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Of all the social media platforms, Twitter has lately been especially aggressive in disputing inaccurate election related posts and hiding messages. That means Jack Dorsey, Twitter's chief executive, may face particular fire while testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday about social media and censorship. President Trump and other Republican leaders have claimed for months and increasingly vocally in recent days that Mr. Dorsey has unfairly cracked down on them. They have threatened to roll back legal protections for Twitter and other social media platforms. They are likely train their ire on two recent developments. One was Twitter's decision last month to restrict users from sharing an unsubstantiated New York Post article about Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s son Hunter. Twitter limited the sharing of the article more than Facebook did, drawing cries of censorship from Republicans. The other focus is likely to be Twitter's handling of election related content and, in particular, how the company has appeared to tightly moderate Mr. Trump and other conservatives. Between Election Day and Nov. 5, Twitter labeled 38 percent of Mr. Trump's 29 tweets and retweets as disputed or misleading, according to a New York Times tally. Some of the tweets were hidden from view.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The Fongoli chimpanzees live in a mix of savanna and woodlands where prey is not as abundant as in rain forests. There are no red colobus monkeys, and although the chimps do hunt young vervet monkeys and baboons, the much smaller bush babies are their main prey. Dr. Pruetz argues that less food may have prompted both technological and social innovation, resulting in new ways to hunt and new social interactions as well. Humans evolved in a similar environment, and, as she and her colleagues write in Royal Society Open Science, "tool assisted hunting could have similarly been important for early hominins." The tools in question are broken branches that Dr. Pruetz calls jabbing tools. The season for bush baby hunting is June, when the temperature may be well over 100 and the humidity is suffocating. The Fongoli chimps find the bush babies in their dens in trees. Chimps will stab and poke one of the small animals, sometimes wounding but not impaling it, until it comes out of its hiding place. The chimps will grab it, Dr. Pruetz said, and immediately "bite the head off." Females, even those with infants, and juvenile chimps can do this kind of hunting. The process does not put a premium on speed and strength as the chase does, so big males do not have an advantage. But there is more than technique and technology involved. There is social change. By and large, said Dr. Pruetz, the adult males, which could take away a kill, show a "respect of ownership." Theft rates are only about 5 percent. The chimps she studies also have more mixed sex social groups than chimp bands in East Africa. Travis Pickering, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, said that with less food available it seems that the Fongoli chimps, "have to be more inventive" and that "these hunting weapons even the playing field for non adults and females." Early hominins may have been in a similar situation, he said. Hunting among human ancestors "very quickly became a male dominated activity," he said, but "female hominins could very well have been the inventors of weapons." When it comes to getting food, deciding who does what depends on definitions. Collecting insects, for example, is defined as gathering, not hunting. In the case of the bush babies, however, though they are small, they struggle and flee, and will bite. Any bite, no matter how small, can pose the danger of infection, so the pursuit of bush babies qualifies as hunting, Dr. Pruetz says, and Dr. Stanford and Dr. Pickering agree.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Alyssa Marie Long and Collin Long both enjoy the outdoors and camping, so when it was time to pick a site for their wedding in May 2017, it came as no surprise that they would chose a campsite. The couple wed at the Y.M.C.A. Camp Campbell in Boulder Creek, Calif., and their 100 or so guests stayed at the nearby Big Basin Redwoods State Park. Nearly 44 percent of all couples nationwide have wedding weekends incorporating multiple events into several days, according to a Knot Real Weddings Study conducted last year. And a growing number of them are booking campsites, wedding professionals say. Campsites offer space to accommodate a long guest list overnight as well as plenty of activities to occupy their time. Friends and family are able to bond in a more casual environment that feels like a minivacation. And costs are often less than at more conventional events spaces and hotels. Campsite wedding costs will vary, though many facilities charge less than 10,000 for two days. Camp Wandawega in Elkhorn, Wis., charges 22,000 for weekends and 10,000 on weekdays for a two day rental of their grounds, including accommodations for the guests. The beauty of the outdoors also makes for a glamorous backdrop for wedding photos. Luke Leasure, who with his wife, Mallory Leasure, operates the wedding photography company Luke Mallory in Portland, Ore., estimate that a third of the weddings they shoot each year are at campsites, including the Longs's at the Y.M.C.A. Camp Campbell. "People are wanting an adventure wedding, especially those who don't like the dog and pony show of conventional wedding traditions," Mr. Leasure said. "In the past two years, people have been into the idea of an adventure elopement, but with a campsite, they can bring people with them and still have that type of ceremony," he said. "It's the feeling of being out there without losing all the amenities." In their work, the Leasures have seen couples employ typical camp activities, like yard game competitions, kayak trips, and s'more creations. Some rename the camp with their monikers, others create a theme. "They really keep it chill and about being with the ones they love," Mr. Leasure said. "It's about the experience and not the flash of money or elegance." Camp Wandawega offers a document couples can share with their guests detailing what they can expect in a rustic environment. "There's a recurring theme of 'disconnecting to reconnect,'" David Hernandez, the camp owner, said. "Friends and family shut their laptops, put away their phones, and immerse themselves in the pleasures of a simpler time. For many, camps are evocative of a childhood they are nostalgic for, allowing them to relive the more innocent times of their youth." Simple is key when it comes to a campsite. Cellphone service is often spotty and you can't always rely on Wi Fi. For the actual wedding day, it can be both a blessing and curse. Guests won't be viewing the ceremony through an Instagram filter, but it does pose challenges for vendors. Teissia Treynet, who runs Firefly Events, an event planning and design company with offices in New York, California and Wyoming, suggests walkie talkies. She also advises couples to set up charging stations for guests who do want to use their devices to reserve other outlets for powering equipment and lighting for the ceremony and reception. She confirms with the site that generators are available, and rents additional units as necessary. Light can be another hurdle. Many campsites lack lamps along pathways, in tents, and in many parts of the property. To keep guests safe and make it easier to move about, Ms. Treynet suggests hanging bistro lights from trees and placing solar lights along walkways. She also suggests setting up a "camp store" where guests can borrow supplies such as lanterns, flashlights, and more. Otherwise guests will need to be told to bring along flashlights. Footwear can also be an issue at a campsite wedding. Because of unstable ground, heels are generally a no go, Mr. Hernandez said. The same goes for open toes, which can catch gravel, wood chips, or other natural elements. For larger properties, couples should consider having golf carts available to help guests with limited mobility get from place to place. Couples looking for a bit more comfort might consider so called glampsites. Glamping typically involves fancier tents, and amenities such as private bathrooms, electricity in the tents, higher ceilings, beds with linens, and sometimes even air conditioning. It's basically a hotel room under a cloth ceiling. Some glampsites offer cabins. At Camp Navarro in Navarro, Calif., which offers glamping style lodging, couples will find a 200 acre campsite specifically crafted as an event space. Rental fees cover accommodations (which include spaces for Airstream trailers), as well as housekeeping services and generators. Among the added amenities: ceramic plates, a sound system and a catering kitchen. The site fee is 25,000 for weddings in April through October, and 15,000 for November through March. (Accommodations are extra.) The camp's founder and chief executive, Dan Braun, explained that he wanted to design an event space that evoked the nostalgia of growing up at camp but where "everyone can stay on site, even grandma." He says he strives to work with couples that value the ability to connect with friends and family on a deeper level without letting go of all amenities. Similarly, Ventana Big Sur, just south in Big Sur, Calif., recently opened a glampground in a Redwood Forest to serve couples who want a laid back and natural celebration with more luxury. While some guests a stay in a glampsite atmosphere with tents, guests looking for a proper hotel can stay at the main resort property a few miles away. Rachel Schanding, the facility's director of catering and events, explained that many couples make use of all the event spaces the resort has to offer, like the Sur House restaurant for a send off brunch. "This way nothing gets missed," she said. "Guests get the full experience of what Big Sur is all about while feeling a part of a resort."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
For weeks, Melissa Cafiero, the director of compliance at Halstead Management, has been fielding phone calls and emails from residents of the co op and condo buildings that her company oversees. They have been exercise deprived since Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's Mar. 16 directive shuttering gyms to help contain the spread of Covid 19, and they think enough is enough. Give them cardio. And give it to them now. The distress calls to Ms. Cafiero and her colleagues are taking on a new urgency as New York City looks to start reopening. Many residential buildings have already reopened their roof decks (or didn't close them in the first place), while limiting occupancy and requiring masks and social distancing. When it comes to amenities like pools and gyms, however, landlords and co op and condo boards are aware of residents' desires, but proceeding with extreme caution. "Gyms are the thing everyone wants to see open," said John Janangelo, the executive managing director of Douglas Elliman Property Management. "And gyms present the biggest challenge." Among the challenges is the placement of cardio equipment, like treadmills and elliptical machines, which tend to be arranged in serried ranks. Some buildings are weighing the advantages of removing some machines to ensure proper social distancing or, space permitting, dispersing the machines around the workout floor. Other options include disabling or roping off equipment. Like many buildings, 133 West 22nd, a condo in Chelsea, is working on the logistics of making its workout room safe for residents. "If there are two treadmills side by side, we're going to shut one off," said Daniel J. Wollman, the chief executive of the property management company Gumley Haft, who is also suggesting to clients that, initially at least, they clear workout rooms of mats, balls, free weights and personal trainers. Of course, limiting the amount of equipment is just the beginning. Buildings also plan to limit the number of people in a gym at a given time, a number they'll come up with based on the gym's square footage. "It's common sense," said Steven D. Sladkus, a real estate lawyer. "If the space is small, you may want to limit it to one person or one family at a time." In fact, according to a spokesman for the Empire State Development Corporation, gyms should remain closed until they get specific guidance from the state about proper protocols. The gym at the rental building 525 West 52nd Street is tentatively scheduled to reopen June 8 on a reservation only basis, with occupancy limited to five people and workouts capped at an hour. "We're dividing the fitness center into five zones and are asking that residents stay in one zone for the duration of their workouts," said Agim Duraku, the building's general manager. The layout is being modified to include an assortment of equipment in each zone. Mr. Wollman, of Gumley Haft, said that his co op and condo clients would similarly require residents to sign up in advance to use the gym, perhaps using a system like BuildingLink, and to limit the length of their workouts. "People will likely get 30 or 45 minutes, depending on how much demand there is," he said. Still to be nailed down is the apportioning of prime time privileges. "A lot of people are going to want a 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. slot," said Mr. Janangelo, of Douglas Elliman. "Maybe it'll be that people will get it only every two or three weeks." There will be new floor signage to mark a one way path around the space, said Ms. Cafiero, of Halstead Management, as well as signage to remind people to wipe down machines after use. But buildings do not intend to rely exclusively on the disinfecting diligence of their residents. Mr. Wollman envisions a building staff member going to the gym to spray down the equipment after every workout session. "Our view is that we'll close each day at noon for half an hour to do a deeper cleaning, reopen and maybe run the gym until 7:00, clean again and lock down until the next morning," he said. Buildings with pools are also trying to figure out a way forward. "There is no evidence that the virus that causes Covid 19 can be transmitted through the water in pools," according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Further, proper operation and maintenance, including the use of disinfectants like chlorine or bromine, "should inactivate the virus." "The co op and condo boards we're working with are talking about having sign up sheets, limiting the number of people in the pool and how long they can be in the pool," said Adam Stern, the senior vice president of management at the property management company AKAM Associates. An added complication is the pool deck. "We're going to have disinfecting guidelines for the pool chairs and the access area to the pool," Mr. Stern said. Craig L. Price, a partner at the law firm Belkin Burden Goldman, suggested that the coronavirus could serve as a catalyst for co ops and condos to take a good, hard look at their amenities and the risks they pose. "It may be that they'll want to come up with different uses for some spaces," he said. Residents may be doing some risk assessments of their own. "There will likely be some people who will say, 'I'd rather get a Peloton in my apartment and not pay part of my common charges for a gym,'" Mr. Price said. In any case, the spontaneous trip to the building gym to work off the tension of the day is off the table, at least for the foreseeable future. So is possessiveness about the third treadmill in the row (that treadmill may be unplugged) or that special recumbent bike (it's been an hour time's up). "Some people aren't going to be happy," Mr. Janangelo said. "But we're going to be living in a different world, and they're going to have to get used to it." 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
You want to see a real can't look away train wreck of a relationship? Look to the nation's capital, where a messy falling out is chronicled everywhere from the tabloids to a glossy fashion magazine, replete with a photo shoot by a swimming pool. The saga has enough betrayal, backstabbing, recrimination, indignation and ostracization to impress Edith Wharton. The press breathlessly covers how much time has passed since the pair last spoke, whether they're headed for splitsville, and if they can ever agree on what's best for the children. It was always bound to be tempestuous because they are the ultimate odd couple, the doctor and the president. One is a champion of truth and facts. The other is a master of deceit and denial. One is highly disciplined, working 18 hour days. The other can't be bothered to do his homework and golfs instead. One is driven by science and the public good. The other is a public menace, driven by greed and ego. One is a Washington institution. The other was sent here to destroy Washington institutions. One is incorruptible. The other corrupts. One is apolitical. The other politicizes everything he touches toilets, windows, beans and, most fatally, masks. After a fractious week, when the former reality show star in the White House retweeted a former game show host saying that we shouldn't trust doctors about Covid 19, Donald Trump and Anthony Fauci are gritting their teeth. What's so scary is that the bumpy course of their relationship has life or death consequences for Americans. Who could even dream up a scenario where a president and a White House drop oppo research on the esteemed scientist charged with keeping us safe in a worsening pandemic? The administration acted like Peter Navarro, Trump's wacko bird trade adviser, had gone rogue when he assailed Dr. Fauci for being Dr. Wrong, in a USA Today op ed. But does anyone believe that? And if he did, would he still have his job? No doubt it was a case of Trump murmuring: Will no one rid me of this meddlesome infectious disease specialist? Republicans on Capitol Hill privately confessed they were baffled by the whole thing, saying they couldn't understand why Trump would undermine Fauci, especially now with the virus resurgent. They think it's not only hurting Trump's re election chances, but theirs, too. As though it couldn't get more absurd, Kellyanne Conway told Fox News on Friday that she thinks it would help Trump's poll numbers for him to start giving public briefings on the virus again even though that exercise went off the rails when the president began suggesting people inject themselves with bleach. "How did we get to a situation in our country where the public health official most known for honesty and hard work is most vilified for it?" marvels Michael Specter, a science writer for The New Yorker who began covering Fauci during the AIDs crisis. "And as Team Trump trashes him, the numbers keep horrifyingly proving him right." When Dr. Fauci began treating AIDs patients, nearly every one of them died. "It was the darkest time of my life," he told Specter. In an open letter, Larry Kramer called Fauci a "murderer." Then, as Specter writes, he started listening to activists and made a rare admission: His approach wasn't working. He threw his caution to the winds and became a public health activist. Through rigorous research and commitment to clinical studies, the death rate from AIDs has plummeted over the years. Now Fauci struggles to drive the data bus as the White House throws nails under his tires. It seems emblematic of a deeper, existential problem: America has lost its can do spirit. We were always Bugs Bunny, faster, smarter, more wily than everybody else. Now we're Slugs Bunny. Can our country be any more pathetic than this: The Georgia governor suing the Atlanta mayor and City Council to block their mandate for city residents to wear masks? Trump promised the A team, but he has surrounded himself with losers and kiss ups and second raters. Just your basic Ayn Rand nightmare. Certainly, Dr. Fauci has had to adjust some of his early positions as he learned about this confounding virus. ("When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" John Maynard Keynes wisely observed.) "Medicine is not an exact art," Jerome Groopman, the best selling author and professor at Harvard Medical School, put it. "There's lots of uncertainty, always evolving information, much room for doubt. The most dangerous people are the ones who speak with total authority and no room for error." Sound like someone you know? "Medical schools," Dr. Groopman continued, "have curricula now to teach students the imperative of admitting when something went wrong, taking responsibility, and committing to righting it." Some are saying the 79 year old Dr. Fauci should say to hell with it and quit. But we need his voice of reason in this nuthouse of a White House. Despite Dr. Fauci's best efforts to stay apolitical, he has been sucked into the demented political kaleidoscope through which we view everything now. Consider the shoot by his pool, photographed by Frankie Alduino, for a digital cover story by Norah O'Donnell for InStyle magazine.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Although it can't be said that we're done with winter, the worst appears to be behind us. If you live where there was a lot of snow which, this year, seems to have been most places in the United States your car is no doubt coated with a salty film right now. Salt works great when it comes to melting snow and ice, but it also attacks your car's steel body panels and other parts, opening the door wide for oxidation. Here are a few tips on how to ensure that your car doesn't immediately succumb to its adverse effects: Wash your car as soon as possible. You should have been keeping on top of this all winter, but it can be difficult to find a car wash that still works in the below freezing temperatures that have been common in the past two months. As the weather gets warmer, it's your chance to wash off all of that salt. The best kind of carwash to visit is one with handheld pressure wands. Start at the top of the vehicle and work your way down, paying particular attention to the underside. Salt and grime tends to collect in the corners and crevices of the undercarriage, but if you wash it regularly you can flush away corrosion causing chemicals. Also, keep in mind that when the undercarriage and frame rust, it can eventually lead to safety problems and reduced structural integrity. Keeping the car's paint waxed is a good way to make sure the finish lasts. Paint protects your car from oxidation and it's expensive to get redone, so taking care of it makes a lot of sense.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
