access to card stock at the moment, but don't fret. Here are your options. This is the easiest and fastest option. Sites like AllFreePrintable.com and Supercoloring.com offer free chess set templates. All you need is a functioning printer, some paper and a pair of scissors, and you can be playing chess in minutes. However, the quality of these sets leaves a lot to be desired. The chess pieces are flimsy and hard to move around the (woefully small) chess board. A stiff wind, rowdy pet or grumpy child could make a mess of things in short order. Most adults would find these chess sets lacking, especially if you've played on more robust sets before and are used to being able to pick up a piece and knock an opponent off the board. A free 3 D printable paper chess set template from PrintChess.com designed by Gary French is the best option for most people. The board is a little larger, as it weaves together two sheets of paper, and the pieces are easy to assemble. Feel free to customize the pieces with colors or paint. But honestly, this chess board is pretty perfect as is. None Step 3. Cut out the shaded tabs on each sheet of the chess board. Interlock the two pieces of the chess board so they fit together seamlessly. Step 4. Next, cut out the individual chess pieces. Step 5. Snip the notches on the top and bottom of each chess piece. Step 6. Gently fold each chess piece at the two gray lines to construct a flat base. Interlace the notches at the top. Arrange the pieces on the chessboard. If you're looking for something sturdier and have a little more time to invest in the project, there are free templates for a cardboard chess set available from Instructables.com. A set designed by one user, MakerKeith, requires a bit more elbow grease as you're cutting shapes out of cardboard and affixing them to a base using toothpicks. If you're planning on using a template for 3 D pieces like the one Ms. Jamieson Larkin created, she recommended using a quick drying tacky glue for the adhesive. "Get your glue to the edges," she said. "A little goes a long way. If you use too much glue, the moisture will tend to warp the paper." Take your time to make sure the edges match and are lined up properly. "There's no point in doing something and it ends up messy," she said. "That won't be appreciated by anyone." None One piece of 8 by 4 inch cardboard for the pawns None One piece of 9 by 7 inch cardboard for the rest of the chess pieces None One piece of 18 by 18 inch cardboard for the board None Extra bits of cardboard for the chess piece bases How to make an origami chess set For those who are comfortable practicing origami, you can assemble a chess set through origami techniques. Joseph Wu has provided free instructions for creating bird themed chess pieces. Tutorial videos on YouTube created by other origami enthusiasts can walk you through the process of creating each piece. "Origami Chess: Cats vs. Dogs" by Roman Diaz explains how to construct an origami chess set themed to cats and dogs. Tutorial videos posted on YouTube walk you through each step as well. These sets are durable and, frankly, adorable. However, the process of constructing each piece is labor intensive. You also need to make sure you have the right kind of paper to use.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
TRIPLE FRONTIER (2019) Stream on Netflix. Action comes with a side of self righteousness in this heist movie, directed by J. C. Chandor ("All Is Lost," "A Most Violent Year"). It pits a gang of burly American veterans (played by Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac and a few others) against a drug lord (Rey Gallegos) and his cronies. The vets are after a stash of drug money. The movie like a militarized "Ocean's Eleven" follows them as they plan and execute an infiltration of the narcotics guys' forest lair. That it doesn't go exactly as planned is about as unsurprising as the fact that most of the macho fighters have facial hair. In her review for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis called the film a "slickly enjoyable, bankrupt take on a fail safe formula."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The Michael Jackson estate, facing questions prompted by a new documentary detailing abuse allegations against the singer, announced Thursday that it was canceling a planned Chicago tryout of a new jukebox musical about him. The estate and its producing partner, Columbia Live Stage, said that they would instead aim to bring the musical straight to Broadway in the summer of 2020. The reason for the change in plans, the producers said in a statement, was not the documentary but "scheduling difficulties" caused by a labor dispute. A five week job action by Actors' Equity, which was resolved last week, delayed a planned developmental lab for the show, and the producers decided they needed more time before staging the full show. The musical, called "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough," has a highly credentialed creative team. The book is by Lynn Nottage, a two time Pulitzer Prize winning playwright with a history of deeply researching the subject matters she writes about, and the director and choreographer is Christopher Wheeldon, a prominent English artist who won a Tony Award for choreographing a stage adaptation of "An American in Paris."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The study theorizes that the "chaotic terrain" on Mercury's surface was formed by activity underneath the planet's barren, scorched exterior, and not a collision. Mercury a planet with a surface hot enough to melt lead might once have contained ingredients needed for life. Though that's a pretty big might. The new theory, published last week in the journal Scientific Reports, is based on a particularly muddled feature on the planet orbiting closest to the sun, known as "chaotic terrain." Here, the cracked, uneven and jumbled landscape consists of fractured rock, mismatched peaks and collapsed craters. "Think of a kid throwing up a bunch of building blocks and how they land," said Deborah Domingue, a co author of the study from the Planetary Science Institute, headquartered in Tucson, Ariz. "Some are up, some are down, some are tilted that's chaotic terrain." For nearly 50 years, scientists have thought the chaos on Mercury was caused by earthquakes that raced throughout the planet when a massive asteroid struck the planet's far side. But the new study, led by Dr. Domingue's colleague Alexis Rodriguez, upends that notion. It suggests the terrain could not possibly have formed in response to the collision because it occurred 2 billion years after the impact crater formed. In addition, Dr. Rodriguez and his colleagues discovered that areas within the chaotic terrain appear to have dropped. It's as though the layer of crust just below the surface had simply disappeared. The easiest explanation is that subsurface volatiles elements that can easily switch from a solid to a liquid or a gas heated up as a result of the intrusion of magma below. That caused those elements to transform into a gas, forcing the terrain above them to collapse into a jumbled mess. "Let's say I have a house on stilts, and I kick one out," Dr. Domingue said. "My house is going to tilt right? That's what's going on here." Paul Hayne, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder who was not involved in the study, agrees that the prevailing explanation for Mercury's mishmash which has long been unchallenged is likely wrong. He also notes that the new story is consistent with what scientists have observed on Mars, where similar terrain was likely caused by the release of volatiles. It's a thrilling prospect given that volatiles particularly water are needed to kick start life. Though the team cannot say which volatiles were present, there is reason to hope that water might be one of them, Dr. Domingue said. The finding runs against the notion that Mercury is inhospitable. At such a close distance to the sun, its surface reaches a scorching 800 degrees Fahrenheit during its day. Then, because the planet has no atmosphere to retain the heat, its surface plummets to minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit during its night. But a short distance below the surface, the temperatures are much cooler, even pleasant at least for some life forms, said Jeffrey Kargel, a co author of the study who is also from the Planetary Science Institute. "It is possible that as long as there was water, the temperatures would be appropriate for the survival and possibly the origin of life," Dr. Kargel said. But at first, even he was not convinced. "I thought Alexis had lost it at some point," he said, referring to Dr. Rodriguez. "But the more I dug into the geologic evidence and the more I thought about the chemistry and physical conditions there, the more I realized that this idea well it might be nuts, but it's not completely nuts." Dr. Hayne, however, thinks that water is an unlikely culprit. The only scenario in which it might be possible is one where water is bound to the rocks. "So you could have transient pockets of high water activity, but I don't think this is a case where we'd see massive pools of water and subsurface lakes and that sort of thing," Dr. Hayne said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Some of the titles recently available from the online video game marketplace Steam have names like Suicide Simulator that are fairly self explanatory. Others have more innocuous titles that conceal the darker thrust of their game play: In the forthcoming Kindergarten, for instance, cartoon children are shot in the head by the school principal or hacked apart by the janitor. It was a role playing game called Active Shooter, however, that recently inspired broad protest, including condemnation from the parents of victims of the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla. Last week, the game, in which players prowl a school campus from the point of view of an attacker, had its scheduled release canceled by Valve Corporation, the software and technology company that operates Steam. But far from backing away from controversial games entirely, Steam has now decided to "allow everything" on its platform, it said on Wednesday, carving out disqualifying exceptions only for content it finds to be "illegal, or straight up trolling." Doug Lombardi, a Valve spokesman, emphasized that Active Shooter would never have made the cut. "It was a troll, designed to do nothing but generate outrage and cause conflict through its existence," he said in an email, noting that the game's developer, Acid Publishing Group, had also been involved in "numerous misrepresentations, copyright violations and customer abuses."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
In its top left corner, Instagram invites you to share "your story." The platform's savviest users log on not to share what's happening with them spontaneously, but to create the story of themselves. Natalie Beach, a writer who helped her college friend Caroline Calloway create a healthy Instagram following by telling these stories, made that process explicit this week. In an essay published on Tuesday by The Cut, Ms. Beach explained how she and Ms. Calloway had together created a persona for Ms. Calloway's Instagram account, until their working relationship became untenable. Who is Caroline Calloway? Here, we can explain. Now, that has become the story to tell. "The piece is about the perils of creating a version of yourself online, and now I've done just that," Ms. Beach, 27, said in an interview by phone on Wednesday. She said that though the essay had provided Ms. Calloway and herself with a surge of followers, it had not been coordinated between them. She talked at length about their relationship, and addressed some of the questions about her story that have arisen among readers. I'm interested in the essay's conception. It's so crafted. It reads like it could be in a novel or at least in a memoir written by a novelist. I had been working on this essay for six months. But really the moment I met Caroline, she was already such a literary figure that it's really sort of been in process for seven years. Also because my job became writing the character of herself, and sometimes writing the character of me interacting with her. So there's many layers of fictionalization within this true story. When I think about it, the real impetus was trying to reclaim my own perspective in a narrative where I was very intentionally pushed to the sides of it. I think about Lorrie Moore's "People Like That Are the Only People Here," where it's technically fiction but it's inspired by true life experiences and it just feels like this very angry reclamation of personhood in the medical establishment. How did the essay come into being? Did you pitch The Cut? I did. I have had really complicated feelings about whether or not to write about this because it's a lot of vulnerability that I still feel about the way I acted. I feel embarrassed and ashamed about how small I made myself at times in that relationship and also my own manipulation. And even though the effort of the piece was to tell my story, of course Caroline is still a huge part of it and right now she is completely in the public eye because of this. It took me a long time to make the decision to start writing about it, and I can't really point to one key moment where everything changed. But in January when the creativity tour happened, she started becoming a bigger and bigger public figure and she began speaking openly about her Adderall use and her mental health. And I felt that because she was living publicly and branding herself and making money off being public in this way and also speaking openly about things, I wouldn't be outing her. She was back in the news telling the story of her life, and I'm not mad at her for not talking about me, I actually very explicitly told her not to but I suddenly felt like, "Wait a minute, I have a story to tell, and I can tell it." Have you been approached by agents and by editors who are interested in that story? My inbox is pretty full right now. I'm a little overwhelmed with sort of a tidal wave of attention. But I'm just trying to take it really slow. This is the first time I've really put myself out there as a writer publicly. I used to write about books for Oprah magazine, but this is not the same thing. I studied screenwriting at N.Y.U., and I prefer that kind of writing because I like the collaborative process. I worked really hard at memoir, and I went to a great creative writing arts school called the Educational Center for the arts in New Haven and I loved writing memoir. But I just came to this realization that you have to sell off parts of yourself and you have to sell out your friends and your loved ones if you want to make a career off of that. I think that this isn't the end for me in memoir writing, but I don't want to build my life around having to dissect myself on a daily basis. That brings me to an obvious question. You're probably getting a lot of two different kinds of email, the first thanking you for writing something so relatable and profound, and the second asking "How dare you, you treacherous expletive ?" basically. How are you reconciling that rush of positive attention and that rush of negative attention? It's an ongoing process for sure. I am very aware of movements like Gamergate and the hatred that women of color, especially, face, so I by no means am feeling like I'm the true victim of the internet right now. I've gotten a few emails that have been polite but pretty firm about their feelings that I was wrong for talking explicitly about Caroline's struggles with mental health. I guess my feeling about that is that there's a part of me that agrees with them. That's why I was so divided about whether or not to write this in the first place. And the reason I did was because I thought that she was so public about it herself that I wasn't revealing any horrible secret. More of it got cut later on, but I've been in therapy, I'm on antidepressants, I talk about my own assault here. And I felt that by being raw personally it sort of creates this understanding that we're all dealing with our own problems and that's not a dirty secret. We have things like this owner of a pencil store wondering what pencil store exactly you worked at. Another person is cross referencing old Minetta Tavern menus with your account. How do you address people questioning you on the facts? Did you not set out to write something that was purely journalistic, or is there some other explanation of those things? Well, my explanation for the menu of the Minetta Tavern and this is the first I'm hearing about it is that I was incredibly drunk that night. And it's very possible that I confused the pasta dish. Ms. Beach texted the morning after the interview to say that she had gotten the Minetta Tavern and the Waverly Inn confused. "I was very drunk at the Waverly," she wrote. "The Minetta was just (sober) lunch, and I based that description off notes from my diary. It was a really long time ago though and of course it's possible I mixed up the exact appetizer we ate." As for the pencil controversy, I worked at Shorthand, which is a letterpress/stationery store in Los Angeles. I love Shorthand and they were great for me. Everything with Caroline fell apart and I needed a job, and they hired me off the street. Rosanna Kvernmo, the owner of Shorthand, confirmed that Ms. Beach had worked there in early 2017 and that the store sells pencils. I think that CWPencil, who I know through the pencil community, just misread the piece and thought that I worked at the pencil store in New York when actually I worked there in L.A. If I was trying to be more specific, I would have said "I got work at a letterpress card making store slash high class office supply distributor." But I thought the sentence "I got work at a pencil store" had more of an immediate kick to it. I by no means was trying to fictionalize my life. I just made a word choice that I thought conveyed my emotional state of mind, which is a disbelief that I was going back to work behind a counter as opposed to being a professional writer. I wonder how you see the two things, the creation of the Caroline Calloway character on Instagram and the creation of this essay, in relation to each another. How similar is that work? When Caroline and I first met, it was this incredible melding of the minds. It was that really exciting moment where you are passing books back and forth and we're getting stoned in her apartment and talking about our dreams. We were talking about Amy Hempel and Lena Dunham and Zadie Smith. When we approached writing together, it was from a place of literary ambition. There are lots of factors that degrade that from a frayed working relationship to trying to type out nice sentences on a keyboard on your phone to the demands of the algorithm. All sorts of things. Writing this essay, I was still drawing from all the same source material. I still brought my same toolbox with me. The difference being here that it was purely my story. I wasn't trying to brand myself, and it wasn't Caroline and working together to create this third person, which is herself online. I do wonder, though ... in reading the essay, your character is so coherent. The "Natalie Beach" in this essay is so well drawn. It has to have helped to have written "Caroline Calloway" all these years. Yeah, I think so. Writing with Caroline and for Caroline was an incredible crash course in character creation and honesty and confessional writing. Caroline is a fantastic writer and I think the roadblocks to her creating great literary work have nothing to do with her talent. Her voice is really singular, and I think that's the reason why she's a figure who has over the years persisted in our culture. Obviously right now, your relationship is not what it once was. Do you think you'll be friends again at some point? I don't know. I haven't been looking at her feed right now in part because I feel a deep guilt about causing her pain. It's a small thing, but Caroline was the one who introduced me to the man who did me the great honor of relieving me of my virginity. Which was very nice of her. And I'll be eternally grateful. And so a part of me was like, should I have figured out a way to fit that in because that was a really nice thing she did for me as a friend. This feels really juvenile now, I'm a married woman and it was many years ago. But I also don't know Caroline and I haven't interacted in two years and now suddenly we are in various ways crashing against each other, in front of everyone. I really care about her a lot and I know that she is going through a lot and this might sound disingenuous given that I'm one of the people who is contributing to the tough times. When I emailed her to tell her that this piece was coming out, I told her that this is my perspective and that I really look forward to reading hers. Because I am truly such a fan of her writing and I want her to be able to be in a place where she can create work and respond to me as just one example of the stuff she can put out in the world. Who are some of your favorite writers? My favorite book, maybe, is "Grendel" by John Gardner. Its great. It's about Beowulf but from the perspective of the monster. He is not of nature, but he is not of man and he's wandering around with this wildly profane internal monologue asking existential questions and eating townspeople.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
