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Bernadette Caulfield, an executive producer of "Game of Thrones," on the set. Emilia Clarke, who plays the dragon queen Daenerys Targaryen, described her as "the beating heart of our show." Meet the Woman Who Is the 'Best Thing That Ever Happened' to 'Game of Thrones' "Game of Thrones" stars past and present filled Radio City Music Hall earlier this month for the world premiere of the first episode of the fantasy saga's eighth and final season, which debuts Sunday on HBO. But in their speech before the screening, the creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss gave some of their deepest thanks to someone who most of the crowd probably wouldn't recognize. "We only made it this far because of Bernadette Caulfield, the greatest producer alive," Benioff said. Read our complete guide to "Game of Thrones" and sign up for our newsletter. Caulfield, an executive producer for the show, isn't as familiar to fans as Benioff or Weiss or actors like Emilia Clarke (who plays the dragon queen Daenerys Targaryen), Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark) and Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister). But for those people, she is the real star of "Game of Thrones." "She's the beating heart of our show," Clarke said. "The woman that I want to grow up to be like," Turner said. "The single best thing that ever happened to the show," Benioff and Weiss wrote in a joint email. Even as writers and showrunners have become celebrated in this age of intensely dissected series, television is still made mostly by the unsung all those names in the credits that turn the scripts into actual television. This is especially true for "Game of Thrones." With its sprawling tale unfolding in a wide variety of environments, it was almost certainly the most technically complicated series ever made, at times running five units (film crews) simultaneously, on multiple continents, to complete a given season on time. And they rarely shot simple scenes "Game of Thrones" became a sensation partly through gobsmacking sequences involving elaborate battles, people on fire and the occasional bear. It inhabited cliffs, crypts and caves in Northern Ireland. It closed city streets in Spain and Croatia to film riots, insurgencies and a nude walk of shame. It took a crew into an Icelandic blizzard to capture the world beyond the Wall. "Without her, the whole thing would have collapsed under its own weight long ago," Benioff and Weiss said. "Well, I wish I was that important," Caulfield said when I reached her in England, where she's working on Joss Whedon's new series, "The Nevers," for HBO. "But obviously it takes a major team to put it together." That team included her "wingman," the producer Chris Newman, and the show's production designer, Deborah Riley, among many, many others. But Caulfield was the person in charge of everything, the creators said, overseeing all aspects of the production, from the enormously complex logistical planning to the budget and production schedule to the "health and happiness of the crew." For Caulfield, however, the task was relatively straightforward. "My job is to make whatever they write on the page come to the screen," she said. Caulfield grew up in upstate New York and went to high school in Rochester, where she also worked in local theater. When a movie filmed in the area in 1981, she signed on as a production assistant and was bitten by the show business bug she moved to Los Angeles within a year. As she rose through the industry ranks, she worked with some of the most esteemed producers in Hollywood, including Steven Bochco (on "Brooklyn South" and "Philly"), Michael Mann ("Robbery Homicide Division") and Ridley and Tony Scott ("The Good Wife"). She honed her multiple unit chops as a producer on "The X Files" and then later on the HBO polygamy drama "Big Love." As that show was wrapping up in 2011, she heard about "sort of a fantasy, medieval piece" the network was shooting in Britain. She joined "Game of Thrones" for its second season, replacing the outgoing producer Mark Huffam. It's easy to forget now, given the cavalcade of spectacle "Game of Thrones" has become, that it was a much quieter show in the early days. The dragons were glorified lizards and the first big combat sequence, the Battle of the Blackwater, didn't come until the end of Season 2. Season 3 brought signs of the expansion to come, with new worlds and more extreme elements, like the bear that Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie) squared off with in one gonzo sequence. "Gwendoline said, 'I can't believe I'm working with a live bear here!,' and David said, 'I know, I didn't believe that Bernie would actually do this,'" Caulfield recalled, laughing. "I didn't think I had any option but to do it." As the story and budgets grew, from 5 million per episode in the early days to as much as 15 million in Season 8, so did the production. If it wasn't explicitly a goal for the show to top itself each season, that was the practical result of a story that grew from a clash of clans to a transcontinental war to this season a battle against an undead army for the survival of humankind. "She created a production that could effectively scale up from season to season without losing either its efficiency or its heart," Benioff and Weiss said. "There are so many versions of 'Game of Thrones' that would have fallen apart under the strain of producing 10 increasingly big hours of television on a 12 month schedule. Pretty much every version except the Bernie version." When Caulfield wasn't on some far flung set or checking out the action on any of the six stages at the show's Belfast studio, she was in the production office planning prepping new directors, new shoots, new countries. "It really was the Game of Meetings," she said. But it was her "gruff love of every damn person on the show," Benioff and Weiss said, that made her beloved by the people she was ordering around in often extreme conditions. "I know how heavy cable is; I know what the crew has to go through I'm actually married to a dolly grip," she said. "Sometimes he'd say, 'You love your crew more than me.' Probably at that moment I do, because I have to." The most emotionally taxing days were the ones that involved lighting people on fire. Stunt coordinators will generally say falls are the most dangerous, but the shoot that sticks in Caulfield's memory is the scene in the fighting pits of Meereen in Season 6, when the big dragon Drogon on set represented by a long pole with a ball on the end torched multiple victims. The execution of the scene involved a flamethrower on a dolly rolling past, igniting multiple stunt performers. "They say they don't worry and they love doing it, but I think they're all crazy," she said. The maternal dynamic extended to the actors, whose growing fame led to ever more demanding schedules to juggle as the show itself became more physically strenuous. "She literally was the mum of the whole thing," Clarke said. "It was like, 'Listen, I know we're in the middle of a field and it's 3 a.m. and it's the second month of night shoots and everyone's exhausted and everyone's screaming at you because you are the person that everyone comes to for everything, but can I just talk to you about this Dothraki line I've got next week?'" she added. "And she will." Caulfield's angst antenna bordered on the uncanny, they say. Nikolaj Coster Waldau, who plays the redeemed rogue Jaime Lannister, recalled a time when a stressful personal situation had him on the brink of an on set tantrum. "Suddenly she was next to me very gently saying, 'Hey are you O.K.?'" he said. "And just the way she said that made me look at myself from the outside and see that I was about to turn into one of those horrible actors." He continued, "So I am really grateful that she stopped me from becoming a complete fool." Caulfield acknowledged that whatever considerable scheduling, weather and budgeting obstacles she overcame on "Game of Thrones," her most important attribute on a production full of ice and fire and many flavors of human toil, was her emotional intelligence. "I do feel like I'm sensitive to seeing somebody who's not smiling as much," she said. "I still run into a lot of different crew, and you know, you hug them like you don't want to let go," she said. "A lot of people felt like it was time to move on, but I also think if it went on another five years, everybody would have hung in there for five years. Because it meant that much to all of us."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Q. I can see the year, month and day views on the default iPhone calendar, but no weekly view. Did Apple really omit the week at a glance option? A. Apple's iOS Calendars app for the iPhone does have a weekly view, but you have to take an extra step to get to it. Rotate your phone sideways to the horizontal orientation and tap the Week tab at the top of the screen to get the seven day schedule. If your screen remains in the vertical or portrait orientation, swipe up from the bottom to open the Control Center and tap the encircled lock icon. This allows the screen to automatically rotate depending on how you're holding the phone; you can restore the Screen Lock here later. (In the Calculator app, turning the iPhone sideways switches the display from a simple calculator to a scientific calculator to handle trigonometric problems and other complex mathematic functions.) If your iPhone model includes the 3D Touch feature, you can see several days' worth of future events from the month view when you press and hold your finger on a particular day.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
We almost didn't go. I'd put the outdoor concert on our calendar, but as Sunday unfurled and some work I had to do relentlessly stared me down and inertia took hold of our family, I announced, "If no one REALLY wants to go to the concert, we're going to skip it." I felt bad about this: Living in Manhattan through the pandemic has left me constantly searching for safe things to do with our kids, to remind us how special it still is to live in this city. My 8 year old son motivated me. "I want to go, Mom, if that's OK?" he said as he slipped on his sneakers. My husband, exhausted on the sofa, and my daughter, flopped somewhere near him with Legos in hand, waved goodbye. When the taxi turned onto West 112th Street, I gasped a bit at the grandeur and beauty of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and reminded my son that we'd first visited the church when he was 4 years old, and we saw a peacock named Phil walking the grounds. The concert had already begun as we took a spot on the corner of 112th and Amsterdam. Each member of the choir surprisingly few people making astonishingly gorgeous noise was spaced more than six feet apart over several steps in front of the cathedral. Their sound was unearthly. Hundreds of us stood, enraptured. I felt so strongly and with such gratitude that we were part of a community everyone was masked and socially distant, but we were together in this moment, listening to Latin verses gloriously ascend. My boy stood in front of me, and I ran my fingers through his very long pandemic hair. I whispered through my mask into his ear, "I'm so glad we did this. Thank you for wanting to come." The author's son, during the concert. "I don't feel safe," he said later. "Now I think anyone could have a gun." I took a video of the choir and the crowd, panning up the church's western facade. "How to be a New Yorker at Christmas time," I posted on Twitter. A celebration of the moment. A sharing of holiday spirit. A brag about being a New Yorker. After the concert ended, the front steps largely cleared, and folks milled about. We were planning to get a slice of Dobos torte at a nearby pastry shop when a gunshot split the air. Birds scattered off the steps in a violent rush. I didn't realize it was a shot at first, though who's ever expecting to hear gunfire? My absurd thought in that millisecond was this: Yo, St. John, what a jarring way to remove birds from your entrance! Then another shot was fired and another, so loud my body contracted I've only ever heard guns in movies and we saw the gunman shooting into the air. "What's happening?" my son asked, wide eyed. "Someone's shooting RUN!" I ordered, and we joined the sprinting surge of terrified people. Before I turned away from the cathedral, I saw a couple hit the ground near the steps. I prayed my child hadn't seen. My son lost his shoe. I ran back upstream, grabbed it from a man who handed it to me like a baton in a race, and we kept running, shots firing behind us. This is a shooting. This is real. I got us into a taxi and turned to my boy, a kid who is usually excruciatingly verbal, now silent. He stared straight ahead. "I don't feel safe," he said quietly. "Now I think anyone could have a gun." I told him he was safe now. When we got out of the cab, I got on my knees on Broadway, in front of our building, to hug him. Then I realized I was kneeling in front of a line of New Yorkers waiting to get Covid tests at a CityMD and hustled us home. He sat on my husband's lap, and we talked to him about how the officers did their job. At that point thanks to the miracle/curse of instant social media we could assure him that no one was hurt except the shooter. We leaned into how the police are taking care of the community rather than the lie that bad things don't happen. I'm shaken, but fine. My son seems to be OK, too (although we're keeping an eye on him). I've felt the need to investigate my subdued reaction, though, because it feels incommensurate with the concern coming my way. Scores of friends and kind strangers on social media who know we experienced a shooting keep checking on us. They use words like "trauma" and say they're praying for us. If you'd told me a year ago that this Christmas, not only would I not be taking my kids to see a live performance of "The Nutcracker" (ha!), but that we would be in the midst of a pandemic in a city where almost 25,000 people have died of a disease that has kept us on chronic lockdown; if you'd told me that I would grab my little boy's hand to sprint away from an active shooter, I couldn't have absorbed that information. But after a year that's exceeded the bounds of the imagination, my brain is rewired. My mind now goes to: It could be so much worse. Because if 2020 has given me anything, it's perspective. It's plummeted my expectations. I mean, the last time I attended a Christmas concert at St. John the Divine, it was inside, candlelit and cozy despite the expanse, hundreds of us side by side to listen to Sting. This year the opportunity to just stand on a corner for 20 minutes, in a mask, holding my kid, moved me to tears. Indeed, 2020 has taught us that things can go from bad to worse and from worse to worser. It's preposterous that in 2016 "dumpster fire" was named a word of the year; 2016 did not KNOW from dumpster fires. The image of the shooter doesn't play over and over in my head unless I summon him. What does come at me on a loop is incredulousness for how lucky we are in a year when the unthinkable can and has happened. Yes, we witnessed a man open fire, creating terror after a beautiful event. But no innocent person got hurt. Those people I'd seen falling to the ground had been ducking for cover and remained safe. My child didn't see anyone die. I was with him; he didn't have to survive the horror of an active shooter in school. I realize how privileged my family is to live a life in which even the sound of gunfire, much less the reality of gun violence, is unusual. In the same year during which certain officers have behaved brutally, the police saved the day on the steps of the church. A man with a gun sent us running for our lives, and yet we can be grateful that unlike so many others in similar terrifying experiences we were able to return to a safe home. We end this long year on the precipice of what looks like a dark winter of disease at the same time that vials of hope are being delivered in subfreezing temperatures. It could be so much worse, I get to say. It is a gift this holiday season to be able to utter those words. Faith Salie is the author of the essay collection "Approval Junkie."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
On June 17, five months after BuzzFeed's newsroom was devastated by layoffs, a large inflatable rat appeared on the doorstep of the company's Manhattan headquarters. Scores of staff members, including those at its offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington, staged a walkout that day as part of an effort to force Jonah Peretti, the site's founder and chief executive, to recognize a newly formed union. His position was well known at the time: Collective bargaining was not a good idea for BuzzFeed. His employees, known for generating infinitely shareable bits of digital culture (what color is this dress?), feared for the site's future. The layoffs had claimed 15 percent of the staff, and an internal survey revealed that only 56 percent of those still standing expected to be working at BuzzFeed in a year's time. On Tuesday, another bombshell: Ben Smith, the founding editor of BuzzFeed News, who expanded the editorial mission to include serious fare amid the meme worthy material, announced that he would be leaving after eight years on the job to become the media columnist for The New York Times. The news hit a BuzzFeed that is on better financial footing than it was during the season of the rat. The site booked a profit for the second half of 2019, according to three people with knowledge of the business. They did not specify how large it was. For the year, the company generated around 320 million in revenue, or 6.6 percent above the previous year, the people said. There's a twist to BuzzFeed's newfound financial health: The closer the company gets to achieving a year's worth of profit, the more its backers are likely to agitate for a return on their investments, either through a sale or a public offering. The company's financial boon underscores how BuzzFeed has changed from the internet laboratory Mr. Peretti hatched out of a small Chinatown office in 2006. The site once eschewed banner ads. Now it is filled with banner advertising and sells cookware at discount retailers. An emphasis on native advertising listicles and such sponsored by brands eroded once Facebook opened its channels to companies, allowing them to post marketing messages on the site. "We had to shift, and our team was able to adjust," Mr. Peretti said. BuzzFeed now has a growing commerce business that includes branded cookware at Walmart and an affiliate division that brings in money any time a reader buys something from an online store when coming from a link in a BuzzFeed article. Last year, those two businesses drove nearly 68 million in revenue, almost double that of the previous year, the people with knowledge of the company said. Mr. Peretti thinks that model can be expanded. Readers who come across a story about a particular hotel, for example, might end up booking a stay there. BuzzFeed wants a commission for that transaction. He also has plans to create subscription revenue from events, what he calls "paid social." Now that he has matured as an executive, Mr. Peretti, who in BuzzFeed's early days seemed driven by a mad scientist's interest in sussing out what people like to share online, has gotten more interested in translating his knowledge of digital culture into dollars. At a company of roughly 1,100 people, the news division employs 200 journalists and costs about 18 million a year, according to two executives with knowledge of the company's finances. Mr. Smith, who oversaw the layoff of dozens of journalists during what he described as "a tough week" in January last year, was given a mandate to find new ways to subsidize the newsroom, only to express frustration that BuzzFeed's sales team rarely, if ever, sold ads against news articles, these people said. BuzzFeed News was eventually allotted two salespeople of its own. Mr. Smith's departure will not change the company's identity, Mr. Peretti said. "We want to do everything possible to continue Ben's legacy," he said. "We want to break news and be fearless and stand up to power to do all the things that define what BuzzFeed News is." 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 addition of a robust news division lent BuzzFeed prestige, but questions swirled around the effort as it got started in 2011, about five years after the site went live. Reporting is expensive, and investors questioned the cost. Other journalists were skeptical that a company known for memes could compete with established news organizations. But under Mr. Smith, BuzzFeed News was a two time Pulitzer finalist and a winner of a National Magazine Award, a George Polk Prize and several other prizes. Readers have sometimes confused the whimsical posts that BuzzFeed is known for with the news operation. BuzzFeed appeared to acknowledge the mixed brand message in 2018, when it moved the news articles to a new web address, BuzzFeedNews.com. Despite questions from early BuzzFeed backers, Mr. Peretti saw the news division as vital. "There is a long tradition of media companies subsidizing or partially subsidizing news," he said. He said he sees the potential for its journalism to make enough money to pay for itself though he didn't specify how it could achieve that goal. "We want to operate as a whole in a responsible way that will allow it to grow," Mr. Peretti said. "Sometimes to grow things you need to get costs in line and find operating efficiencies." A lot will depend, he said, on how Mr. Smith's successor plans to manage the group. Venture capitalists typically look for an exit at about the 10 year mark, when their funds usually close, and some early BuzzFeed investors have either passed that period or are hitting it this year. They can also get their money back by selling shares to another investor, known as a secondary offering. BuzzFeed's current investors include the venture firms Andreessen Horowitz, Lerer Hippeau and NEA. NBCUniversal is also an investor. But any sale or public offering would require Mr. Peretti's endorsement. He has great influence over the board. The company's recent growth "means we have the choice and freedom to stay independent," he said. "And we don't need to raise more capital." BuzzFeed has so far raised 500 million at a valuation of 1.7 billion. Its investors are aware that, even as the company continues to grow, it is unlikely to attract buyout offers near that price, three people with knowledge of the matter said. They added that BuzzFeed could enhance its financial profile by merging with a competitor. The picture they paint is one in which BuzzFeed combines with a business that would lift the total revenue to over 400 million, with about 15 or 20 percent of that accounting for profits before tax. The resulting company could then be more attractive to a big company, or make for a public offering. In a 2018 interview with The Times, Mr. Peretti discussed the possibility of such deals. Last year, BuzzFeed was in talks with Group Nine, the publisher of sites like The Dodo and Now This, according to several people familiar with the matter. (Recode first reported on the discussions.) Complicating matters was that both businesses shared a board director, the venture capitalist Kenneth Lerer, who bowed out of discussions because of the conflict of interest. Around that time, he also stepped down as BuzzFeed's chairman. Group Nine is also helmed by Mr. Lerer's son Benjamin Lerer, a friend of Mr. Peretti's. The discussions about a deal went far enough that cost savings were analyzed. Group Nine and BuzzFeed have sizable video operations, and a tie up would have meant cuts in that area, the people said. Later in the summer, the talks ended, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions. One issue was who would manage the new business. Scenarios included either Mr. Lerer or Mr. Peretti as chief executive, with the other as chairman of the board. That question was never resolved. "I've known Ben Lerer a long time," Mr. Peretti said in the Thursday interview. "I had a conversation with him, and I've had conversations with C.E.O.s of a lot of other companies, and I think there's value to being in the mix and talking to people and being open for the right deal at the right time." Mr. Lerer said the timing of the talks was not right, "or else we would have done something." Last year, Group Nine acquired PopSugar, a digital publisher focused on millennial women. Mr. Lerer left open the possibility that a BuzzFeed deal could still take place. "I have immense respect for Jonah, and I will always have an open dialogue with him and others," he said. A month after the June walkout, BuzzFeed recognized the union, the NewsGuild of New York, which also represents Times employees. Mr. Smith was charged with handling the matter from the management side, and he was keen to come to an agreement with the staff. He was also growing restless. In the past few months, he wrote more than a dozen articles, a change from the recent past, when his byline appeared a few times a year. In November he wrote a column analyzing the succession planning at The Times. Dean Baquet, the executive editor, will retire in a few years, and Mr. Smith offered a lengthy exegesis on who might succeed him. In December, at the Lambs Club, a restaurant on West 44th Street, Mr. Smith met with Mr. Baquet and Sam Dolnick, an assistant managing editor of The Times and a member of the Ochs Sulzberger family that controls the paper. They discussed the media columnist job over lunch.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
SOUTHBURY, Conn. "I've loved jewelry my whole life," said Augusten Burroughs, the best selling author whose most recent book, "Lust Wonder: A Memoir," discusses his most important and romantic relationships, jewelry being one of them. "As a child, I loved shiny things," he said. "I would buy little silver rings with my allowance. I'd keep them in my pocket or put them on display in my room and stare at them. I loved looking at the intricacies of something so elaborate in something so tiny." His paternal grandparents helped create his interest. "My grandfather was a cough syrup salesmen and went to China on business. He would bring home jade for my grandmother," Mr. Burroughs recalled. "I loved looking at it and touching it. She was the one relative I was closest with, and so I associate jewelry and comfort with her." When he was 8, his grandfather gave him a 23 karat gold signet ring. "I loved owning something someone had labored over," he said. "There was artistry and intent. It was portable, beautiful and permanent." Today, Mr. Burroughs's collection comprises more than 200 pieces, many of them men's rings. "I didn't buy anything expensive until I had money, which I got from my first advance for my novel 'Sellevision' in 2000," he said. "I spent the entire amount on a ring I saw on display in the window of Cartier. It was a limited edition that was a kinetic sculpture of the earth, which unfolded and turned into a sphere. When I saw it I knew I had to have it. It's one of the few pieces of jewelry I've ever bought new." Mr. Burroughs, 51, has boyish, Southern charm and green eyes, which on this particular day were set off by his pink Oxford and jeans. Eight other works have followed that first novel four memoirs, three essay collections and a self help book selling a total of nearly 10 million copies worldwide. Probably the best known is "Running With Scissors," which in 2006 was made into a major motion picture starring Annette Bening and Alec Baldwin. Although he became serious about collecting in 2002, "2008 is when it really ramped up. I started finding and acquiring these pre Georgian rings in onyx and malachite, which I loved," he said. "The more I learned about gemstones and gemology, the more it exploded for me." When it comes to the jewelry's composition, Mr. Burroughs favors jade, gems and pearls, and he says he can spend up to 15 hours a day searching for a specific item online. That is not surprising, considering the lengthy list of guidelines he reeled off: "If I'm buying a gemstone, it can't be treated. If I'm buying a ruby, it can't be heated, it alters the color, and no substances can fill fissures in the stones. I want as natural and as unadulterated as possible. "Grade A jade can only be waxed with beeswax," he continued. "Sapphires need to be earth minded. And I'll only purchase pre Mikimoto pearls. I'm not interested in Bulgari, Cartier or vintage Van Cleef. Nothing mass produced. I like handmade, one off pieces." He said he has gone through phases: rich, deep emeralds; diamonds from the 1800s; anything from the 1770s; pieces that exude mysticism; midcentury men's rings with large stones; Victorian era turquoise. But his particular obsession with jade never changes: "I'm always looking for different colors: orange or red, the perfect yellow or violet." Some pieces he considers standouts include an 18 karat gold Tiffany ring from the 1870s, featuring a cabochon cut sapphire from Ceylon with hand engravings on the shoulders. "This ring is from the day when Tiffany was at its absolute height at the Gilded Age. It's one of the finest men's rings you could buy at that time," he said. "I bought it for 15,000 five or six years ago in San Francisco." He also prizes two rings mounted with chrysoberyl cat's eyes. Mr. Burroughs said that when he is under stress or on a book tour, he loves to prowl junk shops and estate sales from Maine to San Francisco for great finds. While at a vintage shop in New England several years ago, he paid a few hundred dollars for an Art Deco ring with a jade stone in a setting of base metal. Once he was home, he popped out the stone and put it in a 22 karat gold setting that he had designed. "The jade quality was spectacular. It was the perfect imperial emerald green, and the person who sold it to me called it 'that green stone,' which happens a lot," he said. "I'm fascinated by how people can miss something which I feel almost programmed to recognize. "When I do, I get a physical reaction. It's a thrill paired with a sense of need and immediacy. I get goose bumps and a flushed feeling in my chest. My face gets hot. It's the recognition of something exquisite and extraordinary. Like the feeling of seeing a unicorn in the woods." Another score happened three years ago in a junk store near Kettering, Ohio. It was Dec. 24, and Mr. Burroughs and his husband, Christopher Shelling, were shopping for last minute Christmas gifts. "I spotted these white 'plastic' beads in the counter," he said. "The instant I held them in my hand there was no hesitation." The beads, marked at 17, were flawless, angelskin coral white, with a soft blush of pink. "Hundreds of people walk into that store every day, and there they were, lying next to rhinestone clip earrings and a gaudy, red plastic necklace," Mr. Burroughs said. "Christopher thought they were plastic. I know he was thinking, 'Why is he buying this?' But now he's been trained. I told him what they were the minute we walked out of the store." There are two pieces of jewelry Mr. Burroughs doesn't take off. One is a finely carved three sided emerald jade necklace dating from the 1920s that he found while sleuthing in New Hampshire. The other is his wedding ring, a midcentury marquise cut diamond in a setting that resembles the decor of the Chrysler Building. For a serious storyteller like Mr. Burroughs, it's no surprise he views his rings as having a similar role. Each has history, energy and most important, narrative. "With each owner, with each time they wore it, a little piece of their soul attached itself to this highly personal, exquisitely beautiful item," he said. "I love the stories that seep into these vintage rings over time by the previous owners. I like to think about who wore them."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
In the latest chapter of the debit card fee wars, the banks and Federal Reserve were dealt a victory on Friday when a federal appeals court overturned a lower court's decision. The ruling means that the amount banks collect from retailers when consumers swipe debit cards can remain as is, and not be reduced further. The takeaway message for consumers: Nothing much will change, at least for now. "There is no reason consumers should see their own fees go up or their rewards go down, or any other change," said Adam Levitin, a professor who specializes in financial regulation and consumer protection at Georgetown Law. As part of the financial regulatory overhaul after the economic crisis, Congress included legislation that intended to put a cap on how much banks could charge retailers when consumers made purchases with debit cards. But they left it to the Federal Reserve to write the rules: The fees were ultimately reduced to about 21 cents a transaction, starting on Oct. 1, 2011, from an average of about 44 cents. But on Friday, the United States Appeals Court for the District of Columbia overturned a district court judge's opinion issued last July, which said the Fed had been too generous to the banks. That decision benefited the retailers, who challenged the original rule. If the July ruling stood, experts said, it was possible that the so called swipe fees could have been reduced further.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
"Social distancing" might sound like an emotional phase in early adolescence (it certainly was for me) but in reality, it's a public health term describing our best defense against the coronavirus. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this pathogen can spread "between people who are in close contact with one another (within about six feet)." That close contact has carried the virus across the planet, killing at least 4,000 people and infecting over 110,000 (that we know of). Until a vaccine or even an effective treatment can be developed, the best hope for protecting ourselves is slowing the spread of the disease. But how do we do that? Travel bans are proving to be too little too late. It's too easy to mistake the symptoms of coronavirus for a simple cold or flu. Even worse, since the virus can incubate for 14 days, carriers can spread it before they even know they're sick. We've already seen that happen in Washington State, where health officials believe some people were passing on their infections for up to six weeks. This long asymptomatic incubation period also renders airport screening ineffective. What's the use of taking a passenger's temperature if it's going to be 98.6 degrees even when he or she is carrying the virus? Likewise, protective gear such as masks and gloves works only if used correctly. Masks are supposed to be worn by sick people, or those caring directly for them. But when uninfected people wear hot, sweaty masks out in public, they will be more prone to touching their faces, which is also the Achilles' heel of rubber gloves. It doesn't do any good to cover our hands, if those hands are still touching infected surfaces before touching our eyes, nose or mouth. Those hands, gloved or ungloved, have to be sterilized in order to prevent transmission. Which is why washing hands is an important defense but by no means the only one. The best way to prevent "community spread" is to spread out the community. That means keeping people apart. No more handshakes, group photos and "free hugs" from those cosplayers at Comic Con. In fact, it might mean no more Comic Con for a little while, as well as no trade shows, concerts or any other events that draw a large crowd. This "disruption to everyday life" carries a huge financial risk a risk of which I'm painfully aware. I've built my career on the road, assembling a readership one handshake, hug and group photo at a time. I have a novel coming out this spring, and a speaking tour is vital to its success, as it has been for all my books. Now that tour might be canceled, and I've already had to pull out of two events. My book "Devolution" is about Bigfoot, and now I can't even promote it in the Pacific Northwest. But what is the alternative? Bring an infection home to my 93 year old dad? Gather a large crowd in a room where they can all infect one another? As a writer who lives one book at a time, I'm the last person who should be practicing social distancing. But as a writer who roots my books in factual research, I know what history can teach us about community spread. In 1918, in Philadelphia, health officials ignored calls for social distancing and allowed a World War I victory parade to proceed. Within three days, all the hospital beds in the city were filled. Within a week, roughly 45,000 people were infected. Within six weeks, 12,000 were dead. The prospect of a repeat of that kind of mass manslaughter is frightening especially when you consider that the 1918 influenza had a fatality rate of about 2.5 percent, compared to the 3.4 percent fatality rate for the coronavirus estimated by the World Health Organization. We can learn a lot from history's tragedies, but also from its triumphs. The plague that terrorized my generation, AIDS, was subdued by the same kind of public education, cultural flexibility and medical advances we need today. Back in the 1980s, when AIDS awareness tipped from denial to panic, our salvation didn't come from a lab, but from a pamphlet. That piece of paper, "Understanding AIDS," was mailed to almost every American home in 1988. Thanks to the pamphlet, along with a nationwide education offensive on safe sex, my generation learned that nothing, including love, was free. We adapted then. We can adapt now. And we must. Just as in war, everyone has a role to play. If we all contribute to reducing community spread, we can buy enough time for science and industry to come up with a vaccine. Does that mean hiding in a bunker with beans, bandages and bullets? No, of course not. Panic is not preparation. Our plans should be guided by qualified experts like the C.D.C. We also have to keep a sharp eye out for the kind of stigmatization that harks back to the early days of AIDS. Even before the virus started showing up throughout the United States, we've seen disgusting examples of what fear can do to the human spirit. In Southern California, a petition called for the closing of a largely Asian American school district even though there was no evidence of any child being infected. In New York, an Asian woman wearing a face mask was assaulted by a man who called her "diseased." Such panic driven prejudice has no place in our war with the coronavirus. Hopefully, if we all do our part now, we'll soon be able to resume our lives, and go to such fun events as book signings, where I'll be waving at you from seven feet away. Max Brooks ( maxbrooksauthor), the author of "World War Z" and the forthcoming "Devolution," is a senior nonresident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point. 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
Yes, you often have to peer around a column to glimpse the art that's up for sale at Phillips, given the poor sight lines in the auction house salesroom at 450 Park Avenue. But that's about to change. Phillips and Macklowe Properties are announcing that next fall, the auction house will move its New York headquarters practically next door into 432 Park Avenue, the gridded luxury building by Rafael Vinoly Architects, one of the tallest residential towers in the Western Hemisphere. "We're looking at increasing our capabilities to present state of the art exhibition space for auctions," said Edward Dolman, who became Phillips's chief executive four years ago. "It's a serious upgrade." At the new address for which an architect has yet to be selected Phillips will have 55,000 square feet of space, including the so called Park Avenue Cube, a white glass modernist structure on the northwest corner of 56th Street and Park Avenue. The auction house will also occupy a double height, column free underground concourse of more than 30,000 square feet with direct access from Park Avenue, and executive office space with an entrance on East 57th Street.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Microsoft advises against running its Windows Defender security software on the same system with another installed third party antivirus program. Likewise, antivirus software companies also warn against using other system security products when you are using theirs; Bitdefender, Kaspersky Lab and Symantec all have articles on their sites explaining the potential problems in detail. Programs that do not constantly patrol your operating system, like mail scanners, may not be an issue. When you install a third party antivirus application on a Windows 10 computer, the Windows Defender Antivirus software should automatically turn itself off and make way for the new program to take over. Some security apps may also include a firewall feature to block online intrusions, but Microsoft's own Windows Firewall should be used if the antivirus app does not offer that protection.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
San Sebastian is a city divided, literally, by a river. On the west side of the Urumea are most of the Basque city's main attractions: The Old Town packed with pintxo bars, the bay of La Concha, its golden beaches and elegant promenade. But to the east is Gros, a low key neighborhood behind Zurriola beach that is fast becoming the best area to shop in the city. Forget kitschy souvenirs and chain stores; this welcoming neighborhood caters to residents, with shops focused on what's local, from bookshelves and bathing suits to take away beers worth a stroll across the river. Warm plastic cups of San Miguel beer on the beach are a thing of the past. Since opening next to Zurriola beach last year, this sunny yellow beer shop has been pouring pilsners and pale ales into beach ready PET bottles with stick on labels and cute brown paper bags. The 18 taps feature many local craft brews, like the Kong IPA from Naparbier, a brewery in the nearby town of Navarra.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Mr. Sunstein was administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Obama administration. Since Jan. 30, 2017, the Trump administration's approach to federal regulation has been defined by a simple requirement: "one in, two out." The basic idea, set out in one of President Trump's first executive orders, is that whenever a federal agency issues one regulation, it has to take at least two regulations away and produce an incremental cost, on the private sector, of zero. The idea was absurd from the very start. It was profoundly demoralizing to experts in federal agencies, who know a lot about science and who have plenty of good ideas about how to protect public health and safety. But its absurdity has been put in a whole new light by the Covid 19 pandemic, which demonstrates that the regulatory state is no enemy of the people and that smart safeguards, designed by specialists, save lives. It is true that to many people, the one in, two out idea has a lot of intuitive appeal. For one thing, it instructs regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Transportation, the Department of Health and Human Services and elsewhere to get rid of outmoded or dumb regulations. But there is a subtler point. Mr. Trump clearly wanted to slow the issuance of new regulations. The one in, two out principle is well suited to achieving that goal. If agency heads know that they have to eliminate two regulations for every one they issue, they have a strong disincentive to issue new regulations. What if eliminating two regulations is unlawful? What if it turns out to be tough to find two old regulations, equal in cost to the new one, that really don't make sense? Since 2017, the one in, two out principle seems to have done just what it was intended to do. A report from the Office of Management and Budget, issued late last year, found that the total costs of federal regulations in 2018 and 2019 were spectacularly low the lowest, in fact, going all the way back to 2001. (Any official report should, of course, be taken with many grains of salt, but the actual numbers here for costs and benefits representing fiscal years are produced by civil servants, not political appointees, and they provide a valuable picture of differences across administrations.) Under President Bill Clinton, for example, the costs of regulation were in the vicinity of 7 billion in the 2005 fiscal year. Under President George W. Bush, they were around 14 billion in the 2007 fiscal year. Under President Barack Obama, they were around 7 billion in the 2015 fiscal year. Under President Trump, the flow of new regulations was greatly slowed, and their costs were much lower a maximum of 300 million in 2018, and a maximum of 600 million in 2019. But there's a big problem. When regulations aren't issued, people are going to get hurt, especially if health and safety are involved. Worker safety regulations prevent illnesses and death. Air pollution regulations protect public health. Regulations intended to prevent the spread of the coronavirus save lives. The Office of Management and Budget's own report confirms that point. Under Mr. Trump, the benefits of federal regulations were also, by far, the lowest on record: a maximum of 600 million in 2018 and somewhere between 200 million and 3.7 billion in 2019. That compares with benefits in excess of 40 billion in both 2005 and 2007, and in excess of 28 billion in 2015. It's crucial to point out that those numbers, capturing the benefits of regulation, are not limited to purely economic savings. They are meant to include deaths, injuries and illnesses prevented. When Republican and Democratic administrations issued expensive regulations, they also saved a lot of lives. The Covid 19 pandemic is vividly making that point. For example, recent work finds that air pollution makes the disease significantly more deadly. Even a small increase in exposure to particulate matter one of the most harmful air pollutants produces a big increase in the Covid 19 death rate. That finding is consistent with an earlier one, to the effect that in China, deaths from SARS were significantly elevated in areas with high levels of air pollution. That is especially bad news, because levels of particulate matter in the ambient air have spiked under Mr. Trump (after significant decreases from 2009 to 2016). In 2018 alone, that spike was estimated to have caused 9,700 additional deaths. Consider in this light the Trump administration's decision to finalize its rollback of fuel economy standards a decision announced, in a kind of cruel irony, during the early stages of the pandemic in the U.S. The new rule is highly likely to produce significant increases in air pollution (including greenhouse gases). For that reason, it will produce more illness and more death. Or consider the Trump administration's proposal not to tighten regulation of particulate matter, even in the face of scientific evidence, compiled before the pandemic, suggesting that doing that would prevent over 10,000 premature deaths annually. In view of the pandemic, that number might well be too low. Any administration, Republican or Democratic, should be scrutinizing existing regulations and eliminating those that no longer make sense. That is an urgent project, because many regulatory requirements impose "sludge" paperwork requirements and administrative burdens that make it tough for people to get economic assistance to which they are entitled, or that impose pointless obstacles to those seeking medical help. Right now, doctors, nurses and hospitals could benefit a lot from clearing out regulatory sludge. So could small business owners, whose ability to obtain financial help from the recent stimulus package has been badly undermined by sludge, including paperwork burdens. At the same time, regulations designed to protect health, safety and the environment should be immediately freed from the one in, two out rule. They should also be exempt from any other kind of gimmick that focuses on the costs of regulations while turning a blind eye to the benefits. In a pandemic, we need regulatory safeguards in a hurry. Whenever their benefits exceed their costs, they should be welcomed. And even when the pandemic is over, the president of the United States should celebrate, rather than stymie, the efforts of experts, in regulatory agencies and elsewhere, to use their knowledge to prevent unnecessary illnesses, accidents and deaths and to protect the most vulnerable members of society. Cass R. Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School, served as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs during the Obama administration. 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