The album seems to start jauntily enough, with "Knockin' on Your Screen Door," a Johnny Cash style country march. But the lyrics that Mr. Prine cackles through begin with "I ain't got nobody" and mention that his wife and family have left him; now he's knocking at someone's door just hoping for company, even though he knows, "You don't got to answer." The album ends with the jovial bounce of "When I Get to Heaven," complete with kazoo, which Mr. Prine imagines as a place where he can open up a nightclub called the Tree of Forgiveness and forgive a lot of people and where he can "smoke a cigarette that's nine miles long." The catch, he also recognizes, is that he has to die first. Mortality looms throughout "The Tree of Forgiveness." It's played for comedy in "Egg Daughter Nite, Lincoln Nebraska, 1967 (Crazy Bone)," with honky tonk piano rippling behind a closing verse about dementia and deterioration in a nursing home, while "In a local cemetery/They already got your name carved out in stone." It also suffuses "Caravan of Fools," a haunted minor key tune (written with Dan Auerbach, from the Black Keys, and Pat McLaughlin) with guitar picking and enigmatic lyrics that envision "the pounding of the hooves/the silence of everything that moves." Other songs grapple with loneliness, estrangement and regret. In "No Ordinary Blue," written with Keith Sykes, he contemplates the aftermath of an argument and separation: "I hope we don't find it's the last time we ever say goodbye," he sings. In "God Only Knows" the completion of a long ago songwriting collaboration with none other than Phil Spector he muses over hidden transgressions, the times "when I'm not true/To the things that I say and the things that I do."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Last year I wrote an essay about the importance of seemingly ordinary yet prized mementos souvenirs I didn't buy but, rather, found or was given, be it stones from the Irish Sea or a 2 cent euro coin that I spied on a Paris sidewalk. Some objects, like a little book of Shakespeare quotes, given to me by a British tour guide, I've had since I was a young student. Speaking of students, I recently received a surprise in the mail from some fifth and sixth graders at Mueller Charter School in Chula Vista, Calif. They'd read my essay and wanted to share with me stories about their own travels and the objects that were meaningful to them. I opened a package to find wonderfully detailed letters from each of the students, as well as colorful handmade postcards of favorite places they had been, from Canada to Tijuana, Mexico. Their stories and drawings made me think about summer and family travel the theme of a recent New York Times Travel section that included a kids' guide to Atlanta and a list of family friendly travel ideas. As a columnist I usually write about travel for adults. But after reading the letters from the students at Mueller, some of which included questions, I began wondering: How many other students out there have questions about travel? Let's find out. If you're a tween or teenager and would like to ask me about travel, I'll be selecting and answering your questions, big and small, on an ongoing basis from now through the end of August. Just post your questions on the Travel Facebook page.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The foundation of tennis success in Nava's family can be traced to an undersized court in a small town in Mexico. His grandfather Ernesto Escobedo Sr. fell in love with the sport when he watched a Davis Cup tie in Los Angeles. After moving his large family to Jerez, Mexico, he built a tennis court, or as much of one as he could fit, in the family's backyard. Xochitl Nava, Emilio's mother, said the little court her father built had its limitations, but also offered boundless opportunities. "On one side of the court, we didn't have room to hit a backhand or forehand," she said in a telephone interview. "So it was a tennis court, but more of a playground where we could hit balls and have fun." Their father's passion for tennis rubbed off on many of his 10 children. "When we started getting older, everybody went their own ways," Xochitl Nava said. "But we were always playing tennis."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
President Trump usually ignores the criticism that comes his way from MSNBC, the reliably liberal cable channel that, his advisers argue, will attack his administration no matter what. But two reports by the channel's parent network, NBC News including a scoop that the president sought to expand the nation's nuclear arsenal set off some of Mr. Trump's most hostile rhetoric yet about the freedom of the press. "Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked," he wrote on Twitter. "Not fair to public!" A few caveats to keep in mind. Rage against the media is political Wagyu for the president's base. And Mr. Trump's notion of suspending licenses along with his proposal, tweeted last week, that late night comedians be subject to the "equal time" rule is essentially unworkable, given how government regulation of the airwaves actually works. "One has to suppose that he's looking for ways to shock people," Russell Baker, the gimlet eyed longtime observer of Washington, said in a rare interview on Thursday. He seemed not so worked up about this most recent fusillade against the press. "It may go through, or he might probably forget about it," said Mr. Baker, 92, a former columnist for The Times. "Is anybody shocked anymore? He's used it up. It can only last so long." Mr. Trump seems to think like a television producer, a trait recently criticized by Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee. And as the makers of political thrillers like "House of Cards" and "Scandal" know all too well, television must ratchet up the stakes lest viewers lose interest. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. The president has already called the news media "the enemy of the American people," and his tweets about "fake news," once a reliable prompter of fury, increasingly feel like a part of Washington's white noise. "What else could he say that he hasn't already said?" Bob Schieffer, the broadcasting eminence who formerly anchored "CBS Evening News" and hosted "Face the Nation," said in an interview on Thursday. Seen it all veterans may take Mr. Trump's recent statements with a few grains of salt. But two former White House officials turned pundits, David Axelrod and Robert Reich, warned of creeping autocracy. And advocacy groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists were moved to point out that such words, issued from the presidential pulpit, can embolden dictators who are more empowered than Mr. Trump to shape or censor coverage. In an instance of irony that Mr. Baker might appreciate, Mr. Trump's State Department issued a pro media statement around the time that the president was jabbing NBC that condemned Turkish authorities who had sentenced a Wall Street Journal reporter to prison. Mr. Schieffer, 80, whose book, "Overload: Finding Truth in the Deluge of News," was released this month, said the news media was playing a crucial civic role. "This is our assignment from the founders," he said. "Check out what the politicians are saying. Give people information on whether it's true or false." It stands to reason that Mr. Trump's latest rhetorical thrusts amplified by the megaphone of Twitter and 24 hour cable coverage have had at least an ambient affect on Americans' trust in the press. The divide between Republicans' and Democrats' perception of the news media is growing. Still, a poll by Reuters this month found that trust in the news media has ticked upward. Nearly half of Americans surveyed said they had "some" or a "great deal" of confidence in the press, up from 39 percent last November. In that same period, trust in Mr. Trump slipped. The president often uses shocking statements to steer the focus of coverage. On Wednesday, amid a stalled legislative agenda and reports of West Wing turmoil, he told reporters in the Oval Office: "It's frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write, and people should look into it." Those words chilled Mr. Schieffer. "We have to take that very seriously," he said. Mr. Trump may be threatening a crackdown, but his team's courtship of the news media goes on. On Thursday, the White House press office emailed reporters an invitation for a traditional Halloween party. "Trick or treating will take place on Friday, October 27," the note read. "All White House press corps are invited to bring their children to the event."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Tennessee Williams's most reliable instrument of release and torture glows impiously in the hushed white gallery of the Morgan Library Museum, like a neon sign in a church. It is only a manual typewriter, one of the many that did hard labor under the fingers of this great American playwright, who is the subject of "Tennessee Williams: No Refuge but Writing," a profoundly affecting new exhibition of manuscripts and memorabilia. But the color of this sleek machine, an Olivetti Lettera 32, belies its utilitarian function. How to describe this particular shade of blue? To call it aqua or teal seems too pedestrian for the man under consideration here. Williams (1911 1983) delighted in finding names for blues chromatic, spiritual, emotional. Splashes of blue erupt throughout the dominating blacks and whites of "No Refuge but Writing," which is curated by Carolyn Vega, in the manner of sudden springs forcing their way to the surface. They show up in the background of portraits Williams painted as a young man of himself (and of his lover, Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzalez) and in the empyrean fierceness with which he endowed his own eyes. Then there's the echo sounded in the first entry in a diary Williams kept in 1955 during rehearsals for his "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." It begins, "A black day to begin a blue journal." He was, he wrote, "tired and a bit drunk, and I have a beastly cold." And after lamenting the inadequacy of his leading lady, Barbara Bel Geddes, he fretted about "the play not coming to life enough." One can imagine Ms. Vega, an associate curator in the Morgan's Department of Literary and Historical Manuscripts, facing similar worries. Documents under glass; black and white photographs; manuscripts on yellowing paper these would hardly seem ideal elements for conjuring a man who lived and wrote in Technicolor and was always, it seemed, on the run from his demons. Yet "No Refuge but Writing" feels anything but static. The restless, searching energy that drove (and sometimes flattened) Williams throughout his life buzzes amid the quiet of this exhibition, which follows the dramatist's career from "Battle of Angels" (1941), his first produced play, to "Orpheus Descending" (1957), a reworking of the same material. Both "Battle," which starred Miriam Hopkins and never made it to Broadway, and "Orpheus" were flops. But what came in between were the works that made Williams a literary titan, including "The Glass Menagerie" (1945), his breakthrough play, which he said ushered in "the catastrophe of success"; "Streetcar" (1947), his masterpiece; "The Rose Tattoo" (1951, and his only Tony Award winner); and "Cat," his personal favorite. These productions are mostly represented here on paper, via rough drafts, scripts, programs, notebooks, correspondence and sketches for sets. In other words, the living flux that is theater is reduced to two dimensions. Look closer, though, at the framed pages on display, and a fraught and excited dialogue surfaces, reminding us that what is now archival was once trembling potential. Penciled notations on the rough drafts show a writer still sculpting and shaving material that, in its finished form, has acquired the solidity of sacred texts in a canon. But how fungible they once were, names and characters and stories still swirling before settling into the shapes of posterity, and how different they might have been. The typewritten text for a late addition to "The Glass Menagerie," its concluding scene, offers that much quoted benediction from its narrator, Tom, to his sister: "Blow out your candles, Laura." Those are not, however, the play's last words. They are "And so, goodbye." And we can see here that this curtain closing farewell has been penciled in, not by Williams, but by the producer of the original production of "Menagerie," Margo Jones. Sequential versions of what would become "Streetcar" are on display across a long wall. One draft (dated 1945 46) is titled "The Passion of a Moth," and instructions, in the author's hand on the upper right corner of the title page, read, "Typist please change 'Ralph' to 'Stanley' whenever found in script." The Blanche character appears as "Gladys" in a precursor to "Streetcar" called "Interior: Panic," a title that speaks volumes about both the character's and her creator's states of mind. There's chatter frenzied and buoyant, discouraged and exultant in these changes, which suggest endless exchanges among a writer and early readers. You have the chance to examine, side by side, the four count them, four alternative endings that Williams proposed to the director Elia Kazan for "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," each of which slants the play toward slightly different degrees of optimism, cynicism and resignation. Williams's steamroller mother, Edwina, and his delicate sister, Rose whom with the playwright made up the quarrelsome tribe of fantasists that inspired "Menagerie" are represented here by snapshots that look as if they had been freshly unglued from the pages of a family scrapbook. The presence of his adored Rose, who would spend her life in mental institutions after being given a prefrontal lobotomy, feels especially vivid. You can see her as a young woman, seated in serene profile in a pink dress against a twilight blue background, in a portrait by Florence Ver Steeg. There is an innocence about the painting's subject and its rendering that breaks your heart. And if you know anything about Williams's life and work, you can be excused for thinking that those demure pastels scream "danger." The vision of the damaged Rose of Laura and her still burning candles, of Catherine and her dangerous, endangered brain in "Suddenly, Last Summer" would always inform Williams's work. It also surely figured among the "dismembering furies" (a phrase scrawled on the title page of his "Orpheus Descending" manuscript) that pursued him wherever he went. Not that he didn't do his damnedest to outrun them. His typewriters were portable of necessity. The life portrayed in "No Refuge" is exhaustingly and hopelessly itinerant.