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A diorama by Maurice Sendak, created in the early 1980s during the design process for Oliver Knussen's operatic adaptation of Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are," is on view at the Morgan Library Museum. There is a drawing that gets to the root of Maurice Sendak's ominous sweetness, his work's potent mixture of childhood idyll and threatening night. It's a sketch of a costume for the premiere of Oliver Knussen's early 1980s operatic adaptation of "Where the Wild Things Are," the picture book that had made Sendak a publishing sensation two decades earlier. The costume is for one of the maniacally grinning Wild Things, complete with horns and pointy sharp teeth. But the drawing is a cross section. Inside the looming beast is just a child, his little hands and feet strapped into the woolly Wild Thing's, making the character roar by speaking through a tiny cone. The boy in the monster, the monster in the boy: This is the reality Sendak, who died at 83 in 2012, wanted us to see, and understand. It was his rare ability to convey that quality the light in darkness, the darkness in light that brought him to opera, the focus of "Drawing the Curtain: Maurice Sendak's Designs for Opera and Ballet," aimed at adults but likely delightful for children, too, at the Morgan Library Museum through Oct. 6. Five of his productions emerge before our eyes from rough sketches to storyboards, polished designs and a bit of video footage in those unmistakably Sendakian colors, watery and vivid at once. Drawn from Sendak's bequest to the Morgan of his theatrical drawings and organized by Rachel Federman, an assistant curator at the museum , the succinct yet bountiful exhibition offers an overview of a dense, underappreciated period in this artist's career, undertaken with his most celebrated books well in the past and his life in uneasy transition. "Fifty," he said, "is a good time to either change careers or have a nervous breakdown." The new midlife career he took on in the late 1970s, it turned out, was that of a designer for music theater. It was not actually such an unlikely shift. Music was a lifelong preoccupation of Sendak's; he revered composers above all artists certainly far above illustrators like himself. And there was one he worshiped in particular: "I know that if there's a purpose for life," he said, "it was for me to hear Mozart." Frank Corsaro, the daring stage director, didn't know about this adoration of Mozart when he asked Sendak in 1978 to work with him on a production of "The Magic Flute" for Houston Grand Opera. Corsaro merely suspected that Sendak would be well suited to the opera's slippery tonal blend of fairy tale delight and somber pathos. "Flute" was well known to Sendak: Just three years before, he had produced one of his delightful "fantasy sketches" fluid drawings swiftly executed as he listened to music illustrating Mozart's first act. (The most wonderful of these sketches at the Morgan has a miniature Mozart rushing among the staves in a page of the score for "Der Schauspieldirektor.") And at the time he was engaged for "The Magic Flute," Sendak was already at work on "Outside Over There," the profound picture book that completed a loose trilogy with "Where the Wild Things Are" and "In the Night Kitchen." It, like "Flute," endows music with redemptive power: Its heroine saves the day by playing a wonder horn, as Mozart's Tamino does with his flute. Sendak was clearly ready for opera when it came calling. With Corsaro, he created for "The Magic Flute" a flight of Masonic Pharaonic fancy, an explosion of Enlightenment era Egyptology, doubtless influenced by the splashy "Treasures of Tutankhamun" exhibition touring America at the time. Lush vegetation spills over ancient ruins in the drawings. Dioramas created during the design process, three of them on view at the Morgan, show the irresistible combination of Baroque style scenography, with its receding flats, and Sendak's inimitable drawing style old and new, living and dead, in charming balance, teetering delightedly on the edge of kitsch but made with great craftsmanship and earnestness. The Morgan itself was a character in the creation of some of the designs in the exhibition. Elements of Sendak's "Flute" may well have been inspired by a 1977 visit to the museum, when he was researching "Outside Over There," to see the curving shapes and iridescent colors in drawings by William Blake. These Blake works are on view in "Drawing the Curtain," as are Tiepolo drawings in the museum's collection that are obvious models for Sendak's designs for "The Love for Three Oranges," a surreal Prokofiev satire that stumped him and Corsaro until they saw Tiepolo's images of commedia dell'arte and 18th century life. Sendak and Corsaro reached perhaps the height of their partnership in 1981, with a New York City Opera production of Janacek's "The Cunning Little Vixen," a richly wistful yet cleareyed story of life, death and nature's rebirth among both human characters and anthropomorphic animal ones. Relayed nationwide in a 1983 Live From Lincoln Center broadcast, Sendak's luminous backdrops evoked German Romantic paintings. The stage was populated by figures adorable yet uncanny: A fox suavely smokes a cigarette in one of the fluently rendered drawings. An outsize owl costume its giant feathered head and talons on view just outside the exhibition at the Morgan is cuddly until its yellow eyes keep staring, increasingly sinister, into yours. Sentiment is also hard to find in Sendak's "Nutcracker." In his version of what he called a "throbbing, sexually alert little story," created with Kent Stowell of Pacific Northwest Ballet in Seattle in 1983, Clara is not a little girl but a young woman on the verge of maturity. When she travels, it's not to a cutesy land of sweets but to an island seraglio. (Perhaps Sendak was again thinking of Mozart, and his "Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail.") In the ballet, as throughout this late part of his career, Sendak resisted being typecast as a "kiddie book" artist, brought into theaters to sprinkle around some twee. "At my age I'm not about to do a predictable, candy coated version," Sendak, then 69, said of his production of the opera "Hansel and Gretel" in 1997. But as he knew better than anyone, the pieces he worked on were far from kids' stuff. They depict the blurry border of order and chaos, childhood and adulthood, boy and monster. And Sendak clearly poured himself into them, especially in his heady, jam packed first years as a designer. He looms over the shows sometimes literally, with self portraits as the wide eyed, lovably smiling Wild Thing Moishe and as a clenched teeth Nutcracker on two of the curtains he created.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Ellen Page, 29, best known for her Oscar nominated role in "Juno" and recently starring in "Freeheld" with Julianne Moore, has become an advocate for L.G.B.T. rights after coming out as a lesbian in 2014. In the past year, Ms. Page developed and produced the documentary series "Gaycation" with her friend Ian Daniel. The series, created with Vice and the filmmaker Spike Jonze, the creative director of the new Viceland channel, follows Ms. Page and Mr. Daniel as they explore lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender groups around the world. Following are edited excerpts from a conversation with her. Q. How did "Gaycation" come to be? A. Spike Jonze is a good friend, and I was crashing at his place in New York while I was working on a movie. He said, "Hey, we're making a network, if you have any TV ideas." The next day I texted my idea to him and then it went really quickly. I've always loved travel shows so much. Were you and Ian experienced travelers? Myself more than Ian. Because of my job, I've had the great fortune of going to lots of different places. But to be honest, I haven't had much experience as a gay traveler, so that was something new to me. Like when I was going to Tokyo to do press years ago, I wouldn't be going to the gay district because I was very closeted. I didn't even know it existed. So getting to experience that was awesome.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
"The Great War" takes inspiration from the real life 92nd Infantry Division, a segregated African American unit. In the film, a regiment has broken through German lines. But the clock is ticking to the cease fire, and at 11 a.m., Nov. 11, 1918, the territory they have captured will go to the Germans, leaving them vulnerable to being killed. So a unit, headed by the white, shellshocked Captain Rivers (Bates Wilder), is dispatched to retrieve them. The rescue scenario steals several tropes from "Saving Private Ryan"; General John J. Pershing (Ron Perlman) even reads aloud a letter from Abraham Lincoln as justification for the mission, as happens in Steven Spielberg's film. The central drama involves racism within Captain Rivers's unit and a growing respect between Rivers and Private Cain (Hiram A. Murray), an African American soldier under his command.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Like theatrical villains who arrive a couple of scenes into the play, Liv and Griff Adamson slither into view in "The Snakes" preceded by their reputations. At first, it's hard to see what all the preamble d fuss is about. They seem bad, sure, but only ordinarily so tone deaf and mean when we encounter them on a trip to France to visit their son and daughter. They gripe about the ghastliness of the journey and the inadequacies of their offspring. Griff fails to take into account the mixed income company at lunch when he complains about the annoyances of private jet ownership. Liv is weird and out of it and skeevily attached to her son. On the other hand, the couple appear eager to shower their vast fortune on their children as well as on Dan, their son in law. Maybe their boorishness is an inevitable side effect of great wealth, we can almost hear him thinking something like the way walking around with butter stained clothes is a side effect of eating lobster. This is the fifth novel by the nimble, versatile British author , who is equally at home in a class bound Edwardian country house filled with visitors ("The Uninvited Guests") as she is in a repressed London suburb harboring secrets after World War II ("The Outcast"). Set in present day London and Burgundy, "The Snakes" is a creepy, scary novel about the corrosive effects of money and power and parenthood. If you can judge people by the way their behavior affects their children, the Adamsons have failed in every category. Alex, their younger son, is a recovering drug addict who has been unable to renovate or even clean up the crumbling hotel his father bought for him (out of guilt; out of a compulsion to control; out of a worse reason that we will learn later) in France. He lives there in squalor and isolation, making up in wine what he has forgone in drugs. 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. His sister, Bea, lives in an Ikea furnished flat in London, refusing to accept even a penny from her father. (A third sibling lives offstage in Hong Kong, oddly unscathed.) That she and Dan, a mixed race artist toiling at a soul sucking real estate firm, have a few thousand pounds in the bank is a source of great pride to her but anxiety and bitterness to him. What will happen to his principled love for Bea when her family fortune is dangled before him? We will soon find out. Jones writes with cool, crisp prose about cruelty of many kinds; about class and race and power; and about regular people caught up in complicated situations that veer far out of control. She has an Ian McEwan esque ability to provoke tension and anxiety. Like the fog in "Bleak House," dread permeates the first half of "The Snakes," right from the opening paragraph, when Bea has a bad dream on the eve of her longed for trip to Europe with Dan. ("She thought how strange it was to have a nightmare when they had such plans, and she was so happy," Jones writes. She has no idea.) Dread follows the couple across the Channel and stalks them at Alex's deteriorating horror fest of a hotel. There is a serious dearth of guests. Dan and Bea seem to be the only visitors, unless you count the rats decomposing in the attic and the snakes coiling and skittering around the property. ("They're sort of company," Alex says, creepily. "They've got nice round eyes.") As bad as it might be that the hotel rooms are named after the seven deadly sins Dan and Bea are awarded Hubris there is far worse to come. What's going on with the hotel guest book? Why do the neighbors seem like escapees from "Deliverance"? Is Alex really getting anything out of his online Narcotics Anonymous meetings? When Griff and Liv drop in to complete the tableau of family dysfunction, the book becomes less like "The Shining" and more like Edward St. Aubyn's Melrose novels, with their lacerating descriptions of how cruelty courses like poison through the veins of a family. In this closed, stifling environment, we're also reminded of the Danish movie "The Celebration," in which the children of a distinguished financier announce to the guests at his 60th birthday banquet exactly what it is that he did to them. "Someone should have helped him," Jones writes, as Bea berates herself about Alex's childhood. "She tried to. But fear was bigger. She didn't know what chance there was that he could save himself." On its own, this seems an ambitious enough plan for a novel. But along the way Jones shifts gears, and then shifts them again, and then turbocharges the engine, so it can feel almost as if you are reading two (or three) different books. The effect is like walking into what you think is an upscale seafood restaurant and being served not just sole meuniere but also eggplant parmigiana, chicken pad thai, beef souvlakia and a Quarter Pounder with cheese. Everything is beautifully prepared, but you are overwhelmed by the sensory overload and the branding confusion. The tension diffuses and reconstitutes, and we're not sure how to reorient our thinking. Is "The Snakes" a portrait of a messed up family? A cautionary tale about the evil that money does? A murder mystery involving a malign and racist foreign police force? A "Simple Plan" style thriller about greed and wads of cash? I would walk a long distance to procure one of Jones's daring, interesting, beautifully written, atmospheric books. Readers will find this novel provocative and propulsive even when they suspect the author of over egging the pudding. But it is at its best when it homes in close rather than venturing far afield. Bea and Alex originally seem a study in contrasting approaches to childhood trauma do you remain inside a compromised system, or do you try to escape by rejecting it and cauterizing the wounds? But Bea's parental avoidance program turns out to be just as precarious as the prison of obligation Alex has built for himself. One by one, the cards in her paper house fall. Snakes are everywhere here: slithering unseen in the walls of the house; looming with unblinking eyes and lipless mouths in the garden; leaving their old skins behind as false promises that change is possible. But nothing could be as malign or coldblooded as the human reptiles in this family.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
After years of growing concern about obesity among children, federal researchers have found the clearest evidence yet that the epidemic may be turning a corner in young children from low income families. The obesity rate among preschool age children from poor families fell in 19 states and United States territories between 2008 and 2011, federal health officials said Tuesday the first time a major government report has shown a consistent pattern of decline for low income children after decades of rising rates. Children from poor families have had some of the nation's highest rates of obesity. One in eight preschoolers in the United States is obese. Among low income children, it is one in seven. The rate is much higher for blacks (one in five) and for Hispanics (one in six). Several cities have reported modest drops among school age children, offering hints of a change in course. But gains were concentrated among whites and children from middle and upper income families, and were not consistent across the country. "We've seen isolated reports in the past that have had encouraging trends, but this is the first report to show declining rates of obesity in our youngest children," said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which prepared the report. "We are going in the right direction for the first time in a generation." The cause of the decline remains a mystery, but researchers offered theories, like an increase in breast feeding, a drop in calories from sugary drinks, and changes in the food offered in federal nutrition programs for women and children. In interviews, parents suggested that they have become more educated in recent years, and so are more aware of their families' eating habits and of the health problems that can come with being overweight. Health officials noted a small decline in the national rate for low income children for the first time in December, but they did not regard it as important because they lacked a geographic breakdown to show whether the pattern had taken hold in many states. The new report, based on the country's largest set of health data for children, used weight and height measurements from 12 million children ages 2 to 4 who participate in federally funded nutrition programs, to provide the most detailed picture of obesity among low income Americans. It included data from 40 states, as well as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands. Ten states were not included because of incomplete data. Trained health professionals took the children's measurements. "This is the first time we have this many states in the U.S. showing a decline," said Heidi Blanck, a senior researcher at the C.D.C. "Until now, it has been a patchwork." Researchers last analyzed these data in 2009, when only 9 states and territories had obesity declines and 24 had increases. In the report on Tuesday, the proportions were reversed, with only 3 states experiencing increases and 18 states and the Virgin Islands showing declines; 19 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico were flat. The declines were modest: Most states dropped by less than 1 percentage point. More children were added to the study because of a drop in their income during the economic downturn, leading researchers to investigate whether the decline could be attributed to an influx of new children with lower weights. They concluded that it was not, Dr. Blanck said. Researchers agreed that the decline was real and held good implications for future health in America. Children who are overweight or obese between age 3 and 5 are five times as likely to be overweight or obese as adults, creating a higher risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer. But there was little consensus on why the decline might be happening. Children now consume fewer calories from sugary beverages than they did in 1999, Dr. Blanck said. More women are breast feeding, which can lead to healthier weight gain for young children. Federal researchers have also chronicled a drop in overall calories for children in the past decade, down by 7 percent for boys and 4 percent for girls, but health experts said those declines were too small to make much difference. Another explanation is that some combination of state, local and federal policies aimed at reducing obesity is starting to have an effect. Michelle Obama has led a push to change young children's eating and exercise habits and 10,000 child care centers across the country have signed on. Many scientists doubt that anti obesity programs actually work, but proponents of the programs say a broad set of policies applied systematically over a period of time can affect behavior. "We can't prove what are the changes in environment and policy that led to" the declining rates, Dr. Frieden said. But he added that it was hard to believe that the government policies now in place "aren't having a big role here." Tom Baranowski, a professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine who has been skeptical about government interventions, said obesity has as much to do with genes as it does with behavior. "It could be that we are hitting some sort of a biological limit," he said, in which "all those who are genetically predisposed to being obese already are." At the Union Baptist Harvey Johnson Head Start, a bright preschool in Baltimore, the focus is on behavior. Children now get health lessons, field trips to a grocery store, healthier meals and an hour of exercise a day on a new jungle gym. Instructors measure children's height and weight and a nutritionist counsels parents. The income threshold for a family of three is under 20,000. The share of the school's approximately 250 children who were obese or overweight fell to 33 percent in 2013, from 35 percent in 2010. In interviews, parents agreed that encouragement from child care programs like Union Baptist, as well as warnings from doctors, had helped. But just as important, they said, were health worries that have taken hold in low income communities because of the epidemics of obesity and diabetes. Shannon Freeland, a 35 year old pharmacy tech instructor, said both her grandmothers died in their 50s. One, who weighed 300 pounds, had a heart attack, while the other died from diabetes after amputations that began with her toes and ultimately took both legs. "Grandparents aren't supposed to pass like that," said Ms. Freeland, whose first child, Iren, was overweight as a toddler. "That's when it started to click for me." She added, "We were pricking Iren's finger at age 2, and that was scary for me." Ms. Freeland said it was still hard to eat better, partly because it is expensive, but also because with three children, the pull of fast food is strong. She has tried shopping at Whole Foods, but said she cannot afford it. But since going back to college for a degree in public health, she has become more aware of her family's food habits. Many of her friends are also back in school, avoiding a grim job market. "People look at Head Start moms and say, 'Oh they're just low income and that's it,' " she said. "I think parents have changed. Our income may still be low, but we're more educated."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
The Lyric Theater underwent major renovations for "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child," including exterior additions that are symbolic to the play: a wing on the facade and a rooftop nest with a child huddled inside. The Harry Potter economy is filled with jaw dropping numbers, including 500 million books sold and 7.7 billion in worldwide film grosses. Here's another one: "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child," a two part drama now in previews and opening April 22, cost about 68.5 million to bring to Broadway, including not only 35.5 million to capitalize the show more than for any other nonmusical play in history but also another 33 million to clear out and redo the theater. It's a huge bet in a flop prone industry, but also a seemingly safe one, predicated on the expectation that "Cursed Child" will become a big hit on Broadway, a long running production that can spin off profits for years. "That's a ton of money, no question about it, in terms of what things cost around here, but it's Harry Potter, one of the most popular brands in the history of brands," said Tom Viertel, the executive director of the Commercial Theater Institute. "It has a title the likes of which we would rarely, if ever, get to see on Broadway." Even in previews, as the cast finds its footing and the creative team makes adjustments, the show is setting box office records. Potter fans have been filling up the Lyric, one of Broadway's largest theaters, and the 2.1 million the play took in during the first week of April was more than any play had previously grossed in a single week. The record setting 35.5 million capitalization the amount raised from producers and investors to pay an unusually large cast and crew, rehearse an unusually long show and build an unusually elaborate production was disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. By comparison, most nonmusical plays on Broadway are between 3 million and 5 million, and even the splashiest musicals rarely top more than 25 million. But the capitalization is only a portion of what it took to pave the way for "Cursed Child" to get to Broadway. Ambassador, which competed with other Broadway landlords to woo "Cursed Child," overhauled the Lyric at the behest of the play's producers. A charmless barn of a theater (previously home to a series of flops, including the 75 million musical "Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark"), it was reconfigured to feel more like an old fashioned opera house, with a vaulted ceiling, a necklace of boxes, and 1,622 seats (down from 1,896). Even the entrance was relocated, from crowded 42nd Street to the less dense 43rd Street. The work on the building was expected to cost about 10 million, according to documents filed with the New York City Department of Buildings. The play, a two part experience with a running time of more than five hours, is a sequel to the series of young adult fantasy novels written by J.K. Rowling about a boy wizard. "Cursed Child" takes place 19 years after the final book, at a time when Harry and his friends have become parents. "Cursed Child" was written by Jack Thorne, based on a story by Mr. Thorne, Ms. Rowling and the director John Tiffany. It was developed in Britain and has been sold out in London's West End for 22 months, and last year it won a record nine Olivier awards the British equivalent of the Tonys including one for best play. A third production, in Melbourne, Australia, is scheduled to open next year. In response to questions about the show's finances, two of the lead producers, Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender, offered a tour of the renovated theater. Strolling through the theater, they showed off phoenix sconces and dragon lanterns and a lobby wall featuring prints of patronuses (silvery animal guardians). The color scheme is rich and dark most of the walls are painted a color called raven plume and a custom carpet features H monograms (for Hogwarts, Harry's alma mater). The newly adorned exterior features giant wings and large sculptures of a child (symbol alert!) trapped in a nest. Ms. Friedman, who has been vocal about the high cost of working on Broadway, said that the play has cost significantly more to mount in New York than in London. Labor, marketing and theater rentals all tend to cost more in New York. "I find the costs here difficult to comprehend," Ms. Friedman said. "It's a number I do not like." But she also said that particular aspects of "Cursed Child" make it expensive. A play in two parts required twice as much time to rehearse; the show's elaborate illusions required significant substage mechanics and extra training. It took 16 weeks just to load the show's set elements into the theater. Investment documents filed with the New York attorney general's office offer a rough breakdown of the capitalization, including 11.7 million for the physical production, 7.8 million for "general and administrative" costs, including the design and signage of the facade, 3.4 million for advertising and publicity and 3.2 million for salaries. That money goes to pay a cast and crew that is much bigger than for most plays. According to Ms. Friedman and Mr. Callender, a shop crew of 220 people was assembled to build and install the scenery and lighting and costumes. The show has 40 actors, a stage crew of 26, some 16 people assigned to wardrobe and hair and 5 stage managers. "It's very obvious where the money went the whole theater has been transformed to fit the show, and the level of technical expertise is like nothing I've ever seen on Broadway," said Jonathon Rosenthal, a 38 year old I.T. consultant from the Bronx who runs a Harry Potter meet up group and who saw the play on Broadway earlier this month. "It looks like there is magic going on on the stage." The Broadway production is already largely sold out through next March, although there are periodic releases of more tickets, including some low priced ones every Friday. Each part of the show had a recent average ticket price of 164.83 and a top price of 286.50; 300 seats per performance cost 40 or less. The two parts can be seen on the same day or consecutive days.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
ISTANBUL The fury drew them in their hundreds to the doors of the Ulker Stadium. They pressed up against the barricades, climbed onto each other's shoulders and chanted for change: for the manager to be fired, for the owner to step aside, for the players to be chased out of town. Fenerbahce had lost, and someone, anyone, had to pay. It had not, after all, lost just any game. For the first time this century, Fenerbahce had lost the game known as the Intercontinental Derby on home turf. Galatasaray, its bitter rival from the European side of Istanbul, had come to a simmering Ulker in the Asian half of the city and won. For the fans, it proved one humiliation too far. Dreams of the title had long since disappeared. Now defeat had all but ended Fenerbahce's dwindling hopes of landing a place in next season's Champions League. Now their club was drifting into mediocrity. Their fury was rooted not just in disappointment, but fear. That Fenerbahce was not the only team suffering provided scant solace. Istanbul has three totemic clubs: Galatasaray and Besiktas in Europe, Fenerbahce in Asia. Between them, they account for all but one Turkish championship since 1984. Their fans number in the millions, not just in Istanbul but deep into the country's interior, too. They are less sports clubs and more vast, unwieldy empires. But this season, with three games to play, all three Goliaths have fallen by the wayside; most likely, none will even feature in next year's Champions League. The championship will be won by a David: most likely Istanbul Basaksehir, a team from one of the city's package fresh suburbs that has barely a decade of top flight experience, which could see off its final challenger Trabzonspor the biggest club from outside Istanbul as early as Monday. Fenerbahce was the first to fall away, long before the rage filled the streets outside the Ulker. Besiktas lasted a little longer, until a late equalizer at home to Trabzonspor the night before the Intercontinental Derby saw its title challenge fizzle out. Even Galatasaray found that victory in the Intercontinental derby was illusory: It lost ground soon after the Super Lig restarted in June. On both sides of the Bosporus, the gilded palaces that have held sway over Turkish soccer for a century are falling. Their foundations, though, have been crumbling for some time. Turkey, as late as the middle of March, was planning to play on. The country had started to record its first cases of Covid 19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and many players were confiding how uncomfortable they were with the idea of the league's continuing. No matter, the country's sports minister declared. The games, that weekend, would go ahead, albeit without fans. For the richest leagues in Europe, the economic consequences of the pandemic, and the subsequent hiatus and even the games without fans, would be unwelcome. In Turkey, they sat somewhere between unfathomable and existential. Even before the coronavirus struck, the teams of the Super Lig were already operating with some 2.6 billion in debt. They, and by extension Turkish soccer, could not afford a shutdown. Most of that debt belongs to Fenerbahce, Galatasaray and Besiktas, as well as Trabzonspor. Much of it relates to unpaid taxes, though the collapse of the lira, the country's currency, has not helped. All four teams have breached UEFA's financial fair play regulations in recent years. But largely, it is the consequence of years of financial mismanagement, in which Turkey's major teams bought high and sold low, paying vast salaries in euros to veteran, imported stars. The Super Lig has the oldest average age of 31 European leagues, according to the CIES Football Observatory. By January, it had become clear that the situation was no longer "sustainable," as Yildirim Demiroren, the head of the Turkish soccer federation, put it. "The big clubs are, to all intents and purposes, bankrupt," said Caner Eler, the editor of the sports magazine Socrates. The rescue staved off collapse, but Ali Ozturk, president of Antalyaspor, a mid table Super Lig club, said it was not a long term solution. "The system is not healthy," he said. "Clubs are earning less, and the expenses are more and more. I am not optimistic for the next few years." To some extent, the dire financial circumstances of the old aristocrats has served to level the playing field in Turkey, allowing the likes of Basaksehir to thrive. "There are no big and small clubs any more," said Fatih Terim, the Galatasaray coach and, for the last three decades, the dominant figure in Turkish soccer. "While the gap between European and Turkish clubs has grown bigger, on the contrary side, the Super Lig is getting more balanced." But in trying to solve one problem, the intervention of the banks and by extension, the Turkish state exacerbated another. "Each financial arrangement for each club is different," Ozturk explained. "The system is not clear enough, and that creates space for people to be suspicious." The thing with conspiracy theories is that it does not always matter if they are true; what matters is if people believe them. There is no shortage of them in Turkish soccer: a million dark whispers of some subtle hand at work, of favorable treatment for a rival, of an outcome foretold. Some of the ideas are more grounded than others. The theory that Basaksehir an overnight success, backed by figures with strong links to the A.K.P., the governing party of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has enjoyed some political support in its meteoric rise is hardly far fetched. The belief that Trabzonspor winning the championship this year would be expedient for the government sounds more paranoid. It makes little political sense: alienating the millions across the country who identify with one of Istanbul's big three would seem foolhardy for a politician as calculating, and as keen to harness soccer to his own ends, as Erdogan. Turkey's clubs are member organizations, electing a president every few years. It is, in theory, a model of democracy that protects the institution from the influence of private interests. Increasingly, though, there is a sense that it no longer works in Turkish soccer's new reality. "It would be much easier if individuals or companies could invest," said Ozturk, a hotelier in the resort town of Antalya who said that he runs the local team to try to "give something back." "As it is," he said, "we cannot get private investors." Without that infusion of income, clubs have limited options to pay off mounting debts: cost cutting, really, is the only choice, one that leads to what Ozturk calls a "negative spiral of quality of play, and then the value of the teams, dropping." But the election model combined with the possible political capital to be made out of running a successful team has another impact. Presidents are encouraged to think short term, the only way of keeping their post for another few years, to maintain the powerful position they have acquired. It is not only an expensive approach, but a deeply flawed one, prioritizing statement signings of older players at vast expense. Eler sees it as a "vicious circle," in which clubs build teams of loan players and aging stars for this year, and are then saddled with their wages when they are no longer of use. "Presidents think they have to give gifts to the fans," said Hamit Altintop, the former Bayern Munich and Real Madrid player who now works for the Turkish soccer federation. Perhaps more damaging, though, is that the approach discourages long term planning. "When there is a failure as a soccer team, as a first step, the clubs give up their coach," Terim said. "That is the easiest way to show them as the cause of failure." Emre Utkucan's journey, he admits, has been unusual. Eight years ago, he was working as a television commentator; his role was, largely, covering games from the rest of the world, particularly Italy and Spain. One night as it was explained to Utkucan Terim was watching a game, and listening to his commentary. Terim admired the way Utkucan saw the game, the way he analyzed players, his depth of knowledge. So he invited him to the club's training facility. Not long after, Terim asked Utkucan a lifelong club member to join his staff, assigning him to overhaul the way Galatasaray operated in the transfer market. "It was a big move," Utkucan said. "Inviting a TV commentator, someone in a wheelchair, to be in charge of recruitment and analysis." Terim got away with it because he is Terim. Since he joined, Utkucan has worked with seven managers and four presidents. He has stayed, though, building up his team of international scouts, expanding his personal network, hiring his own team of analysts his "nerds," as he calls them. It is no surprise, he said, that in his eight years at Galatasaray, it has won four league titles and four Turkish cups. He does not believe it is down to any special talent; it is just hard work and consistency. "Organizational stability is a huge luxury," he said. It is that trait that has been sorely lacking across Turkish soccer, and it is the one thing that all of those who want it to recover and to improve cite as the key absence. Terim is adamant that a "healthy solution" to the country's problems can only be found with "consistent, long term planning." Altintop wants clubs to be "more constant, more disciplined." Such an approach is especially crucial in the field of youth development. For a country with a population of 80 million, Turkey lags alarmingly behind other European nations in terms of producing its own stars: a surprisingly large percentage of the national team has long come, like Altintop, from Germany's second and third generation Turkish community. "We have great potential," Altintop said. "But we don't have the right system. The concentration is on first teams and results. We forget to give youth teams and players the details they need." The priority, he said, must be not only in training a new breed of coaches, but paying them properly: many Turkish youth coaches are paid little more than minimum wage. Even Altintop, tasked by the federation with transforming a whole soccer culture, does it on a voluntary basis. "Clubs have to understand that if you don't have money, you have to work, and you have to take your time," he said. "The way to change it is the right education for youth coaches, and then to trust in our own boys." Like Altintop, Terim hopes that Turkey's clubs will see the current financial crisis as a chance to reset. He sees no other option; the days of lavishing money on veterans and mercenaries, of thinking only of next week, of hoping to win elections through largess, must end. "This situation will continue, unless there are correct, and permanent, solutions," Terim said. Outside the Ulker Stadium, hours after the Galatasaray defeat and long after most fans have left, a solitary Fenerbahce fan stood on the street, still screaming into the night, still demanding a different sort of change. Two days later, he got his wish. Fenerbahce fired its coach.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Paris Fashion Week closed in March with a spectacle held by Louis Vuitton in a shadowy courtyard of the closed Louvre museum. Though no one knew it at the time, the event may have been the last traditional catwalk show of 2020. Shortly afterward, the spread of the coronavirus put an end to physical gatherings, including the runway circus more commonly known as fashion week. In its stead for now anyway comes a whole new digital experience. This week, London will up the ante on the industry experiment as the city becomes the first of the four fashion capitals to take its runway shows online. Previously called London Fashion Week Men's, the shows, held in June, were a weekend roundup of British men's wear that acted as a curtain raiser for the bigger, beefier men's wear lineups shown later elsewhere in Europe. Now London Fashion Week has dropped the "men's" and will be a digital platform catering to all genders. It will roll out from June 12 to June 14 and showcase new designs, virtual showrooms, short films, podcasts and playlists, all from a new home (londonfashionweek.co.uk) and new hashtag ( LFWreset). The answer is a Netflix style home page with three category streams. There is an official schedule of roughly 20 brands that would normally show in London, like Chalayan, Marques Almeida and Nicholas Daley, unveiling new or existing product lines on the site at specific time slots alongside links to look books, digital showrooms and e commerce sites. There is also an exploration portal where brands, schools, retailers and cultural institutions can display creative content, like 3 D films and poetry readings. And finally there is footage produced by the British Fashion Council, including interviews and video diaries from designers including Roksanda. "This is about keeping fashion week going culturally at a time when it can't take place physically," Ms. Rush said. "Designers can tell a story and build their brand on this platform in whatever way they choose." Not every brand has embraced the new format. Ms. Rush noted that when the fashion council made the decision to produce the digital event, it didn't know whether many designers would be able to produce new collections in the current climate. The official lineup of participants was published on June 5. Few established names from the London women's wear scene, like Burberry and Victoria Beckham, were on it. Preen and Marques Almeida had signed on, but most brands had opted to wait to show in September. Others offered up what may be termed collection adjacent productions. Nicholas Daley, for example, a London based men's wear designer who was a finalist for the LVMH Prize this year until the competition was canceled in April, decided to produce a playlist rather than a full new collection. Known for his colorful explorations of multiculturalism within British identity, Mr. Daley has built his brand on manufacturing via local craftspeople and infusing music into his fashion week presentations. He will also appear on the schedule with a short film on his AW20 collection, with behind the scenes footage from his January runway show. "I am genuinely grateful that this fashion week platform exists and think it was the right thing to do to make sure it was there for those who wanted it," said Mr. Daley, who received a grant from the BFC Foundation Covid Crisis Fund, an initiative started in March to make 1 million pounds in emergency assistance available for designer businesses affected by the pandemic. Mr. Daley's musical playlist will reflect his inspirations for his spring summer 2021 collection, and be accompanied by sketches and snapshots of fabrics "an interactive mood board" was how he described it. "It wasn't feasible for me to complete a collection with so much of my time being taken up by keeping the business afloat," he said. "But I wanted to do this. Contributing is better than stagnating." Rosh Mahtani, the founder of Alighieri jewelry, will upload product and contact information to the platform but will not be showing anything new. At the last London Fashion Week, in February, Princess Anne presented Ms. Mahtani with the Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design. But Alighieri's revenue from wholesale sales was cut in half during the shutdown (although e commerce sales went up), the company said, and Ms. Mahtani had to desert her studio for months with only a few hours notice; several of her employees got sick. "I've found it really hard during lockdown," she said. "I just felt insecure and quite confused. I wished I could make ventilators not jewelry." Although Ms. Mahtani added that she liked the fact that this London Fashion Week would be open to everyone and that customers can join as well as press and buyers, ultimately, "I want to take the time to do something amazing and relevant in September," she said. London is not the first city to move its fashion week online since the outbreak began; Shanghai and Moscow went digital for their fashion weeks in late March and April. But it is something of a test case for what will follow: digital offerings from Paris (couture and men's wear) from July 6 to July 13, and Milan from July 14 to July 17. If these digital fashion weeks attract millions of viewers far beyond the traditional attendees and give designers a new creative outlet, they are sure to add momentum to existing questions about the long term viability of the old runway model. In May, two groups of designers and brands published memos that called for, among other things, an overhaul of the fashion calendar so that collections would be displayed in a more seasonally, and audience appropriate, way. "The current situation is leading us all to reflect more poignantly on the society we live in and how we want to live our lives and build businesses when we get through this," Ms. Rush said. She added that the new London Fashion Week platform would be here to stay, even when physical shows were feasible again. "Right now we are trying to build something that fits our needs today," she said. "But we are also investing in a global showcase for the future."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
A triplex penthouse atop a new condominium conversion on the Upper East Side, just a block from Central Park, with three terraces and a private roof deck, sold for 31,000,000 and was the most expensive closed sale of the week, according to city records. The sponsor apartment, PH3, at 33 East 74th Street, at Madison Avenue, has 6,312 square feet of space that includes five bedrooms, five and a half baths, an eat in kitchen with two pantries, a family room, two dining areas and a 30 by 18 foot living room that opens to a terrace. There is also a private elevator. The total monthly carrying charges are 20,471; the asking price was 32 million. Most of the home's bedrooms, along with a laundry room, are on the first floor. The 760 square foot master suite features a walk in closet and a spalike bath. The second floor holds the kitchen, the formal dining room and the living room, while the third level, with two terraces, contains a second dining area, a kitchenette, a family room and an en suite bedroom. The outdoor space totals 2,287 square feet, according to the listing with Douglas Elliman Real Estate. Katherine Gauthier was the listing agent, and Janet Wang of the Corcoran Group brought the buyer, whose identity was shielded by the limited liability company Crest East 74.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
More than 70 percent of taxpayers are expected to get refunds this year, the Internal Revenue Service reports. That represents a big opportunity, according to savings advocates and financial advisers, since many Americans struggle to set aside cash for emergencies. Last year, the average refund was nearly 2,900 a significant amount of money for many people. "For a lot of families, it's the biggest financial event of the year," said Timothy Flacke, executive director of Commonwealth, a nonprofit in Boston that promotes saving and financial security. There is some indication that more people are focusing on saving at least part of their tax refund. In a Bankrate survey, more than a third said they would save or invest their refund this year, while just 6 percent said they would use it to splurge on a special treat, like a vacation or shopping spree. (The telephone survey, which polled 1,001 people in February, has a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points.) Millennials in particular were more likely to say they would save their refund, said Sarah Berger, a personal finance specialist at Bankrate. Perhaps, she said, because they have lived through a recession, they are aware of the need to save, in case of a job loss or illness. Research from the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2015 found that 41 percent of households said they could not cover an unexpected expense of 2,000. And last year, the Federal Reserve reported that nearly half of American families would struggle to meet an emergency expense of even 400. Saving is particularly challenging for families whose income fluctuates widely, new research from Pew finds. "Families have very little liquid savings," said Erin Currier, director of Pew's financial security and mobility project. Tax refunds can offer a chance for people to save, whether by establishing a rainy day fund or setting up a retirement account, said Mr. Flacke of Commonwealth (which was formerly known as the D2D Fund). Getting a large chunk of your annual income as a lump sum "is a big deal," he said. Acting before you have the cash in hand can help make sure you save some of the refund. One option, Mr. Flacke noted, is to receive your refund by direct deposit, and have the I.R.S. divide the money into separate accounts say, half to a savings account and half to your checking account. Mr. Flacke also said consumers might consider buying savings bonds with their tax refunds. Tax time is the only remaining opportunity for people to purchase paper savings bonds; otherwise, consumers must buy digital savings bonds from the federal government. One way to force yourself to save, said Robert Steen, a certified financial planner with USAA, is to get in the habit of talking with friends and family about your goal, whether in person or on social media. "If you share it," he said, "it becomes more real." Here are some questions and answers about using tax refunds to begin saving: How can I split my tax refund? To do this, file Form 8888 with your tax return. The form lets you divide the money among as many as three accounts. Commonwealth and America Saves, a nonprofit that promotes saving, co sponsor an annual "save your refund" promotion, which offers participants the chance to win multiple awards of 100, and a grand prize of 25,000, if they save part of their tax refund. You must split your refund using Form 8888 and save at least 50 to participate. How do I buy savings bonds with my tax refund? To buy savings bonds, you will also need to file Form 8888 and indicate that you want to purchase bonds with all or part of your refund. This year, taxpayers can use their refunds to buy up to 5,000 in I series United States savings bonds, which pay a flat interest rate and an additional rate based on inflation. The bonds may be purchased in 50 increments. What if my refund is very large? Refunds can act as forced savings, but an outsize refund means that you have missed out on the chance to earn interest on that money. That was not such a big deal in recent years, because interest rates on insured savings accounts have been paltry. But with rates ticking upward, there are likely better places to keep your cash.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
The sequel to "The Handmaid's Tale" is inspired in part by "the world we've been living in," said Margaret Atwood. For decades, ardent fans of Margaret Atwood's dystopian classic, "The Handmaid's Tale," have been demanding a sequel. And for years, Atwood has demurred. But now Atwood has decided to continue the tale, more than three decades after it was first published. On Wednesday, she announced that she will publish "The Testaments," a sequel to "The Handmaid's Tale," in September 2019. Set 15 years after the final scene of "The Handmaid's Tale," the novel features three female narrators. In a statement released by her publisher, Atwood said she decided to return to the story not just because of her voracious fans, but because she wanted to explore the eerie parallels between her imagined dystopia and our current political climate. There's clearly an enormous appetite for feminist dystopian tales at the moment. Sales of "The Handmaid's Tale" surged following the 2016 election, buoyed by a critically acclaimed award winning television series, and the novel has sold well over three million copies in the last two years, spending 88 weeks back on the New York Times best seller list. "The Handmaid's Tale," which takes place in a futuristic theocratic state called Gilead where women are treated as property and used as reproductive serfs, has become almost a cultural shorthand for patriarchal oppression. Women dressed in red robes and white bonnets, the costumes that Atwood's handmaids wear, have gathered in protests around the country to voice their opposition to policies that restrict women's access to abortion and health care. At the women's marches in January 2017 to protest the Inauguration of President Trump, protesters carried signs referencing the novel, with slogans like, "Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again!" and "The Handmaid's Tale is NOT an Instruction Manual!" 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. Atwood has often said that her novel was based not on some horrific vision of future, but on real historical eras where women were denied basic rights, as well as current theocratic patriarchal societies around the world. The novel is set in a totalitarian society in near future New England where a radical religious group has seized power, women are forbidden to read, homosexuality is punishable by death, and environmental degradation has led to widespread infertility. The narrative centers on a handmaid named Offred, whose name echoes her male master, Fred. Like all handmaids, Offred belongs to a class of women who are valued only for their fertility, and are forced to bear children for higher status couples. "In Western society, you don't have to go back very far to find a lot of the things I put in," Atwood said in an interview with The Times earlier this year, when she spoke about the growing interest in feminist dystopian stories. "How recently did women gain the right to control their own property?" Atwood said the novel's recent resurgence reflected our cultural preoccupation with imagining disastrous futures as a way of digesting current anxieties about political extremism and the fate of the planet. "We live in an age of dystopias, not just because of women's matters but because of what's happening to the planet," she said. "Things are not right." In 2017, in an introduction to the new Anchor paperback edition of "The Handmaid's Tale," Atwood wrote about the importance of the "literature of witness." "In the wake of the recent American election, fears and anxieties proliferate," she wrote. "In this divisive climate, in which hate for many groups seems on the rise and scorn for democratic institutions is being expressed by extremists of all stripes, it is a certainty that someone, somewhere many, I would guess are writing down what is happening as they themselves are experiencing it." See the Book Review's selection of 100 Notable Books of 2018. "The Handmaid's Tale" became an instant classic when it was first published in 1985. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and went on to sell more than eight million copies globally in English. But the novel has taken on new resonance in recent months, as many women have become more vocal about sexual harassment and assault and curbs on women's reproductive rights. The novel's cultural appeal has also gotten a boost from the award winning television adaptation, starring Elisabeth Moss as the handmaid Offred, which has been renewed for a third season.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
She was known for her friendships with famous writers, including Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and Harold Pinter, and for underwriting literary magazines and a publishing house. But Drue Heinz's passions extended to painting and sculpture. In her Manhattan townhouse were works by Amedeo Modigliani, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. Mrs. Heinz, who died last year at 103, was the widow of H.J. Heinz II, who from 1941 to 1966 was president of the pickle and ketchup empire his grandfather started. He was the chairman until his death in 1987. "My wife is the art connoisseur," Mr. Heinz, an avid skier, once said, adding, "I live from snowfall to snowfall." Now Christie's is preparing to sell items from Mrs. Heinz's collection in two sales the artworks on May 13 in New York and the decorative items on June 4 in London. (A couple of items will be included in other sales in New York in mid May.) Some trans Atlantic shipping will be involved. Furniture from Mrs. Heinz's townhouse is being sent to London, and a Rene Magritte sculpture is being sent to New York. The sales will benefit the Hawthornden Literary Retreat, at Hawthornden Castle in Lasswade, Scotland, which she bought in the 1980s and remade as a sanctuary for writers. It was once the home of the 17th century poet William Drummond.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
A few breakups occurred over the years, but it was Mrs. Sanchez's mother who encouraged her to stick with him. "We were at different points in our lives: He was five years older than me, but he was very patient for me to catch up," she said. "My mom told me, 'This is your person. You should spend the rest of your life with him.' So we got back together." In 2007 he was back in Japan for another tour. This time Mrs. Sanchez traveled with him. At 5 a.m., in the couple's hotel room, Mr. Sanchez proposed. "He woke me up and said, 'Marry me.' He had this ring in his hand I'd never seen. We both had jet lag and were so tired. I said 'Yes,' and then we went back to sleep," she said. Mrs. Sanchez still has the Styrofoam cup with his number on it. Mrs. Sanchez The same way having a child has made me a better person, so has Claudio. He's very grounding. He's always on time and has planned things in advanced, which has not been my strong suit. I've worked at being better in that area. I'm showing up for him. That has made us meet in the middle. I don't think shifting things about yourself to accommodate another person is a bad thing. I've learned fighting is good. I never saw my parents fight, even though they're divorced. I thought any disagreement was bad or if we didn't see eye to eye that meant we didn't have a good marriage. I've learned that's not true. We have a great marriage. And it's O.K. to fight. We get it out and it doesn't fester. Being able to say, 'I don't like that, we should do this,' is very healthy. I'm a super passive person so this was a revelation. He's become a fierce fighter for our family and our son. He shows up for us. He's loyal. We've decided to jump into this creative lifestyle together. We embrace what's not ordinary. We both write together, and I travel with him while he's on tour. Living on a bus with 12 people it's easy to feel like you're getting too much of each other, but that never happens to us.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