LONDON As sure as showers will fall during London Fashion Week (there were plenty over the last four days), Burberry will provide the starriest front row of the schedule. And so it was on Monday. Just as for seasons immemorial well, a decade, which counts as an eternity in fashion terms the A list crowd braved the rain, turning out to snap at one another on smartphones (and at photographers who got too close) from the velvet banquettes of the vast show tent in a leafy corner of Hyde Park. But of course this wasn't like any other season, it being the first show since the announcement this month by Christopher Bailey, the Burberry designer, that it would be the last before the label switches to a see now, buy now seasonless format for collections.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The High Museum of Art in Atlanta has the largest collection of Thornton Dial works in the world. It's now about to get bigger, thanks to a major acquisition of artworks courtesy of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. A total of 54 works by contemporary African American artists from the South make up the gift and purchase. Thirteen of those are by Mr. Dial, a self taught artist who used scavenged materials to depict black struggle in the South. The acquisition includes "Crossing Waters" (2006 11), which refers to the trans Atlantic slave trade and was the largest painting ever made by Mr. Dial, who died last year. With the acquisition, the museum will also receive 11 quilts by the women of Gee's Bend, a remote community in Alabama renowned for its beautiful quilting. In a 2002 review in The New York Times of a Gee's Bend collection at the Whitney Museum, Michael Kimmelman called them "some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced." The collection also includes works by Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett and Sam Doyle. To showcase the new pieces, the museum will increase the space in its folk and self taught art galleries by 30 percent, as part of a permanent collection reinstallation planned for 2018.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
More than 60 artists, including four Pulitzer Prize winners and other prominent writers, actors, directors and playwrights, have signed an open letter calling on Lincoln Center to cancel performances of a play co produced by two Israeli theater companies and backed by the Israeli government. The play, "To the End of the Land," is produced by the Cameri Theater of Tel Aviv and Ha'Bima National Theater of Israel and is based on a critically acclaimed 2008 novel by David Grossman about a mother who tries to escape from her worry over her son's military service by going on a hike in the Galilee. The play, part of the Lincoln Center Festival, is being presented July 24 27 "with support of Israel's Office of Cultural Affairs in North America," according to a news release. This is the main point of contention in the letter, even though Mr. Grossman, the play's author, has been an outspoken critic of the Israeli government in the past. The letter was organized by Adalah NY, an advocacy group that calls for the boycott of Israel over its treatment of Palestinians. "It is deeply troubling that Lincoln Center, one of the world's leading cultural institutions, is helping the Israeli government to implement its systematic 'Brand Israel' strategy of employing arts and culture to divert attention from the state's decades of violent colonization, brutal military occupation and denial of basic rights to the Palestinian people," the letter reads.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
When the larvae hatch, currents carry them north northwest, and experiments have shown that they consistently swim south southeast guided by the sun back to their birthplace. But to see whether magnetic forces are also at work, the researchers tested them by using a device that creates a uniform magnetic field whose direction can be manipulated. With the larvae in a tank surrounded by the device, the scientists turned the earth's normal magnetic north 120 degrees clockwise. The fish followed right along, swimming in the direction the researchers steered them. The study is online in Current Biology. The lead author, Gabriele Gerlach, a professor of marine biology at the University of Oldenburg in Germany, said that many other marine fish and invertebrates "have the same behavior they hatch and then are washed out into the ocean for days, weeks, even months. And they might have this same magnetic orientation behavior."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
For 15 years, employees of Posman Books in Grand Central Terminal have perfected their response to six magic words: "I have a train to catch." "I think that we have always tried very hard to make it easy for our customers to come in in a hurry and grab something," said Robert Fader, Posman's vice president. "Of course, we encourage anyone to linger who has the time, and if the trains are delayed, so much the better." As the evening rush began on a recent Wednesday, several customers did linger, but not for the reasons Mr. Fader once relied on. The store will close its doors on Dec. 31, and some commuters wanted to buy a book, a card, a calendar, in a show of respect. "I wanted to get some books to help them," said Cynthia Cruz, who teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and comes into the store several times a week. "I just figured it was another bookstore that was going away." Bookstores around New York City have been disappearing for years, driven out by soaring rents and the overall gloomy economics of the publishing industry. But Posman's location in one of North America's biggest transit hubs had always been among its biggest blessings, keeping it profitable, according to Mr. Fader. That fortunate locale, however, has now contributed to the store's misfortune, because the shop is in the middle of two separate multibillion dollar construction projects that are pushing it out. SL Green Realty, one of the largest commercial landlords in New York, plans to build a 1,400 foot tower next to Grand Central at 1 Vanderbilt Avenue. Under an agreement that predates the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's oversight of Grand Central, SL Green has a right to take back the rear half of Posman's space to support construction projects above ground, according to Aaron Donovan, a spokesman for the M.T.A. And the M.T.A. is busy with its own 10 billion project to connect Grand Central with the Long Island Rail Road. Bracing for the surge of new passengers both projects will bring, the agency saw 1 Vanderbilt as an opportunity to increase space for pedestrian foot traffic. So SL Green and the M.T.A. reached an agreement: SL Green will use its space to build pillars, columns or whatever it may need for 1 Vanderbilt, but it will turn most of the area into a pedestrian thoroughfare, according to Mr. Donovan. When it finishes, the M.T.A. can turn the other half of the space back into a retail area, he said. In the meantime, Posman's floor space will be used for storage for other retailers that have lost space to the Long Island Rail Road project. SL Green will pick up most of the bill. It has committed to spend 210 million on the walkway and other improvements to Grand Central, Mr. Donovan said. The Rite Aid drugstore next door to Posman will remain open (its lease extends through 2019), although it will lose about 3,000 square feet of space, Mr. Donovan said. PIQ, a nearby gift store, will lose about 200 square feet. Only Posman will close. The M.T.A. opted not to renew its lease when it expired in August, and the store has operated on a month to month basis since then. Mr. Fader estimated that roughly 1,500 people stream through the door each day, nearly double Posman's second busiest location in Chelsea (Posman operates a third store in Rockefeller Center). Many of those customers are tourists, others are commuters. Many are in a rush, and the store is designed to get them in and out quickly. "This isn't one of those stores where you're going into some sort of labyrinth of confusion," Mr. Fader said. "We can then take care of what it is they need and get them out of the door, and I think that there's a sort of nice simplicity to that." The store also caters to popular tastes, unlike what Mr. Fader, 57, said were the snobbier independent booksellers of his native London and his earlier days in New York. (One store would not sell Stephen King novels, he recalled, although he declined to say which one.) He carefully monitors the news to make sure that Posman has plenty of a potentially hot selling book. The Harlequin romance section is always well stocked. "We treat that area with the seriousness that we treat literature, if you like," he said. Posman is one of about 100 retailers and restaurants in Grand Central, roughly double the number when the M.T.A. undertook a major overhaul of the station in the 1990s to try to make better use of the space. "There was a store selling baked potatoes and cooking with no kitchen exhaust," said Nancy Marshall, the M.T.A.'s director of retail leasing and management for the terminal. "There was just a very unplanned method of retail within the building and the lack of any sort of cohesive mix."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Nihonium, symbol Nh, was discovered by scientists at the Riken institute in Japan. They are the first from Asia to earn the right to propose an addition to the table. The name comes from "Nihon," which is one of the two Japanese words for Japan. The other word, "Nippon," made its way to versions of the periodic table in 1908 as element 43, nipponium, but was never officially accepted. At the time, researchers were unable to replicate the experiments of Masataka Ogawa, a Japanese chemist who isolated the element. Two decades later, it was revealed that Dr. Ogawa had in fact found a new element: element 75, by then already known as rhenium. The team that discovered element 113 told Iupac that they had chosen nihonium in part to honor the work of Dr. Ogawa. A trio of research institutions the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, in Russia; Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee; and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California were given the right to propose names for elements 115 and 117. Moscovium, symbol Mc, is named for Moscow, which is near the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. Tennessine, symbol Ts, gets its name from the state of Tennessee, where Oak Ridge National Laboratory is. After californium, it is the second element named for one of the 50 states.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
For the fourth week in a row, it's Drake season on the Billboard chart. "Scorpion," the rapper's latest album, broke streaming records upon its release last month and has maintained momentum since, earning the No. 1 spot once again with the equivalent of another 184,000 albums sold. That total, down 29 percent from last week, includes 212 million streams a still substantial but more modest number after weekly streams of 746 million, 391 million and 290 million plus another 15,000 copies sold as a full album. The last album to spend its first four weeks atop the chart was Drake's own "Views" in 2016. Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder. Drake's commercial dominance has all but cleared the field: No new album debuted in the Top 5 (or Top 10) this week. The highest charting new release was the Internet's "Hive Mind" at No. 26. The rest of the top sellers have been familiar faces on the charts this summer, and also relied largely on streaming: Post Malone's "Beerbongs Bentleys" is No. 2 on the strength of 77 million streams; "?" by XXXTentacion, who was killed in Florida last month, is No. 4 with 59 million streams; and Cardi B's "Invasion of Privacy" is No. 5 with 46 million streams.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Alphabet, Google's parent company, spent big in the first quarter on new data centers and services aimed at businesses. SAN FRANCISCO Alphabet, Google's parent company, is spending like it is beginning to prepare for life after advertising. Currently, Alphabet makes nearly 90 percent of its money from selling advertising on the internet, and gobbles up heaps of data about its users to help marketers target those ads more effectively. But a close reading of Alphabet's financial results for the first quarter of 2018, which were announced on Monday, showed that the Silicon Valley giant is accelerating its efforts to diversify into other businesses. Alphabet has made investments in areas like self driving cars and online computer services for businesses for years, but spending in those areas was up dramatically in the first quarter. The company's capital expenditures, which included installing undersea cables and the construction of new data centers, were 7.7 billion more than triple the same period last year. Ruth Porat, Alphabet's chief financial officer, said that increase reflected a "commitment to growth" because the company had spent heavily on computing infrastructure, for both its own internal use and customer needs like Google Cloud the unit that provides technology services to other companies. Alphabet's expenses rose 27 percent in the quarter. Ms. Porat said the heaviest spending came from research and development costs mainly the hiring of additional technical staff. The company said its total employees had increased to 85,050 from 73,992 in the same period a year ago. Over all, Alphabet said its net income rose 73 percent, to 9.4 billion, from the same period a year earlier, boosted in part by an increase in the value of its outside investments. Revenue rose 26 percent to 31.1 billion. Ms. Porat also pointed out an increase in spending for advertising to promote newer products including Google's own hardware a relatively new business manufacturing branded smartphones, laptops and smart speakers and the company's artificially intelligent digital assistant. "They are thinking about their future," said Collin Colburn, an analyst at Forrester Research who focuses on search advertising. "They want to diversify beyond just advertising being such a big part of their business." That focus on variety comes as the data collection practices that underpin the entire digital advertising industry are under intense scrutiny after the personal information of up to 87 million Facebook users ended up in the hands of the political research firm Cambridge Analytica. Google's advertising business is more than twice the size of Facebook's, and the company's portfolio of data about its users is as expansive if not more so than that of the social network. Still, the search giant's core business showed no sign of slowing in the first quarter. Revenue from Google's advertising business, which includes ads shown on Google search and commercials running before YouTube videos, increased 24 percent during the quarter. However, Google's advertising profits were weighed down by an increase in traffic acquisition costs the fees that it pays companies like Apple to make sure that its search engine is the default option when people open a browser on the iPhone. Also among the company's expenditures in the quarter: 2.4 billion to buy the Chelsea Market building in Manhattan, where the company had set up some of its New York offices. On a conference call with investment analysts, Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, avoided answering questions about the potential effects of new regulations concerning data privacy in Europe. The new law, which goes into effect on May 25, will restrict how companies like Google can collect, store and use personal data from users across Europe. Mr. Pichai said the company has been preparing for the law for more than 18 months, but didn't discuss how the new regulations may affect the company's bottom line.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