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Improbable as it may seem, now that he is the anchor of three action franchises, Vin Diesel, 49, started out as an artsy downtown New York kid. He first hit the stage when he was 7, at the Theater for the New City in Greenwich Village. Years later, after he filled out physically, he worked for a decade as a bouncer at the Tunnel and other clubs. But beneath the brawny surface was a Dungeons Dragons enthusiast who idolized Sidney Lumet and wanted to dedicate himself to the arts. Frustrated with his inability to make it past the gatekeepers, Mr. Diesel directed and starred in a short film, "Multi Facial," which was shown at Cannes in 1995. His next effort as director and star, the full length work "Strays," made the 1997 Sundance Film Festival. If his apprenticeship sounds more Lena Dunham than Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mr. Diesel would say you're exactly right. "Multi Facial" impressed Steven Spielberg, who cast him in "Saving Private Ryan." Soon after that, Mr. Diesel's career took off: He played the killer Riddick in "Pitch Black," the street racer Dominic Toretto in "The Fast and the Furious" and the lethal superspy Xander Cage in "XXX." All three have spawned sequels and video games. Mr. Diesel discussed his unlikely rise in a telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles, where he lives with his girlfriend, Paloma Jimenez, and their three children. When you first became an actor, what kind did you think you would be? I thought I was going to be a dramatic actor. I started acting when I was 7. I grew up in the city, in artist housing on the Lower West Side. My father was a theater director. When I first started acting, the whole idea of an action hero was relatively new. It didn't hit me even as my years as a bouncer were changing the way I looked. I was hellbent on working with Sidney Lumet. Eventually you went west. What was your first impression of Hollywood? Well, the first time I went to Hollywood, I couldn't even get an agent. I remember leaving my bouncing job and saying, "See you, suckers." They asked me, "What are you going to do?" I said: "I've been acting my whole life. I'm going to Hollywood to be a movie star." I got to L.A. and I auditioned a bunch, but I couldn't get an agent. I ended up telemarketing selling tools over the phone. Where did you go from there? That was the beginning of the shoestring film budget movement. When "El Mariachi" came out Robert Rodriguez made it for 7,000 it was a gigantic breakthrough for me. I thought, I no longer have to go beg someone for a spot. I can go bouncing and save up 3,000 and invest in my own story. One Christmas I went home and my mother got me this book by Rick Schmidt: "Feature Filmmaking at Used Car Prices." In New York, I felt there were more resources. There were nonprofit organizations that would help you make a film. So I started putting together a feature, which later became "Strays." But I couldn't get the money to make "Strays" then. This was 1995 and I did eventually complete it, and it was selected for competition at Sundance in '97. So I went by a phrase very successful people say: "If you can't do it all, do what you can." I wrote and filmed a short film called "Multi Facial." It was, in essence, my story about how hard it was to get roles as a multiracial actor. Then I went out and rented a 16 millimeter camera on a Friday, because I didn't have to return it until Monday, so I was able to shoot for three days. Cut to my mom watching me roll an old 16 millimeter Steenbeck into my little room. I was cutting and splicing "Multi Facial" old school style. This was before computers, really. It was a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful time. A lot of people say they want to be successful, to be at the top. That's not where the fun is. The fun is the journey. When did you get your break? Or is there not really such a thing as one big break? That's true, there wasn't just one break. One of my big breaks is "Multi Facial." In January of '95, I screened it at Anthology Film Archives. It was the only place that had a 16 millimeter projector. No one had ever seen my film. Everyone just thought I was the bouncer who did theater on Off Off Broadway. Then I showed the movie and 20 minutes later, when the movie ended, the whole audience never looked at me the same. Friends from my neighborhood, friends who bounced with me, even my own parents, they looked at me so differently. I can't even describe it. Another break was after "Strays" played at Sundance. About a month after, I got a call from Steven Spielberg and he wrote a brand new role for me in "Saving Private Ryan." Do you think you've been underestimated because of your looks? Sidney Lumet used to say the same thing. While we were doing "Find Me Guilty," he told me: "You will suffer what beautiful women have suffered in this industry for 100 years. You will suffer for your action hero physique." You're the first actor to have 100 million Facebook followers. Do you think social media enables others to see you in a more complex way? Oh, definitely. Social media has allowed me to post a video of me singing to the mother of my children on Valentine's Day. How would you ever be able to see that before social media? Social media has documented some of the most challenging moments of life when I lost my brother Pablo the actor and "Fast and the Furious" co star Paul Walker, who died in a crash in 2013 . There's wisdom that comes from an honest page. My Facebook page is also where my relationship with Mark Zuckerberg started. Do you have a dialogue with Zuckerberg? Of course! I love him. He's such a great guy and he's a fan of my work. He probably encouraged me more than anyone else to return to Xander Cage. We were hanging out up at Facebook about two years ago, and I was excited about "Fast 7." He said, "You know what movie I'd most like to see is the return of Xander Cage." It's at a point where if Mark and I are together and if I quote a line from a character I played and I do it slightly wrong, he'll correct me. It's embarrassing! What place do action heroes occupy in Hollywood? Does the action hero really exist? That would be my question if we were killing it at a bar and getting really intense into the discussion. I feel like there are movies that have action in it and they might have comedy and romance moments as well. There isn't a school you go to to become an action hero. If you had to go back to 1939, and you watch "Gone With the Wind," there was action there but you wouldn't call Clark Gable an action hero. Or if it's "Rebel Without a Cause," you're not going to call James Dean an action hero. Maybe the term was invented by Hollywood, to focus on the physique of Arnold or something, as opposed to seeing whether he could credibly pull off a film in what was his second language. Does the term truly exist or is it journalist shorthand? For someone with questionable acting skills? Yes! The best part of "Fast and Furious" is not the big explosions. It's the heart. When you think about the brotherhood of Dom and Brian, that's what carries through so many films. And no characters in history have carried on a love affair that is so captivating and kept your attention for as long as Dom and Letty. It's to the point where a kiss from another woman Charlize Theron in "Fast 8" is the biggest action sequence in the trailer. "Fast 8" has the highest viewed trailer in history, meaning it's officially the most anticipated in film history. But what is the core of the trailer? It's something as familiar and simple as a kiss.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
In its five year existence, GreenTech Automotive has manufactured far more headlines than cars. Now, after a merger with another fledgling auto company, VL Automotive, GreenTech promises to deliver an eclectic mix of electric city cars, plug ins converted into muscle machines and performance tuned cars for the Chinese market. To the professed dismay of its president and chief executive, Charles Wang, the company became embroiled in the 2013 Virginia governor's race. Political opponents questioned deal making by the co founder and former chairman, Terry McAuliffe, now the state's governor. The Securities and Exchange Commission began an investigation into promises GreenTech made while soliciting overseas investors, and political opponents questioned whether pressure was put on immigration officials to grant United States visas to those investors. It didn't help that while the company was making headlines, GreenTech delivered very few cars, the new Mississippi factory was delayed, and 350 promised jobs failed to materialize. But, GreenTech says now, that's ancient history. In a telephone interview, Mr. Wang conceded that "everybody was investigating our little company." Car orders suffered, he said, "but now we have the resources to move forward." GreenTech says it is proceeding on several fronts, including high performance supercars and low cost battery vehicles. With the VL Automotive merger, GreenTech intends to follow through on VL's plan to drop Corvette powertrains into orphaned Fisker Karma plug in hybrids. Gilbert Villarreal, who co founded VL with Robert A. Lutz, the former vice chairman of General Motors, will be chief operating officer of the wider focused GreenTech. Mr. Villarreal said in a telephone interview that the repurposed Karma, to be called the WM Destino, should be available by late summer. It is unclear what role, if any, Mr. Lutz will play in the merged company, and he declined, through a spokesman, to comment. In a telephone interview, Steve Saleen, the chief executive, said GreenTech would be representing Saleen's cars in Asian markets, principally China. "Because of GreenTech's contacts in China, it seemed to be an appropriate time to look at that market with them," he said. Mr. Saleen said that his company's version of the Tesla was likely to make its debut this summer, but that it was too soon to reveal details on the price, performance or the markets where the car would be offered. Saleen no longer produces its S7 supercar for the American market, but it plans to offer similar SS models in China. One of these, the 1,060 horsepower Super S7, will cost 1 million or more in China, Mr. Wang said. The cars that GreenTech plans to manufacture itself are intended not for performance, but for plugging in. The small two seat electric MyCar is a neighborhood vehicle limited to speeds of 25 or 35 m.p.h. The company estimates its sticker price at 16,000. GreenTech attributes MyCar's design to Giorgetto Giugiaro, the prominent Italian designer. MyCar and a battery powered Chinese sedan built under license are intended to be made in a 300,000 square foot factory in Tunica, Miss. Mr. Villarreal said that he had recently visited the site and that despite some delays the plant was expected to be completed by late July. If the demand is there, Mr. Villarreal said the company could deliver 10,000 vehicles to the global market next year. Mr. Wang conceded that very few cars had been built in a temporary factory in Horn Lake, Miss., because of the political turmoil swirling around the company and "a lot of bad stories." GreenTech is ramping up in a tough market for start up carmakers. Jack Nerad, executive editorial director at Kelley Blue Book, said companies like GreenTech had to compete "in a cutthroat, global scale, capital intensive business that already has too many players." But John Gartner, research director for transportation at Navigant Research, said in a telephone interview that there might be a market for MyCars provided the price was kept low within gated communities, possibly in car sharing operations for local transportation, grocery shopping and deliveries.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
American employers expanded their payrolls at a robust pace in November, the government reported on Friday, all but guaranteeing that policy makers at the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates for the first time in nearly a decade when they meet in less than two weeks. In addition to announcing 211,000 new hires last month a bit more than Wall Street had expected the Labor Department also revised upward its earlier estimate of job creation in September and October by a total of 26,000 jobs. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 5 percent. The labor market strength evident in the November data removes the last major uncertainty before the Fed decision. "This is a green light from our perspective," said Phil Orlando, chief equity strategist at Federated Investors. Wall Street, which in the past has sold off after strong jobs data and the prospect of higher interest rates, greeted the report with enthusiasm, perhaps because it removes any remaining uncertainty about the Fed's plans. Stocks reversed Thursday's losses and rose more than 2 percent; bond yields fell slightly. The report on Friday echoes other recent positive data on job openings, new weekly claims for unemployment benefits and private payroll surveys, Mr. Orlando added. "This is a good number for liftoff," he said, referring to the expected move by the central bank, which has held rates near zero since December 2008. Over all, the Labor Department data painted a picture of an economy that is growing steadily and creating jobs at a healthy pace, even as wage gains remain subdued and many Americans are still stuck on the sidelines of the recovery. If hiring continues at a healthy pace next year, as most economists now predict, it could also blunt Republican criticism in the presidential campaign of Democratic economic policies, which have been a prominent target for the current crop of G.O.P. candidates. With an average monthly payroll increase of 210,000 so far this year, the 211,000 gain in November though still subject to revision has a metronome like element of consistency. It is also near the average monthly increase of 199,000 in 2013 and 260,000 in 2014. "For a long time, I've thought the labor market was in pretty good shape, and this just confirms that," said Scott Clemons, chief investment strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman in New York. After the release of the jobs report, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Patrick T. Harker, added his voice to the chorus of Fed officials who said it was time for the central bank to raise interest rates. "Raising rates this year will, in my view, serve to reduce monetary policy uncertainty and to keep the economy on track for sustained growth with price stability," Mr. Harker said at a Fed conference in Philadelphia. Still, even after more than six years of economic recovery from the devastating financial crisis, the labor market is well below its pre recession levels and pockets of economic weakness remain. At 62.5 percent, the proportion of Americans in the labor force remains near multidecade lows. The jobless rate for African Americans rose by 0.2 percentage point in November to 9.4 percent, which is more than twice the 4.3 percent level for white Americans. Moreover, the economy is still 2.8 million jobs short of where it would have to be to match pre recession employment levels while also absorbing new entrants into the work force, according to the Hamilton Project, a research group associated with the Brookings Institution in Washington. Even if the current trend continues, that so called "jobs gap" will not be closed until mid 2017. Despite steady hiring gains and a falling unemployment rate, wage growth in recent years has barely advanced faster than inflation. In October, that trend seemed to improve, with an unexpectedly strong 0.4 percentage point increase in average hourly earnings that pushed the 12 month gain to 2.5 percent even as the pace of inflation fell, mostly because of lower energy prices. But with November's figures reverting to the earlier trend, Mr. Clemons said, "I don't think there's a lot of wage pressure yet." He foresees two more interest rate increases next year, bringing short term rates to about 0.75 percent at this point next year. Other analysts, like Mr. Orlando, expect the Fed to raise rates roughly every other meeting next year, which would bring the Fed's benchmark rate to about 1 percent in the fall of 2016. This week, the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, Janet L. Yellen, and other top Fed officials made clear that a rate increase was imminent unless the economic data went wildly awry. Raising rates, Ms. Yellen said in a speech Wednesday, would be "a testament, also, to how far our economy has come in recovering from the effects of the financial crisis and the Great Recession." Salaries for less skilled positions, like truck drivers, have also been creeping up. In Texas, Redwood has been hiring drivers from among those laid off from the energy industry. "Our drivers will go to work in the oil fields when that's hot," he said. "Now they're coming back."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Audemars Piguet has also been shaking up the category of high jewelry watches. At the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie, known as SIHH, in Geneva in January, the watchmaker will unveil the hotly anticipated final piece in its Haute Joaillerie Diamond trilogy, the Diamond Outrage. The Swiss watchmaker hopes it will make an even bigger impact than its predecessors, Diamond Punk (2015) and Diamond Fury (2016), which are covered in diamonds but a world away from the delicate jeweled watches that dominate the market. The trilogy was the brainchild of Francois Henry Bennahmias, Audemars Piguet's chief executive. And the result has been a collection of bold creations for a modern woman who happens to have more than half a million dollars to spare. "We are living in a time when women are the freest they have ever been," Chadi Nouri, product management leader, said in a telephone interview. "We wanted to create high jewelry pieces full of stones, our craftsmanship and know how, but which reflect the times and the woman of today."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
In firefighting it's called a "rekindle": A blaze thought to be extinguished that later reignites soon after firefighters have left the scene. Failure to find and douse embers smoldering behind walls and flooring leads to rekindles. The only thing that can prevent a rekindle is a thorough overhaul (tearing apart floors, ceilings and furniture). If a firefighter fails to conduct that overhaul, hours later they will be face to face with a second fire that often burns bigger and hotter than the original blaze. "You gotta check the walls," a firefighter friend of mine told me. "The floors, the insulation, the electrical wires, even the mattress. Fire hides everywhere. You have to get in the walls." He unknowingly explained to me the change happening not only in my hometown Birmingham, but Alabama as a whole. We are a country in flux. We are a nation at its best because we are, in many ways, at our worst. But a recent trip through my home state has me hopeful that the country can evolve. Birmingham was my home until I left for Los Angeles in 2007. My workload on "The Daily Show" coupled with fatherhood makes trips home even less frequent than before. Alabama is an interesting place. It's one of the few places in America you can be from that can elicit multiple reactions. If you're from a popular American city, most people do the same thing: They first compliment your city, and then follow it up with a personal gripe about it. "Oh you're from Chicago?! That's nice, the pizza, but oh my God the traffic." You tell someone you're from Alabama, and they start with the gripe and then follow it up with a bigger gripe. I've never been a bigger fan of Alabama football than during that campaign last December: "Anything, please, anything to get people thinking differently about Alabama, even if only for a few days." People from Alabama living outside the state have an unofficial job as P.R. rep for it. The moment someone attacks your state you have to start the spin job like Sarah Huckabee Sanders. "Listen, I know you've heard a lot about the elected officials where I'm from, but I assure you that they don't represent the views of everyone who lives there. It's full of good people who do the right thing more often than not." The most important work in Alabama is happening south of Birmingham in the Black Belt. Aside from black women leading the charge to get Doug Jones elected to the Senate against Mr. Moore, the biggest indicator of an effort to get in the walls and extinguish the past lies in Montgomery and the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Less than a mile away is the equally riveting Legacy Museum. The Peace and Justice memorial was erected to honor those who died during lynchings, not only in the Jim Crow South but also as far west as California. The more than 4,000 names that they could find, each have their place engraved somewhere on the grounds. Tribute is also paid to the scores of unnamed victims of lynchings. Even more jarring than the names on the wall are the reasons some of the dead were lynched. Black people were lynched for doing anything from annoying a white woman to simply voting. Literally, just voting. These lynchings remain of America's greatest acts of domestic terrorism. The museum's "no selfies" policy is fitting considering that this place feels less like a memorial and more like an ongoing wake for the spirits of those who were wronged. It has the energy of a burial ground. And the same amount of silence. Every single name that could be found is engraved somewhere on these grounds. Every single United States county where a lynching has occurred is documented here. It is only natural that you head to your own home county to see how much blood stains its soil. Some people cried, some strangers hugged, many conversed with strangers. Around the corner is the Legacy Museum. If the lynching memorial captures the horrid culmination of manifested hate, then the Legacy Museum shows you everything else that was happening, then and now: A well documented history of our country's relationship with bigotry and ruling with fear. The Legacy Museum shows you how that hatred began, the circumstances that fed it and where we are today as a society. Which is actually the most jarring part of the exhibit. When you can see what was happening decades ago and turn a corner and see what's happening today, the similarities are stunning. The Equal Justice Initiative created and designed both the memorial and the museum, with partners like Local Projects; part of that firm's mission statement is to "test the limits of human interaction." You are for sure tested here. The museum is immersive. Maybe to an emotional fault. Lifelike holograms portraying people from the past come to life and recount their