How Will We Buy Our Perfume Now? The way fragrance is introduced, advertised and sold to the world hasn't changed in nearly a century. No. 5, a seductive scent for the modern woman introduced by Coco Chanel in the 1920s, is marketed similarly to Tom Ford's Black Orchid, a "modern" and "alluring potion" that came out in 2006. Both designers' fragrances depend on an in store experience that conjures these ideas and feelings through smell, somehow enticing people to spend over 100 on a bottle of scented water. "Because smell is invisible, we are super reliant on external cues for how we should interpret what it is that we're experiencing," said Rachel Herz, a neuroscientist and the author of "The Scent of Desire: Discovering Enigmatic Sense of Smell." "Verbal and visual information is exactly what we go to to help us identify and interpret and find meaning." You can get verbal and visual information about scent on your computer. But you can't smell it. And with the coronavirus pandemic forcing most shopping online, this is a problem for the perfume industry. Already, fragrance is doing worse online than any other beauty category, said Larissa Jensen, vice president of the NPD Group. She described brick and mortar as "especially critical" for prestige fragrance in the United States, where sales in March of this year were 45 percent less than in March 2019. "As soon as stores closed, fragrance dipped," Ms. Jensen said. Mother's Day business will likely take a hit. Even with Macy's and Dillard's reopening, sizable e commerce businesses won't be able to offset the loss of in store sales for May, one of the most lucrative months for perfume. One hope is that those who can't be with their families will send perfume instead, said Linda Levy, the president of the Fragrance Foundation. This could create renewed demand for "classics" many are familiar with, like No. 5, La Vie Est Belle by Lancome and Beautiful, from Estee Lauder. And after coronavirus is conquered? "How brands and retailers are going to market will change considerably," Ms. Levy said. "They are going to have to decide how they're going to spend on social media and sampling, and how they're going to change the environment in stores to be more consumer friendly." Online, product pages are filled with ludicrous bordering on nonsensical descriptions of ingredients and emotions a perfume is supposed to evoke. "The language capacity to describe fragrances is highly impoverished compared to our other sensory experiences," Dr. Herz said. "We don't really know what it is we're smelling unless we're told what it is." But for those who still wear fragrance, there is an opportunity for brands to convert e commerce holdouts into fearless online shoppers. This will depend on whether companies can change customer behavior, the same way Casper and Zappos got people to order shoes and mattresses online. Emily Weiss, the founder of Glossier and its chief executive, said investors she met with early on were unsure if people would buy any product from a direct to consumer beauty brand online. She proved them wrong, and four years later, challenged retail norms again by introducing a scent, You, that was sold only on Glossier's website. It was previewed with samples in orders and scratch and sniff stickers, a cheekier version of the old scent strips in printed magazines. Priced at 65, more than three times what most of Glossier's products cost, You won a Fragrance of the Year honor at the Fragrance Foundation Awards (the fragrance industry's Oscars, also known as the FiFis, this year rescheduled hopefully, like so much else, from spring to September). The Glossier perfume benefited from strong word of mouth on Instagram and other platforms. But Laurice Rahme, the founder and chief executive of Bond No 9., a range of perfumes named after neighborhoods, streets and landmarks in New York City and its surrounding beaches, believes smelling a scent before buying is still nonnegotiable. "Even though we do training, you never get the real story," Ms. Rahme said of in store employees. "They don't tell it right. It gets lost in translation. Our staff aren't Ph.D.'s in literature." Jessica Richards, the owner of Shen Beauty, a popular boutique in Brooklyn, said sales for the Functional Fragrance, with purported "anti stress benefits" from the Nue Co., a line of vitamin supplements, have tripled since February. "It's meant to be emotional, calming," Ms. Richards said. The 30 roller ball contains violet, jasmine and palo santo. Quieter language can also help a scent's appeal online. Giving personal fragrance and candles straightforward names such as Tobacco, Dark Rum, Mojito or Cannabis can make an internet purchase seem less intimidating, said Andrew Goetz, a founder of Malin Goetz. (Naming them after vices doesn't hurt either, as Tom Ford can attest.) Jean Guillaume Trottier, the brand president of Jo Malone London, noted a last minute tweak to the brand's annual Blossom ad campaign, with a new flower each year. Home scents, though they are only a tiny portion of overall fragrance sales, are a bright spot online, where brands like Jo Malone London, Diptyque, Nest and Malin Goetz have seen a surge in demand for candles. Diptyque's sales in the home category have tripled since March, according to the company, and D.S. Durga said candles now make up 40 percent of its direct business. About 90 percent of Nest's sales now come from home fragrance, up from 75 percent before the pandemic. And as people start to leave their homes and return to stores, areas where cosmetics are sold traditionally rife with touching, feeling and spritzing are getting a makeover. Retailers like Sephora and Ulta Beauty, and the department stores that invested millions of dollars on new beauty floors (to compete with Sephora and Ulta), are scrambling to outline what brick and mortar looks like post quarantine, pre vaccine. After getting a person to actually walk into your store, allaying customers' hygiene concerns is a priority.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The acclaimed British writer , who is not altogether comfortable with the term "nature writer," has produced books about mountains, very long walks through Britain and the language we use to describe landscapes. In his new book, "Underland," Macfarlane goes underground. He goes beneath forest floors, and into sea caves and sinkholes, among other subterranean adventures, to probe the secrets of man's often malign influence on the earth. "It's pretty unnatural," Macfarlane says on this week's podcast. "There are reasons why very little living goes on down there. Before I went anywhere, I got a friend to take me I just said, look, take me underground for a day in Britain, let's go somewhere scary. I need to see if I can be in these places. And I absolutely loved it. He described me later as a 'rat in a drain pipe.' I think that was a compliment, I'm not sure." Julia Phillips visits the podcast this week to discuss her debut novel, "Disappearing Earth." The book is set on the Kamchatka Peninsula in far eastern Russia a place that is not easy to get to, but that Phillips visited in order to write the novel.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
BENTONVILLE, Ark. It makes sense that the fate of this quintessential company town is being plotted in a conference room just a mile from Walmart headquarters. But what Trevor Drinkwater and his lieutenants are plotting is cultural, artistic and urban. In other words, something less stereotypically Walmart. Along with the actress Geena Davis, Mr. Drinkwater is founder of the nascent but ambitious Bentonville Film Festival, running May 5 9, which hopes to build on the city's recent and surprising development boom. Cranes are cutting up the skylines, and real estate prices are headed in the same direction. This year, the northwest Arkansas metro population, which also includes Rogers, Springdale, Fayetteville and other towns, passed the half million mark. In Bentonville alone, the population jumped 14 percent to more than 40,000 between 2010 and 2013. The rest of the state straggled along at 1.5 percent. Tourists are rushing in, too. About 1.6 million have visited the lavishly Walton financed and mostly free Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art since it opened in 2011. Last year, visitors came from 30 countries to view a collection reputed to be worth at least a half billion dollars. "It's a perfect location, a great American town," said Mr. Drinkwater, a former Warner Bros. vendor to Walmart. "I've been coming here for over 20 years, and the changes over that time are nothing short of spectacular." For the legions of vendors who visit and work in Bentonville and neighboring Rogers, serving Walmart had been a major arena for those fighting through the corporate trenches. Despite good salaries, a tour of duty in rural northwest Arkansas was a dismal assignment. Most cycled in for only a few years, vying for Walmart shelf space for products alongside some 1,400 other companies represented here. Adding to the struggle for many: Benton County was dry until 2012. She failed to mesh with locals and recalls two restaurants, a forsaken town square and "no shopping whatsoever, except for Walmart." As a local developer put it, "You could have fired a gun downtown and not hit anyone." Since then, Bentonville has grown up, and filled in. Now divorced, Ms. Brown and her new fiance, Tom Gheen, own Ramo d'Olivo, an upscale organic olive oil and vinegar boutique with a wine bar in back. Her business sits in a cluster of new storefronts, swarming with pedestrian traffic on quaint, re bricked sidewalks. Nearby is a gourmet tea shop, a niche paper store, new restaurants that feature such artisanal Ozark fare as grass fed beef and gourmet goat testicles, chic apartments and the elegant 21c Museum Hotel, which TripAdvisor ranks as the seventh best hotel in the country. The old lumberyard south of the square has been re appropriated as a craft beer destination, the Bike Rack Brewery. It's an homage to the area's trail system, which includes the new Razorback Regional Greenway, supported by the Walton Family Foundation and connecting six cities in northwest Arkansas. Developers and local and regional planners say this is just the beginning. "If we're going to recruit and retain the talent we need to compete economically, we had to change our approach," said Troy Galloway, the city's economic development director. That approach fostering growth through cultural and recreational amenities has been supported by the local big three, Walmart, Tyson Foods and J. B. Hunt Transport Services. Walton Enterprises is opening the biggest structures yet on the square, the two building, three story Midtown Center, which consumes almost three acres and will offer more than 50,000 square feet of office and retail space expanding the downtown's work force and economy. In adjoining Rogers, Hunt Ventures will open the doors this fall to the tallest building in town, the 10 story Hunt Tower, which brings 900,000 square feet of class A office space to town. That's in addition to the million square feet it's already built in the last 14 years. "It's directly related to demand," said John George, executive vice president of Hunt Ventures. "There are a lot more potential tenants coming into the market looking for a bigger footprint." Real estate prices are following suit. A commercial building on the Bentonville square occupied by a venture capital firm sold in late 2014 for 950,000, a 73 percent increase since its last sale in 2011. The price of another jumped 63 percent. The growth hasn't been great for everyone. Leslie Key, the owner of a new guitar shop and music venue called The Meteor, complained of backlogged construction permits, and some shops, like The Mustache, a clothing store, have already been priced out. Ms. Brown had to rent space for Ramo d'Olivo when she found she couldn't afford to buy. At the same time, developers and community leaders say the area still has work to do. Poverty remains a problem, as does developing a skilled work force. Plus, the old images of Arkansas as rural and boring persist, and in some ways, still hold true. "Bentonville needs life after 10 p.m.," said Mike Abb, the creative director of Rope Swing Group, a property management and hospitality firm based in Bentonville. "The amount of energy and talent we're recruiting here literally demands a nightlife and an interaction zone." A proposed market district may help solve that problem. Planned to occupy 25 acres of land southeast of the downtown square, the market district is set to overhaul an old industrial zone into a major mixed use development with a focus on food, arts and entertainment. The anchor is a culinary arts school that will back up against the Razorback Regional Greenway. The school would train chefs and hospitality workers for the fast growing area. "There is a huge demand to grow the services to run this type of community," said Paul Esterer, the executive managing director for Newmark Grubb Arkansas, one of the project's developers. "There are no workers. Where do you get the sous chefs?" Mr. Drinkwater and his team organizing the film festival have yet another problem: Bentonville still has no movie theater. Mr. Drinkwater is making do by outfitting churches, meeting rooms, conference rooms and even the downtown square to screen festival entries. Despite that technical difficulty, Mr. Drinkwater, an independent film distributor, believes Bentonville is ready to host a major film festival, which he expects to grow each year. If nothing else, he has the corporate sponsors. AMC Theatres, Coca Cola and Walmart have joined to offer distribution on limited AMC screens and via Walmart to the winners. The festival, through its partnership with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, is open exclusively to female and minority filmmakers, with the aim of igniting careers. Robert DeNiro, Rosie O'Donnell, Soledad O'Brien and other A listers are said to be attending. Ms. Davis has visited Bentonville several times in advance of the festival, strolling the square and staying in the 21c Museum Hotel. "The town has attracted a lot of talent New York and Hollywood because they have products sold at Walmart. It's not like it's a new thing," Mr. Drinkwater said. "What I hope it does for Bentonville is expose it as one of the great American towns and help support its ambitions."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
It was the testimony of a once obscure former law enforcement official. Before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. At 10 in the morning. On a workday. No matter. Roughly 19.5 million Americans tuned in on Thursday to watch James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, unspool the tale of his awkward, unsettling and, at times, ethically questionable encounters with President Trump. That is about the same number of people who watched Game 2 of this week's N.B.A. finals between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers. Mr. Comey's full audience was undoubtedly even bigger. The viewership figure released on Friday by the television tracking firm Nielsen did not include statistics for PBS, C Span or the Fox broadcasting affiliates that carried the hearing live.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Andrew White for The New York Times Andrew White for The New York Times Credit... Andrew White for The New York Times : Confirm. I'd be fine with that. I think it would be good for California, good for the rest of the country. It would help Mr. Trump's re election campaign. Confirm. She's probably very overrated, especially by all the people who are vociferously saying that she's overrated. You did the seating chart at the Trump tech meeting. You have eaten 3 D printed meat, which you invested in. The empire in "Star Wars" gets a bad rap. You like "Star Trek" more than "Star Wars." Deny. I like "Star Wars" way better. I'm a capitalist. "Star Wars" is the capitalist show. "Star Trek" is the communist one. There is no money in "Star Trek" because you just have the transporter machine that can make anything you need. The whole plot of "Star Wars" starts with Han Solo having this debt that he owes and so the plot in "Star Wars" is driven by money. You have written some of Trump's tweets. The Trump elevator is the new Mordor. Deny. I've stayed at the Trump International in New York. We should create a GPS style algorithm to tell employees what to do at any given moment, like Bridgewater, the world's largest hedge fund, is doing, according to The Wall Street Journal. Deny. That's always the place where everyone's overpaid and superunhappy. That algorithm doesn't seem like a formula for happiness. As Jeff Bezos said of you in October, contrarians are usually wrong. I'll confirm that but that's too one sided. You have to get some nuances in here. I think it depends where they are. If you're the village atheist in a small town in Alabama, you're probably the most tolerant person there. That's complicated. It always sells some but not as much. Mark Zuckerberg asked you to invest in Facebook while wearing pajamas. Deny. The actual story was that Sean Parker convinced him to go to Sequoia Capital wearing pajamas to insult them at some point. Zuckerberg did not have a great pitch. Confirm. He was 19 years old. He was totally introverted, didn't say much. You desperately need a good pitch when you have a bad company. When you have a great company, you don't need a great pitch. I think the official policy is to deny that. Confirm. Although, trusting in what way? There are a comical number of misguided conspiracy theories about Facebook. Google had too much power in the Obama administration. Confirm. Google had more power under Obama than Exxon had under Bush 43. The age of Apple is over. Confirm. We know what a smartphone looks like and does. It's not the fault of Tim Cook, but it's not an area where there will be any more innovation. There's no job you would take in the Trump administration. Confirm. I want to stay involved in Silicon Valley and help Mr. Trump as much as I can without a full time position. You do not like your character in HBO's "Silicon Valley." Deny. I liked him. I watched the first season. My character died. I think eccentric is always better than evil. You don't like cowhide rugs because you were sitting on one when you asked your father, Klaus, what happened to the cow and you understood mortality. You believe that no one should ever eat sugar.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Burning Man, the annual arts event that draws tens of thousands of people to Black Rock Desert and tens of millions of dollars to Northern Nevada's economy, has joined the list of high profile gatherings to fall prey to the coronavirus pandemic. Organizers of the event, which was to have been held from Aug. 30 to Sept. 7, announced Friday that they had made the difficult decision not to build Black Rock City, the "temporary metropolis" that is created each year for the event. "Given the painful reality of Covid 19, one of the greatest global challenges of our lifetimes, we believe this is the right thing to do," organizers said on their website, The Burning Man Journal. Still, organizers said that they hoped to create an online version of Black Rock City this year though details were sparse. "We're not sure how it's going to come out," organizers said on their website. "It will likely be messy and awkward with mistakes. It will also likely be engaging, connective, and fun."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Central Park South has long been a reservoir of apartment house construction, the expansive north views as attractive in the 1870s as they are now. The sweep of its history runs from the long gone Bradley of 1877 to the modernist 240 Central Park South of 1940 by way of the original Plaza Hotel of 1882 and the artistic Gainsborough of 1908. But as it turns out, it took awhile for developers to arrive at a full appreciation of Central Park South's dazzling prospect. There was wide anticipation that the completion of Central Park in the late 1860s would spur millionaires to build their mansions facing its green space. But millionaires can be balky, and in 1876 The Real Estate Record and Guide fumed that lots facing the park had been "a mere football for speculative ventures," without any significant mansion construction. However, The Record and Guide did suggest that frontage along the park was much better suited to apartment houses, which it also frequently promoted. A row house developer, S. L. Bradley, took note of this and in 1877 built the Bradley, which appears to have been the first apartment house on what later came to be called Central Park South but was then plain old West 59th Street. The Record and Guide approved, calling the Bradley "an exemplar of the latest improvements." These it had, but the building looked little different from a tenement house. A few other multiple dwellings began to sprout, among them the original Plaza, which in 1882 was to be "the largest and handsomest apartment house ever erected in this country," according to The Record and Guide. That project, envisioned with 12 stories and 52 apartments, fell through, and the developers Phyfe and Campbell put up a nine story confection of red brick, mansards and towers that could have been a Paris opera house. But the interior was never finished; the building was replaced by still other Plazas in 1890 and 1907. If the Bradley was dwarfed by the shell of the Plaza, it was made microscopic by Jose de Navarro's vast eight building complex at Seventh Avenue. Twice the size of the Dakota, the 13 story, eight building Navarro Flats was an early co op, with seven bedroom duplexes and entertaining rooms measuring as much as 19 by 22 feet. But even a visionary has to get one brick on top of another, and construction dragged on into the 1880s. When creditors came after Mr. Navarro, he woke up from his dream. He lost the buildings, which were auctioned off, finished and rented out. Despite its magnificent prospect, West 59th Street did not become Central Park South until 1896, by action of the city council. No fuss, lobbying, protest, endorsement, nothing. Very curious. Central Park West had been established about 1890. The year 1940 brought the stripped down, modernist 240 Central Park South, built by the Mayer family, who are responsible for some of New York's most thoughtful apartment house architecture. The complex 28 story tower rises from lower sections like the basalt monolith Shiprock in New Mexico, massive but brilliantly detailed, and called "handsome and adroit" by the hard to please Lewis Mumford in The New Yorker. The developer Bernard Spitzer put up a lesser but no less unusual structure, the huge curved apartment house at 200 Central Park South, in 1963. The balconies, 225 feet wide, curve in from the corner, giving it a Barcelona feeling, and a tower in the rear has an uncanny resemblance to Frank Lloyd Wright's Johnson Wax Tower. Mr. Spitzer, the father of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, told me that he had been worrying and worrying about the design of the building when he flung his pencil down on the drafting paper, and the famous curve was born. Down the block, at No. 230, the 17 story Southmoor House was built in 1938, and Ian Reisner, a resident, says it originally had 14 side by side duplexes, a touch unusual for the Depression. Southmoor House also had dressing rooms, but made a concession to the times with dining areas rather than rooms. Over the last 20 years, Mr. Reisner has bought up half the apartments, combining many, and reclad the plain Jane gray brick front with cream and beige brick in a light glaze. Mr. Reisner, who is selling the renovated apartments, describes the old facade as "an unholy mess" and says the new one, which is in the Art Deco spirit of the old one, was "beyond worth it." He has sold the air rights to the lot next door, which is now vacant and owned by Vornado and Extell. They are locked in a legal battle over the future of the land, but to judge by their other projects, like Vornado's fuzzy glass Lucida, at 85th and Lexington, and Extell's super tall One57, yet another new note will at some point be rung on Central Park South.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
"I'm not trying to be Frank Capra, but you truly learn so much from failure," John Mulaney said of his sitcom, canceled after just two episodes.Credit...Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times "I'm not trying to be Frank Capra, but you truly learn so much from failure," John Mulaney said of his sitcom, canceled after just two episodes. John Mulaney was waiting to take the stage when the "Saturday Night Live" announcer declared, "Ladies and gentlemen, John Mulvaney!" For Mr. Mulaney, that was the ideal punch line to his unlikely setup: a former "S.N.L." writer and failed sitcom star who at 35 had bounced back triumphantly as a stand up and returned to his comedic alma mater as a guest host. "For someone no one knows, and whose biggest credit on that show was for not being on camera, it was perfect," he said. Mr. Mulaney might not be so anonymous much longer. He won raves for his April 14 "S.N.L." appearance and earlier this year sold out seven nights at Radio City Music Hall. It was there that he filmed his anticipated new Netflix special, "Kid Gorgeous," due Tuesday. "For my money, he's the funniest person in America," said Seth Meyers, the host of "Late Night" on NBC and former head writer at "S.N.L." who hired Mr. Mulaney as a writer there in 2008. "He's this combination of great writing and great performing you so rarely see." Mr. Mulaney has earned a reputation as a comic's comic, a choirboy type who makes the sort of embittered observations you'd expect from a much older, more cynical man. He's a gifted wordsmith ("I do like to slip in precise turns of phrase," he said, slipping in a precise turn of phrase), excels at playing characters in his routines and has become physically adept enough to make full use of Radio City's massive stage. "It's such a beautiful venue that it's strangely intimate," he said, exuding thoughtful affability while eating a late morning bowl of oatmeal at a TriBeCa hotel restaurant last week. "I thought, 'This is doable.'" Of course, he embarked on his 2014 sitcom, in which he played a comedy writer named John Mulaney, with equal confidence, only to be brought down by anemic ratings and withering reviews. "Think it's easy to clone 'Seinfeld'?" Matt Roush asked in TV Guide Magazine. "Fox's dreadful, embarrassing misfire 'Mulaney' proves otherwise." Mr. Mulaney put the blame on himself. "It was my baby," he said. "I thought it was a very funny show, but I didn't wrap the package and tie the bow in a way that people enjoyed it all." (Some of the sitcom's bits, like one about how "'Ocean's Eleven' with women wouldn't work," haven't aged well, especially considering the forthcoming release of the female heist flick "Ocean's 8.") Still, he admitted, there were creative changes made when the show moved to Fox from its original home, NBC, that made it less personal, and in the process, less fulfilling. For example, in NBC's version, Mr. Mulaney's character had gotten sober at a young age, just as the comedian did in real life, but that got lost in the transition to Fox. "I did not have self discipline one was not enough," he said of his own wild child days. "One day when I was 23, I thought, 'If this were a movie, I would not be rooting for this guy anymore.' It sounds weird, but that flipped me." So Mr. Mulaney went back to his first loves starting a stand up tour three days after the series was axed and creating a stage show, "Oh, Hello," with Nick Kroll, a close friend since their improv days as undergrads at Georgetown University. In the show, which ran for 15 weeks on Broadway, Mr. Mulaney played George St. Geegland to Mr. Kroll's Gil Faizon, crotchety old Upper West Siders who complain about everything. Mr. Kroll said, "George is an outlet for John to express some of the stuff that doesn't fit nicely into his polite young man persona." Mr. Mulaney agreed: "It was cathartic to play a Robert Durst ian, angry white male who's furious about losing his place in the world." He comes by this fixation on social standing honestly. Growing up the son of lawyers in Chicago, "my family was very formal and dignified you had to sit up straight and you couldn't have your elbows on the dinner table," he said. "My friends would say, 'This is like the 1950s.'" Yet Mr. Mulaney didn't obediently go into the family business; he felt a deep desire to perform from a young age. "I saw 'Les Miserables' on tour, and there was a little kid playing Gavroche, and I was so envious," he said. "I wanted to Jeff Gillooly the hell out of him and take his spot." This explains "Diner Lobster," an elaborate, seafood themed "Les Miz" parody Mr. Mulaney co wrote with Colin Jost in 2010 that didn't make it to air until Mr. Mulaney's hosting gig. Serving as an altar boy at his local Roman Catholic church, Mr. Mulaney got his first taste of stage time and stage fright. "I was like, 'Oh, man, I forgot to eat breakfast. This is warm. Everyone's looking at me. Boy, this could be bad if I collapse,'" he said. "And now, in some theaters, it's like, 'Ooh, it's warm up here. Why did I wear a wool suit?'" He started doing improv with a children's troupe in Chicago but his parents wouldn't allow him to audition for the lead when the 1990 film "Home Alone" was shot in the city. "I was mad I always had grand anger as a kid about how status and stardom were out of my grasp, like most 7 year olds," he deadpanned. "But I do think about how great Macaulay Culkin was in that role and how it would've been a crime if I had gotten it." After graduating from Georgetown with a degree in English and a theology minor, Mr. Mulaney moved to New York and quickly established himself in stand up circles. At 25, he was brought on as a writer at "S.N.L." He got the news while having dinner with his mother. "She was excited, then this relief I never knew she needed washed over her," he remembered. "The unsaid thing was, 'O.K., now we can tell our friends what you do.'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
COME WITH ME By 307 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. 26.99. It's entirely possible that there are happy, well adjusted people who never traffic in regret or ponder what their lives would be like if they'd accepted a certain job offer years ago, had married A instead of B or had planned their financial futures differently. If they exist, these living in the moment individuals are not to be found in the Palo Alto of "Come With Me," 's strikingly original, compelling and beautifully written sixth novel. In this Palo Alto, you'll find people who not only wonder about the other paths they might be following, but have access to technology that helps them explore those alternative lives. This is, don't forget, Silicon Valley. Using algorithms and the accouterments of virtual reality (headphones and special glasses, for starters), one resident entrepreneur has crafted a way to "visit" the life that might have been. "Math can tell you what would happen if you altered history?" he's asked. His reply: "Math plus info, sure. At least a fairly good approximation." ("Info" refers here to the indelible fingerprints left by social media posts and internet searches.) Welcome to your multiverse. This perhaps suggests that Schulman has left behind the hyper realism of her two most recent novels for the realms of speculative fiction. Fortunately, that's true only in a small way. Multiverse theory functions primarily as a thematic framework here, and the headphones and glasses make only a few appearances. In "Come With Me," Schulman's central preoccupations continue to be the endless complexities of marriage, midlife and family and the ever pressing need for people, even in Silicon Valley, to connect. Her writing in this new novel has the humor and wit, the careful eye for social detail and astute character development, that made her previous novel, 2011's "This Beautiful Life," a best seller. Amy and Dan have been married for 20 plus years. They have three sons Jack, a love struck teenager, and 8 year old twins, Miles and Theo, fondly and hilariously referred to as Thing One and Thing Two, or The Things. Dan is an idealistic print journalist, which is to say he's unemployed and lacking viable options for re entering the work force. Amy has abandoned her hopes for a benefits stuffed job at Google and is supporting the family doing P.R. for Invisible E nk, a start up founded by Donny, her best friend's 21 year old son. Donny is a genius, a Mark Zuckerberg wannabe who's seen "The Social Network" ("a generational call to arms") at least a dozen times. He has the audacity of a first world dictator and an aversion to deodorant, and he's one of several vivid secondary characters who steal scenes from the sympathetic but less colorful leads. Amy describes her lush neighborhood as a "ludicrously perfect patch" of the world. Naturally, there's trouble in paradise. Amy and Dan's marriage is sliding into passionless discontent. Sex is infrequent and money is scarce. Dan has started flirting with a brilliant photojournalist, and Amy has obsessively taken up running, in order to "pretend she was unencumbered again." For her, this isn't exercise so much as a cherished "vacation from her life." The novel covers three nonconsecutive days during which Amy will be persuaded to test out Donny's potentially lucrative algorithms and venture into her multiverse. There she will glimpse lost loves and she hopes the fate of the daughter she might have had if she hadn't terminated her first pregnancy. Dan will fly off to Fukushima, Japan, to pursue a possible story but mostly to pursue Maryam, a beautiful, hyper talkative transgender woman with a multinational background. (Maryam is a fascinating character, but the ease with which she walks through the world and the near shrug with which Dan accepts her gender seem more like the ideal than the real.) Back at home, a decision made by teenage Jack's best friend will create a crisis that exposes betrayals and threatens to unravel the fragile threads that have been holding the family together. Schulman's work has often had elements of reportage, from the precisely noted details of 9/11 in "A Day at the Beach" to the sexting scandal at the heart of "This Beautiful Life." Despite its speculative elements, "Come With Me" continues in this vein. In an author's note, Schulman cites as the starting points for the novel her interest in and extensive research into the tragic events at Fukushima, the perils and possibilities of the internet and the mystery of teenage suicide clusters in Palo Alto. The section of the novel devoted to Fukushima is unsettling in its immediacy. It's also strangely beautiful even if, at moments, the author's research feels blended in a bit insistently: "Fukushima City was never evacuated," Maryam announces. "It's the capital of the prefecture. Evacuation orders started small in an expanding radius surrounding the nuclear power station. Some residents of this city didn't even know about the nuclear accident until 10 or 11 days later." And so on. Discussions of multiverse theory are nearly as thorough. Even so, Schulman weaves all this material along with multiple points of view into a tight, urgent narrative that builds in tension until, about a hundred pages in, I found it difficult to put the book down. The disparate sections of the novel create a collective, coherent portrait of a world that's catastrophically out of balance, despite the comforts and privileges of certain corners. Radiation is leaking into the soil and ocean at Fukushima, and radioactive waste is deposited in trash bags left beside the road. In the buffered world of Silicon Valley, teenagers with keys to the future in their hands are following one another in copycat acts of self destruction. The most loving and intimate relationships are perhaps ones like Jack's with his girlfriend, Lily, which is conducted mostly in virtual fashion. Amy and Dan's family sits down to eat organic vegetables from the farmer's market with a place set for Lily, who will be Skyped in from Texas on Jack's laptop. Even virtual sex, from Jack's perspective, can be "better" than the real thing. "What was so amazing about Lily was when they did this, when they had phone sex, she just obeyed him. In real life, she sometimes talked." In the end, all the travel in the novel both real and virtual leads back to the relatively conventional question of whether or not Amy and Dan can stay together after engaging in their different styles of straying. Amy arrives at her answer with the help of Donny, the least socially adept character we meet. Perhaps "math plus info" can be put to some good use after all. The final pages of the novel don't tie up all the loose ends and don't offer promises of happily ever after for anyone. Instead, Schulman delivers an ending that's ambiguous but hopeful about human connections, tender without being sentimental about fated love. That's about as much as these characters can expect in their out of balance world and probably as much as we readers can expect in ours. One of the many triumphs of "Come With Me" is that makes it enough.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
This weekend, the YouTube beauty world erupted into drama. Shane Dawson, 31, and Jeffree Star, 34, two of the biggest stars on the platform, faced renewed backlash after allegations of racism, the sexualization of minors and back stabbing swirled. The public call out has resulted in an unfollow campaign that has led to both losing hundreds of thousands of followers. Mr. Dawson and Mr. Star have been two of the most powerful and influential YouTubers for nearly 10 years. Mr. Star is also the C.E.O. of Jeffree Star Cosmetics, a popular makeup brand, which he started in 2014. Until recently, Mr. Dawson was a beloved creator who has been called the "king of YouTube." He's been a regular on the platform since 2008 and is connected and friendly with many other top YouTubers. Last year, he produced a docuseries on Mr. Star, which has nearly 150 million views; the two also released a makeup palette together. But offensive statements and videos that Mr. Star and Mr. Dawson posted in previous years are getting renewed attention. Mr. Dawson has racked up billions of views on YouTube, often by engaging in offensive humor. He has posted several videos in blackface, mocked those with disabilities, joked about bestiality, sexualized minors, and once spoke about "figuratively murdering someone." On June 26, Mr. Dawson posted a teary apology to his channel, in which he tried to make amends for his past, declaring that he deserved to "lose everything." No sooner had his apology video posted than a clip of him pretending to sexually gratify himself to a photo of Willow Smith, then 11 years old, resurfaced and began to get shared widely. Jaden and Jada Pinkett Smith spoke out against Mr. Dawson immediately. "To Shane Dawson ... I'm done with the excuses," Ms. Pinkett Smith, Willow's mother, tweeted. Here's more by our reporter Taylor Lorenz: None TikTok Users React to Threat to Ban App in U.S. Mr. Star, a close friend of Mr. Dawson's, also faced cancellation last week. Like Mr. Dawson, Mr. Star has been a fixture on YouTube since the early days. But while Mr. Dawson cultivated an image of a good natured friend to all, Mr. Star has been called a YouTube "super villain" and is considered by many fans to be duplicitous. Beauty insiders have speculated that both Mr. Dawson and Mr. Star played a large behind the scenes role in stoking backlash against James Charles, another beauty YouTuber, last year. Mr. Star's tight hold on the beauty community and broader relevance on YouTube has begun slipping, as has Mr. Dawson's. In the past few months, several channels that document drama have released investigations into Mr. Star's past, resurfacing old content in which Mr. Star posed for a brand he was set to start called Lipstick Nazi and supported a fellow music artist, Dahvie Vanity, who was accused of sexual misconduct. Mr. Star also allegedly gathered damning information about fellow YouTube stars to wield over their heads as blackmail. Neither Mr. Star nor Mr. Dawson responded to a request for comment. While many of these incidents have surfaced before, the repeated accusations against the two YouTubers at a time when the broader culture is coming to grips with rampant racism and problematic behavior could lead to permanent changes in the beauty world. Already, Mr. Dawson and Mr. Star are hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of followers and face a storm of criticism online. Target has removed Mr. Dawson's books from its shelves, according to Insider. On Tuesday, YouTube announced the company had suspended monetization across all three of Mr. Dawson's channels. "For the longest time Jeffree and Shane have been untouchable," said Will Larkins, a 15 year old who provides commentary on internet drama and has been documenting these events on his Twitter handle OhMyGodExposeU. "They've gotten away with everything. I think people are finally fed up and realizing that we can't just keep giving people like this a platform." Outside of Mr. Star and Mr. Dawson, fans have begun to look at an entire generation of millennial influencers in a new light. Jenna Marbles, another YouTuber who had been on the site for a decade, recently quit after backlash to an old video in which she appeared in blackface. The YouTubers David Dobrik and Liza Koshy have also faced sharp criticism for old videos, in which they imitated the Japanese language. "I hope one day people can learn and change and grow before they make millions of dollars doing black face," Akilah Hughes, a YouTuber, tweeted on June 26. "My tears are reserved for all the black people who will never even attempt to have a YouTube career because they don't want to be subjected to racism all day every day as a living." As many older white millennial beauty influencers lose relevance, a newer, more diverse crop of creators is stepping in. "You have YouTubers like Raw Beauty Kristi, Jackie Aina, Nyma Tang, who are not problematic, and that's just to name a few," said Ashlye Kyle, 35, who runs a YouTube drama channel focused on the beauty world. "I think that they're going to gain more influence." Even if Mr. Dawson and Mr. Star battle their way through this backlash, Ms. Kyle and others in the YouTube beauty world believe they'll never regain the influence they had. "Do I feel like Jeffree will always have his stans and his next makeup launch will sell out?" Ms. Kyle said. "Absolutely. And will Shane's next docuseries still get millions of views? Yes, I do. But the beauty community itself is finally seeing their true colors." Will Larkins said: "This pyramid system where Shane and Jeffree are kings and everyone else is below them is over." He added that "the next generation of beauty influencers, it's going to be about artistry and not just drama. People are realizing we need more representation of people of color, Asians and every minority. The beauty world is a place to express yourself. The younger generation understands that better than the older beauty gurus."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
TOPEKA, Kan. The Republican controlled Kansas House of Representatives voted narrowly on Monday to uphold Gov. Sam Brownback's veto of a bill to expand Medicaid, ending a quest that came improbably close to succeeding in this deep red state despite Mr. Brownback's unyielding opposition. In spite of a torrent of phone calls and in person pleas from constituents over the weekend, and last minute lobbying by hospital leaders who said that expanding Medicaid would help save a number of rural hospitals from closing, the vote was 81 to 44, three short of the two thirds majority needed for an override. The effort to expand Medicaid to cover 150,000 additional low income people in Kansas had been closely watched nationally, in part because it came just after President Trump and Republicans in Congress tried and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Success might have provided momentum in some of the other 18 states that have not yet expanded Medicaid under the health law to cover far more low income adults. One of them, Representative Clay Aurand, a Republican from Belleville, said he hoped Kansas could find a way to expand Medicaid in "a more fiscal neutral way." Supporters of the expansion had argued that it could save lives and jobs. "We have the ability to help people who truly need it the most," Representative Cindy Holscher, a Democrat from Olathe, told her colleagues. "We have the ability to make a decision today that will save lives not just one, but potentially thousands." Representative Susan Concannon, a Republican from Beloit and a leading proponent of the expansion bill, said, "What we know most of all is that if we do this, it will prevent closures of hospitals." Opponents of expansion questioned whether Kansas could afford it, expressed doubts about whether the federal government would continue to pay for most of it if the health care law eventually is repealed, and suggested the promised benefits to rural hospitals were overstated. Mr. Brownback vetoed the measure almost as soon as it reached his desk on Thursday, saying that the cost to the state would be "irresponsible and unsustainable," and that it would be "unwise" to expand Medicaid while President Trump and Congress were still vowing to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He also said the bill was unacceptable because it did not include a work requirement for beneficiaries of the Medicaid expansion. While the federal government has never allowed states to require that people have jobs in order to receive Medicaid, the Trump administration has hinted that it may. Some Republican led states are considering asking for changes to their Medicaid programs that could reduce recipients, including work requirements, premiums and even lifetime limits on Medicaid coverage. The vote in Kansas came five months after an election in which moderate Republicans and Democrats replaced a number of conservatives in the Legislature, breathing new life into an effort that had stalled for years. The House of Representatives voted 81 to 44 in February to expand Medicaid. The Senate followed last week with a 25 to 14 vote; health committees in both chambers heard often emotional testimony from uninsured Kansans and from medical providers. The Affordable Care Act originally required all states to expand Medicaid to all adults earning up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, but the Supreme Court ruled that states could opt out if they wished. Still, the law has played a major role in reducing the number of Americans without health insurance, with about 11 million low income adults gaining coverage in the 31 states that have chosen to expand the program. In the 19 states that have not expanded Medicaid including some of the biggest, such as Florida and Texas millions of low income people are stuck in a "coverage gap," earning too much for Medicaid under their states' stringent guidelines but too little to qualify for subsidized coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces. David Jordan, executive director of Alliance for a Healthy Kansas, an advocacy group that formed last year to push for expanding Medicaid, said supporters were not giving up. "The problem of 150,000 Kansans not having access to health care doesn't go away," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
At a piano concert, the performer always has a shadow that moves only when prompted by the score: the page turner. This person is in full view, yet invisible a situation the writer performer Alessandro Magania likens to that of an immigrant quietly minding his or her business, or someone deliberately trying to escape attention. In his play "Radio Delirio," Mr. Magania narrates the tale of Cristian Leu, a man disguised as a page turner working hard to not be noticed. But the heavy use of spy tropes only emphasizes how inert and uninvolving the tale is. Mr. Magania starts by sitting next to a stool bench parked in front of an empty grand piano the instrument merely is an outline of itself, the ghostly black frame resting on red carpet. (Simone Peretti did the starkly handsome production design.) Bracketing the central red square are a stage manager (Kim Macron) and a house manager (Mickey Solis), each one at a messy table. They read magazines, snack and chat with each other via their headsets. The page turner occasionally flips a page from the score, until he spaces out and messes up a cue. It's not a big mistake, but it's enough to draw attention. The next day, an audience member recognizes him that was Leu, and we are about to get to know him.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Credit...DC Holy milestones, Batman! Detective Comics, where the caped crusader debuted on March 30, 1939, will reach issue No. 1000 on Wednesday, just days before the hero's 80th birthday. "It is evidence of the greatness and power of the Batman concept that the character has appeared continuously over eight decades," Peter Sanderson, a comic book historian, said. Growing up, I saw versions of Batman in comics and on TV, but one of the great leaps forward was Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, a four part story which presented an older version of the hero coming out of retirement to protect Gotham City once more. Miller's vision of Batman helped pave the way for Tim Burton's "Batman," starring Michael Keaton, perhaps the first time my love of comics was less childish and more socially acceptable. Since then, we've had many film Batmen his onscreen incarnations have oscillated between campy (Joel Schumacher) and dignified (Christopher Nolan) but his guiding principle has remained the same. "Batman never gives up on his mission to protect the innocent from evil," Sanderson said. Detective Comics was an anthology series that began in 1937 that eventually gave DC Comics its name. The Bat Man, as he was then called inside the book, premiered in this issue's six page "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate." (The later cover date of May, in this instance was a practice publishers used to keep comics on newsstands longer.) The story introduces Commissioner Gordon, the wealthy Bruce Wayne and his caped alter ego, who thinks nothing of heaving a criminal off a roof. Batman was created by the artist Bob Kane and the writer Bill Finger, though it took many years for Finger to receive credit for his significant contributions to the canon. Another bat fact: A copy of Detective No. 27 sold at auction for 1.075 million in 2010. Read The New York Times obituary for Bob Kane, who died in 1998, and a short article about Bill Finger and the Bronx. The world of Batman brightened with the introduction of Robin, the Boy Wonder. "Robin humanizes Batman and also allows for some levity in the heavy shadowed stories of Gotham, while of course hooking young readers with someone they can also relate to," said Peter J. Tomasi, who writes the current Detective Comics series. It certainly hooked me. As a young fan in the 1970s, Robin, whose real name was Dick Grayson, was one of my introductions to superheroes. I witnessed his growth into adulthood and transformation into Nightwing, a confident, outgoing adventurer who brings together the DC heroes in a way that the more reclusive Batman cannot. Since Dick's graduation, other Robins have emerged, including Bruce Wayne's son, Damian. Michael E. Uslan, a comic books historian and a producer of the "Batman" films, called this issue transformative. "The Batmobile of 1950," he said, "redefines Batman, modernizes him, and moves him into a new generation, equipped with higher tech." (There have since been many iterations of the Batmobile.) The cover mentions an "Indian lawman," a sheriff who is Sioux. His name is Ohiyesa Smith. But, in a sign of the times, a character decides, "That name's too tough to pronounce," and calls him Pow Wow, based on his philosophy of talking first, then resorting to violence if needed. "This issue introduces the legendary 'New Look' Batman, with the yellow circle around his chest symbol and a whole new look and style both visually and in terms of character development and story," Uslan said. "Readers of that era still feel jarred and elated by this sea change!" The chief architects of the evolution were the editor Julius Schwartz and the artist Carmine Infantino, who came in to shore up sagging sales in the hopes of avoiding cancellation. When producers of the Batman television series wanted to increase female viewership, they asked DC for a new character. They got Batgirl, whose civilian guise is Barbara Gordon, the daughter of Gotham's police commissioner. Batgirl's career was halted in 1988, when she was paralyzed after being shot by the Joker. She eventually became Oracle, a hacker and information broker aiding DC's heroes. In 2011, she underwent experimental surgery that returned her to the rooftops. Many fans would love to see Barbara Gordon and Dick Grayson as a romantic dynamic duo. When the Adam West "Batman" series came to Blu ray. Batman has no dialogue in "Night of the Stalker," which is a little gimmicky but manages to work, if you believe the hero's laser sharp focus leaves little room for words. The story written by Steve Englehart, plotted and drawn by Vin and Sal Amendola and inked by Dick Giordano begins with our hero seeing bank robbers murder a couple in front of their son. After justice is served, Batman unmasks at home. Suddenly "sorrow explodes within him" as he remembers being a boy and witnessing the death of his parents. The final caption: "In this gray lit, lonely tower, for this single moment in infinity ... he is that boy again." Paul Levitz, whose long career with DC began in 1972, said that assembling the all star creators for this milestone issue was his proudest editorial moment. The 80 pages include a prose piece by Walter Gibson, the creator of the Shadow, in a tribute to the earliest days of Detective, which included text stories. Another achievement: In 1978, when Levitz took over editing Batman, he read every issue of Batman, Detective and World's Finest that had featured the hero. It was a daunting task then, and seems nearly impossible today. Batwoman was originally introduced in Detective No. 233 in 1956, in part to give Batman a love interest. It did not take. She was rebooted in 2006 as a lesbian who had been discharged from the military. This Batwoman was embraced by fans, and she took over Detective for a year before graduating to her own series. In 2013, her creative team quit over an editorial edict preventing her from marrying. The decision was about keeping true to the mission of the Batman characters, who have sacrificed their self interests for the greater good.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
High on a mountaintop in Colombia, a raggedy pack of teenagers who answer to names including "Rambo," "Smurf," "Wolf," "Dog" and "Bigfoot" receive supervision, intermittently, from a little person on horseback. These boys and girls have guns, an adult hostage from the United States and, soon, a cow. Their overseer tells them to look after the cow with care, as it is a source of milk. Consequences will rebound if harm comes to the cow. And what do you know. The excitable, sometimes hormonally charged kids let things get a little out of hand one night and, oops, they kill the cow. Which they then rip apart for meat. The ripping apart is depicted in great, bloody, muscle tearing detail. Thank you, God, for the gift of cinema. "Monos," directed by Alejandro Landes, is one of those allegories that is cagey about exactly what it is allegorizing. (The title can yield multiple meanings in translation, including "monkeys.") Child soldiering is an unfortunate fact throughout much of the world, but this paramilitary gang has traits that suggest an extrarealistic interest or intent.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Ibsen Wrote 'An Enemy of the People' in 1882. Trump Has Made It Popular Again. Ibsen's 1882 play, "An Enemy of the People," is suddenly as timely as a tweet. The political drama about a scientist who tries to save his town from water pollution, only to wind up as a scapegoat is being revived in several new productions across the United States. Robert Falls, the artistic director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, decided to stage the play after the election. "I needed to do something about our sudden/current/soon to be ongoing horrific life under Trump and majority Republican rule," he said in an email. Little did he know that Trump would stamp the phrase "enemy of the people" in the American consciousness when he used it to pillory the news media in a tweet last February. Why are productions cropping up now? What started as a response to a Trump presidency now seems to speak to our times in many ways, with a plot that intertwines an ethically compromised antihero, political extremism, corruption, environmental activism and a lack of accountability for the destruction of a town. "An Enemy of the People" was dashed off by Ibsen as something of a response to the scandalized reception of his previous "Ghosts," which was about the taboo subject of syphilis. He wanted to strike back at the liberal press, which he thought was hypocritical for panning his play while claiming to support free speech and progress. The play features a divisive, punitive protagonist and whistle blower, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, who tries to warn his town about contaminated water polluting the spa that keeps the town solvent. His brother, Peter, is the mayor, who, concerned about the economic impact of this crusade, wants to suppress Thomas's expose. Stockmann is able to persuade his friends, including the editor of the newspaper, that telling the truth about the water is important, but his environmental campaign falters. He lurches politically from the left to the right, and by the fourth act, Stockmann, outraged by the mob's resistance to his campaign, becomes a zealot and is demonized as the enemy of the people. He winds up defeated, but not before indicting the town in its own tragedy. Ibsen's dark, realistic drama about "how the hero cannot win" resonates in our era, said Tore Rem, a literature professor at the University of Oslo and the general editor of a new set of Penguin Classics editions of Ibsen plays. But Ibsen, Mr. Rem said, "makes it impossible to sympathize with Stockmann completely," because he is self aggrandizing and elitist. At the Guthrie Theater, the British team that is staging "Enemy" feels the play carries global weight. "I'm living through a time when it's impossible to be a hero," said the director, Lyndsey Turner. And the playwright Brad Birch, who set the Guthrie's pared down adaptation in contemporary Norway, was particularly moved by the heightened political tensions in Britain over Brexit. "We wanted to challenge how being a liberal means being egalitarian but also it involves being quite righteous," he said. There seems to be a sense, he said, that those who voted for Brexit got what they deserved. But for Joseph Haj, the artistic director of the Guthrie, one place engagement with the play began was with anxiety about the destruction of the environment. "The play is about the business economy versus environmental concerns, and how lonely that environmental voice can become," he said. If anything, the play seems endlessly adaptable to fit the political times. In his McCarthy era adaptation in 1950, Arthur Miller softened Stockmann's harshest language in the remarkable town hall speech in Act IV, in which he advances the idea that some people those who totally agree with his antipollution screed are biologically superior to others. "The most dangerous enemies of truth and freedom are the majority!" Stockmann yells. "The common people are nothing more than the raw material of which a People is made!" he yells, before calling those who have turned against him, in some translations, "curs." To our ears, his screed can sound reactionary, or even eugenicist, although when Ibsen wrote the antimob sentiments, they were shared by liberal thinkers such as Dickens and John Stuart Mill. Robert Falls argued that these lines are "not a cut and dried case of Stockmann advocating eugenics." His adaptation, based on a little used 19th century translation by Eleanor Marx, a daughter of Karl Marx, focuses on places in Ibsen's script where the doctor defended education as a way to change minds. "He believes people could be transformed, be made better," Mr. Falls said. But Stockmann's Act IV speech can also be seen as a chilling reminder of how both ends of the political spectrum bear some fault for our some of our biggest political (and ecological) nightmares. Neena Arndt, the dramaturge working on the Goodman production, said in an email that some of Stockmann's most egregious lines could be compared to "Hillary Clinton's 'basket of deplorables' comment, or other comments that people perhaps audience members themselves have made that imply that those they disagree with are inferior." Given that scene's challenge to the audience, it is not surprising that several productions stage it immersively. "Traitor" asks the audience to move from the theater to a storefront next door, where the mob around them gets angry at Stockmann. "We wanted it to be intimate," said Mr. Neveu. Mr. Falls, however, is taking a more traditional approach. "I'm staging it as Ibsen wrote it, as a scene in a public assembly hall." These productions share a reluctance to find an easy moral in a play that ends with Stockmann destroyed and the town's environmental catastrophe imminent. Accordingly, the Guthrie and the Goodman productions both want audiences to see Stockmann's brother, the law and order mayor who wants to suppress the discovery of the contaminated water, as more than a villain and perhaps even a solution "The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone," is Stockmann's famous Act V line, pitched from the ruins of his heroism. These productions count the costs differently. Red Orchid Theater's "Traitor" adds the macabre touch of Stockmann's son dropping dead onstage, poisoned by the water. Ms. Turner, the Guthrie director, imagined her ending as "a man confronting the necessity of action as well as the impossibility of action." Mr. Falls was more interested in how Stockmann, whose idealism has lost him everything, now risks losing those who love him. "A man alone cannot accomplish anything," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