WHAT IS IT? A diesel electric bulldozer. HOW MUCH? Base price is 560,000; as tested, 600,000. Loading up with options like a heated seat, rear camera, rock guards, GPS tracking device and autopilot blade controls can run the sticker to 650,000. WHAT MAKES IT RUN? A 9.3 liter 6 cylinder Caterpillar turbodiesel, rated at 235 horsepower and 719 pound feet of torque, bolts to a 480 volt generator. Two 107 horsepower electric motors power the tracks to a top speed of 7 miles per hour. IS IT THIRSTY? Not for a bulldozer. The D7E pushes 25 percent more m.p.g. material per gallon, that is than its nonhybrid counterpart, the D7R. AT the controls of a machine that stands 11 feet tall, weighs 60,000 pounds and can move mountains, you quickly realize that the word hybrid is a relative term. Officially, the Caterpillar D7E is not a hybrid bulldozer. Before 2009, in fact, Cat did not use the h word to describe the earthmoving machine, a 10 year effort that generated over 100 patents. Caterpillar engineers told me during a drive at the company's test facility in Edwards, Ill., that they prefer to call it an electric tractor with a diesel electric hybrid powertrain. This fuzzy marketing terminology echoes the strategy of General Motors, which calls its plug in hybrid, the 2011 Chevrolet Volt, an extended range electric car.Yet aside from the differences in weight (roughly 28 tons) and price (about half a million dollars), the Cat D7E could easily play big brother to the Volt. Both vehicles use powertrains that directly couple an internal combustion engine with an electric generator, though the Volt carries a lithium ion battery pack enabling it to drive some 40 miles without starting its gas engine. "We just don't have the battery storage element," Mike Betz, chief engineer of the D7E, said. A hybrid tractor, I discovered, drives much like a nonhybrid tractor. (I'm not an expert bulldozer pilot, though I am a certified crane operator). The cab is comfortable, and the controls are intuitive. The air suspension seat gave welcome relief as I bounced over bumps and dips. On each of the chair's telescoping armrests are joysticks. The left side controls direction; the joystick on the right moves the blade up, down or angles it for a cross slope. Simple as that. Sculpturing the dirt into small trenches and hills, I found the powertrain far smoother than those of typical construction machines. Keeping the ground level was where my skills ran out. Part of the D7E's smoothness comes from the steady speed of its engine, which hums along at about 1,500 to 1,800 r.p.m. Normal tractors' engines rev up and down more; a nudge of the joystick is followed by a loud clatter, a plume of smoke and, finally, a jerk to the tracks. Not so with the D7E. And even without a battery pack or idle stop system, the powertrain wrings efficiency out of the engine by running it in a narrower r.p.m. range. That also makes this machine quieter almost eerily so than conventional tractors. Swing the doors closed and the noise peters out even more, to about the same level you'd expect in a car traveling down a freeway. Like automotive hybrids, the D7E does recapture energy that would otherwise be wasted, though not in the traditional sense of a regenerative braking system. During forward and reverse shifts, which happen hundreds of times a day in a bulldozer, the electric motors momentarily push energy back into the engine's flywheel. In bulldozers, miles per gallon is not the defining measure of fuel efficiency. The D7E burns 6.2 gallons of diesel an hour, drawing from a 126 gallon tank, but Cat says it can push 25 percent more material rocks, dirt, whatever per gallon than the nonhybrid D7R. Aside from improving fuel consumption, the hybrid powertrain also spits out fewer pollutants in its exhaust. For this reason the Environmental Protection Agency graced the D7E with its Clean Air Excellence award last spring. Even so, Caterpillar was reluctant to stick the hybrid label on the D7E. "In some circles, that's not necessarily a selling point yet," said Daniel Sperling, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Davis, a member of the state's Air Resources Board and co author of "Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability." But it was Mr. Sperling who prodded the Cat people to step up the hybrid lingo. "They were kind of struggling with how to describe it, both for their management as well as their customers," he said. Perhaps one day Caterpillar will make electric bulldozers. But even now the yellow construction machines are showing a tinge of green. TUDOR VAN HAMPTON	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Small children may have some trouble at that point , and also with Scar's ruthless political machinations, which are pretty murdery for Disney. But it's likely that much of the audience, young and old, will have some familiarity with the narrative, whether from the 1994 animated feature or from the long running, much loved Broadway show. "The Lion King" currently under review isn't meant to replace or outdo either of those, but rather to multiply revenue streams and use a beloved property to show off some new tricks. A lot of people will go, expecting to like what they see, and for the most part they won't be disappointed. I said earlier that the movie, which was directed by Jon Favreau and written by Jeff Nathanson, looks like a nature documentary. But it plays more like an especially glitzy presentation reel at a trade convention, with popular songs and high end talent pushing an exciting new product that nobody is sure quite how to use. Simba and his best friend, Nala, voiced as cubs by JD McCrary and Shahadi Wright Joseph, grow up into Donald Glover and Beyonce, and when they get going on "Can You Feel the Love Tonight ..." It's O.K. When Pumbaa and his pal Timon the meerkat show up I'm not going to stir up trouble by saying which one might be the other's sidekick we get a brisk vaudevillian double act from Rogen and Billy Eichner. That's O.K. too. But of all the second golden age Disney animated features, the original "Lion King" is the most Shakespearean, as well as being the most ideologically coherent Hollywood defense of monarchy until "Black Panther." The grandeur and intimacy, the earthy humor and heavenly songs have given it gravity and staying power. Those are somehow missing here. The songs don't have the pop or the splendor. The terror and wonder of the intra pride battles are muted. There is a lot of professionalism but not much heart. It may be that the realism of the animals makes it hard to connect with them as characters, undermining the inspired anthropomorphism that has been the most enduring source of Disney magic. Real lions don't sing not even like Beyonce and don't actually govern other creatures. The closer the movie gets to nature in its look, the more blatant, intrusive and purposeless its artifice seems. It might have worked better without songs or dialogue: surely the Disney wizards could have figured out how to spin an epic tale of royal succession and self discovery through purely visual means. Or else someone could have spent a few months teaching the digital Pumbaa to whip up a nice tofu scramble. Rated PG. Not too red in tooth and claw. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
In the late 1960s, not long before his groundbreaking "November Steps" for shakuhachi, biwa and orchestra, the avant garde composer Toru Takemitsu struggled to reconcile Japanese and Western music. As evidence of their incompatibility, he pointed to sawari, the noisy buzz that gives the shamisen a three stringed, fretless Japanese lute its characteristic timbre. In contrast to the European ideal of sonic purity, Takemitsu suggested, Japanese music embraces the expressive noise that lives inside every musical sound. But for the composer Dai Fujikura, sawari is a bridge between musical cultures, not a chasm. "I love the electric guitar," he said in a recent interview. "I have more pieces for rock guitar than acoustic guitar. So writing for the shamisen felt very natural: The distortion comes with it." The program, said Rebekah Heller, an artistic director and bassoonist with the ensemble, "is about thinking of these instruments from the inside out. Not ignoring their rich historical traditions, but incorporating these exciting sounds into new sound worlds imagined by composers." It's an apt concept for the group, whose virtuosic players offer composers an ever expanding sonic palette, and in whose hands a flute or cello may sound as unfamiliar and surprising as a shamisen. Mr. Fujikura's concerto draws on his 2014 solo shamisen piece "Neo," a propulsive seven minute tour de force that shifts between rhythmic grooves as it builds relentlessly toward its climax. The piece was commissioned and premiered by Mr. Honjo, who over the past few years has pursued collaborations, such as a concert last year with ICE, designed to push the shamisen into new musical territory. In the new 20 minute, single movement concerto, Mr. Fujikura uses the ensemble to complement and enhance the shamisen, rather than as a foil placed in dramatic conflict with the soloist. But there are still connections to the traditional concerto form; early on, the shamisen breaks into a cadenza like solo of dizzying rapidity that evokes prog rock guitar as much as Paganini. The piece, Ms. Heller said, is "a barn burner." Half a century after Takemitsu's aesthetic crisis and two decades after the founding of Yo Yo Ma's transcultural Silk Road Ensemble, composers seem more comfortable using non Western instruments less anxious, perhaps, about the specter of exoticism. This has led to an exponential growth, driven largely by performers, in the number of concertos featuring solo instruments not found in Western orchestras. The didgeridoo, duduk, sitar and oud even the waterphone are just a few instruments that are enriching the concerto repertoire. In Sofia Gubaidulina's Triple Concerto, the bayan (a Russian button accordion) colors the ensemble with a tenebrous rustle. For Chinese instruments like the pipa, erhu and sheng, the number of concertos from the past 30 years tops 300. Wu Man, a founding Silk Road Ensemble member who has championed the pipa, a four stringed lute, points to the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 1979 performance in Beijing of Wu Tsu Chiang's pipa concerto "Little Sisters of the Grassland" as the moment that whetted China's appetite for concertos. In China now, Ms. Wu said recently, "every player wants to play concertos" rather than give solo recitals. Ms. Wu has collaborated with both Chinese and non Chinese composers in creating new pipa concertos. In her estimation, this diversity is a boon to the instrument. "Different composers all have different concepts of how to use the pipa, of what the character of the instrument is within an orchestra," she said. Lou Harrison's pipa concerto, for instance, which Ms. Wu premiered in 1997, sounds to her neither Chinese nor American. "Parts of it," she said, "sound very Californian." Harrison, despite his unorthodox use of the pipa, knew the instrument well. Mr. Fujikura, on the other hand, knew virtually nothing about the shamisen before researching the instrument when he was composing "Neo." Although he was born in Japan, in 1977, he has lived in the United Kingdom since he was 15 and has a greater affinity for the pop music of British singer songwriter David Sylvian and the film music of Ryuichi Sakamoto than for traditional Japanese instruments like the koto and sho. "I knew the shamisen as much as any other non Japanese composer who has never written for Japanese instruments," he said. "I knew it, like Americans do, from sushi restaurants and movies like 'Kubo and the Two Strings.'" Composing his concerto, even after "Neo," brought some surprises. The use of the left hand pinkie finger, Mr. Fujikura learned from Mr. Honjo, is forbidden, at least traditionally.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Why Everyone Is Angry at Facebook Over Its Political Ads Policy None Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, has said he will run political ads in the interest of free speech. Although the company has reached no decisions, it is weighing some changes. Pete Marovich for The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO After Google announced restrictions on political advertising this week, campaign strategists in Washington quickly turned their attention to a different company: Facebook. Some strategists voiced concerns to Facebook about how Google's decision would affect it, said two people who talked to the company. They told Facebook that if it followed Google by limiting how political campaigns target audiences, it would hurt their ability to reach unregistered voters and make it tougher for smaller organizations to collect donations online, the people said. The conversations added to the pressure on Facebook as it weighs how to handle political advertising. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, has made it clear that Facebook will not fact check ads from politicians even if they contain lies in the interest of free speech. But the social network is discussing some ad changes, like restricting how precisely campaigns can reach specific groups, said three people briefed by the company. Facebook has made no final ruling on its political advertising guidelines, said the people, who declined to be identified because the discussions were confidential. On Thursday at a happy hour discussion with roughly 500 digital strategists, campaign officials and political operatives at Facebook's offices in Washington, company executives were adamant that they would not make any news about political ads, said two people who attended the event. But Facebook risks being whipsawed by its indecision, especially since Google and Twitter have already rolled out revised political advertising policies ahead of the 2020 American presidential election. "Twitter fired the starting gun, and Google just cranked it up to 11," said Eric Wilson, a Republican digital advertising strategist. "Now the pressure is on Facebook they're going to have to act." Political advertising on social media and internet platforms has become particularly fraught in this election cycle because of how campaigns increasingly rely on the digital channels to spread their messages and reach voters. Yet few companies are getting caught in that fray as much as Facebook. On the one hand, the company wants to curtail the spread of disinformation across its site. The practice of targeting specific groups with ads, known as "microtargeting," can stoke disinformation because advertisers can inflame niche audiences who may be susceptible to tailored messages. At the same time, Facebook wants to avoid alienating the groups and candidates who depend on its platform for fund raising and organizing. So in trying to find a way to please everyone on the issue, Facebook has managed to please no one. The social network has now become an outlier in how freely it lets political candidates and elected officials advertise on its platform. While Mr. Zuckerberg declared last month that Facebook would not police political ads, Twitter said it would ban all such ads because of their negative impact on civic discourse. On Wednesday, Google said it would no longer allow political ads to be directed to specific audiences based on people's public voter records or political affiliations. "As we've said, we are looking at different ways we might refine our approach to political ads," a Facebook spokesman said in a statement. The pressure on Facebook over what to do about political ad targeting has been unrelenting. Organizations on both sides of the political aisle from as large as President Trump's re election campaign to smaller, grass roots groups have tried to persuade Facebook not to rein in the ad targeting. "Making major changes to platform ad targeting would severely disadvantage Democrats and progressives who rely on Facebook for fund raising and currently have a much smaller organic audience and current database of supporters to engage on and off the platform than Donald Trump," said Tara McGowan, founder and chief executive of Acronym, a progressive nonprofit group. Some Republican strategists said they also feared losing the ability to raise significant campaign donations online if Facebook reduced ad targeting. On Friday, the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee issued a joint statement condemning Google's changes to its ad targeting policies. "Tech companies should not reduce the power of the grass roots just because it is easier than addressing abuse on their platforms," the groups said in a memo to CNN. "We call on these tech companies, including Google, to reconsider their decision to bluntly limit political advertising on their platforms." Facebook has been contacting ad buyers and advocacy groups for feedback on what changes to political ads, if any, they could stomach. In one recent call with political advertising groups, Facebook said it was considering some tweaks, such as the possibility of raising the minimum number of people who could be targeted to 1,000 from 100, according to two people familiar with the discussion. The potential change was earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal. Facebook also is updating and refining its advertising library, a collection of current and past ads that were paid for by political candidates, in an effort to increase transparency, the people said. On Thursday at Facebook's Washington event with digital strategists and campaign officials, executives ticked through their current ad policies for 90 minutes, before breaking for a question and answer period that lasted roughly 15 minutes. Despite Facebook's pledge that it would not announce any new ad policies, those in attendance tried to pry out some information, said two people who were there. One member of the Trump campaign asked if Facebook was considering eliminating certain data and the ability to reach specific audiences. Facebook said it welcomed all feedback and was considering all the issues. Another questioner professed hope that Facebook would not follow in Google's footsteps, said the attendees. Facebook officials reiterated that they would not be making any news. When asked if the social network would treat Democrats and Republicans equally in the 2020 elections, though, Facebook officials were quick to respond. Their answer: Yes, everyone will be treated the same, the attendees said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The Australian TV dramedy "Please Like Me" earned a devoted following and an international Emmy nomination for the way it used droll humor to explore difficult, even tragic, events. Its creator and star, the comedian Josh Thomas, drew from his own life to shape the four season show, including his experiences coming out as gay and dealing with his mother's attempted suicide. Thomas, 32, is now back with a new show, "Everything's Gonna Be Okay," which he also wrote and stars in. (The show will premiere on Jan. 16 on Freeform, and episodes will be on Hulu from Jan. 17.) Thomas plays Nicholas, a narcissistic, neurotic 25 year old who becomes the legal guardian of his two half sisters in Los Angeles, one of whom has high functioning autism, when their father dies of cancer. The show's ten episodes are an unsparing and often absurdly funny look at the dynamics of sibling life, stripped down to their bare essentials. In a phone interview from Los Angeles, Thomas said that killing off the parents at the beginning of a coming of age TV show "is tradition": "I just wanted to create that world where there were three people living in the house trying to survive." He also discussed working with A.D.H.D., how American TV sets differ from on Australian ones and why he now wouldn't cast a straight man in a gay role. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. "Please Like Me" was inspired by your own life, including a scene in which the mother of the main character, played by you and also called Josh, overdoses. I'm gay, and my mom took 100 Panadol and half a bottle of Baileys: That's true. Those were the starting points and the big topics I wanted to explore. I felt like bipolar hadn't been shown that well in TV and suicides were often shown in a really cheesy way, like a man about to jump off a bridge. How much in "Everything's Gonna Be Okay" is based on your own life? This show is just made up. There is a scene where I pour ceviche on my boyfriend's head and I did that in real life. We were drunk in a bar and we didn't want to eat the rest of the ceviche, and I thought it would be funny. I was just trying to make him laugh. It didn't make him laugh. In the show, Nicholas's 17 year old sister, Matilda, has autism. What inspired you to create her as a character? I've got A.D.H.D., which is different, but it's autism adjacent and it gives me a window of insight into what it's like to have a brain that doesn't work in the way people expect brains to work. I like very direct people who are honest and who have strange points of view. Autism was a good match for what I wanted to do with my next characters. The actress Kayla Cromer, who plays Matilda, also has autism. Was that important for you? It was very important to us from an ethical point of view: There are actors out there on the spectrum who want jobs, and they should get those jobs. When we started auditioning it was so clear that the girls on the spectrum were so much better because they were authentic. I don't know why anyone would hire a neurotypical person to portray someone with autism. I think it's kind of lazy. What about casting straight men to play gay men? In "Please Like Me," for example, Josh's first boyfriend, Geoffrey, is played by a straight actor. I don't know if I would hire a straight guy to play a gay guy anymore. I just think I can tell the difference and they are going to be more believable. I want the gay representation on the screen to be really good. If you make a show with a gay at the center, and it's not good and not a success, people are less likely to make shows with a gay at the center. What is it like working with A.D.H.D.? The thing about A.D.H.D. is you have a pathological fear of boredom, so it forced me to never have a job that is boring, and I think that is a blessing. I'm crazy disorganized. When I was 19 I missed a flight because I wasn't wearing shoes and I didn't pack any shoes. I do that stuff a lot, and I rely on a lot of people to keep me organized, and in clothes, and at the place I need to be. We're seeing a lot of shows recently that combine tragedy with laughter, such as "Fleabag." Why are we seeing this turn toward dramedy? In my life when something sad happens, people usually don't wallow in sadness. People I know try to lighten things up and make jokes. Funny things happen. Comedy drama is just about trying to be realistic, and real life doesn't have genres. If you want to reflect the actual world, you need to have both I think. You used to perform stand up comedy, but then you quit for six years. Last year you started to tour again. Why? It's a weird thing to be onstage all the time. In TV, you have so much control. Whereas in stand up, your self esteem is just as good as the last live show you did. How do you feel about it now? I just decided not to be such a weird neurotic idiot about it. Your dog John, a Cavoodle, played a central role in "Please Like Me." Where is he now? John is still alive. Barely, but he is. He is not answering the door, he just stays in bed. He's got a bad back. Poor old man.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