trials. An interactive booth allows you to pick up a phone and have a simulated conversation at a jail visitation window. You sit and interact with an actual formerly incarcerated person. In this "visitation," you learn some of the inner workings of a prison system that is not only not built to rehabilitate, but is eerily similar to the slavery of old. It's very difficult to just go about your day after leaving such an experience; it stays with you. It's like that iconic N.F.L. image from 1982, when the San Diego Chargers, 13 minutes into overtime, defeated the Miami Dolphins in what is still considered to be one of the greatest football games in history. When it was over, the Chargers tight end Kellen Winslow had severe cramps, three stitches in his lip, dehydration and a pinched nerve. A similar feeling of emotional exhaustion cloaks you as you leave the Legacy Museum. Anger, sadness and sorrow are also in this emotional cocktail. It's heavy. Very heavy. But the fact that the museum even exists shows a willingness to confront the horrible past. The phone policy here is even stricter than at the Peace and Justice Memorial. At the Legacy your phone must be turned off. So as the gravity of the situation weighs on your shoulders, you don't have the comforts of social media to break up the emotions. Strangers become your ally. And bonds are indeed made. Journeys like this are part of the emotional cardio that must be done if Alabama and our country want to truly rise above their past reputations. For every "Confederate Memorial Day" there are concrete instances of people working actively to change the culture and image of the state. Birmingham's new young Mayor Randall Woodfin is quickly infusing new thoughts, creating the Office of Social Justice that works to stamp out discrimination and give citizens a place to take their concerns. An effort to prevent another racial rekindling. The city is in the final stages of creating a Small Business Task Force, with the goal of making Birmingham a hub for women and minority startups by 2020. African American women are the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs in the United States, and yet little more than one half of 1 percent currently obtain start up funding for their businesses or ideas. The nonprofit Birmingham organization called Bronze Valley creates educational and organization opportunities for underrepresented communities, and at its first conference earlier this year a start up called Mixtroz won 100,000 in the Rise of the Rest, a competition funded by the former AOL chief executive Steve Case. The Nashville based mother daughter team behind Mixtroz plan to relocate to Birmingham to develop their networking app. A reporter for Forbes recently visited Birmingham and said this about a tech event: "Amid this mishmash of ideas, I couldn't help but notice the gender breakdown in the room; According to my rough calculations, around 40 percent of people here were women, and 50 percent were African American or Asian. That's huge and far better than" Silicon Valley. This is not the Alabama I grew up in; on the surface a lot of things are the same. There is for sure still discrimination. But Alabama has been the site of so many losses that it's a place where you count the victories, no matter how small. Because they often point to something larger. Still, I'm thankful that there a few things that never change, like the food. As soon as I walk out of the airport, I'm headed straight to get chicken wings from Green Acres, a burger from Milo's and a slice of lemon pie from Jim 'n Nick's BBQ. The only thing more plentiful in Birmingham than barbecue spots are churches. If you want good ribs or religion, we've got you covered. I have to see a Birmingham Barons baseball game at the new ballpark downtown. And to see something unique, I try to find a Ramsay High School baseball game. An entirely black team in an era when African American involvement in baseball is on a steady decline, it is funded by booster donations and the tireless work of the head coach Lavert Andrews. The only way I can describe watching a game is that it's like seeing mentorship happening in real time: To see coaches help instill values in young black men who could very well end up being a statistic. It's a good hang in the Southern sun, but the snack selection at most high school games sucks. (Pick up a plate of smothered pork chops from Niki's West on the way.) How do I know Alabama is ready for a new future? Because it seems to finally be making a few steps toward getting in the walls, and stopping a racial rekindle. You can travel anywhere and get a sense for adventure, but very few places will leave you with a sense of optimism for what's to come.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
There were good and very good performances throughout "The Four Temperaments" Ashley Bouder's Choleric is reliably red hot but its main effect on Thursday was a reassertion of impossibly high standards. Extending ballet with such bracing modernity that it still seems new, the work also remains classical in its clarity; no moment is wasted; everything connects and contributes to a juggernaut force. To have that follow Mr. Peck's effort wasn't the same as Ms. Mearns following Ms. Pereira, but the echo was there, as if Balanchine were saying to Mr. Peck, "Very nice, but watch this." Or, rather, "Watch this again," since Mr. Peck has clearly learned from Balanchine. As in Mr. Peck's 2012 breakout piece, "Year of the Rabbit," the configurations of "Everywhere We Go" show him to be one of the most imaginative dance makers of our time. Karl Jensen's set, with shifting cutouts, offers a nice analogue to Mr. Peck's kaleidoscopic patterns, but the choreography is the show with shapes coalescing and dissolving, disappearing and returning, sometimes sneaking in from the wings. Almost every end is a beginning. The consequent sense of surprise is allied with Mr. Peck's egalitarianism. Principals and corps are dressed the same, and the two groups continually overlap. And that leveling might be partly responsible for the galvanizing effect Mr. Peck has on his casts: Everyone dances at his or her brightest. But esprit de corps is also thematic. The titles of the movements hint at shadows, sunshine and hearts, amid more cryptic clues ("I Am in the House, and I Have the Key"). The traditional loss of the ballerina to the group is here felt but not mourned. One of the work's paired motifs balances a diagonal spurt upward with a wilting or fainting. Everyone who falls is caught. The score, by the singer songwriter Sufjan Stevens, is a problem. It was commissioned, and commissions are risky. (The Paul Hindemith score for "Temperaments" was a rare success.) The fun of Mr. Stevens's score for "Year of the Rabbit" was mainly in Michael P. Atkinson's orchestral arrangement of what was originally electronica. But the "Everywhere" music, rhythmically functional when minimal, is melodically shallow and strains for orchestral effect, with bombastic crashing waves. The music's flaws expose immaturity in the musically sensitive choreographer.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The Arrivals, an outerwear label, will open a holiday pop up on Thursday. There you'll find smart options to wrap up warmly, like a modular bomber jacket with a removable lamb shearling collar ( 395). At 42 Crosby Street. That same day, the men's wear designer Brett Johnson will open a store featuring his super fine knit sweaters ( 465). At 109 Mercer Street. And the Adeam designer Hanako Maeda will open a pop up at Bergdorf Goodman filled with elegant pieces including a puff sleeve cashmere sweater ( 925) and an asymmetrical wrap top with pearl detail ( 1,100). On Thursday from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., the jewelry label Alison Lou will have an ear piercing party. Get a new hole gratis with the purchase of any earrings, like her huggy hoops with enamel hearts ( 195). At 20 East 69th Street.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Rumors of New York's demise are exaggerated. The other day more than 160 business leaders wrote Mayor Bill de Blasio about "widespread anxiety over public safety, cleanliness and other quality of life issues." The city is in many ways back to life. But City Hall had been running low on leadership and good ideas before the pandemic. New York needs them both now. So it was, in a sense, good news that the nonprofit Trust for Governors Island released a proposal on Monday to rezone disused parts of the island, long set aside for economic redevelopment. It's an aspirational plan, more than anything. The goal, which has been circulating for a while, is to incubate a new climate research center. Similar ideas have been advanced for decades on Governors Island. There was once talk about a global health center. In 2002, City University of New York was rumored to be contemplating a campus. The governor and mayor talked about renaming the place CUNY Island. I've seen renderings by WXY, the excellent New York architecture firm. They're rosy advertisements for hypothetical construction. But they give a sense of the scale and potential of the concept, which in this case could entail as much as four or five million square feet of new development. According to Clare Newman, the president and chief executive officer of the trust, the prospective climate center would offer public programs, offices for green tech companies and architecture and engineering firms, and be anchored by a university or research institute that would build and pay for its part of the campus. In recent years, Governors Island has become one of the city's quiet marvels. For several summers, my younger son has attended a kind of "Lord of the Flies" day camp there that's basically a junk yard with hammers, nails and hands off instructors. Eight minutes by ferry from Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, the island feels a world apart, a mini 19th century New England village with Adirondack chairs and food carts, smack in the middle of New York Harbor. The Lenape called it Pagganck, or Nut Island. The Continental Army used it to defend against a British naval assault; the Union Army, to imprison captured Confederate officers. Until 1996 it was a Coast Guard base, with barracks, a Burger King and bowling alley. By the time the city and state jointly acquired it from federal authorities (for 1) it was a ghost town, derelict and lacking potable water. The city took sole possession in 2010, with the goal of creating open space, cultural and educational programs and mixed use development. Leslie Koch, the first president of the trust, oversaw the transformation. Last year nearly a million people from every ZIP code in the city visited. A maritime themed high school has its home on the island. West 8, the Dutch landscape architecture firm, put together a master plan, which determined where development could go, and converted swaths of open space into spectacular parkland with rolling hills and meadows. The city has invested some 400 million so far. Like Brooklyn Bridge Park and other Bloomberg era public private ventures, the understanding has always been that Governors Island should eventually pay for itself. According to Ms. Newman, it still depends on the city to cover about three fourths of a 20 million annual operating budget. With tax revenues cratering, who knows how long that will last. Of course many universities are also facing a cash crunch because of the pandemic. Not many may be looking to expand at this moment. But history can be useful here. Rockefeller Center broke ground at the start of the Depression; Lincoln Center, when thousands of New Yorkers were fleeing to the suburbs. The obvious precedent to the Governors Island proposal, the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island, was hatched during the last recession. Now the West is ablaze. A Washington Post story this week describes two glaciers in Antarctica whose imminent collapse could raise global sea levels 10 feet. Covid 19, and America's feeble response to it, dominate the headlines but what has the pandemic proved if not that apocalyptic threats, man made or otherwise, require preparedness, coordination, public education and fresh thinking? There's a clear climate risk to building a climate research center on the waterfront. The trust counters that the island is, in fact, an ideal petri dish and laboratory for climate adaptation. It's an argument. Part of the ingenuity of West 8's design was to strategize protections that worked during Hurricane Sandy. Alicia Glen, a former deputy mayor, who now chairs the Governors Island Trust, cites the hopeful case of Robert Moses. Three quarters of a century ago he helped persuade the United Nations to locate its headquarters in the city. That coup ensured New York would be at the center of the conversation about humanity and survival in the postwar era. It also brought economic development to the city. These days any new development is a call to the barricades for many New Yorkers. Those who love Governors Island as it is now may well ask whether even a do good project is really necessary. A better question might be: Will whatever gets built there if anything does live up to the design standards of the changes so far? In terms of remaining obstacles, the "elephant in the room," as Ms. Newman, the trust president acknowledged, is transportation. Access to Governors Island is still by irregular ferries. Proposals to extend the No. 1 train line, install a cable car, even build out Lower Manhattan, have all surfaced over the years.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
U.F.C. Says Its Fights Are Back On, Next Month in Florida None The Ultimate Fighting Championship plans to hold at least three events in Florida in May with the blessing of state regulators and elected officials. They would be the mixed martial arts organization's first fights since the widespread shutdown of sports because of the coronavirus pandemic. The U.F.C. has scheduled events for May 9, 13 and 16 at the VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville, according to a statement. The first will be a pay per view event headlined by a title bout between Tony Ferguson and Justin Gaethje, the same fight that was supposed to headline an event last weekend in California but was canceled. Lineups for the two other events were not announced. Fans won't be allowed into the arena, and the fights will be sanctioned by the Florida State Boxing Commission. Dana White, the U.F.C. president, has seen his plans to hold fights throughout the outbreak stymied by state governments' stay at home mandates for workers deemed nonessential. He went so far as to try to hold U.F.C. 249 on tribal land in California without widely disclosing its location, but California state officials expressed concerns about the plan to Disney and ESPN. Disney owns ESPN, which pays the U.F.C. hundreds of millions of dollars annually to show its fights. When White called off the event, he said he had received calls from "the highest level" at Disney and ESPN asking him to cancel. In Florida, however, the U.F.C. has found a welcoming home. Earlier this month, the director of the state's Division of Emergency Management amended its list of essential services, adding "employees at a professional sports and media production with a national audience." This has allowed World Wrestling Entertainment to hold televised events in the state, and will apparently let the U.F.C. do the same. Having the state and local government on board, as well as the state's boxing commission, has mollified any concerns that ESPN which, with few live events to show, has seen its viewership fall dramatically might have had about the event. "We look forward to bringing U.F.C. to fans again," the network said in a statement. White has insisted he can safely go forward with events, but has provided almost no details about how that can be achieved. He has not said whether the U.F.C. has obtained Covid 19 tests, whether fighters and other personnel will be tested or quarantined, or what will happen if a fighter does become infected. When White was asked by ESPN on Friday if the fighters would be tested for the coronavirus, he did not directly answer the question. "We are going to spend a lot of money to make sure the people are safe," White said in an interview conducted live on Instagram. He said that there was a possibility for another event on May 23 and that he was still pressing forward with a plan to hold bouts on a private island outside the United States in June, though he gave no details. The Association of Ringside Physicians has said that all combat sports should be paused during the pandemic, and the virus has already affected some of the fighters who were supposed to compete last weekend at U.F.C. 249. The welterweight Lyman Good pulled out of the event in early April with an unspecified injury, but recently revealed that he had tested positive for the coronavirus. And the strawweight Rose Namajunas withdrew before that event was canceled, as her manager explained that two of her relatives had died of issues "related to the coronavirus." The twists and turns of the last month, along with White's hesitancy about revealing certain details of an event, mean that fighters may be in for a few surprises before they reach the octagon. When Ferguson found out that the California was canceled, the information came not from the organization, but from a reporter in the middle of an interview. And Gaethje learned he was the headliner for the May 9 event only when White announced it to the world. "Man, it's very hard as a fighter to find out information on the internet, but that's essentially how I find out everything," he told ESPN this week. "Emotionally, as a fighter, it's very hard to cope with. It's hard to turn it on, and it's hard to turn it off."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Welcome to the Running newsletter! Every Saturday morning, we email runners with news, advice and some motivation to help you get up and running. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. Twenty five days and 5,9217.7 miles later, my cross country road trip is now complete, and I'm back to writing to you from my dining room table in New Jersey. Driving to and from California with my dog, I logged a lot of hours behind the wheel but made plenty of photo worthy stops: I rode a shuttle to the top of St. Louis' Gateway Arch, ate BBQ in Kansas City, walked on the Badwater Basin in Death Valley and hugged Donald Duck. I also ran in a few spots along the way, and when I saw something out of the ordinary, I posted a picture of it to my Instagram and Twitter accounts using the seenonmyrun hashtag. I haven't been able to pinpoint when the hashtag became a thing, but I've been using it for at least four years. It's a way to show off cool things I see when I run at home, but also to share what I see as a running tourist. Examples from this trip: a creepy looking Bob's Big Boy in Lancaster, Ohio; a shuttlecock on the lawn of the Nelson Atkinson Museum of Art in Kansas City; a dinosaur using a bone as a cane at a mini golf course in Topeka, Kan.; and the most beautiful dog park I've ever seen in Durango, Colo. (yes, that's my dog in the picture).	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