March may be the month of the mega musical on Broadway, what with ticket buyers already queuing for the imminent openings of "Frozen" and "Margaritaville." But the shows listed here are of a less escapist stripe. That is not to say that they aren't every bit as tantalizing as the wayward adventures of hard partying tequila drinkers and snow princesses learning to "let it go." Among this more provocative group are a portrait of immigrant women in New York, a South African protest play, a searing study of infertility and star stuffed new incarnations of two towering modern American classics, "Angels in America" and "Three Tall Women." The playwright Martyna Majok has a gift for crawling under the skins of characters who feel marginalized in Donald J. Trump's America. But as was demonstrated last year by her acclaimed "Cost of Living," a cleareyed portrait of two prickly souls with severe physical disabilities, Ms. Majok doesn't host pity parties. In "queens," a Lincoln Center/LCT3 production, she applies her distinctively poetic brand of empathy to the shifting values and aspirations of two generations of immigrant women, who clash and commune in a basement apartment in the New York borough of the title. Danya Taymor directs. The bold title of this docudrama from South Africa's celebrated Baxter Theater Center, imported by St. Ann's Warehouse, vibrates with implications cosmic, historical, existential. Specifically, though, it refers to the toppling of a statue. Using the hashtag RhodesMustFall, a group of Cape Town University students led a successful campaign to rid their campus of a bronze effigy of Cecil Rhodes, a British imperialist and Cape Colony prime minister of the late 19th century. Devised by its ensemble members, many of whom had worked on the campaign, this show becomes an animated, protest driven debate on the legacy of apartheid and colonialism in the South African educational system. A quarter of a century after it first knocked Broadway on its ear, Tony Kushner's era defining "gay fantasia" about love and loss in the time of AIDS returns in this appropriately epic production from London's National Theater. Marianne Elliott ("War Horse") directs a cast that includes Andrew Garfield (as the drag queen who speaks with angels), Denise Gough (as a pharmaceutically numbed Mormon, at sea in New York and the Antarctic) and, in one of the season's most anticipated marriages of an actor and a role, Nathan Lane (as the closeted super lawyer Roy Cohn). This landmark work should initiate plenty of heated conversation about gay identity, political engagement, bad faith and the role of theater itself.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The Internet is going the way of the Weblog, the Electronic Message and the World Wide Web. The New York Times announced on Tuesday that it would join The Associated Press in lowercasing the name of the global network that lives in our pockets and in front of our faces, keeping us pinned to various feeds like caged mice pressing the button that summons another hit of sugar water. The changes will take effect at both news outlets on June 1 (which explains the incongruity of "Internet" being capitalized throughout this article). Jill Taylor, who manages the copy desks at The Times, announced the change in a memo to the newsroom, acknowledging, "It will probably take a while to get shift I out of our muscle memory." The Times's decision comes after an announcement by The A.P. in a tweet in early April during the 2016 conference of the American Copy Editors Society, the annual event where the "grammar geeks, punctuation freaks and syntax obsessed snobs" (as its website says) drill their fellow editors on the latest rules governing American journalese.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Now lives: In a three bedroom house in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles, with her two dogs and a yard full of citrus and avocado trees. Claim to fame: Ms. Demie is a singer, fashion designer and rising actress best known for "Euphoria," on HBO, in which she plays Maddy Perez, a former pageant queen in an abusive relationship with a toxic jock named Nate Jacobs (played by Jacob Elordi). "I use my mom for a lot of things," said Ms. Demie, who recalled growing up in a home with nonstop screaming and fighting. "I think I feel her pain really strongly. I tell my mind I'm releasing the pain, to heal it." Big break: As an unknown actress in Hollywood, Ms. Demie had small guest spots in TV shows including "The OA" and "Ray Donovan." Things took off when her producer friend Mikey Alfred put her up for a role in "Mid90s," a coming of age skate film written and directed by Jonah Hill.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. On a recent overcast morning here in this former factory town, Joseph C. Thompson donned his cowboy hat, hopped on his bicycle and pedaled to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art to give his final official tour of the institution he has run since he helped found it 33 years ago. While there is always more work to be done, this seemed to the 62 year old director like as good a moment as any for moving on. He recently completed an expansion that brought the complex to 650,000 square feet roughly the total area of the Louvre. He saw the museum through a pandemic forced closing and reopening. And in January, the museum will open James Turrell's light manipulating Skyspace in a former water tower, a project the artist envisioned when he and Mr. Thompson first walked the property in 1987. Walking through the museum with Joe, as most people call him, hearing him recount harrowing tales of birthing the museum, seeing how jazzed he still gets when a visitor's eyes adjust to the mind bending magenta of Mr. Turrell's 2017 light installation "Guardian (Wedgework)," it is clear that Mass MoCA has not only been Mr. Thompson's life's work, but his life. He helped transform this northern corner of the Berkshires which had high rates of unemployment, teen pregnancy and high school dropouts into a thriving art destination with hotels, restaurants and retail. He raised a son here, now 22, and a daughter, 17. Perhaps most importantly, he made Mass MoCA a place of pilgrimage for artists, where they could create unusually longstanding exhibitions Sol Lewitt's wall paintings, Laurie Anderson's virtual reality installations, Anselm Kiefer's steel pavilion of 30 paintings and all those luminous Turrells. The museum now consists of 28 buildings, attracts an average of 300,000 visitors a year and bills itself as the largest museum of contemporary art in the world. "I could write a book on how not to build a museum," Mr. Thompson said. "We started with no endowment, no cash reserves, no line of credit, so we were living on whatever it is we made that week and given that museums lose money every week they're open that was just a very challenging environment." As a result, Mr. Thompson's homespun, easygoing aura belies a dog with a bone intransigence that convinced the former Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis to award the museum a grant of 35 million and prevailed on Gov. William F. Weld not to demand that money back. Mr. Thompson's evangelical salesmanship induced local shopkeepers to pony up their own small contributions. His entrepreneurship enabled Mass MoCA to generate revenue by developing commercial real estate in the area, like a local courthouse and the Porches Inn, a boutique hotel across the road. And Mr. Thompson managed to persevere despite a relatively modest 12 million annual operating budget (recently reduced to 10.5 million because of the pandemic). "Joe's a tough guy," said Thomas Krens, who first had the idea for the museum. "Without Joe, Mass MoCA never would have happened." Having realized while in Germany for the 1985 Cologne art fair that abandoned factories could be used to show art, Mr. Krens teamed up with Mr. Thompson one of his former students and Michael Govan, now director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to start Mass MoCA. But Mr. Krens left in 1988 to become director of the Guggenheim, taking Mr. Govan with him. He offered to bring Mr. Thompson, too, but Mr. Thompson decided to stay put. Born in Oklahoma, where he worked on an oil field after college, Mr. Thompson came to the director position with limited experience a B.A. from Williams College, degrees in art and business from the University of Pennsylvania and a stint at the Williams College Museum of Art. The idea of starting a contemporary art museum in a former textile mill and electronics plant in a depressed region of New England initially struck Governor Dukakis as harebrained. "Northern Berkshire was dying in fact Berkshire County was dying," Mr. Dukakis said. "The notion of doing this was really coming out of left field but there wasn't anything else to do. We had to do something." Over the years, Mr. Thompson has encouraged artists to spread their wings and stay a while considerably longer than the usual few months of most rotating exhibitions, including some for 25 years. (In most cases, the elaborate installations are funded through private donations.) "It's quite a place," Mr. Turrell said. "Each artist is dealt with in depth." Mr. Turrell's exhibition at Mass MoCA is his only comprehensive retrospective on public view, encompassing one of every major category of the artist's work, and at least one piece from each of his seven decades of practice. The new Skyspace is his largest free standing circular piece to date 40 feet in diameter and 40 feet high with a capacity for 70 viewers. Situated in a repurposed concrete tank, which previously held standby water for the factory's fire protection system, Skyspace includes a retractable roof cap as well as a programmable light system. Ms. Anderson said she has found the museum freeing, a place where commerce feels far away and she can "just try stuff out." "It's a much longer relationship with visitors," she added. "It's like having your own private museum." In preparing for his massive show at Mass MoCA last year, "Mind of the Mound," Trenton Doyle Hancock said that he found the creative license hard to fathom, and that Denise Markonish, the senior curator and director of exhibitions, explained to him that the institution's mission "was to make artists' dreams come true." "I had been working on not just painting but animation, a short film, a comic book and all sorts of other side projects," Mr. Hancock said. "They gave me an opportunity to put all of those things under one roof, to basically create a theme park based on my imagined world." To be sure, such hands on involvement can lend itself to micromanaging, and Mr. Thompson acknowledged that he can drive his staff a little nuts with details like the size of a font or the patina of the floor. But curators say the director has given them the creative freedom that matters most. "Not many museums would create a working polar plunge in their galleries," Ms. Markonish said, referring to Taryn Simon's 2018 "Cold Hole" installation. "Most curators hop from one institution to the next. Here, we stay because he lets us see our vision through." Mr. Thompson early on recognized that the museum had to move into the performing arts from David Byrne to the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival because its distinct forms brought in different demographics. "Whether it's country or rap or indie or experimental jazz or new music each of those have a passionate fan base," Mr. Thompson said. "I'm convinced that many of our performing arts visitors don't know what Mass MoCA stands for, but they get there to follow the music or the theater or the dance that they love and they visit the museum on that Saturday afternoon and they find out it's not as bad as they think and come back." Rachel Chanoff, the curator of performing arts and film since the museum's inception, described Mr. Thompson's "reckless optimist" approach as, "'Let's make it the cultural living room of this community. Let's have dance parties, let's have picnics, let's have cooking lessons.'" Mass MoCA has, indeed, become an important anchor in the area, with close relationships to its fellow institutions, namely the Clark and the Williams College Museum of Art. "The Clark gave about 5 million dollars or more to Mass MoCA, which is very unusual in light of the more typical competition," said Michael Conforti, the Clark's former director, who is a trustee emeritus of Mass MoCA. "We need to help one another." Other institutions have modeled themselves after Mass MoCA, like Dia Beacon, which was opened by Mr. Govan; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas; and the Armory and the Shed in New York. "Mass MoCA has certainly been an influence for me in developing Watermill," said the avant garde artist Robert Wilson, referring to the arts complex he founded on Long Island in 1992. What is next for Mr. Thompson? Mr. Krens suggested that he might have a role for him in the ambitious new cultural corridor he is creating in North Adams, which features a railroad and architecture museum. Of course, Mr. Thompson could see this moment as an opportunity to relax, to fly his small airplane or ride his road bike. He is still facing the stress of a trial on charges stemming from a 2018 collision with a motorcyclist, to which he has pleaded not guilty and said is unrelated to his departure. Tracy Moore, the deputy director, is serving as interim director and chief executive while the museum looks to replace Mr. Thompson, who will stay on through next summer as an adviser. "My job is pretty clear for the next eight months or so to wrap up Turrell and I'll be out rattling my tin cup," he said. "We've too often managed by triage or robbing Peter to pay Paul, and I'd really like to put in place some resources so that the next person has a little bit of gas money or 'Oh my God' money so they can fix issues or make things possible. "I want to make it better for the next person."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
The techniques have shown some promise in animal studies. But the medical team, led by Polish and English doctors, also emphasized that the results would "have to be confirmed in a larger group of patients sustaining similar types of spinal injury" before the treatment could be considered truly effective. The case report was published in the journal Cell Transplantation. The history of spinal injury treatment is studded with false hope and miracle recoveries that could never be replicated, experts said. In previous studies, scientists experimented with some of the same methods used on Mr. Fidyka, with disappointing results. Depending on their injuries, patients may show what appears to be spontaneous progress without any special treatments. "You can see surprising improvements in patients engaging in rehab, even long after the injury," Dr. Tuszynski said. And it is often not clear how much spinal cord tissue is spared after an injury, experts said. Mr. Fidyka's injury was severe by any measure. His spinal column was cut nearly in half at midback, the two pieces connected by a bit of scar tissue. Working in Poland, the medical team first removed one of the two olfactory bulbs from behind his nasal cavity. The olfactory bulbs are rich in cells that support nerve function and help repair damage, and the doctors cultured those cells in the lab. They then injected the cells into spinal tissue at the site of the injury. Surgeons also grafted tissue from the patient's ankle to help bridge the nerve repair cells across from one side of the spinal cut to the other about a third of an inch.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
New test results suggest that automakers are quickly improving the safety systems intended to keep a distracted driver from rear ending another vehicle or colliding with an object ahead. The tests of 24 models were released Thursday by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. The institute, which is financed by the insurance industry, released results of its first round of testing last September. At that time, 25 of the 74 evaluated models received a Basic rating, and 36 either didn't offer a front crash prevention system or had systems that didn't meet criteria set by the institute or by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But in the latest tests, 21 of the 24 tested models received either the highest rating of Superior or a medium grade of Advanced; only three got the lowest rating of Basic. The institute attributed the rapid improvements to automakers' adding automatic braking functions to their safety systems and to the availability of automatic braking on more models. Most of the vehicles rated were large family cars and large luxury cars from the 2014 model year. Four were midsize luxury or "near luxury" cars, and four were S.U.V.s Frontal crash avoidance systems use radar or cameras to scan the road ahead while a computer calculates the closing rate between the vehicle with the system and the object ahead. If the distance closes too quickly, what happens next depends on the type of system. If there is an automatic braking system, the brakes are applied to either slow or stop the car in an attempt to avoid a collision or at least reduce the severity of a crash. Other setups, called forward collision warning systems, use an audible alert to warn drivers of an impending crash. In general, they do not slow or stop the vehicle, although some systems also have automatic braking. The tested models were the Audi A3 and A6; the BMW 2, 3, and 5 Series and the X5; the Buick Regal and LaCrosse; the Cadillac CTS and XTS; the Chevrolet Impala; the Dodge Durango; the 2015 Hyundai Genesis; the Infiniti Q70, QX50 and QX70; the Lexus IS and GS; the Mercedes Benz CLA and E Class; and the Toyota Avalon. Three vehicles received more than one rating because they were equipped with different types of systems, which affected how they performed in the testing. The BMW 3 Series was one example. A 3 Series that had "collision warning with city braking function" an optional camera based collision mitigation system received an Advanced rating, whereas a 3 Series equipped with "collision warning with braking function," a system carried over on some 2014 models from the previous year, got a Basic rating. The ratings of Superior, Advanced and Basic depend on whether the cars have automatic braking and on how much the systems reduce the vehicles' speed in track tests conducted at 12 and 25 miles per hour. In the most recent tests, eight models were rated Superior and 13 got Advanced scores. Four of the models received what the insurance institute said was a perfect score when equipped with certain options. They were the BMW 5 Series (equipped with collision warning and braking function), the BMW X5 (with collision warning and braking function), the 2015 Hyundai Genesis (with Automatic Emergency Braking) and Mercedes Benz E Class (with Pre Safe Brake). The insurance institute's decision to do the testing and ratings grew out of insurance claims data suggesting that forward collision warning systems alone reduced collisions with other vehicles by about 7 percent and by 14 percent when automatic braking was added. Cars receive a Superior rating if they have automatic braking and can avoid a crash or reduce speeds by 10 m.p.h. or more in both the 12 and 25 m.p.h. tests. Vehicles receive an Advanced rating if they have automatic braking and can avoid a crash or reduce speeds by 5 m.p.h. or more in one of the two tests. Vehicles with automatic braking also receive credit if they have a forward collision warning system that meets criteria set by the federal government. Vehicles that have forward collision warning systems but do not have automatic braking earn a Basic rating, as do vehicles with automatic braking that only minimally reduced speeds (by less than 5 m.p.h.) in the tests.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau (wearing Edition de Robes), on their way to greet Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge in Victoria in September. On Friday evening, a fashion summit meeting of sorts is taking place in Toronto, and big names will be in attendance: Coco Rocha, the supermodel turned personality, is flying in, as are the London based designer Erdem Moralioglu and the New York based designer Jason Wu, and the nonagenarian style icon Iris Apfel. They will be gathering for the Canadian Arts and Fashion Awards, an annual event akin to those regularly hosted in New York by the Council of Fashion Designers of America and in London by the British Fashion Council. Though this will be only the fourth incarnation of the CAFA, it is also the biggest. It also reflects the way in which Canadian fashion has been working to leverage the spike in global attention the country has attracted since the election of its mediagenic young prime minister, Justin Trudeau. Mr. Trudeau's efforts on behalf of refugees, his vocal commitment to feminism, and his personal style have transformed both him and his wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, into international celebrities. And for fashion, therein lies opportunity. "When we started talking about doing an awards event, there wasn't anything like this in the country," said Vicky Milner, the president of the CAFA. "We didn't just want to throw a party. We wanted to build a community, to make a one voice appeal for the world to take notice." They enlisted major corporate sponsors: Swarovski, Joe Fresh, Sephora and Hudson's Bay. They strategized beyond one night, offering local designers mentorship opportunities, organizing fashion showcases and pop up retail events, and teaming up with the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team, on a design challenge. And last year they snagged a high profile champion: Ms. Gregoire Trudeau, who presented the Fashion Impact Award. "We are renowned around the world for our creativity and innovation in many sectors, but people aren't informed enough about our fashion scenes," she said in a recent statement, adding, "I can only speak for what I can do, and that is to take part in letting the world know that some of the best creative talents in the fashion industry are right here in Canada." As a result, said Tanya Taylor, a designer who is from Toronto but maintains her business in New York City: "There are a lot of Canadian designers I had never heard of becoming more popular both in the U.S. and Canada. I think Sophie Trudeau started that change." Dexter Peart, who, with his brother Byron were among the founders of the Montreal based label WANT Les Essentiels in 2006, noted that Instagram and e commerce platforms have enabled designers to connect with consumers across Canada and the world more quickly than before. "Everything is available at the touch of a button," he said. "People are looking at the same exact trends in Toronto as they are in New York and Los Angeles." He sees the changes as a boon for up and comers. "If I were 19, I would feel like there's much more of a community for me than when we were starting up," he said. In addition, she said, there is not enough of a local support system. "There need to be people helping build business plans and helping with pricing strategy," she said. "Those are the questions that constantly come up when I do talks in Canada." Chantal Malboeuf, a product manager who worked in Paris for LVMH owned houses including Celine, Givenchy and Louis Vuitton for 10 years before returning to start her own development and production atelier in Montreal, believes the lack of logistical support has a lot to do with perception. "The industry is not taken seriously as a business here," said Ms. Malboeuf, whose job is to manage many of the behind the scenes details that are required for producing collections. "At Givenchy and at Vuitton, we had a budget, we had a collection time." Ms. Malboeuf said that if the government took the industry more seriously, investors would be more willing to fund fledgling designers and that all the roles that are required for efficient and ethical production would be more developed. "CAFA did a good thing: They gave designers the recognition," she said. "Now we have to help them in a business sense." It may not happen immediately, she said, but "in 10 years, I think we can do it. I believe it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The current revival, directed by Kim Weild at the Cherry Lane Theater, is a milder, more carnally modest interpretation, and I do miss the heightened sense of risk and abandon that was in the air the first time around. Still, there is something comfortable about this production, starring Angelina Fiordellisi and Michael O'Keefe, that makes it feel in tune with the needs of the present. Its smattering of surreal musical moments, meanwhile, makes it feel like classic Mee. The play perceives the wider world as a place of dreamscape beauty (the Magritte style set, by Edward Pierce, contributes to that) but also of hostility and danger. And while Edith and Harold's relationship is volatile "You're like a baby with a switchblade," she tells him, with cause the little island of the two of them often feels like a refuge, albeit a fragile one. Mr. Mee has written at least a dozen plays that he classifies as love stories, and "First Love" is one of the best known. But he is a sucker for romance, and in plays like "Big Love" and "True Love," swooning passion is more often what he's talking about: a feeling that doesn't have much hope of lasting. "First Love" goes deeper to the bottom of the soul ugliness of lovers' worst selves, shown to each other in moments of rage, but also to the tender comfort of simple companionship and the elemental need for affection. "Love is the glue of human society," Harold says. "We can't live without it." Good thing he shoved up, then, and agreed to share the bench.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
How to Retire in Your 30s With 1 Million in the Bank Carl Jensen experienced what he calls "the awakening" sometime around 2012. He was a software engineer in a suburb of Denver, writing code for a medical device. The job was high pressure: He had to document every step for the Food and Drug Administration, and a coding error could lead to harm or death for patients. Mr. Jensen was making about 110,000 a year and had benefits, but the stress hardly seemed worth it. He couldn't unwind with his family after work; he spent days huddled over the toilet. He lost 10 pounds. After one especially brutal workday, Mr. Jensen Googled "How do I retire early?" and his eyes were opened. He talked to his wife and came up with a plan: They saved a sizable portion of their income over the next five years and drastically reduced expenses, until their net worth was around 1.2 million. On Tuesday, March 10, 2017, Mr. Jensen called his boss and gave notice after 15 years at the company. He wasn't quitting, exactly. He had retired. He was 43. Hacking Your Way to Retirement Although Mr. Jensen's story may seem exceptional, a more modest version of the stockbroker who makes a killing on Wall Street and sails off to the Caribbean, he is part of a growing movement of young professionals who are intently focused on quitting their jobs forever. Millennials especially have embraced this so called FIRE movement the acronym stands for financial independence, retire early seeing it as a way out of soul sucking, time stealing work and an economy fueled by consumerism. Followers of FIRE tend to be male and work in the tech industry, left brained engineer types who geek out on calculating compound interest over 40 years, or the return on investment (R.O.I.) on low fee index funds versus real estate rentals. Could FIRE work for you? Find out. Indeed, much of the conversation around FIRE, on Reddit message boards or blogs like Mr. Money Mustache, revolves around hacking one's finances: strategies for increasing your savings rate to the hallowed 70 percent, tips for cheap travel through airline rewards cards, ways to save nickels and dimes at the grocery store. Some practice "lean FIRE" (extreme frugality), others "fat FIRE" (maintaining a more typical standard of living while saving and investing), and still others "barista FIRE" (working part time at Starbucks after retiring, for the company's health insurance). To be "firing" is to slash one's expenses to maximize saving while amassing income generating investments sufficient to support oneself. To have "fired" is to have achieved that goal. In retirement, Mr. Jensen and his wife and two daughters plan to live on roughly 40,000 a year generated from investments. Because his wife currently works, they have yet to draw on those accounts. But already, it's a life rich on time but short on luxuries: Groceries are bought at Costco, car and home repairs are done by him. "People always assume there's an external circumstance: 'Oh, you must have received an inheritance,'" Mr. Jensen said. "We've just chosen to live far below our means. That itself is a radical idea." Equally radical is opting out of the work force in your 30s or early 40s, a time of life when men and women are normally leaning into their careers, or, less happily, enduring the daily grind to pay the bills until Social Security kicks in. But Mr. Long said he was deeply unhappy in his job, where over his career he witnessed drug costs skyrocketing, sick people battling with health insurers and the over prescription of opioids and the resulting addiction crisis. His customers, angry, confused, financially stretched, often lashed out at the person behind the counter. "There were days when I had 12 or 14 hour shifts where I didn't use the restroom, where I didn't eat, because so much work was piled up on me," Mr. Long said. Like Mr. Jensen, he had been saving a sizable portion of his income over the past decade, and he and his wife had a paid for house and an investment portfolio worth a little more than 1 million. Why stick around? "The reality is the numbers are there for me," Mr. Long said. "To go to a job that's making you miserable every day, it doesn't make sense to pad the bank account at that point." Quitting the rat race isn't a new concept. From the Shakers of the 1700s to the back to the land hippies of the 1960s and '70s, a strain of Americans has always embraced simple living. One of the bibles of the FIRE movement, "Your Money or Your Life," which teaches readers to reduce their spending and value time (or "life energy") over material gain, was published in 1992. But Vicki Robin, who wrote that financial guide with Joe Dominguez, said the FIRE crowd is a different breed of dropout than those in the '90s. "Our aim was not just to have a whole bunch of people quit their jobs," Ms. Robin said. "Our aim was to lower consumption to save the planet. We attracted longtime simple living people, religious people, environmentalists." The FIRE adherents are, by contrast, "very numbers oriented, fascinated by the minutiae of taxes and accounting," Ms. Robin said. They are also benefiting from a lengthy bull run in the stock market and, in some cases, the privilege of class, race, gender and background. It's difficult to retire at 40 if you work a minimum wage job, say, or have crushing student loan debt, or did not have the same opportunities as others because you grew up poor in a crime ridden neighborhood. That accurately describes how Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung felt. The married couple from Toronto became minor celebrities (and the target of online haters) when they retired from their tech jobs in 2015 to travel the world full time. They were in their early 30s at the time. Ms. Shen's wake up moment came when she watched a fellow I.T. colleague collapse at his desk after clocking 14 hour days and get hauled away in an ambulance. For several years before that, she and Mr. Leung, following the path laid out by their parents, had tried to buy a house in Toronto's ever escalating real estate market. But, Ms. Shen said, "It didn't matter how much you saved, it was a goal post that kept moving. And I was seeing people stressed out paying their mortgages." Though they had good educations and well paying jobs in the booming tech sector, Ms. Shen and Mr. Leung faced the looming threats of outsourcing and artificial intelligence, and had no hope of a retirement pension, or even that their employers would exist in five years. At the same time, their jobs were all consuming, their work hours basically 24 7. Rather than chain themselves to a costly mortgage, and therefore to high pressure jobs, the couple decided to pour their money into an investment portfolio and peace out. "The rule books our parents have given us is advice that's perfect for 1970," Ms. Shen said. "We have to throw out that rule book and write a new one." Mr. Leung spoke of the challenges his generation faces more bluntly. "We don't have jobs that will take care of us," he said. "We have to take care of ourselves." By ditching a big city, Ms. Shen and Mr. Leung exemplify another underlying reason for the popularity of FIRE: the high price of urban life, especially in places like New York and Southern California. There's the insane housing prices, the high cost of child care, the temptations of so called lifestyle creep. "We were spending nearly 3,000 a month on rent, and that was considered a good deal," said Scott Rieckens, 35, who, along with his wife, Taylor, 33, and their infant daughter until recently lived in Coronado, Calif., a pricey beach town across the bay from San Diego. "We made something like 160,000 between the two of us, but we didn't have a whole lot left over." After hearing a podcast interview with Mr. Money Mustache, a.k.a., Pete Adeney, who The New Yorker called "the Frugal Guru" (he retired at 30), Mr. Rieckens became fired up. He told his wife they should ditch their leased BMW and quit eating out several nights a week. But even with those lifestyle cuts, the couple couldn't increase their savings rate substantially unless they relocated to a cheaper community, a deleveraging tactic the FIRE crowd calls "arbitrage." The idea, Mr. Adeney said, is "to reap the high salary" of a place like Silicon Valley, "then take that nest egg out to any of the thousands of nice, affordable cities and towns we have in this country and begin a second stage of life on your own terms." Ms. Rieckens, who works in recruiting, was initially reluctant to give up her BMW and beachy life and the prestige that went with it, until she saw a retirement calculator that showed they could retire in 10 years if they adopted FIRE and moved, or when they are 90 if they continued their upscale lifestyle in Coronado. "I never paid attention to the finances, I thought it will all work out," Ms. Rieckens said. "After I had a baby, I had stress around how I could spend more time with her. I was almost a slave to my job because of the way we were living." Last year, the couple left Southern California in search of a community that would give them more financial freedom, a journey Mr. Rieckens, formerly a creative director for a creative agency, is chronicling in a documentary, "Playing With FIRE." They ended up in Bend, Ore., where there's no state sales tax and they could afford to buy a house. Gas for their used Honda CRV with 186,000 miles (they got rid of the BMW and downsized to one vehicle) is a dollar per gallon cheaper than in San Diego, although Mr. Rieckens often rides his bike around town. "The whole retire early thing is unimportant to me. It's more about gaining control of your time," Mr. Rieckens said. "If you dive into the definition of retirement, what you're retiring from is mandatory labor. It's not necessarily about pina coladas on the beach." Perhaps Mr. Long, the pharmacist in rural Tennessee, has given the most detailed, thoughtful account of someone who has fired. In a series of posts to Reddit's financial independence message board, Mr. Long chronicled with dry wit and self effacement his first year in retirement. One month into FIRE, he wrote of the guilt he felt spending money (on video games), and his concern that he would be over his household budget. He spent his days with family, at the gym, doing housework, exercising. He had no regrets so far: "I made the right decision. This is life." In the second month, Mr. Long reported a 2.8 percent increase to his portfolio over the first two months, even after living expenses, and listed his accomplishments as more reading, more cooking, volunteering and "faster Rubik's cube solves." Stress levels were way down, he wrote: "A friend of mine said the sense of dread from my face was gone." In the months that followed, he rewatched the mini series "Roots," lost all interest in talk of FIRE now that he had achieved it, feared a looming stock market crash, had nightmares that "I'm back at work and arguing with morons," finished a marathon in a personal best sub three hours, felt moments of social isolation, took a two week road trip across the heartland, and went twice to the beach in Florida with his wife and watched their net worth reach its highest point, despite not working, which he attributed to "the passage of the tax cut for wealthy job creators like myself." Oh, and he started a blog. "My life is so much better than it was before," Mr. Long wrote seven months in. "I hope everyone here finds this peace." Speaking by phone, Mr. Long acknowledged it was possible that he'd simply burned out, that all of this FIRE stuff was just a needed break until he found a more satisfying career. When he was recently offered a job back in the pharmaceutical field, it induced a mild panic attack. That morning, he'd woken up on his own, "not when an alarm clock told me that I had a responsibility." He'd read the news online for 30 minutes, went on a seven mile run, took a nap and "watched the ceiling fan spin around for a little bit." He had been watching the movies from They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? a website that ranks what it calls the 1,000 greatest films. He'd watched 600 or so. He had work to do.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Stephen P. Grill, the principal of a public school in Belle Harbor, Queens, strode down an auditorium aisle on Tuesday morning, past chairs that had been submerged by floodwaters from Hurricane Sandy and police tape that was blocking a back door. He stood in front of a wall obscuring a badly damaged stage. "All I can say right now is, welcome back everybody," he said loudly over a sea of Hello Kitty and superhero backpacks. "We're all one big, happy family, and now we're back together at 114." But not everyone was feeling so rosy about the first day back at Public School/Middle School 114. The storm had battered Belle Harbor and left the building with a floorless gym and a middle school that remained shuttered because it reeked of sewage. "What are we doing here?" said one teacher, who was fighting back tears and declined to give her name for fear that she would be fired. "The custodian told me they didn't pass the air quality test, and my room smells." When the New York City Education Department announced on Monday that P.S./M.S. 114 would open three days earlier than expected, a stew of emotions erupted in private conversations and on the school's Facebook page, parents said. Was the building safe, and had the air quality been properly tested? Some parents expressed concern that the Education Department was rushing to reopen the school. "It's nerve racking," said Maureen Colon, who walked out of the building crying after dropping off her son, who is in the second grade. "Friday, they were pulling out sopping wet cartons. And Tuesday, they are back?" "There's been so little communication, it's scary," she added. That nerves are frayed and emotions fraught is not surprising. Many families at the school have lost their homes and have endured several relocations while grappling with the emotional aftermath of a devastating storm that many watched in the dark alongside their frightened children. They want the routines and familiar comforts of school. But a significant percentage opted not to return until they had further assurances that the air their children would breathe was safe. Before the storm, the school enrolled 779 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. On Tuesday, 55.1 percent of the students attended school. "I don't see what the rush is," said Christine Charles, whose two children are now attending Public School 207 in Brooklyn. "I think the D.O.E. wants to get out there and say, 'We opened it in a month.' " "There were 26 sets of measurement taken throughout the school building," Ms. Feinberg said, adding that the results showed the air quality was acceptable. "We're happy to share the information with parents, and we will reach out to the principal about arranging a meeting." Some parents defended the decision to reopen the school and reveled in the chance to be back with familiar faces. "I am thrilled, to put it mildly," said Kristine Memoli, whose three children had just entered the school. "Thank God our kids are having some kind of routine." Mr. Grill said that to characterize his school's communication as poor would be unfair since he, too, received very little information from the Education Department. "We only knew as fast as they knew," he said, referring to parents, adding that the school "banded everyone together with what we had." He added that he was confident the building's air quality was safe because the department had told him as much. "I trust the D.O.E. would not sacrifice anybody," he said. But many parents who have spent the past four weeks gutting basements and rifling through debris said they remained concerned about mold, asbestos, fiberglass materials and debris that children would bring in off the streets. "I am a nurse; I don't claim to be a doctor," said Sabina Mills, whose three children attended P.S./M.S. 114 until the storm. "But there are things that can hurt you that you can't see." Ms. Mills said she would keep her children at P.S. 312 in Bergen Beach, Brooklyn, until she saw evidence that the school had successfully passed multiple air quality tests. Her husband, a firefighter, was involved in the cleanup after the Sept. 11 attacks, Ms. Mills said. "Our elected officials said it was safe for them, and we know how that turned out," she said. The art on the walls at P.S./M.S. 114 recounts a prestorm era. Personal narratives about a significant event included tales of sharks, goals scored in hockey and a first triple hit in Little League, sweet memories that would no doubt be superseded by tales of watching floodwaters rise and fires burn and dumping a childhood of memories into the trash. Upstairs, in Classroom 308, teachers asked seventh grade students what they had learned in the relocated schools they had been attending (square roots, rates and ratios, scientific notation) and what books they had read (none, none and "The Omnivore's Dilemma"). Did they know where their missing classmates were? "We're not going to see some of our classmates until next year," a teacher said. "Hopefully, they will be back for eighth grade."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Spotify will rescind a new policy on "hateful conduct" by artists after an uproar among people in the music industry who say that the ill defined guidelines represented a form of censorship, the company announced in a blog post on Friday. While Spotify says it remains committed to removing what it called hate content music meant to incite hatred or violence, like neo Nazi songs the company said it was "moving away" from the second part of its policy, which addressed the behavior of artists beyond what they sing or rap about. "We don't aim to play judge and jury," Spotify said in its blog post. When the policy was introduced three weeks ago, it was the second part, on artists' conduct, that immediately became controversial, with record companies and some artist representatives complaining that it amounted to selective punishment, and was a slippery slope that could be applied too widely. Complicating the issue further, the conduct policy which removed offending artists' music from Spotify's playlists, but did not delete it from the service entirely was initially applied only to two artists: R. Kelly, who has been accused of decades of sexual misconduct, and XXXTentacion, a chart topping young rapper who faces charges in Florida including aggravated battery of a pregnant woman.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
"Family," Laura Steinel's lightweight first feature, relies on audiences buying into the old chestnut that difficult women would be happier (or just easier to be around) if forced to care for a child. In this version, the woman is a tactless workaholic who needs to connect with her feelings; just don't expect those to entail an even greater appreciation for her job. Kate (Taylor Schilling) excels as a vaguely high powered executive at a New Jersey hedge fund. Socially, though, she's a dud, alienating co workers by saying exactly what she thinks. So when the brother she barely knows (Eric Edelstein) asks her to babysit her 11 year old niece, Maddie (Bryn Vale), you can probably write the rest yourself even if you neglect to pointlessly throw the clown painted music fans known as Juggalos into the mix.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Kayak's research shows that Turks and Caicos has come into the mainstream as a beach destination. The popular search site Kayak.com handles more than one billion travel booking searches annually, primarily for airfare and hotels. Poring over that data, its analysts recently produced a statistical survey that reveals the best days to fly to get the lowest prices, recommended flight booking windows and biggest price drops, among other insights. The annual report, called Kayak 2015 Travel Hacker Guide, will be posted as a resource to travelers at the site. Although Kayak won't disclose its user demographics, David Solomito, director of brand marketing for the 10 year old Connecticut based website, said users are "people who aspire to be smarter travelers." He interpreted the website's user data report in a recent interview. Following are edited excerpts from a conversation with Mr. Solomito. Q. Any tips to share, based on the data, on how consumers can save on flights? A. I always say, if you find a deal that's right for you, go ahead and book it as there are a lot of variables that affect prices. Fuel price is a big one. The number of routes and direct flights affect prices. If JetBlue adds a new route to Hartford, which it did this year, that would affect prices. Possibly even big events like the World Cup. But for North America, the ideal booking window within the United States and Canada is four to six weeks in advance of a trip. The lowest fares depart Friday and return on Monday. The report recommends booking flights to Europe six months ahead. What about spontaneous trips? Another insight was that the Caribbean, unlike Europe, has the shorter window for finding the lowest airfare. It's just two to four weeks out. Denver looks like a good deal, relative to the other top 10 destinations, with average fares of 307 in June and 237 in January. Why? Denver in general is fantastic, outdoorsy and cultural. It's not just a ski destination. Year round, things are going on. The legalization of marijuana possibly piqued interest. Denver moved from No. 8 to 7 in the destination rankings this year. Compared to the rest of the top 10 destinations, it's historically been one of the least expensive to fly into in terms of its popularity. What surprised you about this year's findings? Even though Los Angeles wasn't surprising as the No. 3 most popular destination in the United States and Canada, four of five of the most popular hotels there were actually located downtown, which shows us that an area that was once neglected is in style in this stylish city. Once you get into trending, you see that a city like Hyderabad, India, had one of the biggest increases in searches. It has a growing tech scene that we think is driving that. Canada had a good showing. Toronto and Montreal landed in trending destinations for us and Toronto and Vancouver for deals. How do you explain your most popular beaches, which range from Grenada to Nantucket? Instead of looking at popular beaches, we looked at trending destinations to see what was up and coming. It was surprising that the No. 1 was Grenada. It seems to us that people are starting to discover the "Spice Island." Also in some of the other destinations, you get a sense that people are looking for something unique. Turks and Caicos is an example of a destination that has come into the mainstream though years ago you wouldn't think of going.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
WHAT IS IT? An XL hatchback version of the popular 3 Series. HOW MUCH? 42,375 to start (for 328i xDrive); 60,250 as tested (335i xDrive). WHAT MAKES IT RUN? 300 horses from a 3 liter turbocharged in line 6. HOW QUICK IS IT? The 335i GT bursts from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in 5.2 seconds, BMW estimates. IS IT THIRSTY? E.P.A. rates the 335i's fuel economy at 20 m.p.g. city, 30 m.p.g. highway. BMW has been splitting its lineup like so many atoms, smashing particles of models together to create new and potentially lucrative forms of automobiles. As with many experiments, the results range from breathtaking to bewildering. The 1 Series coupe (now rechristened the 2 Series) gave the Bavarian brand a toehold in the booming compact luxury market. The spunky X1 is a nanoscale outgrowth of the X3 and X5 crossover utilities. The 6 Series Gran Coupe is an especially lovely entry in the hot "four door coupe" class. And BMW just spun a 4 Series coupe and convertible out of the 3 Series lineup. But the experiments also unleashed the 5 Series Gran Turismo, the most unsightly interspecies mash up since Jeff Goldblum merged with a winged pest in "The Fly." Now, ignoring venomous critical disdain for the 5 GT's styling which suggests either visionary courage or hubris, both associated with mad scientists BMW has subjected the smaller 3 Series to the same hatchback crossover mutation. Go ahead and peek through your fingers: The 3 Series GT is less disturbing to behold than the 5 GT. Yet it still looks like a half blown up balloon, a turnip, an Olympic speedskater or any other object that starts small and expands at the rear. Yes, BMW already has a new 3 Series Sports Wagon, but Americans buy wagons as often as they attend cricket matches. And not everyone is comfortable with the more traditional S.U.V. body style of the X3 and X5. So BMW has conjured a tweener a roomier hatchback on platform shoes, with standard all wheel drive to attract customers who crave the 3 Series' performance but need more utility to close the deal. That is surely a crumb sized sales niche, but BMW is willing to bake a cake to fill it. The project began by bloating a 3 Series like a foie gras goose, with a stretched platform created mainly for China. The GT adds 7.9 inches to the wagon's length, 4.3 inches to the wheelbase and 3 inches in height. As with the 5 GT, once you're inside, the cabin is a good place to be. Compared with the 3 sedan, the GT has 2.8 inches more rear legroom, totaling more than the larger 5 Series sedan. The 18.3 cubic foot cargo hold is one cube roomier than the much smaller Sports Wagon's. Fold the split rear seat and there is 56.5 cubic feet of storage, negligibly more than the wagon's. The Comfort Access option, copying a feature pioneered by Ford, opens the tailgate with a waggle of a foot below the bumper. At 68 m.p.h., an active spoiler the first on any BMW rises to cut aerodynamic lift, then slips discreetly into the tailgate below 43 m.p.h. As usual, BMW's chassis and powertrains are beyond reproach, whether the strong, efficient 240 horsepower TwinPower turbo 4 or the fierce 300 horse in line turbo 6 in the 335i version that I tested. Either model comes only with a beautifully adept 8 speed automatic gearbox. So equipped, the 335i GT romps to 60 m.p.h. in 5.2 seconds. But turning a compact, muscled athlete into a pear shaped family car is bound to have repercussions. To wit, the GT is the first 3 Series to top two tons on the scales. The 335i GT's claimed 4,010 pounds is 600 more than the lightest 328i sedan. And while the 3 GT acquits itself bravely at speed, aside from some unwanted body roll, I felt those pounds when I started chucking this Bavarian cow through the curves. The GT's seats are also perched 2.3 inches higher than the sedan's. The idea is to let people slide right in without bending their knees. But my knees still have enough cartilage to enter and exit a normal car. What does pain me is the neither nor driving position of the GT or of oddball models like it: too tall to be a car, not tall enough to be a truck.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
For years, dreams for a new kind of institution devoted to exploring Africa's art, economics and policy issues have driven support for the Africa Center as it aspired to build a headquarters at the top of Manhattan's so called Museum Mile and forge a place alongside other major cultural organizations. But despite overhauling its board, broadening its mission and benefiting from more than 30 million in public funding over the years, efforts to complete the unfinished Fifth Avenue headquarters limped forward as the center continued to fall short of its fund raising goals. Now, in what appears to be another setback, the organization acknowledged on Wednesday that Michelle D. Gavin, its much heralded director, hired two years ago to move the center and the project forward, had quietly left more than three months ago. The hiring of Ms. Gavin, an Africa expert and veteran diplomat, had been hailed by Chelsea Clinton, the co chairwoman of the center's board, who said she was the person who could turn "vision into reality" for the center. The center did not announce the October departure of Ms. Gavin, who worked as a surrogate on Africa issues for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign last year, at the time. But in a statement on Wednesday, in response to questions, the center said Ms. Gavin had "made the decision to step down from her role at the Center to explore other opportunities more closely aligned to her personal interests and background." The statement from Dana Reed, the center's interim chief executive, thanked Ms. Gavin and credited her for "expanding our board and leading our capital campaign to see our vision to fruition." Before joining the center, she had served as the United States ambassador to Botswana, a special assistant to President Barack Obama and senior director for African affairs on the National Security staff. In an emailed statement on Wednesday, Ms. Gavin said, "I'm proud of the gains made at the center during my tenure, including significant board expansion, institutional strengthening and substantial progress in the capital campaign," adding that she still believed in the museum's mission. The center, formerly known as the Museum for African Art, had first been envisioned strictly as a cultural organization. But its leaders decided several years ago to broaden its mission to include a mix of programming related to Africa. Its new headquarters has been widely anticipated, partly because of the funding from city, state and federal governments, and partly because it was originally scheduled to open more than five years ago. The center is slated for the ground floor of a 19 story tower designed by Robert A. M. Stern that rises near 110th Street, and includes luxury apartments overlooking Central Park. The condominium complex has been occupied for several years, with homes selling for more than 3 million. The plan for the Fifth Avenue building had been hatched by Ms. Gavin's predecessor, Elsie McCabe Thompson, some 17 years ago. That ambitious undertaking began with a concept that the museum would share the new building with a charter school. But the school dropped out of the project more than a decade ago and was replaced by the plan for condominiums. City officials continued to push the project, citing the importance of the museum, described in a 2005 Economic Development Corporation report as "the first and only independent museum in the United States dedicated solely to African art." The city agreed to sell four city owned lots in support of the project and deviated from its traditional review procedure for selling public land, opting for a streamlined process under the terms of an urban renewal plan that did not include community board or city planning hearings. Now, nearly a decade after the sale, several local officials said they were concerned that a project so long in conception had so far yielded only expensive apartments. Bill Perkins, a Democratic state senator who represents the area, said he, too, was disappointed with the progress. "You come in promising what the community would be receptive to," he said. "And you wind up with something the community cannot afford." The most dramatic change for the museum has been its re envisioning as a broader organization, one that retains a cultural component but that has also added economic and public policy programming to create a mix that is akin to what the Asia Society on the Upper East Side provides. The museum, founded in 1984, was originally on the Upper East Side, then in SoHo and in Long Island City, Queens. The move to Harlem was championed by Ms. Thompson, a lawyer who had worked in the administration of Mayor David N. Dinkins before joining the museum as president in 1997. Although the institution raised 93 million for its new home under Ms. Thompson, it still struggled during her tenure to raise the full amount it needed to open its new headquarters. Some pledged contributions did not materialize, and officials were unable to sell naming rights easily. In 2012 Ms. Thompson left the museum and joined the mayoral campaign of her husband, William C. Thompson Jr., a former city comptroller. The money problems continued. In 2014 the center abandoned a 135 million plan to finish the interior with a spiral staircase and a curved ceiling of rare Ghanaian wood, and slashed the construction budget by 40 million.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Suzanne Corkin, whose painstaking work with a famous amnesiac known as H.M. helped clarify the biology of memory and its disorders, died on Tuesday in Danvers, Mass. She was 79. Her daughter, Jocelyn Corkin, said the cause was liver cancer. Dr. Corkin met the man who would become a lifelong subject and collaborator in the early 1960s, when she was a graduate student in Montreal at the McGill University laboratory of the neuroscientist Brenda Milner. Henry Molaison known in published reports as H.M., to protect his privacy was a modest, middle aged former motor repairman who had lost the ability to form new memories after having two slivers of his brain removed to treat severe seizures when he was 27. In a series of experiments, Dr. Milner had shown that a part of the brain called the hippocampus was critical to the consolidation of long term memories. Most scientists had previously thought that memory was not dependent on any one cortical area. Mr. Molaison lived in Hartford, and Dr. Milner had to take the train down to Boston and drive from there to Connecticut to see him. It was a long trip, and transporting him to Montreal proved to be so complicated, largely because of his condition, that Dr. Milner did it just once. Yet rigorous study of H.M., she knew, would require proximity and a devoted facility with hospital beds to accommodate extended experiments. The psychology department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offered both, and with her mentor's help, Dr. Corkin landed a position there. Thus began a decades long collaboration between Dr. Corkin and Mr. Molaison that would extend the work of Dr. Milner, focus intense interest on the hippocampus, and make H.M. the most famous patient in the history of modern brain science. "Sue had incredible patience; she was absolutely meticulous," Dr. Milner, a professor in the department of neurology and neurosurgery at McGill, said in an interview. "A lot of people dabble in neuroscience; they don't understand how many readings you have to take, and how carefully. Sue was extremely disciplined. You could absolutely trust every observation she had." In hundreds of studies, up to and even after Mr. Molaison's death in 2008 at 82, Dr. Corkin provided an extraordinarily detailed picture of his medial temporal region, which contains the hippocampus, and how the surgical lesions affected his memory. Among many other contributions, her work helped settle a debate about the function of the hippocampus in retrieving and reliving past experiences. Some scientists had argued that once a strong memory was stored, the hippocampus was not critical to retrieving it. Dr. Corkin's work with H.M. showed that such a memory getting lost in the woods at camp, say, or hitchhiking across the country was still partly retrievable without the hippocampus. She found, however, that the narrative richness of the memory was gone. Loose impressions remained, but the "story" was lost. Henry Molaison, known in published reports as H.M. to protect his privacy "She was able to take this single case and do such meticulous work on the anatomy and its effects on memory that it helped settle these questions," said Morris Moscovitch, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. "That is one hallmark of her work. The other is how much she cared for H.M. She wasn't merely using him she became his caretaker, she took care of him like family." Suzanne Janet Hammond was born in Hartford on May 18, 1937, the only child of Lester Hammond, who worked in engine parts sales, and the former Mabelle Dowling, who worked for the local Department of Motor Vehicles. She grew up in West Hartford "just down the street," as she said many years later, from Dr. William Beecher Scoville, the brain surgeon who operated on Mr. Molaison in 1953. It was the era of the lobotomy, and Dr. Scoville was one of a number of swashbuckling surgeons doing experimental surgeries they would be unethical today for a variety of mental problems, including schizophrenia and severe depression, with often disastrous consequences. Mr. Molaison was that rarest of cases: Notwithstanding the seizures, he was mentally healthy and lucid, both before and after the surgery, making him an ideal experimental subject. Dr. Corkin, after graduating from Smith College with a degree in psychology, knew exactly where she wanted to go: to Dr. Milner's laboratory at McGill. She focused on studying how the brain represents touch, an area of research many students found too laborious to take on. In her later work with Mr. Molaison at M.I.T., Dr. Corkin became equal parts experimentalist, protector and advocate. She closely guarded access to Mr. Molaison, especially after his parents died and he moved in with a family friend and later to a nursing home. Dr. Corkin lived in Charlestown, Mass. In addition to her daughter, she is survived by two sons, Damon and J. Zachary, and seven grandchildren. Her marriage to Charles Corkin ended in divorce. Dr. Corkin published more than 100 research papers, touching on topics as varied as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and psychosurgery. She also wrote or co wrote 10 books. But it was her relationship with H.M. that was defining. His profound deficits made their relationship anything but normal every time she walked in the room, she had to reintroduce herself but that repetition bred a curious bond over time. "He thought he knew me from high school," Dr. Corkin said in an interview with The New York Times in 2008. After Mr. Molaison died, Dr. Corkin arranged to have his brain removed, preserved, exhaustively imaged and finally sent for dissection and electronic mapping. It became a kind of monument as well as a historical artifact and resource for further study. In her book "Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H.M." (2013), Dr. Corkin wrote about her transition from seeing Mr. Molaison as a "subject" to seeing him as a human being. "My interest in Henry," she wrote, "had always been primarily intellectual; how else would I explain why I had stood on a chair in the basement of Mass General, ecstatic to see his brain expertly removed from his skull?" Still, she added: "I felt compassion for Henry and respected his outlook on life. He was more than a research participant. He was a collaborator a prized partner in our larger quest to understand memory."