FRANKFURT A sprawling array of new production models and blue sky design studies from humble econocars and all manner of hybrid configurations to 3 million supercars made their debuts last week during two hectic days of press previews for the 65th Frankfurt Motor Show. The show, which bills itself as the world's largest, is held every other year, alternating with Paris, at the enormous Messe Frankfurt convention center here. The show opened to the public Saturday and continues through Sept. 22. Front and center is a mind bending collection of advanced technologies that aim to reduce, restrict or even replace driver input significantly by 2020. Mercedes Benz alone promised "over 30 active and passive safety technologies" that will promote its goal of transforming the automobile into a self driving machine. "Autonomous driving is here," Dieter Zetsche, the board chairman of Daimler, said in an interview. "It will just take a little longer before the regulatory agencies allow us to offer them to the public." National pride seemed to be on the line as German automakers sparred for attention, played down competitors' advances and sought bragging rights for first to market technology breakthroughs. But the German automakers were by no means alone in clamoring for headlines; dozens of automakers revealed new cars and features meant to stir the passions of buyers in Europe, where sales have fallen to bleak levels not seen since 1993. Here are some of Frankfurt's notable debutantes: ALFA ROMEO At long last, the production version of the lightweight Alfa Romeo 4C sports car broke cover. The swift two seater arrives in European showrooms later this year; no plans for a return of Alfa to the United States were offered. AUDI The Sport quattro Concept, which honors the 30th anniversary of Audi's Sport quattro, is a 700 horsepower plug in hybrid coupe capable of returning the equivalent of 95 m.p.g. Audi also showed the odd Nanuk concept, which previewed styling cues like three dimensional lighting that could appear on coming models. FORD Ford highlighted new styling cues in its global design language, while introducing two models aimed principally at Europe. The S Max is a mini minivan and the Vignale is a premium version of the Mondeo. INFINITI The arrival of the Q30 Concept was hardly a surprise, but some details about it were: the concept is broadly hinted as being the prototype for a compact entry to be built in Britain on a variation of the Mercedes A Class platform. JAGUAR Jaguar raised eyebrows with its C X17 concept, which is far enough along in development to be equipped with working door handles and even a gas tank flap. If approved, the model would be Jaguar's first crossover utility vehicle. LAND ROVER Diesel engines carry a price premium over their gasoline counterparts, and so do hybrid systems. But Land Rover bets its well heeled customers will pay a hefty premium for this combination to get 37 m.p.g. fuel economy. The diesel electric hybrid is headed to production next year. LEXUS The LF NX was an attempt by Lexus to signal a bold new styling direction, but the execution bordered on the bizarre. The acute angles, riot of character lines and martial stance stirred double takes. MERCEDES BENZ The company revealed several new models, from the small GLA crossover to the elegant S Class Coupe concept. Also noteworthy was the S500 Plug In Hybrid, which combines a 3 liter V 6 with a 107 horsepower electric motor to achieve fuel economy of 78 m.p.g. with a range of 18 miles on electric power alone.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
SAN FRANCISCO After years of trying unsuccessfully to build a social network to rival Facebook, Google finally got something out of all of its failures: cover. Members of Congress grilled the executives of Google, Facebook and Twitter this week in a trio of hearings focused on the role that social media played in advancing a Russian disinformation campaign before the 2016 election. Google's representative at two of the hearings, Kent Walker, the company's general counsel, made a point of distinguishing the search giant from its internet brethren. Repeatedly and unequivocally, he answered questions at the hearings by saying, "We're not a social network." Tech companies have taken a pounding in the court of public opinion in recent months. In the eyes of their critics, they have become too big, too powerful and too unmindful of their influence. And this week's congressional hearings cast added and unflattering light on the industry's growing embarrassment over the Russian election meddling. "Without sufficient oversight, these companies never imagined hostile intelligence services would misuse their platforms in this way," said Renee DiResta, an independent security researcher at Data for Democracy. "The people running it appear to not fully appreciate what they've designed." Not surprisingly, perhaps, a few of the industry's biggest companies have been happy to say, in essence, don't blame us. Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive and an outspoken critic of the data collection practices of his company's technological rivals, said Wednesday that he was concerned that social networks could be weaponized against the people who use them. "The bigger issue is that some of these tools are used to divide people, to manipulate people, to get fake news to people in broad numbers, and so to influence their thinking," said Mr. Cook in an interview with NBC News. Frank Shaw, head of communications at Apple's longtime rival, Microsoft, praised Mr. Cook's comments in a Twitter post, saying that Mr. Cook had framed the issue "perfectly." Last year, Microsoft did purchase LinkedIn, a career oriented social network, for 26.2 billion, but that site appears to have played little role in Russia's influence efforts. With the emergence of Facebook, Twitter and their ilk over the last decade, "social" became a key Silicon Valley buzzword as companies crammed social network like features into new products. Even Apple, despite the tens of billions of dollars it has earned making computing devices, has tried its hand at a social network focused on music. But as social media has become increasingly connected to unpleasant bickering, race baiting and Russian propaganda, the must have "social" label has become an albatross, said Joseph Bayer, an assistant professor at Ohio State University who focuses on social networks. "The mere fact that a tech company is trying to minimize its overall influence is a telling signal of the moment we're in," said Mr. Bayer. Google, which operates under the parent company Alphabet, can offer a distinction between its business and how social networks operate largely because its attempts to build a social network have not been very successful. The company spent millions of dollars creating Google , a social site built specifically to take on Facebook. The company tied Google into nearly every one of its properties, describing it as the "social spine" of Google in public statements at the time. There also were short lived efforts like Google Buzz and Google Wave, or geographically specific sites like Orkut popular in Brazil but ignored elsewhere. Google continues to exist but it is considered a disappointment. Google said it had found no political posts from state linked actors on Google . Google has often tried to fashion YouTube, its sprawling video service, into something more like a social network in hopes of keeping visitors interested. Last year, YouTube added what it called its "Community" product, essentially features intended to inspire users to interact more with one another. Google said accounts believed to have ties to the Kremlin had uploaded more than 1,100 videos to YouTube on racial, religious and political topics. Those videos were viewed 309,000 times. Many of those videos had only a small number of views, though they were "frequently posted to other social media platforms," Richard Salgado, Google's senior counsel in law enforcement and information security, told a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday. Facebook, to offer a comparison, estimated that 150 million users of Facebook and its subsidiary, Instagram, had been exposed to 80,000 posts that came from the Russian influence campaign. Twitter said it had discovered more than 2,700 accounts that were linked to Russia's Internet Research Agency, a company tied to the Kremlin, between September 2016 and November 2016. Those accounts posted roughly 131,000 tweets over that period. Twitter identified an additional 36,000 automated accounts that had posted 1.4 million election related tweets linked to Russia over that same period. The tweets received about 288 million views. "Now you're seeing all the attention from Congress go to Facebook and Twitter, because they're the linchpin" of the Russian information operations, said Ms. DiResta, the security researcher. In his testimony on Capitol Hill, Mr. Walker, Google's general counsel, sought to draw a bright line separating his company's services from social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which has been an occasional subject of Google acquisition rumors. He also played down what Google knows about its users, a surprising conceit for a company that makes more money than anybody from selling advertising based on the online interests of users. "We're somewhat differently positioned because we're not primarily a social network," Mr. Walker said in response to a question regarding whether Google should notify users who are exposed to propaganda or divisive content from a foreign government. "Many users are not logged in when they access content, so it's difficult to know who sees what."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
AI WEIWEI: 'GOOD FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBORS' at Washington Square Park, Doris C. Freedman Plaza and throughout New York City (through Feb. 11, 2018) A citywide public art disruption by China's most important contemporary artist comprises large steel cages uptown and downtown, chain link fences behind bus stops from Harlem to the Bronx, protective netting around Corona Park's Unisphere, and hundreds of portraits of refugees on lampposts. Mr. Ai is a refugee himself he fled to Berlin in 2015 and by this point there is no untangling his art and his activism. His barriers and obstacles make manifest the borders rising anew in this deglobalizing age. The most shocking thing about them is how natural they appear in the cityscape, and how easily we accept yet more limits on our freedom. (Jason Farago) Installation sites are at publicartfund.org 'DEADEYE DICK: RICHARD BELLAMY AND HIS CIRCLE,' at Peter Freeman Gallery (through Oct. 28). A wistfully romantic portrait of the postwar dealer Richard Bellamy, a passionate advocate for contemporary art and a notably indifferent businessman, "Deadeye Dick" (organized by the Bellamy biographer Judith Stein) emphasizes the early 1960s heyday of the Green Gallery he founded on West 57th Street while inviting cleareyed judgments about the difficult realities of the art trade today. Alongside audacious early works by Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg and other familiar names who got their start at the Green are memorable pieces by the more obscure Jean Follett and Sidney Tillim, as well as portraits of Bellamy by Alex Katz and others that attest to his intensity and charisma. (Karen Rosenberg) 212 966 5154, peterfreemaninc.com	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
A good piece of furniture should do more than merely serve its function it should also have enough sculptural appeal to impress guests and delight its owner. That's what Oliver M. Furth believes, anyway. "I'm interested in that place where art and design meet," said Mr. Furth, a Los Angeles based interior designer who is a founder of LaxartXDesign, a design focused branch of the nonprofit art space Laxart that explores that intersection. In the rooms Mr. Furth designs, he likes to install unexpected pieces by contemporary artists and designers: a metal console table festooned with woven textiles that he developed with Tanya Aguiniga; a chandelier of knotted electrical cord by Kwangho Lee; a coffee table resembling a spill of liquid bronze by Stefan Bishop. But one type of furniture seems especially well suited to making a statement: sculptural side tables. "It's a great place to take a risk," he said, "because they're small, but also impactful."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
So that's how I ended up at Off Center. What seemed at first like a mere moneymaking thing turned into a career making adventure. It was really eye opening for me, bouncing between my brother's room at Columbia and this rarefied world of privilege and opportunity, and then performing at public schools where there was never enough funding and the children and their families were struggling to get by. These were separate worlds in the same city. Sometimes it got me down I felt like these kids didn't have a chance. But it also showed me how kids in poverty learn to find joy in the little things that life has to offer. They have to make do. Look, I'm not saying you should put your children in poverty to make them happy. But growing up poor gives you a special perspective, and there's a lot of value and strength in that. At the schools, we would update the classics. We did "Little Red Riding Hood," where she was a fine black girl and all of a sudden the Big Bad Wolf would start beat boxing. We added slang, Spanglish and hip hop. We did impressions of Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder. One time we did Frankenstein's monster as a breakdancer. We told jokes: "We were so poor my mother would take Polaroids of other kids playing with toys for Christmas." Things like that. Once a kid came up after a show and asked why he didn't know that Jack from "Jack and the Beanstalk" was Latin. He said he was going to ask his mom why she never told him. Man, to see those kids squealing and jumping up from their seats was the biggest highlight of my life. I realized how important it was for them to see themselves and their culture reflected back to them, something the media of the time rarely attempted. Seeing their lingo, mannerisms and pop culture references onstage was a way of being validated. We may have been the first ones to really show them that who they were was important and cool. Especially in my Manhattan.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Woodstock 50's Backer Says the Festival Is Off. Its Promoter Is Holding Out Hope. It was supposed to be the golden anniversary of the most famous rock concert in history, the event that crystallized in mud the free love 1960s and the drawing power of a new generation of music stars. But on Monday, Woodstock 50 appeared to be all but dead. According to a statement from the festival's primary investor, the event planned for Aug. 16 to 18 in Watkins Glen, N.Y., with acts including Jay Z, the Killers and Dead and Company was off. "It's a dream for agencies to work with iconic brands and to be associated with meaningful movements," the investor, an arm of the Japanese advertising giant Dentsu, said. "But despite our tremendous investment of time, effort and commitment, we don't believe the production of the festival can be executed as an event worthy of the Woodstock brand name while also ensuring the health and safety of the artists, partners and attendees. "As a result and after careful consideration," the statement continued, "Dentsu Aegis Network's Amplifi Live, a partner of Woodstock 50, has decided to cancel the festival. As difficult as it is, we believe this is the most prudent decision for all parties involved." The agency believed that production milestones had not been met and was concerned about delays in acquiring permits, as well as a reduction in the originally planned capacity, from 100,000 visitors a day to 75,000. But while Dentsu's statement ricocheted around the news media, Michael Lang, the promoter of Woodstock 50 and one of the primary forces behind the original festival in 1969, denied that the event was kaput. "They do not have the right to unilaterally cancel the festival," Lang said in an interview shortly after Dentsu released its statement, which Lang said caught him by surprise. On Monday evening, Mr. Lang's team released a statement insisting that the show would go on, but giving no further details. "We are committed to ensuring that the 50th anniversary of Woodstock is marked with a festival deserving of its iconic name and place in American history and culture," the statement said. "Although our financial partner is withdrawing, we will of course be continuing with the planning of the festival and intend to bring on new partners." "The bottom line is," the statement added, "there is going to be a Woodstock 50th Anniversary Festival, as there must be, and it's going to be a blast." Lang said that all acts had already been paid in full, leaving open the possibility that he could rescue the festival with another backer. He is no stranger to last minute saves. The 1969 Woodstock festival lost its original venue, in Wallkill, N.Y., and relocated to Max Yasgur's farm in Bethel, N.Y., just weeks before it took place. It was unclear what prompted the timing of Dentsu's announcement. The company declined to make any further comment. Several major music agents and acts booked for the event said they had not received any notification of cancellation. The list of performers also includes Miley Cyrus, the Raconteurs, the Lumineers, Chance the Rapper, Imagine Dragons, Halsey, Robert Plant and some who had played the original event, like Santana, Country Joe McDonald and John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival. Woodstock 50 was announced in January as an ambitious and principled celebration of the original event. Organizers envisioned a three day camping festival, for approximately 100,000 people a day, with what Lang said would be music as well as representation by activist organizations. "We want this to be more than just coming to a concert," Lang said at the time. "And hopefully a lot of the bands will become part of this effort to get people to stand up and make themselves heard, to get and out vote. And if they don't have a candidate that represents their feelings, to find one or to run themselves." But from the start, Woodstock 50 drew skeptics throughout the industry, who doubted that such an event could be successful in an era now dominated by big festivals and tours promoted by giant companies like Live Nation and AEG. Through permit applications, the organizers had also quietly reduced its intended capacity to 75,000. The lineup was announced last month, but the on sale date for tickets April 22, Earth Day came and went with no more information. According to news reports, the organizers had applied for but not yet received a mass gathering permit from the New York State Department of Health. Without that permit, no tickets could be sold. Woodstock 50 was to have been the most prominent event among a series of anniversary celebrations throughout the Northeast, including a series of events at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, located on the site of the original Woodstock festival. Another event, Woodstock Experience 2019, has a lineup including a number of artists who played the original festival, like Melanie, Ten Years After and Jefferson Starship, an offshoot of Jefferson Airplane. It is to take place in West Jefferson, N.C., Aug. 9 to 11, and then in Palm Bay, Fla., Aug. 16 to 18. Its slogan: "Keeping the spirit of Woodstock alive."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Self portraits by Velazquez, left, and Rembrandt. The two artists and their contemporaries are the subject of a major exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. An exhibition at the Rijksmuseum brings together works by Rembrandt and Velazquez. They lived at the same time, but in different worlds. AMSTERDAM Two warring nations: one Catholic, one Protestant; one a monarchy, the other a republic; one profoundly religious, the other ambitiously mercantile. How is it possible, then, that 17th century Spain and the Netherlands, divided in so many ways, managed to produce artists whose works were so similar? That is the central question posed by "Rembrandt Velazquez," a breathtakingly lush exhibition of 17 century Dutch and Spanish masterworks at the Rijksmuseum, running through Jan. 19. "For me, it's a poetic dialogue between two great masters," Taco Dibbits , director of the Rijksmuseum, said in an interview. "It's also just a celebration of painting, with the two greatest portrait painters of all time." Rembrandt van Rijn and Diego Velazquez lived at almost exactly the same time. Velazquez, born in 1599, seven years before Rembrandt, who was born in 1606. Velazquez died in 1660 at the age of 61; Rembrandt in 1669 at 63. For both Spain and the Netherlands, this was an era of economic boom and flourishing culture: Merchants from both countries dominated international trade, and great wealth was accrued by their upper classes. Art was in high demand. Yet, throughout most of the artists' lives, until 1648 when both men were in their late 40s the two countries were engaged in the Eighty Years' War, the Netherlands' struggle for independence from Spain. The northern provinces of the former Hapsburg Monarchy revolted against Roman Catholic rule, seeking to establish an independent Protestant state that eventually became the Dutch Republic. War made travel difficult, so Spanish and Dutch artists rarely met, even if their artworks were circulated, most often in the form of portable prints. It's almost certain that Rembrandt and Velazquez never encountered each other; Velazquez may have seen some of Rembrandt's etchings, and Rembrandt may have heard that there was a master painter in Madrid, said Gregor Weber, the curator of the Rijksmuseum exhibition. But they are not known to have corresponded, he added. Nevertheless, their work bears a surprising resemblance. Both specialized in portraiture, capturing the prominent figures in their respective countries; for Velazquez, this meant the Spanish royal family; for Rembrandt, wealthy Dutch burghers and merchants. They both painted in contrasting dark and light hues, favoring palettes of darker, earthy pigments: bone black, ocher, umber, siennas and lead white. "They meet in their intentions: how to paint, why to paint and what to paint," Mr. Weber said in an interview. "The intention of both was always to go deeper into the psychology of their sitters. To be closer to reality, to be closer to religion, and to be closer, in general to the human condition." But the most striking similarity might be the brushwork of the two artists, according to the Dutch art critic Hans den Hartog Jager . "Both show exemplary technical control, combined with the ability to let go of that control and transcend technique," he writes in the exhibition catalog. These similarities and contrasts can be seen in self portraits of the two masters that hang side by side in Amsterdam. On the left is the only known painting that Velazquez completed of himself alone, a work dated 1640 and on loan from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Valencia. On the right, a self portrait of Rembrandt from 1654, one of more than 80 such paintings he made over his lifetime. Velazquez, with an upturned mustache and bushy black hair, gazes dubiously toward the viewer, his expression somber and stern. Rembrandt, clean shaven and informally dressed, his trademark wide beret covering his curly hair, has a softer, more inviting gaze. Through the use of lighter pigments on their cheeks, both draw our attention to their eyes, which contain multitudes. The exhibition was made possible by a collaboration between the Rijksmuseum and the Prado in Madrid, which lent 14 works for the Amsterdam exhibition.In addition to the two headline artists, the Rijksmuseum exhibition features works by other Dutch and Spanish artists Johannes Vermeer and Bartholome Murillo, Carel Fabritius and Francisco de Zurbaran, Frans Hals and Juan de Valdes Leal presented in pairs or threes to highlight visual rhymes. "The dialogue makes you look more intensely; it makes you think, 'What do I really see?' Mr. Weber said. "Most people will see the inner essence of these paintings. It's kind of a school of looking." Spanish and Dutch artists of the 17th century had similar artistic roots to draw on, Mr. Weber said. They could both lay claim to the legacy of the Flemish painters of the 15th and 16th centuries such as Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Jan van Eyck as well as the Flemish Baroque generation that followed, especially the work of Peter Paul Rubens. They also shared sources in Italian art, such as the works of Titian, Carracci and Caravaggio, he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
SHEFALI KUMAR FRIESEN set out to create an app to allow people to send sound clips, like music or speeches or poems, as text messages. She wanted the app, called Emotitones, to have a vast digital library that would allow people to search for clips by name but also by sounds, like something to inspire or apologize. Without venture backing and unwilling to ask her family for help, she used money from her day job as a music composer and singer to pay people to create the app, a process she found frustrating. Then, last summer, after introducing the app in early 2012, she realized she needed to rewrite all the code herself. The only problem was she didn't know how to do it or have the money to learn. That was when she stumbled upon a new site called Upstart that pairs investors and people who finished college or graduate school after 2008. The Upstarts, as they are called, are looking for relatively small amounts of money, about 25,000 on average, to finance their idea or even pay off debt. Ms. Kumar Friesen, whose father is an inventor, wanted to raise 70,000 through Upstart to learn to write code, pay legal bills from an offer she ultimately turned down and push through her patent application. Last week, I wrote about how parents should think about lending to their children. But for many young adults, parents are not a source of financing. This is where a site like Upstart comes in. The investors, or backers as they are called, receive a percentage of the young person's income for 10 years, regardless of whether the idea they backed is successful. If the person is paid less than 30,000 a year, the period extends for a year to a maximum of 15 years. If the person tries to avoid repaying the investment as opposed to earning too little money that investment converts into a loan with a staggering annual interest rate of 15 percent. Dave Girouard, founder and chief executive of Upstart, said that to ensure borrowers do not regret the deal, the amount a person could borrow is limited to 7 percent of future earnings and the payback is capped at five times the loan amount. That limits the upside on the few people who succeed financially. "People might be paying more than they would on their fixed rate loan," Mr. Girouard said. But, he added, the people who have gotten financing so far were comfortable with the possibly of paying back a higher amount than on a loan because it would mean their idea had succeeded. What I wanted to know was: What did investors want to get out of this and how did they select young people who would agree to give them a percentage of their income for a decade? Backers on Upstart have to be accredited investors, which means having an annual income greater than 200,000 or a net worth above 1 million. They can invest any amount they want, though their offer has to be accepted. They can also sign on to be a mentor. For connecting borrowers and lenders, Upstart takes 3 percent of the money young people raise, and 0.5 percent annually of the amount a backer has invested. Mr. Girouard said the company was close to signing an agreement with a student loan processor to act as a backup if Upstart goes out of business and can no longer collect payments. David Croson, a professor of entrepreneurship at the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University, said he had invested 100 to 10,000 in about two dozen young entrepreneurs over the last month through Upstart. He did so after talking to his wife, also a business professor, about how hard it was for young entrepreneurs to get started. "We were discussing the problem of people who had been relieved of all of their money by educational institutions," he said. "That doesn't matter much for people going into traditional professions, but it does for an entrepreneur who has a negative 100,000 net worth." He said he did not have high expectations for a return about in line with his bond portfolio but he was hoping there would be the additional upside of one or two people succeeding wildly. "It's almost like being on the board of directors of these companies," he said. "All it takes is for one of these people to succeed for it to work out." Still, as someone who has studied entrepreneurship, Mr. Croson said there were flaws in the model. For one, the young people who have the time to go through the vetting process are not the ones who are working around the clock on their idea. Mr. Croson's research has also looked into the optimal time to quit your job to start a company, and he said that most of the people on the site were probably quitting too soon. But he was heartened that Upstart takes a percentage of a person's income for a decade, which made it more appealing than some peer to peer lending sites. "It's not something that allows people to default and walk away," he said. "They can't say I failed once and let me start again. Most of the people I picked are people who are going to have second and third ideas." Susan Tenney, a former software engineer turned nurse practitioner and baker in San Francisco, said she backed 20 people with 500 each, simply because she wanted to help young people. She liked the prospect of receiving a good return for doing it but considered it fairly high risk. "I am interested in talking to people who were interested in being socially responsible entrepreneurs," she said. "I invested a modest amount so that if I lost it completely, which I recognize could happen, it would not be a severe financial blow." Her one complaint was how long a financing round was open generally 60 days. If the young person did not accept the offer or raise enough to close on the financing, there was an opportunity cost to committing money that could have gone to someone else. As for what the borrowers are using the money for, there is a range from the practical to the speculative. Josh Eddy, who graduates this spring from the University of California, Los Angeles, with degrees from the business and law schools, said he went on Upstart for money so he could study for the bar exam before starting his job at a law firm in the fall. He had tried to go the traditional route of taking out a so called bar loan but was turned down because he already owed about 250,000 in student loan debt and had no parents to co sign the loan. "I'm somebody who came from an at risk background," Mr. Eddy said. "But I graduated from high school, college, started my own business and went back to graduate school. I'm proud of that, but student lenders don't give any credence to your history beyond your credit history." He said his funding period had not closed, but so far he has raised 13,000, which was what he needed and worked out to less than 1 percent of his income. "A lot of people look at giving away a percentage of your income, but I look at what I'll be giving away with my student debt," he said. At the other end is someone like Cynthia Salim, who quit her job as a consultant at McKinsey Company to start a clothing company that would make business attire for young women with an eye toward ensuring the manufacturing process was ethical. "We're challenging the idea that being wildly profitable and being ethical are mutually exclusive," Ms. Salim said of her company, C Suite Apparel. As for Ms. Kumar Friesen, who was in the first class of people to receive financing, she said that the process was already paying off. She learned how to code, reintroduced a new version of her Emotitones app this week and paid off her earlier debt. Even the prospect of paying 6.89 percent of her annual income for 10 years up to 350,000 on a 70,000 investment did not dampen her optimism. "It's happy days if that's what I'm concerned about," she said. "Because there's no equity in the business, the only person being affected would be me." And that's what the investment is about, on what might be possible. Mr. Girouard said, "We're providing access to capital to consumers that's based not on the income today or their assets today, but on their future."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
John Stankey, an AT T veteran who was put in charge of WarnerMedia, is the executive behind the moves announced Monday, which show that the company is serious about tearing up old ways and putting its own stamp on its new properties. The new AT T is coming into focus. On Monday the company took a step closer to becoming something never before seen on the American corporate landscape part telecommunications behemoth and part media entertainment giant. The transformation started in earnest last June when AT T, based in Dallas, ventured beyond its core business and muscled into New York and Los Angeles with its 85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner, the former home of HBO, the Warner Bros. movie studio, CNN and cable channels like TBS and TNT. Last week, the deal was set in stone when the Justice Department, after losing a hard fought appeal to block it, said it would no longer try to undo the merger. With this final green light, AT T has in recent days altered its leadership team with an eye toward reinvention. On Monday, the company named Robert Greenblatt, the former head of entertainment at NBC and Showtime, as the new chairman at Warner Media, a job that will give him oversight of Time Warner properties like HBO, TBS and TNT. His hiring followed the resignations of Richard Plepler, the longtime chief executive of HBO, and David Levy, the president of Turner Broadcasting, the division that includes TBS and TNT. As part of its executive shake up, AT T which gained 26,000 employees in the merger, giving it 268,000 worldwide also promoted the CNN chief Jeff Zucker and the Warner Bros. studio head Kevin Tsujihara, both of whom will oversee bigger portfolios. John Stankey, an AT T veteran who was put in charge of Warner Media at the time of the acquisition, is the executive behind the moves, which show that the company is serious about tearing up old ways and putting its own stamp on its new properties. "If you don't make a change, you're not going to get any change in the product," Mr. Stankey said in an interview on Monday. Mr. Stankey's assignment is to help AT T beat out its traditional rivals Verizon, T Mobile and Sprint by offering not only service plans but also "Game of Thrones" and 24 hour news. At the same time, AT T's entry into the media sphere will eventually allow it to compete in the streaming business against companies it has rarely done battle with before, including the Walt Disney Company, Comcast, Netflix, Amazon and others. He emphasized that AT T didn't want to muddy the brands within Warner Media, a group comprising HBO, CNN, TNT, Cartoon Network and the Warner Bros. film and TV studios. "We just needed to get them to sing and dance differently and have them take different approaches," he added. With the hiring of Mr. Greenblatt who has experience as a mainstream broadcaster at NBC and as a programmer of prestige cable fare at Showtime Mr. Stankey believes he has someone who can make Warner Media's offerings broadly popular, without losing their distinctive identities. "There aren't that many people who have both," Mr. Stankey said. "He's got the right track record." Mr. Greenblatt, who goes by Bob, took over as chairman of NBC in 2011, when the network was in dire straits. Over his seven years, he brought NBC back from the dead with series like "The Voice," Dick Wolf's fleet of Chicago shows and "This Is Us." NBC, which he left in September, now regularly finishes No. 1 among the advertiser prized group of 18 to 49 year old viewers. In a statement, Mr. Greenblatt said, "I'm honored to be joining Warner Media during such an exciting time for the company and the industry as a whole, and I look forward to working alongside the many talented executives and team members across the company." 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. While overseeing HBO and the like, Mr. Greenblatt will also manage the product that may be the most important of all, from AT T's perspective: Warner Media's streaming service, which is scheduled to debut this year. The appointment of Mr. Greenblatt allows Warner Media to speed up its plans for a streaming business, a process that was hampered under the older structure, Mr. Stankey said. "We had to put a bit of a Band Aid organization on top of things before we made this change," he said. "Still, I think we've done a remarkable job with what we had. The new combined WarnerMedia will be much more successful filling in the gaps." AT T was handcuffed until recently as it fought a lawsuit brought by the Trump administration's Justice Department to block the merger. The company agreed to take a hands off approach to its Turner division, which includes CNN and TNT, until the appeal was concluded. AT T beat back that challenge last week, giving the company free rein. Concerning the resignations of Mr. Plepler, who had been at HBO for 27 years, and Mr. Levy, who had spent 32 years at Turner Broadcasting, Mr. Stankey said, "I was disappointed but I don't know that I was completely surprised." He added, "When you have someone who had a tremendous amount of autonomy, they tend to covet that." Mr. Stankey plans to be a much more active steward of Warner Media than its executives had anticipated, three people familiar with the new AT T said. He has started to consolidate advertising, distribution and production departments across Turner and HBO, as well as some of the back end functions like human resources, accounting and technology. Those moves effectively took away large chunks of matters once overseen by Mr. Plepler and Mr. Levy, the people said. In Mr. Stankey's view, Warner Media needed to reorganize the TV networks in a way "where they could cooperate more together," he said, which meant that some top executives would have reduced roles. He said his discussions with Mr. Plepler and Mr. Levy, which took place separately, never got far enough to explore what roles they each might accept. Going up against Netflix and Disney will be tough. Mr. Stankey acknowledged that a household is likely to pay for just four or five of these services, and that AT T will have to prove its worth to consumers. At a company presentation in November, he outlined three tiers of online video services that have been in the works: an entry level option centered on films; a "premium" service that includes original television programming and films; and a final product that includes both of those tiers plus classic movies, comedy and children's content. Under the plan, HBO would still be available as a stand alone service. But it is unclear which Warner Media brands will be part of each tier or how each will be priced. Even the names of the video services remain a mystery. "No news on that today," Mr. Stankey said on Monday. The lack of hard information on the streaming strategy has frustrated executives within Warner Media, several people familiar with the internal operations have said. But some have wondered if the lack of communication was the result of the Justice Department's court challenge. Mr. Stankey acknowledged that his sometimes laconic approach might have baffled those inside the organization. "I've read articles out there saying that I'm not prone to flap my gums, and that may not be inaccurate," he said. But Hollywood, not used to such a reserved manner, might require him to open up more. "I'm trying to find a middle ground on it," he said, adding that with the lawsuit behind them, he'll be able to talk more frequently. As part of the reorganization, Mr. Zucker, the head of CNN, will also begin to oversee Turner's sports operations. That includes the website Bleacher Report, as well as Turner's deals with the National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball and the National Collegiate Athletic Association. With the job, Mr. Zucker gets a new title: chairman of news and sports. Mr. Tsujihara, the chief executive of the Warner Bros. movie studio, will continue in his position and also take on what Warner Media described as a "new global kids and young adults business." Children's content is likely to be a critical part of the streaming service and represents a big part of Mr. Tsujihara's portfolio. "As the economics change, it's becoming more and more important to align content value, consumer products and ad sales," Mr. Tsujihara said in an interview. "It takes a real need for deeper level of coordination across the different divisions."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Jamie Fiocco, the owner of Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, N.C., never expected she would be spending tens of thousands on cleaning products, postage and other necessities in 2020. "We just didn't have those line items in our budget," she said. The signs started appearing in bookstore windows this week. "Buy books from people who want to sell books, not colonize the moon." "Amazon, please leave the dystopia to Orwell." "If you want Amazon to be the world's only retailer, keep shopping there." The message: Buy from these shops, or they won't be around much longer. According to the American Booksellers Association, which developed the campaign, more than one independent bookstore has closed each week since the pandemic began. Many of those still standing are staring down the crucial holiday season and seeing a toxic mix of higher expenses, lower sales and enormous uncertainty. Even though book sales have been a bright spot in an exceedingly grim national economy they rose more than 6 percent so far this year compared with last year, according to NPD BookScan most of those purchases are not going through independent stores. Surging interest in specific categories, from educational books to titles on race and antiracism, continues to boost some booksellers but has dropped off for others. Still, local independent stores have hustled and reinvented themselves during the pandemic. Mailing books to customers, which used to be a minuscule revenue stream for most shops, can now be more than half of a store's income, or virtually all of it for places that are not yet open for in person shopping. Curbside pickup has become commonplace. Avid Bookshop in Athens, Ga., sends personalized URLs to customers with a list of handpicked recommendations. Green Apple Books in San Francisco raised 20,000 selling T shirts, hoodies and masks that said "Stay home, read books." Other stores have pleaded for customers to donate money. All that still may not be enough. "Somebody said to me, 'Boy, you must be raking it in with all the online business you're getting,'" said Christine Onorati, an owner of Word bookstores in Brooklyn and Jersey City, N.J. "It makes me laugh." Bookstores across the country face different challenges depending on any number of factors, including their local economies and how they have been affected by the coronavirus. But some broad trend lines have started to emerge, perhaps most of all that bigger, right now, is not better. Take Vroman's Bookstore, a 126 year old institution in Pasadena, Calif. It has more than 200 employees, 20,000 square feet of space and the rent to go along with it. In a normal year, it hosts anywhere from 300 to 400 events, bringing in authors for readings and signings, along with customers who buy books and maybe a glass of wine from the bar. But none of that is happening this year. 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 many other stores, Vroman's is hosting online events to promote new books, which can attract attendees from all over the country but generally bring in almost no money. Last month, it emailed customers, imploring them to come back. "Our foot traffic and sales are improving, but still down almost 40 percent, which will not keep us in business," it said. "If Vroman's is to survive, sales must increase significantly from now through the holidays." At McNally Jackson Books, which has four locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn along with two stationery shops, sales are "unimaginably bad," according to its owner, Sarah McNally. All six shops combined are now bringing in less than its SoHo location would in a typical month. SoHo, normally one of New York City's busier shopping destinations, was quiet on a perfect fall afternoon last week, its normal crush of human traffic replaced with a smattering of people on each block. "Something I've never known is how many of my customers are tourists," Ms. McNally said. "I wonder if it's more than I thought." Source Booksellers, a Black owned store in Detroit, saw an uptick in orders after the death of George Floyd, as readers sought out books on racism as well as ways to support African American businesses. "We had business from different states we had never seen before," said Alyson Jones Turner, who owns the store with her mother, Janet Webster Jones. "Our being able to walk now has a lot to do with that moment." Allison K. Hill, the chief executive of the American Booksellers Association, said the group surveyed its 1,750 members in July and received responses from about 400 of them. Of those who answered, about a third said their sales were down 40 percent or more for the year. But another 26 percent said their sales were flat, or even up. The organization plans to do another survey in January, and Ms. Hill said she expects that positive number to have eroded. Even at stores where sales have held on, profits are often down, Ms. Hill said. In the best of times, the margins at a bookstore are paper thin traditionally, a successful shop hopes to make 2 percent in profits but operating during a pandemic is even more expensive. "We're working harder for less this year," said Kelly Estep, one of the owners of Carmichael's Bookstore in Louisville, Ky. Mailing a book to a customer requires more time and labor than ringing it up at the register. Some stores are offering hazard pay to their employees or have dedicated a staff member to greet people at the door, making sure they're wearing masks and sanitizing their hands before they start running their fingers across the books. "If someone told me this time last year I would be spending 20,000 on postage and shipping materials and P.P.E. and extra cleaning for the stores," said Jamie Fiocco, an owner of Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, N.C., and the board president of the American Bookseller Association, she wouldn't have believed it. "We just didn't have those line items in our budget, or if we did, they were inconsequential." Hanging over all this is the holiday season. Ms. Fiocco said her store does about 30 percent of its business in the last eight weeks of the year, and there are days in December when she sells more in an hour than in a normal day. But this year, customers won't be able to freely swarm the store at the last minute, so booksellers are trying to encourage early shopping. Perhaps most worrying is that the supply chain has been under strain. There have been issues with shippers, limited capacity at warehouses and backlogs at printing companies, where books delayed from the spring are running up against releases planned for the fall. Among those is a new memoir by former President Barack Obama, which is scheduled for publication Nov. 17 and expected to be the biggest book of the year. "There's a Hail Mary here where the holiday season could really change things," said Ms. Hill. "To have a book like that come out right at this critical time, it could make a huge difference." Many store owners are afraid the printers won't be able to keep up with demand, or that publishers won't prioritize indies if supply gets tight, so they're placing large orders up front for some of the biggest books of the season, like a new cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi. (Mr. Obama's book has required other adjustments: At 768 pages, it will weigh 2.5 pounds, said Matt Keliher at Subtext Books in St. Paul, Minn., so the store had to raise shipping fees or else it would lose money on every sale.) Because the demand has been so enormous, Mr. Obama's publisher Penguin Random House will be sending orders out in batches for stores across the country, from little indies to the big boxes. "If we could sell 1,000 copies between November 17 and the New Year, that's going to make a huge difference in us being viable, so we need those books," said Gayle Shanks, an owner of Changing Hands Bookstore, which has locations in Phoenix and Tempe, Ariz. "We're really trying to get the message out, to help customers understand that not just for bookstores but local retailers and local restaurants, if they want them to be there when the pandemic over, they have to support those businesses now."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Lots of people on the left and right found reasons to be a little unhappy, or downright miserable, about the election. The Republican Party lost the White House; Democrats have lost ground in the House, and their path to a Senate majority seems very narrow. But there is one group of people unreservedly happy even ecstatic about the results: those who lean libertarian. They got almost everything they wanted. On the one hand, Joe Biden has a friendlier record on trade and immigration, and on the other, they avoided the burst of spending that inevitably comes with unified control of the federal government. Old school debt and deficit hawks will also be pleased, too, but libertarians are ecstatic. As one writer at Reason wondered, perhaps speaking for many libertarians, "Is this the greatest election of my lifetime?" In the early years of the Trump administration, with Republicans in control of Congress, the country saw a steady rise in spending and ballooning deficits and debt. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas might not have been quite right when he said that, after all, President Trump "didn't campaign on cutting the debt." Actually, Mr. Trump did, but in a throwaway manner, while putting more stress on continued, even increased, big spending and debt. And as is so often the case with one party control, as in Mr. Trump's first years, big spending took hold. According to the Cato Institute, over Mr. Trump's four years, spending went up by a total of 10 percent. Something similar happened under George W. Bush: Spending shot up 24 percent. But what really seems like an effective arrangement for controlling spending is a Democratic president with Republicans in charge of at least one body of Congress. During the first four years of the Barack Obama and Bill Clinton administrations, both of which included years of split control of government, spending was more restrained or even reduced. Under Mr. Clinton, spending inched up only 3 percent. In Mr. Obama's first term, total spending actually went down by 10 percent. There are ways beyond the budget that a Biden presidency could be a boon to libertarians. Mr. Trump was a disaster when it came to free trade, kicking off a huge trade war with China and "renegotiating" NAFTA so that it contained more protectionist, anti free market measures like wage controls. By contrast, Mr. Biden will probably cut a more pro trade profile. Congressional Republicans and Democrats were reluctant to give Mr. Trump trade negotiating authority, but they are more likely to give Mr. Biden that authority than they are to withhold it (despite some pressure from the party's progressives like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio Cortez). Mr. Biden is likely to pursue pro immigration reforms and policies, both in the realm of regulation and administrative practice as well as in terms of legislation. Libertarians never liked the mechanism by which President Obama established the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but they also hated President Trump's dismantling of it as well as his major cuts to legal immigration, big spending for a border wall and more. Libertarians view legal immigration, and especially high skilled workers, as an economic boon to the country and like that free trade keeps prices down for American consumers and extends our opportunities to sell abroad. And there is also Mr. Biden's record. Sure, he made campaign proposals for a health care public option and spending on climate programs. But he has a reputation for tough fiscal discipline relative to the rest of his party. As vice president, he helped resolve spending stalemates and government shutdowns with that ultimate spending slashing tool that big spending Democrats and Republicans hated but libertarians loved: sequestration, or automatic spending caps. As a senator, he worked hard to keep the deficit and debt under control. To take a couple of examples, in the mid 1990s, he voted for a constitutional amendment that would require the federal government to balance its budget a position that put him at odds with a majority of the Democratic caucus. In 1997, he voted yes on a Republican budget that cut both taxes and spending. With a Biden presidency, a McConnell dominated Senate and a less Democratic House, libertarians get the best possible outlook on spending, debt and deficits, and these other important policy areas while also perhaps preventing far left nominees for important executive roles and dodging the specter of court packing. The election will be deeply disappointing to die hard Trumpers, Democrats hoping for a landslide and Never Trumpers eager to see the Republican Party burn. That's a lot of people, probably even most voters.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
YOU'VE no doubt heard about problems some people are encountering when they try to use the health insurance they've bought through the federal and state exchanges. A backlog of applications, the result of a surge in enrollments at year's end for coverage starting this month, has resulted in many people experiencing delays in getting insurance cards, policy numbers or authorization for treatment. Keith Lichtman, an interior designer in Manhattan, knows the problems only too well. He had to pay out of pocket for treatment for strep throat because his doctor's office could not verify his coverage under a plan he enrolled in through New York's state operated marketplace, NY State of Health. He hopes to be reimbursed, but he said a series of missteps since he enrolled has left him frustrated. "There was a real lack of organization in the New York health exchange," he said, adding that he also got confusing information from his new health insurer. Mr. Lichtman had an individual health plan that, like millions of others, was canceled because it did not meet requirements under the Affordable Care Act. After a few false starts in November he said he encountered shutdowns at the New York website, and long waits getting questions answered on the phone he was able to enroll in a new plan through UnitedHealthcare. He paid his first month's premium through UnitedHealthcare's website on Dec. 20, and arranged to have his monthly premium automatically deducted from his bank account. When he called to check on his coverage, he was first told that the plan had no record of his first month's premium, so he paid it again only to have the first payment show up, resulting in an overpayment. (He requested a credit and has received it, he said.) In early January, Mr. Lichtman developed a sore throat and went to his doctor, even though he had not received an insurance card. But the office could not verify his enrollment; a billing clerk tried unsuccessfully to contact both UnitedHealthcare and the New York exchange while he waited. Mr. Lichtman ended up paying for the visit, as well as for a prescription his doctor gave him for strep. The doctor's office said it would resubmit his bill and reimburse him once his enrollment was verified. After several tries, he was able to log into the New York exchange website late one night last week to verify his enrollment. Mr. Lichtman has since received his insurance card in the mail. But he said he ran into trouble getting his plan's computer system to recognize his choice of a primary care doctor, which is necessary before he can get referrals to specialists. He has been told it will become effective on Feb. 1. Mr. Lichtman also said that he received an email notifying him of an additional charge of about 900, which turned out to be a bill for another patient that was mistakenly sent to him. In all, he said, the process involved more than 15 frustrating phone calls. His advice? Use a speakerphone "so you can multitask while you're on hold." The New York State Department of Health said it was aware that some people had experienced enrollment delays but that over all the site had functioned well. Officials said staff members were working closely with consumers who needed help and that an additional 325 trained representatives would be added to its call center in preparation for the March 31 end of open enrollment. That will bring the total number of call center representatives to 657, the department said. UnitedHealthcare said it was working with the state to resolve the problems and suggested consumers could contact the company directly. The New York exchange has generally had fewer problems than some other state marketplaces, and New York has been one of the most successful states in signing up people for new plans under the Affordable Care Act. The marketplace website said roughly 295,000 people had enrolled as of Jan. 12. The state's site has a list of frequently asked questions. Here are some questions to consider about using health insurance benefits obtained through an exchange: What should I do if my insurer isn't properly crediting my premium payments, or if my doctor can't verify my insurance coverage? Be persistent in your efforts to resolve problems with your insurer, and document all of your interactions with both your health plan and the health exchange, said Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation. Keep a log of phone calls. If you have to pay out of pocket for care, get written documentation of the date and treatment provided, so when your enrollment is verified you can request reimbursement. And it doesn't hurt to ask your doctors if they will hold off charging you until you can come back with your insurance card. "My general rule is save everything and, if possible, pay nothing," Ms. Pollitz said. Should I postpone seeking care until I have verification of my enrollment? If you need urgent care, Ms. Pollitz said, you should see a doctor. But it might make sense to hold off on routine visits this month, to avoid a glut of newly insured patients seeking treatment. Kelly Alvord of the Patient Advocate Foundation noted that some pharmacies were bending the rules temporarily to help patients in limbo; Walgreens, for instance, is offering to provide up to a 30 day supply of prescriptions at no upfront cost to patients who do not yet have identification numbers from their health plans. What if I haven't enrolled in a plan yet? You have until March 31 to enroll in a plan to avoid a penalty for lack of coverage. But there is likely to be another glut of people rushing to meet that deadline in March, so it makes sense to get started now, said Lynn Quincy, a health policy analyst with Consumers Union. "Don't wait until the last minute," she advises. "Take advantage of this relatively quieter time and get it done now. Or, as Mr. Lichtman says, "Start much earlier than you think you need to, and anticipate lots of red tape and miscommunication."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