There are radiant heat floors throughout the four bedroom house, including its four baths and modern eat in kitchen. Some of the interior is highly personalized, like the upstairs bar with '90s decor that opens onto the roof deck, and the bathroom with a gas fireplace and a claw foot tub smack in the middle. The finished basement has a sauna, a steam room and a four person hot tub. Outside, a metallic industrial sculpture made of oxidized copper surrounds the main exterior door. There is also a chain link dog cage and a landscaped koi pond, about 4 feet wide and 12 feet long, that has 20 large fish. When Mr. Vinbaytel bought the house in 1997, the backyard was mostly a rocky outcropping. "I leveled everything out," he said, standing on the roof deck and pointing out how neighbors are beginning to follow suit with lush green lawns. "Then I just kept going with the pool and kept going with the pond. Every few years I just put in something else." "Nothing like that has been on the market," said the listing broker, Ariel Tirosh of Prudential Douglas Elliman, noting that the closest comparable property a house on a 10,000 square foot lot, several blocks away on Sheepshead Bay sold for 5.76 million in 2007. Just down the block, a four bedroom three and a half bath house on a 4,000 square foot lot without any waterfront is listed for 2.1 million.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
CHICAGO I was taking a tour of the Den, a warren of performance spaces carved out of a row of former furniture and clothing stores, when one of my guides opened a door to what I felt sure was a broom closet. Wrong! It was another performance space. Inside, crews from WildClaw Theater were preparing the tiny black box for that evening's offering, a play called "Second Skin" that local reviews had called eerie and creepy. Those were compliments; WildClaw's aim is to "bring the world of horror to the stage." The Den, which blends seamlessly into the workaday commercial strip of North Milwaukee Avenue in the Wicker Park neighborhood here, houses a lot of companies with a lot of aims. I had come that evening to see a revival of "Caroline, or Change" by Firebrand Theater, which calls itself the world's first professional feminist musical theater company. But I might as easily have found myself at a historical drama or a director's showcase or who knows what in the Den's six other live theater spaces, which range in size from 50 to 150 seats and, in mission, from here to eternity. Resident ensembles include Broken Nose Theater (a pay what you can company seeking to "cultivate empathy"), First Floor Theater ("stories of individuals facing moments of radical change"), the Griffin Theater Company ("building bridges of understanding between generations") and Haven Theater ("Next Generation. New Canon. Social Profit"). Everywhere I turned there was a work in progress or a coffee bar or a clutch of chairs set up for cabaret. In case anyone should run out of things to see, a table in the lobby offered an array of handbills promoting dozens of shows elsewhere in town. If the Den is a bit like an advent calendar, with surprises popping out from behind every door, so is the Chicago theater scene as a whole. Or that's how it seemed to me when I visited for several days last month, sampling some of the 200 theaters in a city where 100 shows play on any given night. Behind the biggest doors are the institutions with national reputations. At the Steppenwolf Theater Company, I caught the world premiere of Bruce Norris's "Downstate" (through Nov. 11) in a stellar production only a long established ensemble could mount. At Chicago Shakespeare Theater, nicknamed Chicago Shakes, I saw the American premiere of Jessica Swale's delightful "Nell Gwynn" (through Nov. 4), a lavish romp about the Restoration era trollop turned actress turned royal consort. The production, at the theater's recently expanded Navy Pier facility, looks like it cost a fortune in costumes alone. But for a New Yorker, the real surprise was to be found in the far flung spaces like the Den that make up Chicago's "storefront" theater movement. Especially in the northern part of the city, these theaters have colonized churches and renovated restaurants and turned showrooms into show rooms. Some house an audience of hundreds, some just a handful. It was the clash of small and large that created the most excitement for me. Often, as with "Caroline, or Change" (through Oct. 28), that clash occurred within a single production. As you would expect from a musical with a book and lyrics by Tony Kushner, "Caroline" is thematically ambitious, dramatizing an enormous range of ideas in the story of a black maid working for a Jewish family in Louisiana in 1963. It has a cast of 16 and a wonderfully complex, nearly sung through score by Jeanine Tesori. But Firebrand is a new endeavor; "Caroline," directed by Lili Anne Brown, is its third outing. (For the ambitious production, it partnered with Timeline Theater Company, which presents stories "inspired by history" and provided the informative lobby display here.) The cast includes just one Equity member Rashada Dawan as Caroline and a band of five. (On Broadway in 2004, 11 players were kept more than busy in the pit.) When the curtain was delayed by 30 minutes because the soundboard software had self destructed, I began to quail. I needn't have. This "Caroline Unplugged" as Harmony France, Firebrand's artistic director, called it in a preshow announcement came across with full force, in part because of the scale that at first seemed an impediment. Even without amplification, when Ms. Dawan sang you backed up in your seat. And so I found Caroline's monumental dourness, no less than the clueless attempts of the Gellman family to get around it, as heartbreaking as ever. Only later did I understand that the specific missions of storefront theaters like Firebrand, as well as their generally small spaces, are crucial to maintaining this ecosystem. Actors want to work on material that matters to them and they want to do so for like minded audiences. Idealism and sacrifice on all sides keeps the prices down and the work vibrant. Red Tape Theater, which performs in a former Lincoln Square children's shoe store and recreational space called the Ready, takes that idea to its logical extreme. It's a free theater, which is to say there is no charge for tickets. Really. As its artistic director, Max Truax, explained, Red Tape instead finances its productions by asking donors, who may or may not be audience members, to make monthly contributions of any amount toward the theater's budget. The average is 14 but some give as little as 5. The result, when I went there to see Young Jean Lee's "The Shipment" (through Oct. 13), was a full and admirably diverse house of 60 and a long waiting list. Red Tape's mission, aside from making theater available to everyone, is to produce works exactly like "The Shipment," which is avant garde, political and as staged here by Wardell Julius Clark immersive. It's also, in Ms. Lee's typical manner, deliberately cringe worthy. It opens with the all black cast performing a minstrel show and moves on from there. By dialing up the humor as much as possible, Mr. Clark also dials up the discomfort. "The Shipment" has to be executed by actors who are truly committed to its outre style or it falls apart. It was evident to me that this cast relished the opportunity to dig into difficult material without having to worry about drawing a broad audience. But they and the other artists in the storefront theater movement do pay a price, even if the audience doesn't. The Red Tape staff, including Mr. Truax, are all volunteers. And as Sydney Charles, the associate director of "The Shipment," told me, rehearsals generally have to be scheduled in the evenings and on weekends because people involved in storefront productions can't possibly live off their art. A sign of real career progress for Chicago theater folk, she added ruefully, is when they can cut back from two day jobs to one. If this creates a tension between passion and professionalism, it's a tension that has clearly been useful to the Chicago theater scene. It keeps the compost churning. That means a lot of dying off, of course. Often for reasons of debt or exhaustion or, in the case of the prominent Profile Theater, accusations of abuse against the artistic director the companies collapse. But it bears noting that at other times they thrive and evolve. Most of the big theaters started as storefronts: Steppenwolf in a Unitarian church in the suburbs, Chicago Shakes on the roof of a pub. They offer a lesson other cities could learn from: A healthy theatrical ecosystem starts from the ground up.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
LOS ANGELES It's now on you, "Mulan." Warner Bros. on Friday pushed back the release of "Tenet," a 200 million plus mind bender from Christopher Nolan that was supposed to arrive in theaters on July 17 and jump start the pandemic stricken movie business. Instead, "Tenet" will be released on July 31. The move means that Disney's extravagant "Mulan," directed by Niki Caro, will now mark the return of megawatt Hollywood releases when it comes out on July 24 unless Disney also decides that the timing isn't quite right. A Disney spokesman had no immediate comment. To make up for the absence of "Tenet" on July 17, Warner will rerelease Mr. Nolan's cerebral thriller "Inception" on that date (almost 10 years to the day from its initial debut). Toby Emmerich, Warner's movie chairman, said in a statement that the "Inception" screenings will include exclusive footage from "Tenet" as a "count down" to its opening day. He called "Tenet" a global movie of "jaw dropping size, scope and scale." In another schedule change on Friday, Warner moved Patty Jenkins's "Wonder Woman 1984" out of the summer. The lasso wielding superheroine will now arrive on Oct. 2 instead of Aug. 14. After being closed for months by the pandemic, movie theaters around the world are starting to reopen, albeit with limited attendance and heightened safety requirements. But theaters in important markets like New York and Los Angeles may not be open by July 17. Further complicating matters, no one knows how skittish audiences will be about returning to theaters, making big budget releases all the more important. The big studios are eager to begin releasing movies again, but none are particularly thrilled by the idea of going first. In recent weeks, Warner, concerned about its "Tenet" investment, was leaning in favor of postponement, while Mr. Nolan, a fervent advocate for preserving the moviegoing experience, was more eager to press ahead. The discussions amounted to a fraught moment for Warner: Mr. Nolan is a proven moneymaker, and the studio wants to keep him happy. Mr. Nolan's films for Warner include the "Dark Knight" trilogy and most recently "Dunkirk," which collected 527 million worldwide in 2017. In March, he wrote in The Washington Post that movie theaters were "the most affordable and democratic of our community gathering places" and urged Congress to include them in the federal bailout. "When this crisis passes, the need for collective human engagement, the need to live and love and laugh and cry together, will be more powerful than ever," Mr. Nolan wrote. 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 plot for "Tenet" has been kept secret, in accordance with Mr. Nolan's wishes. The film stars John David Washington ("BlacKkKlansman," HBO's "Ballers") and Robert Pattinson, best known for the "Twilight" saga. When the pandemic spread to the United States in March, studios pushed back all of their major releases. "Black Widow" from Disney Marvel, for instance, moved to Nov. 6 from May 1. Some studios notably Universal have started to make some of their stockpile available on premium video on demand services. Universal declared that P.V.O.D. results for "Trolls World Tour" were strong enough to prove a new business model, increasing the pressure on theaters. AMC Theaters, the world's largest cineplex operator, announced on Tuesday that "almost all" of its locations in the United States and Britain would reopen next month. Over all, theaters in 90 percent of overseas markets will be running again by mid July, according to the National Association of Theater Owners, a trade organization for movie exhibitors in 98 countries. "Over these last months we have been keeping Warner Bros. closely informed of our work toward reopening our theaters in accordance with governmental health and safety requirements," the trade organization said in a statement on Friday. A modestly budgeted thriller, "Unhinged," starring Russell Crowe, will test the waters when it is released on July 10 by the upstart Solstice Studios. It is unclear whether people even while watching movies in well sanitized theaters with limited capacity will feel safe from the coronavirus, the spread of which rose to a worldwide high on Sunday, as measured by new cases. As the United States has started to reopen its economy, new hot spots have emerged; Texas, Florida and California all recently reported their highest daily tallies of new virus cases. Mass protests against police brutality have raised the specter of a coronavirus surge in the coming weeks. "Mulan" could have an easier time turning out crowds, some box office analysts say. Parents are desperate to have something to do with their children, the Disney brand offers an aura of safety and the story is well known. "Tenet," with its mysterious premise, could be a harder sell. Restrictions for reopening theaters vary by state. According to California's state guidance, as of June 12, theaters are urged to limit attendance to 25 percent of theater capacity or a maximum of 100 attendees, whichever is lower. Theater owners are also being encouraged to designate arrival times for patrons, establish specific entryways and exits to theaters and reconfigure seats to ensure six feet of physical distance between attendees. Masks are required for employees who must be within six feet of customers and encouraged for patrons when entering the theaters and at the concession stand. Disposable seat covers are also suggested. Los Angeles and the Bay Area are the nation's No. 1 and No. 3 movie markets. New York City and its immediate suburbs are No. 2.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
"I am a retired patent attorney," said Barbara Rae Venter. "None of this is a planned event." She Helped Crack the Golden State Killer Case. Here's What She's Going to Do Next. Much to the frustration of her proud son, the genetic genealogist who helped crack the unsolved case of the Golden State Killer decided early in the investigation that she did not want to be named. "I was worried about my safety, which is why it's taken me so long to come out of the closet," said Barbara Rae Venter. Last week, the 70 year old former attorney, who lives in California, decided she was ready, allowing Paul Holes, a retired investigator at the Contra Costa District Attorney's Office to name her in a tweet: " Some of the stuff on Twitter, I was blushing just reading it," she said. Ms. Rae Venter is the newest character to emerge in the Golden State Killer investigation, which has since inspired others skilled at solving family history puzzles to offer their services to law enforcement. While this has resulted in at least eight arrests over the past four months, not everyone in the genealogical community is so comfortable with the alliance. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. How did she become an expert at genetic genealogy? "I am a retired patent attorney," said Ms. Rae Venter, who lives on California's central coast. "None of this is a planned event." Ms. Rae Venter became an expert in genetic sleuthing techniques largely in an effort to assist a newfound cousin. The two matched on the website Family Tree DNA in 2012, a few weeks after he learned that man that raised him was not his father. "I thought it would really nice if I could help him but had no idea how," said Ms. Rae Venter. She found that the website DNAAdoption.org offered a class on how to use DNA matches, family trees and public records to find one's biological parents. She was not a typical student. Before going into law, she'd gotten a Ph.D. in biology. And as a patent lawyer, she specialized in biotechnology inventions, often working with companies that were innovating in molecular biology. Originally from New Zealand, she'd first moved to the United States with her ex husband, J. Craig Venter, the geneticist who would become known for his work sequencing the human genome. S oon after completing the course, she began teaching it. Although she insists that she still considers genetic genealogy a hobby, she's now talking to various law enforcement agencies about 50 cases involving homicide and unidentified victims. How did she get involved in criminal cases? In 2015, Ms. Rae Venter assisted a detective who was trying to figure out the identity of a woman named Lisa who had been kidnapped as a baby. Now in her 30s, Lisa had spent most of her life thinking that the man who had abused and then abandoned her was her father. That man had later been convicted of murder. In the course of that investigation, detectives had discovered that her DNA did not match his. So who were her parents? Where had she come from? The man refused to answer questions about her origins. It took 20,000 hours and the assistance of more than 100 volunteers. But ultimately Ms. Rae Venter used her techniques find the woman's birth name, Dawn, and connected her with her grandfather, who was her closest living relative interested in a connection. Ms. Rae Venter was able to narrow Lisa's likely father down to a grouping of brothers. All had been married at the time of her birth and those that could be located refused DNA testing. Still Lisa had gone from knowing nothing about who she was to holding a family tree containing thousands of people. Mr. Holes learned about Ms. Rae Venter's work on that case in 2017. If she had been able to figure out this girl's identity with so few clues, couldn't she also identify someone using well preserved semen? Ms. Rae Venter was not the only genealogist approached by law enforcement. At genealogy conferences, a debate about whether or not to cooperate was raging. It's not possible for law enforcement to search a genealogy site like 23andMe without a court order. But genealogists solving adoption cases knew there was a workaround. They could upload crime scene evidence to GEDmatch, a sort of Wikipedia of DNA that has a looser customer service agreement. Some felt that helping law enforcement navigate GEDmatch amounted to exploiting a loophole and violating user s' trust. Others felt it was O.K., but that it was best to proceed quietly, so as not to drive people off the site. Ms. Rae Venter said she was not aware of these