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The fourth presidential impeachment hearings in the history of the United States, whose public phase came to an end on Thursday afternoon in the columned environs of the House Ways and Means Committee hearing room, may have hewed to decorum, but they were a battlefield nonetheless. It was clear in the language, between those who used words like "bombshells" and "smoking guns" and "explosive" and those who used words like "boring" and "flop"; and clear in the spin, as Democrats and Republicans sparred over demands to keep the whistle blower's identity secret. And it was clear in the optics of many of the witnesses, who dressed as if girding themselves for the thinly disguised war that their testimony would likely spur. It has escaped no one that while the purpose of public hearings is transparency, the side effect is theater. (Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, did keep calling them "a show trial," after all.) And the audience was not simply the reality television star whose administration is in the dock, or the body politic of the moment, but the body politic of the future. The images, and the words they frame, will also become part of history. The actors in this drama are playing their parts and costuming themselves not just for the social media age, but also for posterity. How we present when we say something our decoration, our camouflage helps shape the way it is received. There is a reason that both the bow tie of George P. Kent, the State Department official and witness, and the jacket of Representative Jim Jordan, ended up with their own Twitter accounts. (The bow tie actually has two.) There is a reason that everyone became fixated on the seeming twinkle in Ambassador Gordon D. Sondland's eye, the smile that seemed to play around his lips. They undermined the card carrying member of the establishment messaging of his dark suit and subtly patterned Republican red tie, just as his testimony undermined the no quid pro quo White House story line. And of all the images, after the hours of questions and answers, grandstanding, interpreting and debating, it is not the many dark suits with red or blue ties and the little Congressional lapel pins that are the de facto Hill uniform that remain seared into memory. (Though they were consistently, consciously, modeled by Adam Schiff, the Intelligence Committee chairman, and Mr. Nunes, as well as by David Holmes, the political counselor in the American embassy in Kyiv, and David Hale, the under secretary of state for political affairs.) It was, rather, an actual uniform: one that was formal in its rigor, unmistakable in its messaging, and representative of a different kind of national institution. In many ways, Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman's decision to appear in his Army dress uniform, medals arrayed on his breast, buttons agleam, was simply the most obvious statement of an implicit position, one shared by most witnesses, albeit expressed in various individual ways. It was one that stood aside from partisan politics, that prized country above self, that understood testifying as a duty but also understood the rules of combat. Colonel Vindman said as much to Representative Chris Stewart, Republican of Utah, who first put the uniform on the table as a topic of conversation (followed quickly by President Trump, who told reporters, "I understand now he wears his uniform when he goes in."). In response to a not so subtle attempt by Mr. S tewart to portray the choice as a ploy, Colonel Vindman said, "I'm in uniform wearing my military rank" because "the attacks that I've had in the press and Twitter have marginalized me as a military officer." It was a symbol, just as Mr. Jordan's decision to shrug off his suit jacket was a symbol of his willingness to be the Republican Party's attack dog. After all, as he said in the "House Freedom Caucus" podcast in March, apropos of his tendency to tote his jacket over an arm instead of wearing it: "You get in these hearings, and if I think the witness isn't being square with me and it's going to get kind of heated, I mean maybe it's just me, I just don't feel right with the jacket on." The imagery taps into the cinematography of stripping down before you get in the ring; of every boxing or schoolyard tussle movie ever made. Even when he wasn't ceded the floor, Mr. Jordan was telegraphing readiness to rumble. Not that Colonel Vindman and Mr. Jordan were the only participants dressing for a fight. They were simply the most obvious. While Mr. Kent's bow tie got most of the viewing attention during his appearance, his three piece suit was equally notable. All five buttons of the vest were tightly buttoned, even though men's wear rules tend to dictate that the bottom button be left undone, as it is in a suit jacket. The vest formed a kind of extra protective layer for the witness, just as the silk scarf guarding the neck of Marie L. Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, demanded a closer look. Reportedly a traditional design from Hermes known as the Grand Uniforme, created in 1955, it featured a pattern of gold helmets and what looked surprisingly like swords . Elaborate, almost Napoleonic hilts, with tassels and ropes and other elements of martial pageantry. As if there were any doubt that a woman who started her testimony paying homage to her fellow diplomats in "hardship" positions, a woman of calm, carefully considered answers, did not anticipate what weapons may be deployed. There was more: Jennifer Williams chose to appear in a hunter green coatdress with a black belt cinching the waist, almost military in line, and Fiona Hill, the former top Russia expert on the National Security Council, wore a gold chain around her neck, with a matching gold chain around one wrist. It was visible as she raised her left hand to gesture while she crisply handled questions about who knew what in the chain of command. But given the attention paid to the moment, now and forevermore, given how much care and preparation each witness put into his or her testimony, given the way the whole case may turn on the telling detail, it seems unlikely these details, no matter how minor they seem, would be overlooked. They tell their own part of the story.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
This map highlights a patch of sky that was thought to show the most ancient light in the universe, but is now thought to be dust. Scientists will have to wait a while longer to find out what kicked off the Big Bang. Last spring, a team of astronomers who go by the name of Bicep announced that they had detected ripples in space time, or gravitational waves, reverberating from the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second of time long sought evidence that the expansion of the universe had started out with a giant whoosh called inflation. The discovery was heralded as potentially the greatest of the new century, but after months of spirited debate, the group conceded that the result could have been caused by interstellar dust, a notion buttressed by subsequent measurements by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite that the part of the sky Bicep examined was in fact dusty. Now a new analysis, undertaken jointly by the Bicep group and the Planck group, has confirmed that the Bicep signal was mostly, if not all, stardust, and that there is no convincing evidence of the gravitational waves. No evidence of inflation. "This analysis shows that the amount of gravitational waves can probably be no more than about half the observed signal," Clem Pryke of the University of Minnesota said Friday in an interview. "We can't say with any certainty whether any gravity wave signals remain," Dr. Pryke added. "Obviously, we're not exactly thrilled, but we are scientists and our job is to try and uncover the truth. In the scientific process, the truth will emerge." When the galactic dust is correctly subtracted, the scientists said, there was indeed a small excess signal a glimmer of hope for inflation fans? but it was too small to tell if it was because of gravitational waves or just experimental noise. The Bicep/Planck analysis was led by Dr. Pryke, one of the four Bicep principal investigators. Brendan Crill, of the California Institute of Technology and a member of Planck, acted as a liaison between the groups. They had planned to post their paper Monday, but the data was posted early, apparently by accident. It was soon taken down, but not before it set off an outburst of Twitter messages and hasty news releases. A paper is to be posted to the Bicep website and has been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters. But it will be far from the final word. A flotilla of experiments devoted to the cause are underway, studying a thin haze of microwaves, known as cosmic background radiation, left from the Big Bang, when the cosmos was about 380,000 years old. Among them is a sister experiment to Bicep called Spider, led by Bill Jones of Princeton and involving a balloon borne telescope that just completed a trip around Antarctica, as well as Bicep's own Keck Array and the recently installed Bicep3. At stake is an idea that has galvanized cosmologists since Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology invented it in 1979. Inflation theory holds that the universe had a violent and brief surge of expansion in the earliest moments, driven by a mysterious force field that exerted negative gravity. It would explain such things as why the universe looks so uniform and where galaxies come from quantum dents in the inflating cosmos. Such an explosion would have left faint corkscrew swirls, known technically as B modes, in the pattern of polarization of the microwaves. So, however, does interstellar dust. The Bicep group its name is an acronym for Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization is led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Jamie Bock of Caltech; Dr. Pryke; and Chao Lin Kuo of Stanford. They have deployed a series of radio telescopes at the South Pole in search of the swirl pattern. Their second scope, Bicep2, detected a signal whose strength was in the sweet spot for some of the most popular models of inflation, leading to a sensational news conference attended by Dr. Guth and Andrei Linde, two of the founding fathers of inflation. But that was before critics raised the dust question. Moreover, that result was contrary to a previous limit on the strength of gravitational waves obtained by the Planck satellite, which has scanned the entire microwave sky in search of the Big Bang's secrets. Planck observed the microwaves in nine frequencies, making it easy to distinguish dust. Bicep2 had only one frequency and lacked access to Planck's data until last fall, when the two groups agreed to work together. Dr. Bock of Caltech, in an interview at the end of what he called a long, stressful day, characterized the result as "no detectable signal." "I'm not discouraged," he went on. "We're going to have to have better data to get a definitive answer." In an email, Paul J. Steinhardt, a Princeton cosmologist who was a founder of inflation but turned against it in favor of his own theory of a cyclic bouncing universe, said the new results left cosmologists back where they were before Bicep. But Dr. Linde noted that there was evidence in the new analysis for a gravitational wave signal, albeit at a level significantly lower than Bicep had reported. "This is what all of us realized almost a year ago, and it did not change," he said in an email. The earlier Planck result limiting gravitational waves, he said, had inspired a firestorm of theorizing, in which he and others produced a whole new class of theories relating not just to inflation, but to dark energy as well. "So yes, we are very excited, and no, the theory did not become more contrived," he said. Max Tegmark, an M.I.T. expert on the cosmic microwaves, said, "It's important to remember that inflation is still alive and well, and that many of the simplest models predict signals just below this new limit." The next few years will be interesting, he said. Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, said he could appreciate the frustration of his colleagues, who have been wandering in the wilderness for nearly four decades looking for clues to the Beginning. "Inflation is the most important idea in cosmology since the hot Big Bang," he said. "It is our Helen of Troy, launching a thousand experiments."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
In 2004, "60 Minutes" aired a segment on what it called "virus hunters," scientists searching for bugs that can leap from animals to humans and cause pandemics. "What worries me the most is that we are going to miss the next emerging disease," said a scientist named Peter Daszak, describing his fear of a coronavirus "that moves from one part of the planet to another, wiping out people as it moves along." In the intervening years, Daszak became president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research organization focused on emerging pandemics. EcoHealth worked with China's Wuhan Institute of Virology to study coronaviruses in bats that could infect humans, and, as Science magazine put it, "to develop tools that could help researchers create diagnostics, treatments and vaccines for human outbreaks." Since 2014, the EcoHealth Alliance has received a grant from the National Institutes of Health, until its funding was abruptly cut two weeks ago. The reason, as "60 Minutes" reported on Sunday evening, was a conspiracy theory spread by Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican who in March wore a gas mask on the House floor to mock concern about the new coronavirus. On April 14, Gaetz appeared on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show and claimed that the N.I.H. grant went to the Wuhan Institute, which Gaetz intimated might have been the source of the virus the institute may have "birthed a monster," in his words. The first of Gaetz's claims was flatly false, and the second unlikely; the C.I.A. has reportedly found no evidence of a link between the virus and the Wuhan lab. But at a White House briefing a few days later, a reporter from the right wing website Newsmax told President Trump that under Barack Obama, the N.I.H. gave the Wuhan lab a 3.7 million grant. "Why would the U.S. give a grant like that to China?" she asked.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
It happened again: Less than a month after Royal Caribbean's Anthem of the Seas vessel returned earlier than scheduled to its port of origin in Cape Liberty, N.J., after facing 120 m.p.h. winds off Cape Hatteras, N.C., the ship ended another cruise early in anticipation of a severe storm expected in the same location. Anthem of the Seas departed Cape Liberty on Sunday, Feb. 21, for a 12 day trip to the Eastern Caribbean, and instead of returning as scheduled on March 4, the ship will return two days earlier on Wednesday, March 2. In an emailed statement, the company said that a weather system is gaining strength off the coast of Cape Hatteras. "Based on the most recent weather forecast, if Anthem of the Seas continues on its regular scheduled itinerary, the ship would encounter the brunt of the large and powerful storm on the return to Cape Liberty," it said. The email directly referred to the incident earlier in February stating, "On a recent sailing, Anthem of the Seas experienced bad weather that was much worse than forecast; therefore, we want to be extra cautious about our guest's safety and comfort when it comes to weather in the area."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The Future Is Here, Almost: Virtual Travel Becomes More of a Reality None	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
James L. Dolan, the owner of the Knicks, took exception to a fan at Madison Square Garden who suggested that he sell the team. Dolan's response: threatening to bar the fan from future games. In a video released by TMZ, Dolan is seen leaving the courtside area late in the Knicks' loss to the Sacramento Kings on Saturday. A fan yells from off camera, "Sell the team." Dolan stops quickly and responds, "You think I should sell the team?" and beckons the fan to come nearer. "You want to not come to any more games?" "No, it's not an opinion, and you know what? Enjoy watching them on TV," Dolan says. He walks away and seems to signal with his eyes to guards, and then some assistants call out, "Hold him," apparently in reference to the fan. It was not clear if any fan was actually banned. The Madison Square Garden company said in a statement, "Our policy is and will continue to be that if you are disrespectful to anyone in our venues, we will ask you not to return." The Knicks have had a lot of bad seasons recently five years without a playoff appearance. But this season has been particularly ugly, with the team, at 13 54, possessing the worst record in the league. A rare Knicks victory on the night of the Academy Awards was so noteworthy that Samuel L. Jackson publicly alerted the Knicks superfan Spike Lee, seated in the audience, about it. The team has occasionally seemed to lash out at criticism. At the end of December, the Knicks invited reporters to a news conference with Steve Mills, the team president, but the team failed to notify The Daily News, presumably because of its coverage of the team's dismal season. A Daily News back page had encouraged Dolan to sell the team. The headline read: "DO IT! According to a report, James Dolan, who's sick of being berated by fans, won't rule out selling Knicks ... or Rangers." Last year he also struck back at the radio station WFAN after a host, Maggie Gray, sharply criticized him. In response, he barred his employees from doing any business with WFAN and other stations run by its parent company, Entercom. Dolan has also had several run ins in and around the Garden. Two seasons ago, he got into a verbal altercation with a fan outside the arena, a dispute that also began with a recommendation that he sell the team. Charles Oakley, a beloved former star, was handcuffed and ejected from the Garden the same season. Oakley, who had been critical of Dolan, said security guards asked him why he was sitting near Dolan. The team claimed Oakley had acted abusively, and Dolan said on a radio show, without providing evidence, that Oakley might have had an alcohol problem. As a result of the team's struggles, and his own missteps, Dolan is a frequent target of disdain from Knicks fans, and a good percentage of them might agree with the anonymous fan on the TMZ video imploring him to sell. Many fans gave up on 2018 19 long ago and instead are looking ahead to next season, with the hope that the team will land the No. 1 draft pick or perhaps sign a marquee free agent or two. But for now, no change at the top of the Knicks is on the horizon.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The director Osgood Perkins specializes in not quite horror movies: eerie, patient, female centric tales that hint at far more than they reveal. In "I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House" (2016), he teased a standard haunting into a conversation between life and death. And with the more bloody "Blackcoat's Daughter" (released in the U.S. in 2017), he used shifting timelines and an isolated girls' boarding school to examine grief and abandonment. "Gretel Hansel" finds him relying once again on atmosphere over narrative. Flipping the title of the well known fairy tale, he sends the two siblings (confidently played by Sophia Lillis and Sammy Leakey) into the deep, dark woods. Famine and disease have ravaged the countryside, and the children's distraught mother, unable to feed them, has cast them out to fend for themselves. A friendly hunter (Charles Babalola) warns them not to talk to wolves, however seductive; but it's their human counterparts who are more to be feared.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. Bjork and Karin Dreijer who has recorded in a duo, the Knife, and solo as Fever Ray agreed to trade remixes. Dreijer applied both groups' different personae to Bjork's "Features Creatures," a song from the album "Utopia" that was a free floating soliloquy about the nature of attraction, squaring it off and finding beats for it. As Fever Ray, Dreijer set Bjork's vocals atop a half remembered girl group beat, weighted with a throbbing low synthesizer. The Knife's remix suggests a happier flirtation, with a plinking, strutting, carnival like beat and synthesizers hooting like air horns. Bjork, meanwhile, went bleak: She excised all the pop elements and doubled down on the most brutal impacts of Fever Ray's "This Country," for a profanity laced (and retitled) revamp of the song. PARELES Uncontrollable desire is Camila Cabello's recurring topic, and it figures in both songs she just released: "Shameless," which shamelessly echoes Rihanna's belting in "We Found Love," and "Liar," a canny pan Caribbean and Spanish melange. As she sings about how a certain kiss makes her lose control despite herself "Clothes are on the floor," she notes at the end the ultra canny track segues from mariachi horns to the stark electronics of Latin trap to flamenco handclaps (hello, Rosalia!) to a ska pop chorus: border hopping at the speed of pop. PARELES The sound of Los Wembler's de Iquitos hasn't changed a lot since 1968, when these five Peruvian brothers (at that time led by their father) began putting their stamp on the wobbly, psychedelic, surf rock indebted, Afro Latin jungle funk known as chicha. But there's enough depth and delirium in this music for it to stay fresh, even today. A few years ago the group mounted a successful comeback, and briefly toured the United States for the first time. "Los Wembler's para el Mundo," from a new album, is a well deserved victory lap, and a paean to their own powers. In it they sing (in Spanish) of traveling "from the jungle to the world," toting a "fascinating rhythm that makes the people dance." GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO The peculiarly structured "Drive Me Round" starts out almost sleepwalking, with Grace Shaw the Australian songwriter who records as Mallrat murmuring, "Are you still awake?/I know you're up late" in a melody that doesn't quite align with the pillowy keyboard chords around it. It's a whispery late night phone call, one misfit trying to connect with another. Suddenly, about two minutes in, the tempo picks up and Shaw's voice multiplies, imagining love and open roads while repeating "And you drive me round," as if she's lapsed into a blissful dream. PARELES Modal guitar riffs, handclaps, dryly urgent voices: this is what Tinariwen has been doing since the group emerged from the North African desert. The stark six beat beauty of "Zawal," abetted by Western and African collaborators, carries far more for those who understand its apocalyptic lyrics: "All whose consciences won't leave them in peace are sad/They're living through terrible times and believe the last judgment is nigh." PARELES Vengeance is served chilled in "What You Did" from the new album "Love and Compromise" by the English R B songwriter Mahalia Burkmar. The tempo is patient, with ticking, twitching drum machine sounds and samples from Rose Royce's tearful song about loneliness, "I'm Going Down." Mahalia and her grainier voiced colleague Ella Mai shed no tears. "I know what you did," Mahalia warns, and goes on to calmly inquire, "Tell me is she nice? Does she know I know?" Ella Mai adds details to the indictment with jazzy flourishes. Together, they refuse to forgive. PARELES On a slow week, why not Greta Van Fleet? This strikingly overlong number is from the soundtrack to "A Million Little Pieces," a film based on the memoir turned novel by the fabulist James Frey. Like that author, Greta Van Fleet fudges the details a little Zeppelin in the guitar, a little Marc Bolan in the vocals. A hodgepodge of touchstone years: 1974, 1975, 1976, even 1977. But also like that author, this band has a kind of primal instinct, activating long suppressed pleasure centers that are easy to scoff at, and yet ... CARAMANICA Another month in Nashville, another contribution to the ocean full of white collar/blue collar romantic square off songs. "He Went to Jared" is among the funnier of the recent contributions. Hardy and Morgan Wallen are rapscallion like, and shaggy at the edges their singing is lighthearted and unsentimental: "He went to Ole Miss, I went to work/He pushes paper, I push the dirt." CARAMANICA In "Ghost Towns," Stolen Jars set up a quick, precise, transparent tangle of counterpoint, with more than a hint of Dirty Projectors. There are stop start drums, tendrils of guitar, the plink of what might be a marimba and vocal lines that hop around, converge, diverge and eventually reunite, singing about escaping the strictures of the past: "Found my way out, I won't go back to ghost towns." Based in New Jersey and Brooklyn, Stolen Jars is led by the songwriter Cody Fitzgerald, who shares lead vocals with Sarah Coffey; the band's third album is due Oct. 11. PARELES The Messthetics' rhythm section the drummer Brendan Canty and the bassist Joe Lally, both of Fugazi renown is capable of some serious post hardcore thrash. And the guitar and pedals whiz Anthony Pirog has it in him to spin acid arabesques around your head till you can't see straight. But on "Touch Earth Touch Sky," the closer from their second album, the trio isn't trying to outdo or outrun anything. Slow tides of distortion rise and then fade; Canty uses his bass drum to patiently reinforce Pirog's slow, single note lines. The sonic squall grows melancholy and implacable, like a memory that won't fade away. RUSSONELLO	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Yes, They Pay a Dividend, but Can You Afford Them? WHEN gains in the stock market are hard to come by, dividend paying stock funds really stand out. In fact, the four best performing categories of equity funds in 2011 portfolios that specialize in utilities, health care, real estate investment trusts and consumer companies involved in food, beverages and other household products all dabble in dividend rich parts of the market. And all of these groups produced average gains of more than 7 percent last year, when the Standard Poor's 500 stock index rose a mere 2 percent, according to the fund tracker Morningstar. But almost as quickly as investors rediscovered dividend payers, they've started to learn that this strategy is becoming expensive. "It does beg a little closer inspection," said Mark D. Luschini, chief investment strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott. "Investors have plowed into these areas without much regard for what underlying securities are actually producing these yields and what their valuations are." Mr. Luschini noted, for instance, that because of their recent popularity, shares of many utilities and consumer staples companies businesses that produce basic household necessities like food and toothpaste are now at or near their recent highs. Utilities, which have historically traded at a significant discount to the S. P. 500, owing to the sector's slower than average growth, have an average price to earnings ratio of 15, based on the trailing 12 months of earnings. That means the sector trades at a premium to the overall market P/E of about 13. And as far as real estate investment trusts go, their prices are starting to become uncomfortably high, said Chris Cordaro, chief investment officer at RegentAtlantic Capital. "We've been in REITs for clients for more than 20 years, but we're completely out of them right now because of their valuations," he said. Still, prices in income producing sectors haven't reached the point where strategists recommend abandoning the search for dividends. Instead, they say, investors just need to be more mindful of how they use the strategy. Thomas H. Forester, manager of the Forester Value fund, which outperformed 56 percent of its peers last year, noted that his fund sold its shares of a giant utility, Dominion Resources, when they were trading at a P/E of above 15. Mark R. Freeman, co manager of the Gamco Westwood Balanced fund, which beat 65 percent of its peers in 2011, adds that investors would be wise to focus on high yielders and on companies with the potential to methodically bolster payouts over time. "This is the wrong time to reach for stocks with the absolute highest yields," he said. "I'm a bigger fan of companies that are yielding 2 to 4 percent now but that promise earnings growth in the future and higher quality balance sheets." FOCUSING on dividend growth should help create a more stable portfolio, market strategists say. After all, companies that can bolster their earnings and payouts consistently are likely to withstand an economic downturn better than their peers. What's more, this approach should help investors find dividend payers in less expensive sectors of the economy. Henry B. Smith, chief equity investment officer at the Haverford Trust Company, an asset management firm in Radnor, Pa., said that the firm maintains two separate blue chip dividend stock strategies. The first focuses on companies in position "to increase their dividends over time based on their above average earnings growth," he said, and is used in the Haverford Quality Growth Stock mutual fund. The other, available to clients though not through a retail fund, pays more attention to companies with higher current yields. While the second approach outperformed the first in 2011, the dividend growth portfolio has a lower average P/E ratio around 10 times 2012 estimated earnings, versus about 11 for the high yielding portfolio. By focusing on dividend growth, investors will also be drawn to less traditional income producing sectors like technology.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
The Golden State Killer's barrage of rapes and murders began in a gold mining area east of Sacramento in 1976. By 1986, it seemed to have stopped. With the arrest Tuesday of Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, who has been charged so far with eight counts of murder, more than 30 years had passed since the last episode in the series. That long period of quiescence seems to fly in the face of the popular belief that serial rapists and killers are incapable of stopping. But forensic psychiatrists, criminal profilers and homicide detectives who pursue cold cases say that assumption is more myth than reality. Joseph James DeAngelo, upon his arrest this week. "These are not acts that a person is compelled to do," said J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. "They are intentional and predatory. There is choice, capacity and opportunity that is exercised." Any number of factors can contribute to a dormant stretch. An extensive 2008 study on serial murder for the F.B.I.'s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime found that killers may quiet down when they find other outlets for their emotions. The study mentioned Dennis Rader, known as the BTK Killer, who murdered 10 people from 1974 to 1991, but had no other victims before being apprehended in 2005. "During interviews conducted by law enforcement, Rader admitted to engaging in autoerotic activities as a substitute for his killings," the report said. Other killers might have changed behavior after moving away from the original epicenter of activity. Ted Bundy mutilated and murdered perhaps more than 30 young women in the 1970s. Yet there were stretches along his peripatetic travels when he was not associated with murders in those areas. In some cases, jobs and families might have stabilized and exacerbating sources of stress might have faded, some experts said. Dr. Michael H. Stone, a professor of forensic psychiatry at Columbia University who has extensively studied serial killers, noted that Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer, murdered prostitutes during his first two difficult marriages. He married a third time, more happily, and the killings dwindled. "Some of these men have little oases of compassion, within the vast desert of their contempt and hatred of women," Dr. Stone said. So far, the authorities have not offered any public explanation as to why the Golden State Killer spree, for which Mr. DeAngelo was arrested this week, began and continued, much less stopped. But some experts point to the most banal explanation: In 1986, when he was 40, Mr. DeAngelo may have aged out. "The testosterone levels are down," Dr. Stone said. "His capacity to perform is weakened," he added, noting that he was merely speculating. The prey drive is lessened. An undated driver's license photo of Dennis Rader, also known as the BTK killer. Mark Safarik, a retired F.B.I. criminal profiler and consultant to crime shows like "Bones" and "The Blacklist," recently worked on a study with academic researchers about older sexual homicide offenders. "They are really rare over age 50," he said. "We just don't see them. Pedophiles over 50, yes. But not rape murderers." There is little research on why spree killers desist for reasons other than getting caught. No one knows what has happened to a serial killer of young women on Long Island. "There has never been a survey of serial killers asking them why they stopped," said Eric Witzig, a retired homicide detective and chairman of the Murder Accountability Project, a database of unsolved murders. "All we have are anecdotal hunches," he said. Perhaps a victim struggled and spooked the attacker, he said. The killer "might think then, 'Maybe I don't want to do this anymore because I might get caught.' Or, 'I want to stop and reflect on the carnage I wreaked in the past.'" Or, said Dr. Bruce E. Harry, a retired forensic psychiatrist with the University of Missouri medical school: "Maybe they get tired or bored and just don't want to do it anymore." Mr. Safarik, the retired F.B.I. crime profiler, was a beat cop in the late 1970s in Davis, Calif. and remembers being on stakeouts for the Golden State Killer, watching with night surveillance scopes for a man scrambling over rooftops or escaping into nearby fields. Then as now, police believed that the suspect had military or law enforcement training, which helped him evade detection. One reason the rapist murderer may have stopped in the late 80s, speculated Mr. Safarik, is that he was becoming aware of the ability to collect DNA evidence, left by the most meager material. The public was becoming familiar with it, he said, particularly through television dramas. Several experts, underlining the notion that so little is yet known about Mr. DeAngelo including most significantly whether he committed the crimes wondered whether the criminal behavior did stop entirely in 1986. "I would want to look at other rapes and murders in the areas where he lived over time," Dr. Meloy said. "I would be skeptical that there was a complete shutdown at age 40."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Devised theater companies like Improbable fumble their way to a completed piece through trial and error. They come up with a theory for what might work, then test that theory until they realize that it doesn't. Preordained destinations rarely pan out. Or, as the Improbable co artistic director Lee Simpson put it, "You head off and then you turn around and see where you've gone." Not so different from scientists, really, which made Lauren Slater's controversial 2004 book, "Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the 20th Century," such an enticing if counterintuitive title for adaptation. Improbable's past offerings have riffed off works ranging from Shakespeare ("The Tempest") to campy Vincent Price horror films ("Theater of Blood"), typically taking considerable liberties and adding bold visuals along the way. But "Opening Skinner's Box," which begins on Monday at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater as part of the Lincoln Center Festival, plays it surprisingly straight. "This piece is sort of ridiculously faithful to the book, which is not like us," Mr. Simpson said. Still, fidelity to the printed page, in this case, requires any number of modifications, visual and auditory. Here are some of them. The Improbable creative team perhaps best known for its work on the Philip Glass operas "Satyagraha" and "Akhnaten" built the piece's central visual element, a box shaped playing area, out of taut bungee cords. These cords allow the actors to expand or constrict the shape of the box as needed. "For me, the box is about the scientific method," Mr. Simpson said. "You need to create something of a closed system so that it's repeatable. But that's kind of a useful pretense because nothing is a closed system." "We have to remember that it's not true," he continued, although "it's O.K. to pretend that it's true because you can learn a lot of useful stuff that way." Several of the experiments used animal subjects: lab rats, of course, but also rhesus monkeys and sea slugs. Improbable's six actors play each of these creatures at one point or another. "We entertained the idea of using toy monkeys because we do anthropomorphize them," Mr. Simpson said. "But we never found the right toy monkeys." And so it's the actors who skitter about and push imaginary levers for imaginary food. A segment on cognitive dissonance, which hinges on a much anticipated U.F.O. that never arrived, was a boon for the sound designer, Adrienne Quartly, resulting in some of her most (literally) out there work. Ms. Quartly augmented what she called the "highly satirical, outer worldly" music with manipulated recordings of a cast member performing some nasal singing. Her other showcase comes in the segment devoted to Stanley Milgram and his infamous obedience experiment, in which subjects proved all too willing to deliver what they believed to be crippling electrical shocks to a fellow subject (actually an undercover experimenter). The interactive nature of this experiment inspired Ms. Quartly to put a scientific looking sound effects controller onstage, "allowing the actors to put a 'real' element into the Milgram story." The author was not involved in the production ("We had the Devil's own job even finding her to get the rights," Mr. Simpson said), but she is just as present within the play, where she is played by Kate Maravan. "First we had to disassemble the book and go back one step further," Mr. Simpson said, "and then adapt that for the stage." Not all of the scientists described and even depicted were happy with Ms. Slater's work. Dr. Robert Spitzer, who played an instrumental role in developing the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, even conducted his own study to question Ms. Slater's re creation of a 1973 experiment. Rather than evade or elide these criticisms, Improbable incorporated them into the story. "We felt we couldn't tell the story of the book without, to some degree, telling the stories of these controversies," Mr. Simpson said. Sometimes the scientists set the record straight, as in a fictionalized dialogue between Ms. Slater and Elizabeth Loftus, who contended then and now that the book misrepresented her own work and her statements about the malleability of memory. "It just bothers me as a scientist," Ms. Loftus said by phone recently. "I believe that a more educated population is good for society, and it offends me that someone with such reach would make so many mistakes." (Efforts to reach Ms. Slater for comment were unsuccessful.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Bri Houk, left, and Lindsey Leaverton posed for photographs as the cars streamed into their parking lot ceremony on April 28 at Doc's Drive In Theatre in Buda, Texas. Pass the Popcorn and Shhh! The Wedding Is About to Start On what was supposed to be their wedding night, Lindsey Leaverton and Bri Houk sat in their car on the top floor of a parking garage in North Austin and ate pizza, watched the sunset and finished off a Yeti full of champagne. "I put on a private concert for Bri and we danced under the stars," Ms. Leaverton said. Ms. Leaverton, 37, and Ms. Houk, 31, met through the dating app HER. Their first date was 24 hours later, on Ms. Leaverton's birthday. "It was the middle of June in 2018. I asked her to an outdoor concert where we drank red wine, had deep conversations, lots of laughter, and a divine connection. I knew that night she was my person," Ms. Houk said. In that moment, though their original wedding plans had to be canceled, their hopes were far from dashed. They knew it would happen. Soon. The two say they found in one another the kind of magic that some say only exists in movies. But for Ms. Leaverton and Ms. Houk, it could not have felt any more real, and in fact, their love would end up making an appearance on the big screen. Not waiting to miss a moment of magic, both women wanted to propose and be proposed to. And 13 months after meeting, Ms. Houk proposed during the 2019 Austin Pride Parade, celebrating with friends, family and colleagues who joined them on a nearby rooftop bar. Ms. Houk had revealed two details that would prove vital when it came for Ms. Leaverton to propose: She wanted to attend the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta and ride in a hot air balloon. "I also knew that one of Bri's favorite experiences is a beautiful sunrise," Ms. Leaverton said. After a year of planning, they flew to New Mexico for the festival and got up hours before sunrise the next day. "As we headed out to the field to get ready for takeoff, I couldn't stop shaking and smiling," Ms. Leaverton said. "Then it all went to hell in a hot air balloon basket, or so I thought." The couple planned a small but elegant wedding for April 10 at the Hotel Ella in Austin, Texas. But then everything changed. "We kept hearing more and more about this epidemic that was slowly but fiercely making its way across various parts of the world," Ms. Leaverton said. Reality began to sink in when the city issued a shelter in place order on March 24; it was to be in place until at least April 13. "April 10, 2020 would not, in fact, be our day," Ms. Leaverton said. Then about two weeks later the couple learned that Ms. Leaverton's father, Mark Leaverton, had tested positive for Covid 19. Mr. Leaverton, 70, was still recovering from emergency bypass surgery six months before, creating even more concern for his well being and an urgency to have their wedding sooner rather than later. Cassie Crudo, their wedding planner and the owner of Bride's Best Friend, came to their rescue, suggesting they marry at Doc's Drive In Theater, just outside Austin, in the city of Buda. They instantly fell in love with the idea. Everyone would remain in their cars, food would be served to each car, and the ceremony would be projected onto the big screens. When Ms. Leaverton told her parents about their new wedding plans, it certainly was far from what they expected. Of course, when she came out to them or rather was outed to them many years earlier it wasn't what they had expected, either. "I have learned that Plan A is totally overrated," Ms. Leaverton said. "Usually the magic happens somewhere between Plans B and C, all the way to Plan Z." This has been a theme in Ms. Leaverton's life. She once had a rising career as a Christian singer, until she was outed by a woman who had a vendetta, Ms. Leaverton said, and suddenly everything she called solid ground was gone. She lost friends, her church, her tour and her label. There was no Plan B. "I started waiting tables at Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen, cleaning up bread crumbs off the floor for less than minimum wage and just tried to be the best damn little waitress I could." Then, as luck would have it, everything changed for her on New Year's Day 2010 when, Ms. Leaverton explains, "A bigwig senior V.P. from Wells Fargo sat in my section and she proceeded to recruit me to come work for her. I remember getting a suit from Stein Mart and leaving the tags on, because I didn't think I would get the job." But Ms. Leaverton, who graduated from Texas A M, did get the job. "I went into banking and kind of worked my way up," she said. "For almost a year now, I've been lucky enough to serve as the director of wealth management services for an investment firm in downtown Austin, and I love it." Ms. Houk is also no stranger to life's often blatant disinterest in the plans we make. Born in Oklahoma and raised in Louisiana, her upbringing was far from an easy one. "I am lucky to be where I'm at today," she said. "I wasn't necessarily going down the right road and I could have ended up in a completely different place." Her father was absent. "We lived in a shelter home at one point while my mom was trying to get on her feet." Her family later lived in Section 8 housing relying on food stamps. Staying home did allow her time to plan their new wedding a good thing since they only had 17 days to do it. On April 28, in a dusty parking lot at Doc's Drive In Theatre, more than 80 cars, many festively decorated at the brides' behest, arrived at dusk filled with pajama wearing guests, another request from the brides. A small stage was set up and festooned with balloons and a simple backdrop hung behind it. The wedding was shown on two giant movie screens flanking the stage. It was also streamed live on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram Live for friends, family, and curious strangers to watch. Just before the ceremony, Ms. Leaverton approached her parents' car, keeping a safe six feet away. Suddenly she was overcome by tears. "I want to hug you so badly," she said through the window. Ms. Houk planned to have her son, 4 year old Atlas, walk her down the aisle as well. But he was unable to attend as she shares custody with his father and the wedding fell on one of his nights. Instead, her younger sister, Shaye Stephenson, walked with her as their mother, LaDonna Houk watched. Jen Hatmaker, an author and a longtime friend and mentor to Ms. Leaverton, led the ceremony. "Today is a celebration of love," said Ms. Hatmaker, who is ordained through Christian Global Outreach Ministries. "It's the great unifier our one universal truth. No matter who we are, where we've come from, what we believe, we know this one thing: Love is what we're doing right." The couple exchanged vows they had written for one another and Ms. Houk even shared vows she specifically wrote for Ms. Leaverton's daughters. "I am so proud to be your bonus mom," she said to the girls through tears. There was no formal reception after the ceremony no cake, no elegant dinner, no long, drawn out speeches. Instead there were bags of popcorn, plastic cups of champagne and messy pulled pork sandwiches in Styrofoam containers. There were also bubbles and boots and Stetson hats and the brides donned custom embroidered denim jackets after the nuptials. "Mrs. Leaverton" on one and "Wife of the Party" on the other. For this couple, it was never really about the wedding itself. "You can lose every detail the flowers, the catering, the seating chart," Ms. Hatmaker said after the ceremony. "It could all fall away and you'd still be left with the most beautiful parts of all. Lindsey and Bri didn't lose a thing. It felt like a real sacred space out there in that dusty drive in." Message From the Heart The Saturday morning after the wedding, Mr. Leaverton was lying in bed when, he said, he had a revelation. "God said to my heart, Mark you need to do a daddy daughter dance with your daughter and with Bri, because she doesn't have a dad. The God that I believe in is that tenderhearted and loving that he would tell me to do that. It never would have occurred to me to do that with Bri." He said he will do just that when the couple finally has their big reception. Answering With Love Ms. Leaverton, on one of the unexpected joys to come from the change in wedding plans: "To be able to show our kids that things happen that are outside of our control all the time. It's not about the thing that happened it's about how you respond." Outdoor Wedding Perils There was a persistent June bug on Ms. Leaverton's dress that crawled across the gown throughout the ceremony and another that landed in Ms. Houk's hair, which Ms. Leaverton, despite loathing bugs, bravely plucked midceremony. Surely It Was a Hit After the ceremony, the night's second feature glowed on the big screen: "Airplane." Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Scientists have determined that a skull that had been sitting in a drawer at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington for more than 60 years belonged to a previously unknown species of extinct dolphin. The animal, whose skull was found in Yakutat, Alaska, in 1951, has been given the name Arktocara yakataga, which can be loosely translated from the Greek as "the north face from Yakutat." Its description is in the journal PeerJ. There is one descendant of Arktocara still extant, the South Asian river dolphin, a freshwater animal that is itself on the edge of extinction. Arktocara was almost certainly an oceanic creature.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