The cliche goes, when you're frustrated, you chop off your hair. I had the frustrated part down: Winter is cold and seemingly endless, politics are giving me nonstop anxiety, and I am pretty sure I've watched everything decent on television. All I needed was a trim, but I wanted something more. I briefly considered getting my longish curly hair cut into a jaw length bob a la Phoebe Waller Bridge in "Fleabag." But then I forced myself to look at old photos of myself with short hair and realized that I mostly resembled Shirley Temple, which is not the look any woman in her 30s should probably be going for. I found Adriana Rizzolo on Instagram, where she describes herself as the HairWitch. She is a hair stylist and yoga teacher in Los Angeles who shares videos of herself chanting in Sanskrit and has many tattoos. On her website, one of the services she offers is a "Haircut and Healing." I signed up for her mailing list and received a notice that she would be cutting hair in Brooklyn for a few days. (She comes roughly every eight weeks.) I'm a sucker for anything with New Age trappings, which always remind me of my childhood in California. Getting an appointment proved tricky. After emailing her and hearing nothing, I started getting paranoid that she had searched for me online and didn't think I would respond to a healing. I emailed again, and this time she apologized and suggested a date. I responded in the affirmative, waited for confirmation but, again, heard nothing. I persisted and a date was set. The HairWitch may need an assistant, or a lot of us have been seeking out healing.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
THE THING ABOUT HARRY (2020) 8 p.m. on Freeform. Created by the ABC friendly Peter Paige who directed "The Fosters" and its spinoff, "Good Trouble" "The Thing About Harry" is a heartwarming rom com that debuts just after Valentine's Day. The movie, which takes place on the holiday itself, details the unraveling of a high school grudge between Sam (Jake Borelli) and Harry (Niko Terho) when they find themselves on a long road trip together. Sam, who has been proudly gay and uniquely himself since high school, has failed to get along with Harry, a former jock. But as the two spend time together, Sam learns that Harry is also gay, opening up the possibility for romance. The cast is supplemented by Netflix stars Britt Baron and Karamo Brown. SHAFT (2019) 8 p.m. on HBO. This fifth installation of the "Shaft" movies unites three generations of John Shafts: two detectives gone rogue and one M.I.T. educated millennial. The 2019 version finds success in its characters and their dialogues, and the depiction of John Shaft (Samuel L. Jackson) shifts from an action hero to a politically incorrect dad. The Shaft newcomer, JJ (Jessie T. Usher), essentially serves as a reminder of contemporary issues and as a catalyst for shootouts. However, "story coherence has never been the point with Shaft," A.O. Scott reminds us in his review in The New York Times. He adds: "He's all about presence and presentation, and the grace and guile required to deal with the bad guys, the Man and of course all those women." Jackson who revived the series stars again, and Richard Roundtree the original Shaft returns as JJ's great uncle. BECAUSE OF WINN DIXIE Stream on Disney Plus. Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. This story of a 10 year old girl, her father, a small Southern town and a dog named Winn Dixie is based on the 2000 Kate DiCamillo novel with the same title. It begins when Opal Buloni (AnnaSophia Robb) and her father (Jeff Daniels) move into a trailer park in a sleepy Florida town called Naomi. One day, Opal finds a stray dog wreaking havoc in a grocery store, and she decides to take him home. With the help of her new friend, whom she names Winn Dixie (after the grocery store), Opal is able to connect with the residents of Naomi and with her closed off father. In her review for The Times, Anita Gates wrote, "It has old fashioned and heartwarming written all over it, in heavy black Magic Marker. " UTOPIA FALLS Stream on Hulu. In this futuristic sci fi series, which takes place in the last surviving human colony on earth, ancestral worship and societal status are achieved through an annual music and dance competition for which 24 teenagers are invited to partake. When one of the contestants, Aliyah (Robyn Alomar), discovers the long lost genre hip hop, she begins to question the values her colony is based upon. As the series progresses, she and other competitors use hip hop to establish freedom from their government.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
They waited three hours, sometimes in driving rain, to ascend to the fifth floor of a parking garage in Miami Beach. It was the Fourth of July weekend, but the lines went down the block. The promised land was a glass box aerie filled with Justin Bieber branded T shirts, sweatshirts and hats. The box could have been a merchandise stand at a Bieber concert most of the items were branded "Purpose," the name of Mr. Bieber's new album (which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart) and current tour except that it was in Alchemist, a fashion boutique with an outpost in the garage of a Herzog de Meuron complex. The shop more often is given over to high end women's wear by Rick Owens, Chrome Hearts or Haider Ackermann. But for two days, a collection of Bieberiana took over the space, drawing not only Mr. Bieber's die hard fans and the requisite eBay resellers, but also streetwear wonks and fashion girls, Mr. Bieber's new converts. "It's funny," said Roma Cohen, the owner of Alchemist. "I've never really had anything that is for those high fashion fans that love Rick and Chrome Hearts as well as their little sisters." The pop up resulted in the store's best 48 hours of business ever. Mr. Bieber's tour hits Madison Square Garden next week. Touring in tandem, aligned with but not always tethered to Mr. Bieber's performances, is his Purpose merchandise, a boutique's worth of clothes and accessories edging ever further from mere memorabilia and closer to a fully fledged, if single minded, fashion collection. It is finding an eager audience not necessarily in the besotted ranks of preteen Beliebers. Now at pop up shops, at multibrand retailers eager to court and convert fans, and a dedicated online store for those who may never get close to Mr. Bieber at all, Purpose pieces are coming in and, just as soon, flying out. "They're still coming in for it, calling and emailing," Mr. Cohen said. The few pieces that are still available in Alchemist's other location on the complex's ground floor hang alongside items by the French couturier Azzedine Alaia. The interest of a newly rabid fashion fan base in what used to be dismissed as mere "merch" has not gone unnoticed by the fashion industry. Mr. Bieber is riding the wave of a boom in concert merchandise, and after seeing the more fashion forward aesthetic of the Purpose merchandise, and the success of its pop ups, Barneys New York will carry an exclusive Purpose capsule collection. It arrives July 16 at Barneys stores in New York, Beverly Hills, Calif., and San Francisco and online. It is the first time Barneys has carried a musician's touring merchandise. "It was a no brainer for me," said Jay Bell, a senior vice president at Barneys who oversees the men's designer section. "It is the first time we've done it, but it felt right. It felt like something that would resonate with our customers, and that could sit seamlessly with the other brands we sell." The Barneys capsule collection ranges from the expected T shirts to jerseys and jeans, all the way to 1,675 leather jackets. "It's important for an artist to break out of that idea of merch as a T shirt, as a simple memento souvenir, because at the end of the day, they're driving the trends," said Mat Vlasic, the newly appointed chief executive of Bravado, a merchandise and licensing company that produces Mr. Bieber's Purpose collection. "They're driving fashion. They should own it a little more. And we should, too." Concert tees, especially vintage ones, have been status symbol garments for decades. Industry veterans fondly recall the graphic forays of the Grateful Dead; for a younger generation, there was Axl Rose, bellowing onstage in his own Guns N' Roses tee. But today's artists are accustomed to hobnobbing in the fashion world, which both supports them and harnesses their celebrity for its own ends. Rihanna is a face of Dior; in 2015, Mr. Bieber was made a chiseled body of Calvin Klein, which also sponsors the Purpose tour. With the business of merchandise on the rise (Bravado's revenues have increased fourfold since Universal Music Group acquired the company in 2007), it was perhaps inevitable that some artists would look to expand their collections themselves. But he has been just as attuned to his graphic, self branded touring merchandise, taking cues from the fashion industry to promote and distribute it: niggling over details in the in arena merch stands, announcing pop ups minutes before they open. His Yeezus items remain hot tickets on resale sites, and in February he presented a new Yeezy collection; a new album, "The Life of Pablo;" and a Pablo merchandise collection of hats, sweats, shirts, jackets and more all at the same time. With the merchandise for the Yeezus and Pablo tours, Mr. West, wrote the Ringer website last month, has done nothing less than "set a streetwise blueprint for concert merch." In fact, the Pablo merchanise predates the Pablo concert tour, which starts in August. His fellow stars took note. Now Beyonce sells fashionably ironic shirts that read "Boycott Beyonce." Selena Gomez has a 30 piece collection of her own including bandannas and patch covered denim shorts for sale at her Revival tour concerts or available for pre order. Zayn Malik recently began selling his Arabic printed bomber jackets and hoodies online. On Bravado's in house design team, 16 people work on lines for more than 200 artists, many of whom are directly involved in the process. Ariana Grande had been FaceTiming the Bravado team in the days before one meeting there; the rapper Desiigner was en route to a meeting at the office after another. In an earlier generation, many of Bravado's design team would have labored over album sleeves in fact, some did. Dawud West, a veteran of Def Jam records, where he designed an album cover for Jay Z, now designs Guns N' Roses T shirts for Bravado. "Print work is not really in demand anymore," he said. Merchandise has helped to fill the void. For those young fans still in the market for a T shirt with Mr. Bieber's angelic preteen face the merchandise of an earlier era the older goods are, quietly, still available. But for Purpose, Mr. Bieber enlisted Jerry Lorenzo, whose best selling Fear of God label makes up the majority of his touring wardrobe, to work with Bravado on a collection that, unlike his previous merchandise, he was willing to wear himself, and does. The intervention of Mr. Lorenzo, who previously worked with Mr. West on his Yeezus tour designs, brought a harder, more fashion forward edge, drawing on the heavy metal and rock tees of the past. It was part of a "very conscious" effort to recalibrate Mr. Bieber's image, Mr. Vlasic said: He "very much was in a narrow demo of screaming girls, and all of a sudden the door's flipped open to a much larger audience." His apparel, as well as his new sound, has brought new fans into the fold (or at least out of the shadows). "Justin's fan base is gigantic," said Scooter Braun, who discovered Mr. Bieber, now 22, on YouTube a decade ago and still acts as his manager. "But I do think that there are people who stream his music who before didn't want anyone else to know they were streaming it. The fashion sensibility of the tour merch has made it cool to put the name Bieber on the front of your chest and wear it proudly. Whether it brought new fans, I don't know. Whether it made closet fans step out into the open? I believe so." There they were, lined up outside VFiles, the trendsetting SoHo boutique, at the first Bieber pop up, in May, waiting to buy. "We nearly had a riot in the street," said Julie Anne Quay, the founder of VFiles. While many of the Bieber pieces went up instantaneously on eBay, thanks to profiteering resellers, more than a few have found their way to Grailed, a new online resale marketplace aimed squarely at the streetwear demographic. Eighty pieces so far have been listed since the pop ups began, said Lawrence Schlossman, the brand director of Grailed, and 60 percent of those sold immediately, though they do not elicit the fervor of limited editions by Supreme or Yeezus pieces by Mr. West. (Before Purpose, "it would have been a sacrilegious thing to say the word 'Supreme' and 'Justin Bieber' in the same sentence," Mr. Vlasic said.) For women, too, Purpose has become part of a high end designer wardrobe, to judge by the editors and designers who have taken to wearing it. Gilda Ambrosio, whose collection, Attico, was recently touted in the pages of Vogue, often wears Mr. Bieber's merchandise; at Pitti Uomo, the Florentine men's wear fair, she wore a Purpose "Staff" T shirt with a vintage floral skirt, and Louis Vuitton accessories. Mr. Bieber noticed and put up a photo on his Instagram. "When 1,000 people text you about your picture on Justin's Instagram, you really understand how powerful music still is," Ms. Ambrosio said. Many have noted a kinship between cult T shirts by Vetements, fashion's runway fascination of the moment, and those in the Purpose collection. Rather than carp about the connection, Demna Gvasalia, the Vetements head designer, embraced it. A sweatshirt from the fall 2016 collection reads "Justin 4Ever," and Mr. Gvasalia created a "Staff" shirt of his own, which he wore to the Vetements fashion show in July. (The back of the Bieber "Staff" shirt lists the Purpose tour dates; the back of the Vetements one lists the members of the Vetements team, in the same style.) The Vetements T shirt will be sold as part of its spring 2017 collection, a spokeswoman confirmed. "We've seen those," Mr. Lorenzo said of the Vetements pieces. "We kind of riff on their vibe, too." As Purpose noses its way into Fashion Week, it raises the question: Is it fashion? Mr. Bieber himself, who expressed his admiration for fashion labels "everything from Saint Laurent to Calvin Klein to Yeezy" noted that men's fashion in particular is indebted to streetwear, skate, sport and rock, as is his collection. "I'm happy and proud people are reacting to it and adopting it," he said via a spokesman. "I don't think of our tour merch as being 'fashion.' That's a really high compliment for what it is. But I am really happy we were able to dial in to something cool the way we did." Not every one of his admirers is inclined to agree. Chiara Ferragni, creator of the website the Blonde Salad (called "the world's most popular fashion blog" by a Harvard Business School case study), snapped up a Bieber T shirt and wore it with faux patent leather pants, Dior shoes and Balenciaga bag, to the delight of her more than six million fans. "I saw it on one of my friends and I was like, 'I have to get that,'" she said. "Something that back in the day we would have found so stupid and never be caught dead wearing is now the hit piece of the season."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The search for love is back on in "The Bachelor," and feel that high school nostalgia during "Friday Night Lights." THE BACHELOR 8 p.m. on ABC. Colton Underwood, the former NFL football player and Season 14 "Bachelorette" contestant, returns to reality TV once more to try to find love. During the 23rd season premiere of this show, which has captivated many and caused books to be written about its scope and power, Colton meets the 30 contenders after his heart. They include Miss Alabama 2018 and one contestant who brings, and momentarily leaves behind, her 10 year old pet Pomeranian. COLLEGE FOOTBALL NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP 8 p.m. on ESPN. Alabama, with a 14 0 record, takes on Clemson, also 14 0, for the national title. This is the fourth year these teams are meeting in the College Football Playoff, and the third time in those four years that the two go head to head for the championship.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Q. I cannot even get my Canon printer on my wireless network in the first place so I can register it or print anything with a Chromebook. Where do I start? A. Canon makes a large number of different printers, and the wireless setup steps will vary based on the model you have. If you cannot reach anybody on the company's telephone support lines to walk you through the process, check the technical support area of Canon's printers site for instructional videos or browse the page devoted to wireless printing. The Canon video library has clips that guide you through the wireless setup for several printers, and you may be able to find one for your specific model. In some cases, you may need a smartphone or a computer to help get the printer on the network.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The New York City Ballet, with Tyler Angle and Maria Kowroski in George Balanchine's "Chaconne," one of several of the choreographer's works the company has returned to the repertory, at the David H. Koch Theater. Thursday was the 111th birthday of George Balanchine, the most revelatory, influential and protean ballet master in history. New York City Ballet, the company he founded with Lincoln Kirstein in 1948, celebrated the occasion by bringing three Balanchine ballets back to the repertory: "Donizetti Variations" (1960), "La Valse" (1951) and "Chaconne" (1976). "Donizetti Variations" brought laughing effervescence and "La Valse" a morbid spectrum of Romantic agony, while "Chaconne" demonstrated the transcendence of life and love after death. Their compositional complexity springs continual surprises. Even after all these years, we do and we don't know Balanchine. Daniel Capps conducted the scores, whose dates of composition reached from 1774 to 1920, with equal flair at the David H. Koch Theater. Thursday's interpreters were a mixture of the familiar and the new. Ashley Bouder and Joaquin De Luz, both jaunty and swaggering, are a proven and illustrious lead couple in the high voltage coloratura of "Donizetti": They dazzled with explosive attack, fluent speed and scintillating brightness. Sterling Hyltin was making her debut as the elegantly passionate, doom hungry young heroine of "La Valse"; she touched boldly on facets of self destructive dark sophistication new to her. (It's to be hoped these will only increase with successive performances.) And my sense of Balanchine's mastery deepened most from watching Maria Kowroski in "Chaconne." This is a ballet she's danced often before; her spectacularly long limbs, naturally colossal grandeur, physical loveliness and quiet persona all suit it, but her technical limitations have seldom made her seem free within its baroque virtuosity. Here, helped by the luxurious partnering of Tyler Angle, she was more profoundly married to her music than I have ever seen her; and what she revealed was the endless variety of Balanchine's mastery of dynamics. Here the marcato stresses within a phrase, here the staccato end of a step, here the legato current, with the three elements often variously combined: all marvelously fresh. Balanchine's celebrated musicality is too often allowed to pass as if he simply had a hotline to all his composers. Really it involved complex decisions, starting with his choice of music. Though the score for "Donizetti Variations" is fairly straightforward it's the ballet from Donizetti's final opera, "Dom Sebastien" (1843) the program's other two pieces are composites. In "La Valse," Balanchine not only dares to preface Ravel's 1920 "La Valse" with his 1911 "Valses Nobles et Sentimentales," but he also completely ignores the composer's "Valse" scenario. (If you want to see Ravel's intentions beautifully realized, watch Frederick Ashton's 1958 "La Valse," which was praised by Poulenc; a 2013 Royal Ballet performance is on DVD.) And in "Chaconne," Balanchine yokes dances from two different sections of Gluck's 1774 "Orphee et Euridice." (City Ballet's program uses the Italian title, "Orfeo ed Euridice"; but that implies this score is from Gluck's original italophone 1762 version of the opera. Only for his francophone Paris revision did he compose his finest ballet music.) The opening dances are from the second act Elysian fields (Champs Elysees), in which the musician Orpheus rediscovers his wife amid the dead; but the final dances are a selection from the third act finale, in which the couple are reunited in life even after he has lost her a second time. Balanchine's effect in both cases is to take us on a journey. In his Ravel creation, the opening "Valses Nobles et Sentimentales" establishes the characters and mood but keeps the horror in reserve for "La Valse." In his Gluck compilation, we move from the life of the dead to life after death; it's a resurrection in which the secular becomes sublime. Another aspect of Balanchine's pervasive sense of drama is his use of gesture, one of his most distinguishing features. You have only to look at the three women (Marika Anderson, Gretchen Smith, Lydia Wellington), who, presiding like the Fates, do much to establish the darkly sophisticated atmosphere of "La Valse" to see how many things Balanchine knew how to do with arms, elbows, hands. These three no sooner flourish gestures than they break the arms' lines with jagged elbows and wrists; and the games of hands, wrists, elbows, arms that go on seem both to sum up high society (debonair gossip and social commentary) and to subvert it. When those hands frame the women's faces, touch them, and then tip them onto a skewed angle, the drama has moved into the surreal. Later, lighting suddenly reveals the three mystery women as they stand in a bizarre tableau, each screening her eyes with one barrierlike arm while the other arm points vertically; they're a triple signpost to nowhere. One man alone (Zachary Catazaro, making his debut here on Thursday, was well cast for his Romantic presence and upper body fullness) sees them, with horrified fascination; he might be Macbeth finding the three weird sisters on the heath. Balanchine remains the most instructive of choreographers. When most choreographers bring on a supporting ensemble, you soon know the mathematical permutations that lie ahead. Nine dancers? Three trios, natch; sometimes six plus three. Yet as "Donizetti Variations" proceeds, you're in continual suspense: just how many trio, duet or solo combinations can these nine (six women, three men) contain? At one point, all expectations are confounded when four of the six women re enter. The effect is to keep us on tenterhooks: how will the other two return? This was the first work I ever saw City Ballet dance (36 years ago this month, with Mikhail Baryshnikov making his debut opposite Patricia McBride), but I testify that one element of my response is still "What will happen next?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Israel Sapoznick doesn't do well in hospitals. At 89, he sees poorly, uses a wheelchair, and suffers from mild to moderate dementia. Even the ambulette ride from the Hebrew Home at Riverdale, where he lives in the memory care unit, can prove stressful. "It is very scary for an older person to be in a hospital, and it's hard for the family, too," said his daughter Sirena Silber, 45, who accompanies her father to medical appointments. "He gets very anxious and unhappy." So when Mr. Sapoznick was weakened by anemia in February, it came as a relief to learn that instead of going to an emergency room and waiting to be admitted, he could receive an outpatient blood transfusion at nearby Montefiore Medical Center. Transfusions used to involve several days in a hospital, but Mr. Sapoznick returned to his nursing home after a few hours. He received intravenous fluids for two days that month, too, after a period during which he wasn't eating and drinking much. IV therapy also used to require a hospital stay. Like a growing number of facilities, however, the Hebrew Home provides IVs for antibiotics, diuretics and other drugs, or for hydration. Mr. Sapoznick didn't need to leave his room. Hospitalization for these kinds of treatments "should be a thing of the past, but it's not," said Dr. Zachary Palace, a geriatrician and medical director of the Hebrew Home, in the Bronx. The notion that a hospital remains the safest place for old patients dies hard. Many families still believe their aging relatives belong in a hospital when they're ailing. But 20 plus years of research have documented the risks of hospitalization for older adults, particularly those frail or ill enough to need nursing home care. In hospitals, old people fall. They contract stubborn infections. They can develop delirium from unfamiliar surroundings and drugs, and bed sores and loss of conditioning from inactivity. They lose functional abilities, including cognitive skills, that they may never regain, especially if they're already sliding into dementia. Certain procedures and treatments require hospital admission, of course. But "the push is to reduce unnecessary hospitalization for things that can be handled in skilled nursing facilities," said David Siskind, the medical director at the Gurwin Jewish Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Commack, N.Y. Gurwin provides IVs and dialysis on site, and outpatient transfusions at a nearby hospital. A medical practice comes to the home to insert catheters called PICC lines for long term intravenous medication. Changing Medicare and Medicaid policies and incentives, and new HMO like accountable care organizations, are encouraging these practices. But there would be greater optimism if nursing homes were adopting them faster. "It's a slowly growing number, not a tidal wave," said Dr. Leonard Gelman, the immediate past president of AMDA The Society for Post Acute and Long Term Care Medicine, which represents doctors, nurse practitioners and physician assistants working in nursing homes. "There's a mismatch between facilities' capabilities and what they want to do." A major obstacle to offering more procedures is a fact that often shocks families: Many of the nation's 16,000 or so Medicare certified nursing homes don't employ round the clock registered nurses. Federal regulations require them only eight hours a day. Five states Rhode Island, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland and Tennessee mandate 24/7 nursing coverage; in several other states, staffing requirements are tied to facility size. Starting an IV probably the most common procedure that nursing homes could reclaim from hospitals without a registered nurse always on duty can be problematic. "If the nurses start it in the afternoon and there's a problem at 3 a.m., what do you do?" Dr. Gelman asked. The Saratoga Center for Rehab and Skilled Nursing Care in Ballston Spa, N.Y., where he practices, does employ round the clock R.N.s. In facilities that don't, an IV problem would probably land patients in a hospital anyway. Medicare reimbursement policies also give nursing homes incentives to transfer patients to hospitals. The homes receive fixed daily amounts to care for residents, and those rates don't rise if someone needs, say, expensive IV antibiotics. "Facilities don't want these high cost patients in their buildings," Dr. Gelman said. "Once they send a patient out, even the ambulance is paid for by someone else." Gurwin, with 460 beds, and the Hebrew Home, with 855, are so much larger than typical nursing facilities, which average 100 beds, that they can afford more innovative approaches. They're also nonprofit organizations with substantial philanthropic support. Being in or near a major city also makes staffing and arrangements with outpatient facilities simpler than it is in rural areas. But their efforts demonstrate what's possible and why more at home treatment for residents makes sense. At the Hebrew Home, Dr. Palace said, residents needing transfusions previously spent three to four days in the hospital, while specialists conducted the usual series of tests that nobody had requested. "People never came back healthier than when they left us," he said. Digging through data compiled by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Dr. Palace recently found that Medicare patients spent an average of 5.3 days in a hospital for blood transfusions in 2012. The mean cost: 10,339. Outpatient transfusions at Montefiore, by contrast, cost Hebrew Home residents 350 for the same day procedure and 217 for a unit of blood, and transportation. In 2006, Dr. Palace said, the home sent about 70 residents to hospitals each month, for all sorts of reasons. By last year, that number had dropped to 30 to 35. "We cut our hospitalization rate in half, and in large part it's due to these programs," he said of the effort to perform more routine procedures at the facility. Savings like that will interest federal agencies seeking to control health care costs, but older adults also benefit. Families often regard the hospital as a protective haven, a place where lives are saved not where infections develop or muscles atrophy. "We have to educate people," Dr. Siskind said. He now frequently tells families, "It's better for your 85 year old mother to stay here, where she knows us and we know her."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Pregnant women who are infected with the coronavirus and hospitalized are at risk for developing serious complications, and may face an elevated risk for delivering their babies prematurely, according to new studies from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They may also be at greater risk of losing the pregnancy or having a stillbirth. The troubling findings are consistent with some earlier reports that pregnant women may be at increased risk for severe illness when they become infected with the new coronavirus. But some experts warned that the findings, drawn from relatively small numbers of patients, including many hospitalized because of Covid 19, may not be representative of all pregnant women who are infected. The studies found that many hospitalized pregnant women who were infected with the virus did not have any symptoms. Among those who did have symptoms, however, between 16 percent and 30 percent required intensive care, and 6 percent to 8.5 percent required ventilators to help with breathing. Among the 703 cases described in the two reports, three of the women died. Both studies found that pregnant women infected with the coronavirus experienced a higher rate of preterm deliveries than expected, and some had stillbirths. Earlier studies have also suggested a higher risk for preterm births, and a British study noted a population wide uptick in stillbirths during the pandemic. Pregnancy may make women more vulnerable to infection and severe illness for several reasons. The immune system is suppressed during pregnancy, a response designed to prevent adverse reactions to the fetus but one that increases the mother's susceptibility to viral infections. Other physiological changes during pregnancy may also increase women's vulnerability. The lungs may be affected by the expanding uterus, and the cardiovascular system is working harder. Covid 19 can also raise the risks of blood clots, and little is known about effects on the placenta, which nourishes the fetus. "We now have data from three separate C.D.C. surveillance systems all suggesting that pregnant women may be at increased risk for severe disease from Covid 19," Dr. Denise Jamieson, a member of the Covid 19 task force at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in an email. "The take home message is that pregnant women can get seriously ill with this," said Dr. Peter Bernstein, director of the division of maternal fetal medicine at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. "We don't know for sure that they will get sicker than they would have if they weren't pregnant, but certainly there are women out there who are getting very sick and even dying." Although experts said that more research is needed to clarify these links, they urged pregnant women to be scrupulous about wearing masks and social distancing in order to minimize the risk of infection, especially if they have underlying health problems or conditions such as obesity. Some called for screening all pregnant women for the coronavirus, whether they have symptoms or not. Dr. Neel Shah, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Harvard University, said pregnant women should be prioritized for testing, and he called on employers to take extra measures to protect them from exposure to the virus while working. "If there is one call for action, it is that employers need to take care of their pregnant people, especially if they're getting close to term, and do everything possible to avoid them being exposed allowing them to work virtually or giving the time and space they need," Dr. Shah said. But he said the studies, while providing "a signal," that requires further investigation, are not definitive. Dr. Shikha Garg, a medical epidemiologist at the C.D.C. and senior author of one of the studies, said an important finding was that so many pregnant women who had no symptoms of Covid 19 were infected with the virus. "We're still learning about how Covid 19 may affect pregnant women and their newborns," Dr. Garg said. "If testing policies just focus on symptomatic women, we may miss the asymptomatic ones." The new reports came from two different C.D.C. surveillance systems. One study looked at 598 pregnant women with Covid 19 hospitalized in 13 states from March 1 through Aug 22. Like most pregnant women, their median age was young 30 but one in five had a chronic health problem, most commonly asthma or hypertension. About 42 percent were Hispanic and 26.5 percent were Black. More than half of these women were asymptomatic when they were admitted, for a variety of reasons, to the hospital. Among the 272 pregnant women who had symptoms, 16 percent required intensive care, and 8.5 percent required ventilators to help with breathing. Two women died. Of the entire group of 598 women in this study, 458 completed their pregnancies during the hospitalization, and 448 had a live birth. Both symptomatic and asymptomatic women had premature births and pregnancy losses, though preterm births affected about 25 percent of symptomatic women, compared with only 8 percent of the asymptomatic women. Ten women, or 2.2 percent, some symptomatic and some not, had miscarriages or stillbirths. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The other C.D.C. report looked at 105 hospitalized pregnant women from March 1 to May 30 who were infected with the virus, most of whom had been admitted for a pregnancy related reason or because they were in labor. Their median age was also 30. Most were asymptomatic, and more than half were Hispanic. Among those who were hospitalized because of Covid 19, rates of obesity and gestational diabetes were higher than among those who were hospitalized for other reasons. About 30 percent of those hospitalized because of Covid required intensive care and 14 percent required a ventilator. One woman died. Of the women who delivered their babies, 15 percent had premature births and 3 percent had stillbirths. The rates were higher than what is typically observed among pregnant women in the populations encompassed by the data set used in the study, which is called the Vaccine Safety Datalink. "The numbers were small, and we did not control for confounders, such as prior pregnancy history had they had pregnancy losses in the past, or other medical conditions associated with pregnancy that put them at risk?" said Dr. Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, a medical epidemiologist with the C.D.C. and lead author of the smaller study. "More research is needed to understand the implications."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Almost two thirds of women of childbearing age in the United States use contraceptives, according to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Almost all American women turn to contraception at some point in their lives. But at any given time, many may not be using it for various reasons: because they are pregnant or trying to be, for example, or are not sexually active. In interviews, part of a national survey conducted from 2015 to 2017, women were asked about their use of contraceptives in the current month. There are 72.2 million women aged 15 to 49 in the United States. Over all, 64.9 percent use some form of contraception, the researchers estimated.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
For Zverev, the path to a first Grand Slam final has been, at times, uninspiring. Problems with consistency have haunted his game, particularly his service motion. In his semifinal match against Pablo Carreno Busta, he lost the first two sets quickly and made fewer than 60 percent of his first serves. By the fifth set, Zverev had settled down and was landing 75 percent of his first serves. That same pattern held for his groundstroke rallies, with eight unforced errors off his usually stalwart backhand in the first set; in the fifth, he made no unforced errors from that wing. If Zverev is going to have a chance at beating Thiem, he will need to find a groove early on and not allow the Austrian to unsettle him. Thiem, ranked No. 3 and seeded second, is in his fourth Grand Slam final, but his first not facing one of the Big Three Djokovic, Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal. Asked if that would change his mentality going into the final, Thiem said it would not. "I know what Sascha is capable of," he said of Zverev. Thiem had not been expected to do so well as the tournament started. He had just lost in the second round of the Western Southern Open, a warm up for the U.S. Open. A video released by the United States Tennis Association of a practice session days before the U.S. Open showed him smashing a racket. Thiem seemed to gain confidence as he progressed through the U.S. Open. He needed four sets to push past the 31st seed, Marin Cilic, but then blitzed past Felix Auger Aliassime and Alex de Minaur, two promising young players.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
There have been calls for companies to pull ads from Sean Hannity's Fox News show because of his comments on allegations against a Senate candidate in Alabama. Advertisers are sending mixed messages in response to calls for a boycott of Sean Hannity. An effort to pressure companies that advertise on Mr. Hannity's program on Fox News appeared to gain momentum in recent days based on Twitter messages from brands including Keurig, Reddi Wip, Realtor.com, Nature's Bounty and Volvo Car USA. But by Tuesday, those companies were clarifying or even deleting statements they had made on the platform that indicated they had pulled ads from Mr. Hannity's show because of comments he made about Roy S. Moore, the embattled Republican candidate for Senate in Alabama. Those moves followed a backlash against Keurig that included fans of Mr. Hannity posting videos of themselves destroying the company's coffee makers. "It's pretty unusual to see companies like this handling an issue so poorly," said Kara Alaimo, an assistant professor of public relations at Hofstra University. She said it was especially surprising to see companies like Realtor.com and Volvo delete widely circulated tweets. It's the latest social media kerfuffle involving consumers, advertisers and content deemed offensive, at least by some and often along partisan lines, from outlets like Fox News and Breitbart News, as well as cultural institutions like Shakespeare in the Park. Calling for an advertiser boycott has become a common strategy since the presidential election. A group in the case of Mr. Hannity, the liberal watchdog Media Matters circulates a list of advertisers and urges people to contact them directly, particularly on social media. This time, some companies have stumbled. Realtor.com said in a tweet over the weekend that "we are not currently, and will not be running TV ads on Hannity." Later, it deleted the tweet and posted a statement on its website saying the company advertises across "dozens of television networks" and will continue placing ads on Fox News and its top shows. "Some staff didn't realize that we have a practice of not engaging in boycotts," a spokeswoman said of the deleted tweet. "Senior management at Realtor.com became aware over the weekend of the error, and the tweets were taken down Sunday and the policy was posted on our corporate website." Volvo Car USA apparently responded to a tweet from a consumer on Monday to say, "We have spoken with our media agency and have advised them to cease advertising on the show." But that message has disappeared. The company did not respond to requests for comment. Some brands have been swept up in the boycott talk without having advertised on Mr. Hannity's program in months. Nature's Bounty, for example, has responded to consumers' tweets in recent days to say it does not run ads on the program. Some connected that to Mr. Hannity's comments last week, but a spokeswoman said in an email that the company had not advertised on the show since the summer. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Reddi Wip and Hebrew National, both owned by ConAgra Foods, have also been linked to the boycott after saying on Twitter that they had removed Mr. Hannity's program from their advertising plans. But a spokeswoman said on Tuesday that the show had not been part of its media spending for "several months." "We should have replied with a more thorough tweet," Lanie Friedman, the spokeswoman, said in an email, "so people realized this was not a recent decision." Some brands, including Eloquii and 23andMe, do appear to have pulled their ads from Mr. Hannity's show based on Twitter statements. But they declined to elaborate on their reasoning. This most recent issue started Thursday after Mr. Hannity discussed allegations against Mr. Moore, who has been accused of making sexual advances toward teenage girls when he was in his early 30s. Mr. Hannity, during his radio show, seemed to justify Mr. Moore's reported conduct by calling one of the encounters "consensual." Later, on his TV program, Mr. Hannity said he "misspoke," though he went on to discuss the possibility of Mr. Moore's accusers lying for money or political purposes. Calls for a boycott followed. Brands may be exercising caution based on the backlash that Keurig experienced. The brand waded into a maelstrom when it said it planned to halt ads on Mr. Hannity's show, partly because it was responding to a tweet from Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters. Keurig's chief executive said in an email to employees on Monday that while it was appropriate for the brand to pause ads on the program, its decision to express that in a tweet was "highly unusual" and "done outside of company protocols."' He apologized to employees for any negativity they endured from the "appearance of 'taking sides.'" During his show on Monday, Mr. Hannity lauded the support from his fans but asked them to stop destroying the machines, calling Keurig a "victim" of Media Matters. He said on Tuesday that he planned to give away 500 Keurig machines and accepted the company's "apology," without noting it was directed to employees. Through it all, Ms. Alaimo said, the messages from the brands have become muddled. "What all of these companies need to do right now is publicly articulate what their policies are with respect to advertising, and under what circumstances they would pull their ads from broadcasters," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
"Shoppable" hotel rooms offer items from cosmetics and toiletries to art and furniture that guests can buy, essentially turning a piece of your vacation into everyday reality. "Hotels are doing everything they can to increase awareness and appeal of their online stores and grow their sales of their branded merchandise," said Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst and founder of the Atmosphere Research Group. "Online stores are getting as much attention as the hotel website where you plan and book your room reservations." For some properties, this means making standard room amenities like soaps, shampoos, or room art available for public purchase. And at the extreme, an entire accommodation can be turned into an entirely shoppable showroom, offering guests an intimate test drive that most traditional buying experiences lack. When you buy something you loved on vacation from a hotel's retail site, you send a powerful message to the hotel. "It basically implies that they want to take their hotel experience 'home' with them," said Michael Weiss, senior director of online retail for Marriott International. "I'd say that's an incredible endorsement." Shop everything from hotel pillows to dishes Some established hotel groups have long been offering in room amenities for purchase. Guests at Westin (a Marriott International brand since the group's Starwood acquisition in 2016) properties have for years had the ability to recreate their entire night's sleep at home by purchasing the brand's exclusive "Heavenly Bed" mattresses, pillows and sets of sheets. Today, 13 of Marriott International's 30 brands offer everything from mattresses to vanity mirrors for sale on their websites. "I think people even in today's online shopping obsessed world still like the idea of truly sleeping on a mattress for a full night to see if they like it instead of buying one after trying it in a store for five minutes," Mr. Weiss said. But Marriott's merchandise menu doesn't end at beds. The company has responded to concierge inquiries about in room products by expanding its inventory. Customers at Courtyard hotels can take the brand's bistro experience home by way of wine glasses and dishware, for example. And at the Marriott proper, a good experience with the in room alarm clock, shower curtain or bedside lamp is completely reproducible at home. Where Marriott helps you replicate your stay at home, some boutique properties are curating aspirational design lifestyles that are easily transported home for a price. Shinola, a Detroit luxury design retailer that launched in 2011, opened an entire hotel in downtown Detroit this January in order to offer customers a more immersive experience than was possible in its retail stores. Guests at the Shinola Hotel have the opportunity to live with (and later purchase) the brand's high end products, including the hotel's limited edition desk clock, an alpaca throw blanket, a turntable and a set of Bluetooth speakers.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
In the pilot of "David Makes Man," Dr. Woods Trap (Phylicia Rashad) is speaking to her gifted middle school class about history and family origins. She talks about the complexities and unanswered questions of the past, then turns the focus to her students: "What is your story? Will there be one?" These are the eternal questions of coming of age stories, in which characters from Stephen Dedalus to Angela Chase figure out where they came from and where they're going. But in pop culture, they are only rarely asked of 14 year old Black boys like David (Akili McDowell). "David Makes Man," whose first season recently arrived on HBO Max, is remarkable for its lyricism, its visual richness and its magic realist imagination. But above all, it's remarkable for presenting its protagonist not simply as a tragic or troubled figure but also as someone with undetermined promise, an open book just starting to be filled in. The drama, which premiered on OWN last summer, comes from Tarell Alvin McCraney, who wrote the story for Barry Jenkins's "Moonlight." Like that film, "David" focuses on a boy growing up in the projects of South Florida, navigating a twisty path to manhood. In many teen dramas about white kids, school is simply a setting and social crucible. For David, it's a key part of reaching his future. His magnet school, founded in the 1930s to serve the families of Black laborers, is a steppingstone toward a scholarship to an exclusive prep school if he can impress gatekeepers like Dr. Woods Trap. The stakes for David are evident in her gifted class, the only one in the school in which David is surrounded by mostly white students. One of the other Black students, Seren (Nathaniel Logan McIntyre), is David's best friend, confidant and ally but also, by circumstance, his competitor. Each comes to school with baggage: David cares for a younger brother while his mother, Gloria (Alana Arenas), puts in extra hours at work; Seren, from a more prosperous family, is being abused by his stepfather. McDowell is astounding, playing David as childlike but guarded, suspicious but capable of wonder. He poses different faces to teachers, friends and neighborhood rivals, partly as an adaptation mechanism, partly because he is learning who he is, what sort of man he wants to be, what worlds he wants to thrive in. In his scenes with authorities at school, he works to stay calm and deferential on the surface while his legs jitter below desk level he's like a synchronized swimmer, keeping it steady above the surface, churning and straining below the waterline. (Besides the established character actors like Rashad and Ruben Santiago Hudson, the young actors are uniformly excellent in difficult roles.) As striking as the show's portrait of David is the community it draws around him: working parents, church leaders, educators, sex workers, all fully imagined. This is not a story of life in the projects where children are left by feckless adults to fend for themselves. There are support systems, if imperfect ones, all around David his mother, teachers, administrators, all doing their best with what they've got. Even the drug dealers who work the projects where David lives are more than one dimensional threats. Some of them harass David or try to recruit him, a powerful temptation as his mother struggles to make the rent. Others have a more complicated relationship with him, especially Sky (Isaiah Johnson), a mysterious, erudite father figure who materializes to push David in his school ambitions and occasionally quote Robert Hayden poetry. Again, this theme of community and interdependence isn't new on TV think "Friday Night Lights" but it's much rarer to see it in a series about mostly Black characters. "David" arrived in August 2019, building buzz and praise (I didn't review its premiere but put it on my best episodes of the year list) and eventually winning a Peabody Award. But it didn't develop a big cultural profile, and it didn't help that it was unavailable to stream after the show's original run. So if you missed "David" as one of the best new series of 2019, consider its HBO Max return a chance to experience it as one of the best series of 2020. It would be disingenuous to ignore that the show has special resonance now, in a season of protests over the devaluing of young Black lives like David's. The cry "Black Lives Matter," after all, is not just a plea for mere existence. It is a demand for Black people to be recognized, by the state and the culture, as full, complex, varied individuals. "David Makes Man" does this while also exploring issues, like colorism and respectability politics, that series with a few Black faces among mostly white casts can't. For all its stark material, this is also a hopeful series, artful without being pretentious, with a sense of poetry and play. Fantasy sequences can be a visual crutch, but the ones in "David" are ingenious and stealthy in the fifth episode, he gets romantic advice from Sky in the form of a glittery lip sync of New Edition's "If It Isn't Love" and they serve as an extension of the protagonist's consciousness. The show's imagery is fluid and magical because that's how David, for everything weighing on him, sees the world. When David and Seren sit in the hallway after a fight in the first episode, their internal dialogue "GOD!" "He can't hear us" is communicated through looks and words scrawled onscreen like doodles in a notebook. There's a lot going on in the first season; like many teen dramas, "David" sometimes spins into melodrama in order to fuel the plot. But ultimately the plot is less the draw here than the show's incandescent rendering of its protagonist, and its ability to place you wholly in his perspective. This is the story of his life. And his life matters.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
"He ranted and raved for more than an hour this afternoon, airing every grievance, grinding every ax it was his Pettysburg Address." JIMMY KIMMEL "Seriously, I haven't seen that many happy white guys since the Utah Jazz made the playoffs." JIMMY FALLON "He finally found the one job he's qualified for, newspaper boy." SETH MYERS "Before his victory speech, Trump spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast, which was a tough decision, because on the one hand, he doesn't like to pray, but on the other hand, he loves breakfast. So he went. He used it as an opportunity to lash out at those who oppose him, just as Jesus would have done." JIMMY KIMMEL	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
"Droplets of fiery rain." That's how Henry Clifton Sorby, a 19th century British mineralogist, described the tiny spheres called chondrules found within meteorites. Chondrules are such dominant features of these meteorites that they are called chondrites, and they account for 86 percent of meteorites that have been found on Earth. "There's nothing that predicts them," said Rhian Jones of the University of Manchester in England, an expert in chondrites. Now some scientists think they have a new answer to this rocky enigma: The chondrites may have formed in an unusual event during a narrow window of time in the early solar system. The findings, presented at a virtual meeting of the American Astronomical Society this month by William Herbst and James Greenwood of Wesleyan University in Connecticut, paint a strange picture of what parts of the solar system were like before the planets we know began to form. Multiple hypotheses have been put forward for the origins of chondrites. Some agree their formation must have occurred early in the solar system's history, about 4.6 billion years ago. But each of these hypotheses has its downsides. To form, chondrules must be heated and then cooled rapidly, a scenario that is difficult to explain. So the researchers came up with a model for an idea they thought might work, then simulated the conditions with rocks in a lab furnace to test their hypothesis.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Sara Gard has been without work since the beginning of April. "When the 600 is gone, we're going to totally have to rethink our lives," she said of the federal supplement to weekly unemployment pay. An Extra 600 a Week Kept Many Jobless Workers Afloat. Now What Will They Do? For Sara Gard, the government's safety net moved smoothly into place when the coronavirus pandemic upended her family's lives. Jobless benefit checks began arriving a few days after she was furloughed in April from an entertainment company in Atlanta. A 600 weekly supplement, part of an emergency federal program, would cover the mortgage until her company resumed operations probably in June. June came and went, and the reopening was pushed to August. Now August is near, the business is still shuttered and the weekly benefit booster has run out. "When the 600 is gone, we're going to totally have to rethink our lives because we don't have a way to pay the mortgage," Ms. Gard said. Without it, her weekly benefits from the state total 300. Her mortgage is 1,700 a month. Ms. Gard is one of roughly 30 million Americans who are getting unemployment payments a staggering figure that reflects one of the country's most calamitous economic events. The Gards recognize that they and their two children are luckier than many families. Already nearly 11 percent of Americans say they live in households where there is not enough to eat, according to a recent survey by the Census Bureau. More than a quarter have missed a rent or mortgage payment and doubt they will make the next one. Forty percent of adults have delayed getting medical care. Ms. Gard's husband, Matt, has kept his hospital maintenance job, and her employer of 15 years continues to pay its portion of the cost of her medical insurance. But she has to come up with her part 350 a month while dealing with several other bills. "I am our family's major breadwinner," said Ms. Gard, 39, who had just gotten a raise that lifted her annual salary to 80,000. They also have some savings a comfort when more than 40 percent of American households lack cash to cover an unexpected 400 expense. That cushion was crucial last week when the Gards' air conditioning system suddenly died. The repair gobbled up what would have been a few months' worth of mortgage payments. Without further information on when she might be rehired, Ms. Gard has started updating her resume, and reaching out to recruiters and contacts on LinkedIn. Then her school district announced that all teaching would be online in the fall. Her mother, 71, used to pitch in to care for her children, 2 and 5, but Ms. Gard worries about the health risk, so child care is another issue. "I have the month of August to figure out where September's mortgage payment and everything else will come from," she said. As the economy falters, pain is everywhere. Assistance, though, is more uneven. Normally, individual states run their own unemployment programs, setting different benefit levels and eligibility rules. On average, benefits replace about 45 percent of a worker's weekly paycheck. Freelance, self employed and part time workers, who didn't qualify for state benefits but received funds through the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, tended to get a much smaller fraction of their previous earnings. That is where the extra 600 a week came in. It was meant to make up for lost income and ensure recipients had enough money to buy food, pay rent, keep the lights on, afford medical prescriptions or make car payments. Lawmakers settled on a lump sum as the quickest and easiest way to deliver assistance given the limited capabilities of already overwhelmed state unemployment networks. The money was crucial in supplying the economy with fuel to keep the engine going, economists say. Like any one size fits all measure, however, the 600 supplement fell outside the target zone in many instances. Roughly two thirds of workers ended up with more income than they would have earned had they not lost their jobs. The windfalls angered critics who warned of ballooning government expenditures and disincentives to work despite a severe shortage of available jobs. Some recipients said they could manage without the bonus. Kimberly Zaiger, for example, lost her job as a convention services manager at a hotel in San Antonio, Texas, in March. The extra money "was helpful," she said, enabling her to offer some financial help to her grown children, but "not crucial." Ms. Zaiger, 52, will still get 521 a week in regular state jobless benefits in addition to a share of her ex husband's military pension. She also has savings and a fiance who is working and splits some bills. 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. "I've been crunching the numbers and prioritizing and I'll be fine," she said. But for others, the weekly 600 made the difference between staying afloat and ruin. Rebecca Mallery, 46, was cobbling together a living from three jobs when the coronavirus shut the economy. She lost them all on the same day: March 15. Her earnings had averaged less than 250 a week compared with the 600 in supplemental pandemic unemployment assistance that arrived with her unemployment insurance. But without any supplement, she faces bankruptcy. A single mother with a 9 year old son, Ms. Mallery lives just across the Nevada border in Arizona and has been looking for work. But with the tourism industry struggling, there isn't much available. "There's just nothing left out there right now," she said. Even if there were, she wonders how she would manage if schools don't fully reopen and she has to look after her son during the day. "How do you go to work?" she said. "When you're a single parent, that leaves you with nothing, there are no options." She worries that a job that involves contact with the public puts her at higher risk of exposing her mother, who has cancer, to the virus. When the Lowe's near her reopened, though, she quickly applied. "I was out in the garden center, shuffling around cactuses in 100 degree heat, but it was great," she said. "I was glad to be working." But she picked up only a couple of shifts. With the extra unemployment benefits running out and little hope of finding steady work, Ms. Mallery is applying for subsidized housing, even though she hates to leave her townhouse, which has three bedrooms and a yard where her son can play. "I can't use any of my credit cards anymore they're all maxed out," she said. "I'm going to have to declare bankruptcy." Congressional Democrats have pushed for another 3 trillion relief package that would preserve the 600 weekly supplements through January. Senate Republicans and the administration have countered with a 1 trillion proposal that would reduce the extra benefit to 200. But he can't figure out how to keep paying the 1,800 rent for his house beyond September. "We are now facing potential ruin within a couple of months," he said. He also worries about his health. Mr. Parker, 50, has a vascular disease called thrombosis, a blood clotting disorder that puts him in a high risk group for complications if he were to contract Covid 19. Even with the 600 supplement, he didn't have enough money for the 240 monthly cost of continuing his health insurance. Without insurance, though, the cost of the daily medication he takes to prevent blood clots rose from 10 a month to 500 far more than he could afford. In the first few weeks of his furlough, he rationed his medication, taking only half the amount he needed, which gave him a frightening series of symptoms: bruising, dizziness and an increased risk of stroke. He recently qualified for emergency assistance from the pharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb, which will provide a 90 day supply. After that, Mr. Parker is unsure of what to do maybe ask for donations through GoFundMe. This week, just after the final jobless benefit supplements were sent out, Mr. Parker learned that his company was extending the furlough through September. He hopes to return to work, but doubts that the live event industry will be back in the fall. Even if it is, he said, his medical condition will make him think twice about returning to work before a vaccine is available. The weekly 600 premium was a life preserver. "It gave us our one sense of security," he said. "Now that's gone."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