The Buddhist monk remembers the moment he discovered the power of self care. He was a frustrated graduate student when a trusted friend told him the solution was to "be good to yourself first then to others." "I had never once thought properly of caring for myself or loving myself," he writes in his latest book, "Love for Imperfect Things," which is to come out in paperback in February. "We consider it good to be good to others, but don't forget that you have a responsibility to be good to yourself first." (Sunim is the term used to address a Buddhist monk in Korea) has taught Buddhism at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and continues to espouse the power of self care through Buddhist teachings. He has amassed more than one million followers on Twitter and become an international best selling author who guides his readers on managing stress and overcoming the challenges of everyday life. The obvious forms of self care are exercising, eating well and getting enough sleep. But self care also means taking time for yourself to manage stress and practicing self compassion, along with mindfulness and meditation techniques. Most of us already know that self care is good for us. Research shows that people who practice self care have better quality of life, are admitted less frequently to a hospital, and live longer than those who report poor self care. While self care is a simple concept, it can be remarkably difficult to enact. It may feel selfish or too time consuming to focus on your own needs, and many of us don't know where or how to start. suggests a simple five step plan to give yourself the gift of self care this holiday season. Start by just taking a deep breath. Become mindful of your breathing. You'll notice that when you begin, your breathing is shorter and more shallow, but as you continue, your breathing becomes deeper. Take just a few minutes each day to focus on your breathing. "As my breathing becomes much deeper and I'm paying attention to it, I feel much more centered and calm," said. "I feel I can manage whatever is happening right now." Acceptance of ourselves, our feelings and of life's imperfections is a common theme in "Love for Imperfect Things." The path to self care starts with acceptance, especially of our struggles. "If we accept the struggling self, our state of mind will soon undergo a change," writes. "When we regard our difficult emotions as a problem and try to overcome them, we only struggle more. In contrast, when we accept them, strangely enough our mind stops struggling and suddenly grows quiet. Rather than trying to change or control difficult emotions from the inside, allow them to be there, and your mind will rest." Begin to practice acceptance through a simple writing exercise. Write down the situation you must accept and all that you are feeling. Write down the things in your life that are weighing on you, and the things you need to do. "Rather than trying to carry those heavy burdens in your heart or your head, you see clearly on paper what it is you need to do," said. Whether the issue is work, family demands or holiday stress, the goal is to leave it all on the paper. Now go to bed and when you wake up, choose the easiest task on the list to complete. "In the morning, rather than resisting, I will simply do the easiest thing I can do from the list," said. "Once I finish the easiest task, it's much easier to work on the second." Never underestimate the value of meaningful conversation for your well being. Make time on a regular basis for a close, nonjudgmental friend. "If you feel frustrated or angry, look for a close friend and buy them coffee or lunch or dinner," said. "Choose someone who will listen without any kind of judgment." Talking through your feelings will give you insights into your own needs. "You already know the answer," said. "It's just that you haven't had the opportunity to clearly relive the story. Once the story is released, you can see it more objectively, and you will know what it is you need to do." One of the easiest ways to care for yourself is to take a walk. Just walking, said, can distract your mind and create space between you and whatever is causing stress in your life. "Walking can be an incredible resource for healing," said. "When you sit around thinking about upsetting things, it will not help you. If you start walking, our physical energy changes and rather than dwelling on that story, you can pay attention to nature a tree trunk, a rock. You begin to see things more objectively, and oftentimes that stress within your body will be released simply by walking." said he wrote his first book, "The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down," after teaching students at Hampshire College and answering their questions about managing the stress in their lives. He said his ultimate goal in writing "Love for Imperfect Things" was to guide readers to a path of self care and acceptance. "The main point is how to accept yourself when you are living in a world striving for perfection all the time," he said. "Even if you feel there are many things in your life that are imperfect, if you look at them in a compassionate way, you discover that imperfection, in and of itself, is beautiful and has meaning."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
Mario Davidovsky, a Pulitzer Prize winning composer who opened up new vistas in chamber music by pairing live acoustic instruments with electronics, died on Friday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 85. The cause was heart failure , his son, Matias , said. Like many of his fellow composers in the 1950s and '60s, Mr. Davidovsky was drawn to the new possibilities offered by technology. But he was uneasy with the prospect of music that was immune to human interpretation. Beginning in 1963 with "Synchronisms No. 1" for flute and tape, he coaxed electronic sounds into partnership with traditional instruments to create musical pas de deux that were full of mystery and drama. His "Synchronisms No. 6" for piano and electronic sounds won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1971. The composer Eric Chasalow , who studied with him beginning in 1977, said in a phone interview that Mr. Davidovsky was among the first "to make electronics nuanced the way a violin is," adding, "He tried to make the electronic an extension of the organic." That process began at the edge of an instrument's natural capabilities. A piano, for instance, cannot sustain sound: Once struck, a note decays. "Synchronisms No. 6" begins with an unassuming single G on the piano. As the sound begins to wilt, it is joined imperceptibly by the tape, which stretches and swells the note in space. As the music unfolds, electronics function like a genie granting the instrument supernatural powers. 'He didn't want to be someone who contributed to the dissolution of the human being onstage.' Mari Kimura, a violinist and composer who studied with Mr. Davidovsky in the early 1990s, recalled the first time she heard that initial hybrid G. "I almost fell off the chair," she said. "I thought, I have to do that with my violin. I had never heard anything like that before." Beginning in the late 1970s, Mr. Davidovsky shifted his focus back to purely acoustic music. With their meticulous attention to tone color, rhythmic quirks and dazzling varieties of attack, works like "Festino" for mixed ensemble , from 1994, sound uncannily as if they are enhanced by electronic wizardry. "H e wrestled with this idea that he didn't want to be someone who contributed to the dissolution of the human being onstage," the guitarist Dan Lippel, who has performed both "Festino" and "Synchronisms No. 10" for guitar and electronic sounds, said. " He was a real humanist." A former student said that Mr. Davidovsky, shown here in 1981, often compared his early work to "the challenge of being left in the desert for a few days with a knife and a jug of water." Above all, Mr. Davidovsky would say, composition was an ethical act. That was a point he argued passionately as a teacher, especially as mentor to the participants in the Composers Conference, a new music summer program he headed from 1968 until his death, which is now held at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. He urged musicians to consider the moral implications of their art. Through his students, Mr. Davidovsky followed the developments of music technology with curiosity, even as he focused on writing for traditional forces. In some ways his "Synchronisms No. 6" prefigured digital advances in interactive electronics. Much of the time, it sounds as if the tape is responding to the live piano. Mario Davidovsky was born on March 4, 1934, in Medanos, a small town with a large immigrant population in the south of Argentina. His parents were observant Jews who came from Eastern Europe. Natalio Davidovsky was the general manager of a Belgian agricultural company; Perla (Bulanska) Davidovsky was a Hebrew school teacher who would pick scholarly arguments with rabbis and counted a priest among her close friends. In addition to his son, an investment banker, Mr. Davidovsky is survived by a daughter, Adriana Davidovsky; a sister, Luisa Paz; and three grandchildren. His wife, Elaine Joyce (Blaustein) Davidovsky, whom he married in 1962, died in 2017. In conversations, Mr. Davidovsky remembered the Medanos of his childhood as a place of easy coexistence, peopled with characters seemingly drawn from commedia dell'arte. On Sundays there were dances; on national holiday s people came together to play the national march. He started violin lessons at age 7 and composing when he was about 10. His family later moved to Buenos Aires, where he studied law at the university before turning his full attention to composition, in 1954 . A principal teacher was the German born conductor Teodoro Fuchs . Among Mr. Davidovsky's fellow students were Mauricio Kagel , who went on to become a leading composer of the avant garde, and the pianist Martha Argerich . In 1958 Aaron Copland invited Mr. Davidovsky to spend a summer at what is now the Tanglewood Music Center after hearing a recording of his music. There he met Milton Babbitt, the noted composer of serial and electronic music, who was on the cusp of forming the Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City. In 1960 Mr. Davidovsky moved to America to join the center. Working alongside the Turkish composer Bulent Arel , he refined studio techniques for handling tapes that made it possible to sculpt electronic sounds. The sounds were created with audio equipment, including oscillators, that created tunable sound waves. Editing involved splicing magnetic tape using rulers, razor blades and splicing blocks. "He really enjoyed the kind of hands on approach" Dr. Chasalow said of Mr. Davidovsky's work at the Electronic Music Center. "There was a craftsmanship to that." Mr. Davidovsky often likened his early experiments to "the challenge of being left in the desert for a few days with a knife and a jug of water," Dr. Chasalow said. From 1981 to 1994 Mr. Davidovsky directed the Electronic Music Center. He taught at the University of Michigan, the Manhattan School of Music and Yale University, and served on the faculties of the City College of New York, Columbia University and Harvard. He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1982. In addition to his electro acoustic compositions, Mr. Davidovsky's output included string quartets and works for mixed chamber ensemble. He wrote only a few works for orchestra, including a Concertante for string quartet and orchestra that alludes to Beethoven's "Grosse Fuge." In his vocal writing, he often drew on biblical texts. He was fascinated by music's ability to unify voices. In his satyr like "Duo Capriccioso" for violin and piano , he found areas of overlap between the instruments' expressive registers, where they form a new hybrid alloy of sound . "Music is the summation, the aggregate, of all the choices, all we do. It's a chaotic enterprise, a degree of understanding," Mr. Davidovsky told Jose Luis Hurtado, a Mexican composer who studied with him at Harvard, in a recorded conversation. "It is like being monotheist. It is like the kind of language that you may eventually use to see the face of God."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Humans may not be the only primates who enjoy an occasional nip. In West Africa, scientists have found a group of chimpanzees who make a habit of pilfering alcoholic drinks. In Bossou, Guinea, the raffia palm produces a sap whose sugars quickly ferment. Villagers gather the fermented sap and drink it from plastic cups. Using video cameras, English researchers recorded 51 instances in which chimpanzees raided the villagers' cups. The chimps use a folded leaf to dip into the cup and then lick the sap off. Sometimes they drink alone, sometimes alternating dips with a companion. The alcohol content of the palm sap is about 3.1 percent weak, as cocktails go. The scientists calculated that the chimps drank anywhere from a tenth of an ounce to almost three ounces at a sitting. Males and females were equally interested in and adept at drinking.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
FOR years, Stephen Ward, 68, struggled as his wife suffered from multiple sclerosis and died. Then in 2007, he met Phyllis Kellerman, 70, and they started dating. The retired couple discovered that they had much in common. Both loved the theater. Both had long happy marriages and children. Mr. Ward and Ms. Kellerman's late husband had been teachers in the New York area. The couple soon fell in love. Ms. Kellerman moved into Mr. Ward's house in Boynton Beach, Fla. Though they talked about marrying, the couple decided against it. Both planned to leave assets to their grown children, and they worried that marriage could create legal problems for heirs. The partners also were concerned about provisions in the tax code that sometimes force married couples to pay more than single people. "We decided to act as married people but not to get a marriage certificate," says Ms. Kellerman. Americans have long been retreating from marriage. While more people of all ages are living together, the growth of unmarried couples is fastest among the older segment of the population. In 2010, 2.8 million people aged 50 and over cohabited, up from 1.2 million in 2000, according to the United States Census Bureau. For many, the decision to remain single is a matter of money. A partner who remarries stands to lose alimony, Social Security or a survivor's pension. "Young people may be eager to marry for love, but older couples are more practical and worry about paying the bills," says Pepper Schwartz, professor of sociology at the University of Washington. For young people, living together tends to be a transitory arrangement, says Susan L. Brown, professor of sociology at Bowling Green State University, who has studied cohabitation. Young unmarried couples typically have less education and lower incomes than their married peers. Those living together remained single because they could not afford to buy a house and settle down. Such young couples often live together for a year or two and then get married or break up. Ms. Brown found that older couples were not any poorer than their married peers. Older people lived together unmarried for an average of nine years. "For older adults, cohabitation is very much a long term alternative to marriage," says Ms. Brown. Lawyers urge unmarried clients to draw up agreements specifying which partner is responsible for expenses and who will inherit assets. Many couples ignore the advice and share expenses informally. But the loose arrangements can result in messy legal problems if the couple splits or one partner dies suddenly. Lawyers tell stories of couples who lived together for years in a property owned by one partner. When the owner died, children claimed the property and evicted the survivor. To avoid such situations, lawyers suggest drawing up agreements that will protect both partners. Even if they don't draw up formal agreements about living arrangements, some couples insist on signing health proxies, giving each the right to make medical decisions for the other. Medical issues have been a concern for Marie Macchia, 70, and Jack Laurie, 77, who have been together for eight years. They divide their time between Ms. Macchia's home in Manhattan and Mr. Laurie's house in Miller Place, on Long Island. The couple worried that if one partner became sick, hospitals could block access to records or make it difficult for the healthy partner to visit. The proxies are to prevent such problems. "We want to be ready if something happens when our families aren't around," says Ms. Macchia. Whether or not they sign documents, many older couples remain single because of financial issues. Potential medical burdens pose a special problem, says Howard S. Krooks, president of the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys. Under the law, married people are responsible for the debts of spouses. Nursing homes can cost more than 14,000 a month in high cost states, says Mr. Krooks, and Medicaid covers expenses only after the couple has exhausted most of their assets. Mr. Krooks describes a well to do client who lived with a woman and decided to marry. After learning about the potential medical costs, the man elected to remain unmarried. The client agreed to support his partner and leave assets to her in his will. "He wanted to provide for her, but he was unwilling to take on the risk of covering medical costs," says Ms. Krooks. Many couples refuse to marry because of concern about protecting the inheritances of children. While prenuptial agreements can stipulate who heirs will be, the partners often worry that legal documents may not be airtight or could be changed after a spouse dies. In some states, property owners are required to leave one third or more of their assets to surviving spouses. Even if they prove secure, prenuptial agreements can be expensive to draft. "You can easily spend 3,000 to 10,000 because both parties must have lawyers, and they must negotiate the provisions," says Frederick Hertz, a lawyer in San Francisco. A marriage can result in families losing student aid, says Mark Kantrowitz, senior vice president of Edvisors Network, which operates education websites. Mr. Kantrowitz gives the example of a single parent who earns 50,000 and has a child in college with 20,000 in grants. If the parent remarries, the student could lose 3,000 in aid for every 10,000 of annual income that the new stepparent brings to the household. Mr. Kantrowitz has encountered situations where remarried partners insist on prenuptial agreements saying that the stepparent will not contribute to college tuition. But the child loses financial aid anyway. "The prenuptial agreements are between the parents and not binding on colleges," he says. For years, Congress has wrestled with provisions that impose higher taxes on married couples. For many people, the marriage penalty has been reduced, and in some cases married couples pay lower taxes than single peers. But the tax code is still full of provisions that place burdens on married couples, says Katherine Dean, managing director for wealth planning for Wells Fargo Private Bank. The penalties are particularly severe for high income taxpayers. If unmarried partners each make 405,000, they will pay taxes at a rate of 33 percent. But if the couple marries, they will pay at a rate of 39.6 percent. Middle income people can also increase their burdens by thousands of dollars when they marry. Under the rules, older unmarried partners who each earn 60,000 may be able to deduct up to 6,500 in contributions to an individual retirement account. But if the partners married, their joint income would be too high to take any deduction. In another wrinkle, two single people can each use capital losses to offset 3,000 in ordinary income annually or 6,000 for an unmarried couple. But if the partners marry, they can offset only 3,000. Some couples delay marriage because of Social Security. Under the rules, a survivor is entitled to a share of a late spouse's benefits. But survivors who remarry before age 60 lose the benefits. Government pensions also cause some people to postpone marrying, says Linda J. Ravdin, a lawyer in Bethesda, Md., whose clients include federal civil servants. Under the rules, a survivor can be entitled to half a spouse's pension. But if survivors remarry before age 55, they lose the pensions. Survivors of military personnel can face especially steep penalties when they remarry, says Maryan K. Jaross, a financial adviser in Denver. She has counseled a close friend who obtained a pension after her husband died while serving in the military. The widow remarried. She lost the pension, gave up health insurance and the right to shop at a base commissary, where products sell at discounts. Her new husband died two years after the marriage, leaving her a widow with no support. The widow met another man, and this time she is cohabiting. "She is a staunch Catholic, but for now they are just living together," says Ms. Jaross.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