LOCKING UP OUR OWN Crime and Punishment in Black America By James Forman Jr. Illustrated 306 pp. Farrar, Straus Giroux. 27. For advocates and officials working to end the era of mass incarceration and the use of excessive force by the police, our new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, has indicated he intends to do just the opposite. At a recent address to law enforcement officials in Richmond, Va., Sessions announced plans for a new crackdown on crime. He wants to revive a federal mandatory minimum sentencing program for illegal gun possession. He suggests a return to Reagan era zero tolerance approaches to drug use. And he insists, despite nationwide crime rates at historic lows, that a crime wave threatens to engulf America. Here we go again. There are at least two productive ways to look at these recent developments. The success of Black Lives Matter activists and criminal justice reformers caused a backlash that will demand greater resistance, renewed activism and new strategies. The other is that the punitive style of American racial politics has been a constant feature of our history; unless something foundational changes, the United States will remain an exceptionally punitive country, and the question is only one of degree. According to this line of thinking, there will always be hell to pay for somebody, especially poor people of color. Two new books offer timely and complementary ways of understanding America's punitive culture and, in the process, stark pleas to abolish it. In "Locking Up Our Own," James Forman Jr. explains how and why an influx of black "firsts" took the municipal reins of government after the civil rights movement only to unleash the brutal power of the criminal justice system on their constituents; in "A Colony in a Nation," Chris Hayes shows that throughout American history, freedom despite all the high minded ideals has often entailed the subjugation of another. Forman, a Yale Law School professor and former Washington, D.C., public defender, has written a masterly account of how a generation of black elected officials wrestled with recurring crises of violence and drug use in the nation's capital. Beginning in the late 1960s, these officials faced the growing challenge of drug addiction to heroin and later, crack. Forty five percent of male jail detainees tested positive for heroin in 1969, up from 3 percent in the early '60s. During roughly the same period the city's murder rate tripled. By 1987, officials found that 60 percent of Washington arrestees tested positive for crack cocaine. 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. Letters to public officials, mined by Forman, reveal that much of the black community did not agree on what to do. No one disputed the facts of rising drug use and ballooning murder rates across the city. Some of the earliest options on the table ranged from decriminalization of marijuana following the lead of white civil libertarians to increased sentences. Many agreed that some measure of punitive intervention was necessary. But how much could be deployed without destroying the body politic or the social ecology of black Washington was anybody's guess. There were also calls for prevention and drug treatment over punishment, targeting poverty as a root cause of crime. A number of local and national civil rights leaders preferred to follow Michigan Representative John Conyers's proposal for an urban Marshall Plan. Ultimately, Washington's black officials embraced the Nixonian law and order mood of the nation, passing increasingly tougher laws and adopting aggressive policing practices into the 1990s. Marion Barry, Washington's future mayor, claimed the mantle of drug warrior (before he fell victim to his own addiction), and the stark and visible pattern of African Americans increasingly locking up their own was replicated elsewhere. "When an urgent problem required a short term solution, law enforcement was regarded as the only answer," Forman writes. In 1978, Washington appointed its first black police chief, Burtell Jefferson, a staunch advocate for mandatory minimum sentencing, to lead the nation's first black majority police department. By 1990, there were 130 black police chiefs in the United States and more than 300 black mayors. Given a century of brutal, anti black racism in the criminal justice system after the Civil War, these developments give rise to some obvious questions: When African American officials finally gained a measure of control over the machinery of the law, why did mass incarceration happen on their watch? In other words, why did they lock up their own? Forman offers three explanations. First, black officials did not see mass incarceration coming. No one did, he argues. It was "the result of a series of small decisions, made over time, by a disparate group of actors." (Hayes makes the same point in his book.) Second, after legal segregation fell, African American class biases came to the fore. Class privilege meant that middle class and elite blacks had a smaller chance of exposure to criminal victimization and the full hammer of the law, especially long prison sentences. Citing a 1966 University of Michigan study, Forman writes that "a surprising number" of working class black cops "didn't like other black people at least not the poor blacks they tended to police." The third reason is a big deal and a major breakthrough. Forman's novel claim is this: What most explains the punitive turn in black America is not a repudiation of civil rights activism, as some have argued, but an embrace of it. "African Americans have always viewed the protection of black lives as a civil rights issue, whether the threat comes from police officers or street criminals," he writes. "Far from ignoring the issue of crime by blacks against other blacks, African American officials and their constituents have been consumed by it." Forman recalls his own experience as a public defender and the case of a 15 year old first offender who was facing sentencing for handgun possession and a small bag of pot; a black judge, hearing Forman's plea for leniency, was unmoved. "Dr. King didn't march and die so that you could be a fool, so that you could be out on the street, getting high, carrying a gun and robbing people," the judge admonished. "No, young man, that was not his dream." In this way, post civil rights leaders reimagined Dr. King as a crime crusader. In 1995, one year after Bill Clinton signed the biggest crime bill in American history, the nation's first black United States attorney for the District of Columbia, Eric Holder, announced a major anti crime initiative called Operation Ceasefire at a Martin Luther King Day celebration in Arlington: "Did Martin Luther King successfully fight the likes of Bull Connor so that we could ultimately lose the struggle for civil rights to misguided or malicious members of our own race?" This wasn't the politics of respectability; it was what Forman calls the "politics of responsibility." Dr. King's legacy had become fodder for a national trend of personal responsibility jeremiads aimed at black America. This moment peaked about a decade ago just when Barack Obama, an exemplar of propriety, kicked off his presidential candidacy and Bill Cosby was wrapping up a national "call out" tour, dispensing the gospel of tough love in black communities. "Holder's answer was straightforward," Forman writes. "Stop cars, search cars, seize guns." Predictably, Operation Ceasefire exacted a heavy toll. Police officers stopped black motorists for seemingly any reason, like tinted windows. Officials knew hit rates for guns would be low police academy textbooks explained as much. At best, investigatory or pretext stops were supposed to be a deterrent. In reality, they fueled racial disparities in the drug war. The law enforcement equivalent of reverse redlining shielded white Washington neighborhoods and a few tony black ones from the program. White motorists were given a "free pass," Forman writes, to keep their drugs safely stashed in their glove boxes. Operation Ceasefire and similar practices elsewhere made it much more likely that black women, for instance, would be arrested on minor drug charges than white men with much higher rates of gun possession and violent crime. Forman gives the example of Sandra Dozier, who was stopped by Ceasefire enforcers in 2000 and lost a good job at FedEx because they found two small bags of pot in her glove box. Chris Hayes, the host of a news show on MSNBC and the author of "Twilight of Elites," spent many days covering the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown, and he counts himself among the many white men whose minor drug offenses did not earn him a rap sheet or cost him his career. "A Colony in a Nation" opens with Hayes moving through security checkpoints at the 2000 Republican National Convention. As he hands over his bag, he realizes he has a small amount of marijuana in an eyeglass case. When the police find his stash, they let it pass. "The police officer who'd found the drugs put my bag on a table and looked at me, as if to say, Go ahead and take it." Drawing heavily on personal experiences as a white kid growing up in the crack era Bronx and attending a magnet school on the border of East Harlem, much of Hayes's book unfolds along the axis of two "distinct regimes" in America. One for whites, what he calls the Nation; the other for blacks, what he calls the Colony. "In the Nation, you have rights; in the Colony, you have commands," Hayes explains. "In the Nation, you are innocent until proven guilty; in the Colony, you are born guilty." At first mention the metaphor seems overdrawn, and eventually it slips a bit under its own weight. White Americans are also subject to "out of control" policing, he writes, because "policing of the Colony has breached the levee and flooded the Nation" too. But among white Americans, ideas about the collective guilt of black Americans exert a powerful pull. In the Colony, individual guilt or innocence is largely irrelevant. Hayes tells story after story of innocent black suspects routinely standing in for the guilty. Broken windows, stop and frisk, and Ferguson style revenue policing ("the model of cops as armed tax collectors") are all presented as evidence of how the separate system works. Even for black homicide victims, detectives in some cities fail to clear half of all murder cases. Many historians have long noted that black folk are simultaneously overpoliced and underprotected. Hayes writes that violence by police or by gangs are "two sides of the same coin." As such, the Nation evinces a peculiar circular logic: The harm black people do to one another "justifies" the harm the state does in their name. By contrast, the premium on white victimization in the Nation is "painfully clear to people living in the Colony," Hayes writes. "White lives matter, and it hardly needs to be spoken." Hayes's forceful analysis comes from an evocative reading of our colonial past. American colonists staked their claim to independence out of a refusal to be subject to the capricious and abusive whims of British customs agents. In the 17th and 18th centuries, white colonists illegally smuggled boatloads of contraband, such as molasses for rum. While there was a certain amount of corruption and looking the other way Hayes likens the situation to lax alcohol and drug enforcement on college campuses the need to pay debts from the Seven Years' War "changed everything." King George III started a "crackdown" that "essentially inaugurated America's first tough on crime era." More agents, more expansive power, more of "what we now call 'stop and frisk.'" Upon hearing the testimony in a 1761 case against the Crown's use of writs of assistance (the legal mechanism that allowed for abusive searches), John Adams wrote: "Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary rule of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born." White colonists fought for liberty and the freedom to subjugate others. More than 300 years later, Hayes sees what this founding hypocrisy looks like: "On the ground in Ferguson, the Bill of Rights itself seemed to have no force." Taken together "A Colony in a Nation" and "Locking Up Our Own" compel readers to wrestle with some very tough questions about the nature of American democracy and its deep roots in racism, inequality and punishment. Both authors find hope in a shared vision of a future society that protects human dignity and seeks accountability rather than vengeance. "What would the politics of crime look like in a place where people worried not only about victimization but also about the costs of overly punitive policing and prosecution?" Hayes asks. Forman imagines redefining our core values: "What if we strove for compassion, for mercy, for forgiveness? And what if we did this for everybody, including people who have harmed others?" Because, finally, there may be no pathway to end mass incarceration without reconsidering our handling of all crimes, not just nonviolent ones. Fifty three percent of all state prisoners are serving time for violent offenses, most commonly robbery. Racism and mass incarceration are systemic problems, but both Forman and Hayes show that the solution will lie not only with policy changes but with individual changes of heart too. Forman recalls that a 16 year old he defended was saved from incarceration by the testimony of the victim, who told the judge he didn't want the teenager to be sent to prison. A system built to make "teeth rattle," as described by Atlanta's first black mayor, Maynard Jackson, is not a system capable of transformation; we need to build a new foundation. We need to choose to do it. "Mass incarceration," Forman writes, "was constructed incrementally, and it may have to be dismantled the same way."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
LONDON More evidence of a weakening global economy emerged Thursday ahead of the Federal Reserve's decision to take aggressive new steps to stimulate growth in the United States. A report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development pointed to a slowdown in the coming months in Italy, China, India and Russia, with weak growth in France and Germany the two biggest economies of the struggling euro zone. The study focused on indicators that aim to anticipate turning points in economic activity. They show signs of slightly slower growth in Japan and the United States, while for Britain and Brazil, they point tentatively to a pickup in activity, albeit at a slow rate, the organization said. A separate report from the O.E.C.D. said business spending on research and development one measure of economic strength fell 4.5 percent in 2009 in the 34 countries that are members of the organization. Only France and South Korea went against expectations, increasing their spending.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. The late night hosts all lined up to bid good riddance to Kirstjen Nielsen, the former secretary of homeland security, who resigned on Sunday under pressure from President Trump. During her tenure, Nielsen oversaw the White House's crackdown at the southern border and became the public face of the administration's controversial family separation policy. The three major late night hosts each had his own way of sending her off. "Goodbye, Kirstjen. Whoever replaces you permanently is going to have some very big cages to fill." JIMMY KIMMEL "Now, Nielsen's departure is not a total shock. Reportedly, for weeks, Nielsen has felt 'in limbo.' Limbo is the right word here, because we've all been watching just how low she can go." STEPHEN COLBERT, quoting from a CNN report "Nielsen said that this was the right time to step down and she looks forward to spending more time separating her family." JIMMY FALLON	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
An outbreak of the Zika virus in the continental United States could begin any day now. But while there is plenty of discussion about mosquito bites, some researchers are beginning to worry more about the other known transmission route: sex. Intimate contact may account for more Zika infections than previously suspected, these experts say. The evidence is still emerging, and recent findings are hotly disputed. All experts agree that mosquitoes are the epidemic's main driver. But two reports now suggest that women in Latin America are much more likely to be infected than men, although both are presumed to be equally exposed to mosquitoes. The gender difference appears at the age at which sexual activity begins, and then fades among older adults. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, called the evidence "striking." Like other scientists, he had doubts about aspects of the data, but thought the results justified a more rigorous study, probably in Puerto Rico, of the role of sex in transmitting the Zika virus. "I can't say it's not true that women are more at risk," he said. The Zika virus can persist for months in semen, even in men who have had very mild infections. That's why women who are pregnant or trying to conceive are routinely warned not to have unprotected sex with men who have been in areas where the virus is spreading. In most parts of the United States, including New York City, health officials have presumed that the risk of Zika infection is low, except possibly at the peak of summer, the height of the mosquito season. But wider sexual transmission may alter that calculus. Prevention campaigns, for instance, would have to be retooled with a greater emphasis on protected sex. Thousands of men return to the United States every week from countries in which the virus circulates. New York State alone has a quarter of the country's travel related cases. The most disputed piece in this medical puzzle is a relatively obscure study released in May by Brazilian and European biostatisticians. In Rio de Janeiro, a city of 6.4 million, they found "a massive increase of Zika in women compared to men." The authors, from the Getulio Vargas Foundation and other Brazilian, French and Scottish research organizations, adjusted their figures for two confounding factors: Pregnant women are tested for Zika more frequently than anyone else, and women generally visit doctors more often than men do. Even after that adjustment, said Flavio C. Coelho, a Vargas Foundation biostatistician and the lead author, women were still 60 percent more likely than men to be infected with the Zika virus. Sexual transmission, he said, "was the most probable cause." The paper's "very intriguing" conclusions "merit further study," said Dr. John T. Brooks, an expert on the sexual transmission of disease at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But other experts, including Donald A. Berry, a leading biostatistician at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, dismissed the study. Women's fear of Zika is so great, and confusion over dengue, which has similar symptoms, so common that these variables alone could have accounted for the difference in observed infections between men and women, Dr. Berry said. "Women seek to find out whether they have Zika, while men blow it off," he said. "This bias is so large that it could easily explain differences much greater than 60 percent." The biostatistics experts at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases were also skeptical of the conclusions, Dr. Fauci said. But another study, published on June 15 in The New England Journal of Medicine, produced similar data. That study, by researchers at the Colombian health ministry and the C.D.C., was set up to look at birth defects linked to the virus. But the authors also found age and gender disparities among those infected. Young boys and girls in Colombia were infected with the Zika virus at roughly the same rates. Then, after age 15, once sexual activity began, the rates in females shot up. By age 25 to 29, women in Colombia were three times as likely as men of the same age to be diagnosed with Zika. As they aged, the margin tapered off; after age 65, the infection rates were close to the same again. The "most intriguing difference," said Margaret A. Honein, chief of the C.D.C.'s birth defects branch and one of the study's authors, was that in Colombia women 45 to 64 years old were still almost twice as likely as men of that age group to be infected. If large numbers of those women were still sexually active, but very few were worried about pregnancy or fetal damage, then male to female sexual transmission "might be one explanation" for the higher infection rates, she said. On the other hand, she said, "men may just be more stubborn about seeing a doctor, while women are more sensible." The C.D.C. knows of just 13 sexually transmitted cases of Zika in the continental United States thus far. It does not try to count them in Puerto Rico because it cannot distinguish them from mosquito borne cases. Because 80 percent of all infections are asymptomatic, the real number is probably higher. To find out for sure how often sex spreads the virus, researchers would need to choose hundreds of men and women at random and quiz them about how often they were bitten by mosquitoes, how often and with whom they had sex, and how readily they sought medical care, among other factors. Then their blood would have to be tested for the infection.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
We learn about Louise Nevelson's fearless approach to sculpture (and life) and Gertrude Abercrombie's friendships with jazz musicians and other artists but not much about their work. Time is spent discussing Christina Ramberg's notable height. According to her husband, "Finding shoes: It was awful. She had to go to this place downtown, on the 11th floor. A place for women who needed sizes larger than 10. She'd try to find shoes she could bear; there wasn't much to choose from in her size. Maybe only two styles. And the guy says, 'Well lady, it's either those or you wear the shoe boxes.' " Really? Despite its digressions and there are many like this "Identity Unknown" is also a deeply personal book. Seaman's mother, Elayne Seaman, is an artist. A reproduction of one of her ink paintings from 1989 a light colored anemone painted against a dark grid, part Georgia O'Keeffe, part Anni Albers is included in the beginning of the book. So why not write a book about Elayne Seaman? She really is unknown, compared with the artists here. Nonetheless, even if "Identity Unknown" isn't a work of art criticism, it does constitute an art history, and this is where the trouble lies. In the Nevelson section, for instance, Seaman writes that "abstract art is an invitation to imagine, to interpret, to reflect." It "induces reverie" and "liberates us from the literal and the everyday, and provides a bridge to the realm of the collective unconscious." Well, yes. But it also had historical roots in Europe and colonial appropriation, and coincided with Einstein's theory of relativity, Saussure's lectures on structural linguistics, two world wars, the atomic bomb and the breakdown of Western ideas about human subjectivity. It became a Cold War weapon, with the West arguing that abstraction illustrated capitalist "freedom," while the Eastern Bloc's figurative Socialist Realism was repressive, just like its political system. In other words, for those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about art, abstraction is really, really significant not merely an "invitation to imagine" or (gulp) a "reverie." Seaman's writing reflects a romantic view of art that isn't invalid. But as scholars, critics and curators realized early in the '70s, it was going to take a lot more than a reverie to reverse the course of patriarchal art history, and writing about women only among their (women) peers can actually limit the scope of their achievement: feminism as a ghetto rather than a springboard. Seaman addresses this in her section on Lois Mailou Jones, who chafed against the "reductive identity" of "black woman artist." "I'm tired of being considered only as a black painter," Jones once said. "I'm an American painter who happens to be black."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The owners of the 2,000 square foot loft in Chelsea loved antiques, and had furnished the apartment accordingly. There was a china cabinet topped with carved scrollwork and a grandfather clock standing sentry near the door. Persian rugs padded the floor. And it was all getting in the way of a sale. "It was filled very beautifully with antiques that were quite expensive and precious, but did not fit with what you consider a Chelsea loft," said Charlie Miller, a Corcoran agent who represented the owners with his colleague Laurie Lewis. "It didn't fit with the type of buyer who'd be looking at the space." The owners were resistant to removing the furniture, and the brokers weren't happy with the initial level of interest in the condo. At a time when home design television shows and shelter magazines emphasize light colors and pared down interiors, it can be harder to sell homes that are furnished with antiques. Large pieces in particular can make a property feel smaller than it is or hide desirable features. Deborah Ribner, a Warburg agent, recently represented a 2,800 square foot apartment in Sutton Place that was part of an estate. The late owner had loved antiques: Sixteen chandeliers hung from the ceilings; the dining room table sat 12 and had a thronelike chair at one end. "The apartment had the most spectacular views from every single room," Ms. Ribner said. "But it was so full that it was hard to appreciate them." She helped the owner's daughter clear out the antiques, and the co op received multiple offers and was in contract within five weeks. More significantly, in an age when so called brown furniture is far out of favor, antiques can make a property feel dated and less appealing to buyers especially younger ones. That can mean delicate conversations between antiques owners and real estate agents, who have to resort to explaining, cajoling, and creative solutions like virtual staging to make homes more marketable. "If they're a business person I tell them that what I'm selling is space," said Robin Kencel, a broker with Compass in Greenwich, Conn. "If I'm working with a seller who is more emotional about their furnishings, I tread more gingerly. I'll pull up photographs from magazines or Restoration Hardware, because that's a common source if the buyer is between 35 and 45." The problem is compounded by the fact that most antique furniture has dramatically dropped in value over the past couple of decades. Selling a 19th century credenza you love for twice the original price is one thing; begging for offers on Craigslist quite another. William and Mary Claire Barton inherited some antique furniture from their families, and in the 1980s started collecting it as an investment. "I convinced Bill," said Ms. Barton, 70, formerly the owner and director of the Hoorn Ashby Gallery in Nantucket and New York. "By the time we sell these things when we're old, they're going to have gone up so much in value. Guess what? They have not." That has presented a painful challenge as the couple downsizes from their three bedroom apartment in the Musician's Building at 50 West 67th Street to a smaller space nearby. "The fact that we're getting pennies on the dollar when we go to sell them that's no fun," said Mr. Barton, a Corcoran agent. The couple called a well known auction house to assess a George V game table and chairs they bought for 10,000 back in 2006. "He said, 'I love this and everyone will love this.'" Ms. Barton said. But it would likely sell for only 1,200. Their building dates to 1919, and the Bartons hoped that a buyer with a traditional bent might want to keep some of their furnishings. Several European shoppers did appreciate the decor, but it didn't solve their problem: "We had three different viewers who had family antiques," Ms. Barton said. "They needed ours to go so they could fit theirs." The Bartons' children would like to take some pieces and they've reached out to estate buyers, but the prices they offered were too low to make selling worthwhile. They've even contacted the city to ask if they could donate furniture to homeless people getting back on their feet. "Brown doesn't sell," declared Amos Balaish, owner of New York Estate Buyers and Showplace Antique Design Center in Chelsea. He added that there used to be a strong market for antiques "down South, but they're not even buying it anymore. It's sort of sad." He and his employees have a lot of difficult conversations with potential clients who are looking to sell their furnishings. Andrea Baker, manager of Showplace, said the rug market was down 90 percent. "There's the fashion element where things do cycle through periodically, but there's another trajectory, which is life becoming increasingly less formal," she said. "For the last 300 years it's been in a downward trend." That doesn't mean, though, that owners of antiques need to book a dumpster delivery. First, Dennis Harrington, head of Sotheby's English and European Furniture Department in New York, said that the market for brown furniture seemed to have bottomed out. "It's too early to talk about a comeback, but we've had a slight increase in interest over the last two years," he said. Decide what you want to part with, and find out which things relatives will take. She likes to use a sticker method, placing different colors on pieces that will be donated or sold. If the process is truly overwhelming, it can be worthwhile to bring in an organizer, decorator or appraiser who's willing to be paid by the hour to assist. If you suspect you might have something valuable, contact one of the top auction houses. "You shouldn't be intimidated by the brand and the name," Mr. Harrington said. If they're not interested, they will refer you to other sources. If they are, they will ask for photographs and any paperwork you may have, to get a sense of the value of a piece. So will estate buyers, though Mr. Balaish said that wider shots of the home were more useful, because what you might consider most valuable might not actually be. One recent client wanted to sell two 19th century chairs that had originally cost her 12,000. "The current market for them is 1,000," Mr. Balaish said. "But she had these plastic lamps that she bought for almost nothing. They're midcentury we can pay her more for that." Adam Blackman, co owner of the Los Angeles furniture gallery Blackman Cruz, which deals in new and old furniture, points out that there are many regional and local auction houses that sell furnishings and that sellers needn't be discouraged if their belongings are rejected. "Go down the list," he said. For 20th century pieces he would contact Wright auctions in Chicago. Bonhams, which has offices in a number of U.S. cities, takes finer items. Abell Auction Company in Los Angeles is a good final stop, he said, with weekly auctions. It helps to keep in mind what kinds of pieces are easier to sell. Smaller, more versatile items like side tables and compact desks are more likely to find a home, Ms. Baker said. Mr. Harrington said that the supply of antique dining tables far outstripped the demand, but that flip up or expandable versions had some appeal unlike big roll top desks and slant front cabinets. "People don't read or write the way they used to," he said. One solution: paint it. "Especially if we're not dealing with the precious antiques, sometimes it can really be elevated with a coat of paint," Mr. Carter said. "The other thing is, if you put white leather on an antique chair, suddenly it's quite modern." Kim Schmidt, an art dealer, and Andre Wlodar, vice president of newsprint at Cellmark, have traveled extensively, gathering apothecary bottles, candelabra and centuries old cherubim everywhere from Krakow to Guadalajara. The objets filled their apartment; they even had special lighting installed. But when they decided to downsize from their Upper West Side three bedroom a year ago, their agent, Ann Cutbill Lenane, of Douglas Elliman, was firm. "The standard model they tell you and they're probably right was we had to remove at least 25 to 30 percent of our personal furnishings," Mr. Wlodar said. They removed books and edgier art, and made many trips to Housing Works. Ms. Lenane made them paint the walls white. "That. Was. Hard," Ms. Schmidt said. Added Mr. Wlodar: "From that moment, I started to feel like it was no longer our apartment, and that hurt." They moved into their new place in July. It's smaller and more modern, with tons of light. The couple are happy with the change. "It's a good thing to be thoughtful about your things," Ms. Schmidt said. It helps that they have a house in upstate New York that they're planning to expand. "We are already figuring out where things are going to go," Mr. Wlodar said. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Riley Breakell, a Starbucks barista in Connecticut, was reassured in mid March when the company sent a letter announcing expanded catastrophe pay for those absent because of the pandemic. Even though she couldn't live on the roughly 250 per week she received from Starbucks while her store was closed for a month and a half, she appreciated the company's effort to do right by its employees. But after the company said those provisions would cease for those who were able but "unwilling to work" as stores reopened last week, Ms. Breakell became increasingly frustrated, questioning her managers over the risks that workers would encounter. "The first letter they sent said you should not have to choose between your health and a job, and now they're like, 'Well, if you don't want to go back, you have to quit,'" she said last week, shortly before her first day back. "I'm very anxious." Early in the coronavirus pandemic, workers like Ms. Breakell spoke up and staged protests to demand that employers provide protective equipment, limit customer traffic or even shut down in the interest of safety. But as many companies return to business, workers are pursuing a new goal: that employers not prematurely roll back measures they put in place. Employees of Target, some of whom walked off their jobs on May 1 over working conditions, have raised concerns about the company's decision to resume accepting returns from customers, a service that had been suspended to reduce potential virus exposure. Some workers at Amazon, who also joined the May Day protests, said they were upset over the end of the company's policy of unlimited unpaid time off, which many had used to avoid exposure inside warehouses. And workers at Costco and Whole Foods Markets, which is owned by Amazon, have expressed alarm that their employers appear to be relaxing limits on the number of customers in their stores. Workers at three Whole Foods locations in California said their stores had significantly more customers than usual on some days in the past two weeks. "Over the Mother's Day holiday weekend, it seemed that we had nobody monitoring the door," said Kai Lattomus, a Whole Foods worker in Laguna Niguel. "We had lines that went all the way back to the end of the aisle." A Whole Foods spokeswoman said that the company's social distancing and crowd control measures remained in place, and that the number of customers in a store could vary because of local ordinances and staffing. Richard Galanti, Costco's chief financial officer, said that all workers and customers, known as members, must wear face coverings and that the company had expanded store hours to help reduce crowds. "We continue to make sure the number of members is at safe levels and that they are properly distanced," he said. The concerns at Costco were reported earlier by BuzzFeed. The workers speaking out say they are pressing for many of the measures they have pushed for since the pandemic began: more generous and accessible sick leave policies, more protective equipment and better hazard pay. Ms. Breakell, the Starbucks worker in Connecticut, said workers had been trained to handle mobile ordering procedures that the store had adopted for its reopening, which she acknowledged would be safer than having customers order and pay inside. But she said it was difficult for workers to keep a distance from one another and expressed concern that the ordering policy might not last, citing conversations with supervisors. A Starbucks spokeswoman said the company was taking several steps to ensure that only healthy employees went to work, such as temperature checks and paid leave for those who may be ill. (Others can apply for unpaid leave.) Workers are required and customers are asked to wear facial coverings, she said, and the company is trying to adjust schedules with social distancing in mind. The company has no plans to allow customers to linger in stores, according to the spokeswoman, who forwarded a number of internal messages from employees expressing gratitude and excitement that their stores were reopening. The frustrations among workers at various companies have motivated some to begin coordinating their protests. Nationally, participants in the May Day protests said they had communicated through a group on the encrypted messaging app Telegram that brought together workers and organizers at Instacart, Whole Foods, Amazon and FedEx. Among them was Christian Smalls, who was fired from his job at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island after leading a protest there in late March. Amazon said Mr. Smalls had violated its social distancing rules. But there appear to be tactical differences among workers, even at the same company. A Chicago based group of Amazon workers, DCH1 Amazonians United, released a statement that questioned whether the May Day walkout was the best approach. "Calling for a general strike is easy organizing one is not," the statement said. "Before taking action we've got to get organized." The anxiety among workers appears to be tied partly to broader policy approaches by political leaders in their cities and states. Willy Solis, a shopper and organizer in the Dallas area for Shipt, a delivery service owned by Target, said he was concerned by the increase in crowds he had observed since Gov. Greg Abbott lifted a stay at home order on May 1. "That's a fear of mine for sure," said Mr. Solis, who took part in the May Day walkout. "The opening up of businesses to the general public will create an environment where the coronavirus can rear its ugly head, spread further." A look inside Amazon. An examination by The New York Times into how the pandemic unfolded inside Amazon's only fulfillment center in New York City, known as JFK8, found that the Covid crisis exposed the power and peril of Amazon's employment system. Here are our major takeaways: Employee churn is high. The company conducted a hiring surge in 2020, signing up 350,000 workers in three months offering a minimum wage of 15 an hour and good benefits. But even before the pandemic, Amazon was losing about 3 percent of its hourly associates each week meaning its turnover was roughly 150 percent a year. Buggy systems caused awful mistakes. Amazon's disability and leave system was a source of frustration and panic. Workers who had applied for leaves were penalized for missing work, triggering job abandonment notices and then terminations. Strict monitoring has created a culture of fear. The company tracks workers' every movement inside its warehouses. Employees who work too slowly, or are idle for too long, risk being fired. The system was designed to identify impediments for workers. Though such firings are rare, some executives worry that the metrics are creating an anxious, negative environment. There is rising concern over racial inequity. The retail giant is largely powered by employees of color. According to internal records from 2019, more than 60 percent of associates at JFK8 are Black or Latino. The records show Black associates at the warehouse were almost 50 percent more likely to be fired than their white peers. Read more: The Amazon That Customers Don't See. Mr. Solis said he had greatly reduced his hours since the pandemic's onset because of an autoimmune disorder. He said that Shipt had agreed to provide workers with masks but that many, including him, could not obtain them consistently. "I'm afraid I wouldn't make it if I caught this virus," said Mr. Solis, who is 41. A Shipt spokeswoman said that workers could pick up masks at any Target location and that the company had sent kits including gloves and hand sanitizer to workers who requested them. Mr. Solis said that masks were not available at every Target he checked and that some locations said the masks were intended only for Target employees, not Shipt workers. By contrast, in Illinois, where Gov. JB Pritzker has moved to tighten some safety protocols in the past two weeks for example, by requiring a face covering in indoor public spaces workers and labor leaders said they felt most large employers were taking safety concerns seriously. Bob O'Toole, the president of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1546 in Chicago, which represents about 19,000 grocery, meatpacking and food processing workers, said his union had been meeting regularly with regional grocery stores and asking them to make additional protective equipment available and to install plastic shields around cashiers. "Our retailers have been cooperative they've been responsive," Mr. O'Toole said, a reaction he attributed partly to the tone set by Mr. Pritzker and the state government. Marc Perrone, the president of the United Food and Commercial Workers International, said the union planned to begin advocating for the interests of nonunion workers as well as its more than one million members. "The last four, five, six, seven weeks, we've been focusing on making sure our folks had personal protective equipment, that people were getting their pay, that we were addressing those issues legislatively," he said. "We're going to do the same thing on their behalf, to put some weight behind them."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Three years ago, the internet melted down over the color of a dress. Now an audio file has friends, family members and office mates questioning one another's hearing, and their own. Is the voice saying "Yanny" or "Laurel"? The clip and an online poll were posted on Instagram, Reddit and other sites by high school students who said that it had been recorded from a vocabulary website playing through the speakers on a computer. An 18 year old high school student in Lawrenceville, Ga., Roland Szabo, was the first to post it on Reddit, where it quickly took off. At first, he claimed he had made the audio file himself. But on Thursday Mr. Szabo credited the students identified by Wired as creators of the Instagram post, saying he had been caught up in the media excitement. It's not over yet: Yanny or Laurel? The Trump White House wants to play, too. Social media bragging rights aside, the source of the clip may frustrate some and vindicate others: the vocabulary.com page for "laurel," the word for a wreath worn on the head, "usually a symbol of victory." Sorry, Team Yanny. Sharing of the poll really took off Tuesday after the tweet below from a self described YouTube "influencer" named Cloe Feldman, which was featured in too many news articles to count (including an earlier version of the one you are reading). It didn't take long for the auditory illusion to be referred to as "black magic." And more than one person online yearned for that simpler time in 2015, when no one could decide whether the mother of the bride wore white and gold or blue and black. It was a social media frenzy in which internet trends and traffic on the topic spiked so high that Wikipedia itself now has a simple entry, "The dress." Read more about the dress, which was definitely blue and black or was it? here. Many audio and hearing experts have weighed in. Jody Kreiman, a principal investigator at the voice perception laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, helpfully guessed that "the acoustic patterns for the utterance are midway between those for the two words." "The energy concentrations for Ya are similar to those for La," she said. "N is similar to r; I is close to l." Patricia Keating, a linguistics professor and the director of the phonetics lab at U.C.L.A., said: "It depends on what part (what frequency range) of the signal you attend to." "I have no idea why some listeners attend more to the lower frequency range while others attend more to the higher frequency range," she added. "Age? How much time they spend talking on the phone?" Elliot Freeman, a perception researcher at City University of London, said our brains can selectively tune into different frequency bands once we know what to listen out for, "like a radio." "What one hears first depends on the how the sound is reproduced, e.g. on an iPhone speaker or headphones, and on an individual's own 'ear print' which might determine their sensitivity to different frequencies," he said. While the experts theorized, online sleuths were hard at work manipulating the bass, pitch or volume. Some speculated, like Dr. Keating, that the differences might be related to hearing loss or the age of the listener. It is known that some sounds are audible only to people under 25. "If you turn the volume very low, there will be practically no bass and you will hear Yanny," a Reddit user wrote confidently.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
IF the 2011 Los Angeles auto show could be summed up in a single word, that word might well be "tentative." The economy is lurching, the industry's sales are seesawing and prospects for stability are uncertain. So the attitude among automakers here seemed to be one of wait and see, making it all but impossible to identify a definite trend or direction. Important new products were unveiled, but they were, for the most part, mass production models. Bold design studies, and even the whimsical trial balloons that can make an auto show memorable, were scarce. Notably, the scales this year tilted in favor of exotic cars and high horsepower 500 doesn't even warrant a gasp a decided shift from the times when Los Angeles was the showcase event for eco friendly vehicles. The timing of the Los Angeles event nearly coincides with the industry's model year change, making it either the last major international auto show of the season or, as others see it, the first of the coming year. Officials of the show, which opened to the public Friday after two days of press previews, promised more than 50 new model introductions. (The show, at the Los Angeles Convention Center, is open to the public through Nov. 27.) That total represents a steady, if slow, improvement over the dark days of 2008 9, when the show's existence was in question as the auto industry stumbled into recession and bankruptcy. "It's an indication of the improving strength, and underlying solid fundamentals, of the auto industry," said John Mendel, executive vice president of American Honda, "that there are more than enough new models in the pipeline to support this, and other major auto shows throughout the year around the globe." Honda, which unveiled a redesigned version of its popular CR V, a compact crossover vehicle, was one of several manufacturers introducing crucial new products at this show. The crossover category is one of the most ardently contested in the market, and the show floor here was evidence of that. Ford took the wraps off its latest Escape, and Mazda entered the fray with a new model, the CX 5. Still, there were signs of erosion. Floor space that was once packed with millionaires' sports cars sat largely empty this year. Some California based automakers, including the electric car companies Fisker and Tesla, skipped the show entirely, even though they have new models that could have drawn potential customers. European brands like Audi, BMW, Mercedes Benz, Porsche, Volkswagen and Volvo presented mostly warmed over products that had been shown in September at the vast Frankfurt auto salon. Several Japanese manufacturers have held back new product introductions, diverting them to their hometown to help prop up the ailing Tokyo Motor Show, which opens to the public on Dec. 3. The Japanese automakers have had a particularly tough year with the double blow of the earthquake and tsunami last March and the recent flooding in Thailand, which has shut down many of their suppliers and again interrupted production. Even as the United States government just confirmed new fuel economy standards that will require significant improvements by 2025, manufacturers here continued to offer shiny new idols to the gods of horsepower. Chrysler stuffed a new 540 horsepower Hemi V 8, which it calls the 426S, into its 300 sedan; the power plant was described as an "engineering exercise" that may or may not go into production. The smart money is on a production green light sooner rather than later as Chrysler can ill afford to design flights of fancy for which there is no business case. Chevrolet, while feting owners of its Volt plug in hybrid here, on the other hand took the cover off a new 580 horsepower Camaro ZL1 convertible. And Ford, not ready to concede pony car horsepower bragging rights to its crosstown rival, introduced a pumped up 2013 Shelby GT500, powered by a 5.8 liter V 8 making 650 horsepower. Though the horsepower party must certainly end someday, the horizon was nowhere in evidence here. Besides new models, some new technologies were rolled out at the show, including a hands free liftgate on the Ford Escape, a back up collision intervention system on the Infiniti JX, a new fuel saving cylinder deactivation system on the 415 horsepower Mercedes Benz SLK55 and inflatable seat belts on the updated Ford Flex. Here are some of the important models on display at the Los Angeles show: BMW The latest iterations of the company's "i" line of electrically propelled vehicles made their North American debuts here. The compact i3 concept is a pure electric car (though it may be offered eventually with a range extending gasoline engine), while the i8 is a plug in hybrid. The futuristic i8 is a descendant of the former Vision concept, which has a starring role in the upcoming "Mission: Impossible" movie sequel. CADILLAC The flagship brand of General Motors introduced a new flagship model for the marque, the XTS, which shoves aside the DTS and STS. As an antidote for the alphabet soup of a name, which even Cadillac news releases flubbed, just think of it as the new Sedan de Ville. DODGE Chrysler's SRT performance skunkworks has resurrected one classic model name, the Super Bee, and come up with a new one that sounds like a classic, the Yellow Jacket, for two new 470 horsepower versions of its Charger and Challenger models. Can the Hemi 'Cuda be far behind? FIAT In Italy, the Abarth name is applied to Fiat 500 models that get souped up engines, tweaks to the ride and handling, aerodynamic aids and contrasting body stripes. It's a package as compellingly Italian as the new TV commercials for the Abarth. Now an Abarth version of the 500 is coming to the United States, and a power upgrade of about 50 percent will go a long way toward elevating the car's reputation beyond its intrinsic cuteness. FORD Chevrolet's crosstown rival couldn't resist the temptation to raise the ante in the horsepower wars; a new Shelby GT500 version of the Mustang that smoked its tires for the first time at this show is graced with 650 horsepower. Ford says it is the most powerful production V 8 in the world. At the other end of the horsepower scale, Ford also unveiled its thrifty redesigned Escape crossover utility vehicle, which will have only 4 cylinder engines. The Flex people carrier is treated to new styling at its front end that might remind onlookers of a kitchen appliance. HONDA Countering Ford's Escape is a new CR V, a perennial sales leader in the segment. Supply interruptions helped the Escape to overtake the CR V in 2011, but the redesigned Honda, which will soon go on sale, should heat up the sales leadership race again. Honda also revealed new details and pricing a three year lease at 399 a month for its upcoming Fit EV all electric hatchback. HYUNDAI The Korean automaker continues to move upmarket with new offerings like the plush 2012 Azera. The recipe is simple: offer luxury amenities in an attractive wrapper, at a price that undercuts traditional luxury brands by thousands. INFINITI The JX is a large, luxurious seven passenger crossover that aspires to break into an already crowded class of generically similar vehicles. JAGUAR A 550 horsepower convertible version of the XKR S sports coupe was introduced here as the British marque's most powerful droptop ever. Also, at more than 135,000, it is the most expensive serial production convertible. KIA The sleek, classy GT design concept was shown in North America for the first time, and it reinforces the goal of Korean automakers to appeal to more affluent customers. LINCOLN The MKT luxury crossover and MKS sedan are getting mild enhancements more horsepower, more torque, more brightwork to help these Lincoln luxury loungers sell until it is their turn to be thoroughly updated. MERCEDES BENZ Pretty bodies were on display at Mercedes, but auto enthusiasts have seen most of them before. The magic is under the hood of high performance AMG versions of the ML sport utility, C Class coupe and SLK roadster. Americans can also drool for the first time over a roadster version of the SLS AMG supercar. MAZDA The CX 5 actually made its debut in September at the Frankfurt auto show, but it's new to North America. Although it would seem that demand for small crossover vehicles has been sated by the dozens of models already on sale worldwide from various manufacturers, Mazda expects the CX 5 to become one of its biggest sellers. SUBARU This was technically a world premiere of the BRZ Concept STI, even though the car was also seen at Frankfurt. But enough small changes continue to be made to this sports coupe, conceived in a joint Toyota Subaru project, that it has continued to seemingly have "world premieres" at one international auto show after another. VOLKSWAGEN Look closely at the nose of the 2013 VW CC sedan; that's about the only place you'll easily notice a difference between it and the outgoing model. The disappointment for many in Los Angeles, where top down motoring is a birthright was that VW did not introduce a convertible version of its updated Beetle.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