There's one striking image in which women propel men: One man, then another retreats as a man presses her forehead onto his chest as she advances. Otherwise, the view of the sexes here is pretty standard: Gals and guys are all lively, but men have more character and do the partnering. There's so much to commend in "In the Upper Room" that I ought to hold it up as a textbook example of stylistic diversity. Some of the cast are in sneakers, others in ballet shoes; both genres excel, and the stage world is large enough to contain them both proudly. Jogging, martial arts and academic ballet are just part of the cultural pluralism here. There are times when (even now that the work is more than 30 years old) it seems to reinvent pointwork. The complex array of weights and balances that come into play when a woman goes onto toe look new, modern, interesting. I wish I also wish I didn't find this whole concoction synthetic. I wish I didn't find its taped Philip Glass score bombastic and, as it proceeds, pulverizing. I don't believe the posey, self advertising stage behavior here; the more these dancers do, the shallower and phonier they're made to look. In recent years, there's been a rush to commission new works by female choreographers in ballet. Ballet Theater's Women's Movement is an important part of this. As women observed from the stage at the gala, this company was co founded (and directed for decades) by a woman, Lucia Chase. And it has had female choreographers since its inception, notably Agnes de Mille and Bronislava Nijinska. Even so, there's an obvious danger across the ballet world. Much too much? rests on the shoulders of a relatively small number of female choreographers suddenly inundated with invitations from multiple ballet companies. Let's hope that something more important is also happening with a more valuable long term effect: the active encouragement of creativity among female dancers and ballet students. Women in ballet have tended to concentrate on perfecting their skills as dancers rather than as choreographers; and even though female physiques and techniques have been intensely scrutinized (far more than their male counterparts), the pressure has grown only more intense when women come to make new work. Ballet culture itself surely needs to be reformed, from the foundations, to help more women see themselves as makers rather than made.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
When the forces of President Bashar al Assad of Syria destroyed and took control of my city of Aleppo, its residents, including my family, were forced to flee to the northwestern Idlib province. The pattern repeated after every military assault by the Syrian regime on cities and towns outside its control. Idlib became the sanctuary for about four million people. Relentless aerial bombardment by the Assad regime and its Russian allies and a devastating ground offensive have displaced more than half a million people from Idlib since December, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. In the past few weeks, the attacks on the people trapped in Idlib have severely intensified. The White Helmets, the civil defense group, documented more than 6,600 attacks that killed 208 civilians in January. Most of these families are fleeing for the second, third or fourth time. Like mine, their original homes were in places you might recognize from news headlines: Aleppo, Douma, Ghouta, Homs. Each of these places was the site of a massacre by the forces of the Assad regime and its Iranian and Russian allies. The survivors had sought refuge in Idlib. Now they are on the move again. The United Nations Children's Fund reported that more than 6,500 children were forced to flee Idlib every day last week. On a train from Washington to New York, I stared at pictures of mothers fleeing Idlib in cattle trucks. I read about the Turkish border being sealed shut, the Russian and regime forces attacking Idlib relentlessly. The images of the exodus from Idlib return me to being in one of those cars over three years ago, when I was forced to flee my home in Aleppo. My body remembers the cold and pain of that journey. The feeling of holding my daughter, Sama, on my lap and trying to keep her warm. I held a tin of beans and would feed her one at a time. And I tuned the car radio, desperate for any news of the evacuations as we left my beloved Aleppo for the last time. I scroll through endless updates from Idlib: a 15 second video clip of the Ariha hospital struck by a Russian jet; the son of a White Helmet rescue worker begging to see the body of his dead father; another sobbing White Helmet volunteer who found his own son under the rubble. In the past week I have met officials from the House of Representatives and the Senate. In each meeting, I have just minutes to explain what is happening in Idlib. I tell them everything, and it feels like nothing. I don't believe it will change anything. The Syrian people have been abandoned. Some politicians and U.N. officials tell me they hope for an end to the violence. Others tell me they can do nothing. We are left to face death alone. Over the past nine years, we Syrians have been killed in every way possible: by barrel bombs, shelling, guns, chemical weapons, torture, starvation. But I believe the hardest way to be killed is in silence, so I keep telling our stories. It is my duty, my responsibility as a woman who survived. This is the fate of those who have escaped: to endlessly retell our own stories and tell the stories of others still in Syria. When I was living through the siege of Aleppo, I thought I would be killed with my daughter. I became obsessed with the idea that if I couldn't save myself, at least I would save the story of what happened. I filmed everything so that one day people would bear witness to all the crimes that happened in my home city and all those children wouldn't have died in silence. I survived and I made a film. In the years that come, I hope more Syrian women make films to tell the stories that need to be told, for every family has faced its own odyssey. I hope they make films about what the world did in this war: the meetings thousands of miles away from Syria where it was decided we would be left to die. The story of how Russia tested its new military weapons on our homes, schools and hospitals. I also hope they will tell the story of our great return. For all I have left is hope that our stories matter and that those slogans of freedom and democracy we wrote on the walls of Aleppo may one day come true. On Tuesday, a Russian airstrike destroyed a hospital in Sarmin, a city in Idlib. I know the terror of being in a hospital when an airstrike hits; I can still smell blood and smoke, I still hear the sounds of the shells falling, I can still feel the ground shaking. I think of the doctors who will be scrambling to do what they can to save lives. I scroll through Facebook, where local journalists post pictures of the aftermath. They have not given up on showing the world what is happening in Idlib. I wonder how many of the politicians I met this week can say they have also not given up? Waad al Kateab is a co director of "For Sama," a film about the war in Syria. 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
President Trump portrayed the "Phase 1" agreement he announced on Friday with China with typical fanfare, describing the pact as "massive" and "the largest contract" ever signed. "We made a fantastic deal," Mr. Trump said during remarks on Tuesday at the White House. There are good reasons to be skeptical about those claims. The deal appears likely to benefit American farmers by increasing Chinese purchases of agricultural goods and gives some other businesses more access to the Chinese market. But the "agreement in principle" is limited in scope, and exact details have yet to be put in writing a process that has derailed negotiations with China in the past. American officials said Friday that they would work with China on completing an initial agreement in the coming weeks, with hopes of signing a deal when Mr. Trump and President Xi Jinping attend a summit of global leaders in Chile in mid November. Here's what we know so far about what the agreement might contain. From Mr. Trump's perspective, the centerpiece of the pact is a commitment by China to buy 40 billion to 50 billion of American agricultural products per year. Administration officials said that target would be reached in the second year of the pact's enactment. That volume would be a huge increase over what China was buying before the trade war. American farm exports to China peaked at around 25.5 billion in 2016, according to the American Farm Bureau, then dipped to 24.3 billion in 2017. Since then, exports of soybeans, pork and other products have collapsed under pressure from the trade war. American farm exports to China fell to just 13.4 billion in 2018, and are on track for a similar total this year, according to the same data. American officials have not specified which products would be purchased, or how they arrived at a 50 billion figure. But to many analysts, that level of exports seems hard to achieve. Mr. Trump himself acknowledged this on Saturday, saying on Twitter that "there is a question as to whether or not this much product can be produced." "Our farmers will figure it out. Thank you China!" the president added. One factor that could sharply drive up China's imports is its African swine fever epidemic. China has already lost about 40 percent of its hog herd to the sickness, increasing demand for foreign pork and other meats. The 50 billion target may also include a generous estimate of how other parts of the agreement would affect sales. American officials said they had negotiated speedier food safety checks for imports into China and approvals for genetically modified products, both of which could bolster trade. Geng Shuang, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, confirmed at a news conference Tuesday that China would speed up its purchases of American farm goods. "What the U.S. is saying is the actual situation, which is consistent with what we know," he said. From China's perspective, the biggest win is a promise by Mr. Trump to cancel an Oct. 15 tariff increase, when taxes on 250 billion of Chinese goods were set to rise to 30 percent from 25 percent. American officials could also cancel plans to impose a 15 percent tax on roughly 150 billion of additional goods in December if things go well. But that still leaves a huge part of tariffs intact. Since the start of the trade war, the United States has imposed tariffs on more than 360 billion of Chinese products, while China has placed tariffs on roughly 100 billion of American imports. Trump administration officials said that China had pledged to open its markets to American financial services firms, and that banks and credit card companies would be the primary beneficiaries. But few details have been offered, and many of these changes are already in the works for other countries. Some trade experts say the gains to American companies may be limited, pointing out that China has delayed opening its markets for so long that Chinese companies already dominate the financial sector. 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 White House began the trade war over concerns about China's treatment of American intellectual property, including what the administration called outright theft of technology and trade secrets. Mr. Trump said Friday that some measures concerning intellectual property and technology transfer would be included in the "Phase 1" agreement, with additional protections included in later phases. Officials have given few details, though people briefed on the negotiations said the measures included stronger protection for copyrights and patents. Chinese negotiators have pointed to a foreign investment law passed this year as evidence that they have resolved some of the Trump administration's concerns. That law contained assurances that China would even the playing field for foreign and domestic businesses, but it had few details. The crucial enforcement regulations are not scheduled to be issued until January. The agreement also includes new guidelines for how China manages its currency provisions aimed at resolving American complaints that China has intentionally weakened its currency to make its exports cheaper. People briefed on the agreement said the provisions looked similar to the currency chapter in the Trump administration's revised North American Free Trade Agreement. It also closely resembles a pledge that China gave when the Group of 20 nations' finance ministers gathered in Shanghai in February 2016. Both texts call for countries not to devalue their currencies to achieve a trade advantage and to inform each other if they intervene by buying and selling large amounts of currency. Some experts question whether requiring the Chinese government to disclose more data will do much to curb intervention. Beijing could respond by doing more of its intervention almost invisibly through state owned banks, and there are some signs in Chinese data it has already begun doing so. "The more disclosure there is of China's formal intervention, the more China is likely to rely on shadow intervention," said Brad W. Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a Treasury official in the Obama administration. A big question has been whether China will stick to the promises it makes. Robert Lighthizer, Mr. Trump's top trade negotiator, said the pact would set up "a very elaborate consultation process" with "escalation in various areas so that difficulties can be resolved." But he added that the details were still being worked out. American officials have emphasized that their current tariffs, and the threat of future ones, will act as an enforcement mechanism. If China violates the agreement, the Trump administration could move forward with additional tariffs on Chinese products. And if China follows through on its promises, some of Mr. Trump's existing tariffs could be rolled back. No agreement has yet been signed, and some of it remains unwritten. Mr. Trump said Friday that the deal was "subject to getting everything papered," but added that he did not foresee a problem with that process. But the United States and China have reached trade truces before in Buenos Aires last December and in Osaka, Japan, in June only to see them quickly crumble. That has left some critics hesitant. Officials have made no mention of a point that is as crucial for American competitiveness as it is hard to resolve: China's treatment of data. Chinese laws block multinational companies from moving much of the data they gather on Chinese customers out of the country, meaning that many technology and retail companies must silo off their China business from the rest of their global operations. Chinese officials insist this is a matter of national security and have signaled they are unlikely to yield on this point.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
The Indian drama "Chhapaak" succeeds in balancing extremes. It is at once a pleasing and buoyant inspirational story, and a realistic depiction of the brutal aftermath of acid attacks. The movie is based on the life of the activist Laxmi Agarwal, who was burned with acid in New Delhi 2005, and has since become an advocate for banning the sale of acid in India. Details like names and ages have been changed, but the substance of Agarwal's story remains the same. Deepika Padukone plays Malti, a young woman who is assaulted by a family friend, after she rejects his romantic advances. In flashbacks, she recalls the crime and her arduous recovery; in the present, she takes a job helping other survivors and, with a team of female lawyers, tries to change Indian law to reflect the seriousness of the violence committed against her.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
She Owns the Boutique Bird. These Are Her 5 Places to Shop in Los Angeles. None Jen Mankins, left, the founder of Bird, the influential Brooklyn boutique. "I'm firmly a west side L.A. person," she says. Winnie Au for The New York Times, David Walter Banks for The New York Times Jen Mankins became an influencer of style and taste with her free spirited Brooklyn boutique, Bird. The clothing store was a fashion incubator for fledgling brands such as Rag Bone and Isabel Marant, which today are juggernauts. In 2017, Ms. Mankins planted her flag in western Los Angeles County, opening her fifth Bird store and first outpost outside of New York City in Culver City. The store announced it was closing in January. "I'm firmly a west side L.A. person," she says. "It's so quintessentially American. I want to see the beach and palm trees." Winnie Au for The New York Times When Ms. Mankins, 43, travels here for work, she rents a house in Venice, goes for walks on the beach and has breakfast at Gjusta every morning. "It's like a commissary," she says, "with baked goods, smoked fish, produce from local farmers, and everyone knows everyone. The tahini croissant is worth moving to L.A. for." Here, Ms. Mankins shares her favorite places to shop in Los Angeles. "It really is one stop shopping," Jen Mankins says of Japanese focused Tortoise General Store in Mar Vista. David Walter Banks for The New York Times The focus at this chic and spare shop is on Japanese artists, artisans and traditions, with wares that range from herb scissors to bookends. "It really is one stop shopping," Ms. Mankins says. "Any birthday, wedding or baby gift. I bought 90 percent of my Christmas presents there." After 15 years on Abbott Kinney, the main shopping drag in Venice, the husband and wife team Taku and Keiko Shinimoto moved their brick and mortar operation to a series of storefronts in the Mar Vista neighborhood in 2018. Ms. Mankins especially likes the paper goods and textiles. "No one does them better than the Japanese." Nickey Kehoe "sets the tone for what I think of as Los Angeles," Ms. Mankins says of the West Hollywood emporium. David Walter Banks for The New York Times "French market meets Brutalist," is how Ms. Mankins describes this design studio and boutique. "It sets the tone for what I think of as Los Angeles." The eclectic emporium in West Hollywood was founded by Todd Nickey and Amy Kehoe, two designers who call themselves hunter gatherers of good taste. The bright, high ceilinged shop has a lived in air and the international vibe Peruvian rugs, antique French tools, colorful Portuguese plates that comes from a lifetime of combing flea markets. The pair makes frequent sourcing trips abroad, shipping crates back to the United States, to mix with their own line of furniture. "I find things for my house," Ms. Mankins says. "But also gifts books to little ceramics." "Some of the dresses I wear every single day in the summer," Ms. Mankins says of RTH, a trading post of a shop in West Hollywood. David Walter Banks for The New York Times In his fantastical trading post of a shop, Rene Holguin captures his own vision of the world. "The Dries Van Noten store in Paris is my favorite, but next is RTH," Ms. Mankins says. "The spaces are beautifully decorated, chock full, but every object is totally covetable." Mr. Holguin, like Ms. Mankins, is a Texan. He grew up in El Paso, learning about leather from his father, who owned the Laramie Boot Co., then cut his teeth as a merchandiser in New York for brands including Ralph Lauren and J. Crew. In this intimate shop in a residential pocket of West Hollywood, there are giant hats and artisanal ceramics, some enormous, some tiny. There are everyday clothes like poplin shirt dresses. "Some of the dresses I wear every single day in the summer." Arcana: Books on the Arts in Culver City has a deep inventory of new, rare and out of print books. David Walter Banks for The New York Times "It's an art book mecca," Ms. Mankins says of this sunny, open bookstore in Culver City. Arcana has a deep inventory of new, rare and out of print books and catalogs on cinema, photography, architecture ... well, everything including the kitchen sink. The proprietors, Lee and Whitney Kaplan, have been in the business for 35 years and can help locate obscure titles (a Joseph Kosuth, say) with pre internet zeal. Book signings, receptions and discussions regularly fill up the space, often featuring young photographers and creative types. "They're really supportive," Ms. Mankins says. Rolling Greens Nursery Home and Garden has three locations. The original nursery is in Culver City. "It's one of the best plant stores I've ever been to," Ms. Mankins says. David Walter Banks for The New York Times There are now three locations of this garden and home company, but Ms. Mankins likes the original nursery in Culver City, opened in 2001, that sits on two acres. "It's one of the best plant stores I've ever been to, terraced up a steep hill, with a tropical hot house, one for orchids, tons of planters and a whole room of fake plants that are so good my husband and I spent 30 minutes trying to figure out if they were real." 52 PLACES AND MUCH, MUCH MORE Discover the best places to go in 2020, and find more Travel coverage by following us on Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: Each week you'll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to photos from all over the world.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Over the last couple of decades, we have been engaged in an enormous national experiment, taking impressionable and often ignorant teenagers and young adults and seeing just how much student loan debt they can handle. Colleges and graduate schools flaunt their fancy amenities while making the case for their brand of degrees, loan papers in hand. Parents stand idly by and often co sign for the debt. As a result, more than 1 trillion in student loans is outstanding, and people of all ages are struggling to repay them. Whatever you may think of these results and the costs that produced them, there is also a practical question at hand for people who feel as if they are in over their heads: Is it ever a good idea to try to beat the system by openly defying it and refusing to repay the debt that you willingly took on? This is the course of action taken by Lee Siegel, whose opinion article last Sunday for The New York Times's Sunday Review section was the most read piece on the website at one point. Refusing to pay can work under certain circumstances. On Monday, after former students of the now defunct Corinthian Colleges refused to pay loan debts, the Education Department took the highly unusual step of forgiving their loans. Still, the ramifications of defaulting and remaining in debt deliberately are usually real and lasting. After all, the federal government spends over 1 billion annually on collection agencies to get its money back on behalf of the taxpayers who pay for the loan programs. Mr. Siegel suggested that others might want to consider his example and listed three steps that could help them cope. He declined to say much more to me on the record this week, although he did talk to CNN on Thursday. But let's explain why his approach might be flawed by looking at each of the three steps he suggested. First, he tells people to get as many credit cards as they can before they stop repaying their student loans. This way, presumably, you will have plenty of credit available once your credit report is ruined and you can't get new cards. But card issuers are constantly checking the credit of existing cardholders to look for distress signals. If they see any, they may lower your limits or close your accounts. The second piece of advice Mr. Siegel has for aspiring defaulters is to establish a good history of paying rent. This can work, as long as you rent from a landlord who never checks your credit or a new one who relies on your old landlord's good word. But many landlords do check and won't be sympathetic, especially in tight markets. Besides, plenty of people don't want to be tenants forever, given how hard it can be to find rentals in some good school districts. Others want to plant roots and build home equity. Will those defaulters be able to qualify for a mortgage? A judgment resulting from a default may stay on your credit report for up to 10 years. But we're talking about the credit reporting agencies here. Mistakes happen, black marks may linger, and they aren't always easy to fix quickly when your home purchase hangs in the balance. Bank of America, one of the biggest home lenders, did not comment on whether people with defaults on their credit record would be able to get mortgages, and a Wells Fargo spokeswoman declined to categorically rule out the possibility that someone could qualify for a loan within the tarnished credit window. But Richard M. Bettencourt Jr., the secretary of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers and a lender himself with a company called Mortgage Network in Danvers, Mass., said he had never seen people with student loan defaults on their credit records get a mortgage. His most recent rejected candidates were a veteran and his spouse, who had four small loans totaling 11,000. The couple didn't think a debt that small would be a big deal. But even the Department of Veterans Affairs, which will sometimes overlook certain credit blemishes, according to Mr. Bettencourt, would not commit. "They don't want to finance a property where there could subsequently be a lien attached," he said. There are a number of problems with this approach. Some lenders may not allow it, since certain low down payment loans in community property states require both spouses to apply, according to Wells Fargo. Of course, you'll need to talk someone into coupling up with you in the first place, after explaining that you're not so big on financial obligations but that you really, truly intend to honor marital ones. Then, your co habitor needs outstanding credit and enough income or assets to qualify for a loan for the home you both want. Without that, you'll be in for a downgrade in home size, neighborhood and commute time, if you qualify for a mortgage at all. Defaulting may also cause parents or other relatives a world of credit hurt too. They may end up in the mix if they co sign on the so called private loans that the student takes out from lenders like Sallie Mae. Once they do, they are on the hook if and when their children stop paying the principal on principle (or for any other reason). This is the situation that Dirk Wierenga finds himself in. The family believed a series of shiny, happy job placement promises that his son's college made. His son eventually defaulted on his loans, and now the lender is confiscating his father's state tax refunds while flinging mud at his dad for good measure. "I'm basically a third world nation when it comes to my credit score," Mr. Wierenga said. "They put so much weight on these defaults, and they just plain trash you." There is another danger: Employers who can legally check your credit before hiring you may have questions about your character if you've defaulted on a student loan. If you do get hired, lenders often garnish your wages, which can make for some awkward conversations in the first month on the job. Come Social Security time, whether you're disabled or retired, the federal government has the right to garnish up to 15 percent of that check too. In 2013, 33,000 people ages 65 or over lost money to this process, according to a Government Accountability Office study. It noted that the amounts could be enough to push some people below the poverty threshold.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
The cat and mouse battle between athletes who cheat and those who try to find them has gone digital. With a proliferation of online endurance events during the pandemic, catching cheats is the challenge faced by companies like Zwift, which produces an app that allows amateur and professional cyclists and runners to compete against one another from home. Now, the company is trying to crack down on so called digital doping, or the practice of manipulating race data to either improve digital performances or cover up human or technical errors. "There's so much cheating in Zwift that I think a lot of people would like to see more accountability," said Ray Maker, who writes the endurance sports technology blog DC Rainmaker. Yet professional athletes publicly accused of gaming the system by Zwift said that they did not intentionally cheat and that they had been made scapegoats as the company tries to show it is taking the matter seriously. The pressure has been on to get the process right, especially leading up to a new event, the U.C.I. Cycling Esports World Championships, which the Union Cycliste Internationale, the global cycling governing body, is hosting on Wednesday. It will be a race of 50 kilometers (about 31 miles) on Zwift's virtual island Watopia, with each of the more than 130 entrants from 22 countries represented by an avatar. Male and female winners will be awarded 8,000 euros, or about 9,700, and a rainbow striped champion jersey (both digitally and physically). The second and third place finishers will receive 4,000 and 2,000 euros. Instead of the race's taking place in an arena, as originally planned, riders will compete from their place of choice because of the pandemic. And so in addition to traditional antidoping controls to bar the use of performance enhancing drugs, there will be data analysis to avoid digital doping, too. "We feel confident in the ability to catch cheaters and to police the races," said Chris Snook, a spokesman for Zwift. To try to prevent the use of performance enhancing drugs, the U.C.I. requested that athletes be part of an antidoping pool, which includes having proof of a biological passport (a record of biological markers following tests), providing their whereabouts for random testing in and out of competition, and complying with World Anti Doping Agency policies. A group called Zwift Accuracy and Data Analysis, made up of sports scientists and technical experts, will analyze riders' race data. It will look at the riders' race files registered on Zwift and on a second device, and inspect metrics from power meters and heart rate monitors to compare the athletes' digital race performance to their past data. Cyclists will race on bicycles mounted to turbo trainers, which are static devices used for riding bicycles indoors. Participants will all use the same model of turbo trainer as it requires no calibration removing one potential route to cheating and allows more standardized readings. The data that determine race rankings are captured from the turbo trainer and include power, power per kilogram of the rider, cadence and speed. Within 24 hours of the start of the event, participants will also have to submit their height and weight through a recorded video process, providing additional data that will influence the rider's power per weight numbers and final rankings. When the race is over, athletes need to manually upload the second race file that they record on a second device connected to a power meter (usually a pedal or another device in their crank arms or chain rings). This second file is crucial for double checking the validity of the first file registered on Zwift. There have been several accusations of digital doping since 2019, when British Cycling stripped Cam Jeffers of his Cycling eRacing Championship title; he was barred from all races, real and virtual, for six months. In November, news broke that two racers had been barred for six months from Zwift races for "fabrication or modification of any data" and "bringing the sport into disrepute," according to a sentencing decision by Zwift. The athletes Lizi Duncombe of Britain and Shanni Berger of Israel were accused of providing manipulated files. Duncombe has denied cheating; instead, she wrote on Facebook, her bike computer ran out of battery during the race, which meant she could not find a complete race file to upload. "I had a file that looked like the warm up, and it was the only thing I could find, so I sent it,'' she wrote. A friend offered to help her find a full file, she wrote, but Zwift disqualified her after recognizing that the first file was a warm up file. The second file she uploaded ultimately seemed to be an incorrect file, too at which point, she wrote, she was accused of tampering. In Berger's case, the initial problem was that she had linked the wrong device (her power meter, rather than her trainer) to her online race, Zwift wrote. This disqualified her. Berger's team provided Zwift with additional data from the race to prove Berger's results, but those files had been manipulated, Zwift concluded. Berger said that she was still confused about the incident and that she did not intentionally commit any wrongdoing. "I was positive that I connected my trainer," she said. "I don't see any reason for me to connect my power meter. It doesn't make any sense. I even did a test before and sent everything to the director." As for the accusation that files were manipulated, she said she did not know: "I think now everything is possible, but I don't want to blame anyone, and it's not my place to say." Berger, 19, said she received numerous hate messages after being barred; she said she has suffered from anxiety and thoughts of self harm. "Ms. Berger strongly and utterly denies all of Zwift's accusations against her, and is examining the possibility of taking legal action against Zwift," her lawyer, Iro Monitz, wrote in an email. Zwift has stood by its decisions. But the discussion in the cycling community over their cases and how to make the competitions fair and clear of manipulation has continued. Maker, who writes the endurance sports technology blog, said: "There is zero reason technically that anybody, whether pro or amateur athletes, should have to have a secondary device on their handlebars recording data for backup. That should be handled in game."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
In Robert Frost's famous poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay," the New England bard evokes from the changing seasons a sense of continuous loss: "Then leaf subsides to leaf. / So Eden sank to grief." In Chad Beckim's play of the same name, there's similar grief and, more important, circuity. But the show remains steadfastly prosaic, never rising to the heights of poetry. Instead of the New Hampshire and Massachusetts of Frost, "Nothing Gold Can Stay," a Partial Comfort production at the A.R.T./New York Theaters, brings us to a corner of Maine where the big delights are discussions of "Bob Saget's man gland" and trips to the Olive Gah den. (Jason Simms's set design, garish grandmother chic that would make Bobby Berk cry, beckons to the lower middle class but also skews too old timey, making the decade unclear.) Here, Clay (Micheal Richardson) prepares to depart for college, leaving behind his girlfriend, Jess (Talene Monahon). When Jess has a falling out at home, she moves in with Clay's mom (Mary Bacon) and gets a job with his sister, Tanya (Adrienne Rose Bengtsson), at a chicken farm. But Jess soon falls into a pattern of bad behavior (the play calls itself a "love story for the opioid era," after all) and drags down those around her, including Clay and her brother Jamie (Peter Mark Kendall).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. Thanks in part to El Nino, snowpack in the Sierra Nevada is greater than it has been in years. With the winter snowfall season winding down, California officials said that the pack peaked two weeks ago at 87 percent of the long term average. That's far better than last year, when it was just 5 percent of normal and Gov. Jerry Brown announced restrictions on water use after four years of severe drought. But the drought is still far from over, especially in Southern California, where El Nino did not bring many major storms. Despite the better news this year, there are plenty of worrying signs about the Sierra snowpack, which provides about 30 percent of the water Californians use after it melts and flows into rivers and reservoirs, according to the state Department of Water Resources. "We'll be getting more rain and less snow here," said Roger C. Bales, a professor at the University of California, Merced, and a principal investigator with the Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory, which studies snowpack and other water related issues. "That means less snowpack storage and faster runoff." Dr. Bales was standing on a snowy slope in Yosemite last Thursday, at about 7,000 feet elevation, just off a 19th century wagon road that is used by hikers and snowshoers. Nearby, amid car size granite boulders and close to a soaring Ponderosa pine, were instruments that he and his fellow researchers use to obtain detailed information about the snowpack in several spots throughout the southern Sierra. Proof was close at hand, as well. Until the last quarter mile of a two mile hike here from 6,300 feet, snowshoes were not needed. What snow remained was in small patches. Similar effects of climate change have been seen throughout the Sierra, including at the Central Sierra Snow Laboratory, which is operated by the University of California at Berkeley near the Donner Pass, about 120 miles to the north. Researchers there still make some measurements the way they have since the lab started in the 1940s, by inserting special metal tubes into the snow. "We are seeing an ever increasing percentage of annual and winter precipitation in liquid rather than solid form," said Randall Osterhuber, who spends winters at the lab. The altitude above which snow accumulates is becoming higher as temperatures warm. "That change in elevation means a lot less terrain is covered in snow." Climate change is also expected to increase precipitation in some areas, because warmer air can hold more moisture. But it is not yet clear if that will be the case in the Sierra Nevada. Snowpack is measured in "snow water equivalent," or how much water would result if the snow were melted. When snow first falls in the Sierra, it is usually dry and powdery, with about 10 to 12 percent moisture by volume, but as it accumulates and compresses, the moisture content rises to about 40 percent. So 30 inches of snow on March 30 would be equivalent to about 12 inches of water. The data from Dr. Bales's instruments will not be downloaded until later in the spring, but just up the slope, other instruments set up by the Department of Water Resources send data continuously to state offices in Sacramento. Last Thursday, they recorded a water equivalent of 18.36 inches. With warm spring temperatures, the snowpack here was past its peak, with the water equivalent declining by more than three inches in less than two weeks. The Department of Water Resources instruments are set up in a relatively open part of the forest. The observatory's instruments, by contrast, are near the Ponderosa pine, and there are three of them: one next to the trunk, one a little farther away where water drips from the tips of the branches, and one in the open, about 20 feet away. Other sensors, which are buried, detect how much water is in the ground. The goal is to gather a complete picture of the snowpack, which is far from a uniform blanket of white. A tree, for example can affect snow cover in several ways, Dr. Bales said. Some snow is caught by the branches and turns directly to vapor. Other flakes melt and the water drips to the ground. The tree trunk itself absorbs sunlight and re emits it as heat, melting the snow around it. Boulders do the same thing. Even the tiniest pieces of forest litter needles or bits of pine cones can heat up in the sunlight and cause melting. "We're strategically sampling the landscape," Dr. Bales said. "We pretty much know what topographic features affect snowpack." That will give water managers a truer understanding of how much water the snowpack will generate. Trees also affect the amount of water stored in the mountains simply by growing, sucking up water from the ground. Some of it is used in photosynthesis, but much of it is lost through evaporation and transpiration through the leaves and stems. Dr. Bales and his colleagues study this, too, with instruments atop towers that measure the flow of water vapor from the tree canopy. The scientists learned that a lot of water was lost through the trees more than was even thought to be there in some cases. "That told us the precipitation estimates that people had for higher elevations were just plain wrong," Dr. Bales said. Warmer temperatures also mean that trees grow faster, and don't necessarily shut down for the winter. Thus they use more of the melting snow, and over a longer period. That leaves less water to flow into streams and down to reservoirs. Less snow, earlier melting and faster growth mean that more trees are running out of water in the summer. Mohammad Safeeq, a colleague of Dr. Bales at the university, said that, in general, water was flowing off the mountains two weeks earlier than in the past. "Two weeks in a three month summer window is significant," he said. Water stressed trees are more susceptible to pests and disease, so one result of the changes is more tree deaths. This is readily apparent at Yosemite in the drive from the valley floor, where the green hillsides are dotted in some cases in large numbers with the brown of dead pines and firs. Contributing to the problem is the fact that there are many more trees here than there used to be. A century ago, Dr. Safeeq said, Yosemite had perhaps 20 trees an acre; now the number is closer to 100. That means more of the melting snowpack never gets off the mountain to the valley below, he said. The greater number of trees is due in part to years of forest agency policies under which small natural fires were quickly extinguished to protect homes and other property in the mountains. But smaller, less intense fires are nature's way of thinning the forest, culling trees that are less fire resistant, said Martha H. Conklin, a Merced professor and another principal investigator with the observatory. Paradoxically, because fire suppression leaves so much timber on the mountains, it can lead to much bigger and hotter fires, like the Rim Fire that burned 250,000 acres in and around Yosemite and destroyed more than 100 structures in 2013. Fire suppression is a controversial subject in California. But thinning the forest by letting small fires run their course would increase snowpack because more of the snow would reach the ground, and less of the water would be taken up by the trees. That could be, in effect, like adding an entire new reservoir of water in the mountains, rather than building a new billion dollar reservoir down in the valley.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
For Two Writers, the Road Not Taken Beckons Anew The path that led Michael Ruhlman to Ann Hood began in 1988 at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont. "I saw Ann, who had already established herself as a great writer, walking down a path, arm in arm, with two other novelists," Mr. Ruhlman recalled. "At the time, I was an aspiring writer trying to ingratiate myself with as many novel and fiction writers as I could." So he decided to call out her name and tell her just that. "I just sort of yelled 'Ann Hood' in her direction," Mr. Ruhlman said. "I don't know why I did it, I just did." Ms. Hood, who a year earlier had written her first novel, the best selling "Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine," turned toward Mr. Ruhlman with a puzzled look. "You will," she told him before moving on. They would return to their own paths that would not cross again for 20 years, though Mr. Ruhlman, now 53, continued to maintain what he called "a literary crush" on Ms. Hood, now 60. "I didn't know her to actually love her, but over the years, I fell in love with everything about her writing," he said. "In the back of my mind, I always remembered how she inspired me on that path in Vermont." Two decades later, Ms. Hood and Mr. Ruhlman met again in Cleveland, at a 2008 weekend writers' conference where both were scheduled to speak. By then, Ms. Hood was married with two children and had written other best selling books, as well as numerous short stories and magazine articles. She was also teaching creative writing courses while splitting time between homes in Providence, R.I., and Manhattan. Mr. Ruhlman, a Duke graduate, had established himself as a nonfiction writer who collaborated with chefs to produce books like "The Making of a Chef" (1997) and "The Reach of a Chef" (2006). As she waited for her turn to speak, Ms. Hood noticed what she described as "a very, very good looking man" walking into the room. "The same cute guy I was asking about gets up in this crowded room filled with influential writers, and says, 'I'm a little nervous today because Ann Hood is in the audience, and I've been in love with her since 1988.'" Later, Mr. Ruhlman was signing one of his books when he looked up at the next person in line and saw Ms. Hood standing there. "He kind of jumped up when he saw me," she said. "I joked with him a bit, saying that, typically, I would usually know if someone had a crush on me for 20 years." Before their paths diverged once more, Mr. Ruhlman said to Ms. Hood, "The next time you're in Cleveland, give me a call and I'll cook dinner for you." "I knew I would never be in Cleveland again," she said. "So we exchanged books and email addresses and said our goodbyes." But they managed to stay in touch, chatting on occasion via email and text, each learning a little bit more about the other with every press of a send button. Ms. Hood, born in West Warwick, R.I., grew up with a passion for telling her own stories. "When I was a kid, 12, 13 and 14 years old, living in my little tiny town in Rhode Island and dreaming of being a writer, I used to sit on my bed and listen to Simon and Garfunkel," she said. "They had a song called 'The Dangling Conversation'; it's actually a very depressing song, but there's a line in it that goes, 'You read your Emily Dickinson and I my Robert Frost,' and I used to think that someday I'm going to meet a guy who loves poetry like I do, and we are going to talk about Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson." Along the way to reaching her goals, Ms. Hood made a few detours. After graduating from the University of Rhode Island, she worked as a T.W.A. flight attendant from 1978 to 1986, living in Boston, St. Louis and New York. "I went from asking people if they wanted beef or chicken for dinner to writing best selling novels and attending the most incredible book parties ever," said Ms. Hood, who was still at T.W.A. when she earned a master's degree in American literature at New York University. But her own story was not without tragedy. In 2002, her 5 year old daughter, Grace, died from a virulent form of strep, driving Ms. Hood into a depression so dark that she could not write a sentence for a year. She began coping with the pain through long knitting sessions and expressed her grief the best way she knew how through her powerful prose. In 2006, Ms. Hood wrote about her daughter's death in a Modern Love column for The New York Times. Mr. Ruhlman recalled breaking down in tears when he read the column. "I cannot imagine losing a child and the pain and suffering that goes along with that," said Mr. Ruhlman, a native of Cleveland who raised a daughter and a son there with his wife. In fall 2014, another of Ms. Hood's books, "An Italian Wife," had just been published. In an attempt to help promote it, Ms. Hood's publicist asked her if she knew of any food writer who might be willing to take Ms. Hood out to an Italian restaurant to interview her about her Italian roots and her grandmother's cooking. She was living in Providence at that time three years after Grace's death, Ms. Hood and her husband had adopted a daughter, Annabelle and he was still in Cleveland. But they discovered they had studio apartments in Manhattan that were a block apart. They met at a West Village restaurant, where the interview did not go exactly as hoped in fact, it was better. "The food was terrible and the place was noisy, but the company was delightful," Ms. Hood said. "We knew that we were kindred spirits that first night." "We knew what we had from the start, so why wait?" he said. "We have both lost close friends, some of them in their 50s, so we know that life can be too short we shouldn't allow ourselves to believe that it is still early morning, when's it's actually late in the afternoon." They were married on April 20 on an overcast day at Abingdon Square in Manhattan, with a few relatives and friends on hand. Laura Lippman, the crime writing novelist and a longtime friend of Ms. Hood, became a Universal Life minister to officiate. She told those assembled, "This is an occasion born of a particular postponement, of years lived and miles spanned, only to circle back to that path in Vermont where a man called a woman's name and she turned and responded to his greeting." Two such as you with such a master speed Cannot be parted nor be swept away. Her daughter, Annabelle, read Dickinson's "Hope Is the Thing With Feathers." That perches in the soul And sings the tune without the words After the ceremony, Mr. Ruhlman took Ms. Hood by the hand and they traveled their first path together as husband and wife, making their way through the city streets, past construction workers and honking horns on their way to the reception at Barbuto, a restaurant several blocks away. Following behind were their guests, including Ms. Hood's mother, Gloria Hood; her son, Sam; and Annabelle. Mr. Ruhlman was trailed by his mother, Carole Ruhlman; and son, James. Mr. Ruhlman said of Ms. Hood: "I get the sense that from the moment I was born, I started knowing her. There is the platonic notion of love in which Plato postulated that one soul is separated from the other at birth and they each spend the rest of their lives searching for the other half. "Well, if that's true," he said, "then I've finally found the soul I've been searching for."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
CHANGSHA, China The crash happened in an instant two years ago, ending 40 lives, injuring 192 people and casting a lasting shadow over the reputation of China's high speed rail system. When a rainstorm briefly disabled the signaling equipment on a high speed rail line near Wenzhou in southern China on July 23, 2011, one high speed train stopped on a concrete viaduct and the one behind it did not. The stopped train had just started moving forward again when the trailing train smashed into it, spilling shattered cars off the viaduct and 65 feet down into the fields below. While the crash is still talked about in China today, statistics suggest that China's high speed trains have actually proved to be one of the world's safest transportation systems so far. Less clear is how long that safety record will last. Government data shows that the system has carried about 1.8 billion passengers since the start of 2009. Rail experts inside and outside China say they are not aware of any fatal crashes other than the one near Wenzhou. They also note that obsessive attention to the rail system by social media users means that it would be nearly impossible to cover up another fatal high speed train crash although there have been unconfirmed reports of pedestrians killed after sneaking past fences and on to the tracks.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Walter J. Minton in an undated photo. In his 23 years at G.P. Putnam's Sons, he published best sellers like "The Godfather" and acclaimed novels like "Lord of the Flies" as well as controversial works like "Lolita." Walter J. Minton, who as president of G.P. Putnam's Sons published Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," the 18th century novel known as "Fanny Hill" and other sexually explicit works that rankled the guardians of decency but broke ground against censorship, died on Tuesday at his home in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla. He was 96. Balancing a passion for books and a tolerance for risk, Mr. Minton succeeded his father, Melville Minton, in 1955 at the helm of Putnam's and its subsidiaries. Over the next 23 years, he published Norman Mailer's "The Deer Park" (1955) , the first American edition of John le Carre' s "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" (1964), Mario Puzo's "The Godfather" (1969) and many other best sellers. His lists also included William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" (1962), many American editions of Simone de Beauvoir and much of Art Buchwald's humor. Among the first to recognize the potential of mass market paperbacks, Mr. Minton acquired Berkley Books in 1965 and turned thrillers by Lawrence Sanders and spy novels by Len Deighton into page turning triumphs and their authors into household names. But he was perhaps best known for books that challenged the nation's prevailing notions and legal definitions of pornography. The most notorious of them had been banned in the United States and abroad and rejected by American publishers fearing prosecution for obscenity. They also faced a gantlet of decorous critics, clergymen and anti smut crusaders. Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" had been banned in Britain and France and rejected by four American publishers before Mr. Minton published it in 1958. "Lolita," the tale of a professor's obsession with a 12 year old girl, had been banned in Britain and France (it was published by a small French company, Olympia Press, in 1955, a year before it was banned there). It had also been rejected by four American publishers, who came to regard their decisions as terrible mistakes. Mr. Minton flew through a snowstorm in a small plane to Ithaca, N.Y., to meet Nabokov and secure the deal. Published in 1958, the book was castigated in a review in The New York Times by Orville Prescott, who called it "repulsive" and "highbrow pornography." But it became one of the century's best sellers and faced no major legal problems. That was not the case, however, with Putnam's 1963 edition of "Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," the 1749 John Cleland novel about a 15 year old prostitute, also known as "Fanny Hill"; it ran into obscenity charges in New York and Massachusetts. Foes called it pornographic, and critics were divided. But Mr. Minton testified that it was one of the first novels in English literature and, having survived 200 years, "must have literary merit." Lower courts banned the book. But the United States Supreme Court, in a landmark 1966 decision, Memoirs v. Massachusetts, reversed them, ruling that only material that was "patently offensive" and "utterly without redeeming social value" could be banned as obscene. That refined a 1957 Supreme Court standard that had limited obscenity to material whose "dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest." In 1964, Mr. Minton published "Candy," a pornography spoof written six years earlier by the novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern and the poet Mason Hoffenberg. Reminiscent of "Candide," Voltaire's tale of an innocent nymphet, "Candy" had been banned in the United States and, like "Lolita," initially published by Olympia Press. Another ambitious Minton project was publication of an 1894 translation of the voluminous memoirs of Casanova. Mr. Minton also stirred controversy by issuing Elliott Roosevelt's 1973 book, "The Roosevelts of Hyde Park: An Untold Story." Written with James Brough, it elaborated on Franklin Delano Roosevelt's intimate relationships with his secretaries Marguerite LeHand and Lucy Page Mercer. The four other children of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt disassociated themselves from the work. Walter Joseph Minton was born in the Bronx on Nov. 13, 1923, to Melville and Ida (Harris) Minton, and grew up in Mount Vernon, N.Y. His father was a founder of the publisher Minton, Balch Company in 1924, and after its merger with Putnam's he became the company's president in 1932, publishing works by Winston Churchill, John Dewey and Adm. Richard E. Byrd. Putnam's, founded in New York in 1838, had a storied history; its authors included William Cullen Bryant, Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, James Russell Lowell and Edgar Allan Poe. George Palmer Putnam, the founder's grandson, published Charles Lindbergh's 1927 autobiography, "We," and later married the aviator Amelia Earhart. Walter graduated from the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, attended Williams College in Massachusetts in 1941 and 1942 and, after Army service in World War II, graduated from Harvard in 1947. He then joined his father's firm as a salesman and director of advertising and publicity for the subsidiaries Coward McCann (later Coward, McCann Geohegan) and John Day Company. Mr. Minton's marriage to Pauline Ehst, in 1949, ended in divorce in 1970. He married Marion Joan Whitehorn, who also worked at Putnam's, that same year. In addition to his wife, he is survived by three children from his first marriage, Andrew, David and Pamela Minton; three children from his second marriage, William, Jennifer Minton Quigley and Katherine Minton Aisner; 17 grandchildren; and four great grandchildren . After his father's death in 1955, Mr. Minton became president and later chairman of Putnam's. His family retained control of the company until 1967, when it went public. Putnam's was acquired by MCA, the diversified entertainment company, in 1975. MCA replaced Mr. Minton as president in 1978. A year later, he enrolled at Columbia University's law school, becoming the oldest full time student in its history. He graduated in 1982 at the age of 58, passed the New York and New Jersey bar exams and worked for Schepisi McLaughlin, in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., from 1983 to 1987, specializing in copyright, trademark and entertainment law. In a 2018 interview with The New Yorker, Mr. Minton talked about the rise of literary agents and the influence of Hollywood as factors in what he called the death of the publishing industry he had known. "Traditionally, publishers and editors talked to their authors," he said. "When the agents came along, that became much rarer. Now you went to lunch with them."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