conversations. "I didn't get into any debates," she said. Rather, after a review of Mr. Holes's previous cases, she agreed to help him. It was only later that she was told the details of the Golden State Killer case. The more she learned not only had the suspect killed at least 13 people, he'd raped dozens more the more determined she was. "This man needs to come off the street," she said. Ms. Rae Venter, is no stranger to ethical debates. An interest in medical ethics led her to law school. And as a lawyer, she helped the company Calgene obtain a patent for the Flavr Savr tomato, the first genetically engineered fruit licensed by the F.D.A. She was also involved in patenting crops that were genetically modified to resist Roundup herbicide. There is a misconception that solving a case using this new approach is as simple as finding a genetic match in a database. "DNA is an initial baby clue," said Ms. Rae Venter. In the hands of someone without experience in genetic genealogy, that clue typically a couple second or third cousins located in the GEDmatch database is useless. There were obstacles to overcome in the Golden State Killer case. A crucial step involves following cousins back until a common ancestor is identified. Many of the suspect's relatives were recent Italian immigrants and so the team hit dead ends in locating family tree data. Eventually , by focusing on the British side of the suspect's family , they began making progress and developed the rough outlines of trees, which would eventually be merged. Ms. Rae Venter then guided the team in how to fill out the branches using birth records, newspaper clippings, social media profiles and family tree data. Her trainees, which included two people from the F.B.I., two people from the Sacramento County district attorney's office along with Mr. Holes, were quick studies, she said. What cannot be so quickly learned is how to compare two autosomal DNA profiles and understand what the overlapping fragments are hinting at, knowing which branch of a tree to focus on or seeing how these pieces will fit together to identify the unknown person. Mr. Holes said that genetic genealogists like Ms. Rae Venter, "are worth their weight in gold," because "they understand the DNA testing and DNA inheritance and the genealogy aspects," which is rare to find in a single person. After several months, a handful of men emerged as candidates for further investigation because of their ages and histories in California. The team took a voluntary DNA sample from the man who looked like the most likely suspect. He was not a match. But he was closely related to the Golden State Killer, which was helpful information. Ms. Rae Venter then turned to an eye color prediction tool on GEDmatch. It said that the suspect's eyes were blue. A site called Promethease.com, created for health risk analysis, suggested that the suspect would bald prematurely. Only one man they were looking at Mr. DeAngelo had blue eyes. A DMV photo showed a receding hairline. Investigators knew that these types of predictions could be misleading. But they illustrate how layers of clues built up to reinforce moving in a certain direction. From there, traditional detective work suggested that Mr. DeAngelo was the likely suspect. Eventually, after obtaining a discarded DNA sample and confirming a match, detectives arrested him. Mr. DeAngelo has yet to enter a plea. Why is she coming forward now? Soon after the Golden State Killer announcement, Parabon, a forensic consulting firm, said it would be launching a genealogical arm. CeCe Moore, a genetic genealogist known for her work on adoption cases, went on to announce breakthroughs in six murder cases and two sexual assault cases. "The Golden State Killer case said we could go into homicides," said Colleen Fitzpatrick a rocket scientist turned genetic genealogist, who is now working on a dozen murder cases for Identifinders International, a forensic identification organization. Because these women have been public about their work, Ms. Rae Venter said she felt safer coming forward. If multiple people were out there identifying perpetrators from semen or blood, it helped make any one genealogist less of a target. But other genealogists feel that in the excitement about helping catch the Golden State Killer, some in their community are failing to remember that cooperation comes at a cost. Once they've turned over their insights about all that can be gleaned from public family tree and genetic data to law enforcement, there is no taking them back if they don't like how the techniques are being used. "The larger issue here one that the larger genetic genealogy community hasn't really advocated for yet, is to start pressing for laws to protect the privacy rights of all people and limit access to everyone's genetic material," said Teresa Vega, a genealogist and family historian who writes a blog called Radiant Roots, Boricua Branches. Ms. Rae Venter agrees that these investigations have the potential to go off the rails. She has seen it in her work with adoptees. "There are people who are self proclaimed 'search angels.' They are charging adoptees money and they really don't know what they are doing," she said. On several occasions, she had to explain to an adoptee that the person they'd been told was their f ather was actually a cousin. After hearing reports of genealogists showing up at police departments to offer their services, Ms. Rae Venter has been reminded why a certification process could be useful. "If anyone gets it wrong it could damage this whole, emerging field," she said. Did she ever find her cousin's father? The cousin is from Britain. Finding genetic matches and family tree data for people outside the United States is exponentially more difficult. But just recently a new match popped up, and so this may be the year she solves that case as well.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Written language is an imperfect method for the messy, complex business of communication, where facial expressions, gestures and vocal tones transmit oceans of meaning and subtext for those, at least, who can read them. Words themselves offer none of that: In a famous study, Albert Mehrabian, a psychology professor at U.C.L.A., found that humans tend to perceive only a fragment of a speaker's meaning through spoken words. Instead, he observed, most meaning is gleaned from body language and tone of voice. In a text only environment, how can we ever be certain other people understand what we mean when we post online? Enter tone indicators. Interpreting text can be frustrating for anyone online, but is particularly so for users who are neurodivergent a wide category that can refer to people with a range of neurological differences including autism spectrum disorder and dyslexia. Some neurodivergent people say they have trouble deciphering the subtle cues associated with sarcasm or flirtation, in particular, and are tone indicator enthusiasts. Here are more fascinating tales you can't help but read all the way to the end. None Getting Personal With Iman. The supermodel talks about life after David Bowie, their Catskills refuge and the perfume inspired by their love. A Resilient Team for a Broken Nation. With the Taliban in control, what, and whom, is Afghanistan's national soccer team playing for? The Fight of This Old Boxer's Life Was With His Own Family. A battle among Marvin Stein's family over his fortune broke out, and he suddenly found himself powerless to fight for himself. This year, ideas and arguments about tone indicators have generated sprawling and passionate conversation online. Some people find them absurd, while others fiercely evangelize their importance. This is a dynamic common with emerging linguistic trends tied to accessibility and vulnerability (trigger warnings, for example, and sharing of pronouns). Even among supporters, there is broad debate about what their scope ought to be. Tone indicators are most popular within some Twitter and Tumblr communities of young people with overlapping interests in identity representation, anime and K pop fandom, twee aesthetics, and sensitivity toward mental health and gender issues. It's a milieu where inclusivity is considered a paramount virtue. These people use and like tone indicators because they want to help others have better experiences online. In recent weeks, several users have posted lists containing dozens of tone indicators ranging from "/j joking" to "/lh lighthearted" and "/nsx nonsexual intent." "Tone indicators are literally used to indicate the tone of what you write, since written conversation can be harder to get by people who have communication issues or just aren't used to a certain way someone speaks online," wrote Michael Guazzelli, who is 21 and identifies as neurodivergent, in a direct message on Twitter. "There's plenty of different typing styles and if someone is not familiar to someone else's, the tone indicators make everything more simple because no one has to ask what the person is talking about or what they mean with what they said." "It's like, you say you hate a friend of yours, but of course you don't someone may misunderstand that though, so to avoid that you put /j to indicate that you wanted to make a joke," he continued. "Or, if you actually ended your friendship with said person, you would like to use /srs (serious) so people know something is actually up and you are not playing around about the topic." He explained that while indicators are "mostly used by neurodivergent people," they have been "spreading to all people who find them useful or just want to be clear and help nd people understand things (which is most appreciated by us!)" Today's tone indicators go a step further than, say, putting a winky face emoji at the end of a sentence. They assign a narrow, concrete meaning to a statement, leaving no room for interpretation. They are not subtle and can deflate humor. (Picture a comedian declaring to an audience "I am joking" after saying something outrageous.) But what tone indicators lack in artfulness, they make up for in their bulletproof inability to be misinterpreted. In complicated conversations, that goes a long way. The growing lexicon of tone indicators, beyond helping people understand what's sincere or what's flirty, can feel, to the uninitiated, like another language. And at their most complex, tone indicators may veer into the patronizing. But these semantic constructions are part of a long tradition of social media users pushing back against platform limitations. Compared to hyper customizable GeoCities and Myspace pages of old, platforms like Twitter and Facebook rigidly restrict how much latitude users have in formatting posts. In response, people often create informal hacks to communicate with nuance and address ever shifting norms around language and identity. Occasionally platforms end up incorporating user generated features, like quote tweets, which Twitter adopted after users spent years doing so manually. Twitter users may soon be able to indicate at least one new tone. The site is reportedly exploring the addition of a dislike button. All the Things We Have Tried Before Over the Centuries For ages, posters on forums like Reddit have used "/s" at the end of a post to indicate sarcasm. But the history of tone indication is much older. In her book "Eats, Shoots Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation," the grammar historian Lynne Truss describes how, in 1575, a British printer named Henry Denham created a punctuation mark called the "percontation point," a reversed question mark meant to indicate that a question was rhetorical. ("It didn't catch on," Ms. Truss writes.) A century later, in his 1668 work "An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language," the Anglican clergyman and philosopher John Wilkins proposed that ironic statements could be indicated with an inverted exclamation mark. "Wilkins's choice of the ! seems most appropriate," Keith Houston writes in his book "Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks." "The presence of an exclamation mark already modifies the tone of a statement, and inverting it to yield an i like character both hints at the implied i rony and simultaneously suggests the inversion of its meaning." That didn't catch on either. "Wilkins's invention was not only the first of many proposed irony marks, but also the first of them to fail," Mr. Houston writes. In 2010, a company in Michigan called Sarcasm, Inc. released the "SarcMark," essentially a dot inside of a squiggle. It was marketed as "the official, easy to use punctuation mark to emphasize a sarcastic phrase." Initially sold as a font download for 1.99, it's now available for free as a sticker pack for iMessage. In a 2001 post, the blogger Tara Liloia proposed that tildes might be used to indicate sarcasm. "The closest thing to a sarcasm mark is the winking smiley and he isn't really a professional tool. You can't write a missive to a business associate with little cutesy ASCII faces in it. It's just not done," she wrote. "And no one can claim that sarcasm isn't professional. If the amount of sarcasm in the American workplace is any indication, sarcasm is nothing but professional!" While the tilde also never reached critical mass, cutesy emoji faces achieved global dominance, even among business associates. They've been around nearly as long as internet communication itself: The smiley face emoticon ": )" is generally credited to a 1982 message from Scott E. Fahlman, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, after a misunderstanding that occurred when a colleague posting on the proto internet service ARPANET made a dry joke about mercury contaminating an elevator shaft. The utility of emoticons for tone indication quickly spread off campus: A few months later, a researcher named James Morris sent a message titled "Communication Breakthrough" to his colleagues at the research lab Xerox Parc. "Because you can't see the person who is sending you electronic mail you are sometimes uncertain whether they are serious or joking," he wrote in a message that would likely result in a very sincere cancellation today. "Recently, Scott Fahlman at CMU devised a scheme for annotating one's messages to overcome this problem. If you turn your head sideways to look at the three characters : ), they look sort of like a smiling face. Thus, if someone sends you a message that says 'Have you stopped beating your wife?: )' you know they are joking. If they say 'I need to talk to you : (,' be prepared for trouble.'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
In 2011, Jad Abumrad, the creator and a host of the syndicated radio show and podcast "Radiolab," won a MacArthur Fellowship, better known to the admiring and the envious as a genius grant. Appropriately enough, Mr. Abumrad used some of the 500,000 prize money to build and outfit a studio on the top floor of the Fort Greene, Brooklyn, house that he shares with his wife, Karla Murthy, a documentary filmmaker, and the couple's sons, Amil, 11, and Tej, 8. "It actually costs a lot of money to make something soundproof," said Mr. Abumrad, 47. "I couldn't afford the full soundproofing, so I have a studio that is mostly soundproof. I can still hear the kids screaming in the background." Compounding the problem, Mr. Abumrad also neglected to put a lock on the studio door no, he can't begin to explain his thinking "so my kids barge in and interrupt every recording." Pre pandemic, he could avoid such distractions by availing himself of the facilities at WNYC, which produces his show. These days, he braces for barging: He's working full time at home on "Radiolab," a show celebrated for its adroit blending of story and sound, as well as on a yet to be named new show for Apple Music. But there's a distinct upside. Being right there on the premises, Mr. Abumrad needn't worry about the consequences of Ms. Murthy's hobby, now pretty much under control: rearranging the furniture. "For a while, it was a running joke that every time I'd come home there would be an entire new look to the parlor," he said. "A couch would be against a different wall. Not only would things be reorganized so I'd hit my shin, but giant furniture that had been on one floor would now be on another floor." "Karla's a pretty small person," he added, "but throughout our relationship she has been able to move 300 pound objects up and down stairs." Occupations: He is the creator and a host of the Peabody Award winning radio show and podcast "Radiolab"; she is a documentary filmmaker. A house divided: "One of the things we tried to do was make the bedrooms smaller and the common spaces bigger," Ms. Murthy said. The two met as incoming freshmen at Oberlin College in Ohio, but didn't become a couple until senior year. After graduation, they moved to Brooklyn and initially lived in separate apartments. Their first joint residence was an illegal sublet on the top floor of an industrial building in Williamsburg. Friends referred to it as "the K and J Party Palace." "We would have big gatherings where people could share their works in progress," said Ms. Murthy, 47, whose first feature documentary, "The Place That Makes Us," about the efforts of community activists to rebuild Youngstown, Ohio (Mr. Abumrad served as executive producer), is slated to air next year on PBS. "Jad would share early versions of electronic music compositions. I would try out art video ideas. And our friends would share everything from puppet shows to short films and music." The couple bought their Fort Greene house, a mid 19th century Italianate brownstone, in 1999, with help from Mr. Abumrad's mother, Nada, and his father, Naji (a doctor whose friendship with Dolly Parton spurred the star to make a 1 million contribution to help fund Moderna's coronavirus vaccine). "Half the joists had been cut, and the house was sagging toward the middle. It was a complete dump," Mr. Abumrad said. But here and there was some of the original plaster molding. It was a propitious sign. So was the slender, arched mirror hanging between the windows in the living room. "The mirror was what immediately made us fall in love with the place," Mr. Abumrad recalled. "It connected us somehow to the original state of the house, to the past, in a deep way." Since buying the house, which they initially shared with Mr. Abumrad's cousin and a friend (there's still an apartment on the garden level for visitors to crash), the couple have charted two renovations. The first, a sort of guerrilla rehab that required multiple late night trips to Home Depot, was done on the cheap. The second, overseen by Clay Miller of Bergen Street Studio in 2013, was more expansive and more thought out, including the creation of Mr. Abumrad's studio, an office for Ms. Murthy, a laundry area and a bedroom for their second son, who had just been born. They blew out the back wall of the kitchen and installed an enormous picture window that overlooks a deck and a birch tree. "You just look out that window when you're having breakfast, and you feel you're in a treehouse," Mr. Abumrad said. "It's almost my favorite thing in the house." As a final touch, they lengthened the floor to ceiling chalkboard that runs along another kitchen wall. "When we were working with the architects, they were like, 'Since you already have this, we should just extend it,' and we really liked that idea," Ms. Murthy said. The expanded surface offers plenty of room for the children to do math homework and for the adults to list chores and schedules, and to sketch out their story ideas.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