DRESDEN, Germany Last month, 74 years to the day since the bombers came, the late winter sky was gray as German tour guide Danilo Hommel called a halt before a short, dark green door in a large terracotta roofed building that today forms part of an events and conference complex. One among several structures like it are laid out in neat rows in a bend of Germany's River Elbe, two miles from Dresden's historically reconstructed center. Anonymous except for a plaque by its side reading "Schlachthof 5," and underneath, in English, "Slaughterhouse Five," it was an exit way through which the tall, lean 22 year old prisoner of war Kurt Vonnegut Jr. may have had to stoop to emerge into a scene that would cast a shadow over the rest of his life. In February 1945, after sheltering in a deep underground meat locker in the abattoir turned P.O.W. camp, he and other American soldiers captured at the Battle of the Bulge, before being shipped eastward by train, were confronted by a smoldering hellscape where the Saxon capital had stood, its baroque architecture until now pristinely untouched by the wrecking hand of war. Claiming around 25,000 lives late in World War II, the Allied firebombing raids on Dresden whipped up an inferno so fierce it sucked the oxygen from all but the most subterranean of shelters and destroyed practically everything that would burn. Vonnegut would later compare the sound of bombs stomping across the earth overhead to the footsteps of giants. Put to work by his German captors disinterring corpses from the rubble, he would one day write with characteristic black comedy that the hideous task resembled "a terribly elaborate Easter egg hunt." Published 50 years ago this month, the book became his first best seller and made 47 year old Vonnegut a star. Weird, wise, moral, profane and profoundly human, it remains a countercultural classic and one of the most enduring antiwar novels of all time. Not to mention a salvational act of self therapy by a man who likely suffered from what would today be recognized as post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. For a book about surviving a massacre, "Slaughterhouse Five" makes you laugh an unreasonable amount. Not least through the repetition of three short words that have inspired a thousand bad tattoos: "So it goes." 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. Those words are "one of his clues to us that he had PTSD," said Julia Whitehead, the founder and head of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, over the phone from Vonnegut's native city, Indianapolis. "He's trying to figure out, 'O.K., did something really horrible just happen? How am I going to deal with that?'" From a bottle of champagne that's lost its fizz to entire "corpse mines" in the lunar landscape of flattened Dresden and a fellow prisoner shot for scavenging a teapot, "Slaughterhouse Five" is a book steeped in expiry, such that the author can only seem to summon a cry laughing refrain every time another endpoint is reached. "So it goes" tolls bright and solemn 106 times throughout the book, cunningly conveying fatalism, stoicism, acceptance and stubborn continuity each time. "It was his way of coping," Whitehead said. "And it's kind of teaching us to keep going, when these things happen in our lives ... to stop and say, 'This is what it is, and I will keep going.'" Vonnegut has said he based the novel's protagonist, Pilgrim the sweet but hapless Army chaplain's assistant and future millionaire optometrist on his comrade, Edward R. Crone Jr., who died on April 11, 1945, soon before the war's end. In 1969, when the novel was published, PTSD was a concept as alien as the four dimensional beings who kidnap Pilgrim to the planet Tralfamadore. While the condition is widely known today, the term only entered medical doctrine after 1980. Whether he knew it or not, Vonnegut was improvising a self help manual for psychic pain at a time when many young Americans needed it most. Vonnegut's daughter Nanette remembers him and her "mother watching the news and him just losing his temper," she said, recalling her parents watching TV dispatches from Vietnam when she was a teenager in the late 1960s. He would be "pointing at the screen saying, 'The liars.'" "He saw the numbers, how many dead," she added, "that these kids were being conned, and sent to their deaths. And I do think probably it set a fire under him to have his say." Vonnegut was driven into his study time and again to fight his own internal battle, and at last complete a novel inextricably intertwined with the preservation of his soul. Nanette, who is a writer and artist herself, grew up intrigued by her father's creative struggle. In language worthy of her father, she wrote in a 2012 essay that it was like "living with an elephant for 15 years that was trying to give birth to something twice its size." "I had a short time up until I was 14, 15, and I was witness to the writer at work," she reflected, speaking from her home in Northampton, Mass. "The labor of it, and the up and down of it. It was like a manic thing. When there was a good day of writing and he nailed it, you could tell. And other days it was like, just, you know, so hard." The Vonnegut children six from his first marriage and a daughter, Lily, from his second have complicated relationships with "Slaughterhouse Five," the vessel that whisked their father away to fame. Yet when Nanette reread it recently, "It just blew my mind," she said. "It is a magical thing that he pulled off. I'm so proud of him that he delivered it. It's a gift to the world." Nanette has happy memories of her father, even if she is certain that he suffered from PTSD, the symptoms of which flashbacks, sleeplessness, dissociative episodes and sudden, inexplicable surges of emotion he drew so vividly in Billy Pilgrim. "He was writing to save his own life," Nanette said, "and in doing it I think he has saved a lot of lives." Over the course of 10 head spinningly nonlinear chapters, Vonnegut's darkest memories from Dresden refract through the prism of a brilliant and unconventional mind, like light filtered through a warped stained glass window, scattering colorfully and unpredictably. The pain becomes wild, hilarious, beautiful. His moving through time "seems to me a conspicuously therapeutic response to Dresden," said Sidney Offit, an author who was good friends with Vonnegut later in life. "Because when you're moving through time you're trying to put it into a perspective," Offit added. "And he was doing it through the individual details of one life. It obviously had an extraordinary appeal to readers." Offit, who is 90, recalled that Vonnegut, his former tennis and lunch buddy, often confided in him about his wartime trauma. Yet it was always with the same sense of irony and mischievousness as in his writing. "It's a way of coping, humor," Offit said. Vonnegut died in 2007 at the age of 84, gone but destined to never be forgotten. His fame continued with books such as "Breakfast of Champions," "Galapagos" and "Hocus Pocus." The Tralfamadorians in "Slaughterhouse Five" see lives laid out like strings of spaghetti, every second occurring side by side and always for eternity; by their philosophy death is but a "bad condition" in one's final moment. In that clever disruption of logic lies perhaps the author's most enduring masterstroke, a trick that in the mind's eye has the power to pull bombs back up into the bellies of Lancasters and B 17s, return fat to the bones of starving P.O.W.s and let lives senselessly deleted be suddenly restored. "It's a genius device," Offit said of his friend's elastic contortions of time. "It has almost a spiritual or religious theme," he laughed, "because it's suggesting life everlasting. The future, the past, the present all blend. And none of them seem to have a real ending." With the bright sandstone structure of the stunning Church of Our Lady at its heart leveled in 1945, left in ruins for decades, then rebuilt between 1994 and 2005 the city of Dresden in late 2019 presented its own blend of the future, past and present. In the former slaughterhouse district, Hommel's Kurt Vonnegut themed tour of the city concluded with a descent into the bowels of Schlachthof 5. On a wall in the basement cloakroom where hooks for coats and not animal carcasses hung from the ceiling a light box storytelling mural by artist Ruairi O'Brien depicted scenes and quotations from "Slaughterhouse Five." Surprisingly it's the city's only real monument to the novel. As for the deep concrete meat locker where a young intelligence scout sheltered from the footsteps of giants? Filled in and built over during renovations years ago, it was gone. Returned to the earth, like so many former citizens of Dresden and everywhere. Vanished in that moment, and yet, if you think about it the Tralfamadorian way, still there forevermore in plenty of others past. So it goes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The majestic giraffe, the world's tallest land mammal and a prime attraction at zoos worldwide, is threatened with extinction because of illegal hunting and a loss of its habitat, according to a report published on Thursday by an international monitoring group. The giraffe population has declined by 40 percent over the past three decades and now stands at about 97,600, according to the findings by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which designates endangered species. While the largest giraffe populations reside in national parks and reserves, those protected areas have proved to be inadequate, one of several alarming conclusions about the animals' future in the group's latest Red List of Threatened Species report. "While global attention has been on threats to elephants and rhinos, giraffes have been off the radar, and we've been losing them in significant numbers," said Liz Bennett, the vice president for species conservation for the Wildlife Conservation Society, which was not involved in the report. "People and governments need to start acting to save giraffes, fast." With their soaring heights of up to 20 feet and their stunning necks, which are typically about six feet long, giraffes have long been the stuff of dreams for children who love to draw them and for adults who retain an awe for the otherworldly creatures. Their tongues can extend a foot or more, making feeding times an especially popular sight at zoos and on safari. Yet the animals' rare size and regal visage have made them a prime target of poachers in Africa, who drop steel wire snares from tree canopies or stalk and shoot giraffes with rifles, wildlife experts say. The threat to giraffes is so great that the Red List upgraded the species from the "least concern" category to "vulnerable," skipping over the intermediary "near threatened" designation. Graver categories include "critically endangered," "extinct in the wild" and, ultimately, "extinct." The animals are divided into nine subspecies; according to the Red List report, five have decreasing populations, three are on the increase, and one is stable. One bright spot: The numbers of West African giraffes are on the rise, numbering about 400 now, up from 50 in the 1990s. This remains the smallest of the subspecies. Asked if it was possible for giraffes to become extinct in the wild in the next 20 years if nothing is done, Derek Lee, an ecologist who contributed to the Red List report, paused for several moments during a phone interview on Thursday from Tanzania. He then said, "I think we'd see drastic declines at the very least." Giraffes are found mostly in southern and eastern Africa, with smaller populations in West and Central Africa. Some of those populations are particularly vulnerable because of war and other civil unrest in countries on the Continent, like Sudan. Poaching and the loss of habitat are "equally dangerous threats that vary in degree from place to place," said Dr. Lee, who is a founder of the Wild Nature Institute. While governments and organizations could take stronger actions against poaching by enforcing laws and animal protection rules, habitat loss can be harder to stop because it involves curbing economic activity, such as land development, mining and scavenging. "These are problems everywhere for giraffes," Dr. Lee said. "You need to stop both threats." The threat to giraffes is not expected to affect their numbers at zoos in New York and other cities around the world, wildlife specialists said, because zookeepers have a good record helping the animals with reproduction. Still, zoo leaders are likely to consider changing signs at their exhibits to stress the animals' vulnerability to extinction as a way to raise public awareness. "That would be the best way to get the word out to people that we need to do more to protect these animals," said Dr. Bennett, of the conservation society, which runs the Bronx Zoo, the New York Aquarium and other zoos in the city.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
While making her 2016 album "The Hope Six Demolition Project," the musician PJ Harvey did something rare: She opened her recording process to public viewing. She and her team constructed a studio in London that allowed fans of the musician, or the merely curious, to look in on Harvey and her musical collaborators as they laid down tracks. As "A Dog Called Money" chronicles, this was the culmination of a longer workflow. The songs began as writings from when Harvey, with the photojournalist Seamus Murphy, who also directed this picture, spent time in Kabul, Kosovo and Washington D.C.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Alicia Bognanno has a horror movie scream not the shriek of the beleaguered heroine so much as the guttural howl of the demon pursuing her. "I'm trying to hide from my mind," she hollered on a track from "Feels Like," her grungy debut album as Bully in 2015. The song's foundation trembles in her wake. "It actually happened because of the lyrics," Bognanno, the 29 year old singer, songwriter and guitarist said of her now signature vocal style, which can instantly flip from melodic to pummeling. "I started writing stuff that was really personal and meaningful, and because of built up aggression, some of the words just felt like they needed to be screamed." That may be part of what led the director Alex Ross Perry to ask Bognanno to write songs for his gritty 2018 rock star flick "Her Smell," with Elisabeth Moss playing a Love like lead singer. Bognanno sent close up videos of her hands on the fret board to Moss, who practiced the songs with a teacher. "She did a fantastic job, but I think it was good for me to not have total control," Bognanno said. It became one of the many opportunities she has had over the past few years to practice letting go. Zooming on a recent afternoon from her Nashville home, where strings of white Christmas lights and scattered guitars hung vertically throughout a cozy living room, Bognanno spoke quietly enough not to disturb the two dogs sleeping soundly behind her. Her mop of unruly bleached hair fell around her shoulders as she admitted that the prospect of releasing a new album without being able to immediately hit the road and play live had, just the night before, brought on a mild existential crisis. "I was like, 'I don't even know who I am without touring!" Compounding the stress is the fact that Bully's third album, "Sugaregg," crystallizes a few major changes. It is the first record since Bognanno parted ways with her former band members and recalibrated Bully as a solo project. It's the first Bully record she hasn't engineered herself. And it's the first time she's written frankly or spoken frankly about her struggles with bipolar II disorder. "Being able to get a better grasp on that just rebuilds you," Bognanno said, squeezing a slime green stress ball in one palm. "I just felt like a shell of myself for a very long time and getting that back was the best feeling ever and opened up so many doors for me with my writing." "I had a really hard time in school," she said. "The education system infuriates me, because there's a structure for learning, but everybody learns differently." On her report card, though, there is a row of straight As all from an audio engineering class she took as an elective. It changed her life. Growing up in suburban Minnesota, Bognanno didn't know anyone who made music. The audio engineering class was rudimentary, but it got her "just a little bit closer to something that I had dreamed of being involved in." After school, she'd head straight to the studio and work on her music. She wasn't sure that this was something people went to college for, let alone with her grades and finances, but her teacher did some digging and pointed her to Middle Tennessee State University. "I think about that teacher all the time," she said. Production remains one of the most male dominated professions in the music industry: The Audio Engineering Society estimates that somewhere between 5 and 7 percent of audio engineers and producers are women, though some believe the figure is even smaller. In most of her classes, Bognanno was the only female student. "I have to be good, otherwise I'm going to give a bad name to women in audio engineering," she said of the pressures. "It just feels like all eyes on you, and then someone will say something kind of flirty to you and you just feel so uncomfortable." During a summer internship in Chicago, she found an encouraging group of male engineers in a relatively unlikely place: Electrical Audio, a studio owned by the notoriously curmudgeonly punk legend Steve Albini. Bognanno sat in on recording sessions; during breaks, she would snap photos of mic placement and equipment manuals. "They were so supportive, so willing to answer anything," she said, "and I think they just really liked to see somebody that was eager to learn more about the gear." Back in Nashville, Bognanno linked up with a group of punk musicians who amplified the increasingly personal, scream demanding songs she'd been writing: the guitarist Clayton Parker, the bassist Reece Lazarus and the drummer Stewart Copeland (who was not in the Police). Within a few years of completing her internship at Electrical Audio, she returned there to record her band's first two albums, "Feels Like" and its 2017 follow up "Losing." Copeland and Lazarus eventually left the band, and while writing "Sugaregg," Bognanno made the difficult decision to part ways with Parker. Her therapist, who helped her reach this conclusion, is one of the first people thanked in the album's liner notes. Bognanno's writing for Bully is so personal that some people in her life have learned basic facts about her for the first time through her lyrics or interviews. "I pretty much came out as being bisexual through Bully," she said with a laugh. And she has recently begun writing and speaking openly about her bipolar II diagnosis, which she received a little while after Bully began. "You stay unsure, you're still acting tough," she sings on the speedy, corrosive "Stuck in Your Head," a track she describes as "an outline of the inner dialogue going on in my head." Elsewhere, though, "Sugaregg" has welcome moments of lightness, like the bouncy "Where to Start," or the cleareyed "Prism," which freeze frames a ruminative moment: "Ooh, the sun hits a prism/Your ghost in my kitchen." Without imminent plans to tour, Bognanno has found a positive way to spend her free time during quarantine: She just completed an online foster care training program and eventually hopes to use a spare bedroom in her apartment to host foster children for their first few nights in the system. It is, in some sense, a way to offer others the sort of refuge she has found in music. "When I'm playing onstage, I'm by far my most authentic self," she said. "I feel like I have a sense of purpose any sort of awkwardness or insecurity for that 45 minutes are just totally diminished. I've never really had anything else in my life that has been like that."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
In 2015, the musician and journalist Ryan H. Walsh published an article in Boston magazine about "the untold story of how Van Morrison fled record industry thugs, hid out in Boston and wrote one of rock's greatest albums." The album was the sylvan, ineffably spiritual "Astral Weeks," released in 1968, when Morrison was 23. Walsh's article included less than sylvan details about cash handoffs to gangsters, someone smashing an acoustic guitar over Morrison's head and insights from the singer's first wife, Janet Rigsbee ("Being a muse is a thankless job, and the pay is lousy"). "Astral Weeks" was recorded in New York City, but it was "planned, shaped and rehearsed in Boston and Cambridge," Walsh writes in his new book, which shares its title with the album. "This fact has been a secret kept in plain view." What exactly this secret yields is a question that the book never quite answers. Morrison's work had to be conceived somewhere, after all, and the album's otherworldly pastoral vibe means that almost any earthly answer any place other than an unknown planet covered only in ferns and flutes would be a surprise. Van the Man, who's front and center in the montage of characters on the book's cover, didn't talk to Walsh, but that's no matter; the singer's oppositional crankiness tends not to produce much. More troubling for the project is the width of its lens. "While researching the album's half buried local connections, my curiosity about Boston in the late '60s grew into obsession," Walsh writes. And that's how the book reads, as the record of an obsession, with the surfeit of granular detail, the loose anecdotal structure and the numerous cul de sacs that implies.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
During lockdown, essays like G.K. Chesterton's "On Lying in Bed," Adam Phillips's "On Being Bored" and Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" make good company. "With a nap between each, these essays will fill a whole day," Dwight Garner writes. Not everyone is having a bad lockdown. In The Spectator, the English weekly, Tom Stoppard wrote, "This is the life I've always wanted social distancing without social disapproval." Me? I've grown twitchy. The song I can't stop listening to is Cab Calloway's "I Gotta Go Places and Do Things." With so many hours to obliterate, I've found myself turning to the experts. I've pushed away the Tootsie Roll wrappers and empty root beer cans and gathered around my bed what I will call my library of indolence. A lot of the writing I value is, in one way or another, about the seven deadly sins, especially sloth and gluttony. People who are sophisticated in these two areas tend to be congenial sorts who have good advice about how to live in most other areas, too. By "library of indolence" I mean novels like "Oblomov," Ivan Goncharov's satire about a man who hates to leave his bed, and "Bartleby, the Scrivener," Herman Melville's long short story about the clerk whose motto is "I would prefer not to." I mean essays like G. K. Chesterton's "On Lying in Bed," Robert Morley's "In Praise of Obesity," Adam Phillips's "On Being Bored" and Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness." With a nap between each, these essays will fill a whole day. I also mean nonfiction books like Eva Hoffman's "How to Be Bored," Jenny Odell's "How to Do Nothing" and Patricia Hampl's "The Art of the Wasted Day." Then there is Keith Waterhouse's slim primer "The Theory and Practice of Lunch." Waterhouse writes, "Lunch is free will." No one seems to remember her any longer, but I'm a terrific fan of the writer Barbara Holland, who died in 2010. Her best known book is "The Joy of Drinking." But don't forget her "Endangered Pleasures." The subtitle says it all: "In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences." 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. Like Protestants, these books come in many denominations. The wittiest and most profound, the one that covers the most bases, is Tom Hodgkinson's 2005 classic "How to Be Idle." I can't recommend it highly enough. It was a best seller in some places, though it never made The New York Times list. In a sane world it would top lists again now, the way that "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)," the R.E.M. song, recently returned to the Billboard charts. Hodgkinson founded The Idler, a cult magazine about intelligent slacking, in 1993. The magazine is available online, but if you subscribe to the print edition you get one of life's better tote bags. It's decorated with a drawing of a snail. I like to think of it as an emotional support snail. In "How to Be Idle," Hodgkinson takes novitiates by the hand and leads them through an entire day, hour by hour, in 24 chapters. These chapters include "10 a.m. Sleeping In," "Noon: The Hangover," "2 p.m. On Being Ill," "3 p.m. The Nap," "4 p.m.: Time for Tea," "5 p.m. The Ramble," "6 p.m.: First Drink of the Day," "7 p.m. On Fishing," "2 a.m. The Art of Conversation" and so on. "This book seeks to recover an alternative tradition in literature, poetry and philosophy, one that says not only is idleness good, but that it is essential for a pleasurable life," Hodgkinson writes in his preface. "Where do our ideas come from? When do we dream? When are we happy? It is not when staring at a computer terminal worrying about what our boss will say about our work. It is in our leisure time, our own time, when we are doing what we want to do." He recommends not clicking on news radio upon waking. He nails me entirely when he writes, "A certain type of person feels it is their duty to listen to it, as if the act of merely listening is somehow going to improve the world." He is the laureate of sleeping in. "The lie in by which I mean lying in bed awake is not a selfish indulgence but an essential tool for any student of the art of living, which is what the idler really is. Lying in bed doing nothing is noble and right, pleasurable and productive." He likes the lie in, too, because it annoys the wrong people. "To the bureaucrat, the man of business, there is nothing more offensive than the idea that potentially productive citizens are prone, inactive, staring at the ceiling," Hodgkinson writes, "while he is bustling away doing something 'useful,' like inventing new ways to sell popcorn to the masses or delivering summonses for nonpayment of parking fines. Inaction appalls him; he cannot understand it; it frightens him." He is a critic of modern medicine. Once upon a time, a sick person was advised to convalesce, a word (and an idea) he relishes. Now we're handed a prescription and told to get on with things. He recommends calling in sick as often as is plausible. Hodgkinson likes smoking because it "does what great satire is supposed to do: It comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable." Citing George Orwell and Barbara Ehrenreich on working class life, he notes that smoking gives people who are under the heavy thumb of employers not only pleasure but a measure of autonomy. He pays tribute to slacker heroes such as John Lennon, who wrote "Watching the Wheels" and "I'm So Tired," and Sherlock Holmes, who solved cases while sitting around in his smoking jacket, sucking on a pipe. He works up a head of steam about why tea, the leaf, is more noble than coffee, the bean. "Coffee is for winners, go getters, tea ignorers, lunch cancelers, early risers, guilt ridden strivers, money obsessives and status driven spiritually empty lunatics," he writes. I hope "lunch canceler" catches on as an epithet. I've always been pretty good at staying in. I admire Sheila Heti's novel "How Should a Person Be?," in which she writes: "Let other people frequent the nightclubs in their tight ass skirts and Live. I'm just sitting here, vibrating in my apartment, at having been given this one chance to live." This whole period can seem like a free month away from school. And as Anita Brookner wrote, "Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has." In a chapter on staying in, Hodgkinson advises readers on how to "create your own little paradise of duvets, televisions and pizzas, your own castle of indolence." Maybe we can watch just enough TV news to witness lockdown protesters last laughing themselves to death. With a few chili pepper lights, your living room can become its own sort of nightclub, with bottle service. And why not? As Hodgkinson writes elsewhere, "You'll have plenty of opportunity to be miserable later, so why not enjoy yourself now."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Although the hotel's official check in time was 2 p.m., the staff made our room available at 8 a.m., when my husband and I arrived from our red eye flight, so we could restore ourselves immediately with a nap. The room had no phone, but a Samsung tablet was provided both for using the free Wi Fi and, if needed, contacting the front desk. The minibar featured No Fork brand pretzels, cashews, peanuts, gummy candies, chocolate crinkles and butterfly puff cookies (2.60 to 3.60 euros). Drinks on offer were local Laranjada Melo Abreu and Kima passion fruit soda, along with Fever Tree soda water and Coke (all 2.50 euros). Morning beverages were available for, surprisingly, an extra charge: Gorreana teas from one of the island's own tea plantations for 1 euro, along with Nespresso coffee pods for 2 euros. Exposed black volcanic basalt rock is to the Azores, what exposed brick is to many other cities, and the intimate 14 seat restaurant Cardume dramatized itself with a full wall of it. Dinner featured typical Azorean flavors in elevated dishes fish confit with passion fruit sauce (26 euros), slow cooked pork shoulder with caramelized local pumpkin and sweet potato (32 euros), and a sweet potato brownie with lime ice cream (12 euros). I indulged in a tall, thick glass of passion fruit juice, while my husband had a gin and tonic made extra spicy with local Azor gin. The complimentary breakfast the next morning included yogurt with granola, fruit and six other small jars of toppings like a seed mix; local cheese and meat; Portuguese biscuits; scrambled eggs; banana pancakes and fresh mango juice.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Breaking Up With One Show to Take Another to Broadway In "Oklahoma!," they were two young lovers. In "Hadestown," he was again a young lover, but she was a much older (like, eons older) goddess. Over the last several years, as two artisanal musical productions took less traveled roads through the alt theater woods, Damon Daunno and Amber Gray found themselves side by side, bringing contemporary voices to reinterpret their shows' classic stories. Now they are arriving on Broadway, a few days and a few blocks apart. Mr. Daunno is riding in on a darkly revisionist revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Oklahoma!" as Curly, the lovestruck cowboy; Ms. Gray will spring forth in Anais Mitchell's folk rock "Hadestown" as Persephone, the bluesy queen of the underworld. First, Ms. Gray portrayed the farmgirl Laurey to Mr. Daunno's besotted Curly in "Oklahoma!" Then he played the mellifluous Orpheus to her intoxicating Persephone in "Hadestown." But the shows have been in development long enough that along the way, Ms. Gray had two children; Mr. Daunno got married; and their paths to Broadway diverged. Now "Oklahoma!" is starting performances March 19 at Circle in the Square Theater, with Mr. Daunno as Curly and Rebecca Naomi Jones as Laurey; "Hadestown" starts performances March 22 at the Walter Kerr Theater, with Ms. Gray as Persephone and Reeve Carney as Orpheus. Mr. Daunno, a 34 year old from New Jersey, and Ms. Gray, a 37 year old who grew up in a roving military family, spoke in separate interviews about their intersecting journeys through parallel shows. I gather neither of you ever expected to be in "Oklahoma!" DAUNNO I had seen it when I was like 8, and I thought, "I'm not really into Oklahoma!" And I thought there's no way any production of "Oklahoma!" is ever going to cast me as Curly. But they came back and said, 'Trust me, this is not your grandmother's "Oklahoma!," and then I Googled some bits of the movie and Hugh Jackman, and cobbled together a video of me playing "Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin." I wasn't going to try to please them, but just do it the way I do it, and it turned out that's what Daniel Fish was looking for. GRAY I had seen lots of Daniel's work over the years, and they kept saying "He wants to see you for Laurey," and I was like, "Surely there's a mistake. Doesn't he mean Aunt Eller?" I've been a theater broad since I was 13, so that's in my head it's ridiculous, but that's how we get trapped as performers. It took me a moment to wrap my brain around it. And how did you wind up in "Hadestown"? DAUNNO I got an offer to do a 29 hour reading in 2012, and so I listened to the album and was thrilled to be a part of it. It was just a week in New York, but it was lovely, and I got to know Anais through that. GRAY Rachel Chavkin has been one of my greatest collaborators I've been in six of her shows and, during the "Great Comet" tent phase, other kids in the cast were doing "Hadestown," and I was like, "What's 'Hadestown?'" Then they were doing a staged workshop, and I came in to audition. Was there a fork in the road for you? DAUNNO This business can be complex, with scheduling and things like that, and you need to make decisions and keep moving. There wasn't a time for me when I had to choose it was just no longer an option. We went on different paths I went to England and worked with Kneehigh for six months, and then toured Russia and Eastern Europe with a jazz singer friend and by the time "Oklahoma!" came back, I had grown quite fond of Curly. GRAY It's a bit sensitive, because my agent who was the point person died, and there was a miscommunication. But I had a great time in London with "Hadestown," while really mourning that I had to break up with "Oklahoma!" It's complicated, but what a good problem to have. How are the roles you played in each show similar or different? GRAY Laurey is young and green to a lot of life experiences, and has lots of questions. Persephone has been around for centuries, and has lots of answers. Both women wake up, but in very different ways Laurey gaining experience, and Persephone remembering how open she used to be when she was young.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Over the weekend that ended with "Hamilton" winning 11 Tony Awards, Lin Manuel Miranda and his family stayed at the Mandarin Oriental, a luxury hotel near Columbus Circle. Mr. Miranda and his wife, Vanessa Nadal Miranda, were staying on the 46th floor, while his mother and father were on the 47th. The day of the awards ceremony, a Sunday, began with the playwright and his father, Luis A. Miranda Jr., having a room service breakfast at 6:15. Later that morning, the creator and star of "Hamilton," along with fellow cast members, rehearsed for the awards ceremony at the Beacon Theater, about 15 blocks north of the hotel. During downtime, as the first grim reports out of Orlando, Fla., were circulating, Mr. Miranda took out his phone and began to tap out the sonnet he would read aloud that night while accepting the Tony for best score. In 14 lines he paid tribute to his wife, his son and the victims of the massacre. Back at the Mandarin Oriental before curtain time, he realized he would need a printout of the verse he had written. He called the suite where his father was staying and asked him if he wouldn't mind taking care of it. Luis, 61, said yes, and traveled down a flight, where his son handed him a thumb drive. Lin Manuel had one stipulation: "He said, 'Can you please not read it?'" Luis said, recounting the night by phone from the office where he works as a political consultant. The playwright's father, along with his mother, Luz Towns Miranda, 65, a clinical psychologist, had exposed the Miranda children early on to Broadway musicals and their soundtracks, and he was happy to help with such an errand. He went down the elevator, thumb drive in hand, toward the concierge desk. There, employees of the Mandarin Oriental sprang into action. Back in the elevator, with the printout, the father did the very thing his son had asked him not to do: He read the sonnet. "That's like asking me not to drink water when it's 90 degrees out," Luis said. "I thought it was very moving and pretty and important for the moment." Back in the suite, Luis listened as Lin Manuel read it aloud, practicing for the big moment. It had already been a busy weekend for the Miranda family. Twenty five relatives, nearly a dozen of whom had flown in from Puerto Rico, had come together for the Tony festivities. The day before the awards, on Saturday at matinee time, a group of 13 went to the Richard Rodgers Theater to be in the room where "Hamilton" happens; then a group of 12 attended the 8 p.m. performance. Between shows, the clan gathered for dinner at the Glass House Tavern, near the theater. Lin Manuel joined the group. "We now go there all the time," Luis said. "The food is great, the service is great, they know we need to get to the theater." A family feel permeated the two suites at the Mandarin Oriental, said Benjamin Macklowe, the owner of Macklowe Gallery on Madison Avenue. He arrived at the hotel on Sunday at about 4 p.m., accompanied by a 6 foot 5 bodyguard and a bag of vintage jewelry worth several million dollars. In the parents' suite, a TV set was tuned to reporters and pundits giving the latest from Orlando. When Lin Manuel's father bemoaned the news that had been streaming from the television over the last six hours, Mr. Macklowe like Lin Manuel an alumnus of Hunter College High School asked if he would like him to play from his iPhone a Juan Luis Guerra album. It turned out that Mr. Guerra is a favorite artist of Luis's. The TV was shut off, the music was turned on and the mood lifted. Mr. Macklowe presented Dr. Towns Miranda with a number of diamond and rubies in gold pieces "on a beautiful pillow, like she was a queen," he said. "She put on everything and then took off half of it, which is exactly what she should have done." Her gown was by Cenia Paredes, a New York designer whose line will be available on the Home Shopping Network June 24. Ms. Nadal Miranda, a lawyer and scientist, also wore Cenia that evening. The Miranda men outfitted themselves in tuxedos they had had made especially for the Tonys. "We went to a place in Yonkers called San Marko," Luis said. "We have been going there for a very, very long time." Lin Manuel, who won a 2016 Pulitzer Prize for "Hamilton," went for an understated look. He worked with Robert Forchetti, an owner of San Marko, on a simple black tuxedo, opting for a treble and clef music symbol stud set and Puerto Rican flag cuff links. "My son is very square," Luis said. The elder Mr. Miranda's tuxedo was dark burgundy, with a bright burgundy lining. "I also wore a very loud burgundy tie, with rhinestones," he said. Mr. Macklowe offered both men a choice of lapel pins. "Lin Manuel said, 'No, no, no, it's too much for me,' but I, of course, wore mine," Luis said. "Nothing is too much for me." Ms. Nadal Miranda wore jewelry selected for her by the stylist Stacy London: an emerald ring, diamond and sapphire chandelier earrings from Cartier and diamond and sapphire bracelets to match. Close to 5 p.m., while helping Lin Manuel tie his bow tie, Mr. Macklowe asked him if he intended to chop off his founding father ponytail, once he leaves the "Hamilton" cast this summer. "He said to me, 'I have been having dreams of going to the barbershop,'" Mr. Macklowe said. Then Mr. Macklowe took note of large trays of sushi and fruit that were untouched. "The Jewish bubbe in me came out, and I said: 'Have you eaten enough? You're going to be at the Tonys during dinner!'" Lin Manuel and his wife ate a few pieces of sushi and headed to the Beacon Theater for the coronation of "Hamilton." After the show, Lin Manuel, Luis and their wives took a limousine to the Plaza hotel for the official post awards party. But the main event was the "Hamilton" party, at Tavern on the Green in Central Park. The Mirandas arrived about 45 minutes after the Tonys had ended. "People were telling me, 'This is your son's bar mitzvah," Luis said. (The Miranda family is Catholic.) The highlight of the party for Luis was meeting Barbra Streisand. "She waited for us, which was incredibly humble," he said. "I don't think Barbra Streisand needs to wait for anyone." She posed for photos with the family. "That was up there with meeting Julie Andrews and Debbie Reynolds," Luis said. Back at his Upper West Side apartment at 1:30 in the morning, Mr. Macklowe received a call from Ms. London, the stylist, to come fetch the borrowed jewels. He summoned the 6 foot 5 bodyguard, and the three of them crouched in a corner of the packed Tavern until about 3 a.m., taking inventory of the returned gems.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
To keep a step ahead of Facebook, Snap is introducing on Tuesday a new feature for its Snapchat ephemeral messaging service that will allow users to place 3 D cartoon objects into their videos and pictures. The technology is similar to the augmented reality used with Pokemon Go, a Nintendo game for mobile devices that overlays digital images on the physical world. Snap's new technology, a 3 D lens, can also change and shift in response to physical objects. Snap said in a blog post that it launched lenses which are images that people can superimpose on their selfies a year and a half ago to give users more ways to express themselves. These features added whimsy and color to Snapchat's messaging service, which has drawn an avid base of users and has helped propel new forms of digital advertising.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos and anything else that strikes them as intriguing. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. The title of Mariah Carey's new album, "Caution," sums up her shrinking horizons in the 21st century: murmuring where she used to belt, gently scratching where she once was velvety, striving to insinuate strategically rather than to overwhelm. "Caution" itself admits to lust but sets conditions: "Don't be dishonest" and "Touch me in a different kind of way." A trendy, minimal production, uses a thin, synthetic, Latin tinged beat, with Carey's old trademarks the melismatic asides, the way up there whistle tones mixed into in the background. Upfront, she is cooing both "Proceed with caution" and "I need you closer to love me harder," tempering desire with self preservation. JON PARELES "Shake that booty, if you wanna/Drop that booty, it's your choice": That's the chorus of the song at the center of this satirical "Saturday Night Live" sketch, which sends up hip hop's longstanding indifference to conversations about respect and consent. "S.N.L." cast members Kenan Thompson and Chris Redd are the main rappers here, and they rap as well as comedians. Over production that's notionally Southern influenced, they opine about various ways to establish better boundaries. But the real humor comes from the high profile guests: Lil Wayne, who cheerily delivers a surprisingly nimble verse, and Future, who raps "Hendrix steal your girl, but only with her permission," and makes it rain into a collection jar for women's rights activism. JON CARAMANICA The year after Bobbie Gentry released her indelible 1967 hit, "Ode to Billie Joe," she came out with "The Delta Sweete," a far less commercial concept album about her Mississippi roots. Among those who have rediscovered its songs is the psychedelic band Mercury Rev, which has remade the album with guest singers among them Norah Jones, Lucinda Williams, Phoebe Bridgers and Laeticia Sadier for release in February as "The Delta Sweete Revisited." Its preview is "Sermon," a prayer and a warning "God Almighty's gonna cut you down" sung by Margo Price. Mercury Rev replaces Gentry's brisk, nearly rapping original with swelling orchestral drones, the better to reveal the song's fearful awe. PARELES On their new album, "Invisible Sounds," the trumpeter Ingrid Jensen and the tenor saxophonist Steve Treseler pay tribute to Kenny Wheeler, a Canadian British trumpeter who died in 2014, leaving behind a book of lovely, warm blooded compositions. The album opens with a studio recording of the charging "Foxy Trot," and it ends with this live take. Onstage, Jensen and Treseler's quintet skips the studio version's lengthy, drifting intro, and they kick the tempo up by a hair. On her solo, using what sounds like a wah wah pedal, Jensen emphasizes both the slipperiness of the tune's melody and the traction of its rhythm. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO "Adicto" is Marc Anthony's first bachata song, and there is likely a good reason for that. Bachata is a genre that prizes sensuality and caress. It is slick and subtle, things the bazooka voiced Anthony is not. And so "Adicto," a collaboration with Prince Royce, one of bachata's biggest stars, sounds like an argument of reason vs. aggression. This is Royce's turf, and he's a whispery singer. But every time Anthony arrives, it sounds like he's delivering a tsk tsk lecture, shouting down a foe. CARAMANICA Most of the South Korean music that reaches the West has been determinedly poppy, perfectly groomed and eager to please. The hip hop duo XXX has other, far more confrontational plans. In "Sujak" from an upcoming album, "Language," the rapper Kim Ximya drops a few English words "strip club casket body in the basket" into nasal, percussive stretches of Korean, while the producer FRNK surrounds him with irritants, providing a buzzing electro beat only to interrupt it at will with crashes, thuds, plinks and digitally stuttered syllables that stay disruptive all the way through. PARELES A primo straight ahead jazz pianist, Aaron Goldberg plays each melody with careful attention, letting joy emerge from within. On his new album, "At the Edge of the World," Goldberg is joined by the bassist Matt Penman and the (all too rarely heard) drummer and percussionist Leon Parker, whose strategy is more effervescent. Their cover of Luiz Bonfa's "Manha de Carnaval" provides a wonderful showcase of their complementary styles. Goldberg plays nimbly against Penman's lissome bass, phrasing things just behind the beat, then just ahead, but never coming off track. Parker shows the same sensitivity, but he also lets himself go: On a vocal percussion cameo, he's practically bursting. RUSSONELLO	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
"Folklore" backs off slightly from the bold outline, clear cut arena pop songwriting of albums like "1989" and "Red." In quarantine, Swift chose a more introspective approach but also, as she points out when talking about "Illicit Affairs," a choice to be less autobiographical than her past songwriting. For many of the songs, Dessner one of the main composers behind the National's somber, reflective rock sent instrumental tracks to Swift; then Swift came up with words and melodies. In the documentary, Swift says she was nervous about telling her label, "I know there's not like a big single, and I'm not doing like a big pop thing." But her songwriting remains self conscious and meticulous. Swift and her collaborators detail the ways that songs on the album overlap with and echo one another; three of them "Cardigan," "August" and "Betty" tell the same story from different characters' perspectives. She explains "Mirrorball" to Antonoff as a cascade of interlocking images: "We have mirrorballs in the middle of a dance floor because they reflect light. They are broken a million times and that's what makes them so shiny. We have people like that in society too they hang there and every time they break, it entertains us. And when you shine a light on them, it's this glittering fantastic thing." Swift has written and sung particularly on her 2017 album, "Reputation" about the pressures of celebrity. On "Folklore," she sings about them more subtly in "Mirrorball," "Hoax" and "Peace," coming to terms with her place in the information economy. But she also knows how to feed tabloids. A big reveal from "The Long Pond Studio Sessions" is that the pseudonymous, no profile songwriting collaborator on two key songs, "Exile" and "Betty," is her boyfriend, Joe Alwyn. She got her headlines. For "Exile" a cathartic post breakup ballad that's a duet with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver Vernon appears remotely, from his own recording setup in Wisconsin. His face is almost entirely concealed behind a bandanna and a baseball cap, but the emotion in his voice rises to meet hers as the song spills over in recriminations.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
How to Log Off of Facebook Forever, With All Its Perks and Pitfalls Part of the allure of social media is telling friends and strangers what's happening in your life. But suppose you are worried that you have revealed too much and want to protect your privacy. You can delete your social media accounts and try to cover up your digital footprints but be warned: The process can be laborious and is not always foolproof. Why are you leaving? Experts cautioned against trying to erase every trace of yourself from the internet. Rather than obliterating your social media presence, clean it up by deleting or deactivating dormant accounts, said Amy A. Lavin, a professor of management information systems at Temple University. Lavin said that she had recently deleted her Myspace account because it was years old, probably had a "supersimple" password, and she wanted to reduce the risk that someone might take photos from her profile and use them against her. "I think it's a matter of being as responsible about your social media presence as your personal presence," she said. "What is it you want people to see and know about you?" Bruce R. Mendelsohn, a digital marketing and social media consultant, recommended staying on LinkedIn, the professional networking site. If potential employers cannot find you there, they may wonder what you are hiding, he said. "Not being on social media raises questions about legitimacy, popularity and hipness," he said. Also consider your motives for wanting to disappear, Robert Siciliano, chief executive of IDTheftSecurity.com, said in an email. Are you a private person who doesn't want the world to know your personal information? Or do you feel threatened somehow? How to delete your accounts Sites such as accountkiller.com, deseat.me and justdelete.me link you to pages where you can delete your profiles and they provide step by step instructions and useful tips. Mr. Mendelsohn suggested a "nuclear option" deleting your accounts entirely on the "Big Four": Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus or a "limited strike" of deleting selected posts by or about you. Gone but not forgotten "Whenever you're deleting a social media profile, it's important to check whether the process actually deletes your profile or simply deactivates it," Henry Carter, a professor of computing sciences at Villanova University, said in an email. Even when you close an account, some sites might retain your data and keep an "inactive" version of your profile posted should you decide to return, he wrote. Read more on how to delete Facebook and Instagram. You might be able to remove content you created, but it will be impossible to stop others from posting about you, said Allison Matherly, digital engagement coordinator at Texas Tech University. "In the long run, removing 100 percent of references to yourself from social media is highly improbable," she wrote in an email. While Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram may be your most frequent stops online, don't overlook other platforms such as dating sites, blogs, Flickr, eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, PayPal and support forums. "We often only think of the social media channels we are currently using, when we have actually been online and using social media or similar forms of two way online communication for much longer than we think," Ms. Matherly wrote. What do you stand to lose? Disappearing from the web can mean losing any marketing presence you've established, Mr. Siciliano said. You also may be unable to restart an eliminated account with the same name or email address.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Below are edited excerpts from a conversation with Ms. Kiros. Q. How did you become a food writer? A. I started writing my first book, "Twelve: A Tuscan Cook Book," after the birth of my second daughter. I was always collecting things and keeping journals; it was just a collection of things that I really loved in one place. My first book was essentially a journal of my time in Tuscany, Italy. This has been going on for 20 plus years. What are some of your favorite childhood culinary memories? I was born in London; my mother is from Finland and my father is Greek Cypriot. However, I grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa. I think they have wonderful meat in South Africa. We always used to go out and get sticky ribs. They have great dried meat the biltong which is like a beef jerky. Where are some places you would like to revisit? I was so impressed with Vietnam. I loved India and would love to go back to Mexico. La Reunion was incredible in terms of nature. One of the most exciting feelings is when a plane touches down and you need to get out and start from absolutely nothing. How did you craft such an array of French and French inflected foods? In a place like Guadeloupe, there are African people standing on this beautiful Caribbean beach holding baguettes and eating blood sausage like boudin noir. And then you start thinking, how did this food get here? That is what I was looking for. In Guadeloupe, you have an incredible mixture of things: the French that came and stayed, and a mix of things from Africa and India. How has food affected your family life? I love the concept of families cooking together and learning about things that have been passed down for generations. I like to wake up on Christmas morning and show my children how to make cinnamon cardamom buns.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
As this animated movie's title suggests, this tale is a celebration of taking on life's challenges your own way. Or, more specifically, finding the courage to do that. And yes, surfing is the dominant metaphor. A long limbed, cheerful teenager, Hinako, sets down in a seaside town for the summer, catching waves with expertise. Observing her from a rooftop, a young firefighter, Minato, describes her to a friend as his hero. The two meet cute, more than once, before embarking on a fairy tale anime romance, their affinity defined by a song they love. There is making out, there is talk of finless dolphins, and these creatures hold a key to one of the movie's mysteries. And there is soon loss, and the process of piecing life back together afterward.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
MOUNT VERNON, Va. The costumed characters at George Washington's gracious estate here are used to handling all manner of awkward queries, whether about 18th century privies or the first president's teeth. So when a visitor recently asked an African American re enactor in a full skirt and head scarf if she knew Ona Judge, the woman didn't miss a beat. Judge's escape from the presidential residence in Philadelphia in 1796 had been "a great embarrassment to General and Lady Washington," the woman said, before offering her own view of the matter. "Ona was born free, like everybody," she said. "It was this world that made her a slave." It's always 1799 at Mount Vernon, where more than a million visitors annually see the property as it was just before Washington's death, when his will famously freed all 123 of his slaves. That liberation did not apply to Ona Judge, one of 153 slaves held by Martha Washington. Judge is among the 19 enslaved people highlighted in "Lives Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington's Mount Vernon," the first major exhibition here dedicated to the topic. She is also the subject of a book, "Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge," by Erica Armstrong Dunbar. Most scholars who have written about Judge's escape have used it as a lens onto Washington's evolving ideas about slavery. But "Never Caught," published on Tuesday by 37 Ink, flips the perspective, focusing on what freedom meant to the people he kept in bondage. "We have the famous fugitives, like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass," Ms. Dunbar, a professor of black studies and history at the University of Delaware, said in an interview in Mount Vernon's 18th century style food court. "But decades before them, Ona Judge did this. I want people to know her story." Research on slavery has exploded in the two decades since Mount Vernon, Monticello and other founder home sites introduced slavery themed tours and other prominent acknowledgments of the enslaved. "Lives Bound Together," which runs through September 2018, was originally going to fill one 1,100 square foot room in the museum here, but soon expanded to include six other galleries normally dedicated to the decorative and fine arts, books and manuscripts. "We had so much material, and it's such an important story," Susan P. Schoelwer, the curator at Mount Vernon, said. "We realized we could take many of the objects already on view and reframe them." 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. The exhibition makes it clear just who poured from the elegant teapots and did the backbreaking work on the 8,000 acre estate. But integrating the harsh reality of slavery into the heroic story of Washington "a leader of character," as the title of the permanent exhibition across from the slavery show calls him remains unfinished work, some scholars say. "He's a much more mythic figure than Jefferson," said Annette Gordon Reed, the author of "The Hemingses of Monticello" and a Harvard professor. "Many people want to see him as perfect in some way." But his determined pursuit of Judge, she said, as much as his will freeing his slaves, reflects the basic mind set of slave owners. "It's saying, 'Whatever I might think about slavery in the abstract, I should be able to do what I want with my property,'" she said. "I said to myself: 'Here I am, a scholar in this field. Why don't I know about her?'" Ms. Dunbar recalled. Since then, Judge's story has inspired several children's books, and even an episode of "Drunk History." But "Never Caught" is the first full length nonfiction account, drawing on some newly unearthed sources to track her from Mount Vernon to New York City, Philadelphia and then New Hampshire, at a time when gradual abolition left the line between slavery and freedom ambiguous. "There's a myth of the North as free, but her story shows how complicated that was," Ms. Dunbar said. It is in the meticulous ledgers of Mount Vernon that we first see Ona Maria Judge, who was born around 1773 to an enslaved mother and a father who was a white indentured servant. At age 9 she was brought to live in the mansion house, eventually becoming Martha Washington's personal maid. When Washington became president, Judge followed the first couple to New York and then Philadelphia, home to a growing free black community. Free blacks, Ms. Dunbar writes, aided Judge's escape in the midst of a presidential dinner, after she had learned that she was to be given to Martha Washington's granddaughter, Eliza. And it was free blacks who helped her catch a sailing ship to Portsmouth, N.H., where she married, had three children and lived on the edge of poverty, laboring in households far less exalted than the Washingtons'. Four months later Washington was dead, freeing all his slaves in his will. Judge and the others held by Martha Washington remained her legal property. Ms. Dunbar calls Washington's act "no small thing," but does not see the former president, who had no biological children to disinherit, as the hero of the story. "When it was safe, he emancipated his slaves," she said. "He dealt with it after his death. And you know what? That's what all the founders did with slavery: They kicked the can down the road."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Botox injections are approved to reduce the frequency of migraine headaches, but studies of their effectiveness have had mixed results. Now a review of studies has concluded that Botox has small but significant benefits, with few serious side effects. Researchers analyzed data from 17 studies, including 3,646 patients, that tested botulinum toxin injections against placebos. More than 86 percent of the patients were women, and 43 percent had chronic migraines, with more than 15 headache days a month. The analysis is in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. Treatment usually consists of 15 to 20 shots around the head and neck given once every three or four months. The pooled data showed that in comparison to a placebo, Botox injections resulted in an average 1.6 fewer attacks per month for chronic sufferers those with more than 15 headaches a month. Botox did have more side effects than a placebo, including a greater incidence of muscle weakness, double vision, drooping eyelids, neck pain and muscle tightness, though no severe side effects were reported.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