General Electric began selling toasters to Americans 109 years ago but that homey relationship is ending. Last Monday, G.E. said it was selling its entire appliance division to a foreign company, Electrolux of Sweden, for 3.3 billion. An old company G.E. is an original member of the Dow Jones industrial average is shedding historically important assets, but the market barely blinked. Selling off legacy assets is the way of the world, even if the buyer is based overseas. It doesn't seem to matter where you make your products, either. Apple, the world's biggest company by market capitalization, captured attention last week with the introduction of a digital watch, larger iPhones and a slick electronic payment system. Amid the hoopla, there was scarcely any mention that much of its hardware is made outside the United States or that Apple's sophisticated lawyers and accountants could be expected to keep its American taxes low, partly by stashing much of its profit overseas. At this stage of globalization, in other words, most American consumers, investors and politicians have tacitly accepted that if a company is profitable, doesn't violate the law and produces appealing products and services, it can operate wherever and however it likes. That's why the furor over tax inversions is so intriguing. If you haven't kept abreast of the latest fashions in accounting, tax inversions are an increasingly popular maneuver among American companies seeking to save money by moving their tax domiciles abroad. While the markets have generally applauded them, the tactic has drawn fierce condemnation from many American politicians and consumer groups. In a speech in Los Angeles in July, President Obama denounced tax inversions as "unpatriotic." (He has had nothing to say about G.E.'s sale of its home appliance division or of Apple's global wheeling and dealing.) He added that while he would prefer to settle the issue through comprehensive tax reform legislation, his administration would stop tax inversions through other means, if need be. Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew said on Monday that the Treasury had been going over the details and would come to a decision soon. The explicit nature of tax inversions has attracted negative publicity. Burger King was pilloried last month after it said it would buy Tim Hortons of Canada and move its tax headquarters there. And Walgreen, which had been contemplating moving its tax domicile to Zug, Switzerland, as part of a merger with Alliance Boots, found itself the focus of controversy for simply entertaining the possibility. In the end, Walgreen decided that the outcry over tax inversions was too much to bear: Gregory D. Wasson, the Walgreen C.E.O., decided to go ahead with the Alliance Boots merger but not with a tax relocation overseas. "We had to consider the consumer backlash," Mr. Wasson said in a meeting with employees in August. "We had to consider the political backlash." Tax inversions, he said, are "going to become a big part of the November elections, frankly, between the Democrats and Republicans and corporate tax reform, loopholes and so forth." He summarized the reaction to his decision this way: "Main Street applauded it while the investors were disappointed." On Aug. 6, when he announced that there would be no inversion, Walgreen shares fell more than 14 percent. They have not yet recovered. There's the nub of the problem: Investors appear to like tax inversions. After Burger King said it would embark on one, its shares rose an astonishing 19.5 percent in a single day. No wonder that earlier this month, Newedge USA, a unit of Societe Generale, said that "the rising tide of opposition in Washington, D.C., toward reincorporating for tax reasons may, in fact, accelerate deal making as companies rush to complete conversions and other tax strategies before legislative changes." After years of a rising stock market and buoyant profits, much of them held abroad, American companies are engaging in a spree of mergers and acquisitions. And the United States is nearly alone among major industrialized nations in taxing or, more realistically, trying to tax all the worldwide income of corporations domiciled within its territory. Canada, Switzerland and nearly every place else tax only the income earned in their own territories. This makes tax planning much simpler. "Corporate executives have a fiduciary responsibility to do the best for their shareholders that they can," said Elizabeth Chorvat, a visiting professor at the University of Illinois college of business. "Under these circumstances, it's reasonable to expect them to explore whether their shareholders would benefit." Of course, many American corporations with foreign operations including G.E. and Apple haven't needed tax inversions; they've found other ways to minimize taxes in the United States. By keeping profits overseas, American tax bills can be deferred. Bloomberg estimated in March that the foreign cash hoard of American companies had reached 1.95 trillion. And congressional hearings last year disclosed that companies like Apple have reduced taxable earnings in the United States and shifted them to lower tax territories overseas. But inversions may make it much easier to reduce American corporate taxes, Edward Kleinbard, a professor of law and business at the University of Southern California, said in a recent report. He opposes inversions, saying they are stripping the United States of its tax base. While Burger King and Walgreen may have galvanized public opinion, neither fits the classic inversion profile, Professor Chorvat said. Combinations that appear to do so, she said, are AbbVie's merger with Shire in Britain, Medtronic's merger with Covidien in Ireland, Alkermes's merger with Elan in Ireland and Valeant's merger with Biovail in Canada. When companies have substantial revenue from "intangibles" including intellectual property like patents and trademarks that can be located overseas, she said, "executives who presumably have inside knowledge of the true market value of their companies" may find a shift in tax domicile especially advantageous. In a study of "the first wave of tax inversions" those that took place before Congress tightened the rules in 2004 she found that companies that moved their tax domiciles outperformed the overall stock market. It's too early to tell whether the current wave will be similarly lucrative, she said, but corporate motivations are clear. While inversions prompt immediate tax bills for some shareholders, she said, they often end up being beneficial. By prohibiting techniques that enable corporations to cut their tax bills, new Treasury regulations could make inversions less attractive. Yet inventive lawyers and accountants are likely to find ways to keep taxes low without drawing as much attention. Fundamentally, low taxes are in corporations' narrow self interest but if corporate taxes dip low enough, individuals must pay more or the government must cut services or borrow money. Facing this quandary, Republicans and Democrats alike have called for comprehensive tax reform for years, with little to show for it. In the meantime, amid rampant globalization, American corporations are doing what they do best: finding ways to profit, regardless of national borders.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Two weeks after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took down a statement about airborne transmission of the coronavirus, the agency on Monday replaced it with language citing new evidence that the virus can spread beyond six feet indoors. "These transmissions occurred within enclosed spaces that had inadequate ventilation," the new guidance said. "Sometimes the infected person was breathing heavily, for example while singing or exercising." The incident was only the latest in a series of slow and often puzzling scientific judgments by the C.D.C. and by the World Health Organization since the start of the pandemic. Despite evidence that use of face coverings can help cut down on viral spread, for example, the C.D.C. did not endorse their use by the public until April, and the W.H.O. did not do so till June. Regarding aerosols tiny airborne particles the C.D.C. lagged behind even the W.H.O. In July, 239 experts who study aerosols called on the W.H.O. to acknowledge that the coronavirus can be transmitted by air in any indoor setting and not just after certain medical procedures, as the organization had claimed. Notably, the C.D.C.'s new guidance softens a previous statement referring to the coronavirus as "an airborne virus," a term that may have required hospitals to treat infected patients in specialized rooms and health care workers to wear N95 masks anywhere in a hospital. The new advice instead says the virus can "sometimes be spread by airborne transmission" and can be spread by both larger droplets and smaller aerosols released when people "cough, sneeze, sing, talk, or breathe." But while the virus can be airborne under some circumstances, it is not the primary way the virus spreads, the C.D.C. said. "I'm a little concerned that they still distinguish between close contact and airborne transmission, implying that airborne transmission only matters beyond six feet," said Linsey Marr, an expert in airborne transmission of viruses at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. "Airborne transmission also occurs at close contact and is probably more important than the spray of large droplets." The revisions arrived as President Trump received treatment at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., for what may be a severe case of Covid 19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. (Mr. Trump left the hospital on Monday evening.) Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., too, may have been exposed to the virus during the presidential debate with Mr. Trump. But he is continuing to campaign, his aides said, because he did not meet the C.D.C. requirement for close contact less than six feet of distance from an infected person. But in a press statement accompanying the new guidance, the C.D.C. said, "People are more likely to become infected the longer and closer they are to a person with Covid 19." Mr. Trump talked loudly and at length during the debate, which experts have said could have released 10 times as much virus as breathing alone. The new language on the C.D.C. website makes some of the same points as a previous version, which quietly appeared on the C.D.C. website on Sept. 18 and was taken down just three days later. At the time, C.D.C. officials said the document had been posted in error and had not yet been cleared through the agency's rigorous scientific review. In both documents, the agency emphasized the risk of infection in poorly ventilated indoor environments. Under such circumstances, the amount of infectious smaller droplets and particles expelled by the people with Covid 19 "became concentrated enough to spread the virus to other people," the agency said, even to those who arrived in a room shortly after an infected person left. But the new version struck a more conservative tone on airborne transmission, saying it is much more common for the virus to spread through close contact with an infected person than through airborne transmission. Some experts praised the softer emphasis on airborne transmission. "This is consistent with what the epidemiological data has shown us opportunistic and situational airborne events do occur, but close contact is really where it's at," said Saskia Popescu, a hospital epidemiologist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. But on Monday, a group of aerosol scientists including Dr. Marr contended the opposite in a letter to the journal Science. "There is overwhelming evidence that inhalation represents a major transmission route," the researchers wrote. The new guidance takes on urgent importance as cooling temperatures send people back indoors, where risk of the virus spreading by air is highest. The agency's advice also guides managers of schools, offices, hospitals and other public buildings in preparing for the winter by improving their ventilation systems and taking other precautions. Scientists disagree on the precise definitions of droplets and aerosols, and on their relative contribution to the spread of the virus. But they generally agree that droplets are heavier and fall more quickly to the ground, whereas lighter aerosols can linger in the air indoors. Before it was taken down on Sept. 21, the previous version of the C.D.C. guidance was the agency's first unambiguous acknowledgment that the virus spread by air. Before that, the agency had emphasized hand hygiene, wearing face coverings and maintaining six feet of distance as the primary ways for people to protect themselves. Those things all do matter, experts said, but it has been clear for months that at least in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, the virus can travel farther than six feet. In August, for example, scientists reported that they had successfully isolated live virus from aerosols collected at distances of seven and 16 feet from an infected patient in a hospital. Some scientists have also said that spread by aerosols is the most likely explanation for superspreader events, such as a cluster of cases following a choir practice in Washington State and perhaps the White House celebration for Judge Barrett. Aerosol transmission indoors may also explain the surge in Southern states this summer as people stayed in air conditioned indoor spaces. But the C.D.C. had not openly acknowledged the risks of coronavirus floating in particles adrift in indoor air, beyond indirect nods to the importance of ventilation in schools and businesses. After public outcry, the W.H.O. agreed to review the new evidence and updated its guidance a few days later to reflect that the virus may linger in aerosols in crowded indoor spaces. But the C.D.C. did not directly acknowledge this change, even though parts of its website have advised schools and businesses to upgrade their ventilation systems. The reversal on Sept. 21 to language that emphasized only droplets as transmission vectors led some public health experts to speculate that the agency had been ordered to take down the acknowledgment of floating aerosols. The agency had reversed its position on another recommendation, one that said close contacts of infected people did not need to be tested if they had no symptoms. After The New York Times reported that the language had been dictated by political appointees in the administration rather than by C.D.C. scientists, the agency reverted to more scientific phrasing and recommended that everyone who has been in contact with an infected person should get tested, regardless of symptoms.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Dwayne Johnson, the actor and former wrestler known as the Rock, announced on Instagram on Wednesday that he and his family had recently tested positive for the coronavirus. Mr. Johnson, 48, said they had become infected around two and a half weeks ago, from "very close family friends." He called it "one of the most challenging and difficult things we have ever had to endure as a family," but added that he and his family were now "on the other end of it" and were healthy and no longer contagious. While the symptoms were mild for his youngest daughters, Jasmine and Tiana, Mr. Johnson said he and his wife had a "rough go" with the virus. "It baffles me that some people out there including some politicians will take this idea of wearing masks and make it part of a political agenda," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
"I don't want to be looked at anymore," Whitney Solloway says. "I want to be the one that does the looking." "That is where the power lies," agrees the wealthy gallery owner to whom she is speaking. Soon she will tell him all her dreams owning her own gallery, where she can foster new artists whose work shows her things she's never seen before. Soon after that, she'll be making love to her abusive ex boyfriend while the owner looks on and masturbates. The quid pro quo is explicit, in every sense. But Whitney's initial exchange with her would be benefactor speaks to more than their arrangement. What is "The Affair" if not a five season long exploration of the power of looking? Noah and Helen Solloway; their departed counterparts, Cole and Allison Lockhart; Cole and Allison's daughter, Joanie; the odd boyfriend or girlfriend; and now, at long last, Noah and Hellen's daughter Whitney: Whatever humiliations and calamities befall them, they have been given the ability, in turns, to make us see it all through their eyes. That is power. And on this week's episode, "The Affair" wields that power beautifully and provocatively. Noah takes the lead in the episode's first segment technically speaking, anyway, since as usual it's a tale of a hapless antihero buffeted by circumstance. A slow motion shot of his ex wife Helen as she enters the room indicates that he is falling for her again, and hard. But within minutes, he learns from his obsequious colleague Josh that her relationship with the actor Sasha Mann, who has hijacked a writing credit and overall creative control on their movie and banned Noah from the set has become tabloid fodder. Noah's relationship with the rest of his family is also rocky. His ex mother in law, Margaret (a truly glorious turn by Kathleen Chalfant ), wants him to help care for her husband, Bruce, who has Alzheimer's. She also wants him to plant sex toys in Sasha's bedroom in order to sabotage his relationship with Helen. At the same time, Noah's daughter Stacey has her first period while Helen is out, and Noah is a poor, if welcome, substitute. On a lighter note, Noah buys the wrong fabric to complete his son Trevor's Dr. Frank N Furter Halloween costume. (As a former "Rocky Horror" kid myself, I can relate.) What follows is a relatively rare case of Noah's getting exactly the humiliation he deserves. After sneaking into Sasha's Halloween party, he is about to abandon the sex toy plan when a smitten crew member comes on to him. Recalling how finding a telltale bra led Helen to end their marriage, he finagles a lacy undergarment off this poor woman, plants it in Sasha's bedroom ... and promptly gets caught in the act by Sasha and Helen. It's one of the most flagrantly scummy things Noah has done in ages, evincing a complete disregard for anyone but himself. Noah's daughter Whitney has the opposite problem, as we learn in her first ever (and, given the great performance of Julia Goldani Telles through the years, long overdue) point of view segment: She is putting others' needs ahead of her own to a near crippling degree. Whitney is the sole breadwinner in a relationship with an artist who seems to spend his days doing more napping and texting her about unpaid rent than working. First thing in the morning and last thing at night, he quizzes her on the personal factoids she needs to know in order to win him a visa. He mocks her connections to the upper stratosphere of the art world as mere capitalist social climbing. (Perhaps Noah was right when he warned her last week about getting married too young.) Whitney's work life is no better than her life at home. Her boss is a condescending gallery owner who overworks and underpays her, if she pays her at all. And when Whitney's abusive ex, the nude photographer known as Furkat, swans into the gallery looking for her, Whitney's boss asks her to take her to his opening that night. (As played by the actor Jonathan Cake, Furkat is even more unctuous than Claes Bang's Sasha Mann.) Furkat apologizes for having struck her back in Season 3 , but once she's at the gallery, Whitney discovers that the apology was, in fact, a part of an elaborate installation piece in which kaleidoscopic monitors display the moment, flanked by nudes taken of Whitney years earlier. Despite the deception, Whitney is flattered. Perhaps that should come as no surprise despite her expressed desire to be the subject rather than the object of the gaze at least Furkat treats her like someone worth being around. But the sex scene that follows, and the interloper who accompanies it, complicate even this consolation prize. As is custom now, the episode ends three and a half decades later, with Joanie Lockhart. Here, perhaps more clearly than anywhere else, we see the power of being the one who looks. Joanie spends her brief P.O.V. segment cleaning out her father's abandoned home. She discards photos of her parents holding her as a baby; the love letters her tormented grandfather received from his mistress in California; even the small wooden toy box that belonged to Gabriel, her older brother, who drowned as a toddler years before she was born. Joanie does not wish to look at her family anymore, which gives her the power to effectively wipe them from existence. With one or two exceptions, that is. Wittingly or no, she takes her mother's distinctive bicycle out of the garage and rides it to a nearby cemetery. She bends to look at a tombstone. "Hi, Dad," she says. The stone reads "COLE MCGINTY LOCKHART 1979 2053." Perhaps this is just one last look before she excises her past completely. Or perhaps it's an indication that she'll be looking deeper into the past, giving us a glimpse of how her father died and perhaps even uncovering the truth about her mother's murder. However the remaining episodes of the series wind up looking, through Joanie's eyes or anyone else's, I expect the result to be powerful. None I could spend this whole section rattling off killer Margaret lines, but since several would be too vulgar for publication, I'll content myself with her exchange with Trevor regarding his Frank N Furter drag: "If you have to be gay, can't you be the elegant kind?" "You mean like grandpa?" None O.K., one more, and this one is more serious. When she asks Noah why she, rather than he, must go out to buy menstrual supplies for Stacey, he barks: "I'm her father! I'm staying here in case she needs me!" "There you are, Noah," Margaret replies. "Welcome back. It's nice to see you again." It's Noah's one moment of grace in his whole sordid segment. None Whitney's boss is star struck when Furkat strolls in, and she expresses this to the photographer in very oeuvre specific terms: "I love your vaginas." None When Furkat reveals his installation to Whitney, he says, "It's all for you!" That's the same thing the nanny says to Damien in "The Omen," right before the party ends for her, permanently. None Whitney and Joanie's segments prominently feature the song "Noise" by the artist Zsela: "They're packing up the pieces / Of a broken love affair."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
NIAGARA ON THE LAKE, CANADA The slip of paper lodged in Shaw Festival programs at a recent Saturday matinee didn't beg for donations or warn about an understudy. Instead, it had a 5 offer for a bonus play one that would begin at 11:30 that very evening. The day before that, attendees of George Bernard Shaw's "Androcles and the Lion" were handed juggling balls to chuck onto the stage. Whenever this happened, the cast members burst into a song or recited from Shaw's prologue or told a little story about themselves. And the day before that, devotees of this 56 year old summer festival a 23.3 million enterprise that runs for nine months and sells more than 235,000 tickets a year received even less notice about a workshop of a new work. It was the latest version of Secret Theater, in which anyone who gets onto an email list is informed of one off performances with short notice. There's a new artistic director in town preaching the gospel of "two way theater" at this Ontario hamlet 20 miles north of Niagara Falls, once the exclusive home of Shaw and his fellow early 20th century luminaries. And not all of the regulars, heretofore fed a steady diet of Wilde and Rattigan, are pleased. "I want to make the whole place more porous," said the festival's new artistic director, Tim Carroll, previously an associate director at Shakespeare's Globe in London. "I want to let people in, and I want to go out and find the people." Mr. Carroll, 51, represents a curious blend of familiar and radical: He is best known stateside for the "original practice" Globe productions of "Twelfth Night" and "Richard III" that he brought to Broadway in 2013, which hewed as closely as possible to the staging choices made at the turn of the 17th century. But he is also a founding member of the British guerrilla theater known as the Factory, which once staged a "Hamlet" in which any actor could end up performing any of the roles on any given night. The Shaw Festival actors presumably knew their parts for the Secret Theater performances, about which all parties have been tight lipped. Mr. Carroll finally allowed that one such event asked the audience to walk around Niagara on the Lake with a map, as scenes popped up around them. "Basically, our new mission is to celebrate the work and spirit of George Bernard Shaw any way we want," said Mr. Carroll, who is known throughout the company as "T.C." If that includes recent works by Branden Jacobs Jenkins or Will Eno (a fine boned rendition of his 2010 "Middletown") in its 11 play season, so be it. Mr. Carroll has stepped into the role on the heels of two consecutive years of operating deficits. Ticket sales have followed a gradual decline over the last decade here, and plans are currently on hold to build a new theater on a tract of land that the festival purchased for 3.63 million in 2014. One casualty of his arrival is the festival's much discussed mandate. The first three years of its existence were devoted solely to Shaw, and for decades the repertory was confined to works written during his lifetime. (He lived to the age of 94, giving the festival quite a bit of latitude.) Over time, the definition expanded to include contemporary works set during Shaw's lifetime as well as plays on Shavian themes. "It had become a bit of a running joke, about the ever expanding mandate," Mr. Carroll said. (In fact, next year's season includes a work by a playwright who missed Shaw's lifetime by some 240 years: William Shakespeare.) The repertory acting system, however, remains a hallmark of the festival. On this particular day, Jonathan Tan was assaying a smug Lord Chancellor in Shaw's "Saint Joan" less than two hours after hopping around the stage as a frog in a charming family adaptation of Oscar Wilde's tales for children. Three of Mr. Tan's "Wilde Tales" co stars got a longer break before making up the cast of that evening's surprise performance, "1979," a comedy about Joe Clark's absurdly short tenure as prime minister of Canada. Still, it is Mr. Carroll's innovations that have become the talk of this town's many coffee shops and wine bars and ice cream parlors. It is not unusual to find audience members who have been attending the Shaw Festival for decades. And unsurprisingly, opinions among these stalwarts vary widely. "Change is hard, especially for people who are older," said Betty Schaeffer of Rochester, who has been coming with her husband for 31 years and had seen two previous festival stagings of "Saint Joan" before this year's streamlined production, directed by Mr. Carroll. "It all feels very, very different all of a sudden. I like it." But Leslie Varnick and Michael St. Clair, who have been visiting from Cleveland for nearly as long, warned that the unique nature of the festival is in jeopardy. "Anyone wants to come in and put their stamp on things, of course," Ms. Varnick said. "But I want the work to be honored, and a lot has been lost. It can feel a bit like a circus now." Mr. Carroll will be the first to admit that the new approach is a work in progress. "Some people in the company would rather not try something until we've worked out exactly how to do it," he said. "And I say to them, 'Let's just get it wrong this year. And then next year, it will be much easier to get it right.' " The festivities begin before each play starts. Rather than use the typical recorded preshow announcement, Mr. Carroll enlists a member of the festival's cast, crew or staff to speak live. Gray Powell, who performed for 10 seasons under the previous artistic director, Jackie Maxwell, recently gave his first of these impromptu addresses. "It's an experiment, but then, all theater is an experiment," said Mr. Powell, who has roles in "Middletown" and "Saint Joan" this season. "The important thing is that T. C. has gotten people off the backs of their seats and closer to the front."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Ford announced Tuesday that it was developing technology with the company Telogis that would allow police departments to monitor the driving behavior of officers. Using telematics, Ford said police administrators could prevent crashes by encouraging good driving and the use of seatbelts. Ford said the program would also provide details about "lateral acceleration, spins, yaw rates, pursuit mode, accelerator pedal position, brake pedal position, engine torque, antilock braking system events, and stability control and traction control events" on police interceptor vehicles. (Ford) MarketShare, a marketing analytics company, released a report Tuesday concluding that Twitter spurred 716 million in auto sales among 20 models that accounted for 34 percent of domestic sales in 2013. According to the study, luxury compact cars generated 17.80 for every dollar invested into social media and midsize cars, which sell in greater volume, generated 7.90 for each dollar invested. (Ad Age) The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced this week that it was investigating Chrysler because of delays in the implementation of three Ram truck recalls. The agency cited replacement part delays and "poor communications" from Chrysler, which recalled 1.2 million pickup trucks last year for a problem with the steering system. (Reuters) Humanetics, which produces crash test dummies, said this week that it was developing an obese dummy. One of the prototypes the company developed weighed 273 pounds. Chris O' Connor, the company's chief executive, said that obese people were 78 percent more likely than their nonobese counterparts to die in an auto accident. (CNN)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
"The Cuban" opens with Cuban jazz on the soundtrack and bright watercolors of mid 20th century Havana accompanying the credits. But things get more subdued, literally, as the watercolors start depicting a nursing home. Moving into live action, the colors are muted, the light diffuse. And they stay that way to the extent that you might wonder if something's technically wrong. But no. The director, Sergio Navarretta, switches back to vivid color for the vivid color memories of Luis Garcia (Louis Gossett Jr.), a once famous Cuban musician, now suffering from Alzheimer's disease and hobbled by anti psychotic drugs in that nursing home, in Ontario, Canada. The muting is a dramatic device, like Otto Preminger's shifting from a black and white present to a full color past in "Bonjour Tristesse." But Navarretta is considerably less adept than Preminger.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The final season of "Game of Thrones" arrives April 14. Before then, we're getting prepared by rewatching the first seven seasons. Sign up to get these straight to your inbox. So now that you've rewatched Season 4, do you need a drink? Here, let us be your cupbearer. Read on for a deeper dive into the season. If you're just joining us, you can catch up with recaps of past seasons with our ultimate watching guide, which also includes suggested episodes to rewatch in later seasons. Who Played the Game Best? House Lannister House Loser. Thanks to all the family squabbling, the Lannisters overlooked real threats and ended up sacrificing each other, to the detriment of the Seven Kingdoms. House Arryn thought they were safe and the Eyrie impregnable but they let Littlefinger waltz in and take the Vale for himself. House Martell lost their chance for revenge (and we lost the best part of the Dorne story) because Oberyn didn't know when to just walk away. So, the winner? House Baratheon. Stannis the Mannis is the only king looking to protect the realm, not just his own interests. Remember the realm, guys? Tyrion isn't the only poor soul in Westeros holding out for a hero a champion to stand up and fight for him. What is Hodor, if not Bran's champion? (Although not always voluntarily.) Yara hopes to become her brother Theon's champion in order to save him from Ramsay (too bad that Theon has become Reek and can't accept her rescue). And while both the Hound and Brienne deny any knight like affiliations, they are unmistakably chivalrous watching over a little orphan girl (even if the little girl in question hardly needs their help). Such heroism among humbler figures in this story points to the fact that those actually charged with protecting their people are generally selfish or feckless or both. When Tywin quizzes Tommen ("What makes a good king?"), they discuss several necessary qualities, but ultimately settle on wisdom, the crucial virtue for anyone seeking to rule over a kingdom filled with groups pursuing hotly contested interests. However, Tywin doesn't address the social contract between a monarch and his vassals that in return for fealty, kings and queens are accountable to their subjects as protectors of the realm. Tywin is aware of that responsibility, but he is more interested in using authority to advance his personal goals. In Meereen, Dany is driven less by calculation than extremist ideas about justice. As she learns in the aftermaths of Astapor and Yunkai, it's not enough to liberate slaves if their former masters retain institutional power. So, enraged by the ghastly crucified slave children she sees on the road, she executes all the masters. "They can live in my new world, or they can die in their old one," she says. But what exactly is Dany's new world? She has replaced an oligarchy with an absolute monarchy, one with a judicial system defined by a lack of due process and disproportionate sentencing, as Hizdahr zo Loraq points out. His father, a critic of the child slave crucifixions, was himself crucified. "Is it justice to answer one crime with another?" Hizdahr asks, in regards to executing the masters without questioning them first. Dany's response? That what she did was no crime. She's above the law because she is the law. That comes awfully close to Joffrey's assessment that the king can do what he likes. It's not like there are better models elsewhere. If you're a lord or a lady accused of a crime in Westeros, the only way you can hire someone to defend you is in a trial by combat; there are no lawyers in the courtrooms of Westeros. Nor are there rules regarding conflicts of interest among the three judges drawn from among your peers (more lords). In Tyrion's trial, Tommen recuses himself, presumably because he's related to the accused, the accuser and the victim, but Tywin stays on. Outside of the king's court, justice is even more arbitrary. The dissidents burned by Stannis and Melisandre presumably received no trial before their execution. Littlefinger is suspected of murder and faces a trial by two lords and one lady of the Vale, and half of their objections are that he's an outsider (Sansa's testimony clears him). Jon Snow is also tried for a few crimes breaking his vows, murdering Qhorin Halfhand. But the Night's Watch allows him to defend himself, and one judge on the bench decides he's telling the truth (good old Maester Aemon). That's enough to stay an execution, to the dismay of Alliser Thorne, the acting Lord Commander. Westerosi law is more consistent in the areas of property, inheritance, and succession it privileges the powerful, not the common people. Again and again in Season 4 we were reminded that in such a fundamentally unjust world, the people need a new kind of champion. Not someone who's trying to become king or queen in order to theoretically save the realm, but someone who'll fight to save the realm first. Love stories on "Game of Thrones" tend to end rather badly your lover dying in your arms, or pushing you through the Moon Door, or strangling you with a golden chain. We talked to actor Sibel Kekilli about the sad standoff between Tyrion and Shae in Season 4. (Adapted from an earlier interview with Kekilli.) How did you find out about your character's death? Dan Weiss and David Benioff told me that my role would be slightly different from the original character in the books, a bit bigger. But as I hadn't read the books at that point, I had no clue exactly what they meant. When I told some friends that I was going to be in the show, they spoiled the whole thing for me, big time. I actually thought they were going to kill me off at the end of Season 3, so after reading the scripts for that season, I asked Dan and David if they had changed their minds and decided to put Shae on the throne at the end? Unfortunately, their answer was no. But they gave me the good news that my character would live for one more season. So at least that was a nice surprise. What do you remember from your last day on set? My last day on set was actually the strangulation scene with Peter Dinklage, and I was rather sad that my time on "Game of Thrones" had come to its end. But I thought it was really kind that Dan and David came over from another set to watch me die. Did you read any of the fan reaction? Unfortunately, I did once. Apparently people can be really mean these days, and some can't differentiate between the fictional character and the real person. What bothered me the most was the fact that people didn't believe Shae was really in love with Tyrion. But I'm happy that it also could be the other way around. I once met Barack Obama, and he just said, "I am so sorry that they killed you off," with a big ironic smile. He was very kind and charming. And George R.R. Martin told me that if he had known me earlier, he wouldn't have me killed. He liked my Shae better than the one in the books. How did being on the show change your career? It's a bit crazy and scary at the same time. Sometimes I get recognized because of the show, even though it has been a while since I have been on the series. Sometimes it's really funny, because they think they know me from somewhere or have met me before. And if they find out that I played Shae in the show, they immediately say, "Ah! You betrayed Tyrion!" Who had your favorite death and why? Viserys's death was very memorable, and it had such an impact. And sorry to say, Joffrey's death was very good he was a horrible king, and his death scene was just magnificent. There were several departures from the Song of Ice and Fire books in Season 4, the most controversial being that in the show, Jaime and Cersei attend the funeral for their dead son. After a furor erupted, the show's creators and cast then gave everyone whiplash trying to explain it. The books are divided into point of view chapters, and this particular juncture in "A Storm of Swords" is told from Jaime's perspective. He has just returned to King's Landing from his stint as a prisoner of war and discovers his son/nephew Joffrey is dead. Alone in the sept with Joffrey's corpse, he and Cersei comfort one another with kisses and caresses. Cersei's receptive, but she objects, weakly, when Jaime starts kissing her neck. "No," she says. "Not here. The septons ..." But Jaime kisses her again, until she moans. Then he knocks the candles off the altar and lifts Cersei up onto it. Next, she pounds on Jaime's chest, "murmuring about the risk, the danger, about their father, about the septons, about the wrath of gods." This could be interpreted as a no, except that after Jaime starts having sex with Cersei, she begins whispering words that indicate assent (including the actual word "yes"): "Yes, my brother, sweet brother, yes, like that, yes, I have you, you're home now, you're home now, you're home." It's clear that Cersei's initial objections were to the holy location the Sept of Baelor and to the presence of her dead son's body. She reciprocates and consents to be roughly ravished, even if her consent is complicated. As author George R.R. Martin says, "Though the time and place is wildly inappropriate and Cersei is fearful of discovery, she is as hungry for him as he is for her." In the show, the circumstances are different. Jaime has been back in King's Landing for a while and Cersei has been standoffish, telling him he's been gone too long. The dialogue in the sex scene is different: We get her initial no, but not her later yes. She's at first receptive to a kiss, but then pulls away. "You're a hateful woman," Jaime angrily tells her. "Why have the gods made me love a hateful woman?" He grabs at her and starts tearing at her clothes. "Jaime, not here, please," Cersei says. "Please. Stop it. Stop it. Stop. No. Stop it. Stop. Stop. Stop. It's not right. It's not right. Don't. Don't." That's an awful lot of flat out no. Viewers and critics were disturbed and outraged by this scene, and there was much debate about whether what we saw was a rape. Some observers were unequivocal, sure that it was; others were confused by the ambiguous blocking and shot choices; and some thought what the hey Jaime was justified in taking what he wanted, however roughly. Pressed for clarification, the show's producers, the episode's director and the actors themselves sent out mixed messages, publicly disagreeing with one another and even contradicting themselves about the intention of the scene. The director Alex Graves claimed at first that it was intended to look consensual. "It becomes consensual by the end," he said in an interview with Hitfix, "because anything for them ultimately results in a turn on, especially a power struggle." In another interview, with Vulture, he attempted to clarify: "The big things to us that were so important, and that hopefully were not missed, is that before he rips her undergarment, she's way into kissing him back. She's kissing him aplenty." Graves then turned around and told the Hollywood Reporter that it was rape. Then during the "Inside the Episode" featurette, the showrunner David Benioff said the sex was forced: "She's saying no, and he's forcing himself on her." The actor Nikolaj Coster Waldau claimed that what we saw was both rape and not rape. "It took me awhile to wrap my head around it," he told the Daily Beast, "because I think that, for some people it's just going to look like rape. The intention is that it's not just that ... There are moments where she gives in, and moments where she pushes him away." This confusion regarding a fictional rape came at a time when Americans were grappling with defining what constitutes consent and coercion in real life, especially in regards to a few high profile cases. (Emma Sulkowicz started carrying her mattress around Columbia University that year.) Whether or not "Game of Thrones" intended Cersei to be raped by her brother/lover, the issue was dropped after this episode we see no subsequent recriminations between Cersei and Jaime for the rest of Season 4. Which would be strange, if it had been rape, because Cersei would seem to be the last sort of person to let such a thing slide. Instead she simply tells Tywin about their incest and then returns to Jaime and vows her everlasting love. Hmmm. Part of the viewer outrage that erupted around this scene was more plot focused. It seemed to reverse the narrative direction of Jamie being on a redemption arc. People were just starting to like Jaime and they felt betrayed. Very few of the fans so concerned about Jaime's narrative arc had as much to say about Cersei's. There have of course been ongoing objections to the sexual politics of Westeros a place where women are repeatedly threatened with rape and in fact are raped quite a lot. What could be the reason for turning an instance of consensual sex in the books into what appears to be yet another rape in the show? Answer still awaited. How Did You Get Your 'Game' On? You have more lingering questions! I have confusion over Daenerys' provenance. She says her father was the Mad King, yet we know that Elia Martell was the Mad King's wife, had two children with him, and all three of them were murdered by the Mountain. So who was Dany's mother? It's suggested that Dany is Jon Snow's "aunt" or something like that, but if her father was the Mad King, and Jon's father was the Mad King, too, then they are half siblings, with the same father. So what's the real story? Help! Roberta Smoodin I've been grappling with Jon's lineage for a while. I don't buy that he's a Targaryen. His hair gives ample evidence that he could be Robert Baratheon's son. Why did George R.R. Martin go to such great lengths regarding hair color as it pertains to lineages just to abandon it now? How can Jon Snow with his curly black (Baratheon like) hair come from a Targaryen (white blonde) and a Tully (brown/red)? It doesn't make sense. Also, now Jon would be Dany's nephew? Susan Keating Let's tackle these two lineage queries together, and hopefully sort through the confusion before Jon and Dany continue the Targaryen family tradition of incest any further! King Aerys II, the Mad King, was Dany's dad. But he was not married to Elia Martell he was married to his own sister, Rhaella. Rhaella had three children Rhaegar (the crown prince), Viserys and then Dany but died from complications during Dany's birth. Rhaegar was the one who married Elia Martell, and they had two children together, daughter Rhaenys and son Aegon. But Rhaegar abandoned Elia and the kids to run off with Lyanna Stark, with whom he had his third kid and her first. Rhaegar (a Targaryen) and Lyanna (a Stark, not a Tully) could have blonde or brunette kids, but the chance of white blonde was slimmer than brunette since the lighter hair color is a recessive gene. In this case, the dominant gene (darker hair) won out, giving Jon more of the Stark coloring. ("The seed is strong.") Although Lyanna was betrothed to Robert before running off with Rhaegar, this was not Robert's baby. Rather, Lyanna made her brother Ned (and Robert's BF) promise to protect the baby from Robert. "If Robert finds out, he'll kill him. You know he will," she told Ned on her death bed as she, too, died from childbirth. The new regime would have to wipe out the Targaryen line. And so Ned changed the kid's birth name (Aegon Targaryen) to a bastard name of the North (Jon Snow) and claimed him as his own. Jon is roughly nine months older than Dany, but she is his paternal aunt.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
SAN FRANCISCO More than 450 antiquarian book dealers in at least 26 countries pulled their books off an Amazon subsidiary on Monday, an impromptu protest after the site abruptly said it would drop all sellers from several nations. The flash strike against AbeBooks, which removed over 2.5 million books from the marketplace, is a rare concerted action by vendors against Amazon, which depends on third party sellers for much of its merchandise and revenue. The protest arrives as increasing attention is being paid to the extensive power that Amazon wields as a retailer a power that is greatest in books. The stores are calling their action Banned Booksellers Week. The protest got its start after AbeBooks sent emails last month to booksellers in countries including South Korea, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Russia to say that it would no longer "support" them. "We apologize for this inconvenience," the company said. As the news spread, even unaffected dealers were surprised and angered. AbeBooks, together with Amazon itself, is by far the biggest international marketplace for secondhand and rare books. AbeBooks lists millions of books and manages the payments. The booksellers mail the books directly from their shops. The platform was founded in 1995 and was bought by Amazon in 2008. It continues to operate independently, and many of its customers never even realize who the owner is. AbeBooks is based in Victoria, British Columbia, where it started. The Amazon subsidiary told the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers that it was scaling back because "it is no longer viable for us to operate in these countries due to increasing costs and complexities." The reaction was fierce. "AbeBooks is saying, 'We're cutting you and your country off. It's nothing you did, we just decided we don't want to deal with you anymore,'" said Scott Brown, a bookseller in Eureka, Calif. "It's infuriating." One of the affected booksellers was Antikvariat Valentinska, a large antiquarian store in the center of Prague. "The decision to close our account on such short notice has come as a complete shock, especially since no reason was given, not even upon request," the store said in a statement. "Just our company alone will almost certainly have to dismiss at least five employees." Last week, the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association, based in London, responded by saying it would drop AbeBooks as a sponsor of its 2019 book fair. "Our mission is to champion the highest standards of rare bookselling across the world, irrespective of location," the association said. "Sadly we feel that AbeBooks is not a suitable fair sponsor for us at this time." Simon Beattie, a British bookseller, set in motion the impromptu strike on Thursday afternoon. "I have decided to put my books on (permanent) vacation on ABE in solidarity with fellow booksellers in the Czech Republic, Hungary, South Korea and Russia," he wrote to colleagues. "I hope you might like to follow suit." In the tight knit, if loosely organized, antiquarian community, the idea quickly spread. On Saturday night, in response to a query from a reporter, AbeBooks issued a statement saying it was dropping the countries because "our third party payment service provider is closing at the end of the year." It added that, "We regret that we cannot continue to serve all sellers." Asked how many booksellers and countries were affected, Richard Davies, an AbeBooks spokesman, said, "I am not adding anything else to that statement." Mr. Brown, one of the dealers organizing the protests, said that for many of the booksellers, AbeBooks' actions underlined both Amazon's power and its refusal to be accountable for it. "The biggest e commerce giant in the world apparently finds it too complicated to do business in Prague," he said. "You have to wonder who's next. We're all vulnerable to Amazon's capricious actions."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
VIETNAM: An Epic Tragedy, 1945 1975, by Max Hastings. (Harper Perennial, 22.99.) Hastings, a British journalist and military historian who reported on the war, chronicles the conflict and its staggering destruction, excoriating both sides for corruption and inhumanity. The United States, he argues, failed most egregiously in not helping create a viable South Vietnam. Our reviewer, Mark Atwood Lawrence, called the book "monumental." UPSTREAM: Selected Essays, by Mary Oliver. (Penguin, 17.) The Pulitzer Prize winning poet, who died this year, turns her attention to the natural world that inspires her as well as to her literary forebears, including Emerson and Whitman. In these pages, Daphne Kalotay called the book a "gem of a collection" that "offers a compelling synthesis of the poet's thoughts." BOOMER1, by Daniel Torday. (Picador, 18.) The millennial protagonist of Torday's third work of fiction is a jobless Ph.D. who is forced to move back home, but hits a cultural nerve by creating an alter ego that declares war on boomers and inadvertently starts a movement. Our reviewer, Olivia Sudjic, called the novel a "contemporary satire with Shakespearean echoes." SEDUCTION: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood, by Karina Longworth. (Custom House, 17.99.) This portrait of the eccentric studio head places Hughes's pursuit of control over women, including Ava Gardner and Bette Davis, front and center. The book is "guaranteed to engross anybody with any interest ... in Hollywood, in ... MeToo and in the never ending story of men with power and women without," Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote here.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