In Portland's So Called War Zone, It's the Troops Who Provide the Menace PORTLAND, Ore. To watch Fox News is to learn from Sean Hannity that the "Rose City" of Portland is "like a war zone" that has been, in Tucker Carlson's words, "destroyed by the mob." So I invite Hannity and Carlson to escape their bubbles and visit Portland, stroll along the Willamette River and enjoy a glass of local pinot noir. They'll be safe unless they venture at night into the two blocks beside the federal courthouse. Citizens need to be vigilant there, for armed groups periodically storm the streets to attack peaceful visitors. I'm talking, of course, about the uninvited federal forces. "They knocked the hell out of him," President Trump boasted on Fox News. "That was the end of him." Trump is pretending that he is bringing law and order to chaotic streets, and now he has dispatched similar troops what else can you call a militarized force like this but "troops"? to Seattle, where that city's mayor has also said they are unwanted. Yet if Trump is actually trying to establish order, he is stunningly incompetent. The ruthlessness of the federal forces has inflamed the protests, bringing huge throngs of Portlanders out to protect their city from those they see as jackbooted federal thugs. "Their presence here escalates," Kate Brown, Oregon's governor, told me. "It throws gasoline on the fire." Brown noted that the federal troops may also be breaking the law. "We cannot have secret police abducting people into unmarked vehicles," she said. "This is a democracy and not a dictatorship." The paradox is that Oregon is simultaneously begging for federal assistance to address a real threat the coronavirus pandemic. Brown said she has been pleading for Covid 19 tests and for personal protective equipment, but the federal government has rebuffed the state. "It's appalling to me that they are using federal taxpayer dollars for political theater and making no effort to really keep our communities safe," Brown said. So let's be real: Trump isn't trying to quell violence in Portland. No, he's provoking it to divert attention from 140,000 Covid 19 deaths in the United States. Once again, he's tear gassing peaceful protesters to generate a photo op and he's doing this every night in downtown Portland. This is a reckless campaign tactic to bolster his own narrative as a law and order candidate, a replay of Richard Nixon's successful 1968 campaign theme. It is true that some protesters are violent. Some start small trash fires. Others paint graffiti, including "kill pigs" and "kill cops," or hurl water bottles or firecrackers at federal agents. Some protesters point lasers at officers and in one case a man allegedly hit an agent with a hammer. Such violence is wrong and plays into Trump's narrative. Representative John Lewis, who died earlier this month, showed how much more powerful it is for changemakers to endure violence than to commit it. But it's also true that the vast majority of those in the crowds each evening are peaceful. They sing about racial justice, chant "Feds out now" and try to protect their city from violent intruders dispatched by Trump. The protesters including a "Wall of Moms" who turn out each night to lock arms and shield protesters protect themselves with bicycle helmets and umbrellas, while suburbanites bring leaf blowers to dispel tear gas (this works surprisingly well). Medics attend to the injured, and cleanup crews collect litter. "They have guns; I have an umbrella," said a protester named Jackie who added that she was fearful of the government and did not want her last name published. That's common in dictatorships, but I find it ineffably sad to breathe tear gas in my beloved home state and to interview Americans with such fears of their own leaders. On the streets, I have no fear of the protesters (except when they pull their face masks down to shout slogans, risking the spread of Covid 19), but it's prudent to worry about the troops. In a few weeks, they: None fired "less lethal" munition at a peaceful protester named Donavan La Bella, fracturing his skull and requiring facial reconstruction surgery. Video shows that the shot was unprovoked. None clubbed a Navy veteran, Christopher J. David, as he tried to ask federal agents how they squared their actions with the Constitution. None allegedly sexually assaulted a lawyer who had been arrested after taking part in the "Wall of Moms." An iconic moment came when a woman known as Naked Athena confronted the troops while wearing only a hat and face mask. Her naked vulnerability as armed troops fired pepper balls at her feet underscored the absurdity of Trump's narrative that he is "protecting" anything. Beware. What you're seeing in Portland may be coming to other cities. After all, Trump's verdict on the troops: "In Portland, they've done a fantastic job." 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.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
SAN FRANCISCO For weeks, Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's chief executive, and some of his lieutenants had worked behind the scenes to repair the ride hailing company's fractious relationship with Waymo, the self driving business spun out of Google. A Waymo lawsuit over autonomous car technology, in which it accused Uber of stealing trade secrets, was about to go to trial in a San Francisco courtroom for all to see. So Mr. Khosrowshahi, who was appointed Uber C.E.O. late last year, leaned on his history with Google from his previous job as chief executive of the travel site Expedia. Mr. Khosrowshahi worked to coax Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and to let them know that Uber had turned over a new leaf, according to two people briefed on the situation, who asked not to be identified because the details were confidential. Tony West, Uber's recently appointed general counsel and a former Department of Justice official, also jumped into the negotiations, these people said. The actions helped lead to a compromise. On Friday, four days after the trial began and revealed some embarrassing testimony, Uber and Waymo announced they had settled the trade secrets dispute. Under the agreement, Waymo dropped the suit and will receive 0.34 percent of stock in Uber. Uber also said that it could have handled some past actions around driverless car tech differently. The settlement signified something else, too: Uber is Mr. Khosrowshahi's company now. Since stepping inside Uber's doors last fall, the 48 year old has made it clear he wants to put the company's checkered past behind it as fast as possible. With the Waymo deal, he showed the many tactics that he plans to use to accomplish that expressions of regret, accompanied by conciliation, compromise and efficiency. Call him the diplomat in chief. Mr. Khosrowshahi's modus operandi is to clear the way for the big tasks ahead for Uber, said the people who were briefed on the matter. One of those tasks is taking the ride hailing company public next year, in what is likely to be a blockbuster initial public offering. As a private company, Uber is valued at around 70 billion. "My job as Uber's C.E.O. is to set the course for the future of the company: innovating and growing responsibly, as well as acknowledging and correcting mistakes of the past," Mr. Khosrowshahi said in a company blog post. The deal with Waymo is the latest maneuver by Mr. Khosrowshahi to shed the baggage of Uber's past. For months, he has been on a mea culpa tour to mend fences with legislators around the world for how Uber often barreled into markets while flouting local laws. He has publicly apologized for an enormous hack that briefly compromised the information of 57 million drivers and riders. And he has introduced a new set of cultural values for Uber, replacing a list created by Travis Kalanick, the former chief executive who was pushed out last June. Internally at Uber, Mr. Khosrowshahi has also made changes, including bringing on a new slate of lieutenants. In December, the ride hailing company said Barney Harford, a former chief executive of the travel site Orbitz, would become its chief operating officer. In October, Uber hired Mr. West, a former federal prosecutor, from PepsiCo. Mr. West has since been restructuring the company's legal department. Mr. Khosrowshahi's style is markedly different from that of Mr. Kalanick, who took a no holds barred approach to the business world. In court this week for the trade secrets trial, Mr. Kalanick testified that he had moved from seeing Google as a potential partner for Uber to an existential threat. Google's self driving vehicle research, he said, could eventually have crushed Uber. Mr. Kalanick also testified that he became friendly with Anthony Levandowski, a former top self driving researcher at Google. Mr. Levandowski started a self driving trucking start up, Otto, with the help of other Google engineers he took with him, while downloading proprietary information from the company. Mr. Kalanick bought Otto in 2016, an acquisition that led to Waymo's case against Uber. (Uber has since fired Mr. Levandowski.) On Friday, Mr. Kalanick struck a defiant tone about the settlement. "Our sole objective was to hire the most talented scientists and engineers to help lead the company and our cities to a driverless future," he said in a statement. "The evidence at trial overwhelmingly proved that, and had the trial proceeded to its conclusion, it is clear Uber would have prevailed." For now, Mr. Khosrowshahi has appeared to smooth over the sore spots with Waymo. Waymo will still be able to pursue a separate legal proceeding against Mr. Levandowski, which is unfolding as a closed door arbitration. "While I cannot erase the past, I can commit, on behalf of every Uber employee, that we will learn from it, and it will inform our actions going forward," Mr. Khosrowshahi said in his blog post.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The answer, alas, is that the author is keeping him there to force a conversation. Directed by Andrew Leynse for Primary Stages at the Cherry Lane Theater, "A Walk With Mr. Heifetz" is a play constructed for the sake of an argument. Inspired by real people and events in the decades leading up to the foundation of Israel, Mr. Inverne wants to make a point about the vital role of music in establishing a culture and knitting together a new nation. Thus the buttonholing of the comparatively decadent Heifetz by the idealistic Yehuda (Yuval Boim), who is determined to use his own music for social good. Way off in the future, Yehuda will become an important Israeli composer. His more formal elder brother, Moshe (Erik Lochtefeld, dependably fun to watch), an alpha politician, will serve as the nation's second prime minister. But for all the biography in it, this play is an awkward amalgam of hastily sketched history, which will read clearly only to those who already know it, and stories told in detail to characters who would surely not be hearing them for the first time. The two acts take place about 20 years apart, ending on the other side of World War II, and a timeline in the program provides some context. M.L. Dogg's sound design, too, helps to locate us in history at the top of Act II. It wasn't clear for a while, though, which country Yehuda and Moshe were in then; at the end of Act I, Yehuda seemed to be leaving Palestine. Intermittently, a violinist (Mariella Haubs) roams Wilson Chin's jagged edged, reversible set, handsomely lit by John Froelich. Her playing is a salutary addition to a show that often aims much higher than it can reach.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The Arctic Ocean may seem remote and forbidding, but to birds, whales and other animals, it's a top notch dining destination. "It's a great place to get food in the summertime, so animals are flying or swimming thousands of miles to get there," said Kevin R. Arrigo, a biological oceanographer at Stanford University. But the menu is changing. Confirming earlier research, scientists reported Wednesday that global warming is altering the ecology of the Arctic Ocean on a huge scale. The annual production of algae, the base of the food web, increased an estimated 47 percent between 1997 and 2015, and the ocean is greening up much earlier each year. These changes are likely to have a profound impact for animals further up the food chain, such as birds, seals, polar bears and whales. But scientists still don't know enough about the biology of the Arctic Ocean to predict what the ecosystem will look like in decades to come. While global warming has affected the whole planet in recent decades, nowhere has been hit harder than the Arctic. This month, temperatures in the high Arctic have been as much as 36 degrees above average, according to records kept by the Danish Meteorological Institute. In October, the extent of sea ice was 28.5 percent below average the lowest for the month since scientists began keeping records in 1979. The area of missing ice is the size of Alaska and Texas put together. Since the mid 2000s, researchers like Dr. Arrigo have been trying to assess the effects of retreating ice on the Arctic ecosystem. The sun returns to the Arctic each spring and melts some of the ice that formed in winter. Algae in the open water quickly spring to life and start growing. These algae are the base of the food chain in the Arctic Ocean, grazed by krill and other invertebrates that in turn support bigger fish, mammals and birds. Dr. Arrigo and his colleagues visited the Arctic in research ships to examine algae in the water and to determine how it affected the water's color. They then reviewed satellite images of the Arctic Ocean, relying on the color of the water to estimate how much algae was growing what scientists call the ocean's productivity. The sea's productivity was rapidly increasing, Dr. Arrigo found. Last year he and his colleagues published their latest update, estimating that the productivity of the Arctic rose 30 percent between 1998 and 2012. But Mati Kahru, an oceanographer at the University of California, San Diego, was skeptical. As an expert on remote sensing, he knew how hard it is to get a reliable picture of the Arctic Ocean. The ocean is notoriously cloudy, and algae are not the only thing that tinting the water. Rivers deliver tea colored organic matter into the Arctic Ocean, which can give the impression that there's more algae in the water than is actually there. Dr. Kahru and his colleagues decided to take an independent look, scouring satellite databases for images taken from 1997 to 2015 "every image available," he said. The scientists used a mathematical equation to determine how the color in each pixel of each image was determined by algae, runoff, and other factors. Dr. Kahru decided that Dr. Arrigo was right: The Arctic Ocean has become vastly more productive. Marcel Babin, an oceanographer at Universite Laval in Quebec who was not involved in the new study, said that the researchers had done "very careful work" that confirmed the earlier studies. "It's an important finding," he said. Not only is the Arctic Ocean producing more algae, but it's doing so sooner each year. "These blooms are coming earlier, sometimes two months earlier," Dr. Kahru said. In fact, the bloom may be coming even sooner than satellites can record. On research cruises, Dr. Arrigo and his colleagues have found that open water is no longer a requirement for algae to grow. The ice has gotten so thin that sunlight reaches through it. "Now they're not even waiting for the ice to melt," said Dr. Arrigo said of algal organisms.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Every month, Netflix Australia adds a new batch of movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for June, broken down by release date. Not the month you're looking for? Find the newest Netflix Australia guide here. The fifth season of the British science fiction anthology "Black Mirror" arrived early last December, in the form of the experimental, interactive movie "Bandersnatch." The series now gets back to normal relatively speaking with three new episodes, the details of which will remain shrouded in mystery until the date of the premiere. The cast list this year includes Anthony Mackie, Damson Idris, Andrew Scott, Topher Grace and (in an episode about a glamorous pop star with a stressful private life) Miley Cyrus. Whatever these stories turn out to be, the show's writers and directors will continue to challenge viewers to ponder how technology can warp their perceptions of the world. Between 1993 and 2001, the UK's Channel 4 produced three mini series based on the first three books in Armistead Maupin's nine novel "Tales of the City" cycle, about the intertwining lives of a makeshift family of radicals and libertines in San Francisco. Netflix's new mini series continues those earlier TV adaptations, bringing back the actors Laura Linney as a formerly inexperienced Middle American who had her eyes opened when she first arrived in California, and Olympia Dukakis as a landlady who opens her home to outcasts. This sequel will draw on the later Maupin books, while also commenting on how the very concept of "the city" has changed in the 21st century. A spiritual sequel to the writer director actor Jon Favreau's well received 2014 dramedy "Chef," the new docu series "The Chef Show" has Favreau and the culinary celebrity Roy Choi (who consulted on the movie) cooking and chatting with some of their famous friends. They travel from Atlanta to Austin to Los Angeles, sharing food with Gwyneth Paltrow, Robert Downey Jr., Robert Rodriguez, David Chang, Bill Burr and more, in a show about how preparing and serving a meal can bring people together. Netflix's latest true crime mini series comes from Spain, and tackles a complex rape and murder case from 1992, when three teenagers were abducted while hitchhiking. Decades later, only one man has been charged for the crime, with another still on the run. But the clues suggest more perpetrators and also don't seem to match up with the police's preferred suspects. The four part documentary "The Alcasser Murders" goes over what happened in explicit, gruesome detail, while also covering the controversies surrounding an investigation that many believed to have been bungled by the police, by the media, and by a hysterical public. There is something highly compelling about the way the producers and crew of docu series "Dope" bring a "tell it like it is" attitude toward their embeds with drug dealers and narcotics agents. Footage is cut and narrated to make the material as pulpy and sensationalistic as possible. The intimate conversations with hard cases and the surveillance style angles on criminal activity have given "Dope" an irresistibly voyeuristic quality through two seasons, which should continue into the third. "Arthdal Chronicles" (June 1), "Happy" Season 2 (June 5), "3%" Season 3 (June 7), "Designated Survivor" Season 3 (June 7), "Cuckoo" Season 5 (June 13), "Jinn" (June 13), "Aggretsuko" Season 2 (June 14), "Awake: The Million Dollar Game" (June 14), "Black Spot" Season 2 (June 14), "Leila" (June 14), "Unite 42" (June 14), "The Missing" Season 3 (June 17), "Ad Vitam" (June 21), "Bolivar" (June 21), "The Casketeers" Season 2 (June 21), "The Confession Tapes" Season 2 (June 21), "Dark" Season 2 (June 21), "Girls Incarcerated" Season 2 (June 21), "Mr. Iglesias" (June 21), "Forest of Piano" Season 2 (June 24), "Answer for Heaven" (June 27), "The Chosen One" (June 28), "Exhibit A" (June 28), "Motown Magic" Season 2 (June 28), "Queen of the South" Season 3 (June 28) and "Glee" Seasons 1 6 (June 30) Want more Australia coverage? Sign up for the weekly Australia Letter here. While largely staying out of the public eye, the entertainment manager and promoter Clarence Avant has been a dominant force in American music, movies, sports and politics for over 50 years, making deals and offering advice to everyone from Snoop Dogg to Quincy Jones to Hank Aaron to Barack Obama. Director Reginald Hudlin's documentary "The Black Godfather" features interviews with all four of those men, along with dozens of other past and present showbiz industry players, who discuss how Avant has worked behind the scenes not just to make people a lot of money, but to keep them focused on their deeper personal goals and values. A guilty pleasure fantasy romance about living the life of the mega rich as well as an incisive look at the culture clashes within the global Chinese community became a box office hit last year in large part because it puts a spotlight on people and places who rarely get featured in mainstream American movies. Directed by Jon M. Chu and based on Kevin Kwan's best selling novel, the film stars Constance Wu as the middle class university professor Rachel, and Henry Golding as her wealthy boyfriend Nick. The two travel to meet Nick's wealthy relatives at a Singapore wedding, where Rachel finally comes to understand just how privileged Nick really is and how much her every move is scrutinized by his controlling mother Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh). Bob Dylan's 1975 76 "Rolling Thunder Revue" tour was something of a summation, both of the singer songwriter's career to that point, and of America on the cusp of its bicentennial. Star studded, theatrical, and packed with great music (much of it drawn from Dylan's two mid '70s masterpieces "Blood on the Tracks" and "Desire"), all "Rolling Thunder" was missing was a fitting document of the event. Dylan's own attempt to turn the experience into a movie, 1978's "Renaldo Clara," disappeared quickly from circulation after critics trashed it for its self indulgence. Now Martin Scorsese has taken a crack at getting an account of the tour right, reshaping the original footage and adding new material, looking to recreate the shaggy, wild vibe of the USA, circa 1975. 