Ronny Rodriguez, a physical education instructor at Sheridan Academy for Young Leaders, an elementary school in the Bronx, ran 12 students through a rigorous 50 minute class. More than a half century ago, President Dwight D. Eisenhower formed the President's Council on Youth Fitness, and today Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Michelle Obama are among those making childhood obesity a public cause. But even as virtually every state has undertaken significant school reforms, many American students are being granted little or no time in the gym. In its biennial survey of high school students across the nation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in June that nearly half said they had no physical education classes in an average week. In New York City, that number was 20.5 percent, compared with 14.4 percent a decade earlier, according to the C.D.C. That echoed findings by New York City's comptroller, in October, of inadequate physical education at each of the elementary schools that auditors visited. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, found just 20 percent of elementary schools in San Francisco's system were meeting the state's requirements: 20 minutes per day. At Anatola Elementary School in Van Nuys, Calif., not only are there no gym teachers, but there is also no gym. The principal, Miriam King, has relied on 15 an hour aides to oversee once weekly exercise regimens for her 450 students at an outside playground. "Sometimes, when it is raining, we just cancel," Ms. King said. In the Miami Dade School District in Florida, physical education classes for middle school students were threatened by state legislation last year, in the face of anemic local tax collections and dropping property values. But the district's top health educator, Jayne D. Greenberg, watched in thankful relief as a grass roots effort mounted enough political pressure to beat back the proposed cuts. Still, Dr. Greenberg said, she has had to "double up some of the elementary physical education classes." In East Harlem, at TAG Young Scholars, an elementary and middle school for gifted students, there was no gym teacher for elementary students, according to Patricia Saydah, whose son Mitchell Deutsch just finished the first grade there. Art teachers and guidance counselors oversaw the classes, and students were sometimes called on to demonstrate stretching, Mitchell said. Next year threatens more hardship: One of the four schools that share TAG's building is expanding, further straining the sole gym. "He comes out of school and he is bouncing off the walls," she said. Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, has proposed injecting language into the federal budget creating incentives for schools to report how much physical activity students are getting. He also asked the Government Accountability Office to look into the issue and, in February, it released a survey showing that while schools appeared more aware of the benefits of physical education, "they have reduced the amount of time spent" on such classes. Principals most frequently blame budget cuts, and in New York, they also cite pressures to devote resources to test preparation, and what one union leader called a lack of interest from the department headquarters. "There does not appear to be a promotion, or support, from the Department of Education for daily physical education in many of our high schools," said Jeff Engel, a vice principal at Long Island City High School, in Queens, who is a member of the executive board of the principals' union. He said that his own school provided daily physical education, but that many did not. "We have a huge obesity epidemic in the city, yet we see many of our high schools going to nondaily physical education." According to the city comptroller's audit, none of the 31 elementary schools that auditors visited were holding physical education classes as frequently as required: every day for kindergarten through third grade and three times a week for grades four through six, for a minimum of 120 minutes weekly; and at least 90 minutes a week for grades seven and eight. In grades 7 through 12, state guidelines call for physical education three times a week in one semester and twice a week in another. Kathleen Grimm, New York City's deputy schools chancellor for operations, said the Bloomberg administration required adequate physical education in schools, but acknowledged it had work to do. Since principals face challenges in providing space and time for those classes, she said, the administration hoped to put a plan in place by summer's end to provide them "better support" across all areas of education, including physical education. The department has not filed a physical education plan with the state since 1982, though state officials recommend a new one every seven years. A spokeswoman for the city schools says one will be presented in September. "There is shrinking P.E. and recess time for our kids," Dr. Ratey wrote. "P.E. teachers are fighting like cats and dogs to hold the line on their jobs and worth, at the same time as there is a dawning awareness that we have missed the boat." Despite the shortcomings in physical education, Mr. Bloomberg has received high marks from public health advocates for his anti obesity policies, including calorie disclosures in chain restaurants, a proposed ban on large sugary drinks in certain settings, and limits on the calorie and sugar contents of food sold in school vending machines. In the meantime, the city has promoted several school health initiatives, including 10 minute "fitness breaks" in classrooms and before and after school recreation for middle school students. And Ms. Grimm said that the city had been honored, nationally, for a program to assess students' fitness and that 850,000 pupils had completed the program this year. In December, the city said that annual fitness exams given to most of the city's kindergarten though eighth grade students showed a 5.5 percent drop in the number of obese schoolchildren over five years, the biggest decline reported by any large city. Despite the improvements, the study showed that 21 percent of the children were still considered obese. One elementary school making an effort is Sheridan Academy for Young Leaders, in the Bronx, where Ronny Rodriguez, a physical education instructor, ran 12 students through a rigorous 50 minute class one day last month. Each student gets class once a week, far short of state requirements. During fitness breaks, students in science class stand and clap to the beat of a heart, and in social studies, they move as if navigating a rain forest. Still, Mr. Rodriguez and Vicki Weiner, co chairwoman of the school's wellness program, wish more days had gym class.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
In the late 1980s, scientists at Osaka University in Japan noticed unusual repeated DNA sequences next to a gene they were studying in a common bacterium. They mentioned them in the final paragraph of a paper: "The biological significance of these sequences is not known." Now their significance is known, and it has set off a scientific frenzy. The sequences, it turns out, are part of a sophisticated immune system that bacteria use to fight viruses. And that system, whose very existence was unknown until about seven years ago, may provide scientists with unprecedented power to rewrite the code of life. In the past year or so, researchers have discovered that the bacterial system can be harnessed to make precise changes to the DNA of humans, as well as other animals and plants. This means a genome can be edited, much as a writer might change words or fix spelling errors. It allows "customizing the genome of any cell or any species at will," said Charles Gersbach, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University. Already the molecular system, known as Crispr, is being used to make genetically engineered laboratory animals more easily than could be done before, with changes in multiple genes. Scientists in China recently made monkeys with changes in two genes. Scientists hope Crispr might also be used for genomic surgery, as it were, to correct errant genes that cause disease. Working in a laboratory not, as yet, in actual humans researchers at the Hubrecht Institute in the Netherlands showed they could fix a mutation that causes cystic fibrosis. The technique is also raising ethical issues. The ease of creating genetically altered monkeys and rodents could lead to more animal experimentation. And the technique of altering genes in their embryos could conceivably work with human embryos as well, raising the specter of so called designer babies. "It does make it easier to genetically engineer the human germ line," said Craig C. Mello, a Nobel laureate at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, referring to making genetic changes that could be passed to future generations. Still, Crispr is moving toward commercial use. Five academic experts recently raised 43 million to start Editas Medicine, a company in Cambridge, Mass., that aims to treat inherited disease. Other start ups include Crispr Therapeutics, which is being formed in London, and Caribou Biosciences in Berkeley, Calif. Agricultural companies might use Crispr to change existing genes in crops to create new traits. That might sidestep the regulations and controversy surrounding genetically engineered crops, which generally have foreign DNA added. The development of the new tool is an example of the unanticipated benefits of basic research. About 15 years ago, after it became possible to sequence the entire genomes of bacteria, scientists noticed that many species had those repeated DNA sequences that were first noticed a decade earlier in Osaka. They were called "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats" Crispr for short. It is part of an adaptive immune system one that remembers a pathogen so it is ready the next time that same invader appears. The human adaptive immune system is why people get measles only once and why vaccines work. But it was not imagined that single cell organisms like bacteria had such systems. Here is how it works. The repeated DNA sequences in the bacterial genome are separated from one another by other sequences. These "spacers" are excerpts from the sequences of viruses that have attacked the bacterium or its ancestors. They are like genetic mug shots, telling the bacterium which bad guys to watch for. The Crispr defense system will slice up any DNA with that same sequence, so if the same virus invades again, it will be destroyed. If a previously unseen virus attacks, a new spacer, a new mug shot, is made and put at the end of the chain. That means the Crispr region "is like a tape recording of exposure to prior invaders," said Erik J. Sontheimer, a Northwestern University professor who helped unravel the mechanism. And it provides a way to tell two bacterial strains apart, because even two strains from the same species are likely to have encountered different viruses. This is already being used to identify sources of food poisoning outbreaks. Cheese and yogurt companies can examine Crispr regions to see if their bacterial cultures are immunized against particular viruses that could slow production. The real frenzy, however, started in 2012, when a team led by Emmanuelle Charpentier, then at Umea University in Sweden, and Jennifer A. Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrated a way for researchers to use Crispr to slice up any DNA sequence they choose. Scientists must synthesize a strand of DNA's chemical cousin RNA, part of which matches the DNA sequence to be sliced. This "guide RNA" is attached to a bacterial enzyme called Cas9. When the guide RNA binds to the corresponding DNA sequence, Cas9 cuts the DNA at that site. The cell tries to repair the cut but often does so imperfectly, which is enough to disable, or knock out a gene. To change a gene, scientists usually insert a patch a bit of DNA similar to where the break occurred but containing the desired change. That patch is sometimes incorporated into the DNA when the cell repairs the break. Would this work in organisms besides bacteria? "I knew it was like firing a starting gun in a race," Dr. Doudna said, but sure enough, by early 2013 scientists had shown it would work in human cells, and those of many other animals and plants, even though these species are not known to have Crispr based immune systems. "I don't know any species of plant or animal where it has been tried and it failed," said George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. "It allows you to do genome engineering on organisms that are very hard to do otherwise." In the past, making an animal with multiple genetic changes usually required creating separate animals with single changes and then crossbreeding them to produce offspring with multiple changes. With Crispr, multiple genetic changes can be made in one step, by putting multiple guide RNAs into the cell. "It just completely changes the landscape," Dr. Doudna said. Berkeley scientists used to farm out that work to specialized laboratories or companies. Now, she said, "people are able to make mice in their own labs." There are other techniques that can do what Crispr does, though Crispr is "the easiest by far," Dr. Church said. RNA interference, for instance, can silence particular genes. It is similar to Crispr in that it also uses RNA that matches the gene to be silenced. But RNA interference works by inhibiting messenger RNA, which translates a gene into a protein. That usually provides only a partial and temporary disabling of the gene, because the cell can make new messenger RNA. Crispr disables the gene itself, potentially a more complete and permanent inactivation. There are also already ways to change genes, namely zinc finger nucleases and transcription activator like effector nucleases, or Talens. The biotechnology company Sangamo BioSciences is already conducting a clinical trial of a treatment for H.I.V. that uses zinc fingers to alter patients' immune cells to make them resistant to the virus. Both techniques use proteins to guide where the DNA is cut; it is more difficult to develop a protein that binds to a specific DNA sequence than it is to make a piece of RNA with the matching sequence. Chase L. Beisel at North Carolina State reported that Crispr could be used to kill one strain of bacteria in a mixture of strains, by targeting a sequence unique to that strain. That might one day lead to antibiotics that can kill the bad bugs without also killing the good ones. David S. Weiss of Emory University found that some bacteria use Cas9 to silence one of their own genes, rather than that of a virus, to help them evade detection by their host's immune system. The pace of new discoveries and applications is dizzying. "All of this has basically happened in a year," Dr. Weiss said. "It's incredible."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
REX, a brokerage in Woodland Hills, Calif., has an AI trained robot that greets potential buyers at home showings. It can answer questions such as "How old is the roof?" and "How are the schools around here?" Zenny is not your ordinary real estate broker. For starters, Zenny is only three feet tall, with a long slender body and a rectangular head. Zenny is also quite young: Created in 2017 by Zenplace, a rental management start up, Zenny is a remote controlled robot that is essentially an iPad mounted on a wheeled base, and it is part of an expanding fleet of bionic agents showing homes across the United States. During Covid 19, their numbers are only growing. Eric Holly, Zenplace's chief executive, has been with the company since 2017. At the time, he said, "Real estate was old school, a lot of pen and paper, shaking hands, a lot of face to face." There's plenty of competition: VirtualAPT, based in Brooklyn, has robots that glide through homes and provide immersive virtual reality tours; REX, a brokerage in Woodland Hills, Calif., has an AI trained robot to answer potential buyers' questions at open houses; RealFriend and OjoLabs have AI powered chatbots that mimic human conversation while providing deeply personalized home listings and buying advice. In Zenny's case, the robot is powered remotely by the real estate broker or property manager who is handling the showing from afar. It is also equipped with sensors to keep it from running into walls or people. In addition to Zenny, Zenplace's platform includes a full suite of rental management solutions, including tenant screening, electronic lockboxes for on demand property viewings, and a secure online portal for rent payment. The company charges a 599 flat fee for some properties, and 99 a month for others. VirtualAPT's robots, which roll through homes capturing 360 degree videos in 4K resolution, provide ultra crisp, high quality images. Their service costs 50 cents per square foot, which is significantly less than a human video crew would charge. And REX, a full service, digitally focused real estate brokerage leaning heavily on tech and AI, has equipped its robotic kiosks with AI and natural language processing. They charge a fee of only 2 percent of the home's sale price, compared to the traditional 5 to 6 percent that traditional agents take. "Way back in 2017 we started experimenting with all sorts of AI and robotic systems for showing homes, including the REX Robot Kiosk," said Andy Barkett, REX's chief technology officer. "You could ask it questions like 'How old is the roof?' Or 'How are the schools around here?' and it would answer.'" Their focus now is on drone based imaging, which they use to display customized information about REX and the property on hand, and building 3 D models of each home using digital imaging and LiDar technology. Zenny's added value, Mr. Holly said, is that tenants can set the schedule for viewings, cutting through the red tape of traffic crowded calendars. "It's an on demand economy," Mr. Holly said, "If you look at any other product that you can purchase in the marketplace, you don't have to negotiate a time to go see it, so that's a huge barrier that slows the process down." In the world of rentals, robots could be a win win, said Kelli Miller, a broker associate at Compass Real Estate in Cardiff, Calif. "Realtors don't make any money on rentals, and you put in a lot of work showing those homes," she said. "Renters, too, aren't putting down their life savings, so they're not picky, and a robot could definitely make things more convenient." But when it comes to home purchases, Ms. Miller was more skeptical. "Part of finding an ideal home means having your needs understood, and requires building a relationship between a buyer and an agent. A robot may be convenient and efficient, but it can't do that." Where bionic realtors are making headway in real estate, bots are quickly moving in, as well. Luke, an AI powered chatbot from the start up RealFriend, scours dozens of real estate databases to pull personalized recommendations. The bot provides detailed recommendations with targeted amenities like sunlight, safety ratings and nearby subways, and can also answer specific questions such as, "Which directions do the windows face?" or "Is this apartment a better deal than where I am currently living?" RealFriend was started in 2018 by Hadar Landau and Omri Klinger, two entrepreneurs who served in the same elite intelligence unit of the Israel Defense Forces. They first rolled out Dooron, Luke's older, Hebrew speaking cousin, for the Tel Aviv rental market. Luke launched in New York in July. The service is free for users. Brokers selling a property, who generally earn a three percent commission on sales in New York City, pay Luke 25 percent of their commission when the bot brings in a buyer. The developers consulted with a behavioral economist when building both Luke and Dooron, employing strategies like always letting the client make the decision; making sure the bot's replies are a discussion rather than facts only; and showing vulnerability by admitting when the bot doesn't understand or gets something wrong. Users say the result is similar to texting with a person if that person had access to every real estate listing in the city. "Luke is very empathetic. He apologizes if his answers are taking too long. It really feels like you're talking to a person," said Dr. Ruben Pagan, who has been hunting for a new one bedroom apartment with a traditional broker for four months. One month ago, he decided to expand his search reach, and began using Luke to browse listings, while he also kept his human broker. Thanks to Luke's direction, he's now focused on New York's Seaport neighborhood, and finds himself exploring properties and asking Luke for a recommended starting offer at all hours. "I can text him at 11 p.m., or even 1 a.m., and not worry that I'm bothering him," Dr. Pagan said. He started using Luke by asking which neighborhoods in the city were considered "up and coming" with prices around 700 per square foot. RealFriend says that 45,000 users have chatted with Luke since his New York debut, resulting in more than 1,000 signed leases and a handful of home purchases. Mr. Klinger, RealFriend's co founder and chief technology officer, says he expects the number of buyers utilizing Luke to grow.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
President Trump has made heckling the Federal Reserve, and its chair, Jerome H. Powell, something of a sport. He has berated Mr. Powell for raising interest rates and taking steps to end a crisis era stimulus program, likening the Fed to a powerful golfer who has "no touch" and cannot win. The past provides some precedent for that frayed relationship. The executive branch had avoided complaining about the Fed or interest rate policy since the Clinton administration, after officials determined that criticizing the independent central bank was a bad approach and leaving it alone would lead to better economic outcomes. But Mr. Trump quickly dumped that doctrine and returned to an old pattern of blaming the Fed for not doing more to help the president by lifting the economy. His grievances echo those voiced by presidents in the 1960s and '70s, though his favored delivery channel a social media account with more than 60 million followers is far more public. Below is a timeline of Mr. Trump's comments, a history of the White House's relationship with the central bank and a dive into the practicalities of an untested development: the president's recent flirtation with stripping Mr. Powell of his chair title and demoting him to a Fed governor . Such a move, if it worked, could allow Mr. Trump to install a new chair one who would ostensibly vote in favor of lowering rates more quickly. Can the president demote the Fed chair? It depends. Candidate Trump accused the Fed of being too political. As president, he has encouraged its politicization. Mr. Trump's Fed rhetoric has evolved since he was a presidential candidate accusing the agency of keeping rates low to help President Barack Obama. More recently, he has accused the Fed and Mr. Powell, whom he appointed as the chair, of undercutting his economic policies by keeping rates too high. Bashing rate policy on the campaign trail "The interest rates are kept down by President Obama. I have no doubt that that's the reason that they are being kept down now as a real estate person, I love it." Mr. Trump, speaking to CNBC Mr. Trump, a real estate developer with a fondness for borrowing money, said he personally favored low rates. But that did not stop him from claiming that the Fed was keeping rates low to benefit Mr. Obama. The Fed cut rates to near zero in the wake of the financial crisi s, when the economy was mired in a recession, and lifted them just twice during Mr. Obama's tenure as it tried to give the economy room to recover. "I do like a low interest rate policy, I must be honest with you." Mr. Trump, speaking to The Wall Street Journal When asked about the Fed's policies in 2017, Mr. Trump stopped short of criticizing the central bank or its chair, Janet L. Yellen, who was embarking on a slow but steady plan to return interest rates to a more normal level as the economy grew more steadily. The Fed lifted rates three times in 2017. "I don't like all of this work that we're putting into the economy and then I see rates going up." Mr. Trump, speaking on CNBC The president broke with recent White House precedent in July 2018. Mr. Trump, with the help of Republican lawmakers, had pushed through a 1.5 trillion tax cut in December 2017, a move he said would increase economic growth to as much as 5 percent. The Fed raised rates to keep the economy from overheating, but Mr. Trump saw those moves as working against his economic policies. "My biggest threat is the Fed. Because the Fed is raising rates too fast, and it's independent, so I don't speak to him, but I'm not happy with what he's doing." Mr. Trump, speaking to Fox Business Network The Fed had raised rates three times already in 2018, prompting Mr. Trump to accuse the central bank and Mr. Powell of posing the biggest threat to the American economy. Those remarks did not deter the Fed it voted for a fourth increase in December 2018. Mr. Volcker, who was the Fed chair from 1979 to 1987, said in his recent memoir that during a 1984 White House meeting with Ronald Reagan and James A. Baker III, then the chief of staff, Mr. Baker declared that "the president is ordering you not to raise interest rates before the election." Mr. Volcker, who had not planned on raising rates and found the attack to be an overstep, walked out without replying. Fast forward to the early 1990s, and Bill Clinton's team convinced him that grousing publicly about the Fed was useless: The independent central bank would and should set policy as it saw fit based on economic conditions. A hands off approach lasted for a quarter century until after Mr. Trump's election. To fire, demote or wait it out? "I think the law is clear that I have a four year term, and I fully intend to serve it." Mr. Powell, at a June 19 news conference As Mr. Trump's displeasure with the Fed has mounted, his administration has explored how to rid itself of Mr. Powell. Based on the Federal Reserve Act, the central bank's governors can be removed from their 14 year terms only for cause. The chair is a governor, so he is nearly impossible to outright fire. Instead, Mr. Trump has reportedly toyed with demoting Mr. Powell to a simple governorship. It remains unclear whether that is possible: There has never been an attempt, so there is no court precedent. Because of the 1977 Federal Reserve Reform Act, the Senate separately confirms the chair to a four year term, so Congress could bring a lawsuit if Mr. Trump tried to remove Mr. Powell. Mr. Powell has said that he thinks the "law is clear" and that he has his role for the duration. Mr. Trump's better chance of getting rid of Mr. Powell will come in 2022, when his term runs out. If Mr. Trump is re elected, he could choose to appoint a new Fed chief. Even then, he would have to get his nominee through Congress, which has been unwilling to confirm Mr. Trump's more unconventional picks for the Fed Board.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
In its first steps toward commercialization, IBM's Watson took on grand, science laden challenges like helping doctors diagnose cancer. But that is changing as IBM strives to build its artificial intelligence technology into a multibillion dollar business. Today, companies including Geico, Staples and Macy's are adding the Watson technology to answer customer questions or to improve mobile apps that guide shoppers through stores. Now in its broadest deployment so far, Watson will be assisting H R Block's 70,000 tax professionals this filing season at 10,000 branch offices across the country, where 11 million people file taxes. The H R Block partnership with Watson, announced on Wednesday, is being presented to a wider audience with a 60 second television ad during the Super Bowl on Sunday. For IBM, the collaboration with H R Block underlines its strategy in the emerging market for artificial intelligence technology. Watson will touch consumers, but through IBM's corporate clients. "Watson will become a really smart, virtual assistant," said David Kenny, senior vice president of IBM's Watson business. The embedded in business formula is different from the path other technology companies are taking with digital assistants powered by artificial intelligence. Others are pursuing the broad consumer market directly with artificial intelligence software helpers like Siri from Apple, Cortana from Microsoft, Alexa from Amazon and Assistant from Google. Data fueled artificial intelligence will be an ingredient in all kinds of software used in corporations, to streamline work, identify new customers, spot savings and guide product development, analysts say. By 2018, the research company IDC predicts that 75 percent of new business software will include artificial intelligence features. "A.I. is becoming part of the mix, part of the infrastructure in consumer and business applications," said David Schubmehl, an IDC analyst. IBM is also banking on Watson as an engine of its corporate transformation. The company needs its new businesses like Watson, data analysis and cloud computing to more than make up for the erosion in its traditional hardware and software products. That has not happened yet. Two weeks ago, IBM reported its 19th consecutive quarter of declining revenue. But there were encouraging signs in the last quarter of 2016. IBM executives noted that the company's newer businesses, including Watson, grew by 14 percent to represent 41 percent of total revenue. That was ahead of IBM's previous forecast that the 40 percent of revenue threshold would not be reached until 2018. The H R Block collaboration suggests that IBM is getting better at working with partners. Some of the early Watson projects stretched out for years partly because of poor communications between IBM and its clients. "This is not magic," Mr. Cobb said the Watson team told him. "You have to teach Watson over time." Watson proved to be a quick learner. Its core skill is its ability to digest and classify vast amounts of text, using what is known as natural language processing. So, among other things, it was fed the 74,000 pages of the federal tax code and thousands of tax related questions culled from H R Block's data, accumulated over six decades of preparing tax returns. Then, H R Block tax professionals were brought in to "train" Watson. They approved when Watson suggested a smart question for a particular tax filer and corrected it when a proposed question was off base. The tax professionals were not told they were working with Watson, just a software program. The technology was tested in about 100 H R Block offices in January, and it will be available throughout the company's retail network next week. One goal, Mr. Cobb said, is to assist H R Block's tax professionals and improve their chances of fairly increasing refunds and reducing tax liabilities for clients. Seventy five percent of Americans who file taxes get money back. For H R Block clients, the figure is about 85 percent, Mr. Cobb said. But Watson's other task was to make visiting H R Block a more "engaging and interactive" experience, he said. Clients will be able to watch suggestions and questions on a separate screen, as the Watson assisted tax professional works. Mr. Cobb said he was "very pleased" with Watson's performance in the 100 office trial. But the test will come after this tax season, when H R Block sees what percentage of customers return next year. The retention rate is crucial in the tax preparation business. Sixty percent of the 140 million Americans who file taxes seek help instead of doing them themselves. Kartik Mehta, an analyst at Northcoast Research, estimates that H R Block's retention rate is 75 percent. "If they can get that 75 percent up to 80 percent, it's a big deal for H R Block," Mr. Mehta said. The Watson collaboration is a "long term partnership," Mr. Cobb said. Mr. Kenny of IBM described this tax season as "phase one" of the partnership. Over time, Watson's suggestions get better and better, more individually tailored to specific occupations, household finances and personal circumstances. "It's crawl, walk, run learning," Mr. Kenny said. "But the pace of the Watson learning is so much faster than humans."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Instead of applauding the courage of the millions of voters who stood in long lines during a horrible pandemic, and the supreme dedication of poll workers who have put in many, long hours, President Trump is spreading ridiculous falsehoods about the voting process. In many states, Republicans demanded that mail in votes could not be counted until Election Day. That is one of the main reasons it is taking so long to count all of the votes, not because anyone is doing anything illegal. If President Trump wants to challenge the results with recounts, that's fine; it's his right to do so. But he should not try to cast doubt on the integrity of the poll workers or the millions of determined people on both sides who went to great lengths to vote. President Trump's early claim of victory on the night of the election and his news conference Thursday night remind me of playing Candy Land with my 5 year old nephew. It only counts if he wins, and forget about rules. If disappointment ensues, the whole board will be flipped upside down. Is this what the United States of America has come to? When is the intervention? I was a member of the team of lawyers who worked on the 2000 recount team for Al Gore. My law partner, Warren Christopher, supervised the effort and served as the counterpart to James A. Baker III, who headed the George W. Bush cohort. Though the battle was hard fought, Mr. Christopher and Mr. Baker shared an unspoken understanding that the manner in which the parties engaged could have a profound impact on how Americans viewed the institutions that are fundamental to our democracy. Though the fight can hardly be said to have been waged under Marquess of Queensberry rules or that the contest was free of political manipulation, there were lines that were not crossed. Ignoring the laws that govern our elections was not on the table in 2000, nor should it be in 2020. Mark Steinberg Los Angeles The writer was an associate deputy attorney general and counselor on international law under President Bill Clinton. As the United States painstakingly counted its election ballots state by bloody state and agonized over the razor thin margins between two presidential candidates, the rest of the world was bewildered and asking: Couldn't all this nonsense be avoided if there were no Electoral College and all we had to do was tally the national popular vote? Many people have been asking how President Trump received so many votes, even after all of his gross incompetence during the past four years. People have also been lamenting that they don't know what America we are living in. For answers, I suggest reading "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent," by Isabel Wilkerson. I have been doing so during the past two weeks and believe her thesis that America's social structure is fundamentally a caste system to be quite compelling. Re "Exit Polls Point to the Power of White Patriarchy" (column, nytimes.com, Nov. 4): Charles M. Blow wonders why so many gay people, Black men and white women voted for President Trump, concluding that aspiration "to power by proximity" must be the reason. An alternative explanation might be that many Americans, regardless of race, sexual orientation or gender, voted for Mr. Trump because they believed that he was better for "the economy" code for "I fear losing my livelihood, my life savings and my ability to pay for health care more than I fear the virus." Democrats need to do a better job of hearing those fears and crafting messages that speak to them. If Democrats had been able to persuade Americans that to rebuild our economy, we must control the virus first, there might have been more than a razor thin margin between Joe Biden and the most corrupt, incompetent president in modern history. It is public knowledge that President Trump's hotels and golf courses are losing substantial amounts of money. Without the presidency to help support the occupancy and use of these facilities by those who would like to curry favor with the president, these facilities would be a financial disaster.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Roblox, a gaming company that had been preparing to go public this month, has decided to delay its initial public offering until next year, in a sign that the enthusiastic market for I.P.O.s by DoorDash and Airbnb this past week has made it difficult to price shares accurately. The company's co founder and chief executive, David Baszucki, announced the decision in a memo to employees on Friday, saying that waiting provided "an opportunity to improve our specific process for employees, shareholders and future investors both big and small." DoorDash, the country's largest food delivery company, started trading Wednesday with an I.P.O. price of 102, but ended the day up 86 percent, closing at 189.51 per share. The next day, Airbnb, a home rental company, rose 113 percent on its first day of trading, from 68 to 144.71 per share. A slew of companies have rushed to go public before the end of the year. But the head turning results have raised concerns about a new stock market bubble and prompted questions about whether the valuations of the unprofitable start ups were divorced from reality.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Every neighborhood has its stepchild, an overlooked swath that does not receive as much attention as surrounding blocks. For Midtown East, that area is around East 57th Street near Bloomingdale's, a strip with neither the commercial bustle found farther south, nor the rarefied character of its decidedly residential neighbors Sutton Place and the Upper East Side. But several new developments could soon give the area a residential flavor all its own. Spurred by the success of trophy skyscrapers like 432 Park Avenue, developers are planning luxury residential towers that could reshape the area between Park Avenue and Second Avenue from 57th Street to 60th Street. At the corner of Second Avenue, sales recently began at 252 East 57th Street, a 65 story residential tower. And at 520 Park Avenue, on the edge of the Upper East Side at 60th Street, a 54 story limestone tower designed by Robert A. M. Stern Architects is rising with a triplex penthouse priced at a jaw dropping 130 million. Developers are also assembling parcels around Bloomingdale's while new developments rise in the lower 60s, blurring the boundary between Midtown East and the Upper East Side. "It is an area that has kind of been forgotten and not developed as much in recent years," said Gabby Warshawer, the director of research and communications for CityRealty. "It's finally having its day." The World Wide Group, which is developing 252 East 57th Street with Rose Associates, hopes to attract Upper East Side buyers looking for new construction, as well as international buyers. The 65 story tower will include 93 condominiums beginning on the 36th floor, so all these units will enjoy desirable city views. The lower half of the building will include 173 luxury rentals. Prices for condos start at 4.5 million for a two bedroom, and the penthouse, which is not on the market yet, will be listed for 37.5 million. Other units include a five bedroom listed for 21.25 million. For another 250,000, residents can buy a parking spot. Prices have not been set for the rentals, which will begin leasing closer to the time the building opens in late 2016. "It's the new start of the Upper East Side," said Pamela D'Arc, an agent at Stribling and Associates who is marketing the development. The temptation to draw Midtown into the Upper East Side's fold can be hard to resist. After all, sellers obtain much higher prices for properties with Upper East Side addresses. In the third quarter, the average sale price for a residential property in Midtown East was 1.161 million, nearly half of the 2.236 million during the same period on the Upper East Side, according to data provided by CityRealty. "At this point, East 57th Street is becoming the Upper East Side," said Tamir Shemesh, an agent at the Corcoran Group who is marketing several new developments in the vicinity. "It's like Tokyo and Yokohama they used to be far from each other and now they're one big city." The residential tower at 252 East 57th Street is the final stage of an effort by World Wide, starting in 2005, to redevelop a one and a half acre site that now includes two public schools and a Whole Foods. With three floors of retail planned for the tower, World Wide hopes the project will transform the unremarkable corner into the East Side's answer to the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, the architects for the Time Warner Center, also designed 252 East 57th Street, which will have an undulating glass curtain wall so every condo apartment and some rentals will have at least one window that curves inward. "We see this as an eastern version" of the Time Warner Center, said Julia Hodgson, the director of development for World Wide. "It's all one residential corridor." Not everyone is convinced that a Whole Foods and a few more shops could reinvent Second Avenue the way that the Time Warner Center invigorated Columbus Circle when it opened in 2004. "We've had such big hopes for that Whole Foods, but half of the time it's empty," said Victoria Vinokur, an agent with Halstead Property who also lives in Midtown East. "There's nothing else in the radius." A handful of restaurants like the Smith and Crave Fishbar have opened along Second Avenue around 50th Street, replacing check cashing shops and unmemorable Irish pubs with more sophisticated eateries. But the blocks farther north still feel like an afterthought. "It's not an easy street to maintain a business on, because it doesn't get the foot traffic and the rents are quite high," said Paul Anavian, the manager of Manhattan Arts and Antiques Center, which has been on Second Avenue since 1975. Businesses have an easier time farther west. Tres Carnes, a popular downtown barbecue taco restaurant, opened an outpost on Third Avenue and 57th Street this spring. And Spa Castle Premier 57 plans to open a three story luxury spa at 57th Street and Park Avenue in late November. On East 60th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues, World Wide plans to build a residential development across from Bloomingdale's. "That will also be a tall tower," said Ms. Hodgson, adding that it would "be a similar type of development" to the East 57th Street project. To make way for the tower, World Wide has been steadily assembling low rise buildings on the block, including the building that houses the Subway Inn, a beloved dive bar that has been in its location for 77 years. But World Wide did not renew the bar's lease and on Dec. 2, the storied tavern is scheduled to close and later move to a new location on Second Avenue and 60th street, two blocks away. "This whole block is changing left and right," said Steven Salinas, whose father, Arsemio, owns the Subway Inn. "Everybody wants to make a lot of money and the city's letting them do that, and they don't care too much about the mom and pop places." More blocks might soon amass the ubiquitous sidewalk bridges and cranes that have come to symbolize an era of endless construction. On Third Avenue from 58th to 59th Streets, Harry Macklowe, the developer of 432 Park Avenue, bought three properties just north of the Decoration and Design Building earlier this year. He recently partnered with Keppel Land, a Singapore developer, to redevelop the parcel, which will include residential and retail. "It's not going to be 432 Park," said Mr. Shemesh of Corcoran, who is familiar with the Third Avenue development. "You can't compare a project on Third Avenue with Park Avenue, and it certainly won't be in that price level." In the low East 60s, several residential developments are also underway, including a 30 story tower at 1059 Third Avenue and a 19 story residential development at 301 East 61st Street. Later this year, sales are expected to begin at 337 East 62nd Street, a seven story, 22 unit boutique condo developed by Yeung Real Estate Development. Prices will start at around 700,000 for a 600 square foot one bedroom, and the largest apartment, a three bedroom duplex with a garden, will be listed for around 3 million, according to Mr. Shemesh, who is marketing the property. Although developers insist they have discovered untapped potential in the area, others see it more as development following the path of least resistance. "I don't think there's a strategy other than this is where we can assemble land," said Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel. "It's the site first and concept later."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
When she was named director of MoMA PS1 this summer, the British curator Kate Fowle said she would still make time to organize exhibitions and work directly with artists. Next year, she will as one of four curators of Greater New York, the art center's once every five year survey of contemporary art made in and around the city. The fifth edition of Greater New York will open in the fall of 2020, and promises to be another sprawling survey of new art, principally (but not only) by up and coming artists. Leading the selection team is Ruba Katrib, the PS1 curator who co organized "Theater of Operations," its current, building spanning exhibition of art in the shadow of the wars in Iraq. Joining Ms. Katrib are Ms. Fowle; the Ugandan independent curator Serubiri Moses; and Ines Katzenstein, MoMA's curator of Latin American art, who organized its current landmark exhibition "Sur Moderno." The quartet has not yet settled on a list of artists, but they have already had "a lot of conversations between ourselves about the New York that we're in right now," said Ms. Fowle. A focus of their discussion, she added, has been changing patterns of migration to New York; for example, the city now has the country's largest Native American population. The exhibition will therefore zero in on "New York as a network," and examine the friendships and alliances that local artists might forge in and beyond the city. "So many people who call New York home also have a home elsewhere," said Ms. Fowle. "You can have many homes at once."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
One of the newest additions to Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater's repertory is, in another sense, the oldest. Asadata Dafora choreographed "Awassa Astrige/Ostrich" in 1932, soon after moving to New York from his native Sierra Leone. On Friday at the David H. Koch Theater, Ailey became one of a handful of troupes to present this three and a half minute gem, with Antonio Douthit Boyd as its majestic interpreter: part prowling warrior, part resplendent bird. Mr. Dafora was one of the first artists to translate West African dance onto the Western theatrical stage. While "Ostrich" may not feel as groundbreaking now as it did then, it invokes an important chapter in modern dance history, when black choreographers in America were for the first time commanding respect as artists, not just entertainers. Mr. Dafora's student Charles Moore recreated the dance; the former Ailey dancer Ella Thompson Moore restaged it. With hips bedecked in colorful plumage, the strapping Mr. Douthit Boyd entered with a slow, gliding strut: chest high, arms rippling like beating wings, each step landing on a low drumbeat in Ron McBee and Carl Riley's ritualistic music. Darting, birdlike movements alternated with luxuriant, liquid preening and the occasional coiling crouch or springing leap, before the same proud walk carried him offstage. There were resonances here, in the body's pulsations, of Ronald K. Brown's ecstatic "Grace" (1999), an Ailey staple, which opened the program. The more you see this dance, the more it reveals and the less imposing its spiritual overtones. (Recordings of Duke Ellington's "Come Sunday," with its call to "God almighty God of love," bookend the rousing house and jazz score.) This time, I noticed Mr. Brown's expressive use of the palms, the way in which an open hand can be an invitation or a plea or a challenge, communicating "Come here" or "What do you want from me?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