'TARSILA DO AMARAL: INVENTING MODERN ART IN BRAZIL' at the Museum of Modern Art (through June 3). The subtitle is no overstatement: In the early 1920s, first in Paris and then back home in Sao Paulo, Brazil, this painter really did lay the groundwork for the coming of modernism in Latin America's most populous nation. Tired of the European pretenders in Brazil's art academies, Tarsila (who was always called by her first name) began to intermingle Western, African and indigenous motifs into flowing, biomorphic paintings, and to theorize a new national culture fueled by the principle of antropofagia, or "cannibalism." Along with spare, assured drawings of Rio and the Brazilian countryside, this belated but very welcome show assembles Tarsila's three most important paintings, including the classic "Abaporu" (1928): a semi human nude with a spindly nose and a comically swollen foot. (Jason Farago) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'BEFORE THE FALL: GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN ART OF THE 1930S' at Neue Galerie (through May 28). An exhibition in the form of a chokehold, the third of the Neue Galerie's recent shows on art and German politics pushes into the years of dictatorship, with paintings, drawings and photographs by artists deemed "degenerate" by the Nazis as well as by those who joined the party or who thought they could shut out the catastrophe. (You will know the dissidents, like Max Beckmann and Oskar Kokoschka; the fascists and sellouts are less known.) Gazing at ornery still lifes of dolls and dead flowers, or dreamy landscapes in imitation of an earlier German Romanticism, you may ask to what degree artists are responsible for the times in which they work. But then you see "Self Portrait in the Camp," by the Jewish German painter Felix Nussbaum made between his escape from a French internment camp and his deportation to Auschwitz and you know that there can be no pardon. (Farago) 212 628 6200, neuegalerie.org 'THOMAS COLE'S JOURNEY: ATLANTIC CROSSING' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through May 13). The Met's exhibition of the nation's first major landscape artist and progenitor of what would be called the Hudson River School is gorgeous, politically right for right now and a lesson in the mutability of art history. Politically, Cole's art is conservative, but it's also work that challenges and complicates that term. And this show is precisely about complication. Just as Cole is most realistically and revealingly seen and judged against the background of his time, so is the exhibition, coming as it does in this confounding MAGA moment. (Holland Cotter) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'DIAMOND MOUNTAINS: TRAVEL AND NOSTALGIA IN KOREAN ART' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through May 20). Mount Kumgang, or the "Diamond Mountain," lies about 90 miles from Pyeongchang's Olympic Stadium, but it's a world away: The august, multipeaked range lies in North Korea and has been impossible to visit for most of the past seven decades. Featuring stunning loans from the National Museum of Korea and other institutions in Seoul, South Korea, this melancholy beauty of a show assembles three centuries' worth of paintings of the Diamond Mountain range, and explores how landscapes intermingle nostalgia, nationalism, legend and regret. The unmissable prizes here are the painstaking paintings of Jeong Seon, the 18th century artist who is perhaps the greatest of all Korean painters. And later impressions of the mountains, including a blotchy vision from the Paris based modernist Lee Ungno, give a deeper historical weight to very live geopolitics. (Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'THE FACE OF DYNASTY: ROYAL CRESTS FROM WESTERN CAMEROON' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Sept. 3). In the African wing, a show of just four commanding wooden crowns constitutes a blockbuster in its own right. These massive wooden crests in the form of stylized human faces with vast vertical brows served as markers of royal power among the Bamileke peoples of the Cameroonian grasslands, and the Met's recent acquisition of an 18th century specimen is joined here by three later examples, each featuring sharply protruding cheeks, broadly smiling mouths and brows incised with involute geometric patterns. Ritual objects like these were decisive for the development of Western modernist painting, and a Cameroonian crest was even shown at MoMA in the 1930s, as a "sculpture" divorced from ethnography. But these crests had legal and diplomatic significance as well as aesthetic appeal, and their anonymous African creators had a political understanding of art not so far from our own. (Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION' at the Museum of the Moving Image. The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America's great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program "Sam and Friends" before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother's old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace and love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and story boards and rediscover some old friends. (Farago) 718 784 0077, movingimage.us 'PETER HUJAR: SPEED OF LIFE' at the Morgan Library and Museum (through May 20). It's hard to say which is more surprising: that Peter Hujar's photographs of underground life in New York in the 1970s and '80s have found their way to the Morgan Library and Museum, or that the classically minded institution has become unbuttoned enough to exhibit them in this heartbreaker of a show. Hujar (1934 87) lived most of his professional life in the East Village and, through studio portraits and cityscapes, captured a downtown that has since been all but erased by time, gentrification and AIDS. Although he was little known by the mainstream art world in his lifetime, this show, startlingly tender, reveals him to be one of the major American photographers of the late 20th century. (Cotter) 212 685 0008, themorgan.org 'THE INCOMPLETE ARAKI' at the Museum of Sex (through Aug. 31). It remains a bit of a tourist trap, but the for profit Museum of Sex is making its most serious bid yet for artistic credibility with a two floor exhibition of Japan's most prominent and controversial photographer. Nobuyoshi Araki has spent decades shooting Tokyo streetscapes, blossoming flowers and, notably, women trussed up in the baroque rope bondage technique known as kinbaku bi, or "the beauty of tight binding." Given the venue, it's natural that this show concentrates on the erotic side of his art, but less lustful visitors can discover an ambitious cross section of Mr. Araki's omnivorous photography, including his lastingly moving "Sentimental Journey," picturing his beloved wife, Yoko, from honeymoon to funeral. (Farago) 212 689 6337, museumofsex.com 'ZOE LEONARD: SURVEY' at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through June 10). Some shows cast a spell. Zoe Leonard's reverberant retrospective does. Physically ultra austere, all white walls with a fiercely edited selection of objects photographs of clouds taken from airplane windows; a mural collaged from vintage postcards; a scattering of empty fruit skins, each stitched closed with needle and thread it's an extended essay about travel, time passing, political passion and the ineffable daily beauty of the world. (Cotter) 212 570 3600, whitney.org 'LIKE LIFE: SCULPTURE, COLOR AND THE BODY (1300 TO NOW)' at the Met Breuer (through July 22). Taking a second run at the splashy theme show extravaganza, the Met Breuer has greater success. This one is certainly more coherent since it centers entirely on the body and its role in art, science, religion and entertainment. It gathers together some 120 sculptures, dolls, artist's dummies, effigies, crucifixes and automatons. Many are rarely lent and may not return any time soon. (Roberta Smith) 212 731 1675, metmuseum.org 'THE LONG RUN' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Nov. 4). The museum upends its cherished Modern narrative of ceaseless progress by mostly young (white) men. Instead we see works by artists 45 and older who have just kept on keeping on, regardless of attention or reward, sometimes saving the best for last. Art here is an older person's game, a pursuit of a deepening personal vision over innovation. Winding through 17 galleries, the installation is alternatively visually or thematically acute and altogether inspiring. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'SALLY MANN: A THOUSAND CROSSINGS' at the National Gallery of Art (through May 28). All of this photographer's strengths are on view in this deftly chosen and admirably displayed exhibition in Washington covering most of her 40 plus year career. The 108 images here (47 of which have never been exhibited before) provide a provocative tour through Ms. Mann's accomplishments and serve as a record of exploration into the past, into this country's and photography's history, stamped with a powerful vision. (Vicki Goldberg) 202 737 4215, nga.gov 'MILLENNIUM: LOWER MANHATTAN IN THE 1990S' at the Skyscraper Museum (through April). This plucky Battery Park institution transports us back to the years of Rudy Giuliani, Lauryn Hill and 128 kilobit modems to reveal the enduring urban legacy of a decade bookended by recession and terror. In the wake of the 1987 stock market crash, landlords in the financial district rezoned their old skyscrapers for residential occupancy, and more than 20 towers were declared landmarks, including the ornate Standard Oil building at 26 Broadway and the home of Delmonico's at 56 Beaver Street. Battery Park City flowered; yuppies priced out of TriBeCa came down to Wall Street; a new Guggenheim, designed by a fresh from Bilbao Frank Gehry, nearly arose by South Street Seaport. From this distance, the 1990s can seem almost like a golden age, not least given that, more than 16 years after Sept. 11, construction at the underwhelming new World Trade Center is still not finished. (Farago) skyscraper.org 'OUTLIERS AND AMERICAN VANGUARD ART' at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (through May 13). Tracing the interaction of taught and untaught artists over the past century, this exhibition tackles an impossibly immense subject and starts stronger than it finishes. But it presents quantities of stunning art in all mediums, revealing the vastness of American creativity and the many attempts by museums to do it justice. It proves more forcefully than ever that the distinction between the works of the self taught and that of the professionals has outlived its relevance. (Smith) 202 737 4215, nga.gov 'REBEL SPIRITS: ROBERT F. KENNEDY AND MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.' at the New York Historical Society (through May 20). Featuring stark black and white photographs of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as faded ephemera that memorialized them, this exhibition reveals the various ways in which the lives of these two influential figures were juxtaposed. It also traces the circuitous routes that belatedly pointed Kennedy toward the more incendiary goals King set first regarding civil rights, poverty and the Vietnam War. (Sam Roberts) 212 873 3400, nyhistory.org 'ALBERTO SAVINIO' at the Center for Italian Modern Art (through June 23). The paintings of this Italian polymath have long been overshadowed by the brilliant work of his older brother, Giorgio de Chirico. This show of more than 20 canvases from the late 1920s to the mid 30s may not change that, but the mix of landscapes with bright patterns and several eerie portraits based on family photographs are surprisingly of the moment. (Smith) 646 370 3596, italianmodernart.org 'SCENES FROM THE COLLECTION' at the Jewish Museum. After a surgical renovation to its grand pile on Fifth Avenue, the Jewish Museum has reopened its third floor galleries with a rethought, refreshed display of its permanent collection, which intermingles 4,000 years of Judaica with modern and contemporary art by Jews and gentiles alike Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and the excellent young Nigerian draftswoman Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. The works are shown in a nimble, nonchronological suite of galleries, and some of its century spanning juxtapositions are bracing; others feel reductive, even dilletantish. But always, the Jewish Museum conceives of art and religion as interlocking elements of a story of civilization, commendably open to new influences and new interpretations. (Farago) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org 'STEPHEN SHORE' at the Museum of Modern Art (through May 28). Not staged, not lit, not cropped, not retouched, the color photographs of this American master are feats of dispassionate representation. This must see retrospective curated with real wit by Quentin Bajac, MoMA's photo chief opens with Mr. Shore's teenage snaps at Andy Warhol's Factory. Then it turns to the road trip imagery of "American Surfaces" and the steely precision of "Uncommon Places" landmarks in photographic history that scandalized an establishment convinced the camera could find beauty solely in black and white. Mr. Shore is revealed not only as a peripatetic explorer but also a restless experimenter with new photographic technologies, from stereoscopic slide shows to print on demand books. The only flaw is his recent embrace of Instagram, allowing museumgoers to lazily flick through images on MoMA's smudged iPads. New technologies are great, but not at the expense of concentration. (Farago) 212 708 9400, moma.org '2018 TRIENNIAL: SONGS FOR SABOTAGE' at the New Museum (through May 27). This Bowery museum's fourth triennial exhibition, "Songs for Sabotage," is the smallest, tightest edition of the show so far. Immaculately installed, it's also the best looking. There's a lot of good work, which is global in scope and not by a list of prevetted up and comers. (Zhenya Machneva, Dalton Paula and Daniela Ortiz are artists to look for.) Less admirably, it's a safe and unchallenging show. Despite a politically demanding time, it acts as if ambiguity and discretion were automatically virtues. In an era when the market rules, it puts its money on the kind of art easily tradable, displayable, palette tickling objects that art fairs suck up. (Cotter) 212 219 1222, newmuseum.org 'DAHN VO: TAKE MY BREATH AWAY' at the Guggenheim Museum (through May 9). This is the first museum survey of the Vietnam born Danish artist, who draws his art from his life and the history he has lived through, recycling family mementos, found letters and artifacts, as well as random materials, into a very spare, poetic and astute study of power, colonialism, and the lives of refugees and of objects. The Guggenheim's rotunda looks nearly empty at times, and there are lots of labels to read, but it is ultimately worth it. (Smith) 212 423 3500, guggenheim.org 'GRANT WOOD: AMERICAN GOTHIC AND OTHER FABLES' at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through June 10). This well done survey begins with the American Regionalist's little known efforts as an Arts and Crafts designer and touches just about every base. It includes his mural studies, book illustrations and most of his best known paintings including "American Gothic" and "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere." Best of all are Wood's smooth undulant landscapes with their plowmen and spongy trees and infectious serenity. (Smith) 212 570 3600, whitney.org 'BIRDS OF A FEATHER: JOSEPH CORNELL'S HOMAGE TO JUAN GRIS' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through April 15). This small, hyper specialized, stunning exhibition brings together a grand total of only 13 works a dozen shadow boxes by Joseph Cornell, the Queens based assemblage artist, and the Cubist masterwork that he cited as their direct inspiration, Gris's "Man at the Cafe" (1914). It might seem like a surprising obsession for Cornell, who was not a painter nor a Frenchman. He and Gris never met. But Cornell was deeply moved by Gris, the overlooked, tag along third wheel in the Cubist movement that also included Picasso and Braque, and the show succeeds in tracking the fluttery ways of artistic inspiration. (Deborah Solomon) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'MARKUS BRUNETTI: FACADES GRAND TOUR' at Yossi Milo Gallery (through April 21). Micro and macro collide to visceral, even wondrous effect in these large, astoundingly detailed photographs of European cathedrals and churches, most dating from the 11th to the 14th centuries. Stitched together from hundreds of small digital images, the photographs ignore the laws of perspectival recession. The structures are implacably frontal, powerful expressions of fervent religious belief that also convey how they once sat, and sometimes still do, above their town and cities like large, protective beasts. (Smith) 212 414 0370, yossimilo.com 'THE VIETNAM WAR: 1945 1975' at the New York Historical Society (through April 22). In contrast to the PBS series "The Vietnam War," this exhibition delivers historical data, a lot of it, quick and dirty, through labels, film and audio clips and objects, some of which fall under a broad definition of art. Along with paintings by contemporary Vietnamese artists, there's graffiti style drawings on combat helmets and Zippo lighters, and period design in album covers and protest posters. Words and images work together in murals labeled "Home Front" and "War Front" that put you in the middle of the war's primary issues and events. (Cotter) 212 873 3400, nyhistory.org 'ZURBARAN'S JACOB AND HIS TWELVE SONS: PAINTINGS FROM AUCKLAND CASTLE' at the Frick Collection (through April 22). More devout than Velazquez, more shadowy than Murillo, Francisco de Zurbaran was little known outside Spain until the mid 19th century, when Manet and his friends found the seeds of modernism in his frisky, open brushwork and streamlined form. The Frick is now showing a baker's dozen of the Spaniard's biblical portraits, of an aged, hunched Jacob and the sons who would become the founders of the Twelve Tribes of Israel, with most of the paintings on loan from a castle that until recently belonged to the Church of England. The gents pose in a startling variety of crisp, supple fabrics, whose glamour or grittiness echoes Jacob's foretelling of their destinies in Genesis. Two are especially compelling: Judah, child No. 4, decked out in a fur trimmed coat and vamping alongside a kindly lion, and Joseph, who forgoes the Technicolor dreamcoat for a blue sash and a belt stitched with gold. (Farago) 212 288 0700, frick.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
WASHINGTON Is the Mariinsky Ballet of St. Petersburg breaking records this week? I hope so. Between Monday and this coming Sunday, it is to perform eight programs in four theaters, in three cities on both sides of the Atlantic. This might be exciting if the company's artistic policy was either coherent or impressive. The Mariinsky was the home of the centrally influential classicist Marius Petipa in the late 19th century and, in the 20th, was the seedpod for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and the training ground of George Balanchine, Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov. Its traditions have repeatedly fertilized dance around the world. Yet currently those traditions look mannered, tepid, inhibited, while much about the week's repertory looks crazily misguided. At the Kennedy Center Opera House here, beginning with Tuesday's opening night, it's performing Petipa's three act 1898 ballet "Raymonda." At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, beginning Thursday, it will present four successive programs, all called "A Tribute to Maya Plisetskaya." Ms. Plisetskaya, who died last year, was never a Mariinsky dancer. What's more, much of the season has nothing to do with what or how she danced. Back in its native city, the company is not only playing at both Mariinsky Theaters (I and II) but also tackling two dissimilar versions of "The Nutcracker" (a kind of "Nutcracker" civil war) as well as a "Romeo and Juliet." Neither "Nutcracker" has anything to do with the original though multiple Western "Nutcracker" productions preserve core features of what Tchaikovsky, Petipa and colleagues intended. What kind of overweening ambition does this reflect? The answer has much to do with Valery Gergiev, the maestro who rules both opera and ballet at the Mariinsky. Very possibly the single most powerful figure in the Russian performing arts today, he's become the musician with more dominion over ballet than anyone since Jean Baptiste Lully in the late 17th century France of Louis XIV. Since the Mariinsky's responsiveness to music was already looking lax in the late Soviet era, a great conductor's guiding hand might have been just what the doctor ordered. I've admired Mr. Gergiev in opera and concert since the early 1990s; there's no denying his mastery. Yet, as his ballet music recordings and his conducting of the company's "Swan Lake" production in Brooklyn last year proved, his style and temperament are alien to ballet. Where ballet is buoyant, his dynamics are hammer like; and his tempos tend to straitjacket dancers. The company, whose acting director since 2008 has been Yuri Fateev, sometimes comes keenly to life when Mr. Gergiev isn't around, as in last year's performances of "Paquita" at the Kennedy Center. Oxana Skorik of the Mariinsky Ballet in the title role in "Raymonda" at the Kennedy Center. The score for "Raymonda" is by Alexander Glazunov, planned with the guidance of Petipa. Abounding in sensuous melodies, sprightly meters, lavish colors, it's the main reason "Raymonda" keeps being revived, either in full length stagings or one act abridgments. Since Mr. Gergiev is in Brooklyn this week, there was reason to hope. And, despite a few minor hiccups, the music was well played by the Kennedy Center Orchestra, with the American, but Russian trained, conductor Gavriel Heine shaping it lusciously. The Mariinsky dancers, though, treated it like a necessary inconvenience. Where it was punchy, they slid over it in a smooth legato. Where its long melodic lines maintained tension, the performers arched with romantic vagueness. They moved as if dynamic contrasts the breath of life in most dance forms were bad form. And the imprecise connection they made to the music's beat was devoid of rubato or wit. The creaky story line of the 1898 "Raymonda" was shaped by Countess Lydia Pashkova and Petipa along the lines of the Romantic historical fiction popularized a century earlier by Ann Radcliffe (the novelist satirized by Jane Austen in "Northanger Abbey"). It's set in Provence in the medieval era of troubadours. The aristocratic heroine Raymonda and her house are protected from harm by a spectral White Lady: just as well, since the Saracen chief Abderakhman tries, first, to seduce Raymonda courteously (Glazunov gives him the ballet's most dangerously sensuous tunes of all) and then (he has a large retinue of Arab and Spanish dancers) to abduct her. In the nick of time, Ramonda's fiance, Jean de Brienne, returns from the Crusades and kills Abderakhman in single combat. (If this were a movie, you'd envision a cast of Olivia de Havilland, Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone.) The last act wedding of Raymonda and Jean honors his uncle, King Andrew of Hungary, with Hungarian national dances and classical variations on the theme of the Hungarian czardas. Konstantin Sergeyev's "Raymonda" production new in 1948 when this company was the Kirov and performed on its 1961 first tour of the United States has always been a serious misrepresentation of Petipa's original. It does away with the harmless White Lady but retains the awkward Saracen versus Crusader element. But as late as a 1980 broadcast starring Irina Kolpakova this could be forgiven because of the gloriously sensitive dancing. Tuesday's Raymonda was Oxana Skorik, who trained in Perm and joined the Mariinsky in 2007. She has long, tapering limbs, remarkably arched feet, effortlessly high leg extensions, technical efficiency but she's already become glacially posey, as if always dancing for the mirror. Timur Askerov, as Jean, is a redoubtable and handsome young dancer. But he chopped up his dances into highlights, as if entering in a competition. The Saracen and Spanish characters wore copious body tan. The most vivid dance was the Act III czardas, performed by an ensemble in heeled shoes and lavishly gilded orange costumes; here alone you could feel musical playfulness, a spirited use of eyes, and steps played against each other for contrast and color. But the finest passage occurred without motion onstage. As the first scene of Act I concluded, Raymonda slumbered in a chair on our right. On our left, at the back, a tapestry depicting Jean suddenly turned into the armored Mr. Askerov. He stood still. Nothing else happened except for Glazunov's music lavishly conjuring all the longing between them and our view of a Provencal courtly garden at twilight.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
For millions of older Americans, it is time to sift through the mind boggling array of Medicare plans. There is an average of 29 drug plans to digest, and about 18 options for Medicare Advantage, the plans delivered through private insurers. Then there are the 10 supplemental plans that cover what traditional Medicare does not. The choices can be paralyzing for anyone, and they can be even more challenging as you age. The Medicare open enrollment season, which runs from Oct. 15 through Dec. 7, gives individuals a chance to rethink it all and reassess whether their plan still fits their needs. While no broad based changes are expected, there could be meaningful shifts within individual plans. Maybe your Part D prescription plan will no longer pay for one of your drugs, or you started a new one. Perhaps your Medicare Advantage plan dropped your favorite doctor (or worse, a cancer treatment center) from network. "People treat this as a momentous decision but they get scared of it, and the thing that worries me is that they don't make the changes that they should," said Joe Baker, president of the Medicare Rights Center in New York. "Don't stay in a plan because you're overwhelmed with the choices." Elizabeth Cooper, a 68 year old former elementary schoolteacher, weighs her options each year. She has already tried a couple of plans, including one through Medicare Advantage, which lured her in because it had no monthly premium. But the plan required her to shoulder a significant share of her medical costs. She is healthy now, but she has a history of skin cancer. "I didn't feel that would give me a sense of ease because of the co pays and the possible unexpected expenses that can crop up," said Ms. Cooper, of Birmingham, Ala. So she backed out of that plan during the trial period, and opted for peace of mind. She enrolled in original Medicare, and bought a supplemental policy for about 135 a month that covers items like deductibles and her share of each bill. After having a few diagnostic tests this year, her decision already paid off. "Had I been on the Advantage plan, I would have had to come up with the money for each test," she said. "It turned out to be a reasonable plan for me. And for that reason, I plan to stick with it." Here are some ideas on how to approach the decision making process. A REFRESHER COURSE Before delving into the details, here is a quick primer on original Medicare: Part A covers hospital and skilled nursing facility stays, as well as some home health visits and hospice care. Part B covers preventive care, doctor visits and outpatient services. Premiums, for most retirees, were 104.90 a month last year and are projected to be the same in 2015. Deductibles, co payments and coinsurance (that is when you pay for a percentage of medical services) can be burdensome since there is no out of pocket ceiling, experts said. That is one of the reasons most people buy supplemental coverage, known as Medigap, to cover out of pocket costs on Parts A and B. People lucky enough to have retiree employer coverage rely on that instead. Medicare Part D, which is offered only through private insurers, covers drugs. The average monthly premium for such plans is estimated at 32 in 2015, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Alternatively, you can just buy a Medicare Advantage plan from a private insurer, also referred to as Part C. It can serve as a one stop shop because it covers Parts A, B and often a drug plan and sometimes throws in extras like dental and vision coverage. Average monthly premiums for Advantage plans are estimated to rise to 33.90, a 2.94 increase, in 2015, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. (aYou pay that in addition to the Part B premium). ORIGINAL OR ADVANTAGE? Some consumer advocates favor using traditional Medicare with a supplemental plan, largely because it is more predictable and you are free to see any doctor who accepts Medicare. That is what Mr. Baker said he would recommend for his own grandmother. "I would say enroll in original Medicare and let's get you the Medigap plan you might need when you are older or sicker," he said. "If you are in original Medicare and you have a Medigap plan, you are pretty much set for life if you are happy with those things." Medigap, with 10 plan levels that are labeled with letters from A to N, is federally standardized coverage, which means coverage must be exactly the same across insurers. For instance, the option known as Plan F will pay for your Part A and Part B deductibles. "This is one area, once you decide on the level of coverage you want, where you can go for the lowest price because you know Plan F will be exactly like any other Plan F," said Jocelyne Watrous, advocate at the for the Center for Medicare Advocacy. Depending on the plan, the total cost of your premiums could come close to your final out of pocket cost for the year. In Connecticut, for instance, one of the most comprehensive Medigap policies is called Plan F. It costs an individual about 218 a month, or 2,622 annually. "But that's it," Ms. Watrous said. "You will pay that premium and it will cover all of your co payments and deductibles." If you are contemplating switching from Medicare Advantage back to original Medicare and you want to buy a supplemental policy that is something you may want to do while you are younger and healthier. Later on, coverage may become more expensive or you can be denied altogether. With some exceptions, individuals are guaranteed coverage only if they buy it during a special period six months after their 65th birthday. During that time, insurers cannot refuse to sell you a policy because of a pre existing condition or other medical issue, nor can they charge you more. Outside of that safe period, you aren't guaranteed coverage under federal law, though many states, including New York, extend greater protections. It is important to ask your local State Health Insurance Assistance Program, or SHIP agency, for more details. After you buy a Medigap policy, it generally cannot be canceled because you are old or sick. ADVANTAGE Nearly 16 million people, or 30 percent of all Medicare beneficiaries, enroll in a Medicare Advantage plan. Most people are attracted by the plans' enticingly low and sometimes zero premiums and, for certain services, low co payments. Some even offer limited dental or vision coverage, advocates said. The drawback of Advantage plans are their limited networks of providers. Doctors can drop out midyear. And consumers are responsible for all cost sharing, which can be unpredictable. Those are capped at an out of pocket limit for in network services of 6,700 in 2015, although the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services recommends a limit of 3,400, according to Kaiser. But it is difficult to calculate how fast you might reach those ceilings. "The cost sharing requirements are often harder to compare because it requires consumers to anticipate what their health care needs might be," said Tricia Neuman, director of the Medicare policy program at Kaiser. "Some advisers suggest considering what services you would need if you were sick and take a careful look at potential costs under various plans." People who travel frequently or who spend a significant chunk of time in another state also need to ensure that they will be covered. "Snowbirds need to consider whether the networks and coverage extends to two places," said Nicole Duritz, vice president for health, education and outreach at AARP. If you are already enrolled, the "annual notice of change" sent to plan enrollees will detail changes in coverage, costs and networks. But if you are dissatisfied with your Advantage plan for any reason, you can unenroll from Jan. 1 to Feb. 14 and switch to original Medicare. DRUGS Even if you are happy with your Part D coverage, don't assume it will remain exactly the same. Lists of covered drugs often change or the company may insert new restrictions, limiting quantities or requiring you to try another drug first. Go to the Medicare website's Plan Finder, where you can enter your drugs, the dosage and frequency, as well as where you like to buy them. It will then show you what the plans cover and your total estimated costs for the year. "The plans are so complicated and there is so much variation and the only way to really compare is to use the Plan Finder," Ms. Watrous said. Don't shop on price alone. "The best and cheapest plan for you is the one that covers your drugs the best," said Mr. Baker, who advised calling the plan, or even your doctor or pharmacist, who has a lot of interaction with the different plans. RESOURCES Besides local SHIP agencies, advocates suggest that people check out the latest Medicare You booklet, which all 54 million enrollees should have received in the mail by now. It's remarkably clear. To talk to someone live, call 1 800 Medicare. Whatever you do, Mr. Baker advised, "Don't renew blindly."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Astronomers have discovered a passing rock from another star the first interstellar asteroid. It came from outer space. A cigar shaped object tumbling end over end through the void. The first interstellar asteroid. A rock from a distant star. On October 19, 2017, the Pan STARRS telescope in Hawaii was searching the sky for killer asteroids when it spotted a faint blur. Its trajectory was like nothing ever seen before. The word went out. High in the Chilean mountains, the Very Large Telescope turned to look. It spied a dark object zooming past the Earth. Its surface was stained deep red by radiation from years of travel between the stars. The Allen Telescope Array listened for radio signals, in case it was an alien artifact. The invader was given a name: Oumuamua. Hawaiian for "scout." Its shape is like nothing in our own solar system, where objects are more or less round. Oumuamua is ten times longer than it is wide. A tumbling dart, a quarter mile long. It approached from above the plane of the planets, pierced the orbit of Mercury like a bull's eye and swung past the sun at 50 miles a second. By the time astronomers noticed it, the asteroid was beyond Earth's orbit, moving away into the deep night. Oumuamua is dark and receding quickly. It will soon fade from view. Was this stranger among us a fragment from a broken planet? Did some other event shape and fling it toward our star? Oumuamua came from the direction of where Vega is now, but after so long in transit the stars have shifted behind it. We may never know where it came from, or when. Now it is heading outward in the direction of Pegasus, continuing its lonely walkabout through the galaxy. This was our first glimpse of a cosmic vagabond. But not the last. Astronomers think hundreds of comets and asteroids have slipped past us unnoticed, trailing dust and scars of galactic history. We might not be able to explore the galaxy ourselves. But in the fullness of time the galaxy will come to us. Visit the galaxy before the galaxy visits you. This fall, the galaxy came calling in the form of a small reddish cigar shaped object named Oumuamua by astronomers based in Hawaii. They discovered it in October, careening through the solar system at 40,000 miles an hour, an interstellar emissary from points unknown. Oumuamua (Oh moo a moo a), Hawaiian for "scout" or "messenger," was not here long. It was first noticed zooming out of the constellation Lyra on Oct. 19, about 20 million miles from Earth. By next May, it will already be passing Jupiter on its way out of the solar system. The asteroid brought shades of Arthur C. Clarke's novel "Rendezvous With Rama," in which explorers find and board an empty alien spacecraft sailing through the solar system. Or perhaps even reminders of the monoliths that power human evolution in "2001: A Space Odyssey." The discovery set off a worldwide scramble for telescope time to observe the object. Astronomers from the SETI Institute even got into the act, swinging into action to look for alien radio signals Just In Case. For now, however, those are just science fiction thrills. "Our observations are entirely consistent with it being a natural object," said Karen Meech of the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy and leader of the international collaboration that discovered Oumuamua with the Pan STARRS 1 telescope on Haleakala, Maui. Dr. Meech's team has now published the first report of their observations in Nature. The paper describes the interstellar visitor as both reassuringly familiar and utterly alien. "We don't see anything like that in our solar system," Dr. Meech said. In its color and other imputed properties, Oumuamua resembles the asteroids we already know and fear will one day smash the Earth and human civilization to smithereens. But asteroid's shape is weird. It is extremely elongated, at least 10 times as long as it is wide, perhaps 800 yards by 80 yards. The Pan STARRS telescope was built to patrol the sky for dangerous asteroids in our own system, not interlopers from beyond. But astronomers got a surprise. Dr. Meech learned in a phone call one night that her colleagues had found one whose path seemed to originate beyond the solar system altogether. "Wow, this is exciting," Dr. Meech recalled thinking. Astronomers had long surmised that interstellar debris might invade the solar system from time to time, in the form of icy chunks spit from the rocky disks forming faraway planets. Such wanderers would manifest themselves as comets when they got close to our sun, vaporizing and lighting up; however, they have not been seen. Now astronomers know why. Oumuamua showed no such cometary brightening. It is so dark and faint that it could only have been detected by a powerful telescope with a wide field of view, like Pan STARRS. Many more should be visible to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, with a diameter of eight meters, being built in Chile. "We have to get ready for these," Dr. Meech said. Oumuamua brightens and dims dramatically every 7.3 hours, which suggests that it is rotating about its short axis. That is something the little asteroid could endure without flying apart only if it were made of sterner, stronger stuff than the dirty snow that characterizes most comets. Spectral measurements have revealed that Oumuamua is dark red, the color of many moons of the outer solar system on which icy organic molecules have been stained by radiation in outer space. Iron can also contribute that color, Dr. Meech said. How Oumuamua got its shape is a mystery for now. Perhaps, Dr. Meech said, it was shot away from its home star by a supernova explosion. Or perhaps it was formed by a pair of objects that collided and stuck together. Stay tuned. Where did it come from? Dr. Meech said the astronomers were initially excited when the orbit appeared to point to the brightest star in Lyra, Vega, which is known to have a debris disk. It would have taken the object about 600,000 years to get here from there, astronomers estimated. But further refinements in the trajectory have made it less likely that Vega actually was the source. The fact that Oumuamua was traveling at about the same speed relative to the sun as other nearby stars suggests that this is the asteroid's first encounter with a new star system. Still, the authors write in Nature, "The possibility that Oumuamua has been orbiting the galaxy for billions of years cannot be ruled out." Where it's going is equally in the dark. Like the Voyager spacecraft slingshotted around Jupiter, Oumuamua will leave the sun with more energy and heading in a different direction, Dr. Meech said. The adventures of this asteroid and its ilk paint a very different picture of the galaxy than you might imagine while gazing up at a sky in which the stars seem separate and sovereign, beaming away in solitude. The oxygen and iron in our blood were created in a supernova explosion long ago and far away from here, and the gold in our wedding bands was formed in the collision of neutron stars. We now know that meteorites sprung by asteroid impacts on Mars land on Earth all the time. Otherwise respectable astronomers speculate that one of them might have seeded Earth with life that started on Mars when it was warm and wet long ago. But we can look even further out and backward in time for our connection to the cosmos. Consider the hundreds of thousands of years that Oumuamua might have taken to get here. While that might sound like a long time, it is a blink of cosmic time. The Milky Way galaxy is 10 billion years old. Which means that over the course of our galaxy's lifetime so far, little Oumuamua might have cruised through some 20,000 star systems a small fraction of the 200 billion stars in the galaxy, but still a goodly number of stamps on its cosmic passport. Oumuamua would have trailed behind bits of dust and debris, and so the stars and the worlds of the galaxy mix it up. It may be that the universe is a small place after all.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Could You Make It Through Dinner Without Checking Your Phone? When Marc and Kara Lyons take their family out for a nice dinner, they typically hand their two sons cellphones to play games and watch YouTube videos. Sometimes, the parents grab the devices back to check their own email and text messages. But on a recent night at Hearth, an Italian inspired restaurant in the East Village, the boys, 5 and 7, colored on blank white paper with crayons. Their parents discussed the highlights of their trip to New York from their home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to celebrate Mr. Lyons's 40th birthday. The reason for the tech free dinner? The cellphones were stashed in a small decorative box on their table, an initiative that Marco Canora, Hearth's chef and owner, began in November to help customers disconnect from their devices for a little bit. Tech addiction, and what staring at smartphones all the time does to cognition, well being and productivity, have become a top concern in Silicon Valley. Google recently announced a series of "digital well being" updates. Apple, facing pressure from a couple of large investors, has said its next version of its mobile operating system will provide users statistics about time spent on the devices. But even companies outside the industry are addressing the issue. FedEx tells employees to leave their personal phones at home, while executives at Brown Parker DeMarinis Advertising and United Wholesale Mortgage have placed restrictions on their employees' cellphone use to improve productivity. Some restaurants, partly from irritation when patrons take pictures of the food, place limits on cellphones in their dining rooms. Others, including in Chicago and San Antonio, have banned them entirely. Hearth is taking a softer approach there are no rules, just the containers on each table. A note on top says, "Open me!" Inside is an invitation to stash your phone during the meal. Mr. Canora started thinking two years ago about how to try to curb his customers' increasingly distracted behavior. At first, he considered asking guests if they wanted to check their phones at the host stand, as they would a coat, but he worried this could create arguments between couples at the front of the restaurant. And he didn't want to be responsible for lost or forgotten phones. His other idea was asking customers for their phones once they were seated, but he didn't want to add another task for his servers. Mr. Canora finally decided on the vintage boxes, which the restaurant's general manager and wine director, Christine Wright, bought from Etsy. No two boxes look the same some are vintage candy boxes, others old cigar cases. They complement the restaurant's whimsical decor, including the mismatched glassware. Servers ignore the boxes, leaving guests to discover the option themselves. "I don't think there is anybody who is coming in and feeling like we are condescending to them," said Erik Gullberg, a bartender and server who has worked at Hearth for four years. Few guests make it through their meal without checking their phone, Mr. Canora said. If a diner's companion leaves to go to the restroom, the phone comes out immediately. "It has really reinforced our belief that it is a true addiction," Mr. Canora said. "You see people succumb to their addiction all night long." Even if customers don't follow through completely, he said, he figures it's better than nothing. People at least often have a conversation about technology's impact on their lives. Some customers say they don't need the box to avoid technology during their meal. Janie Quinn and Elissa Epstein, friends who live in Manhattan, noticed the box but didn't put their phones inside. "My purse is like that. I don't need a box," Ms. Quinn said. She worried that she might forget about her phone and leave without it. "Are you kidding?" Mr. Canora said. "They're counting the seconds before they can grab it." Joy Habian, who lives in TriBeCa, said she wished she could forget her phone in the box, noting the oversize role of technology in her life. Although she tries not to check her phone while eating at restaurants, she said she was only successful about 75 percent of the time. "It's just an unconscious habit," Ms. Habian said. "It's not rational or meaningful." At Hearth, she placed her phone in the decorative container and tried to focus more on enjoying her meal. One way diners frequently use their phones during meals is to post photos of their food on Facebook or Instagram, often tagging the restaurant and providing a source of free publicity. Hearth's boxes have led fewer people to do that. Some of Hearth's staff members had initially worried that this would hurt the business. Ultimately, Mr. Canora decided the loyal following that Hearth has built in its 14 years meant that it didn't need to depend on Instagram. That doesn't mean the social media platform is devoid of content about Hearth. "We do see people Instagramming about the boxes, so I don't know if that's a win or a lose there, but I guess it's still good for us," Ms. Wright joked. Still, she said most customers hadn't heard about the boxes. The restaurant has yet to receive negative reactions from diners, with most offering enthusiastic feedback. Mr. Lyons was certainly a fan of Hearth's strategy, noting that he and his wife enjoyed their conversation more without the distraction. Their sons asked for the phones only once, and he quickly dismissed the request. Instead, the boys entertained themselves with tic tac toe, and Mr. Lyons taught them how to play hangman. "We said we should get a box at home," Mr. Lyons said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Developers like to quote Mark Twain: "Buy land. They're not making any more." A fair point, although Twain probably never said it. Advertisers popularized the slogan in the early 1900s, according to the Center for Mark Twain Studies. Another quibble: There is plenty of land that hardly anyone wants. In New York, one of the most expensive cities for new development, there are acres of vacant land on irregular lots considered too narrow, too shallow or too onerous to build on. Like the offal left after the prime cuts of meat, they are the odds and ends that take the most skill to manipulate. But with land prices near all time highs, developers and nonprofit housing groups are giving the leftovers another look. In some cases, building on odd lots can mean a rare chance to get into high demand neighborhoods. In others, the lots can represent a relatively inexpensive way to build below market rate housing. The city has long grappled with how to deal with vacant public land that comes into its possession often through unpaid taxes even as the need for affordable housing has grown. Across the five boroughs, there are roughly 10,516 acres of vacant land with residential zoning, according to a public records analysis by Localize.city, a real estate data website. That represents just 6.7 percent of the land in the city, said Israel Schwartz, a data scientist with the company, and only a fraction of it can realistically be used for development, because of site access, difficult land conditions and zoning requirements. City agencies own about 1,015 acres of vacant land in the five boroughs, according to Living Lots NYC, a data tool created by the nonprofit organization 596 Acres. Some lots, too narrow even to stand on, are the result of mapping quirks, while others are remnants of adjacent land sales. Many privately owned lots have other obstacles, including persnickety landowners, tax liens or other hurdles that limit potential building. For many developers, searching for missed opportunities is becoming the norm as is learning how to build on trapezoidal, rocky or remote parcels. "We're considering sites that, 10 years ago, we wouldn't even have looked at," said Martin Dunn, the president of Dunn Development Corp., a company that specializes in affordable and supportive housing. The site of an 80 unit rental building in the Norwood section of the Bronx that is nearing completion was selected in part because market rate developers had avoided it. The roughly half acre property, on a bluff overlooking the New York Botanical Garden, has a massive rock outcropping in the rear that many assumed would cost too much to excavate. The company bought the site from a private owner for about 45 a square foot in 2016, Mr. Dunn said, when nearby lots were selling for closer to 60 a square foot. Thanks to a clever design by SLCE Architects, the seven story project was built above and around the 21 foot tall outcropping, so that most of the building begins on the second floor and minimal stone removal was needed. "Basically, the cliff is inside the building," Mr. Dunn said, similar to how old homes sometimes have bedrock in the cellar. The lower cost of the land, coupled with state subsidies, allowed the developer to build a mix of below market rate apartments, most of which were reserved for renters making between 27,000 and 73,000 a year. There are also 12 units for adults with intellectual or developmental disabilities. Rent starts at 736 a month for one bedrooms, 890 for two bedrooms and 1,022 for three bedrooms. Now the company is facing more competition from market rate developers, Mr. Dunn said, in once ignored areas like the South Bronx. "They're looking for opportunities after being priced out of other neighborhoods," he said, and driving up land costs in the process. Despite a recent slowdown in residential sales, land prices remain stubbornly high. In Manhattan, south of 110th Street, buyers spent an average of 691 a square foot for buildable land in 2018, the highest price since at least 2014, when the average was 602 a square foot, said Michael A. Tortorici, an executive vice president with Ariel Property Advisors. But there were only 75 development site sales in the area in 2018, half as many as in 2014, Mr. Tortorici said, suggesting that developers are becoming more price sensitive and looking beyond their core markets. On the margins of East 60th Street in Manhattan, where the Queensboro Bridge and the Roosevelt Island Tramway cross the East River, Azimuth recently completed a 21 unit affordable rental building on a crescent shaped site that was previously a parking lot. The roughly 3,750 square foot lot, which curves along a ramp to the bridge, near a bundle of cables for the elevated tram, has just eight feet of frontage on East 60th Street. Because the site is so close to transit infrastructure, a crane could not be used. Instead, the developer parked a cement truck on a nearby sidewalk and poured concrete through an eight inch hose, completing a floor every 10 days, until the eight story, 25,000 square foot structure was completed. The process took about as long as steel frame construction, Mr. Subotovsky said, but cost about 20 percent more. Even with the added costs, the land was a bargain: They bought the site in 2015 for about 400 a buildable square foot, when nearby lots were asking between 500 to 750 a square foot, he said. Those savings were, in part, passed on to tenants. The units were reserved for renters making about 45,000 to 72,500 a year, with two bedrooms leasing for 1,511 a month. The median rent for a market rate two bedroom in Manhattan was 4,348 in December, according to the real estate brokerage Douglas Elliman. That isn't lost on Ramon and Maria Joaquin, who qualified to live in the building through the affordable housing lottery. Mr. Joaquin, who works as a cleaner, moved into a two bedroom apartment on the fifth floor with his wife, Maria, a maintenance worker for a newspaper, and their daughter last May. The location may not be ideal, he said, but the apartment is new, and the curved living room rounded to conform to the crescent lot has an unusual view: Roosevelt Island trams, filled with commuters, glide by the windows. "We've been posting pictures on Facebook," he said. Designers are also noticing a shift in new projects. "All the easy lots are built on," said Ariel Aufgang, the principal of Aufgang Architects, in Suffern, N.Y., which designed the East 60th Street mid rise. "So from here on out, it's the challenging ones." In the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx, the firm designed a 91 unit luxury rental building on a pentagonal lot so narrow on one side that the back of the building seems to disappear. Think of the triangular Flatiron Building in Manhattan, but with more zoning requirements. Called Bridgeline, the 12 story structure was built on a 13,650 square foot site left over from a larger land purchase several years earlier, said Joshua Weissman, the president of JCAL Development, one of the developers. The site's unusual shape is thanks to an elevated train track that once crossed the swooping lot. Wedged between commercial buildings and a parking lot, the site had no sewer, gas, water or electrical infrastructure when the developers bought it in 2015. 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 had perks: There are expansive views of Manhattan and the Harlem River; the site is a short walk to the subway; and because of a tax abatement program to encourage building in the area, the developer's costs were partially mitigated. The lot was not bought at a discount, but the company, which has built several affordable projects in the area, believed the area was growing rapidly. The building's shape had a clear influence on some of the units, which range in price from 1,695 a month for a studio to 3,950 for the choicest two bedroom. About a third of the units are leased, said Jillian Faulls, the leasing agent with Citi Habitats. But they have not yet marketed the most unusual one bedrooms near the top of the building, which come to a sharp point on one side and follow the contours of the building. A 9th floor one bedroom, expected to list for 3,400 a month, has 890 square feet of interior space and an almost 1,500 square foot wraparound terrace, because of the arrowhead layout. Every apartment has a washer and dryer, and floor to ceiling glass brings light and air into the units including a compact 458 square foot studio with a tapered layout, for 1,800 a month. The city, too, is contending with vacant land use issues, and not always on the scale of large developments. In early 2018, the City Council passed Local Law 29, which will require a citywide survey of vacant residential buildings and lots, not including flood zones, to be released sometime in 2021. And this month , the Department of Housing Preservation and Development announced a design competition for ideas on how to create affordable housing on 23 small, publicly owned lots in the five boroughs, many in quickly gentrifying neighborhoods. One of the goals is to learn how to build housing on other difficult lots in the city, public and private. The contest is open to designers around the world, and has attracted the attention of some architects who are all too familiar with difficult urban infill. A rendering of XS House, a seven unit apartment building under construction on an 11 by 93 foot lot in Philadelphia. ISA, the design firm, is considering entering New York's small lot competition. "We're going to take a look at it," said Brian Phillips, the principal at ISA, a Philadelphia based firm that designed XS House, a seven unit, four story apartment building squeezed into an 11 by 93 foot lot on the edge of the city's Chinatown. "A bunch of people sent it to me," said Jonathan Tate, the principal of OJT in New Orleans, of the competition. His firm gained acclaim for designing an affordable single family home on a 16 by 55 foot lot. Word also reached Jakub Szczesny, the principal of SZCZ in Warsaw, who designed one of the narrowest homes in the world there. Keret House, officially an art installation completed in 2012, houses traveling artists in residence. The building is about five feet wide, with 150 square feet of interior space. Keret House, in Warsaw, is a 150 square foot building that houses traveling artists in residence. Mr. Szczesny, who previously lived in New York, said he is entering the competition with reservations. His Keret House project, never intended to be a model for affordable housing, busted its budget of 150,000 zloty (or about 40,000) twice over, as zoning quirks and site problems raised costs. He wonders how the competition will translate ideas into bricks and mortar. And what if the contest is a success? Well, that is also worrisome. "The moment we say that even crazy, abnormal lots are able to sell, possibly for a lot of money," he said, "you won't be able to buy a shoebox anywhere in the five boroughs." 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
Louise Erdrich's novel "LaRose," which centers on two Native American families in North Dakota whose lives are upended by a horrific hunting accident that kills a 5 year old boy, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction on Thursday. Ms. Erdrich, who has published 15 novels, won in an especially competitive year for high profile literary fiction, with Michael Chabon, Ann Patchett, Zadie Smith and Adam Haslett among the finalists. "I'm among such dramatically wonderful novels that it didn't seem that this was possible," Ms. Erdrich said in her acceptance speech, before making a passionate plea about the importance of free expression and the need for writers and journalists to challenge falsehoods. "The truth is being assaulted not only in our country but all over the world," she said. "More than ever, we have to look into the truth." Like virtually every other cultural event these days, the NBCC awards ceremony at the New School on Thursday night frequently veered into pointed political commentary. The ceremony took place not long after President Trump revealed his first federal budget plan, which proposes eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, prompting outcries from PEN America and other writers' groups. 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 novelist Yaa Gyasi, whose debut novel, "Homegoing," won the John Leonard Prize for the best first book in any genre, thanked her parents for the sacrifices they made to bring her family to the United States from Ghana. "In a time where it feels like every day immigrants and refugees are being met with new affronts to their humanity, I am even more grateful," she said. In accepting a citation for excellence in reviewing, the book critic Michelle Dean urged her fellow writers not to become complacent about politics or lapse into solipsistic, navel gazing work that fails to engage with pressing social issues. "Every day brings a fresh fear, a fresh outrage," she said. "It's natural to want to look away." The award for nonfiction went to the sociologist Matthew Desmond's critically acclaimed best seller, "Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City," a deeply reported narrative about impoverished people who lose their homes in Milwaukee, which explores how evictions can be not just a result of extreme poverty, but one of its causes. The NBCC Awards, which are open to any book published in English in the United States, stand out from other major awards because book critics deliver the verdicts. The finalists and winners, in six categories, are selected by the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle, which was founded in 1974 and is made up of more than 700 literary critics and editors. The prize for poetry went to Ishion Hutchinson for "House of Lords and Commons," which explores the landscape and the author's memories of his native Jamaica. The book critic Ruth Franklin won the biography prize for "Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life," her study of Ms. Jackson's life and work. The award for autobiography went to "Lab Girl," by the scientist Hope Jahren, an American geochemist and geobiologist whose engrossing memoir details her coming of age as a scientist, and her lifelong fascination with plants, trees and soil. The award for criticism went to Carol Anderson for "White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide." In The New York Times Book Review, Jesse McCarthy said Ms. Anderson's book "links scenes that should be familiar to us, yet somehow keep falling by the wayside in the story of America we tell." The Canadian novelist and environmental activist Margaret Atwood, who was given the organization's lifetime achievement award, delivered the evening's most memorable and grim political forecast, as she ticked off the stages societies go through as they slip into totalitarianism. "Never has American democracy felt so challenged, never have there been so many intents from so many sides of the political spectrum to shout down the voices of others," she said. "As independent critics, you are part of the barrier standing between authoritarian control and pluralistic, open democracy." She expressed gratitude for the lifetime achievement award, but said the recognition was bittersweet. "Why did I only get one lifetime?" she said. "Where did this lifetime go?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Lisbon may be one of Europe's more affordable capitals, but if you're in search of a spectacular meal, it's not difficult to drop 120 euros (about 135) for a three course dinner (without wine) at restaurants like the Michelin starred Belcanto. Fortunately, budget travelers can turn to tascas: small, unpretentious restaurants that, back in the early part of the 20th century, catered mostly to the working class, and sold wine and petiscos, or shared plates, along with what was once their main product: coal. These days, Lisbon's tascas including those that have recently opened or been taken over by new owners still serve traditional, filling dishes, with meat and seafood based stews figuring predominantly. "The word tasca," said Tiago Cruz, the author of "Guia das Tascas de Lisboa," a guide to about 25 of Lisbon's most traditional restaurants, "is a compliment, more like a guaranteed, trusted value, with well cooked, comfort Portuguese food, and honest prices." While newer versions of tascas "bring a touch of refinement," he said, "the Portuguese traditional tasca cuisine continues to be there." Twenty euros or under will buy you a three course meal with wine at most of these restaurants, and you can expect to find dishes like pataniscas de bacalhau (salt cod fritters) and cozido a portuguesa (meat and sausage stew) on the menu, along with a variety of petiscos: clams a Bulhao Pato (clams with a sauce of olive oil, garlic and cilantro), say, or moelas estufadas (chicken gizzard stew). If you're looking for a taste of local Lisbon, here are four spots all part of a new wave of tascas worth checking out. Walk downstairs to this small, tiled, basement level restaurant in the residential neighborhood of Campo Pequeno, and you'll find one of Lisbon's great dining bargains. The two new owners and cooks, Carlos Pinheiro and Diogo Meneses, weren't even born when this tasca first opened 30 years ago with the name O Buraquinho, which means tiny hole (and indeed, the dining room seats only about 20 people). Their goal is to attract a mainly neighborhood clientele with dishes that the former tasca specialized in: filetes de peixe galo (John Dory fillets), feijoada (bean stew) and arroz de gambas (rice and shrimp), while keeping the TV on a news channel. For 8.5 euros, you'll get a full lunch, with bread and olives, a main course, dessert and espresso. On a recent visit, I settled on a wooden stool next to two locals who were already devouring pots of feijoada with a bottle of homemade piri piri, a Portuguese sauce made with crushed chiles, lemons and red bell peppers. I hesitated between petingas fritas com arroz de tomate (fried whitebait with tomato rice) and entrecosto assado (slow cooked spareribs), and settled on the latter, which was tender and moist, served with homemade fries and a tomato and lettuce salad. Dessert was a sweet, dense slice of syrupy torta de laranja (orange roll cake). For almost 25 years, this space was called O Tomas, a favorite among locals, not only for the convivial atmosphere, but also for its inexpensive daily specials. When the new owner and chef, Jose Saudade e Silva, bought it in 2017, he wanted to improve its appearance, so he replaced the dark wooden walls with lighter wood, and added a counter in front of the kitchen. He has barely touched the prices, though, with daily dishes costing between 6 and 12 euros. He also hired Dona Rosa, who cooked at the original tasca, to produce a weekly menu that runs to feijoada, bacalhau a minhota (salt cod with onions and potatoes), and favas com entrecosto (fava beans with spareribs). A friend and I recently had a marvelous lunch that included pataniscas (cod fritters), pastelinho de lingua (veal tongue patty), ovas panadas (fried fish eggs) and turbot fillets, both with tomato rice on the side. For dessert, we had an indulgent chocolate mousse and arroz doce (rice pudding). There are no reservations for lunch, so get here early or late to beat the crowd, but you should book a table for dinner. Expect to pay 15 euros for lunch, and 20 for dinner, with wine. In 2012, the city's downtown shopping district, Chiado, was only just starting to feel the consequences of Portugal's financial crisis. In that same year, A Taberna da Rua das Flores opened in a building once used by a pharmacy for storage, and has not only survived the economic crisis, but thrived. Diners here will find an emphasis on innovative versions of classic dishes. On a recent afternoon, a friend and I sat down at a small table. We started with rye and wheat bread, olives and puntillitas, tender fried baby squid served with chopped red onion and parsley. The servings were copious: frango com tomilho e laranja, a moist half chicken with orange, apples and parsnip in a thyme scented broth; and iscas com elas, or thin slices of marinated cow liver with boiled potatoes (a dish that has silently disappeared from most tasca menus). We shared a creamy lime mousse, but there was also leite creme queimado (burned custard) listed on the chalkboard menu. The cost was 15 euros per person, without wine. A friend and I started with a bittersweet watercress, orange and onion salad, and a faultless croquete de lingua (pan fried, minced cow's tongue in bread crumbs). Our mains were bacalhau a Bras (salt cod, scrambled eggs and fried potatoes) and a rich, buttery raia alhada (stingray in garlic sauce). The desserts were exceptional, too, including the cinnamon baked apple with pennyroyal ice cream, and dark beer pudding. Include house wine or one of the restaurant's homemade brews, as we did, and you can get away for less than 18 euros a person. Reservations are crucial, and can be made only by email (tabernasalgrosso gmail.com) or Facebook (facebook.com/tabernaSalGrosso/), or come after 9.30 p.m., when the restaurant is not as busy.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