'Teen Titans Go! To the Movies' Starts streaming: June 12 The animated "Spider Man" movie "Into the Spider Verse" wasn't the only snappy, self referential superhero cartoon released last year. The colorful and manic "Teen Titans Go! To the Movies" features all the rocket paced action and jovially juvenile silliness that thrill fans of the TV series "Teen Titans Go!" The film follows the adolescent super team (led by Batman's sidekick Robin) as they work extra hard to become the kind of beloved crimefighters worthy of making it to the big screen. Throughout, the writer director producer team of Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, and Peter Rida Michail mock genre cliches and the pretensions of comic book super heroics. Set in one of Chicago's rougher neighborhoods, "Beats" stars Anthony Anderson as a high school security guard who gets involved in the life of a frequently truant student (played by Khalil Everage) after he hears the teen's remarkable gift for making hip hop backing tracks. Uzo Aduba plays the kid's mother, who's raised him to feel paralyzingly anxious about the dangers waiting outside their door. Directed by the accomplished music video and commercial director Chris Robinson, "Beats" is both a coming of age and an underdog story, scored to some catchy music. An absolutely vital piece of documentary filmmaking, director Petra Costa's "The Edge of Democracy" covers the recent political turmoil in Brazil, where a combination of corruption and betrayal pushed one administration out of office and cleared the way for a more authoritarian one. Costa whose family has been heavily involved in the country's politics and industry for generations has a personal stake in the outcome of this situation. She uses her film to explain Brazil's complicated history and to warn that even a seemingly stable, prosperous democracy can descend into chaos in an instant. Before the writer director Rian Johnson made "Star Wars: The Last Jedi," he dabbled in science fiction with 2012's "Looper," a clever time travel adventure with film noir trappings. Joseph Gordon Levitt plays Joe, an unusual kind of hitman who kills people sent back to the past by the criminal underworld of the future. Bruce Willis plays "Old Joe," a future version of Joe who escapes his own assassination and sets out to alter the timeline. Fast paced and unpredictable, "Looper" isn't really a special effects driven techno thriller; it's more of a character study, with the exciting action scenes serving Johnson's larger questions about the mistakes people keep making across generations, even after they know better. It's been 19 years since Samuel L. Jackson donned the long trench coat of Harlem private investigator John Shaft II. The 2000 "Shaft" was always meant to be the beginning of a new film franchise, following directly from the 1970s version, which starred Richard Roundtree. So while this latest "Shaft" has the same title as the movies released in 1971 and 2000, it's intended as a sequel, with Jackson and Roundtree now playing the older generation of Shafts, teaching the newcomer John Shaft Jr. (played by Jessie T. Usher) how to follow leads, crack skulls and stand up to the man. Directed by Tim Story and co written by Kenya Barris and Alex Barnow all better known for their comedy movies and TV sitcoms the 2019 "Shaft" appears to offer a more tongue in cheek approach to the series. "Oh, Ramona!" (June 1), "The Princess Bride" (June 1), "Save the Last Dance" (June 1), "The Lovely Bones" (June 2), "Everybody Wants Some" (June 5), "American Made" (June 6), "Alles ist gut" (June 6), "Elisa Marcela" (June 7), "Rock My Heart" (June 7), "The 3rd Eye 2" (June 13), "Victoria and Abdul" (June 13), "Charite" (June 14), "Cinderella Pop" (June 14), "Life Overtakes Me" (June 14), "The Witches" (June 15), "The DUFF" (June 19), "The Nun" (June 19), "Smallfoot" (June 19), "Jaoon Kahan Bata Ae Dil" (June 21), "A Dog's Purpose" (June 30) and "20th Century Women" (June 30) For over a decade, the actress/comedian Colleen Ballinger has entertained millions of fans via her YouTube channels and live tours, playing the character "Miranda Sings," a fame chasing vlogger with a grating voice and smeared makeup. The special "Miranda Sings Live... Your Welcome" (misspelling intentional) documents one of those concerts. It features Miranda's typically twisted self help tips and terrible show tunes, along with some furious pushback at her many "haters." It's also a distillation of nearly everything Ballinger has done over the years to parody a particular strain of online narcissism. "Jo Koy: Comin' In Hot" (June 12), "Adam Devine: Best Time of Our Lives" (June 18) and "Mike Epps: Only One Mike" (June 25)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
American Ballet Theater's gala at the Metropolitan Opera House on Monday was a triumph on many levels. Alexei Ratmansky's two act "Whipped Cream," an exuberantly nutty piece, new this March, in which a candy shop coming to life is only the start of the tale's subversive craziness made its New York debut with high spirited success. The illustrious David Hallberg returned from injury to give his first New York performance (as Prince Coffee) in almost three years. Mark Ryden's color abundant sets and costumes turned the evening into a rising wave of visual glee. And Richard Strauss's two act score, heard only a few weeks after "Der Rosenkavalier" in the same house, proves to be a revelation. Above all, Ballet Theater is looking more like a company than ever before an important, world class one, vividly musical, excitingly refined, with performers seizing the moment again and again. Monday's cast was the same as in the March world premiere (in Costa Mesa, Calif.), but the second cast I saw in California was quite as fine, and later casts are likely to be quite as individually rewarding. The subtle tilt of a torso, the spiraling flourish of one raised arm amid supported pirouettes, the flicker of legs beating or circling in the air: these and many other details delivered with grace and panache add up cumulatively, like threads in a tapestry, so the ballet becomes a complex visual luxury. That's as it should be in the Ratmansky piece, since most of the characters are bonbons: 16 women in meringue like outfits are the Whipped Cream of the title. This ballet is both for gourmands and gourmets: the Boy protagonist (Daniil Simkin) overindulges in sweets in Act I but ends up entering Sweet City as the consort of Princess Praline (Sarah Lane). Tea, Coffee, Sugar and Cocoa are all royalty here. Surrealism takes wing as the known world totters; the authority figures, a doctor and nurses who supervise the Boy after his overindulgence, turn out to be tipplers. The chief rewards of revisiting "Whipped Cream" go beyond the fun of cast changes. Most astonishingly, the choreography brilliantly vindicates a score and libretto by Richard Strauss that have long been deemed ill advised failures. Strauss planned his ballet "Schlagobers" in the original as the biggest of several projects hoped to restore the fortunes of the Vienna State Ballet after the Hapsburg Empire collapsed; it was part of a decades long fascination with dance on his part. Mr. Ratmansky has made welcome tweaks to the original story. (Strauss included, as part of the original plot for Act II, a failed revolution by the candy proletariat, with Jewish matzos throwing Communist pamphlets. This aspect was denounced by some as anti Semitic at the time of the 1924 premiere and swiftly adjusted.) But Mr. Ratmansky's response to this music doesn't feel diplomatic; it feels energetically impish. Amid Strauss's many other quotations and references, the music continually, powerfully, conflates effects from his opera "Der Rosenkavalier." (For those who know that opera: Think of "Whipped Cream" as if the Marschallin had a fulfilling marriage to Baron Ochs while Octavian and the Faninals presided over the wedding. Yes, irresistibly improbable.) I find most Strauss music overelaborate, but this score is just abundantly, delectably satisfying, laden with varied dance rhythms and succulent melodies. All admirers of Strauss should see this production and reconsider where his best talents lay. Mr. Ratmansky, artist in residence at Ballet Theater since 2009, feasts on this music. Soon after the sweets first come to life, there's a fabulously intricate dance for four male Sugarplums, four male Marzipans and four Gingerbread Men in which the three groups move in different and overlapping rhythms, styles and patterns. They're just supporting delicacies, but neither Strauss nor Mr. Ratmansky condescend. On the contrary, you could spend hours analyzing all that's going on here in music and dance. The whole ballet is like that. Admittedly, I question Mr. Ratmansky's busy response, for Princess Tea Flower (Stella Abrera) and her companions, to the first appearance (solo violin) of the melody that becomes the main candy motif. Doesn't the flowing line call for a moment of choreographic spaciousness and calm? And yet it feels later on the phrase returns several times during the ballet, more fully orchestrated that he was cleverly supplying rhythmic counterpoint to music that in due course becomes irresistibly delicious, a revelation of sensuous beauty at its most innocently luscious. Ballet Theater announced that in 2016 it began the Ratmansky Project, a five year, 15 million initiative to support new work. Monday's gala was we were told by Misty Copeland, Marcelo Gomes, Caroline Kennedy and Kevin McKenzie before the dancing began by far the most successful in the company's history. This success, it soon emerged, was measured in financial terms. Yet a rarer, even more valuable, success here is artistic. Ballet Theater has long been a haven for world class guest stars, and during Mikhail Baryshnikov's artistic directorship (1980 89) it grew thrillingly versatile. Now, thanks mainly to Mr. Ratmansky, it is exemplifying a distinctive classical style that ranks beside the best anywhere.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
A replica of the Chauvet Cave of southern France, which contains some of the earliest known figurative cave paintings in the world, at the Caverne du Pont d'Arc in the French Rhone Alpes region. This is the essay is part of The Big Ideas, a special section of The Times's philosophy series, The Stone, in which more than a dozen artists, writers and thinkers answer the question, "Why does art matter?" The torrential rains at the summer resort in the Catskills, where my dad was a weekend bass player, entitling us to the use of a free if leaky bungalow, drove all us campers into the cavernous dance hall for an impromptu game of trivia. I was 5 years old, and the first up. "Where are you from?" the head counselor asked when I had climbed onto the stage. I was so intently focused on my private, newfound passion that I hardly registered the question. "Math!" I answered, only to be baffled when everyone around me erupted in laughter. Mathematics is a universal language of pattern. Equations articulate relationships. They speak to unassailable truths that stand beyond the vagaries of perception and interpretation. Every flat, right angled triangle drawn before Pythagoras, and every one after, until eternity, satisfies the famous theorem that bears the ancient Greek philosopher's name. There are no exceptions. That's the nature of mathematical insight. And through its terse, pristine delineation of inflexible truth, mathematics offers us the comfort of reliability and the beauty of precision. Since my earliest introduction, I have felt the deep allure of these unchanging patterns. Patterns that are impervious to authority. Patterns that transcend all things personal. It is a perspective I have found to be widely shared among those who practice mathematics or physics as a profession. All the same, many more of us are drawn to patterns of a different sort, patterns conveyed through particular combinations of sounds and colors and shapes and textures and movements, yielding works of music or dance or film or painting or sculpture patterns, that is, which emerge as creative human expression. These are patterns we value because of, not in spite of, their capacity to reflect thoroughly personal, deeply subjective responses to the infinite spectrum of human experience. As cave paintings, ancient figurines and archaic musical instruments attest, since the earliest glimmers of thought our species has intensely pursued and consumed such expression. I have little doubt that should we ever make contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence, they will understand our mathematics, especially the equations we have developed to explain the regularities of reality. After all, recognizing the patterns inherent in physical phenomena is central to survival. We have prevailed because we can sense and respond to the rhythms of the world. Every tomorrow will be different from today, but beneath the myriad comings and goings we rely on enduring qualities. The sun will rise, rocks will fall, water will flow. The vast collection of allied patterns we encounter from one moment to the next profoundly influence our behavior. Instincts are essential, and memory matters, because patterns persist. While the specific environment of a distant intelligence may differ significantly from our own, it is likely that it, too, prevailed by developing a refined sense of pattern described with precision through some version of mathematics. Yet when it comes to our artistic yearnings, there's a chance that the extraterrestrials will be thoroughly perplexed. Why would any species spend time and energy on creative works that seemingly have no survival value? In a precarious world with limited resources, the puzzle is thus to understand why we are drawn to activities that relate so obliquely to the goals of securing food, or a mate, or shelter. Charles Darwin himself took up this question, and wondered if the goals might not be as oblique as they seem. Perhaps, he suggested, the art impulse originated as a type of mating call, drawing various of our forebears together and thus steering the propagation of the species. Other researchers have suggested that the creation and consumption of artistic works may provide an intellectual playground, where ingenuity and imaginative problem solving skills are brought forth and refined in a safe environment. According to this view, the sorts of minds that can summon forth everything from "The Starry Night" to "Guernica," from the "David" to "The Burghers of Calais," from the "Goldberg Variations" to the "Ode to Joy" finale, are minds that have creatively imagined their way out of one potentially devastating challenge after another. Perhaps, then, art matters because it primed our very capacity to survive. Among those who think carefully about the relationship between art and evolutionary selection, there is as much controversy as there is consensus. Establishing an irrefutable Darwinian basis for art is no small challenge. Moreover, in considering why art matters today, not just in our ancestral past, the adaptive role may give us insight but at best would provide only a partial accounting. To fill in that account, we must focus on the many nuances of truth. Mathematics and science seek objective truth. Physicists approach it through their analyses of fundamental particles and the mathematical laws that govern them. Chemists illuminate it by invoking collections of these particles, organized into atoms and molecules. Biologists consider higher levels of organization, amalgamating atoms and molecules into the fantastic complexity evident to us within cells and life forms. Psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers add further layers still, examining the workings of the mind and the questions minds can pose about themselves and their experiences. No single story tells it all. Only by blending insights from each of these accounts can we gain the fullest understanding. Art is a critical component of this project, a pathway toward a yet broader variety of truths that encompasses subjective experience and celebrates our distinctly human response to the world. This is vital. There are truths that stand beyond articulation, whether in the language of mathematics or that of human discourse. There are truths we can sense, truths we can feel, that would be diminished by translation from inner expression. Art is our most refined means for accessing such truths. There is no universal summary of art, no definition that unambiguously delineates it. Our reactions to art are uniquely our own. But it is this very flexibility, this dependence on the individual, this reliance on the subjective, that makes art essential for grasping our all too human place in the cosmic order.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