The ocher walls at Santo Palato are hung with loud, Futurist style posters embodying the stylized Cubism of 1920s Italian art. This design scheme is more than a trendy aesthetic choice it prefigures the menu's bold and decisive flavors and signals that the dishes are clearly rooted in their location: the San Giovanni neighborhood southeast of central Rome, which was laid out during the Fascist era to house working class families. Today, San Giovanni is a graffiti tagged but middle class area laden with trattorias serving the comfort food that defines the Roman culinary canon: carbonara, cacio e pepe, simmered oxtails, stewed tripe. Many of these places offer filling but unremarkable fare making newcomer Santo Palato stand out in a way that goes beyond its bright, polychrome decor. The restaurant, which opened in April, is the latest from its owner, Marco Pucciotti, who has entrusted the chef Sarah Cicolini to helm this self described trattoria moderna. In Rome, the use of "modern" is typically a red flag that accompanies menus featuring gummy sous vide proteins and unpleasant deconstructed classics. But Ms. Cicolini isn't forcing the evolution of classics from her tiny kitchen. Rather, her menu is quite traditional and she expertly coaxes intense flavors from fine local ingredients using restrained techniques, a rarity among young chefs in Rome. Ms. Cicolini, 29, has already spent nearly all her life in food service, first at home, then in hotels in her native Abruzzo, and finally in bars and restaurants since moving to Rome a decade ago. Eventually, she landed at one Michelin starred Metamorfosi where, she said, "my chef, Roy Caceres, taught me what it was to love eating while applying technique."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention resigned on Wednesday, in the middle of the nation's worst flu epidemic in nearly a decade, because of her troubling financial investments in tobacco and health care companies that posed potential conflicts of interest. Alex Azar, the newly appointed secretary of Health and Human Services, announced the resignation of the director, Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald. An agency statement cited her "complex financial interests that have imposed a broad recusal limiting her ability to complete all her duties as the C.D.C. director." The statement continued: "Due to the nature of these financial interests, Dr. Fitzgerald could not divest from them in a definitive time period. After advising Secretary Azar of both the status of the financial interests and the scope of her recusal, Dr. Fitzgerald tendered, and the secretary accepted, her resignation. " Mr. Azar, a former executive with Eli Lilly, made the decision on his third day running the sprawling H.H.S. agency. Dr. Anne Schuchat, a veteran official with the C.D.C., was named acting director the position she had filled before Dr. Fitzgerald took office. She has had prominent roles in many of the agency's emergency responses to disease outbreaks and vaccine programs around the world. The resignation was announced less than a day after Politico reported on Tuesday that Dr. Fitzgerald, 71, had traded in tobacco stocks even after taking the position at the public health agency. The tobacco trades were small: Dr. Fitzgerald bought between 1,001 and 15,000 worth of stock in Japan Tobacco in August, according to her financial disclosure forms, before she signed her ethics agreement. She sold the stock, as promised, in October. Before assuming the post, she also had investments in major tobacco companies, including Reynolds American, British American Tobacco, Imperial Brands, Philip Morris International, and Altria Group. Those were also sold in October, along with many of her other holdings. A former Georgia health commissioner, Dr. Fitzgerald was appointed to the federal agency last July by Tom Price, a fellow Georgian who served as Mr. Trump's first H.H.S. secretary until he too was forced to resign under fire, for traveling extensively on private jets and expensing more than 400,000 for those trips to the government. Mr. Price's investments in health related companies had also come under scrutiny while he was in government. In a September ethics agreement, Dr. Fitzgerald said she would divest from many stocks that might pose a conflict of interest. The other investments included CVS Health, Quest Diagnostics, AbbVie, and Zimmer Biomet Holdings, among others. But she also said that she and her husband, Dr. Thomas Fitzgerald, were unable to divest from some holdings because of legal or contractual restrictions. Those were GW Ventures and Greenway Messenger, which are limited liability companies formed to invest in Greenway Health LLC, an electronic health information company, and Isommune, a biotech company focusing on early cancer detection. Dr. Fitzgerald pledged to avoid any C.D.C. work that would affect those holdings, drawing criticism from Democrats who said such recusals would limit her effectiveness. In December, Senator Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the Senate panel that oversees the agency, expressed concerns that Dr. Fitzgerald's recusals on issues involving cancer and opioids prohibited her from dealing with two of the biggest health problems in the country. And even as she divested from many holdings in health related companies, some members of Congress continued to express concern that those investments could compromise her positions on a variety of agency matters. "It is unacceptable that the person responsible for leading our nation's public health efforts has, for months, been unable to fully engage in the critical work she was appointed to do," Senator Murray said Wednesday. "Dr. Fitzgerald's tenure was unfortunately the latest example of the Trump administration's dysfunction and lax ethical standards." But Dr. Fitzgerald's predecessor at the C.D.C., Dr. Tom Frieden, issued a statement that suggested the latest investments causing concern were made by a portfolio manager without Dr. Fitzgerald's knowledge. In August, financial disclosures show she purchased stocks in several companies that might conflict with her activities at the agency, including Japan Tobacco, the drugmaker Merck, and Humana, the health insurer. The records show she then sold those and other health stocks in October. "I have spoken with Dr. Fitzgerald and believe her when she says that she was unaware that a tobacco company investment had been made," Dr. Frieden said. "She understands that any affiliation between the tobacco industry and public health is unacceptable, and that when she learned of it, she directed that it be sold." But Craig Holman, the government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, the consumer advocacy group, said not knowing about the investments a manager is making on your behalf is not an excuse. "You cannot just say the manager can do whatever he or she wants to do as long as I don't know about it," he said. "That's not the conflict of interest code." The tobacco related investments alarmed others. "It's astonishing that the director of the Centers for Disease Control, which plays a major role in reducing tobacco use, would purchase stock in a tobacco company," said William B. Schultz, a former general counsel for H.H.S. The agency has been tackling several tough issues this year, including potential budget cutbacks and a flu epidemic that claimed more lives this week and closed some schools across the country. About 80 percent of the cases this season are of the H3N2 strain, and officials said last week the rate of hospitalization among flu sufferers was particularly high this year. The agency plays a critical role in tracking the number of illnesses and deaths and helping coordinate the public health response.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
This culture of cruelty is what drives decent people from public service, and what makes millions of Americans recoil from politics, and even from participating in our democracy. Vice President Biden has spoken openly and courageously, in my view about the pain of his severe childhood stutter. He takes time to reach out to children who have suffered as he did. As I grew older, I learned to manage and overcome my stuttering, through much hard work and intense focus. I learned to slow down and to enunciate each word with precision. I joined the church choir, and found that singing helped me to practice controlling my breath, and the formation of words. I learned to resist and overcome the bullying. I also learned that our imperfections do not define us. The fact that I once stuttered did not keep me from being a successful U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, an airline pilot, or even a public speaker. And on that frigid day in January 2009, when I had to tell the air traffic controller at New York Departure Control that I was about to land US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River, after a bird strike following takeoff caused both engines to fail, my words came out with precision and control, even in the stress of a life threatening emergency. So, to every child who feels today, what I felt, after hearing those cruel remarks by an adult who should know better, here is what I want you to know: You are fine, just as you are. You can do any job you dream of when you grow up. You can be a pilot who lands your plane on a river and helps save lives, or a president who treats people with respect, rather than making fun of them. You can become a teacher to kids who stutter. A speech disorder is a lot easier to treat than a character defect. You become a true leader, not because of how you speak, but because of what you have to say and the challenges you have overcome to help others. Ignore kids (and adults) who are mean, or don't know what it feels like to stutter. Respond by showing them how to be kind, polite, respectful and generous, to be brave enough to try big things, even though you are not perfect.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
NYFOS NEXT at the DiMenna Center (March 28, 7:30 p.m.). A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 and a crafter of "playful, thoughtful, befuddling, enchanting" music, as my colleague Zachary Woolfe has put it, Kate Soper curates this concert under the New York Festival of Song umbrella. She sings two excerpts from her next opera, "The Romance of the Rose," as well as "The Understanding of All Things." There's also music by Kaija Saariaho, Natacha Diels and Alvin Lucier. Charlotte Mundy and Charmaine Lee are the other featured vocalists; Sam Pluta is in charge of the electronics. nyfos.org/nyfos next Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. TYSHAWN SOREY at Miller Theater (March 28, 8 p.m.). Sorey has had such success in the past few years that he barely needs one of the Miller's important composer portraits to spotlight his art, but any opportunity to hear his music is a welcome one. Here there's a world premiere, "Autoschediasms," for "creative chamber orchestra," as well as five other pieces. The International Contemporary Ensemble and the JACK Quartet are on hand to play. 212 854 7799, millertheatre.com 'DIE WALKURE' at the Metropolitan Opera (March 25, 6:30 p.m.). See if this "Walkure," from Robert Lepage's retooled "Ring," fares any better than "Das Rheingold" did earlier in the month. Philippe Jordan was a high point in "Rheingold," my colleague Anthony Tommasini wrote, and he remains to conduct a cast that includes Greer Grimsley as Wotan, Stuart Skelton as Siegmund, Eva Maria Westbroek as Sieglinde, Gunther Groissbock as Hunding, Jamie Barton as Fricka and, most excitingly, Christine Goerke as Brunnhilde. 212 362 6000, metopera.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. 'EMPIRE' at the Whitney Museum (March 9, 1 p.m.). In a cinematic career known for offscreen intimations of oral sex ("Blow Job") and movies with Edie Sedgwick in her undergarments ("Poor Little Rich Girl," "Beauty 2"), Andy Warhol made what is perhaps his most notorious film in "Empire" which simply captured Empire State Building from shortly after 8 p.m. until nearly 3 a.m. one night in July 1964. (Jonas Mekas, who died in January, was part of the small crew who helped film the movie from the 41st floor of the Time Life Building.) "Empire" treats time itself as a variable: According to the Museum of Modern Art, when projected, the film is meant to be slowed down so that it runs slightly more than eight hours. The Whitney is screening "Empire" this Saturday as part of its exhibition "Andy Warhol From A to B and Back Again," which includes a large sampling of Warhol's moving image output. whitney.org/exhibitions/film 'GIRL 6' at Alamo Drafthouse (March 11, 7 p.m.). This 1996 feature from Spike Lee, with a script by the playwright Suzan Lori Parks, follows a struggling actress (Theresa Randle) who takes work as a phone sex operator. Currently unavailable to stream, the film was not one of the director's biggest hits critically or commercially, but even mixed reviews suggest it has its upsides. "Bold colors, a dance track of Prince songs, a parade of wild costumes, good humored sexual teasing and warmly inviting cinematography by Malik Sayeed all contribute to this comedy's high energy party mood," Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times. 718 513 2547, drafthouse.com/nyc SEE IT BIG! COSTUMES BY EDITH HEAD at the Museum of the Moving Image (through March 10). The museum's retrospective on the legendary costume designer closes with a weekend of Hitchcock. Grace Kelly and Cary Grant don their best (and Grant, his cat burglar suit) on the French Riviera for "To Catch a Thief" (on Friday), while Tippi Hedren is impeccably well dressed for both the avian attacks in "The Birds" (on Saturday and Sunday) and for safecracking in "Marnie" (on Saturday and Sunday), in which Head's tailoring is just one element of the sophisticated color scheme in Hitchcock's depiction of repressed trauma. 718 784 0077, movingimage.us	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
For years, Newsmax was a bit player in the right wing media universe. The 22 year old news outlet was small compared with conservative media juggernauts like Fox News and Breitbart, with a modestly popular website and a little watched TV network featuring shows with Republican B listers like Diamond Silk and Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary. But that changed after last week's election, when Newsmax refused to call the election in Mr. Biden's favor. Newsmax does not have a decision desk, so its refusal mostly amounted to a symbolic protest. Still, it buoyed Trump supporters who were defiant about the president's loss, and led Mr. Trump and his allies to embrace the outlet as a friendly venue. Since then, Newsmax TV has promoted a parade of conspiracy theories and false allegations of voter fraud, and has pointedly refused to refer to Mr. Biden as the president elect. The alternate reality strategy is working, and turning Newsmax into a legitimate contender for conservative eyeballs in the post Trump era. Newsmax TV is getting its highest ratings this week, with as many as 800,000 people tuning in to its prime time shows, according to Nielsen. (Before the election, it was averaging just 65,000 viewers at any given time, according to CNN's Brian Stelter.) Mr. Trump has been furiously sharing Newsmax clips and retweeting supporters who say they are turning to the network out of frustration with Fox News. "He's very disappointed in Fox News," Christopher Ruddy, Newsmax's chief executive and a friend of Mr. Trump's, said in a CNN interview on Sunday. Citing increased ratings since the election, Mr. Ruddy claimed that Newsmax is now "a major player in cable news."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
At once simple and twisty, "His Girl Friday" is essentially a romantic duel between a newspaper editor, Walter Burns (Grant) and his ex wife, the ace reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell). Hildy's about to get married, but a breaking story and Walter keep getting in her way. It's based on "The Front Page," a crackling play that the film puts into delirious overdrive. And now Hildy is a woman, a glorious change. Does it matter? That's one of the things that we'll be chewing over while we're watching "His Girl Friday" again. Is Hildy a role model? Or is it Russell who makes the character feel liberated? Hildy isn't just a great "newspaperman," as she's called. She and Walter are equals who can both dish it out and take it, no matter how stinging and funny the barb. Oh, and one more question: is Cary Grant the greatest film actor in history? We have thoughts. "His Girl Friday" is on several platforms (here's a guide), but be warned that there are disgracefully battered copies out there. The best looking ones we found are on the Criterion Channel and a free version on YouTube. So, take a look and, after you have watched, tell us what you think in the comments section below. Be sure to weigh in by 6 p.m. Eastern time on Monday. We'll return with our reactions to your comments on Wednesday. Have fun, talk soon, be safe.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Entering the Fergus McCaffrey gallery requires an act of Gutai participation: You step through a jagged hole in gold paper stretched across the doorway. This is a remake of Saburo Murakami's famous "Entrance" ("Iriguchi") of 1955 a collision of mind, body and art. In the 1950s, the artists of the newly formed Gutai group of Japan worked fast and fearlessly, changing styles and mediums at will, staying abreast of the latest postwar developments abroad. The mood of this band of innovators was eclectic and electric as demonstrated by "Gutai: 1953 1959," an ambitious show at Fergus McCaffrey gallery. Across some 70 works we see 11 of the artists who formed the group's early reputation, ranging easily among abstract painting and sculpture, installation, environments and performance. The McCaffrey effort is so large that it has taken over the cavernous space next door (formerly the Robert Miller Gallery) and at times feels like a series of solo shows. Some works here date from 1953 and helped spur the formation of Gutai a year later by several artists born mainly in the 1920s and led by an elder artist, Jiro Yoshihara (1905 1972). They excelled at hybrids and experimenting with materials, exemplified by the performative paintings that Kazuo Shiraga (1924 2008) made with his feet, usually while suspended from a swing, achieving extravagant ridges and ruts of swirling paint. One rare work involving a brown sponge hiding a bonelike object invited viewer participation: "Please Push Strong." (You can no longer touch, but there's a video that shows Mr. McCaffrey doing so in white gloves, and Mr. Shiraga creating his swinging paintings.) Perhaps not surprising in a country renowned for calligraphy, several of these artists (Mr. Shiraga included) probably did more with Jackson Pollock's allover compositions and innovative drip techniques than their American counterparts. In New York, younger painters sought inspiration in the easier option, the more traditional paint handling of Willem de Kooning; a chief exception was the temporary transplant Yayoi Kusama, who, like her fellow Japanese artists, extended his ideas. (And whether by choice or economic pressures, the Gutai rarely worked in a large scale, avoiding macho overstatement, which is refreshing.) You'll see the influence of calligraphy in two abstract paintings by the great Masatoshi Masanobu: black surfaces covered with delicate curls and loops of cream color. In a smaller, equally beguiling work, he dabs cream over two shades of red and then adds more life with hundreds of short quick scratches rather like whiskers. Chiyu Uemae has several approaches. In a slightly unnerving painting, bits of bright color shine through a rough layer of brown paint; the effect is of buried jewels but also radiantly winged insects squirming to life, just below ground. Entering the show is an act of Gutai participation: You have to step through a jagged hole in gold paper stretched across the gallery's doorway. This is the most recent remake of Saburo Murakami's famous "Entrance," at the First Gutai Art Exhibition in Tokyo in 1955, in which he burst through several layers of paper that then became a work of art. (At the opening of this show in April, Alexandra Munroe, a curator of the Guggenheim Museum's sweeping survey, "Gutai: Splendid Playground" in 2013, flung her body through gold leafed Japanese paper.) Other Murakami works here veer from Abstract Expressionist to Fluxus to Conceptual Art. His 1956 "Air," an eight inch square cube of clear glass, is both a startling precursor and sendup of Minimalism; "All Landscapes," also 1956, has you looking through an empty frame hanging from the ceiling, a Fluxus joke. But he was also making heavily slathered paintings that he intended to fall apart, as demonstrated by a red painting here that is missing a central chunk. Sometimes this show fills in backgrounds on a particular artist. Toshio Yoshida was represented by seven of his wood panels burned with patterns, all from 1954, at the Guggenheim. These works, which parallel if they don't anticipate the burned canvases of the Italian artist Alberto Burri, are, I suppose, Yoshida's best bet for posterity. But the McCaffrey show includes 10 additional paintings, each different, registering the artist's restlessness. Silk cords dangle from one painting; another, on red velvet, entails big daubs of concrete. My favorite seems at first to have a garland of bright flowers around its edges, but a closer look reveals patches of color on a surface of brown papier mache on burned wood with a hole in the center. It suggests a packed earth floor strewn with petals as well as an ingenuous way to save paint while commenting on Japan's postwar poverty. Sadamasa Motonaga's work makes a similarly memorable impression of constant motion. A big white box periodically spews fog; the two big slurry green forms on a larger canvas might be an abstract tribute to Edvard Munch. In a pile of sand, two slim tree trunks bristle with scores of nails. Brightly painted stones with a row of short straws resemble a herd of small finned reptiles, but also weapons. The revered Atsuko Tanaka, whose dress made from colored light bulbs was one of the highlights of the Guggenheim show, is represented here by "Work (Bell)" of 1955, an interactive installation with 12 bells installed around the space that buzz when someone steps on their floor buttons. The wiring for this piece helped inspire Tanaka's interest in electricity. Fujiko Shiraga, wife of the paint by feet Kazuo Shiraga, is represented by five foot high drawings of layered rice paper that the artist has scratched with her fingernails or torn in different ways. They're at once deeply Japanese and in step with some of Robert Rauschenberg's early '50s white and black paintings. One piece that especially intrigues is "White Board" of 1955 a sloping 26 foot long plank of wood nearly four feet wide and bisected by an irregular crack. It could be like a model for an earthwork by Walter De Maria or Dennis Oppenheim, as well as "Shibboleth," Doris Salcedo's 548 foot long crack in the floor of the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2007. Aesthetic ideas drift in the air, used by one artist and then discarded, reabsorbed by another, according to ambition, means and opportunities. The sad thing, at least for art, is that in 1961 Ms. Shiraga stopped making her own visionary art to work closely with her husband. Perhaps their efforts merit double billing.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Deborah S. Jin, a much honored physicist who created and explored matter that exists only at a sliver of a degree above absolute zero or minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit died on Sept. 15 in Boulder, Colo. She was 47. The cause was cancer, said JILA, a joint institute of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where Dr. Jin worked for 20 years. (JILA was once an acronym for Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics; the organization dropped the longer name in 1995.) In 2005, Dr. Jin became the second youngest woman ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Her other honors included a 2003 MacArthur fellowship the so called genius award, with a no strings attached grant of 500,000 and the 2013 L'Oreal/Unesco For Women in Science award for North America. She was mentioned as a potential candidate for a Nobel Prize. Dr. Jin, a daughter of two physicists, had earned her doctorate in physics at the University of Chicago when she moved to Boulder in 1995 to join the laboratory of Eric A. Cornell, a JILA scientist, as a postdoctoral researcher. Dr. Cornell and Carl E. Wieman, then a physics professor at the University of Colorado, had recently succeeded in cooling a gas of rubidium atoms to less than one millionth of a degree above absolute zero, at which matter comes to an almost complete stop. The individual atoms melded together, acting as a single coherent particle. It was a state of matter that had never been observed before, though it had been predicted in the 1920s by Albert Einstein and the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose. That feat earned Dr. Cornell and Dr. Wieman the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001. Dr. Jin performed many of the early experiments characterizing the gas, known as a Bose Einstein condensate. When Dr. Jin was hired to a permanent position in 1997, she took on an even harder experiment. The rubidium atoms in Dr. Cornell and Dr. Wieman's experiment acted like bosons a fundamental class of particles named after Professor Bose which cozy up to each other to form the condensate. Dr. Jin wanted to do a similar experiment with fermions, the other class of fundamental particles (named after the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi). Fermions, which are inherently antisocial, are loath to meld together like bosons, but they can pair up and, coupled together, act like bosons. Dr. Jin succeeded in making what she called a fermionic condensate in 2004. "A lot, lot harder," Dr. Wieman said of Dr. Jin's work, comparing it with his Nobel winning experiment. "What did come out was more impressive than I thought would be possible." There is currently no practical application for fermionic condensates, but insights from Dr. Jin's work could help scientists develop new materials, like room temperature superconductors, which could convey electricity more efficiently than it is today. Deborah Shiu Lan Jin was born on Nov. 15, 1968, in Stanford, Calif. Her father was a physics professor at the Florida Institute of Technology; her mother was a physics trained engineer. She grew up in Indian Harbour Beach, Fla., not far from Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics from Princeton in 1990 before earning her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1995. Last year, the news agency Thomson Reuters, which predicts possible winners of the Nobel Prizes, included Dr. Jin on its short list for the 2015 physics prize. (Nobel rules bar awarding the prize posthumously, unless the death followed announcement of the prize.) Dr. Jin is survived by her husband, John Bohn, also a JILA scientist; their daughter, Jaclyn; her mother, Shirley Jin; a sister, Laural Jin O'Dowd; and a brother, Craig Jin. After creating fermionic condensate, Dr. Jin began collaborating with Jun Ye of JILA to move beyond atoms and study ultracold molecules. That involved cooling two types of atoms and then finding a way to bring them close enough to bond, without the atoms heating up from the energy of the collision. Lasers and magnetic fields carefully braked and steered the atoms, siphoning off energy as they bound together into molecules. That achievement has opened up a new field of research into chemical reactions: Scientists can now start to study quantum effects that are obscured at higher temperatures. "You can start to describe the very fundamental nature of chemical reactions," Dr. Ye said. The experiments required of them both broad theoretical understanding of the physics they were seeking to reveal and precise knowledge of the experimental details. "She just had this incredible balance between detail and big scientific vision," Dr. Ye said of Dr. Jin.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
When the investigative journalist Julia Angwin worked for ProPublica, the nonprofit news organization became known as "big tech's scariest watchdog." By partnering with programmers and data scientists, Ms. Angwin pioneered the work of studying big tech's algorithms the secret codes that have an enormous impact on everyday American life. Her findings shed light on how companies like Facebook were creating tools that could be used to promote racial bias, fraudulent schemes and extremist content. Now, with a 20 million gift from the Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, she and her partner at ProPublica, the data journalist Jeff Larson, are starting The Markup, a news site dedicated to investigating technology and its effect on society. Sue Gardner, former head of the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, will be The Markup's executive director. Ms. Angwin and Mr. Larson said that they would hire two dozen journalists for its New York office and that stories would start going up on the website in early 2019. The group has also raised 2 million from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and 1 million collectively from the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative. Ms. Angwin compares tech to canned food, an innovation that took some time to be seen with more scrutiny. "When canned food came out, it was amazing," said Ms. Angwin, who will be the site's editor in chief. "You could have peaches when they were out of season. There was a whole period of America where every recipe called for canned soup. People went crazy for canned food. And after 30 years, 40 years, people were like, 'Huh, wait.' "That is what's happened with technology," Ms. Angwin said, calling the 2016 election a tipping point. "And I'm so glad we've woken up." The site will explore three broad investigative categories: how profiling software discriminates against the poor and other vulnerable groups; internet health and infections like bots, scams and misinformation; and the awesome power of the tech companies. The Markup will release all its stories under a creative commons license so other organizations can republish them, as ProPublica does. Ms. Angwin, who was part of a Wall Street Journal team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for coverage of corporate corruption, said the newsroom would be guided by the scientific method and each story would begin with a hypothesis. For example: Facebook is allowing racist housing ads. At ProPublica, Ms. Angwin's team bought ads on the site and proved the hypothesis. At The Markup, journalists will be partnered with a programmer from a story's inception until its completion. "To investigate technology, you need to understand technology," said Ms. Angwin, 47. "Just like I got an M.B.A. when I was a business reporter, I believe that technologists need to be involved from the very beginning of tech investigations." Ms. Angwin has known Mr. Newmark since 1997, when she wrote about him while a reporter at The San Francisco Chronicle. "Craig is ideal for us because he has no interest or temperament for trying to interfere in coverage," she said. Mr. Newmark, who splits his time between San Francisco and New York, has for years kept a low profile. But he worries about what he sees as a lack of self reflection among engineers. "We're in an information war now," Mr. Newmark said. For many years, the outrageous success of Silicon Valley companies and the aggressive public relations teams who worked for them kept many journalists at a remove. The societal effects of tech were hard to quantify, and moral responsibility was often sloughed off on something called an algorithm, which most people could not quite explain or examine. Even if, as in the case of Facebook, it influenced around 2.5 billion people. At ProPublica, Ms. Angwin and Mr. Larson subverted the traditional model of tech reporting altogether. They did not need access. With the right tools, they could study impact. "There's an opportunity for more reporters to use statistics to uncover societal harms," said Mr. Larson, who has been doing data driven journalism for a decade. "And then Julia's gift is she takes data journalism and doesn't make it like an academic report." Some of Ms. Angwin and Mr. Larson's reporting tactics may violate tech platform terms of service agreements, which ban people from performing automated collection of public information and prohibit them from creating temporary research accounts. Ms. Angwin has been a strong defender of these practices and has argued that tech companies ought to allow reporters to be an exception to their rules. "Without violating those rules, journalists can't investigate our most important platform for public discourse," Ms. Angwin wrote in August. The two worked together on investigations like one into criminal sentencing software, which took a year. Ms. Angwin would report and write. Mr. Larson would measure and analyze. In the end, they proved that the algorithm was racially biased. Mr. Larson, who will be The Markup's managing editor, said the result was just as much a surprise to readers as it was to those who had made the biased algorithm. "Increasingly, algorithms are used as shorthand for passing the buck," said Mr. Larson, 36. "We don't have enough people to look at parole decisions, so we're going to pass it on to the computer and the computer is going to decide, and once they go into production, there's no oversight." The two also showed how big tech companies were helping extremist sites make money, how African Americans were overcharged for car insurance, and how Facebook allowed political ads that were actually scams and malware. "There are unintended consequences," Mr. Larson said. "In all three of those cases, it was a complete surprise to the people who made those algorithms as well." Engineers being surprised by the tools they have made is, to the Markup team, part of the problem. "Part of the premise of The Markup is the level of understanding technology and its effects is very, very low, and we would all benefit from a broader understanding," Ms. Gardner said. "And I would include people who work for the companies." Ms. Angwin said part of her goal was to help readers understand what exactly they should be worried about when it comes to tech.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Talk, talk, talk "Let Them All Talk" is aptly named, because it's full of stilted conversations, though they fail to captivate. (The script was written by the short story writer Deborah Eisenberg but much of it was improvised.) And despite the talented actors onscreen, Soderbergh's mannered direction lacks charisma and the characters lack chemistry. It's not like Soderbergh is going for the warm, fuzzy reunion movie. He wants uncomfortable static in these scenes, a movie full of social disconnects something offhand and offbeat but with underlying depth. But even on their own the characters lack verve, and Soderbergh seems ambivalent to them. There are hints of a more interesting film: with nimbler dialogue and more prominent character design, we'd near the field of "Annie Hall" era Woody Allen; some more notches of tenderness and we'd be on "Before Sunset" era Richard Linklater's doorstep. By the end the issue isn't the sluggishness and unseasoned execution, but its moral ambiguity regarding Alice's use of the unofficial Karl Ove Knausgaard writing method plucking from loved ones' lives for inspiration. The question of what stories Alice can own, what's off limits and how she herself lives in the writing is more interesting than the film gives it credit for. But I'm done now; can we change the conversation? Let Them All Talk Rated R. They all talked. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. Watch on HBO Max.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
WASHINGTON The Federal Reserve said Wednesday that its economic stimulus campaign would press forward at the same pace it has maintained since December, putting to rest for now any suggestion that it was leaning toward doing less. The Fed emphasized that it was ready to increase or decrease its efforts to spur growth and reduce unemployment as necessary, a more balanced position than it took earlier in the year, reflecting the reality that a strong winter has once again yielded to a disappointing spring. It was the first time that the Fed had explicitly mentioned the possibility of doing more in a policy statement, although officials, including the Fed's chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, have made the point repeatedly in public remarks. Analysts disagreed about the central bank's intent. Some saw it as a signal that the Fed's next move could be an expansion of its stimulus. Others, however, said the Fed was simply underscoring that it did not plan to reduce its asset purchases. It is buying 85 billion a month in Treasury and mortgage backed securities. "I don't think there's much chance of them stepping it up," said Jim O'Sullivan, chief United States economist at High Frequency Economics in New York. "But this is certainly their way of saying there's no bias toward scaling down." The Fed maintained a relatively sunny economic outlook in its statement, released after a two day meeting of its policy making committee. It said that the economy was expanding at a "moderate pace" and that the labor market had shown "some improvement." It added, however, that federal spending cuts were "restraining economic growth," an implicit critique of the rest of the government. That language was stronger than the Fed had used in previous assessments of the economic impact of fiscal policy. Fed officials have repeatedly expressed frustration that fiscal policy is working at cross purposes with their own monetary policy. The statement also noted that the pace of inflation had slackened, a potential sign of economic weakness. Bringing the annual rate of inflation closer to its target of 2 percent has been a primary goal of the Fed's four year old stimulus campaign, but the statement expressed little concern about the recent deceleration to a pace of only about half that level. Investors and the Fed have taken the view that inflation is likely to return to a more normal pace without additional effort. "In effect, the Fed signaled that the pace of asset purchases would be data dependent in both directions, but that right now the data gives them little reason to change in either direction," Mr. Feroli wrote Wednesday in a note to clients. The statement won support from 11 of the Federal Open Market Committee's 12 members. Esther George, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, cast the dissenting vote, as she has at each meeting this year, citing concerns about potential "economic and financial imbalances" and the risk of excessive inflation. The pace of economic growth appeared to slow in the weeks between the Fed's previous meeting and the one this week. Inflation slackened in March to the slowest pace in two years, while employers added the fewest jobs in any month since last summer. And economists say that the pain of federal spending cuts is just beginning to tell. Inflation was 1.1 percent during the 12 months ending in March, according to the most recent data from the Fed's preferred inflation gauge, the Commerce Department's index of personal consumption expenditures. That is well below the 2 percent annual pace that the Fed considers healthy. The share of Americans with jobs has not increased since the recession. The central bank is modestly expanding its stimulus campaign each month, as it increases the size of its bond portfolio. The Fed's most recent economic projections, published in March, showed most officials expected persistently low inflation and persistently high unemployment for years to come. Officials, however, are reluctant to do more. They see modest benefits and uncertain costs in buying more bonds. The volume of the Fed's first quarter purchases already roughly equaled the volume of new mortgage bond issuance and about 72 percent of the volume of new issuance of long term federal debt. And the Fed already has tied the duration of low interest rates to the unemployment rate, announcing in December that it intended to hold its benchmark short term interest rate near zero at least as long as the unemployment rate remained above 6.5 percent, provided that inflation remained under control. An official account of the Fed's previous meeting, in March, showed that officials discussed reducing the monthly volume of bond purchases. Some officials who supported the purchase program when it began last year said they saw evidence that the economy was growing more quickly, and that the Fed might be able to curtail the volume of its asset purchases by the third quarter. An account of this week's meeting will be released in three weeks, providing a comparable look at the latest round of internal debate. But analysts said that the changed language in the statement reflected a shift in that debate. The statement said, "The committee is prepared to increase or reduce the pace of its purchases to maintain appropriate policy accommodation as the outlook for the labor market or inflation changes." The Fed's previous statement said it would adjust the level of purchases based on economic conditions. Michael Gapen, director of United States economic research at Barclays Capital, wrote in a note to clients that the statement was "a fairly obvious nod to some of the recent softness in economic activity, labor markets and inflation." He said it reinforced his view that the Fed would maintain its 85 billion pace through the end of the year. The Fed also could increase the impact of its campaign by telling investors how long it will run either in terms of a date or an economic target. But officials say that it has been impossible to reach a consensus on that issue.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