LONDON The glitterati descended on Trafalgar Square amid wintry showers on Tuesday night to celebrate 100 years of British Vogue and the unveiling of the "Vogue 100: A Century of Style" exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Stepping through the doors, however, was more like entering a hall of mirrors than an artistic retrospective. The Champagne fueled evening, hosted by Alexandra Shulman, British Vogue's editor in chief, and the sponsor of the exhibition, the Russian retail tycoon Leon Max, heaved with many of the very same guests whose faces beamed down from the walls. "I shot my first Vogue cover when I was 16 years old, a long, long time ago now," drawled a beaming and recently engaged Jerry Hall, whose fiance, Rupert Murdoch, was not in attendance as she stood near a 1976 Vogue cover shot of herself wearing a yellow helmet. "But ever since, it's been like a beautiful lifelong courtship between us. I still use it to decide what to wear, 40 years on." The photographer Mario Testino declared triumphantly, "That's mine, that's mine, that's mine and that's mine," as he spun around and gestured toward some of the exhibition's 280 archive prints. The party, much like the pages of the magazine, was peppered with famous designers and other society names: Christopher Kane, Emilia Wickstead, Peter Pilotto, Charlotte Dellal and Erdem Moralioglu rubbed shoulders with Earl Spencer, a brother of Diana, Princess of Wales; the furniture designer David Linley, the queen's nephew; the financier Ben Goldsmith; and Claudia Lady Rothermere. A requisite who's who of London fashion editors completed the guest list. But when all was said and done, the night belonged to the catwalk: '80s glamazons including Yasmin Le Bon and Elizabeth Hurley, who mixed with '90s icons like Eva Herzigova, Laura Bailey and Erin O'Connor, alongside 21st century names such as Karlie Kloss, Jourdan Dunn, Edie Campbell and Suki Waterhouse. Tellingly, for all the color and glitz they wore in the images on the walls, every single one of them was wearing black. "I really didn't know what to wear," the model Lara Stone said. "I stood there for ages. Eventually, I just pulled this on after rifling through my wardrobe." In a midnight hued suede mini and sheer silk blouse combo, she turned to her fellow supermodel Lily Donaldson (who wore a silk plunging V neck shift) and asked, "Do you ever have those days?" One notable exception to the black dress code was Dakota Johnson. The "Fifty Shades of Grey" actress wore a gold lame floor length red carpet gown with full train, having dashed over from the European premiere of her latest movie, "How to Be Single," that had taken place about 500 yards away, in Leicester Square. "I'm a little late to the party, but I love what I've seen so far which is this room," Ms. Johnson said, her fur wrap clutched by the social gadabout and writer Derek Blasberg, as the two made their way, giggling, around the exhibition. It was left to Christopher Bailey, chief executive and creative director of Burberry, to express what he had seen. "It's beautiful, every bit of it, the way it is curated, and the pictures hung, and the way so many of these images are so familiar," he said, dwarfed by a cinema size video room of Cara Delevingne blowing chewing gum bubbles in the background. "It is a reminder that British Vogue has had a power over women and the way they see the world that goes far beyond the expected remit of a fashion magazine. It always has." Given the fact he recently announced that Burberry would move to selling its collection straight from the catwalk, changing lead times for shoppers, buyers and magazine editors, it was unclear whether such style dominance would continue in the future. Mr. Bailey, however, begged to differ. "Of course!" he beamed, blowing a polite but demurring kiss and retreating into the crowd. Mr. Max, the exhibition's sponsor, who had spent the evening at the entrance, greeting his guests, was even more bullish about the future of the glossy. "The exhibit is a spectacle, it is exquisite and it shows the place of Vogue in shaping history," he said. "We all know it is a magazine here to stay."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
SAN FRANCISCO In 1994, Intel faced a public relations crisis over an elusive mathematics glitch that affected the accuracy of calculations made by its popular Pentium computer chips. After insisting that the problem would not affect many people, the company succumbed to public pressure and recalled the chips, costing it 475 million. Now Intel faces an even bigger test: two serious security issues with its chips that could have implications for nearly everyone touched by computing. And so far in something of a repeat of the 1994 incident Intel has failed to quiet critics, putting it in an awkward position this week as its chief executive prepares to take the stage at one of the world's biggest tech trade shows. The cause of the new public relations crisis is the disclosure last week of two new ways to filch data from the microprocessors inside nearly all of the world's computers. Called Meltdown and Spectre, they could allow hackers to steal the entire memory contents of computers and spur the discovery of new attacks. "It is a very big deal, because it's an area people haven't looked at before," said Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert and lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. "Everybody is going to start now." Intel was privately informed of the issues by security researchers in June. The company, which has rejected doing a chip recall or other costly remedies, said it has quietly marshaled a coalition of software, hardware and cloud services to develop and deploy programming tweaks that are designed to close most of the security gaps. Intel and its partners said the fixes should be largely in place this week. "We've gotten much more mature in our ability to respond," said Steven L. Smith, an Intel vice president who was closely involved in the Pentium crisis and is now overseeing its handling of the new security issues. But just how well the proposed fixes work remains a matter of debate, putting Brian Krzanich, Intel's chief executive, in the hot seat. Mr. Krzanich is scheduled to help kick off the International CES trade show, one of the biggest tech conventions of the year, at a Las Vegas hotel on Monday night. Now he may need to address the chip security problems in addition to topics like artificial intelligence, virtual reality and self driving cars. Adding to Intel's image challenges is that Mr. Krzanich sold about 39 million in Intel shares in late November, after the company learned of the chip security problems. A company spokesman said the sale had been unrelated to the security issues and followed a prearranged annual trading plan. Mr. Krzanich, who reduced his holdings by about 50 percent, "continues to hold shares in line with corporate guidelines," Intel said. Intel, largely by virtue of its success, has the most at stake. While the Pentium chip underpinned most PCs running Microsoft operating systems in 1994, Intel processors are now also used in all Apple Macintosh systems and more than 95 percent of the chips used by cloud services and data centers run by corporations. Its technological reach means that both Meltdown and Spectre could affect just about anyone who uses the internet. "We created a microprocessor monoculture," said Bryan Cantrill, chief technology officer at Joyent, a cloud service owned by Samsung. "There are dangers associated with that." Intel's situation is complicated by history and semantics. The Pentium problem was caused by a design error. But Meltdown and Spectre attacks exploit a common speed boosting technique in chips called speculative execution that Intel's Mr. Smith insisted is working as it should. That approach to chip design emerged before researchers developed new ways to spy on such internal operations, using what they call "side channel" analysis, Mr. Smith said. As a result, the security issues that were discovered were not flaws or bugs, he said. The features that hackers could exploit are a bit like a door or window in a house, which burglars can exploit but that builders would not consider leaving out. That hasn't stopped an uproar from security researchers and tech industry executives. One widely distributed barb came from Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system, who posted a testy message last week advising Intel to "take a long hard look" at its chips "and actually admit that they have issues instead of writing P.R. blurbs that say that everything works as designed." Major users of Intel chips including Apple and the cloud computing arms of Google and Amazon have said they deployed security fixes recommended by Intel and so far they have not reported the sharp performance slowdowns of the sort some experts projected. But the solutions are far from perfect. While Meltdown's effects can be mitigated with updated operating systems, countering Spectre requires more complex steps like updating computer code stored in the chips themselves or in some applications like web browsers, Intel recommends inserting special instructions in places that security professionals said may be hard to identify. Mr. Smith said Intel and its partners had originally planned to disclose the security problems and their proposed solutions on Jan. 9, before the news was broken last week in The Register, a tech publication. Mr. Smith said the company did not disclose the issues when they were informed of them in June because Intel needed time to analyze the issues and then develop and test remedies. Many security professionals said they accepted the argument. "This is not a simple 'we found a bug, here's a patch and we are done,'" Mr. Schneier said. Whether Intel's actions to address Meltdown and Spectre will be enough for the company to sidestep a sizable financial hit is unclear. At least one lawsuit seeking class action status has been filed against Intel, and some industry executives expect more litigation to come. At a minimum, Intel engineers working on future microprocessors now face the additional labor of trying to make them less susceptible to the new kinds of attacks. Using the software fixes, "we already have the security improvement that we are seeking to get," Mr. Smith said. But making internal changes to the chips could handle those changes more efficiently, he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
WE'RE HERE 9 p.m. on HBO. In last week's debut episode of this new reality show, the hosts Shangela Laquifa Wadley, Bob the Drag Queen and Eureka O'Hara, all of "RuPaul's Drag Race" fame helped locals in Gettysburg, Pa., put on a drag show. It involved lipstick, glitter and "I Will Survive." This week, they'll do the same in Twin Falls, Idaho. Expect more glitter and lipstick (no guarantee of more "I Will Survive," though). LONDON HAS FALLEN (2016) 10 p.m. on TNT. In a trailer for this thriller, the vice president of the United States (played by Morgan Freeman) delivers a televised warning to the bad guys threatening democracy. "Make no mistake," he says. "We will find you, and we will destroy you." If you hear in those words an echo of the Liam Neeson line "I will find you, and I will kill you" from "Taken" well, maybe be generous. Consider labeling it a homage, instead of an imitation. Indeed, the very setup of "London Has Fallen," a sequel to "Olympus Has Fallen" (2013), borrows heavily from its own predecessor: Just like the first film, the sequel casts Gerard Butler as a Secret Service agent charged with protecting the American president (Aaron Eckhart), who gets captured by terrorists. "Will this hard luck president again defy death while his stoic sidekick vanquishes the nasty, uncivilized terrorists?" Neil Genzlinger asked in his review for The Times. "It's hard to care when a movie is this formulaic and moronic."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
That economic stress is compounded by the political impasse over new federal aid. The election this week made congressional control likely to remain split, dampening chances for a large package favored by Democrats, though possibly increasing chances for something smaller before year's end. "The prospects of a fiscal stimulus over the next few weeks are still quite uncertain, and the possibility of even a stronger economy under a Democratic sweep is now highly unlikely," said Gregory Daco, chief U.S. economist for Oxford Economics. "As a result, we are that much more concerned about the pace of growth heading into 2021 and the effect on the labor market." The labor market has recovered about half of the 22 million jobs lost after the pandemic struck in March, but the gains have been steadily slowing in recent months. Economists expect the Labor Department's comprehensive October report, due on Friday, to show an increase of 590,000 jobs, compared with 661,000 in September, and a decline in the unemployment rate to 7.7 percent from 7.9 percent. Experts will also be watching sectors like retailing, and leisure and hospitality, for signs of renewed economic pain. A surge in coronavirus cases in the Midwest has prompted a fresh round of lockdowns, which could lead to more layoffs as businesses close and people feel less comfortable dining in restaurants and shopping in stores. More Americans are joining the ranks of the long term unemployed, defined as those out of work for 27 weeks or more, and many have exhausted their state benefits. The number receiving assistance through Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation, which provides 13 weeks of benefits after state unemployment insurance runs out, is rising.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
The power of Ronald K. Brown's choreography lies in its myriad layers. There are the undulating bodies that form strong diagonal lines, which suddenly dissipate as dancers drift across the stage like mist. There is his agile use of stillness that subtly brushes the surface of raw emotions. And there is the undeniable way his propulsive movement crosses beyond the stage. Yes, this is the rare choreographer who makes you want to get up and dance. In the first of two programs presented at the Joyce Theater on Tuesday, Mr. Brown showed what a sophisticated artist he has become since forming his company, Evidence, in 1985. Just as his dances are anchored by traces, or evidence, of African lineage, they also evoke a feeling of passage. Some journeys are more major than others, but they all conjure a poetic sense of transformation. "She Is Here," a premiere set to music by Andy Gonzalez, is brief but potent. Dedicated to the legacy of mothers and teachers, it features Annique Roberts, a glorious dancer who moves with such liquid abandon that her body seems directed not by positions but by air. This solo has a slipperiness but it's not timid. Like Ms. Roberts, it has grit.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
SAN FRANCISCO Waymo, the self driving car business spun out of Google's parent company, claimed in a federal lawsuit on Thursday that Uber was using intellectual property stolen by one of Google's former project leaders. In a federal court filing in San Francisco, Waymo said Anthony Levandowski, who runs Uber's autonomous car division, downloaded 14,000 files from Google a month before leaving to start his own self driving car company, Otto. Uber acquired Otto in August for 680 million, about seven months after Mr. Levandowski left Google. "Otto and Uber have taken Waymo's intellectual property so that they could avoid incurring the risk, time, and expense of independently developing their own technology," the company said in the filing. "Ultimately, this calculated theft reportedly netted Otto employees over half a billion dollars and allowed Uber to revive a stalled program, all at Waymo's expense." Uber did not respond to requests for comment. In its filing, Waymo said it was inadvertently copied on an email from one of its suppliers with drawings of Uber's circuit board design for its lidar technology, short for light detection and ranging, " that are laser based sensors used in self driving cars. Waymo said Uber's design bore "a striking resemblance" to its proprietary and highly secret design and infringed on Waymo's patents. The suit accuses Uber of stealing trade secrets, infringing on patents and competing unfairly in an effort to catch up on autonomous vehicle technology. Otto was the brainchild of a handful of former Google employees who pioneered autonomous vehicle research at the search giant. Mr. Levandowski, who had been at Google nine years, led that effort. He is a prominent figure in the world of self driving vehicles, having worked on the technology for more than a decade and achieving some degree of renown as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2004, when he designed a self driving motorcycle that was entered in the Pentagon's first contest for autonomous vehicles. Later, when Google began working on self driving cars, it acquired Mr. Levandowski's start up, 510 Systems. Mr. Levandowski left Google in early 2016 to found Otto with Lior Ron, who also was experienced in autonomous vehicle research and digital mapping. Waymo noted in its suit that the sale to Uber closed shortly after Mr. Levandowski received his final "multimillion dollar" compensation payment from Google. Companies in Silicon Valley and Detroit are betting big on self driving car technology. And the intense interest has spawned a string of expensive investments and lawsuits. Last year, General Motors paid more than 1 billion for Cruise Automation, an autonomous vehicle technology start up, and Ford recently announced plans to invest 1 billion over five years in Argo AI, an artificial intelligence start up formed in December. In January, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Sterling Anderson, a former director of the company's Autopilot program, saying that he broke his employment contract by trying to recruit Tesla employees to join a new self driving car company. Tesla's suit, filed against Mr. Anderson and his partner Chris Urmson, a former Google employee, also claims that Mr. Anderson took proprietary information and tried to cover his tracks by destroying information. In December, Google's parent company, Alphabet, said that its seven year old autonomous vehicle project was spinning off from its research lab X and would operate as a stand alone company called Waymo. Alphabet said its decision to spin out Waymo was a signal that the company thought its self driving technology had advanced beyond research project status and was ready for commercialization. Waymo executives have said it is open to using the technology in many ways, including a ride hailing service to compete with Uber. For Uber, Otto represents a significant bet on the future of transportation. Mr. Levandowski was named vice president of Uber's self driving technology, and he reports directly to Travis Kalanick, the company's chief executive. Mr. Levandowski leads Uber's Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh, the epicenter of the company's testing and self driving efforts. Uber has said it could be years before self driving vehicles enter wide mainstream use. But the company has already deployed early tests in Pittsburgh and Tempe, Ariz., where the public can travel in prototype vehicles. In Fort Collins, Colo., Otto recently completed its first self driving truck delivery, a 120 mile beer delivery for Budweiser. Uber has also struck a deal with Volvo to jointly develop a self driving vehicle, the XC 90; early versions of it have been released in some cities. In December, Uber ran into opposition to a test of its self driving Volvo XC 90s in San Francisco, an operation the California Department of Motor Vehicles said was illegal because Uber did not hold the proper permits. One week later, Uber relented, redirecting its test to Tempe and pulling a fleet of its self driving cars out of the Bay Area. Uber, now privately valued at nearly 70 billion, has raised a dizzying amount of money from venture capitalists around Silicon Valley. One of its early investors was GV, the venture capital arm of Alphabet. In August, David Drummond, a longtime Alphabet executive who was instrumental in GV's 250 million investment in Uber in 2013, stepped down from his seat on Uber's board of directors as it became increasingly clear the two companies were on a collision course. It has been a difficult week for Uber. The company is still reeling from a blog post written by Susan Fowler, a former Uber employee, who claimed she was sexually harassed by a manager at the company and was ignored when she complained to the human resources department. The company said it was investigating Ms. Fowler's claims and other concerns about a toxic workplace culture. Mitch and Freada Kapor, early investors in Uber, wrote in a blog post on Thursday that they are frustrated with the company's inability to change its culture, despite their attempts to help. They also expressed concern about the independence of the investigation, which will be led by Eric H. Holder Jr., the former United States attorney general, and Arianna Huffington, an Uber board member. Mr. Holder has been paid to work on behalf of Uber since at least 2016, they wrote, and Ms. Huffington's board seat also compromises her independence. Mr. Holder and Tammy Albarran, a partner at the law firm Covington and Burling who is working on the investigation, said the inquiry would be "thorough, impartial and objective."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The death and ostensible resurrection of the great American city of Detroit has been the subject of so many feature pieces of journalism over the last 10 years (at least) that an outsider might be inclined to believe those events are recurring in a sort of temporal loop. The actual experience of living there day in and day out is credibly conveyed in the director Andrew James's documentary "Street Fighting Men." Eschewing interviews and even identifying titles, James interweaves portraits of three men. James "Jack Rabbit" Jackson is a retired cop who keeps neighborhood watch in an area blighted by break ins and vandalism. Luke Williams is working on restoring a vacant home, but is short on money and resources. Deris Solomon, a new father, wants to get off the street and stick to the straight and narrow for the sake of his child. The religious leader Malik Shabazz, who was the central figure in James's short film "Community Patrol," is also seen here.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
In President Trump's first two years in office, factory job growth accelerated, an achievement he has been claiming credit for ahead of the 2020 election, particularly in the industrial Midwest. His administration is "restoring American manufacturing," Mr. Trump told workers at an Ohio factory in March. Some of the 465,000 factory jobs that the country created in 2017 and 2018 are in the most economically beleaguered counties that voted for Mr. Trump in 2016. But the biggest winners have not been the traditional manufacturing hubs where workers have been hammered this century by outsourcing and automation, federal statistics show. Instead, factory job creation has flowed to frontiers of the advanced manufacturing economy like Nevada, home to a Tesla factory that churns out batteries for electric cars, homes and utilities and oil patch epicenters like Tulsa, Okla. The strong growth includes large contributions from the booming craft brewing, wine and spirits industries, which the federal government classifies as manufacturing and added nearly 30,000 jobs in that time. The vast majority of the factory jobs have come in counties that were already adding factory employment before Mr. Trump took office. And a disproportionate share of the expansion was concentrated in prosperous areas like Silicon Valley and Houston. An analysis of those statistics by the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington think tank that studies regional inequality and pushes for policies to combat it, reveals a mixed political and economic picture for Mr. Trump. His 2016 victory was forged with upsets in manufacturing hubs like Michigan and Pennsylvania, and he has reveled in blue collar job growth on his watch. A combination of tax cuts and deregulation pushed by the Trump administration appears to have fueled a widespread, though possibly temporary, increase in the pace of job creation in manufacturing. Production jobs increased in many more counties in Mr. Trump's first two years than under President Barack Obama from 2010 to 2016. Those gains have started slowing this year, in part under strain from the president's trade wars with China and other countries. And it appears doubtful that Mr. Trump will achieve his campaign promise of restoring the millions of factory jobs that many states and counties lost over the last two decades. The United States lost nearly six million manufacturing jobs from 2000 to 2010 as companies moved production to China and other low cost countries, increased use of machines on factory floors and scaled back operations after the 2008 financial crisis. The economy has regained just under 1.5 million, but not always in the places that lost the most. The Mountain West and the energy rich Great Plains have experienced much faster factory job growth than the Great Lakes states that are crucial to Mr. Trump's hopes of winning a second term. Nearly every state west of the Mississippi added manufacturing jobs faster than the national average in 2017 and 2018, the analysis shows. Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania were all at or below average. And several Northeastern states, including New York, Massachusetts and Vermont, lost factory jobs. Nearly half the counties that had more manufacturing employment in 2018 than in 2010 are in the West. But not all Western counties fared well. Los Angeles County lost more than 11,000 factory jobs and nearby Ventura County nearly 4,000 in Mr. Trump's first two years in office. Administration officials celebrate job growth in manufacturing and credit Mr. Trump's policies but acknowledge that it has mostly helped more prosperous parts of the country, at least so far. 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. "If you look, there are a heck of a lot of successful manufacturing parts of the country right now," Kevin Hassett , the departing chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in an interview. "But look at where they're being created." Mr. Hassett drew a distinction between "creative destruction" parts of the country, where the Great Recession wiped out jobs but others sprung up to replace them, and "destruction destruction" parts, where jobs have been slow to return. Recent factory job growth, he said, was "not necessarily disproportionately in the destruction destruction places." Mr. Hassett said many of those left behind areas would add more factory jobs as a result of the opportunity zone program in the tax overhaul that Mr. Trump signed in 2017, which aims to steer investment to distressed communities. The list of counties that added the most manufacturing jobs in 2017 and 2018 highlights that divide. It is led by Harris County, Tex., which includes Houston and factories that supply the oil and gas industry. It also includes Alameda County, Calif., in the Bay Area, and Storey County, Nev., east of Reno, which are home to Tesla plants that added jobs after Mr. Trump took office. Only two of the top 10 counties are in the industrial Midwest: Macomb County, Mich., near Detroit, and Peoria County in western Illinois. The 10 counties that created the most jobs in 2017 and 2018: Nearly half the job gains were in the most prosperous quintile of counties in America, according to the Economic Innovation Group, even though those counties accounted for just 40 percent of the nation's factory jobs before Mr. Trump took office. And in an indication that many of the gains may be part of long running economic trends, two thirds of the new positions were in counties that added jobs from 2010 through 2016. Still, there are some signs of hope for the counties that the group rates as the most economically distressed quintile. Collectively, they lost factory jobs throughout the Obama administration, but they added more than 20,000 during Mr. Trump's first two years, with the biggest gains in the Southeast, including Tennessee, the Carolinas, Arkansas and Georgia. "The manufacturing sector is steadily realigning after the shocks of the early part of this century," said John Lettieri , the president of the Economic Innovation Group, which came up with the idea for the opportunity zone program. "The West is emerging as a new growth engine for the sector, and manufacturing's rebound is finally reaching many distressed areas of the country." He added, "These gains are real but still fragile." The fragility is a result of a global manufacturing slowdown, which many analysts link to Mr. Trump's tariffs on imports from China among other products and the escalation of trade tensions with countries around the world.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Netflix said it had teamed up with about 75 companies, including Baskin Robbins, Levi's and H M Group, to draw attention to the show "Stranger Things." New Coke, the soft drink that drew a nationwide backlash in 1985, is back. And the credit, or blame, for the return of Coca Cola's greatest folly goes to Netflix. A limited supply of the vintage beverage will be available starting on Thursday as part of a robust promotional campaign related to the coming season of "Stranger Things," the supernatural thriller set in the 1980s. New Coke will also appear in several episodes of the show. Representatives of both companies said no money changed hands in that product placement deal. The return of the failed drink comes as Netflix ramps up its corporate partnerships and merchandising deals in an effort to recruit even more people to the streaming service, which has 149 million paid subscribers worldwide. Netflix said it had reached agreements with roughly 75 brands to spread the word about one of its biggest hits. Because of the new push, which rivals the campaigns for summertime blockbusters, "Stranger Things" may be hard to avoid in the coming weeks. H M and other retailers will sell clothes that replicate what the show's characters wear. Baskin Robbins will serve new flavors referencing the program's Scoops Ahoy ice cream parlor. The more aggressive promotional strategy gives the streaming service a way to market its wares and generate a new revenue stream that doesn't involve interrupting its shows with commercials. Unlike its competitor Hulu, Netflix is commercial free, although it has included product placement sometimes paid, sometimes not on its series and films. Matt and Ross Duffer, the creators of the show, said the New Coke tie in came about naturally, given that the third season, available July 4, takes place in summer 1985. That was when the Coca Cola Company fended off the unexpected negative reaction to the sweeter, smoother version of its flagship beverage, a reaction that included boycotts, letter writing campaigns and thousands of phone calls to its Atlanta headquarters. "It was one of the first ideas in our Season 3 brainstorm," the Duffer Brothers, as they are listed in the credits, said in a joint email interview. "It was the summer of '85, and when you talk about pop culture moments, New Coke was a really big deal. It would have been more bizarre to not include it." Barry Smyth, Netflix's head of partnership marketing, said the idea first came up during a meeting in 2017 between the show's creators and Netflix executives. "We asked the question, 'What would really blow it out of the water for this campaign?'" Mr. Smyth recalled. "They jokingly said, 'Bring back New Coke.' They thought it was a joke. We took it as a brief." Although Coca Cola executives have acknowledged that New Coke was a debacle, they said yes. The company had to dig up the recipe from its archives and said it would make 500,000 cans of New Coke available on its website and in some vending machines. The association with an oddity of '80s consumer culture is on brand for a show known for stirring nostalgia among viewers who grew up in the Reagan years. Its visual language owes a debt to Steven Spielberg's "E. T. the Extra Terrestrial" and other '80s films, while the story and mood bear the influence of Stephen King, who has defended the practice of including brand names in his fiction. And the show's title sequence has a look inspired by the King paperbacks that were all but inescapable during the decade. 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 props on "Stranger Things" recall the era, too. One of its young protagonists carries a Trapper Keeper notebook, a onetime status symbol of school hallways; another character keeps a He Man action figure, a popular '80s toy, in his room. The throwback mood has been heightened by the soundtrack's inclusions of Toto's "Africa" and the Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go." H M's "Stranger Things" collection includes a line of '80s style T shirts, swimsuits, visors and flip flops. Some are branded with the "Stranger Things" logo; others replicate things worn by the show's characters. The collection will be accompanied by an ad campaign featuring Dacre Montgomery, who plays the villainous Billy Hargrove on the show. The return of New Coke is perhaps the most surprising and nostalgia inducing element of the broader publicity effort. The almost forgotten artifact belonged to a predigital time of fewer entertainment options, with network TV still dominant, and fewer soda varieties, too. Nowadays, Coca Cola has many spinoffs, including obscurities like Coca Cola Zero Sugar Vanilla and Diet Coke Blueberry Acai. In 1985, there was Cherry Coke, introduced that year to a positive reaction, and Diet Coke. From late April into July, New Coke was the only drink to go under the name Coca Cola or Coke. (The official name was Coca Cola or Coke, and the word "new" was featured on cans.) In an about face, the company brought back the original under the name Coca Cola Classic, and the two types existed side by side for the remainder of the decade. After taking on the name Coke II, the reformulated drink lasted until 2002, when it was quietly pulled from shelves. The original formula had won out, but the "Classic" tag didn't fall away from cans and bottles until 2009. The Duffers featured brand name products in the first two seasons of "Stranger Things," with Kellogg's Eggo waffles and Kentucky Fried Chicken having prominent roles. Netflix said the two companies did not pay anything to appear on the program. The company added that many of its other corporate partnerships, including with Baskin Robbins, would not generate revenue, although the streaming service will get a cut of "Stranger Things" branded clothing and other merchandise. Any money the company brings in from the arrangements isn't as important as "fueling the fandom," said Christie Fleischer, Netflix's vice president for consumer products. For the show's creators, the association with brand name products lends a touch of their favorite '80s movies to the show. "When we were kids, we were obsessed with those self lacing Nikes in 'Back to the Future Part II,' and, of course, we loved that Elliott baited E. T. with Reese's Pieces!" the Duffers, who are 35 year old twins, said. "When we were kids, that simply made Elliott more relatable, more ordinary, more like us." Relationships with outside companies seem likely to become a trend for Netflix. The producer Shonda Rhimes, who has a nine figure, multiyear contract with the service, expressed an interest in "product integration" during an interview with The Times last year. The Duffers said none of the marketing deals meant to hype their show would add to their bank accounts. "We're not getting a revenue cut from any of this," they said. "The hope is that it just gets the show more exposure." The arrangement did lead to a paid side gig, though: The Duffers directed a Coke commercial to be shown in movie theaters starting this weekend. And they said their show would stay true to the brand, saying, "We did tell our production designer to make sure we never saw any Pepsi!"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
In 2003, the "King of Pop" gave a strange, on brand performance in "Living With Michael Jackson," a 90 minute television special hosted by the British journalist Martin Bashir. Part documentary, part "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," this program seemed to demonstrate just how out of touch with reality Jackson was. Among other things, he insisted that he'd only had two cosmetic surgeries in his life a claim that seemed silly at best, even to a lifelong M.J. fan like me. Then there was a 13 year old boy whom Jackson had befriended. The boy defended sleeping in the singer's bed at Jackson's Neverland Ranch, at one point in the interview resting his head on Jackson's shoulder as the star declared, "The most loving thing to do is share your bed with someone." For some, this rang alarm bells; months after the special aired, the police began a criminal investigation, which led to Jackson's being charged on several counts, including child molestation involving the 13 year old. But in 2005, a jury found him not guilty in a trial in which the former child star Macaulay Culkin and another witness named Wade Robson testified that they had spent many nights with Jackson and had not been abused. It was easy for many fans to categorize that uneasy conversation from "Living With Michael Jackson" not as criminal, but as just another example of the singer's disconnect. That isn't possible for me anymore. I came away from "Leaving Neverland," a new two part HBO documentary in which Robson and James Safechuck accuse Jackson of having molested them when they were children, fully convinced by their stories. (The 13 year old did not participate in the documentary, but his presence looms over it in news footage and as a figure Robson says he now wishes he could have been a "comrade" to during the trial.) A subsequent rewatch of that conversation with Bashir left me feeling mortified, in a way I probably should have felt long ago. Perhaps even more difficult to digest than the very explicit details of the abuse Robson and Safechuck describe in "Neverland" are the indelible effects that persisted into adulthood. In "Living With Michael Jackson," the way Jackson speaks about the physical abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of his father, Joseph, only lends more credence to Robson's and Safechuck's stories. The three seemed to process their individual traumas in similar ways. Since January, when "Leaving Neverland" debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, Jackson's superfans, his family and his estate have tried to poke holes in Safechuck's and Robson's stories. During an interview with Gayle King that aired last week, Michael's brother Marlon wondered, "If Neverland was so horrifying" for Robson and Safechuck, "why would you keep going back?" Michael Jackson's fans are tenacious. Our critic Wesley Morris reviews the documentary. "Leaving Neverland" answers that question compellingly. In Part 2, Robson recalls the strong emotional bond toward Jackson he still felt as an adult, a closeness cemented when he was 7 and first met the star. Robson, 22 at the time of the trial, says in the film he was "excited at the idea of being able to defend him and being able to save him." He says he had nightmares of seeing Jackson in jail, and adds that he wasn't yet ready to see himself as a victim. "I still loved him deeply," said Robson. And as his wife, Amanda, says in "Leaving Neverland," "Love is powerful." In discussing patterns of abuse in relationships, many psychologists and researchers point out that victims commonly do not recognize their abuse as what it is and remain close to those who hurt them. Jackson showered Safechuck and Robson with attention and presented himself as a child trapped in a grown man's body. When such an intimate relationship is established, as Safechuck and Robson say was the case with Jackson, the memories of happier feelings can overwhelm the toxic ones.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Over the past two or three years, Warren Isensee's abstract paintings, while always good, have taken a sharp turn for the better. For nearly a decade Mr. Isensee, who has been exhibiting since 1998, cultivated a distinctive geometry of parallel lines whose softened edges and pulsing color contrasts conjured the tubular glow of neon, compartmentalizing them into squares and rectangles with black outlines. But recently a kind of dam seems to have burst. In paintings from the last year or so, viewable in person and online, Mr. Isensee's lines of color curve, bulge and undulate, forming gorgeous often quatrefoil patterns that evoke gears, jacks and also intarsia Renaissance tables, their inlaid stone updated with a cartoonish bounce. Thicker rubbery versions of the black outlines push the colors in and out, squeezing them into narrow ribbons or allowing them to expand into quasi shapes. The leftover spaces outside those lines are filled by weird shapes nodules, lozenges, light bulbs and boomerangs outlined in two or three colors. Over all, there is a strange effect: The surface has such energy that it seems to make the canvas all but disappear. Mr. Isensee sets out his compositions in small, delectable colored pencil studies that are also on view. He then turns to canvas, painting freehand, in oil, producing a luscious surface. His palette tends toward calibrated variations on the primary colors: brighter and more pure outside the black outlines, paler within. Figuring out the inter workings of these paintings their contrapuntal colors, geometric high jinks and bodily, mechanical or decorative suggestions is tremendously thrilling for both mind and eye. A formalist vocabulary continues to operate in these works. In particular Mr. Isensee seems to build, at least partly, but elaborately on the work of Paul Feeley, the uncategorizable abstract painter of the 1950s and '60s. Feeley's emblem like shapes are almost quoted verbatim in "Out of Touch." But these paintings go beyond formal. They are complex collaborations of line, shape and color in which everything coalesces into a kind of visual equality, to beautiful, and inspiring, effect. They also testify to how much time and work is required to become the artist that only you and no one else can be. ROBERTA SMITH Let's say you start "Sex and Love With a Psychologist," a tricky new show by Sojourner Truth Parsons, with the painting "Ocean With Piano." There you'll find a paper doll ballerina on point in front of a matte black background. Behind the dancer are several views of a full moon, "attached" to the painting's bottomless darkness with trompe l'oeil blue tape, and beside her is a lavender doppelganger. If, then, you turn to "Tell Them That It's Human Nature" and find the same ballerina behind a seated, naked young woman, and both of them enclosed together in another painting within the painting under another piece of blue "tape," you may think you've got the point: The show, as billed, is about sex, love and escalating levels of self consciousness, as well as a steady cultural drumbeat of highly stereotyped images of femininity. But since you could just as easily find a different progression entirely crisscross the gallery following the round yellow moon, instead, or simply linger in front of the jagged, fractured face in "My Perfect Look" it's almost impossible to get your footing. The secret, I finally realized, was in those changeless black backgrounds, which the paintings' reds, yellow, and hot pinks throw into such relief. Though they look thick and velvety online, if you're able to visit in person you'll discover that they're painted quick and thin. In combination with the sketchy drawing, this makes the whole group of paintings look as much like stage dressings as they do like a gallery show which adds a final, crucial turn to the work's self consciousness. WILL HEINRICH Breath is central to two phenomena dominating our moment, the coronavirus crisis and the reinvigorated Black Lives Matter movement, as well as to "Edition One and Two Fantasies," a spare conceptual installation by the New York artist Park McArthur that you can view online or in person at Essex Street gallery. The door to the gallery is left open to suggest ample air circulation and ease of access. Just inside is "Fantasies" (2020), a stack of 12 disposable filters on the wall, taken from a ventilator that Ms. McArthur uses at night. (The actual filters are safely encased in plastic.) Elsewhere in the gallery, framed blue on white printouts titled "Form found figuring it out, show" like artistic prints are appropriated from the medical device called an incentive spirometer, which Ms. McArthur also uses and which is designed to help improve the functioning of the lungs. Ms. McArthur's work recalls artists like Michael Asher and Cameron Rowland, whose institutional critiques consider questions like who makes an object and how it is displayed, purchased or consumed. However, ability (and disability) is what's at issue here. Ms. McArthur, who uses a wheelchair, expands upon critical disability theory issues that challenge discrimination and the single ("able") version of how people should be in the world. This show is somewhat stark and sterile compared with her clever and engaging 2014 show of disability access ramps laid out on the gallery floor. But it feels exceptionally timely. Where the coronavirus and Black Lives Matter highlight the "I can't breathe" of patients and Black victims of police brutality, Ms. McArthur shifts it to a personal register that feels both ameliorative and activist. MARTHA SCHWENDENER For all art galleries and institutions, the fallout from the coronavirus has been brutal; for those devoted to performance, it has been existential. Blank Forms, a reliably intelligent nonprofit devoted to experimental performance, music, dance and sound art, has had to cancel its concerts and postpone its seminars but it has also pursued some nimble digital efforts, like an online exhibition of the artist and composer Graham Lambkin titled "Time Runs Through the Darkest Hour." View it on your biggest monitor, and plug in your headphones. Mr. Lambkin, born in southern England and now based in upstate New York, has produced more than a dozen large drawings in which humans, animals, plants, fungi and biomorphs of indeterminate status seem to fly, float, collide, collapse. Their thin contours and light coloring (mauve, beige, cerulean, gray) put me in mind of the spectral figures of Henri Michaux or Roberto Matta, though compared to the existential anxieties of those midcentury modernists, Mr. Lambkin's drawings of unmoored species express a more ecological unease. In each drawing the picture plane is reliably shallow; bodies stack and tumble in these overlaid spaces, in a manner that recalls the compressed perspectives of Piranesi's imaginary prisons. The drawings, if seen on their own, might feel too general yet Mr. Lambkin is displaying them against an ambient, 40 minute sound recording that grounds their floating forms within the everyday sounds of the artist's studio. I heard, or think I heard, the hiss of a gas burner, a dripping faucet, footfalls on wood, the chiming of a stylus striking bells or cordial glasses, a deep hum that could be a cello or a space heater. Listening at my computer offered a very different experience from listening in Blank Forms's Brooklyn space; it sounded like a private missive from artist to audience, both of us trapped at home, both of us lost in space. JASON FARAGO	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Twelve patients became seriously ill after receiving injections that supposedly contained stem cells from umbilical cord blood, according to the Food and Drug Administration, which issued a warning to the California company, Genetech, that made the blood product they were given. The F.D.A. said on Thursday that it had also written to 20 clinics that offer unapproved stem cell treatments, warning them that such products are generally regulated by the agency and encouraging the clinics to contact federal regulators before November 2020, when enforcement will tighten. The names of the clinics have not been released. "We're going to be going in and inspecting more stem cell operators this year," Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the agency's commissioner, said in an email. "We're focused on outfits that may be engaging in unsafe practices and haven't been working with F.D.A. to come into compliance with the laws they're subject to. Unfortunately, there are too many firms that fit this description." Hundreds of clinics have sprung up around the country, offering treatments supposedly containing stem cells, to treat a wide variety of ailments, including arthritis, eye disorders, Parkinson's disease and lung problems. The treatments are marketed as having curative or healing properties, but there is no proof that they work or are safe.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Marvel Comics turns 80 in August. To celebrate, the company is releasing Marvel Comics No. 1000, which follows its heroes from Day 1 in 1939, long before they became the global entertainment phenomenon they are today. Each page of the comic will correlate to one year in Marvel history. Along the way, readers will see many of the marquee characters from the mighty Marvel universe like Captain America, Thor and Iron Man, and some less familiar ones, like Blue Marvel, Night Thrasher and the Three X's. "This is by far the most complex and complicated and difficult book I've ever had to assemble," Tom Brevoort, Marvel's executive editor and senior vice president of publishing, said in a conference call with C.B. Cebulski, Marvel's editor in chief. While most comic books are created by one writer and one art team, Issue No. 1000 will have 80 one team for each of its 80 pages. The company began teasing the project in issues that arrived in stores this week: Comics on Wednesday featured advertisements with one, two or three names, along with the words "August 2019" against a background collage of historic Marvel covers. There was a lot of buzz among fans.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Mary Tyrone casts a long shadow over "Long Day's Journey Into Night" while she's onstage, and while she's not. For much of the second act, this morphine addicted mother haunts her husband and sons with her absence. They know that once she disappears up the stairs of their ramshackle summerhouse, she is finding a vein, getting a fix and slipping away. Meanwhile, as soon as Mary steps offstage, the actress Lesley Manville has shaken off the character and started taking care of business. She spends her long break, before returning for Mary's final dope fueled monologue, getting her own life in order: taking a shower, doing a bit of sewing, answering emails. "I hope that doesn't destroy the illusion," Ms. Manville told me the morning after her American debut in the Eugene O'Neill play, which has arrived in New York after runs in London and Bristol. (It will be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theater through May 27.) Onstage the night before, Ms. Manville's hands were instruments of Mary's pain, fiddling restlessly, wringing each other red, scratching at her neck and plinking madly at the piano. Now they were sheathed in a kind of delicate armor a collection of intricate metallic rings, a gold watch, a slim Tiffany bracelet inscribed with her initials and cupped around a mug of hot water with lemon. The idea of that character managing to consume this woman was suddenly ludicrous. "You're imagining I'm sitting in my dressing room," she said with a laugh, "pretending to shoot up!" She just earned her first Oscar nomination for her turn as Cyril Woodcock, the sharp as a sewing needle older sister to Daniel Day Lewis's precious dressmaker Reynolds in "Phantom Thread" (2017), but she has been reliably dazzling in the corners of films for years. As the 19th century scientist Mary Somerville in Mike Leigh's film "Mr. Turner" (2014), she crackles with the energy of scientific discovery; as the desperately lonely secretary Mary in Mr. Leigh's "Another Year" (2010), she appears almost in stop motion as she jitters across the screen, downing glasses of white wine and spitting out deflections. Lately Ms. Manville has sparkled on television, too, where she currently appears as the endlessly patient widow Cathy in the BBC's tender sitcom "Mum" and as the sadistic madam Lydia Quigley in Hulu's 18th century drama "Harlots." She recently squeezed in shooting the second season of "Harlots" during the day while performing "Long Day's Journey" in London at night, so she used her second act break to learn her next morning's lines. This is too much work for one person, but she is unfazed. "It had to be done," she said. "I am unbelievably pragmatic. There's no point in me going" she affected a childlike whine "Oh, I'm too tired! I can't get up and do 'Harlots,' and I can't learn these lines, so I'll turn up on set and I'll throw a wobbly." Back to her big girl voice: "bollocks." Some actors stomp their feet, impatient for their turn to arrive. But Ms. Manville has been quietly waiting for decades for this moment. Finally, with "Phantom Thread," her face with her Sphinx like line of a mouth and lavender crystal ball eyes has become an international object of fascination. At the beginning of the film, Lesley as Cyril refracts her brother's gaze into a steely glare, staring down his outgoing girlfriend and sizing up his incoming one, Alma. ("You have the ideal shape," she tells Alma after assisting Reynolds in taking her measurements. "He likes a little belly.") But first, it took some more waiting around. The film's director, Paul Thomas Anderson, said: "The entire first couple weeks for Lesley were challenging, because she spent so much time dutifully sitting in the corner. Two weeks of sitting there, smiling at your brother, nodding at what a genius he is it's exhausting." During those long first weeks, before Cyril came alive as a force of her own, Mr. Anderson recalled: "I would say to her, 'Your time is coming.' And that's exactly how it worked out." MS. MANVILLE WAS RAISED in a little flat in the seaside town of Brighton, the youngest of three daughters to a taxi driver father and homemaker mother. Her parents were part of what she calls the "gin and tonic set" of Brighton's mod 1960s scene charming, glamorous and traditional. They "didn't instill in me any sort of feminist values," Ms. Manville said. "I grew up thinking the man was the boss of the household, and that a woman was subservient." Her mother danced ballet but quit when she married. She wore a girdle under her clothes every day, even if she was just at home doing housework. When Ms. Manville wiggled into a similar item to play Cyril, she found that "they're not the most comfortable of things, but they do make you look great underneath a fitted suit." She struck out on her own early to dance and sing at stage school, but took more to acting, and, at 19, logged episodes as a farm girl on the British soap "Emmerdale" to pay for a flat of her own. Soon after, she met Mr. Leigh. In her, he saw "a brilliant character actress stuck just playing herself," he told me. In his work, which emphasizes naturalistic character building and improvisation, she saw "a way forward." In 1987, Ms. Manville married Gary Oldman, and they split shortly after their son, Alfie, was born. Mr. Oldman went off to become an American movie star, and she raised Alfie on her own. "It makes me anxious and neurotic and hell to live with," Mr. Oldman has said of his acting process. Not so for Ms. Manville. She departed from her parents' traditional path, but her mother's example of how to look after a family stuck. "Even when I was working, I would make sure there was something home cooked in the fridge," she said. Alfie is grown now, but she's still calibrated to single motherhood. "The problem is that I've always done everything, so now I can't stop doing everything," she said. "I don't like being driven I like to drive. I don't like people doing my hair. I don't like people doing my makeup. I'm not good with people doing things for me." To be clear: "It's not because I don't want someone to cook my dinner. It's that nobody ever really has. So I just cook it myself." Taking care of the business of life is an artistic choice as well as a personal one. Many of the details she builds into characters "I'm getting for nothing," she said. "That's just what having a life brings you. I have an inherent understanding of someone who's lost a husband, or someone who isn't married, or someone who's lonely." Or someone who is not lonely at all. For Cyril, who eschews marriage and instead pair bonds with her brother in the "quiet, anal, hermetic world" of the House of Woodcock, "control is almost a kind of sex," she said. If she identifies with Cyril, it's in this way: "I've spent a lot of time happily on my own. I'm very sure of who I am." IN MS. MANVILLE'S RECENT WORK, a theme has emerged of women who contend with towering male artists and reveal their shortcomings. There's "Long Day's Journey," of course, in which Mary's life is constructed (and deconstructed) around her husband, the matinee idol James Tyrone, played here by Jeremy Irons. "She's had what looks like a quite glamorous life," Ms. Manville said of Mary. "I make sure I deliver with great clarity and emotion when she speaks about what her life actually has been like" following her husband around the country, waiting alone in cheap hotels as he goes out to the theater each day and comes home drunk each night. Ms. Manville, seen here in "Another Year," has collaborated with the filmmaker Mike Leigh more than any other actor, and from him she learned to maneuver easily in and out of character. James speaks of Mary's love lighting a fire beneath his ambition, but he extinguished hers. She dreamed of being a concert pianist, before she married. Through morphine, she can escape to her memories, to a time, Ms. Manville said, "when she was Mary, instead of just Mrs. Tyrone." And then there is "Phantom Thread," in which Reynolds Woodcock can make beautiful dresses but can't seem to make his own omelets or dump his own girlfriends. He needs Cyril to supervise both the atelier and his life. In the months leading up to the shoot, Ms. Manville and Mr. Day Lewis began forging that super glued sibling codependency over text message. He was preparing for his role by apprenticing in the costume department at the New York City Ballet, and he would update Ms. Manville on his progress: "I'd get a text from him that just said: 'buttonholes today.'" There's something striking about the approaches of these two actors: Mr. Day Lewis, the method actor, giving over his own life for a year to learn to sew couture, a process that would engulf him in such a depression that he swore he'd never make another film, and the practical Ms. Manville, literally taking care of her own mending between film shoots and O'Neill scenes. There is an assumption embedded in the figure of the artistic genius that every faculty must be directed toward the art, leaving life behind. The genius is, of course, a designation rarely extended to women. He's a man who can create wonderful things but can't manage himself, so he has women do it for him. Even as she plays such women, Ms. Manville challenges all that: She is the great artist who can take care of herself and everybody else, too. But while the men of her cohort Mr. Irons, Mr. Oldman, Mr. Day Lewis have become acclaimed as generational talents, recognition of her has remained just out of reach. It's a little closer now. When she arrived at the Oscars, she was surprised to find that "Steven Spielberg knew who I was," she said. "Emma Stone knew who I was. Meryl knew who I was." Her roles are getting bigger, the openings wider. Next she's slated to play the cancer stricken wife to Liam Neeson's husband in the drama "Normal People" (the first time in recent memory that he's been paired onscreen with a woman born in the same decade as him) and Gala, Salvador Dali's wife and muse (Ben Kingsley will be the genius). A funny thing happened at the Oscars, actually. "Gary and I, by complete coincidence, arrived at the same time," she said. "It was really surreal." For a moment their careers aligned, and then diverged again. Mr. Oldman won his Oscar. Ms. Manville is still waiting sitting, mending, biding her time for that.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater

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