On a sunny Saturday morning in New York a few months ago, a group of 50 start up founders gathered in the dank basement of a Lower East Side bar. They scribbled notes at long tables, sipping coffee and LaCroix while a stack of pizza boxes emanated the odor of hot garlic. One by one, they gave testimonials taking aim at something nearly sacred in the technology industry: venture capital. Josh Haas, the co founder of Bubble, a software writing start up, told the group that he and venture capitalists "were pretty much totally on different wavelengths" about the trajectory of his business. Seph Skerritt, the founder of Proper Cloth, a clothing company, said that the hype around raising money was a trap. "They try to make you feel inferior if you're not playing that game," he said. The event had been organized by Frank Denbow, 33, a fixture of New York's tech scene and the founder of T shirt start up Inka.io, to bring together start up founders who have begun to question the investment framework that has supercharged their field. By encouraging companies to expand too quickly, Mr. Denbow said, venture capital can make them "accelerate straight into the ground." The V.C. business model, on which much of the modern tech industry was built, is simple: Start ups raise piles of money from investors, and then use the cash to grow aggressively faster than the competition, faster than regulators, faster than most normal businesses would consider sane. Larger and larger rounds of funding follow. The end goal is to sell or go public, producing astonishing returns for early investors. The setup has spawned household names like Facebook, Google and Uber, as well as hundreds of other so called unicorn companies valued at more than 1 billion. But for every unicorn, there are countless other start ups that grew too fast, burned through investors' money and died possibly unnecessarily. Start up business plans are designed for the rosiest possible outcome, and the money intensifies both successes and failures. Social media is littered with tales of companies that withered under the pressure of hypergrowth, were crushed by so called "toxic V.C.s" or were forced to raise too much venture capital something known as the "foie gras effect." Now a counter movement, led by entrepreneurs who are jaded by the traditional playbook, is rejecting that model. While still a small part of the start up community, these founders have become more vocal in the last year as they connect venture capitalists' insatiable appetite for growth to the tech industry's myriad crises. Would Facebook's leadership have ignored warning signs of Russian election meddling or allowed its platform to incite racial violence if it hadn't, in its early days, prized moving fast and breaking things? Would Uber have engaged in dubious regulatory and legal strategies if it hadn't prioritized expansion over all else? Would the tech industry be struggling with gender and race discrimination if the investors funding it were a little less homogeneous? "The tool of venture capital is so specific to a tiny, tiny fraction of companies. We can't let ourselves be fooled into thinking that's the story of the future of American entrepreneurship," said Mara Zepeda, a 38 year old entrepreneur who in 2017 helped start an advocacy organization called Zebras Unite. Its members include start up founders, investors and foundations focused on encouraging a more ethical industry with greater gender and racial diversity. The group now has 40 chapters and 1,200 members around the world. "The more we believe that myth, the more we overlook tremendous opportunities," Ms. Zepeda said in an interview. Some of the groups are rejecting venture capital because they've been excluded from the traditional V.C. networks. Aniyia Williams, who started the nonprofit Black Brown Founders, said a venture funded system that encourages many failures for every one success is particularly unfair to black, latinx and women founders who "are rarely afforded the opportunity to fail, period." Members of these organizations, she added, see more value when whole groups in their communities thrive, rather than venture's winner take all model. Other founders have decided the expectations that come with accepting venture capital aren't worth it. Venture investing is a high stakes game in which companies are typically either wild successes or near total failures. "Big problems have occurred when you have founders who have unwillingly or unknowingly signed on for an outcome they didn't know they were signing on for," said Josh Kopelman, a venture investor at First Round Capital, an early backer of Uber, Warby Parker and Ring. He said he was happy that companies were embracing alternatives to venture capital. "I sell jet fuel," he said, "and some people don't want to build a jet." Right now, that jet fuel seems unlimited. Venture capital investments into United States based companies ballooned to 99.5 billion in 2018, the highest level since 2000, according to CB Insights, a data provider. And the investments have expanded beyond software and hardware into anything that is tech adjacent dog walking, health care, coffee shops, farming, electric toothbrushes. But people like Sandra Oh Lin, the chief executive of KiwiCo, a seller of children's activity kits, say that more money isn't necessary. Ms. Oh Lin raised a little over 10 million in venture funding between 2012 and 2014, but she is now rebuffing offers of more just as her company has hit on a product people want the very moment when investors would love to pour more gas on the fire. KiwiCo is profitable and had nearly 100 million in sales in 2018, a 65 percent increase over the prior year, Ms. Oh Lin said. "We are aggressive about growth, but we are not a company that chases growth at all costs," Ms. Oh Lin said. "We want to build a company that lasts." Entrepreneurs are even finding ways to undo money they took from venture capital funds. Wistia, a video software company, used debt to buy out its investors last summer, declaring a desire to pursue sustainable, profitable growth. Buffer, a social media focused software company, used its profits to do the same in August. Afterward, Joel Gascoigne, its co founder and chief executive, received more than 100 emails from other founders who were inspired or jealous. "The V.C. path forces you into this binary outcome of acquisition or I.P.O., or pretty much bust," Mr. Gascoigne said. "People are starting to question that." Venture capital wasn't always the default way to grow a company. But in the last decade, its gospel of technological disruption has infiltrated every corner of the business world. Old line companies from Campbell Soup to General Electric started venture operations and accelerator programs to foster innovation. Sprint and UBS hired WeWork to make their offices more start up like. At the same time, start up culture hoodies and all entered the mainstream on the back of celebrity investors like Ashton Kutcher, TV shows like "Shark Tank" and movies like "The Social Network." Few questioned the Silicon Valley model for creating the next Google, Facebook or Uber. Those who tried to buck the conventional method experienced harsh trade offs. Bank loans are typically small, and banks are reluctant to lend money to software companies, which have no hard assets to use as collateral. Founders who eschew venture capital often wind up leaning on their life savings or credit cards. Jessica Rovello and Kenny Rosenblatt, the entrepreneurs behind Arkadium, a gaming start up founded in 2001, initially avoided raising venture money. It took four years before the business earned enough to pay them a salary. The sacrifices were "very real and very intense," Ms. Rovello said. Nevertheless, the business grew steadily and profitably to 150 employees. By 2013, though, as investors poured capital into some rivals, the lure of easy money became too tempting to pass up, and the company raised 5 million. Tensions ensued as Arkadium's investors expected the company to continue raising money with the goal of selling or going public. Ms. Rovello wanted to keep running the company profitably, growing revenue at 20 percent per year and developing a new product that could take years to pay off. In September, Arkadium used its profits to buy out the investors, allowing the company to remain independent and grow on its own terms. Ms. Rovello said she had no regrets about stepping off the venture funded path. "If your end game is having a business that you love and continuing to thrive and making careers for people," she said, "then I'm winning." In September, Tyler Tringas, a 33 year old entrepreneur based in Rio, announced plans to offer a different kind of start up financing, in the form of equity investments that companies can repay as a percent of their profits. Mr. Tringas said his firm, Earnest Capital, will have 6 million to invest in 10 to 12 companies per year. Hundreds of emails have poured in since the announcement, Mr. Tringas said in an interview. "They're almost entirely from people who assumed there was no form of capital that matched any version of their expectations," he said. Earnest Capital joins a growing list of firms, including Lighter Capital, Purpose Ventures, TinySeed, Village Capital, Sheeo, XXcelerate Fund and Indie.vc, that offer founders different ways to obtain money. Many use variations of revenue or profit based loans. Those loans, though, are often available only to companies that already have a product to sell and an incoming cash stream. Other companies are inspired by the investor buyouts executed by Buffer, Wistia and Arkadium, and are asking investors to agree to similar deals at potentially lower returns on their investments in the future. Indie.vc, based in Salt Lake City and part of the investment firm O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, offers start ups the option to buy back the firm's shares as a portion of their total sales. That caps the firm's return at three times its investment. In the typical venture capital model, the earnings for a home run deal are limitless. When Indie.vc started three years ago, it saw two or three applications a week, mostly from venture capital rejects. Now it gets as many as 10 applications a week, mostly from companies that could raise venture capital but don't want to, said Bryce Roberts, the firm's founder. "We think there is going to be a tsunami of entrepreneurs who have experienced the one size fits all venture model and want to cherry pick the pieces of it that work for them," Mr. Roberts said. Some venture capitalists have applauded the shift; their style of high risk investing is not right for many companies. In a recent blog post, Founder Collective, a firm that has invested in Uber and BuzzFeed, praised Mr. Roberts's offerings while warning founders of the dangers of traditional funding. "Venture capital isn't bad, but it is dangerous," the post reads. The firm created ominous warning labels and brochures to send to its companies. Privately, some venture capitalists have bemoaned the way they're locked into rigid investment mandates with perverse incentives. "We heard from many investors who said, 'I can't say this publicly, but I'm in the machine and I know it's broken, and I know there is a better way,'" Ms. Zepeda said. Others have dismissed the trend, according to Mr. Roberts. "It's amazing how thin skinned and threatened V.C.s tend to be around people who question their model," he said. Even if venture capitalists ignore the companies rejecting their model, some of their investors endowments, pension funds and mutual funds are exploring ways to participate. The tech industry's year of bad headlines has inspired some soul searching. "I think we should, as investors, take seriously our role in driving some of these destabilizing forces in society," said Rukaiyah Adams, chief investment officer at Meyer Memorial Trust, an investor in venture capital funds and nonprofits. "As one of the controllers of capital, I'm raising my hand and saying, 'Wait a minute, let's really think about this.'" Still, the new growth models represent a tiny percentage of the broader start up funding market. And venture capitalists continue to aggressively pitch their wares even to companies that aren't interested. Notion, a collaboration software company based in San Francisco, has just nine employees and close to one million users, many of whom pay 8 a month. The company is handily profitable. Aside from a small seed round in 2013, it has avoided outside funding. Venture capitalists, desperate to get a piece of the company, have dug up Notion's office address and sent its founders cookie dough, dog treats and physical letters, company executives said. Every few months, a new investor inevitably shows up unannounced at Notion's gate. Notion's ambitions are big the company wants to replace Microsoft Office. But its executives don't believe they need hundreds of millions of dollars in financing to do it, nor do they want the strings that come attached. "We're not anti V.C.," said Akshay Kothari, the company's chief operating officer. "We're just thinking for ourselves, rather than for them or other peers."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The director Peter Jackson, known for the "Lord of the Rings" and "Hobbit" trilogies and the new WWI documentary, "They Shall Not Grow Old," has a new project on his hands: an archival documentary on the Beatles. The film, which is still untitled, will cull from roughly 55 hours of never released footage of the band's 1969 studio sessions that led to their final album, "Let It Be." The announcement of the movie comes on the 50th anniversary of the Beatles' final show, that much loved performance on a windswept roof in London. How Peter Jackson Made WWI Footage Seem Astonishingly New With "They Shall Not Grow Old." "This movie will be the ultimate 'fly on the wall' experience that Beatles fans have long dreamt about," Jackson said in a statement. "It's like a time machine transports us back to 1969, and we get to sit in the studio watching these four friends make great music together."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
"Actually, Ali doesn't talk that quickly, but I do," she added. "We just realized we had a shared philosophy, and this was an opportunity to take a leadership position in the sector." LVMH, which also owns Edun, the sustainable fashion line founded by Ms. Hewson to promote local business in Africa ("trade not aid," as her husband likes to say), bought Nude in 2011. But the brand had languished since then, a very small fish in a big beauty pond. By contrast, Beautycounter, founded in 2013 as a for profit business but certified for its social and environmental performance, grew rapidly and is predicting 225 million in revenue by 2017. Investors include TPG Growth and Jeremy Zimmer of United Talent Agency. The brand is known for its "Never List," more than 1,500 ingredients it has sworn not to include in its products, as well as its political lobbying for greater oversight of beauty products. Personal care products in the United States are still regulated according to a 1938 bill, much to Ms. Renfrew's dismay. Though smaller than Beautycounter, Nude's global profile (and that of its founders) will be invaluable to Beautycounter, which is available only in the United States and Canada. Ms. Renfrew sees the acquisition as an opportunity to extend both brands' reach, while also leveraging similar production facilities to mutual advantage. Although Beautycounter has done select limited collaborations with other brands such as Goop and J. Crew, and will have a partnership with Target this fall, it is based on a direct sales model, with a sales force that could be characterized as a contemporary version of the Avon ladies. It now has more than 20,000 saleswomen around North America. Nude, which has been billed as a luxury line, is sold through retail outlets such as Sephora and SpaceNK.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Despite the current atmosphere, Meacham, a journalist and presidential historian, remains optimistic. "If history is any guide and, however imperfect, it's the only guide we have then the right number of Americans at the right time will decide to heed what Lincoln called 'the better angels of our nature' and realize that we've been happiest and strongest in the hours when we have most generously interpreted the Jeffersonian assertion that we're all created equal," he says. "This isn't sentimental or hokey: It's the fact of the matter of the American experience. I'm not saying, 'Relax, everything will be fine.' My argument is 'Let's get to work and perhaps we will survive as we've survived before.'" His book is a call to action. "Let's learn the lessons of the past: Resist tribalism, deploy reason and remember that fair play for others is the best way to ensure fair play for you. If we can do that, then we'll rise above the corrosive tweets, the presidential bullying and the narcissism of our reality TV president," he says. "It feels dark and insuperable, but it's felt that way before."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
The core benefits of co living took a big hit when the coronavirus struck New York City. Instagram friendly common rooms and co working spaces sat empty last spring as residents complied with strict lockdown orders. Postage stamp bedrooms became constant quarters. Tenants who had become accustomed to regular cleaning services suddenly had to disinfect on their own. When New Yorkers fled the city in the early months of the pandemic, co living companies like many other rental companies lost tenants and income. Their model, which includes perks like helping residents find roommates and providing fully furnished units, was no match for the virus. Co living buildings have generally charged more than traditional rental buildings, in exchange for shared amenities and a dormlike atmosphere that provides instant community an environment deeply challenged by the rules of coronavirus lockdown. After the initial shock, most co living companies coalesced around a few strategies to woo residents back. They offered rent concessions, promoted flexible lease lengths to tenants who didn't know how long they would be able to stay in New York, and provided a smooth and easy move in process. Now, eight months into the pandemic, co living companies say demand is growing again, and a few are even restarting ambitious expansions they had put on hold when the virus first hit. By the time many medical workers left in July as infection rates leveled off, several co living companies were offering rent deals to attract traditional tenants. Specials included rent reductions in the range of 30 to 35 percent, sometimes in the form of one or two months rent free. Outpost Club's chief executive, Sergii Starostin, said he saw students respond to his company's rent deals first, and professionals followed. The company lost 120 tenants across their New York properties by the height of the pandemic in April, going from 300 people in January down to 180. Numbers started rising in June, but only until September, when Outpost Club signed 60 new leases, did the company regain the leases lost earlier this year. Now, they house a total of 323 tenants in the city. In October, they received 15 requests from landlords interested in working with them to convert traditional apartments into co living spaces, a big jump from just two in October of last year. "Flexibility is now the number one thing that tenants want to have," Mr. Starostin said. "Every second person is asking about it." About half of Outpost Club's newly signed leases in a given month are now one to three month commitments with a month to month option that follows. Before May, just five percent of tenants requested month to month options. Quarters, a global co living network with four buildings in New York, made similar concessions to get similar results. The number of tenants in their buildings declined to roughly 70 percent in the second and third quarters of 2020, but the company hopes to see it increase to over 90 percent by January. New York's case mirrors a national trend. Susan Tjarksen, who studies multifamily capital markets at the real estate analytics firm Cushman Wakefield, said that occupancy rates at co living properties hit a pandemic low in June at 86 percent and rose steadily through the summer. As of October, rates are now in the low 90th percentile. Jorge Hurtado Burgos, a 21 year old student and bank client services representative, saw promise in co living in the midst of the pandemic. In August, he was looking for an easy transition into an apartment after a summer of couch surfing. He chose a four bedroom shared unit in an East Village apartment managed by Bungalow, a San Francisco based co living company that works with landlords to fill, furnish and oversee their investment properties. Unlike some co living brands in New York, Bungalow doesn't own any of the apartments or buildings it outfits. Instead it currently partners with 47 landlords to rent a total of 430 rooms. The company offered to waive Mr. Hurtado Burgos's application fee and he moved in within a week of finding the space. "It was very straight to the point and easy," Mr. Hurtado Burgos said. He signed a six month lease agreement at 1,430 a month, which includes utilities and cleaning fees, but plans to extend his stay through next summer. In another Bungalow building in Williamsburg, Nick Nevins, 26, a digital marketing manager, signed a 16 month lease in September, since some co living companies offer reduced rents for longer lease agreements. On a 12 month lease, Mr. Nevins would have paid 1,515, not including utilities, for his en suite room in a seven bedroom apartment. Instead, he pays 1,485 a month plus an additional 150 for utilities and cleaning. "It's definitely the easiest move in experience I've ever had," he said, since the apartment came furnished and he only had to bring his own bedroom furniture. Mr. Nevins also looked at other apartment listings in Brooklyn, as well as two other Bungalow buildings. He was drawn to the rent by room model because he wouldn't be responsible for replacing roommates. Co living residents often pay a higher price per square footage for a bedroom than what their neighbors in traditional buildings might pay. Mr. Nevins pays 1,485 a month and has three roommates, in a seven bedroom unit where the monthly rent is more than 8,800. According to StreetEasy, the median monthly rent for a three plus bedroom in Williamsburg is 3,600. In the East Village, StreetEasy puts an apartment with three or more bedrooms at a median rent of 4,400. But at Mr. Hurtado Burgos's four bedroom East Village Bungalow apartment, total rent exceeds 5,000. "Co living isn't necessarily targeting people who need affordability," said Nancy Wu, a StreetEasy economist. "If you're looking to sign a one year lease, there are lots of opportunities out there for cheaper apartments with two to three months worth of concessions." Richard Lustigman, director of co living at JLL, a real estate services company, agrees that right now, there is increased interest in the traditional rental market because prices are so low. But in the long run, he says, after the pandemic is over, people will be drawn back to the co living properties that provide more than just a room to rent. Some of the amenities that have motivated co living tenants to pay a premium are gradually coming back. Companies that canceled their cleaning services for residents at the beginning of the pandemic, or provided residents instead with weekly "hospitality kits" to clean their own spaces, are now bringing professional cleaners back into buildings. The most elusive amenity that co living companies originally offered is that of community. Marketing materials showed young residents making friends and having fun together in beautiful common areas. In the pandemic, co living companies have emphasized other aspects of their model, since many of their common areas are closed or limited, and meeting new people presents a health risk. Despite social distancing, companies and residents have found new, pandemic appropriate ways to build connections within buildings. Marcy Snyder, a 22 year old New York University student who is applying to medical school while taking her final classes online, recently hosted a picnic in the park for some of the residents in her Common building in Williamsburg. Ms. Snyder said she knew many people who have three month lease agreements that they keep renewing. Chengwei Wang, a Columbia University master's student, has tried everything from a rooftop flower arranging event to cooking classes on Zoom at Alta , a high rise residential building in Queens Plaza, where co living brand Ollie operates 14 floors of shared apartments. Toussaint Campbell, 23, has also ventured out at Alta . Recently, he did a socially distanced Escape Room with about a dozen people. He's thought about signing up for other events, but it's a harder sell when events are virtual. "When I miss them, I wonder if I could have met anyone, but it's a little less exciting," he said. The co living industry was in the midst of general expansion at the beginning of the year, before the coronavirus arrived. Ollie has six expansion projects going on around the country, but nothing new planned for New York. "It's going to be tough to be a new co living company in New York right now," said Gregg Christiansen, Ollie's president. "I would be concerned if you have a new project opening here." Some companies that entered the pandemic with expansion plans are moving forward. Quarters is slated to open a new location in North Williamsburg in December, and Common is planning a two tower, affordable co living project with L M Development in East Harlem, slated to open at the end of 2023. The company won a competition facilitated by the city's Housing Preservation and Development Department last fall to create a more affordable version of co living. "By the time we deliver these projects," said Brad Hargreaves, chief executive and founder of Common, "we'll be on the other side of this and people will be perhaps willing to socialize more than they did before, to make up for lost time." For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
PARIS Forget a velvet rope: The Balmain show has become such a magnet for fans and paparazzi that French police put up cordons and blockades on Thursday afternoon to control the chaos outside the Hotel Potocki, a former nobleman's palace a stone's throw from the Champs Elysees. Inside, the opulent building was packed with rich red carpets, gold trompe l'oeil, mirrored walls and long lines of gargantuan chandeliers, in keeping with the maximalist, more is more aesthetic of Balmain. Amid the crowds sat Kris Jenner, just off the plane from Los Angeles, waiting patiently for the show to begin. Given the devotion shown by her tribe of daughters to the designs of the Balmain creative director Olivier Rousteing, it was not a surprise to see her there.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
A marine biologist specializing in microplastics examined a water sample from the Mediterranean Sea. A new study suggests that the tiny particles also travel by air and in extraordinary numbers. Researchers in France said this week that they found thousands and thousands of microplastic particles raining down on a secluded spot in the Pyrenees, 75 miles from the nearest city. Their study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, suggests that microplastics long known as a source of water pollution may also travel by air, spreading their ill effects far from dense population centers. Deonie Allen, one of the lead researchers, said the five month study was "the first step toward looking at microplastics as an airborne pollutant." Steve Allen, another researcher, called their findings "scary." "We kind of expected to find plastics there, but we certainly were not prepared for the numbers we found," Mr. Allen said in an interview. "It was astounding: 11,400 pieces of microplastic per square meter per month, on average." Microplastics are pieces of plastic debris that measure less than five millimeters long, roughly the size of a sesame seed, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But they can also be much smaller than five millimeters. The fragments found by the Pyrenees study were generally 10 to 300 microns across, with most clocking in at roughly 50 microns, Dr. Allen said. For comparison, a human hair is about 70 microns wide. "These are invisible atmospheric pollutants," she said. Microplastics can come from a variety of sources, including everyday items like plastic bottles or disposable contact lenses that break down into smaller pieces over time. According to Dr. Allen, a lot of microplastic pollution comes from cities, landfills and farms that are sprayed with "wastewater treatment sludge, which is loaded with microplastics." Microbeads, which are found in some hygiene products like toothpaste, are another source of microplastic pollution. Concern over their environmental impact has led some governments, including Britain's, to ban the manufacture of products that contain them. Where are they found? They may be everywhere. Or, at least, wherever the water and wind can take them. In the ocean, microplastics contribute to phenomena like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling gyre of more than 87,000 tons of trash that lies hundreds of miles from shore. "At this point there is a lot of knowledge about oceans as a driver of microplastic pollution, which is creating some backlash against plastics," Mr. Allen said. "But we are still learning that we can't get away from it because it is also in the air." The study took place in a remote spot four miles from the nearest village and roughly 75 miles from the nearest city, Toulouse. Researchers, taking samples from two separate monitoring devices, found that 365 pieces of microplastic per square meter rained down from the sky each day. Mr. Allen compared airborne microplastics to dust from the Sahara, which has long been known to travel by wind across the ocean to the United States and the Caribbean. "At 450 microns, it can still travel 3,500 kilometers," he said. "Plastics are not as dense, they are about half the weight and they are irregularly shaped, so aerodynamically, it is easier for the particles to be lifted into the air." How much damage can they do? Microplastics have been found to harm animals, including insects and marine species, in a number of ways, but more research needs to be done to determine their effect on humans, researchers said. Mr. Allen said microplastics had been shown to "block up the gut" in fish and insects. "The chemicals that make up the plastic, we know they have an impact on the animal endocrine system and the lymphatic system," which regulate the production of hormones and the elimination of bodily toxins, he said. In an example of plastic's gut blocking effects on a larger scale, a dead sperm whale washed ashore this month on the Italian island of Sardinia with 48 pounds of plastic in its stomach, including microplastics as well as larger items like a corrugated plastic tube and shopping bags. Dr. Allen said microplastic could also change the chemical composition of the environment in small but significant ways, for example, by absorbing pheromones that fish and insects depend on to trigger their fight or flight response. "When you put plastic into that environment, it absorbs that chemical, which means those protection or defense responses are no longer occurring," she said. "It is not just about biological impacts inside the animal; it also impacts the environment it is living in." Researchers are increasingly confident about the ubiquity of microplastics in human life. A study published in 2017 found microplastics in 83 percent of tap water samples collected from around the world, including 94 percent of samples from the United States, which had the highest rate of contamination. A study published last year found a variety of microplastics in stool samples from eight people from Finland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Britain and Austria. Another study estimated that people who frequently eat shellfish could ingest as many as 11,000 pieces of microplastic every year.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
As scientists learn more about how the Zika virus can cause brain damage in a developing fetus, a major question has remained: How does a virus that infects a pregnant mother through a mosquito bite on her skin get into her womb? It is not a simple question. Most viruses that infect a pregnant woman cannot cross from her bloodstream through the placenta, the organ that forms to nourish and protect the fetus as it grows and develops. In the lab, researchers tested Zika's effect on cells from about 50 placentas at different stages of pregnancy. It found that the virus can enter the placenta in every trimester. The risk of the worst damage babies born with unusually small heads, or microcephaly appears to be highest in early pregnancy, but significant brain damage might still occur if the mother is infected in late pregnancy, the researchers found. The study used two strains of the Zika virus one from Africa and one from the current epidemic in Latin America and found that the one from Latin America "was much more infectious," said one of the study's authors, Lenore Pereira, a virologist and tissue biologist at University of California, San Francisco. Carolyn B. Coyne, a microbiologist at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study, said it was important because it started "drawing a road map" for transmission. "I would say that this is the first study to identify a cell type that could be a primary target during transmission from mom to baby," she said. Dr. Coyne is co author of a recent study showing that the main placental barrier cells, resist Zika by releasing an antiviral molecule. She said the new study appeared to have identified what "could be sort of the Achilles' heel" in the placenta that allows the virus into the womb. One possible entry point involves structures called chorionic villi, which anchor the placenta into the wall of the uterus during the first trimester. These anchor points could essentially create openings in the wall, and the researchers found that different types of cells in the villi were easily infected with Zika. This route could be available throughout pregnancy, Dr. Pereira said, but more infected cells appear to produce the virus during the first trimester. The new research suggests that Zika could also get to the fetus via another route, beginning in the second trimester, crossing the membrane that forms the amniotic sac in which the fetus develops. Cells in that membrane were able to be infected with Zika too, the researchers found. "The fact that the cells in the amniochorionic membranes, they were pounding out all this virus, we thought, wow, maybe that's actually a second route," said Eva Harris, an expert on infectious diseases and vaccines at University of California, Berkeley. The researchers reported that the Zika virus binds consistently to a protein in different placental cells called TIM1. They also found that a drug, an antibiotic called Duramycin that is currently approved to treat animals but not people, appears to block Zika from attaching to the protein. That does not mean that Duramycin could be used to treat Zika infection in pregnant women, experts cautioned. Wei Zheng, who runs a lab in the federal Therapeutics for Rare and Neglected Diseases program and is testing drugs as potential Zika treatments, said that Duramycin's molecules were too large to reach the brain and possibly the fetus. He added that the drug, which is in early clinical trials for cystic fibrosis patients, would need considerably more testing to determine its safety for pregnant women. Dr. Harris said the study's authors did not mean to suggest that Duramycin could readily become a Zika treatment. The point, she said, was to show that their experiments provided a model that could be used to test potential drugs that block Zika from entering the womb. That model might indeed be useful, said Hongjun Song, a neurologist at Johns Hopkins who worked with colleagues at other universities to discover how Zika damages fetal brains. "It provides a hypothesis that now can be directly tested" in animals, said Dr. Song in an email, a way to search for "different routes of viral entry to the fetal brain." Dr. Coyne said scientists would likely find other ways that Zika crosses the placenta, perhaps piggybacking on antibodies from a related virus like dengue, which many people in Latin America, especially in Brazil, have previously been infected with. One placental function is transferring helpful antibodies to the fetus, but if Zika attaches to those antibodies, that could be another path to the fetus. "The virus is clearly efficient in getting in," she said, "so I think that it probably gets in through multiple routes."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Neil Innes in 1970. He excelled at satiric songs and parodies of other people's music but could also write a pretty good straight song. Neil Innes, the British humorist and musician who was an honorary member of the Monty Python comedy troupe and made a name for himself with a nutty assortment of musical and television projects, including the Beatles parody band the Rutles, died on Sunday near Toulouse, France, where he had lived in recent years. He was 75. His wife, Yvonne Innes, said the cause was a heart attack. Mr. Innes, a multi instrumentalist, was a particular type of songwriter: one who excelled at satirical songs and parodies of other people's music, but who could also write a pretty good straight song. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. In the early 1960s he was one of the first members of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, also known as simply the Bonzo Dog Band. He wrote the group's biggest hit, "I'm the Urban Spaceman," which climbed into the Top 10 on the British charts in 1968. Mr. Innes also performed live shows throughout his career and was still doing so recently. "His humor is gentle and whimsical, long on non sequiturs and only occasionally risque," Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times, reviewing a show in 1985 at the Bottom Line in Manhattan. "He skewered pomposity in all its guises, from preciousness to enforced singalongs. With a mobile face that could metamorphose in seconds from Buster Keaton to Bob Dylan, and the slightly italicized gestures of a crack vaudevillian, Mr. Innes could get laughs whenever he wanted to." Neil James Innes was born on Dec. 9, 1944, in Danbury, England, northeast of London, to Edward and Rita (Hudson) Innes. His father was in the military, and he spent part of his childhood in postwar Germany. He took piano lessons as a child, taught himself to play guitar and dabbled in drawing and painting. He pursued his art interest first at the Norwich School of Art, then at Goldsmiths College School of Art, graduating in 1966. That same year he married Yvonne Catherine Hilton. While in school he had begun playing in what was originally named the Bonzo Dog Dada Band. "The Bonzos tumbled out of the heady early '60s art school scene, an ever changing troupe of eccentrics who delighted the college crowd with a riot of exploding wardrobes, archaic instruments, prewar novelty songs and jazz age pop," according to an entry about the group's first album, "Gorilla" (1967), in "The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion." "We found the sort of songs we wanted to learn from old 78 Gramophone records," Mr. Innes told NPR in 2004, "the breakable ones, which we used to buy in street markets." The group is seen in the Beatles movie "Magical Mystery Tour" playing its song "Death Cab for Cutie." The Bonzos also appeared in about 20 episodes of "Do Not Adjust Your Set," a children's television show that had a lot of adult fans thanks to a cheeky cast that included Mr. Idle and two other future Pythons, Terry Jones and Michael Palin. Mr. Innes was never a Python, but he did contribute material to "Monty Python's Flying Circus," which premiered in England in 1969. He also appeared in the movies "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (1975) and "Monty Python's Life of Brian" (1979), as well as films by individual Pythons. The Rutles started as a quick gag on "Rutland Weekend Television," a BBC sketch comedy series about a laughably small town TV station. Mr. Idle wrote and starred in the show, which ran for two seasons in the mid 1970s; Mr. Innes's job was to contribute one or two songs per episode. "Not many people saw it," Mr. Idle wrote of the series in his memoir, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" (2018). "Because it had no live audience, I was never very sure whether it was funny or not, and some people kindly went out of their way to point out that it wasn't." But, of course, it was, particularly when, in the second season, it aired a sketch that featured a segment on a local band that looked and sounded an awful lot like the Beatles and performed a tune written by Mr. Innes called "I Must Be in Love." The band, the fake newscaster said, "created a musical legend that will last a lunchtime." In October 1976 Mr. Idle hosted "Saturday Night Live," then in its second season, and played the Rutles clip. Lorne Michaels, creator of "S.N.L.," became a fan and saw possibilities for a full length mockumentary, an idea he sprang during a brainstorming meeting at which Mr. Innes was a casual participant. "I was sitting to one side, on a window sill in an executive office, high up in the Rockefeller Center in New York, listening to all this when suddenly everyone started looking at me," Mr. Innes recalled in a 2014 interview with The Birmingham Mail. "Lorne asked if I could write 20 more Rutles songs by next Thursday lunchtime. I said I would try!" "All You Need Is Cash," a TV movie shown in both England and the United States, was the result. In the mock band, Mr. Innes was Ron Nasty, the John Lennon like Rutle. (Mr. Idle, as the Paul McCartney character, Dirk McQuickly, lip synced.) And he was responsible for the songwriting. John J. O'Connor reviewed "All You Need Is Cash" in The Times. "The music and lyrics," he wrote, "all written by Mr. Innes, smartly capture the essence of the Beatles and then, ever so cleverly, turn it to mush."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
WASHINGTON I used to feel pretty optimistic that the country would get through the Trump years intact. In 2016, America got mad and went mad. This administration has unleashed so many fresh hells that a portrait of the last four years looks very Hieronymus Bosch. But the idea of this country is so remarkable; surely it could withstand one cheesy con man who squeaked in. Now we might have passed a point of no return. No matter who wins in November, can the harsh divisions abate? The stunning news Friday night of the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg guaranteed a political bonfire. President Trump is in a position to reshape the Supreme Court long past his time in office with a third justice, giving conservatives a 6 to 3 majority. With Democrats still smarting over Republicans' refusal to consider Barack Obama's pick of Merrick Garland for the court, this will push them over the edge, and maybe to the polls, especially women. And Trump's base could race to vote, because the president has talked about nominating Tom Cotton or Ted Cruz, aiming to have a court that would overturn Roe v. Wade. Mitch McConnell said Friday that Trump's nominee hopefully not Jeanine Pirro will get a floor vote. "We cannot have Election Day come and go with a 4 4 court," Cruz told Sean Hannity. Imagine a Bush v. Gore scenario with a 4 4 court. As it turned out, the founders created a country painfully vulnerable to whoever happens to be president. They assumed that future presidents would cherish what they had so painfully created, and continue to knit together different kinds of people from different areas with different economic interests. But now that we have a president who takes those knitting needles and stabs the country mercilessly with them, we can see how fragile this whole thing really is. All the stuff we took for granted from presidential ethics to electoral integrity to a nonpolitical attorney general is blown to smithereens. The president who does not believe in science has been conducting a science experiment for four years: What happens to a country when you have a president who is doing everything in his power to cleave it? It wasn't long ago that Obama started on the road to the White House with a stirring speech about ignoring those who would slice our nation into red states and blue states because this is the United States of America. Now Trump blames the "badly run blue states" and "Democrat cities" for everything. He clearly doesn't see himself as president of a majority of the country. Whenever he talks about the half of the country that didn't vote for him, he paints a picture of a Scorsese urban hellscape the minute you cross state lines. On Wednesday, the president offered the heinous hypothetical that the death toll from the coronavirus would not be as bad "if you take the blue states out." As the president of Red America, Trump "regularly divides the country into the parts that support him and the parts that do not, rewarding the former and reproving the latter," The Times's Peter Baker wrote. The line between politics and governing can be blurry, certainly. But with Trump, there is no line. Jared Kushner bragged to Bob Woodward that Trump can "trigger the other side by picking fights with them where he makes them take stupid positions." Woodward writes that Kushner told an associate, "The Democrats are getting so crazy they're basically defending Baltimore." This gleeful assessment from Kushner, a Baltimore slumlord, is the height of cynicism. The anxiety about our fractious nature was reflected in the question of Susan Connors at Joe Biden's CNN Town Hall Thursday night. "Mr. Vice President," she said, "I look out over my Biden sign in my front yard and I see a sea of Trump flags and yard signs. And my question is, what is your plan, to build a bridge, with voters from the opposing party, to lead us forward, toward a common future?" Biden was soothing, reassuring that he could pick up those knitting needles once Trump was "out of the way, and his vitriolic attitude, and his way of just getting after people, revenge." But will it be so easy? The cultural ecosystem, and the fever swamps of social media that amplify Trump's craziness, will remain. Fox News and Facebook will continue to validate the biases and conspiracy theories of a nation that's increasingly proud of its ignorance, anti intellectualism and denial of science. Isn't the simple fact that the race is this close, when Biden should be crushing Trump, given the president's lethal negligence and willful subterfuge on the virus and his racial demagogy, proof that our realities are so disparate from one another that unifying will be akin to cleaning a dozen Augean stables? After Woodward's book revealed that Trump knew early on how dangerous the virus was but downplayed it, I heard from those two alternate universes. "I can hardly breathe, it's so incredible," my friend Rita said angrily. "He was just trying to buck people up," my sister, Peggy, said placidly. In Duluth, Minn., at a campaign stop on Friday, a man in a MAGA hat jeered at Biden and told him he could never win. Biden approached the man from the alternate reality, elbow bumped him, chuckled and assured him that if he does win, Biden would work for him, too. If McConnell has his way, that work wouldn't include replacing R.B.G.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
The flowers come from all sorts of places: weddings, farmer's markets, the online florist company UrbanStems, even a first lady's luncheon. In the truck she calls her "Bloom Mobile 1.0," Kaifa Anderson Hall recovers flowers from venues all over the Washington, D.C., area that would otherwise be discarded and gives them a purpose. After being preserved, often for weeks in refrigerators she keeps in the basement of a four unit apartment building she and her husband own, those flowers take on their second job in therapeutic activities with seniors, homeless women and people with disabilities around the city. Part education, part art therapy and part wellness activity, Ms. Anderson Hall's nonprofit, Plants and Blooms Reimagined, represents an enticing intersection of a number of pressing social issues: conservation; combating isolation for elders, people with disabilities and other marginalized communities; and wellness. Ms. Anderson Hall is a horticultural therapist, a practice based on the idea that working with plants, both indoors and outside, can have therapeutic benefits. Ms. Anderson Hall grew up in a Washington public housing complex where, she said, children weren't allowed to play in the grass, chased off by property managers who wanted to preserve the aesthetic around the buildings. But she also lived just a few blocks from the 400 plus acre U.S. National Arboretum. "We spent many days being free in this green space," Ms. Anderson Hall recalled. But it wasn't until she joined a school program in fifth grade that she was formally invited into the arboretum, or more specifically, the Washington Youth Garden within it. There, she learned to grow food and manage her own 4 foot by 6 foot garden plot, and decades later, she served as the director of that youth garden for six years. Ms. Anderson Hall became a social worker. Her positive experiences as a young person led her to creating and maintaining community and school garden spaces around Washington. But four years ago she had a realization: The people who most needed access to those spaces were also the least likely to seek them out. That realization was inspired by a chance sighting of a vehicle emblazoned with "Children's Blood Mobile" passing on the street. But instead of a "D," she envisioned an "M," making it a Bloom Mobile. "It was very clear that my mission was to take this experience to where people are those who can't get out for myriad reasons." A short time later, Ms. Anderson Hall connected with Sidra Forman, a local floral designer. Ms. Forman introduced her to a little noticed resource that could facilitate this next phase of her work: 30 to 40 events daily in and around Washington where gorgeous and expensive flowers are arranged and displayed for a few hours before being discarded well before reaching their peak. By working with Ms. Anderson Hall, floral designers like Ms. Forman could offer their clients the added bonus of feeling good about what happens to the flowers once an event is over. The reuse of flowers from weddings and other events has been growing in recent years. There are services and nonprofit organizations around the country that will help turn event flowers into bouquets for hospitals, nursing homes and the like. Repeat Roses, founded in 2014, will even ensure that the donated bouquets get composted once they reach the end of their glory. And Ms. Anderson Hall has taken one important element of this work a step further: Her donations become the material for therapeutic workshops in floral arrangement for the predominantly low income and African American people she works with. "We're a throwaway society," Ms. Anderson Hall said. "I want them to recognize there is still beauty in something that is gently loved." The American Horticultural Therapy Association is the institutional home for people like Ms. Anderson Hall whose work focuses on the therapeutic benefits of working with plants. The organization has almost 500 members, says Matthew Wichrowski, who leads its research team. He's also a senior horticultural therapist and clinical assistant professor at N.Y.U. Langone Health, where research is conducted about the therapeutic benefit of work like Ms. Anderson Hall's. In 2005, Mr. Wichrowski led the writing of a study that found that among patients in a cardiac rehabilitation unit, those who participated in a horticulture therapy activity showed a positive impact on their mood. Another 2005 study conducted by Rutgers University showed that flowers presented to older participants "elicited positive mood reports and improved episodic memory." In a 2009 literature review in the Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, researchers examined 38 studies published between 1980 and 2009 of nature assisted therapy, which is defined as therapy that "involves plants, natural materials and/or outdoor environment." The review found that "significant improvements were found for varied outcomes in diverse diagnoses, spanning from obesity to schizophrenia." While there is additional research that supports the health benefits of exposure to plants and nature, it's still a limited body of research, and Mr. Wichrowski acknowledges that more is needed to further legitimize the field. He said that much of horticultural therapy "is intuitive, but until you prove it in a scientific fashion, it's not accepted by the medical community." But Ms. Anderson Hall said she already sees the positive impacts in each of her workshops. For example, with an older woman at Pleasant Homes, a rental community in Maryland that offers programming for residents, Ms. Anderson Hall said she has seen improvement in her participant's dexterity in the time they've been working together. This participant walks quite slowly and has a significant curve in her upper spine. When Ms. Anderson Hall helps her with the bouquet being arranged, she brings the flower up so that her helper has to lift her head. Ms. Anderson Hall also encourages her to use the heavier scissors when she's trimming the stems of her flowers, which Ms. Anderson Hall says helps with her hand strength. While those specific improvements could come from any kind of arts and crafts activity, Ms. Anderson Hall feels that working with live flowers is at the center of her work's effectiveness. "All of the senses are activated when you're working with live plant materials," she said. This is particularly important in her work at the Seabury Center for the Blind Visually Impaired, where her participants use touch and smell to identify and arrange their bouquets. She also relies heavily on metaphors drawn from the living plants as tools in her workshops. "You can move through so many more metaphors," she said, "when working with live plant material in terms of the cycle of life that you can't do with plant material that isn't alive." Ms. Anderson Hall also does a monthly workshop at N Street Village, a day center for homeless women. There, she has seen the emotional benefits of working with flowers. A regular participant in a workshop in June said the workshop calms her: "It relaxes me. Just holding the flowers takes me away from my situation. I've always loved flowers." She has been receiving services from N Street Village for two years and lives in one of its shelters. She isn't allowed to take the flowers she arranges in the workshop to the shelter, but they stay at the day center and decorate the tables where the participants eat their meals. Despite Ms. Anderson Hall's certainty that her work makes a significant impact, she has faced challenges getting support for her work, like finding partners for her workshops. She's also still working toward making that Bloom Mobile dream a reality her current vehicle doesn't have space for the mobile workshops she envisioned. "The greatest barrier is probably minimizing and undervaluing the impact of flowers," she said. "They are just so present to so many people's experience that it's probably hard to really put a true value on their meaning and impact." Miriam Zoila Perez is the author of "The Radical Doula Guide: A Political Primer for Full Spectrum Pregnancy and Childbirth Support," a freelance journalist and the creator of the Houseplant Parenthood website. To receive email alerts for Fixes columns, sign up here. 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
This week, Melanie Finn reviews Amitav Ghosh's latest novel, "Gun Island." In 1986, Anthony Burgess wrote for the Book Review about "The Circle of Reason," Ghosh's first novel, about a young weaver falsely accused of being a terrorist. The picaresque narrative, crammed with characters who would do well in Cervantes, comes to an end without having taught us anything. We are, of course, wrong when we expect a work of the imagination to illustrate some moral profundity. That is not what fiction is about. Mr. Ghosh succeeds in his main aim, which is to show the bewildering diversity of a world very remote from "Dallas" or "Dynasty." In the teeming subcontinent and its outposts, life is pared to essentials but, paradoxically, breeds an obsession with particularities, which are the stuff of fiction. If much British fiction is effete and American fiction overcommercialized, Indian fiction, on the showing of Mr. Rushdie and now Mr. Ghosh, is alive. It has been alive for a long time, though not with sharp eyes and ears for the riches of postmodernism. This novel is not merely a highly contemporary construct: it looks ahead. Read the rest of the review.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
In 1971, Tina Packer, then a classically trained English actress, persuaded the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art to let her direct Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure." Then she directed "The Winter's Tale," then "Hamlet." Ms. Packer kept going, through comedies and histories, tragedies and romances. On Sunday, her production of "Cymbeline" finished its run in Lenox, Mass., at Shakespeare Company, the troupe she founded in 1978. And with it Ms. Packer, 78, finished her run through the Shakespeare canon, having now directed all 37 plays. ("Two Noble Kinsmen," a collaboration with John Fletcher, failed to make the cut. "I didn't find myself interested in it," she said.) How did you come to direct Shakespeare? Well, I loved being a Shakespeare actor, I was passionate about it, but I was always asking questions about the whole play. Now I would say they were feminist questions. All of my directors were men and they were good men, good directors. But I got frustrated. I started thinking there was something wrong with me. And then I thought, "No, this is ridiculous, I just have a different perception and I must try and put my perception into action rather than becoming a grumpy actor." Once I started directing there was no stopping me. When did completing the canon become the goal? I never thought consciously, "Oh, I'm going to do them all." But I started noticing a progression in his writing of the women. In the beginning they're either shrews or sweet young things, but by the time he gets to his late plays, he says: "Guys, you have to go with what the women say. Otherwise we're all lost." That really made me want to keep going. Usually the one I'm working on. I think: "My God, this is brilliant. Why didn't I see how brilliant this was?" "Cymbeline" is a case in point. It is such a deep play, but I couldn't see it on the page. It's about what we can't see, what's unconscious, what's hidden. All the hidden things start coming out in the course of the play and eventually tie up together to make the whole story. Do you feel a sense of completion? What I feel more than anything is a satisfaction about absorbing the whole canon. That doesn't count "Two Noble Kinsmen" or "Edward III" or "Cardenio" or any of those other plays that may or may not be Shakespeare's. "Cardenio" I found absolutely irritating. I will bet my bottom dollar that's not Shakespeare. I do love that fragment of "Thomas More"; that feels so absolutely Shakespeare to me. But none of the others have really attracted me.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