At 34, Alexander Wang has had his fill of labels. "People like to say, 'Oh, you're a downtown brand,'" Mr. Wang said the other day, adding: "Yes, we're geographically located downtown. But what does that actually mean? Why does geography have to define who you are?" Mr. Wang does in fact spend much of his time with friends in the uptown precincts of Lexington Avenue, within sprinting distance of Barneys New York. He routinely scours the store's corridors for a next generation of ladies who lunch, a cohort inclined to mix status laden Chanel tweeds with darker, more subversive matter. Mr. Wang set out, partly at least, to cater to that crowd, his C ollection 2 an improbable meld of commerce, convention and kink. Staged on Saturday evening in the subterranean depths of a tower in Brooklyn the former Williamsburgh Savings Bank the show was a waggish attempt to speak to a client who exists, for now, chiefly in his febrile mind.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
It helps that the seven dancers who were performing this weekend with Kyle Abraham/Abraham.In.Motion at the 92nd Street Y were all good looking, well dressed, well lighted and very good movers. The work in which they appeared, Mr. Abraham's "Radio Show," featured deliberate ambiguities and tensions that, with other performers, could have easily turned it into a quite different piece. These dancers are so appealing that you're on their side from the first. Mr. Abraham was named a MacArthur fellow in 2013. (The other choreographer so named last year was Alexei Ratmansky.) At the Y, Mr. Abraham was presenting "The Radio Show" within the format of the Stripped/Dressed festival: This involves an introductory talk and practical demonstration by choreographer and dancers. (Though this is called "the first half" in the program, Mr. Abraham's presentation lasted only 20 minutes; "The Radio Show," with a short pause between its two parts, lasted 75.) Mr. Abraham had his dancers show movement phrases. The audience was encouraged to do one consisting of upper body gestures and most of us did. Next, some of the dancers showed elaborate variations of those phrases. Then Mr. Abraham improvised short lists of words, designating specific movement ideas, which two of his dancers immediately illustrated. An introduction like this helps relax the audience about what follows: Mysteries remain, but resistance is greatly reduced, and responsiveness increased. (Some bigger companies might consider following suit.) "The Radio Show" itself is a curious collage of popular entertainment and expressionistic sociology. In a program note, and also in his spoken introduction, Mr. Abraham explained that he was drawing from memories of a Pittsburgh radio station, 106.7 FM WAMO, and its sister station, AM 860. WAMO, the only black oriented radio station in Pittsburgh, went off the air in 2009.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Bob Dylan's memoir "Chronicles: Volume One" opens in 1962 with the signing of his first music publishing deal a contract for the copyrights of the budding songwriter's work. The terms of that agreement, brokered by Lou Levy of Leeds Music Publishing, met young Dylan's approval. "Lou had advanced me a hundred dollars against future royalties to sign the paper," he wrote, "and that was fine with me." Fifty eight years, more than 600 songs and one Nobel Prize later, the cultural and economic value of Dylan's songwriting corpus have both grown exponentially. On Monday, the Universal Music Publishing Group announced that it had signed a landmark deal to purchase Dylan's entire songwriting catalog including world changing classics like "Blowin' in the Wind," "The Times They Are A Changin'" and "Like a Rolling Stone" in what may be the biggest acquisition ever of the music publishing rights of a single songwriter. The deal, which covers Dylan's entire career, from his earliest tunes to his latest album, "Rough and Rowdy Ways," was struck directly with Dylan, 79, who has long controlled the vast majority of his own songwriting copyrights. The price was not disclosed, but is estimated at more than 300 million. "It's no secret that the art of songwriting is the fundamental key to all great music, nor is it a secret that Bob is one of the very greatest practitioners of that art," Lucian Grainge, the chief executive of the Universal Music Group, said in a statement. The deal is the latest and most high profile in this year's buzzing market for music catalogs, as artists both young and old have sold their songs, while publishers and investors have raised billions of dollars from both public and private sources to persuade writers to part with their creations. Last week, Stevie Nicks sold a majority stake in her songwriting catalog for an estimated 80 million to Primary Wave Music, an independent publisher and marketing company. Hipgnosis Songs Fund, a British company that has made a rapid run in the market in just two and a half years, recently disclosed that it had spent about 670 million from March to September acquiring rights in more than 44,000 songs by Blondie, Rick James, Barry Manilow, Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders and others. Yet to a degree that still surprises and shocks his audience, Dylan has long been aggressive about marketing his music, including pursuing licensing deals to place his songs in television commercials. In 1994, Dylan let the accounting firm Coopers Lybrand predecessor of the current giant PricewaterhouseCoopers use Richie Havens's rendition of his 1964 protest anthem "The Times They Are A Changin'" in a TV spot. Fans, media commentators and even other artists reacted in horror; Time magazine wrote about the controversy with the headline "Just in Case You Hadn't Heard The '60s Are Over." The Coopers Lybrand spot was far from Dylan's last commercial license: He did a prominent deal for a Victoria's Secret TV spot in 2004, and later worked with Apple, Cadillac, Pepsi and IBM. Two years ago, he launched a high end whiskey brand, Heaven's Door. Since Universal now controls his work, Dylan will no longer have veto power over how his songs will be used. After the deal was announced early Monday, users on Twitter had a field day with corny puns suggesting how Dylan's work could be exploited. "Pay Lady Pay," one user quipped. "Tangled Up in Blue Cross/Blue Shield," wrote another. Still, Universal insisted it would be tasteful in its use of Dylan's work. Jody Gerson, the chief executive of Universal's publishing division, said, "To represent the body of work of one of the greatest songwriters of all time whose cultural importance can't be overstated is both a privilege and a responsibility." Dylan is the kind of writer whose work music publishers tend to salivate over. Not only has it stood the test of time, but most of his songs were written by Dylan alone and have been frequently covered by other artists with each use generating royalties. According to Universal, Dylan's songs have been recorded more than 6,000 times. Music publishing is the side of the business that deals in the copyrights for songwriting and composition the lyrics and melodies of songs, in their most fundamental form which are distinct from those for a recording. Publishers and writers collect royalties and licensing fees any time their work is sold, streamed, broadcast on the radio or used in a movie or commercial. (The recent sale of Taylor Swift's first six albums covered only that material's recording rights. Swift signed a separate publishing deal with Universal in February.) Streaming has helped lift the entire music market publishers in the United States collected 3.7 billion in 2019, according to the National Music Publishers' Association which has drawn new investors attracted to the steady and growing income generated by music rights. Dylan's deal includes 100 percent of his rights for all the songs of his catalog, including both the income he receives as a songwriter and his control of each song's copyright. In exchange for its payment to Dylan, Universal, a division of the French media conglomerate Vivendi, will collect all future income from the songs. Dylan had no comment on the deal. Music publishing has been a little known cornerstone of much of Dylan's career. The songs he recorded with the Band in 1967, for example, which were widely bootlegged at the time and later collected in Dylan's 1975 album "The Basement Tapes," were intended as demos to be shopped to other recording artists. And much of Dylan's business empire is operated through the Bob Dylan Music Company, a small office in New York that administers his publishing rights in the United States. (Elsewhere around the world, his catalog has been administered by Sony/ATV, which will continue to do so until the expiration of its contract in a few years.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Cy Twombly's "Untitled," from 1954, is among the more than 90 works included in the Gagosian exhibition "In Beauty It Is Finished: Drawings 1951 2008." Once upon a time the Gagosian Gallery produced museum quality shows at an unmatched rate at least once a year. Then it seemed to cede this role to the well oiled machine that is David Zwirner's gallery. But now Gagosian is back, with "Cy Twombly: In Beauty It Is Finished: Drawings 1951 2008," a ravishing, revelatory and compressed overview of this great postwar career that more than makes up for lost time. Comprising over 90 drawings, collages and the occasional painting on paper at the West 21st Street gallery, this concentrated presentation spans over five decades and gives Twombly's art a new pace and immediacy. No matter how well we may think we understand his achievement, it introduces an artist we haven't quite seen before. The show has been selected and organized by Mark Francis of Gagosian, with the help of Nicola Del Roscio from the Cy Twombly Foundation; its title is from a Navajo night chant that Twombly used in the title of a voluptuous unbound book of 36 paintings on paper (1983 2002) in the final gallery here. The exhibition, celebrating the publication of the eighth and final volume of the catalogue raisonne of his drawings, coincides with a presentation of his "Coronation of Sesostris," a 10 part painting from 2000 at Gagosian's Madison Avenue gallery, in commemoration of what would have been his 90 birthday on April 25. The gathering of works in Chelsea reconfigures the general sense of Twombly (1928 2011) as a lanky, slow moving, ever relaxed Southerner who worked in fits and starts and soaked up the good life on Italy's Amalfi Coast or in Lexington, Va. his birthplace, to which he returned in his later years. In its stead is a man driven by an almost demonic energy, who never stopped pushing and testing his aesthetic engine, drawing, making it ever bigger and more encompassing. Paraphrasing Shakespeare, this show could be said to ask, "What's in a line?" Everything: drawing, painting, language from vulgate to Olympian, mathematics, pictographs, architecture, writing in tongues, the body, the war between the sexes, myth and history, and nature, especially the sea. The show is densely installed and has an immersive feeling that becomes oceanic as the rhythms of Twombly's hand expand. It begins with a startling vitrine of 39 drawings, which are being exhibited for the first time: tiny scraps mounted on index cards made in 1951. They show a range of quasi abstract motifs resembling trees, fences, rows of flowers and strangely little sketches for Wiener Werkstatte broaches. They are about as precise as Twombly gets; the motif turns shambling in four larger oil paint drawings nearby. Twombly's signature line, nervous and diagonally adrift, makes a tentative appearance, faintly penciled, suggesting a sloping hill in six drawings near the entrance. Then it shortens, gathering in flocks on four postcard size works from 1955, evoking illegible scribblings. On the opposite wall, the lines cluster into thatches of electric crayon color seaweed, waves, electricity, brain synapses. Classicism, Romanticism, numbers and pornographic sgraffito pop up in a drawing titled "See Naples Die," with the outline of a possible temple, a quote from Keats and crude, sputtering gunlike shapes that evoke Claes Oldenburg's early sculpture. It's 1960, you're still in the first gallery but Twombly has indicated most of the directions his work will take. From here his lines thicken and become frazzled like unraveling wool. He draws in white wax crayon on paper covered with wet chalkboard gray paint a favorite wet dry technique to creating wobbly spirals, tumbling figure eights and lasso y loops that suggest an artist working on a tightrope. Line is expanded geometrically into narrow planes that cascade noisily through four drawings summoning Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" paintings. At some point toward the middle of the show oil paint settles in to stay, along with subjects like flowers and buds. Twombly is at his most free. In the largest work in the show, "Untitled (Gaeta)" from 1989, he paints mostly with his fingers, creating a small mountain of blacks and violets mixed with white. Their opulence is gorgeous, funny and not a little scatological. The self contained arc of this show separates Twombly from the two artists with whom he is often affiliated, usually to his detriment: Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Also Southerners, they set the stage for postwar art by choosing images and objects from everyday life. They became consummate appropriators of things souvenirs that signified their times or private lives frequently erasing the boundary between painting and sculpture. Twombly was more traditional and more European, and not much of an appropriator, except in his sculpture. He also was not an urban artist, but a pastoral, romantic one a lyric poet often inspired by nature who read omnivorously, breaking his experiences down, releasing them as a kind of visual music through the seismographic vibrations of his hand. He seems less drawn to transgressing the physical boundaries of media although he does combine drawing and painting than in expanding art's capacity for direct emotional expression and radical vulnerability. It reverberates throughout this sumptuous show.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
"Open Window II" (1969) features the signature hooded figures that Philip Guston drew in a crude, cartoonish fashion in his later years. Several museums claimed more contextualization was needed before a Guston retrospective could open. The much discussed Philip Guston retrospective will now open in 2022, a spokeswoman for the National Gallery of Art in Washington said on Wednesday, after the announcement last month of a delay until 2024 sparked a backlash in the art world. The National Gallery and three other major museums had announced that they were delaying the retrospective, which was originally intended to begin its tour last June, after taking into account the surging racial justice protests across the country. The museums had decided that roughly 24 of the Guston works featuring Ku Klux Klan members risked being "misinterpreted" and needed to be better contextualized for the current political moment. Some critics said the decision to delay the retrospective amounted to self censorship fueled by fear of controversy, but the National Gallery countered that the museums were still committed to the exhibition. A National Gallery spokeswoman, Anabeth Guthrie, said that the four sponsoring museums including Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston were in the process of confirming tour dates for 2022 and 2023. Ms. Guthrie said the rescheduling was not a result of the backlash. When the museums announced the postponement, she said, they chose a time that was well beyond the pandemic; 2024 seemed like an achievable time frame for each institution. Scheduling such an expansive exhibition with an international tour in normal circumstances is already complicated, Ms. Guthrie said, but the pandemic has made it even more so, with the challenges of transporting 200 objects from multiple locations amid border restrictions. "We never would have identified 2024 as a possible timeline if we were not serious about doing the show," she said. The repercussions from that September announcement of the delay have continued to unfold. The Art Newspaper reported Wednesday that a curator who co organized the exhibition at Tate Modern had been suspended by the institution because he had criticized the postponement on his Instagram account last month. The curator, Mark Godfrey, wrote that museums had already been engaged in putting the Klan imagery in context and that the delay to 2024 came off as "extremely patronizing" to viewers. "By canceling or delaying, a message is sent out that the institutions 'get' Guston's Klan paintings, but do not trust their audiences," he wrote. The Tate declined to comment and Mr. Godfrey did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in a letter to the British newspaper The Times, responding to a columnist saying that the postponement amounted to "cowardly self censorship," the directors of Tate and the Tate Modern wrote that "Tate does not self censor" and suggested that the decision was primarily made by the U.S. museums that were grappling with the "volatile climate" over "race equality and representation." "Proceeding on our own would not have been possible for financial and logistical reasons and would have been disrespectful to our partner museums," the directors wrote. The museums had already decided to delay the opening from June, in Washington, to February 2021, at Tate Modern in London, because of the pandemic. Earlier this month, the director of the National Gallery, Kaywin Feldman, in an interview with The Washington Post, defended the decision to postpone, saying that the retrospective needed an African American curator as part of the project. She also said that the museum needed to prepare its largely Black security force for the content of the exhibition.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design

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