When the car industry collapsed in the recession, automakers pulled back sharply on aggressive leasing deals and other financial incentives that had artificially increased their sales for years. But now, with carmakers under pressure to maintain last year's record numbers, they are once again turning to the same tactics that got them into trouble a decade ago. Automakers are offering increasing discounts on economy cars and luxury models alike, relying more on sales to fleets like rental car companies and bloating dealers' inventories. More and more auto loans are being stretched out over longer periods of time. At the same time, automakers have cranked up leasing to record levels. In March, leasing accounted for 31.3 percent of all new car transactions, a record that exceeds the prerecession levels, according to Edmunds.com, an auto research website. But there could be a harsh payback in the future. Automakers that rely heavily on leases end up taking the vehicles back in three or four years and selling them as used often at big discounts. "I've seen this movie before; it's not a pretty ending," said Mike Jackson, chief executive of AutoNation, a chain of 373 new car franchises. In the mid 2000s, he railed against similar excesses that overheated the auto market, and he's fretting again. "Manufacturer incentives are at a dangerous level," Mr. Jackson said. Pumping up sales through profit eating incentives and high fleet sales, he added, "is nitroglycerin." At the top of Mr. Jackson's concerns is leasing, which is a way of renting a new car for a specified period of time, like 24 or 36 months. Customers like leases because they typically make lower monthly payments than if they bought cars with loans. Automakers and dealers like leases because they get more flexibility to structure deals that enable customers to get pricier cars with affordable payments. Consider the lease secured by Allen Lin, a teacher from Altadena, Calif. A few weeks ago, he walked into a Lexus dealership and drove out about two hours later with a 2016 RX 350, leased for three years at 408 a month. The small sport utility vehicle one of the most popular on the market had recently been fully overhauled, and redesigned car models typically sell with little or no discounts. But Mr. Lin paid no money up front, did not trade in his old car and got 5,000 knocked off the car's list price of 43,779. "If you can get a deal like this, it's pretty sweet," said Mr. Lin, 35. Brian Smith, vice president for marketing at Lexus, said that leasing helped keep customers from straying to other brands but that Lexus did not use it to drive sales volume. Luxury makers tend to lean on leasing more heavily than more middle of the market brands. For example, more than half of all Lexus, BMW, Mercedes Benz, Audi and Acura cars are leased. Still, all automakers use leasing to some extent, and all shapes and sizes can be leased. The three most leased vehicles are the Honda Civic, the Honda Accord and the Toyota Camry, according to Experian Automotive. A Honda spokesman said the Japanese automaker took a measured approach to leasing to maintain used car values. Toyota said it also managed leasing with a focus on residual value. In the past few years, some brands have significantly increased leasing. Five years ago, leases made up less than 20 percent of sales for Chevrolet, Hyundai and Mazda. Now it accounts for more than 30 percent of their sales. A spokesman for General Motors said leasing helped Chevrolet increase sales and retain customers. Hyundai's leasing levels are in line with industry practices, a spokesman said. Mazda limits lease discounting to maximize the value of used cars for customers, a company spokesman said. But while leases can lift sales, they also pose risks for car companies and their finance arms. They have to borrow billions of dollars to finance leases, and then, after leases expire, they take the cars back and sell them through dealerships or at used car auctions. Selling gently used cars can be a good business for dealers and can help automakers attract new customers. But if they lease too many vehicles, or economic conditions sour, the value of used cars can fall and leave car companies with big losses. That's exactly what happened in 2008, when the market suddenly crashed and automakers and dealers were left a glut of cars coming off lease. Some analysts worry that the industry could be heading for that kind of situation. Dealers now have 3.8 million new cars in inventory, the most in 10 years, according to WardsAuto. On top of that, Experian reports that 1.8 million cars, moderately used during leases, are expected to enter the used car market this year, providing lower cost alternatives to new cars. This is happening at a time when consumer purchases of new cars are slowing. In the first quarter of the year, sales to individual consumers rose less than 1 percent, compared with the same period a year ago, according to data from J.D. Power and Associates. In March, consumer new car purchases, known as retail sales, fell 1 percent. But total sales are higher because of a big jump in sales to fleets, such as rental companies. Car companies are also offering auto loans over longer periods of time. Edmunds.com found that more than 27 percent of all new cars sold in the first quarter went to customers who took out loans lasting 73 to 84 months, up from 23.4 percent in the same period a year ago. "It feels like a tougher market now," said Mark Wakefield, a managing partner at AlixPartners, a consulting firm with a large automotive practice. "It's difficult to see where the growth is going to come from."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
"Says the sweaty old man who's mad at a magazine because they didn't put him on the cover of it." JIMMY KIMMEL "The president of the United States is on Twitter bullying a teenage girl. Just try to imagine any other president doing something like this, huh? Like, imagine F.D.R. doing a fireside chat where he just goes in on Shirley Temple." TREVOR NOAH "Donald Trump has no right to tell anybody to chill, all right? He is the least chill human being of all time. Like, if there's anyone you wouldn't want on your meditation app, it's this guy. Could you imagine him trying? It would be like, 'Inhale and exhale. Let the air rush into your lungs, like the criminals and rapists swarming across the border coming to take your jobs and kill your parents." TREVOR NOAH "And the fact that Greta Thunberg is a teenager makes this especially insane. I'm old enough to remember a time when everyone at the White House had a full blown hissy fit because a witness at Trump's impeachment hearing had the gall to to say the word 'Barron' in a completely benign fashion. That time was last Tuesday, by the way." JIMMY KIMMEL	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
A volcanic eruption in Alaska that sent a cloud of ash more than seven miles into the atmosphere and forced the cancellation of more than 40 flights appeared to ease late Monday, officials said. Pavlof Volcano, 625 miles southwest of Anchorage near the tip of the remote Alaska Peninsula, began erupting on Sunday afternoon, the Alaska Volcano Observatory said, bringing heightened seismic activity with it. Lava could be seen spewing from its mouth by local mariners, pilots and residents of the town of Cold Bay, about 40 miles to the southwest, the observatory said. Strong winds carried the ash hundreds of miles into the interior of the state. A nearby village, Nelson Lagoon, was blanketed in a thin layer of it on Monday morning, The Alaska Dispatch News reported.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Of the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who left the city in the early months of the pandemic, there are a few that Lori Levine van Arsdale won't miss. "One I told directly, if we never meet again, it would be all right," Ms. Levine van Arsdale, the board president of a five unit co op near Gramercy Park, said to a departing neighbor one of three who sold in her small, self managed building in the last year. In the haze of almost a full calendar year with the virus, one of the overlooked aspects of life amid Covid is how it is reshaping one of the city's most enduring vertical villages, the cooperative. In co ops big and small, where term limits are rare and lifers often make the rules, the sudden departure of even a few residents can have an outsize effect on governance, longstanding policies, even the vibe of a building. And while the virus might not have caused the shake up, residents said, it has almost certainly hastened the change. "Covid has really brought a lot of things to the surface," said Christopher Totaro, a Warburg Realty agent and co op board member. "It's kind of like splinters that were festering." Cooperative housing, a corporate structure in which residents own shares of the property, is often considered a more affordable route to New York homeownership, in part because the buildings are generally older and have more restrictions than condos, with rules established by the shareholders. Estimates vary because of the variety and corporate structure of co ops, but citywide there are more than than 7,100 co ops, according to the commercial brokerage Ariel Property Advisors, and many are entering a busy season of board meetings delayed by Covid. Their votes might determine if a hike in maintenance or other fees are needed; if a wave of new pandemic puppies can stay; if financing rules should be eased to improve sales; if subletting should be allowed; if parents can co sign or pay toward an adult child's down payment, and countless other quirks of shared homeownership in a slumping market. The types of issues facing co ops citywide can be vast and varied, from half empty, white glove buildings on the Upper West Side where many shareholders have decamped to vacation homes, to income restricted walk ups in Brooklyn and the Bronx, where some buildings' financial reserves are nearly tapped. Here are some of the changes happening beyond the socially distanced lobbies, from the residents and building staff on the ground. The recent sale of three out of the five apartments in Ms. Levine van Arsdale's Gramercy Park brownstone has completely changed the mood in the building. "I've been here 15 years, and only since February or March have people been nice to each other," said Ms. Levine van Arsdale, who runs Flying Television, a talent booking firm. Having a majority of the units switch ownership in recent months also created an opportunity to revise the building's bylaws, which previously required only three people to be on the board; now every unit gets an equal say. Cheryl Brinkman, a longtime shareholder who works in digital design, said "there was some bad blood" between former residents, in part because not everyone was doing their fair share, from filing routine paperwork to shoveling snow. The newest arrival, Lilia Levine, an interior designer and first time buyer, who closed on a two bedroom apartment in July after renting for several years in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, thinks the new mix of owners will be more collaborative. "Some people are trying to get out of co ops at bargain basement prices, and that's making the boards apoplectic," because they fear the deals will hurt other owners' resale value. (In most co op sales, the board can reject an offer for reasons that are not always clear to potential buyers.) Many co ops are also facing lost income from ground floor commercial tenants, like restaurants and retail shops that have fallen behind on rent, said Michael Tortorici, an executive vice president of Ariel Property Advisors, a commercial real estate firm. About 1,136 co ops citywide, or roughly 16 percent, recently had a commercial tenant, according to their analysis of public records. Some of those buildings, mostly in Manhattan and Brooklyn, may have to charge residents a temporary monthly fee or a permanent increase in maintenance to shore up lost funds. Big fees can be a major concern for older residents on fixed income, as well as sellers trying to compete in a crowded market. Different Views Across the River Turnover has been high in parts of Queens, as well, but shareholders there can have very different concerns about pricing. Regina T. Rice, the board president of a 135 unit co op in Rego Park, said there have been 18 sales in the last two and a half years, which is more than they've had in the previous 10 years. The biggest reason, even before Covid, was quickly climbing home values, spurred by buyers priced out of other parts of the city seeking relative affordability, which has encouraged shareholders to sell and cash out. A two bedroom that would have listed for 200,000 three years ago, she said, could now sell for around 275,000, a 37.5 percent jump. (Two bedroom co ops in Manhattan sold for a median 1,245,000 last quarter, according to Jonathan Miller, a real estate appraiser.) The prices have been eye popping for longtime owners like Ms. Rice, a former information technology consultant, who arrived 24 years ago, when units sold for about an eighth of today's value. "There are a lot of people up and leaving, but by the same token, I think there's a lot of promise," she said, noting that apartments don't stay vacant for long, with an influx of recent East Asian buyers and a number of out of state newcomers, including people from Texas and Florida. The rising home values could encourage shareholders to vote with their wallets at the next board meeting, with plans to renovate the hallways and pay for other capital improvements. It's possible that the board could also vote to lower the cash down payment required of buyers to 20 or 25 percent of the sale price, down from 30 percent, which would make it easier for first time buyers to qualify. Across all price points, many boards are facing pressure to liberalize their policies in response to the changing demographics of shareholders and competition from condos that have more relaxed rules, said Melissa Leifer, an agent with Keller Williams NYC. Just last year, a client from California had to fly to New York for a co op board interview, with no guarantee of acceptance. Now, she said, the necessity of Zoom and other video conferencing during the spring lockdown has softened many buildings' policies toward in person interviews. Changing the status quo is often contentious in co ops, but one crisis after another has had a way of smoothing over outright animosity, said Emanuela Lupu, a partner at the law firm Smith, Buss and Jacobs. "The courts are pretty much inaccessible at this point," she said, because of case backlogs, so litigious shareholders have been somewhat muted. "The pandemic has just chilled out everyone people are just less obnoxious." With the explosion in online shopping since March, the staff might handle 100 packages in just a few hours, triple what used to arrive. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. But it has also been rewarding work in April, he comforted an older resident who had fallen in her apartment, and helped convince her to go to the hospital at a perilous time in the city. "It's like I was taking care of one of my aunts," he said. "She told me I owe her a dance." Ardist Brown Jr., a concierge at a luxury co op on the Upper West Side who is known as Butch, tested positive for Covid in March and experienced severe fatigue and other symptoms. Within three weeks, he said he was back to work. "I felt like I was going back into a war zone." At the spring peak of the virus, he estimates that at least half of the residents left for other homes, and now the share of absent residents is closer to 40 percent. Those that stayed, some of them seniors without regular access to home health aides, because of Covid restrictions, relied more on Mr. Brown. From April to July, he said he would gather extra boxes of food supplies from a friend who works for a nonprofit, and distribute them to some residents. "If Butch didn't do this for quite a few shareholders, they would have gone without, and they may not be here today," said Yelena Sverdlova, a senior property manager who oversees the building. There are co ops all over the city, even in affluent neighborhoods, she said, where at least a few older residents have no local family or support. "I did it because it was the right thing to do," he said. "I slept good at night." David Calvert, 67, is an original H.D.F.C. shareholder who squatted in his Manhattan Valley building until 1983, when he bought his apartment for 250. Now units in the building can sell for more than 300,000. About half of the residents in the 10 unit walk up are original residents. Keeping the building current on various expenses has always been difficult in fact, this was the first year in which every resident regularly paid their maintenance in full. "We all came in here either homeless or completely under housed," he said of the original shareholders. "You care so much for your neighbors that there's a lot of tolerance." While their building remains on solid financial footing, some H.D.F. C.s are teetering on financial distress. In some cases, longtime residents have felt forced to sell for financial reasons and move to lower cost cities; they have been replaced at times, critics say, with wealthier buyers who meet the income criteria on paper, but have access to more cash, from family or reserves, than many previous residents.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
The first drug for women suffering postpartum depression received federal approval on Tuesday, a move likely to pave the way for a wave of treatments to address a debilitating condition that is the most common complication of pregnancy. The drug works very quickly, within 48 hours a significant improvement over currently available antidepressants, which can take two to four weeks to have an effect, if they work at all. Experts say the new treatment will provide immediate relief for mothers whose depression keeps them from providing their babies with the care, bonding and nurturing that is crucial for healthy development. As many as one in seven American women experience depression during or after pregnancy. "Postpartum depression is a serious condition that, when severe, can be life threatening," Dr. Tiffany Farchione, acting director of the Division of Psychiatry Products at the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a statement. "This approval marks the first time a drug has been specifically approved to treat postpartum depression, providing an important new treatment option." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. There are limitations to the new drug, brexanolone, which will be marketed as Zulresso. It is delivered by infusion over 60 hours, during which a new mother must remain in a certified medical center, under supervision should she get dizzy or faint, as several patients did in clinical trials. The infusion will be expensive, averaging 34,000 per patient before discounts, according to Sage Therapeutics, the manufacturer. That does not include the costs of staying in a medical center for two and a half days. Company officials say they expect that insurers will cover the treatment; insurers said this week that they are evaluating the drug. A pill made with a similar molecule, which would be much more accessible and easier for patients, is showing promise in its clinical trials and would be submitted for approval in a couple of years if the results are good, according to Sage. The infusion is to be administered just once, and patients may also take standard antidepressants. Clinical trials of the drug, all sponsored by Sage, found that it produced a steeper decrease in symptoms in women with severe and moderate postpartum depression than a similar placebo infusion. The relief from depression continued for a month after the treatment. While there were anecdotal reports that it extended beyond that period for some women, there has not been systematic research on longer term results. "The major thing is, of course, the rapid effect," said Dr. Margaret Spinelli, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, who treats and studies postpartum depression and was not involved in the research on brexanolone. "That it's the first that's designed for postpartum depression is important and means it will probably be a segue to design other medications for postpartum depression to be administered in an easier way," she added. The treatment may be helpful for up to 30 percent of the 400,000 American women who develop postpartum depression each year, said Dr. Kimberly Yonkers, a professor of psychiatry, obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at Yale, who was not involved in the research. Candidates for treatment would likely be those experiencing severe symptoms or who failed to improve on standard antidepressants, said Dr. Yonkers, who was not involved in the research. "This brings up a lot of very complex public health issues," she added, noting the expense of the treatment and the need for patients to be admitted to medical centers. Stephanie Hathaway, 33, a mother of two in South Windsor, Conn., had no history of depression. But after giving birth to her daughters Hadley, 4, and Brenley , 2 she began crying nonstop, and lost interest in doing things she loved, like cooking and socializing. "I started having intrusive thoughts that would not go away," she recalled. "'Your daughter deserves a better mom, and your husband deserves a better wife' that would just play on repeat." Ultimately Ms. Hathaway felt suicidal and feared she would harm herself if she stopped holding the baby. After Hadley's birth, Ms. Hathaway, then living with her husband in China, spent two weeks under round the clock suicide watch at home. The antidepressant she was prescribed, Zoloft, took three months, at increasing dosages, to eliminate her symptoms. Following Brenley's birth, Zoloft didn't help at all, Ms. Hathaway said, so about five months afterward, she volunteered for the brexanolone trial. Between 12 and 18 hours after the infusion started, "I actually woke up from a nap and those intrusive thoughts that played on repeat, they were gone," said Ms. Hathaway . After leaving the hospital, "I felt like myself again," Ms. Hathaway said. "I'm not going to say I was 100 percent, but I will say there was so much less of a gap to get there." She did not stop antidepressants altogether, but switched to a low dose of Effexor. Dizziness and sleepiness were the most common side effects in the trials, each affecting about one in eight patients, including Ms. Hathaway. The most worrisome effect, the F.D.A. said, was fainting or temporary loss of consciousness, seen in five patients. All recovered within an hour and resumed getting the infusion. Brexanolone is a synthetic form of allopregnanolone, a hormone produced by progesterone in the brain that may help ease depression and anxiety by dampening neural activity, said Dr. Samantha Meltzer Brody, director of the perinatal psychiatry program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who was the principal investigator for the brexanolone studies. The research presented to the F.D.A. consisted of three clinical trials that were led by Dr. Meltzer Brody and funded by Sage Therapeutics, which was also involved in the study design, data analysis, interpretation and writing of the reports. The trials involved 247 women randomly selected to receive a placebo or brexanolone a relatively small number of participants, compared to many other medical trials. Still, the results were considered persuasive by a joint F.D.A. advisory committee last year, which recommended approval in near unanimous votes. The women in the trials had given birth within six months of getting the infusion and were experiencing severe or moderate depression that had started in the third trimester of pregnancy or within four weeks after childbirth. Participants could not have psychosis or bipolar disorder. Their symptoms could include suicidal thoughts but not a recent suicide attempt. They were asked to stop breast feeding during the infusion and for a few days after. But Dr. Meltzer Brody said the drug appears safe for nursing mothers and babies, because very little of it seeps into breast milk. Depression improved in the women receiving brexanolone and in those receiving placebo, a phenomenon common in studies of depression treatments. But more women in the brexanolone group showed improvement, and their improvement was more substantial. In one trial, severely depressed women started with scores of about 28 out of 30 on the Hamilton Depression Scale, a standard evaluation tool. After the infusions, the placebo group averaged about 14 while the brexanolone groups averaged at 9 or 10. A person with a score of 7 or below is considered to be virtually without depressive symptoms. About twice as many women on brexanolone achieved that status, Dr. Meltzer Brody said. After a month, more brexanolone patients managed to keep depressive symptoms at bay, compared to those who received placebos. But in a study of moderately depressed women, those receiving placebos reported feeling as good as the brexanolone patients after 30 days. That may mean that standard antidepressants finally began kicking in, Dr. Spinelli said. Or perhaps the subjects simply improved on their own. "We're going to have more data to understand what happens in a larger population after 30 days," Dr. Meltzer Brody said. Dr. Jeff Jonas, the chief executive of Sage, who trained as a psychiatrist, said he believed the infusion would initially be delivered in hospitals, but "we are talking to family practitioners, we are looking at pediatricians, ob gyns." Dr. Jonas said the experimental pill, given for two weeks in the clinical trials, seems to offer the same benefit as the infusion. It is being tested for treatment of major depression in addition to postpartum depression.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
NEW ORLEANS New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees shared a curious statistic after his team defeated the defending champion Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday: In the third quarter, with the Eagles ahead by 4 points, the Saints put together a 23 play, 117 yard touchdown drive. Yes, 117, if you include the penalties that forced the Saints to backtrack and regain lost yardage. The long march down the field which officially was listed as an 18 play, 92 yard drive paid off when Brees hit wide receiver Michael Thomas for a 2 yard receiving touchdown that put the Saints ahead for good. "That just was the tipping point, it turned the tide of the whole game," Brees said of the 11 minute 29 second drive. "We knew everything after that was building a lead." The top seeded Saints held on to win, 20 14, overcoming a slow start and a bundle of errors in their divisional round game to set up a rematch against the second seeded Los Angeles Rams next Sunday here in New Orleans. The game started with the Eagles playing like Super Bowl champions. They scored two quick touchdowns to go up by 14 0 before the first quarter was over, quieting the raucous crowd of 73,027 at the Superdome. But those were the only points the Eagles would score. The Saints clawed back to 4 points behind at halftime, and then in the third quarter, Brees found his rhythm, conducting the epic drive that left the Eagles' defense, already banged up from injuries, exhausted. Eagles quarterback Nick Foles, who looked like the magical, postseason version of himself on his team's first two drives, was unable to muster much offense in the second half, struggling to communicate with his teammates amid the noise of the crowd. 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. "We think it's a tremendous advantage to play here," Saints Coach Sean Payton said. "It's one of the reasons you fight for the best seed you can get. There's an attribution to that noise. It's all of the communication that strains you not just on one play, but throughout the game." Brees faced no such concerns as he continued his dominance in New Orleans, where he remains undefeated in the playoffs. Brees found his favorite receiver, Thomas, early and often; Thomas had 12 receptions for 171 yards including four catches on the 92 yard third quarter drive. Next up for the Saints are the Rams. The Saints dealt them their first loss of the season at the Superdome with a 45 35 victory in November. At least early in Sunday's game, the odds of a Saints Rams rematch looked slim. Brees threw an interception on the Saints' first play of the game, as he tried to reach Ted Ginn Jr. streaking down the middle of the field. It was only his second interception this season at home. Foles moved the Eagles down the field almost effortlessly on their first two drives to jump out to a 14 0 lead. He found Jordan Matthews for a 37 yard touchdown pass then scored from the 1 on a quarterback sneak for a second touchdown. And he was driving the Eagles back down the field in the second quarter, seemingly on his way to giving Philadelphia a three score lead. But Foles was intercepted by cornerback Marshon Lattimore to end the threat and, it turned out, swing the game's momentum. On the ensuing drive, the Saints pulled a rabbit out of a hat with a fake punt. The team's utility star, quarterback Taysom Hill, lined up behind the center on fourth and 1 in the Eagles' half of the field, took the snap and ran 4 yards for a first down. "It's a gutsy call," Hill said. "I wasn't going to be denied." The Eagles' woes were quickly compounded. Defensive lineman Fletcher Cox was hurt on the play, and hi s replacement, Treyvon Hester, jumped offside on the next snap, giving Brees a free play. He took advantage, hitting Thomas for a 42 yard pass. Seven plays later, on fourth and goal at the 2, Brees threw a touchdown pass to Keith Kirkwood for the Saints' first points. "We felt we needed 7 there," Payton said of his decision to go for the end zone instead of a field goal. Though the scoreboard showed the teams just a few points apart for most of the game, the Eagles looked worn down in the second half, unable to mount a serious threat. The Saints, who averaged more than 31 points a game during the regular season, looked as if they were making up for lost time. Brees hit his receivers on the Saints' end to end drive, including on a third and 16 in which he evaded tacklers and bought himself time before finding Thomas Saints kicker Wil Lutz added a field goal early in the fourth quarter to give the Saints a 6 point lead, but he missed another attempt with just under three minutes to give the Eagles one last chance. Foles moved the Eagles down to the Saints' 27 just before the two minute warning, but then a second down pass went through the hands of Alshon Jeffery and was caught by Lattimore for his second interception of the game. The Saints charged across the field to celebrate, while the crowd, sensing another party next weekend, erupted once again. Brees and the Saints will now have to find a way to slow down an offense as potent as their own, with a trip to the Super Bowl on the line.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
MIAMI I had the honor once of being kicked out of a Donald Trump news conference. I asked him a question he didn't want to answer and a security guard threw me out. It happened on Aug. 25, 2015, in Dubuque, Iowa, during Mr. Trump's first presidential campaign. The news conference revealed with astonishing clarity who Mr. Trump really was: a dangerous populist, an anti immigrant bully, and a threat to democracy and the free press. Some were paying attention. But as Mr. Trump's base of support grew, journalists and politicians began paving his way to the White House. Ignoring that early warning sign in Iowa cost the United States dearly. My tussle with the president in Iowa can be traced back to the announcement of his presidential campaign a couple of months earlier, when he rode down an escalator in Trump Tower and then made a speech in which he called Mexican immigrants criminals and "rapists." Those racist comments were simply unacceptable. So, like any sensible journalist, I wrote to the new candidate and asked him for an interview. However, instead of answering my letter, he posted it on Instagram along with my phone number. As a result, I received hundreds of hateful calls and texts and I had to change my number. What I didn't change was my determination to challenge his views on immigration, which led to our clash at the news conference. Here's how it all went down in Dubuque. I waited for a pause in Mr. Trump's comments, raised my hand, said I had a question about immigration and stood up to start speaking. Mr. Trump pretended he didn't see me and pointed to another journalist. But I kept talking. "Sit down!" he ordered me four times. I ignored him. "You haven't been called," Mr. Trump said. "Go back to Univision." It was the Trumpian version of the racial slur: "Go back to your country." He then gestured at a nearby security guard, who started pushing me back from Mr. Trump, and eventually I was forced out of the room. As the guard pushed me out, I told him not to touch me and that I had the right to ask a question. Outside the conference room, one of Mr. Trump's supporters told me to "get out of my country," not knowing that I was a United States citizen. Hate is contagious. Of all the reporters who were there, only MSNBC's Kasie Hunt and ABC News's Tom Llamas defended me against Mr. Trump. I was soon allowed to return to the room, where I was finally able to ask Mr. Trump some questions. David Gergen, a longtime presidential adviser, told The New York Times soon after the news conference that my exchange with Mr. Trump was going to be "one of the lasting memories of this campaign." After my confrontation with Mr. Trump, several journalists expressed their solidarity with me. And yet, strangely and dangerously, the incident failed to shift the media's obsessive coverage of Mr. Trump, which over time normalized his rude, abusive and xenophobic behavior. Some members of the press seemed fascinated by the Trump phenomenon; others wrongly thought that he would soon change his ways. The prevailing attitude was something along the lines of "That's just the way Trump is, and we have to cover him no matter what he says." Unfortunately, the things that Mr. Trump kept saying were fundamentally against the idea of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. He insisted that he would build a border wall between Mexico and the United States and that Mexico would pay for it. He said he would consider closing mosques in the United States as a way of fighting the Islamic State. None of these odious comments, and many others like them, should have been surprising given that the same candidate, back in 2011, falsely claimed on a radio program that President Barack Obama "doesn't have a birth certificate." Despite that behavior, journalists sought constant access to Mr. Trump during the campaign, and the media aired sometimes without any criticism or context many of his most mind boggling comments. All of which contributed to Mr. Trump's surprise, poll defying victory in the 2016 election. And yet the attitudes and behaviors that came to define Mr. Trump as president were already visible in 2015. Several journalists especially those of us who had worked in Latin America and covered strongmen there saw this dynamic clearly and denounced Mr. Trump. But it wasn't enough. At the time, I believed, as I still do, that the new normal established by Mr. Trump was great for ratings, but not for civility or democracy and I made this clear publicly. If Mr. Trump could attack me, he could attack other journalists. And that's exactly what he did as president, by calling certain media organizations "the enemy of the people." In Mr. Trump's convulsive, chaotic four years in the White House, he separated thousands of children from their parents at the border while failing to condemn white supremacy. At the same time, he was able to fill three vacant seats on the Supreme Court with conservative justices, extending his influence over America's judicial system for many years to come. But ultimately his presidency was overshadowed by a terrible tragedy: more than 270,000 people dead in the United States and roughly 14 million infected, partly as a result of his irresponsible and erratic handling of the coronavirus. The United States will never fall prey to tyranny. The nation's balance of powers has survived quite well for nearly two and a half centuries. And yet the celebrations I saw in the streets of Washington and other American cities after President Trump's defeat last month reminded me so much of what I experienced in Nicaragua in the 1990s after the fall of Sandinismo and in Mexico in the 2000s after the fall of the Institutional Revolutionary Party's "perfect dictatorship," which had lasted 71 years. All were celebrations of unburdening, of something close to revenge the bully who had dominated public life for so long had finally been forced out. A huge weight had suddenly been lifted from everyone's shoulders. We journalists should have been tougher on Mr. Trump, questioning his every lie and insult. We should not have let him get away with his racism and xenophobia. We should never again allow someone to create an alternative reality in order to seize the presidency. Perhaps it was the pandemic that was most responsible for putting an end to Mr. Trump's presidency. But the entire debacle might have been avoided if we had simply paid greater attention and offered more resistance to the words and gestures of the undeserving man who descended the golden escalator of Trump Tower in 2015. Jorge Ramos ( jorgeramosnews) is an anchor for the Univision network, a contributing opinion writer and the author of, most recently, "Stranger: The Challenge of a Latino Immigrant in the Trump Era." 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
Bryan Derballa for The New York Times Bryan Derballa for The New York Times Credit... Bryan Derballa for The New York Times Catherine Hurlin of the American Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York in June 2019. A Poet's View of the Year: Longing for Our Own Lives This is an article from Turning Points, a special section that explores what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. "The Life Unlived" is a poem, or a dramatic sketch, that revolves around a new era. It focuses on what is happening inside those who populate the text and inside us readers as we watch the ballet the poem describes. Perhaps we're longing to do something real. Perhaps we're longing for our own lives. In the poem, Isaac and Ishmael meet again. I imagine that these brothers have spent a long time missing each other. I've been thinking about them for years. They speak of doves and death, the mighty condor, all while watching the ballet. I want to believe that this text is an embodied response to the question of what's possible, even in a year like 2020. All movements keep the beat, a fixed choreography, the dancers are dancing ballet A man holds a clock, in the end all we hear is the clock's ticking (A transition from the dancer's choreographed movements to the clock's simple ticking) I have asked for a new age to begin You may choose one piece of knowledge to take with you You may choose as you see fit, the freedom is yours, but if limitations are what you want What will die becomes a beginning, leave everything Yes, them too. Remembering won't be possible. You die. We all die Yes, in a way, in a way not You won't be able to choose when What do you know of the new age? You do have experience. What you see in front of you. It's no use being afraid. Greet the new with confidence, be fair Who are you, the one who will explain it all to us? Never, no such thoughts, change the melody and listen to what is barely audible The dead: It grows, it grows, it grows Rise up when I speak to you Are you a man of violence? How do you rule without violence? Everything rests on you believing me, my every word Don't think for a moment that I'll reveal to you anything about me The dead: About me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me The man who spoke of a new age walks his clock offstage There, off they go, fools all They're not coming back, we're alone here, we're free, and yet not I don't understand a thing, now say what you mean Now everyone must heal themselves The murmur of the dead lies behind it, under it, murmur freely How many, two, or three, fifty, hundred thousand, sevenhundredthousandthirty? Go ahead, just lie down, over there. He points to the dead, their murmur Your sleep will be dreamless So stay right there, there you'll get to dream Is it that easy, but a few words, he laughs Everything begins again. Isaac, Ishmael, the sacrifice and the desert Thunder rolls, lightning flashes, in its flash we see the dancers' ballet Everyone watches as they dance, each in his own mind, thoughts, if we could hear them A bird flies through the landscape, falls down before Isaac and Ishmael. It is death, the condor, death's proud emissary. A bird you say, had it been a dove we'd already be celebrating, but the condor, with wings to carry it from hell and back So quick to cleave thoughts, Ishmael my brother What are you thinking of? The meadows I rode through as a child. Thoughts, hope perhaps as simple as this is a novelist and poet. Her most recent novel is "Welcome to America." This text was translated by Saskia Vogel from the Swedish. 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, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Not all Twitter bots are trying to spam, hack or peddle you fake news. Some are works of creativity, programmed to tweet diagrams of imaginary bird migrations or haikus composed of words scavenged from surveys of marine mammals. I follow Twitter bots for serendipitous notes that take me out of my day, if just fleetingly. There's comfort in witnessing a narrative take form outside the direct control of humans and oblivious to the breakneck clip of the internet. Science themed Twitter bots come in various forms, doling out humor, factual information and galactic perspective. There's shark girls, which casts two geotracked great white sharks as travel writers, quoting from the writings of Virginia Woolf and the poet Hilda Doolittle. There's the ephemerides, which juxtaposes raw images taken by outer planet probes like the Cassini spacecraft with computer generated poems. There are many more. Below are some of my favorites. Nicole He programmed this bot to tweet a photo of her fiddle leaf fig, a common houseplant, at 10:17 every morning. Over time, you can see the plant birth new offshoots and shuffle its leaves ever so slightly. "It's striking how often people tweet encouraging, nice things at the plant about how shiny its leaves are or how fast it's growing," wrote Ms. He, a programmer and artist, in an email. "I think I've discovered that a humbly tweeting plant is actually the secret to world peace (or at least kindness on Twitter)." This bot tweets descriptions of emergency room visits from a government database that tracks about 100 hospitals across the United States. Its parent, Keith Collins, a reporter at Quartz, emailed that he didn't expect to laugh out loud when he first looked at the data. But most of the injuries are minor, he said, and there's something about the way they're written in the "pithy style of a rushed E.R. doctor." Noticing a glut of entries about patients who punched walls, he charted the age distribution of wall punchers and found that 15 year olds were most prolific. Each tweet from birdcolourbot is a bird name followed by a swath of colors resembling a paint chip. Each band's width is determined by the probability of a given bird of that species being that hue. "I'm red green colorblind, so I'm interested in color perception and how different people see birds (or anything really)," emailed David L. Miller, the bot's creator and a statistician with affiliations at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Also dedicated to winged creatures, this bot tweets make believe moths of all shapes, sizes, textures and iridescent colors. It's programmed to generate variations in several anatomical structures of real moths, including antennas, wing shapes and wing markings. Another program, which splices and recombines real Latin and English moth names, generates monikers for the moths. You can also reply to the account with name suggestions, and it will generate a corresponding moth. Inspired by naturalist illustrations, such as those of Ernst Haeckel, the programmers designed their bot to create moths stroke by stroke, with each insect composed of tens of thousands of individual strokes. "At its core, the moth generator is a wildly byzantine drawing machine in the shape of a moth," said Katie Rose Pipkin, an artist at Carnegie Mellon University who created the bot with Loren Schmidt. "They have discovered a planet. A guinea pig like creature lives there and creeps through the valleys. It is something of a mystery." Such are the snapshots offered by Newfound Planets, a bot that tweets about fictional distant worlds. The human behind it, Charles Bergquist, who directs the public radio program Science Friday, wrote via email that he thinks people enjoy the bot because they yearn to know what it's like on another planet "how big it is, might there be water or what might the sunrise look like." This bot also tweets about fictional lands, but based on actual erosion science. Martin O'Leary, a glaciologist at Swansea University in Wales, programmed it as part of National Novel Generation Month, a spinoff of National Novel Writing Month that challenges people to write an algorithm that writes a novel (here's his accompanying novel). The bot starts with a random initial terrain, then simulates how water would flow over it to create channels, valleys and coastlines. Cities are placed away from each other and near running water, and Dr. O'Leary wrote another program to name the cities. To him, Twitter bots are a piecemeal form of science outreach. He said a lot of publicly available information about science amounted to, "Look at this amazing thing right now!" But Twitter bots "worm their way into your life, sit there and slowly give you this drip of stuff. They're gentle."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
With "Pokemon Detective Pikachu" hitting theaters soon, it's no surprise that this week's highest profile new trailer also spotlights an old school video game character. But it's far from the top scoring spot. Here's the new crop, ranked from least to most promising. Everyone (both of you!) who has been clamoring for Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston to reteam after the 2011 groaner "Just Go With It": Your prayers have been answered by Netflix. The "Saturday Night Live" and "Friends" alumni are cast as a New York City police detective and his crime novel loving wife who become suspects in a murder while on a European vacation. The mystery? Why all the laughs are missing from this pedestrian trailer. "Every hero has a genesis," reads the tagline for this hybrid of live action and animation built around the speedy blue creature from the Sega Genesis game. "Parks and Recreation" veteran Ben Schwartz gives voice to Sonic, and Jim Carrey gets back to his cartoonish roots as the mustachioed supervillain Dr. Robotnik. No stranger to robots from his gig on HBO's "Westworld," James Marsden co stars as Sonic's straight man BFF, and the fact that he delivers the trailer's funniest line isn't necessarily a positive sign. Even worse, when the internet got a look at the trailer, it gave a big thumbs down to the human aspects of the hedgehog's design, prompting the director, Jeff Fowler, to promise a revamped look before the movie is released in the fall. Ever since "Jaws" devoured the box office in June 1975, summer has been the season of underwater horror movies like "Deep Blue Sea" and "The Meg." In this one (whose producers include the "Evil Dead" mastermind Sam Raimi), Barry Pepper and Kaya Scodelario play a father and daughter terrorized by giant gators after a hurricane hits their Florida home. The scream bait trailer for "Crawl" suggests it might be a throwback to gritty, witty '80s flicks like "Alligator" and "C.H.U.D." If so, count me in. In 2003, the director Gurinder Chadha released "Bend It Like Beckham" here, about a Sikh teenager in London who's obsessed with the soccer star. Her new movie, based on the soaring trailer, could be called "Sing It Like Springsteen." Set in 1987, it follows a British teenager of Pakistani descent (Viveik Kalra) who's inspired by the Boss's tunes to travel to the United States. With the Scottish country music drama "Wild Rose" and Danny Boyle's Beatles themed rom com "Yesterday" both due in June, brace yourself for a British musical movie invasion this summer. The hysterical British trailer for Olivia Wilde's directorial debut makes it look like a gender switch reboot of "Superbad" and that could be a very good thing. "Lady Bird" scene stealer Beanie Feldstein (Jonah Hill's real life sister) and "Justified" standout Kaitlyn Dever star as overachieving high school seniors who plan one last blowout before graduation. Bonus: Wilde's husband, Jason Sudeikis, plays a passive aggressive principal.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
In July, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. presented an economic strategy to "rebuild domestic manufacturing capacity," restoring local supply chains from semiconductors to pharmaceuticals. In September he added a tax penalty to the plan, aimed at companies that move jobs to other countries, alongside a tax credit for businesses that bring them home. The proposals might have seemed like something from President Trump's playbook. "There is a common concern, which the Trump candidacy forced a lot of people to think harder about," said Jared Bernstein, a former top economic adviser to Mr. Biden who is informally advising his presidential campaign. And that is "the extent to which globalization has left significant swaths of people in many different communities behind." These common understandings could reshape the global economy. No matter who wins in November, economic policy for the next several years will aim to protect American employment from outsourcing driven by employers seeking lower labor costs, and to reclaim a foothold in industries that the United States had given up for lost. "If the argument is that we need high paying manufacturing jobs, because they fit the skill set of a lot of people that are being left out, that is an argument for deglobalization," said Derek Scissors, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington. "We would have to have some deglobalization for this to work." Depending on how the next administration deploys the tools of government to serve this cause, the United States could reconfigure the global network of corporate supply chains that multinational corporations have established over the last four decades. A "flat world" with countries ever more closely tied together through trade and investment, pursued by presidents from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, seems to be an outdated goal. A Biden administration is unlikely to continue to impose tariffs on friends and foes alike, deploying protectionist tools in a more strategic and disciplined way. Still, policy proposals suggest that Mr. Biden would stick to the goal of encouraging, steering, cajoling or pushing American companies to develop critical industries and the jobs they support in the United States. "Biden is not blindly pro trade, but he doesn't want to shrink from the world like President Trump has," said Ben Harris, a senior economic adviser to Mr. Biden and his campaign. "What the vice president proposes is a new approach to globalization, one in which we don't get behind every trade deal on the grounds that more trade is always better." Mr. Trump has put tariffs on imports from rivals and allies, started a trade war with China and blocked the access of Chinese companies to American technology. He renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement, short circuited the World Trade Organization's dispute settlement system and pulled the United States out of the Trans Pacific Partnership. But a membership survey published in September by the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai found that despite the administration's push for American companies to redirect investment to the United States, only 4 percent planned to do so; 79 percent reported no change in plans. Moreover, the trade war has come at a cost. Tariffs imposed by the United States and retaliatory measures taken by aggrieved trading partners have shaved billions off the U.S. economy, according to a Federal Reserve paper. And a 2019 study by economists at the Fed, Princeton University and Columbia University showed that tariffs imposed additional burdens on American households, raising the cost of imports and curtailing exporters' access to markets. For all that cost, there has been no improvement in Mr. Trump's preferred indicator of economic dominance, the nation's trade balance. The balance between America's exports and imports of goods and services sank in July to its deepest deficit since the administration of George W. Bush. The balance in the trade of goods alone recorded its deepest deficit at least since the administration of Mr. Bush's father. Whatever turn American protectionism takes, it will remain squarely focused on China. "Trump did wake us up on the China issue," added Rob Atkinson, who heads the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank close to the U.S. technology industry. "He made it clear that we have to get tough with China." At the same time, the American policy objective is increasingly shifting from jobs to broader national security considerations including technological primacy and the protection of intellectual property. "This is a much more complicated discussion than how much do we import and how much do we export," said David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is not advising a presidential campaign. Republicans and Democrats alike are intent on preventing China from becoming the dominant supplier of advanced communications technology and ensuring that the United States develops new energy technology, advanced semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. The effect may be to further slow a globalization process that was already losing momentum as companies reconsidered the far flung supply chains they deployed in the decades after the end of the Cold War. American corporations may not be flocking home as a result of the Trump administration's tariffs, but globalization has shifted into a lower gear since the 1990s and early 2000s, when American businesses flocked to China and other cheap labor markets. Trade growth eased after the financial crisis of 2008, as China and other Asian economies rose up the technological ladder to make more of the sophisticated parts and components they used to import and assemble into finished goods for export. Investment flows across borders also retrenched. Manufacturing has become increasingly automated. So the effort by multinational companies to find cheap workers has taken a back seat to other considerations, like finding skilled labor, being close to consumer markets and ensuring that supply chains can withstand shocks like pandemics, climate related disasters or even trade wars. And those companies are paying more attention to the risks involved in their complex global networks. This has reduced the pressure on American jobs. Factory employment remains far from its peak 40 years ago, but manufacturers added nearly 1.5 million jobs in the 10 years after employment hit bottom in February 2010, in the depths of the last recession. And a flight of white collar service jobs from the United States has yet to materialize. It will be difficult for the United States to disengage from China, which remains a huge market for American companies. Yet the relationship could take a turn for the worse. Mr. Autor, for one, thinks that the new politics of trade and investment is splitting the world into a Chinese bloc and a Western bloc, led by the United States. "It will be a bipolar world, bifurcated, with different standards and different rights," he said. Where the jobs end up will be a secondary consideration.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy

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