A technician working with human cells belonging to cancer patients at Novartis Pharmaceuticals in Morris Plains, N.J. The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved Novartis's gene therapy for leukemia, the first ever treatment that alters a patient's own cells to fight cancer. The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved the first ever treatment that genetically alters a patient's own cells to fight cancer, a milestone that is expected to transform treatment in the coming years. The new therapy turns a patient's cells into a "living drug," and trains them to recognize and attack the disease. It is part of the rapidly growing field of immunotherapy that bolsters the immune system through drugs and other therapies and has, in some cases, led to long remissions and possibly even cures. The therapy, marketed as Kymriah and made by Novartis, was approved for children and young adults for an aggressive type of leukemia B cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia that has resisted standard treatment or relapsed. The F.D.A. called the disease "devastating and deadly" and said the new treatment fills an "unmet need." Novartis and other companies have been racing to develop gene therapies for other types of cancers, and experts expect more approvals in the near future. Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the F.D.A. commissioner, said that more than 550 types of experimental gene therapy were being studied. There are drawbacks to the approach. Because Kymriah can have life threatening side effects, including dangerous drops in blood pressure, the F.D.A. is requiring that hospitals and doctors be specially trained and certified to administer it, and that they stock a certain drug needed to quell severe reactions. Kymriah, which will be given to patients just once and must be made individually for each, will cost 475,000. Novartis said that if a patient does not respond within the first month after treatment, there will be no charge. The company also said it would provide financial help to families who were uninsured or underinsured. Discussing the high price during a telephone news conference, a Novartis official noted that bone marrow transplants, which can cure some cases of leukemia, cost even more, from 540,000 to 800,000. About 600 children and young adults a year in the United States would be candidates for the new treatment. The approval was based largely on a trial in 63 severely ill children and young adults who had a remission rate of 83 percent within three months a high rate, given that relapsed or treatment resistant disease is often quickly fatal. The treatment was originally developed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and licensed to Novartis. It was identified in previous reports as CAR T cell therapy, CTL019 or tisagenlecleucel. The first child to receive the therapy was Emily Whitehead, who was 6 and near death from leukemia in 2012 when she was treated, at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Now 12, she has been free of leukemia for more than five years. To customize Kymriah for individual patients, white blood cells called T cells will be removed from a patient's bloodstream at an approved medical center, frozen, shipped to Novartis in Morris Plains, N.J., for genetic engineering and multiplying, frozen again and shipped back to the medical center to be dripped into the patient. That processing is expected to take 22 days. Novartis said the treatment would be available at an initial network of 20 approved medical centers to be certified within a month, a number that would be expanded to 32 by the end of the year. Five centers will be ready to start extracting T cells from patients within three to five days, the company said. Certification is being required because the revved up T cells can touch off an intense reaction, sometimes called a cytokine storm, that can cause high fever, low blood pressure, lung congestion, neurological problems and other life threatening complications. Medical staff members need training to manage these reactions, and hospitals are being told that before giving Kymriah to patients, they must be sure that they have the drug needed to treat the problems, tocilizumab, also called Actemra. Dr. Kevin J. Curran, a pediatric oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, said his hospital was "99 percent" of the way through the certification process, and would soon be offering Kymriah. "This is a big paradigm shift, using this living drug," Dr. Curran said. "It will provide a lot of hope. This is the beginning." He said he expected that eventually this type of treatment would work for other, more common types of cancer, not just for leukemia. The F.D.A.'s approval of Kymriah ushers in "a new approach to the treatment of cancer and other serious and life threatening diseases," the agency said in a statement, noting that the new therapy is "the first gene therapy available in the United States." Dr. Carl June, a leader in developing the treatment at the University of Pennsylvania, recalled that in 2010, when tests showed that the first patient was leukemia free a month after being treated, he and his colleagues did not believe it. They ordered another biopsy to be sure. "Now, I have to keep pinching myself to see that this happened," Dr. June said, his voice breaking with emotion. "It was so improbable that this would ever be a commercially approved therapy, and now it's the first gene therapy approved in the United States. It's so different from all the pharmaceutical models. I think the cancer world is forever changed."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Credit...Katarina Premfors for The New York Times ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates A decade ago the French architect Jean Nouvel sketched the bare outlines of a fretted dome on flimsy paper. Today this enormous metallic silver canopy rises over desert sands and the Persian Gulf marking the new Louvre Abu Dhabi museum and the global ambitions of France and the United Arab Emirates to deploy art as a diplomatic tool they call "soft power." The vast dome and clusters of waterfront galleries beneath it will open to the public on Nov. 11, with sunlight cascading through a lacework of stainless steel and aluminum and layers of star shaped patterns. It's been a long wait for those thousands of stars to align with five years of construction delays and technical challenges to build the estimated 650 million flagship on Saadiyat Island, by a lagoon near this capital city. And the museum's history is also turbulent a saga of economic downturn, collapsing oil prices, regional political tensions and fierce French intellectual debates about the risks of lending its national treasures to the Middle East in exchange for petrodollars. Through it all the Louvre Abu Dhabi has brought together East and West and also managed to unite France's fractious national museums, which submerged envy and ego to cooperate on the project brokered by two governments. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is the result of a rare government accord in 2007 between France and this young, oil rich monarchy on the Persian Gulf. The U.A.E. is leasing the powerful Louvre brand for 400 million euros (about 464 million) for more than 30 years. Eventually it will pay a total of 974 million euros for French expertise, guidance and loans. In return, 17 French museums and institutions shipped 300 art works here this year, from Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of "La Belle Ferronniere" to massive marble nymphs from Versailles. French museum experts are also advising the Emiratis on what to acquire and organizing temporary exhibitions for up to 15 years. The public opening on Saturday with an appearance on Wednesday by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and flyovers with the Louvre's name on the wings of the country's national Etihad airlines comes as the monarchy is also engaged in a diplomatic boycott of neighboring Qatar, over allegations that Qatar supports extremists. Mr. Nusseibeh, the state minister, said his government considers the Louvre Abu Dhabi part of a cultural strategy to counter tensions in the region. The Emirates' ultimate aim is to promote the capital as a tolerant global city, and its flagship museum as a bridge between civilizations. "The priority is to invest heavily in education and culture," he said, speaking at his art filled country home outside Abu Dhabi. "This has become more important because of what happened with the radicalization of groups that have kidnapped Islam" for their own political purposes. "It is against everything that this country stands for," he added. Despite those lofty goals, the gritty reality of geopolitics intrudes in the country's budding cultural sphere. In late October, as preparations were underway to hang the paintings, a local judo athlete at Abu Dhabi's international Grand Slam tournament refused to shake hands after losing to an Israeli competitor. Image conscious government sports officials rushed to apologize formally for the snub and to pose for photographs with the Israeli athletes. Maymanah Farhat, an independent curator and art historian, said that the nation's new cultural projects do not always deflect intolerance. She cited several incidents, including that of Andrew Ross, a professor at New York University and a labor specialist, who was barred by the United Arab Emirates from entering the country to conduct research after he criticized construction conditions for workers in Abu Dhabi. Since then, Mr. Ross said he remains doubtful about the intentions of government leaders, calling their cultural strategy "promotional rhetoric." (Mr. Ross, a co founder of the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition, said the advocacy group is continuing its boycott of the Saadiyat Island cultural district to seek improvement in workers' wages.) The ambitious project "was a bit far fetched to a lot of people," said Mohamed Khalifa al Mubarak, chairman of the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority, and a Northeastern University graduate in economics and political science. Ten years ago the global museum community was united in opposing the notion of "renting" national treasures and risking damage by shipping them afar. But time has worn critics down, along with the general acceptance of the constant travel of art works globally for exhibitions. "I was completely against this project," said Didier Rykner, director of La Tribune de l'Art, a French online art publication, who organized petitions against the project because he believed the deal was motivated purely by politics and finance. "But with time, with the contract, you must do it. It should be done. But I think it shouldn't be done this way." Turban helmet from the Aq Qoyunlu or Ottoman dynasties, 15th century, in the collection of the Louvre Abu Dhabi. His concern remains the possibility of damage during the transport of artworks. He also says that the Louvre Abu Dhabi has rushed to open to coincide with an Abu Dhabi contemporary art fair in the capital. And Mr. Rykner questions whether security preparations are adequate. Museum officials contend that they are ready and that the site has been inspected recently by the French ministry of culture for security and temperature controls. "It's completely secure," said Laurence des Cars, the director of the Musee d'Orsay and the former curatorial director for the Abu Dhabi project, who is sending the self portrait by van Gogh and "The Fifer," by Manet. "I had to have the content reviewed, but no one said no," she said, when asked if there were any restrictions. She hopes to create an app for museum visitors to pick their own creation myths to project on the stone walls. Abu Dhabi officials are already preparing for the future. Mr. Mubarak predicted that the Louvre Abu Dhabi will have a domino effect and that the construction contract for the long planned Guggenheim Abu Dhabi could be awarded next year. (A Guggenheim spokesman declined to comment.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
LOS ANGELES After four years in the job and two months of intense speculation about his employment status, Philippe Vergne has confirmed that he is leaving his post as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, according to a statement from the museum. The statement says that the museum board and Mr. Vergne "have mutually elected not to renew Mr. Vergne's contract when it expires in March 2019." (He had a five year contract.) Combined with its chief curator leaving in March, this exit creates a power vacuum at the museum, which has already reinvented itself more than once over the last decade. The museum has an unusual number of artists on its board, including Catherine Opie, Mark Bradford, Mark Grotjahn, Barbara Kruger and John Baldessari, and several are now taking an active role in the leadership planning process. "A search committee for a new director has been formed, and there are artists from the board on that committee," the museum spokeswoman, Sarah Stifler, confirmed. "Artists plural," she noted. Mr. Vergne, 52, had replaced Jeffrey Deitch, a New York gallerist whose tenure leading the museum, following its 2008 financial crisis, was scrutinized and frequently controversial. Mr. Vergne, who is French born, seemed to be a stabilizing presence. A likable leader, he rebuilt staff from a low of 42 full time employees in 2014 to a total of 60 today.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
PITTSBURGH About 18 months ago, Shawn Blanton, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, met with some of his graduate students to redesign his course on artificial intelligence. "We need to transform this course to make it more relevant outside these walls," he said. It had only been three years since Professor Blanton started the class, but as artificial intelligence moves from the stuff of dystopian fantasies robots run amok to the reality of everyday use, universities around the country are grappling with the best ways to teach it. This year, Carnegie Mellon said it became the first university in the country to offer a separate undergraduate A.I. degree through its College of Computer Science. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology last month announced plans to establish a college for A.I., backed by 1 billion in investments. And the expansion is not just happening in the country's top science and technology schools. The University of Rhode Island this fall opened an A.I. lab operated by its college library. But this growth also means new challenges, such as figuring out how to teach the subject in ways understandable to those who are not computer science majors and addressing ethical dilemmas raised by the technology, such as privacy and job displacement. "We have to start teaching those who will be practitioners and users in the broad discipline of A.I., not just computer scientists," said Emily Fox, an associate professor of computer science, engineering and statistics at the University of Washington. Professor Fox developed an A.I. course for nonmajors, which was first offered last spring. To qualify, students had only to have completed courses in basic probability and basic programming, far fewer prerequisites than typically needed by students taking A.I. She had to cap enrollment at 110 students because of such high interest. Demi Tu, a senior studying information technology at the University of Washington, is an example of the value of reaching out to students who are not classic technology whizzes. She said she was so taken with what she learned in Professor Fox's class that she may choose to pursue it in graduate school. "Before taking the class, I did not know what A.I. was specifically," she said. "I just wanted the initial exposure. But the class really opened up a different path for me." Educators are also struggling to balance what some see as an essential teaching of the deep fundamentals of artificial intelligence with a desire by some in the industry to focus on the less expensive, less complicated training of workers who can complete the tasks at hand without that deep understanding. Or as Levent Burak Kara, a professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon, noted, there is a tension in teaching A.I. between ensuring "students understand what's under the hood and what industry wants." Freshman year may actually be too late to start teaching A.I. Fei Fei Li, director of Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab and its Stanford Vision Lab, began a three week summer program in 2015 for high school students, focused on offering young women early exposure to A.I. She then co founded AI4ALL, a nonprofit; this year six campuses ran programs exposing high school students, particularly women, people of color and those from rural regions, to the technology. "We want young people to think about their future participation in developing or guiding this technology," Professor Li said. "Today's developers are not diverse enough or inclusive enough. We want to educate tomorrow's A.I.'s technologists, thinkers and leaders and instill them with a human centered frame of mind." The University of Rhode Island has tried to make A.I. more accessible to a broad range of students by opening the lab in its library. "We're democratizing A.I.," said Karim Boughida, the dean of university libraries. The 600 square foot lab provides workstations for students to take tutorials in areas such as robotics, natural language processing and smarthomes, and to design their own projects. There is also a space where students, faculty and community members can learn, discuss and debate the ethics and future of A.I. The ethical issues raised by A.I. among them privacy, security and job displacement and how to teach them are something educators across the country are wrestling with. And many professors and students say more needs to be done in A.I. classes not just in separate ethics courses to ensure students become workers who are thoughtful about the role of A.I. David Danks, a professor of philosophy and psychology at Carnegie Mellon, just started teaching a class, "A.I, Society and Humanity." The class is an outgrowth of faculty coming together over the past three years to create shared research projects, he said, because students need to learn from both those who are trained in the technology and those who are trained in asking ethical questions. "The key is to make sure they have the opportunities to really explore the ways technology can have an impact to think how this will affect people in poorer communities or how it can be abused," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
SLOUGH, England "We're sure we're doing something that no one else is doing," said Lisa Henson last August . She was in a conference room in the newly opened studio complex, just outside London, that served as the home of Netflix's ambitious prequel series "The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance." The walls were papered with maps, photographs and sketches, and the table was laden with a plastic diorama of a mythical city. Just down the corridor, 48 puppeteers were gathering: a core team of 12 and an extra 36 brought in for the day's shooting. "It's the biggest puppet production ever mounted," Henson said. That's a difficult claim to fact check, but if anyone would know, she would. As the daughter of the Muppet impresario Jim Henson and as the chief executive of the entertainment company he founded, she has been around more puppet extravaganzas than most people, including "Sesame Street," "The Muppet Show," "Fraggle Rock," "Labyrinth" and more. The most ambitious of these was the gloomy new age fantasy saga "The Dark Crystal," from 1982. Directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz, the film was, in more ways than one, a world away from "Sesame Street." One of the few live action films to have no flesh and blood beings onscreen, it played like a cross between "Star Wars" and "The Hobbit" as it ranged across the planet of Thra, with its forests of sentient flora and its cackling, vulture like Skeksis rulers. The darker facets of "The Dark Crystal" may have given nightmares to young viewers expecting something closer to Bert and Ernie, but the film's scope and elaborate visuals remain impressive more than three decades later. Henson, who died in 1990, called it his proudest achievement. "The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance," premiering Friday on Netflix, is built on an even grander scale. A 10 part series, it includes 180 puppet characters, 90 different sets and 10,000 lines of dialogue voiced by an all star cast that includes Mark Hamill , Helena Bonham Carter , Andy Samberg , Simon Pegg and Keegan Michael Key . The grotesque Skeksis, the gentle Gelflings and the potato faced Podlings will be familiar to anyone who has seen the film, but the series is new territory for everyone involved, including the viewer. "What's it like to watch 10 hours of something, and it's live action, and there are no humans in it?" asked Jeff Addiss, a co executive producer and one of two head writers (with Will Matthews), on set in August 2018. "We're going to find out." All 10 episodes were directed by the French director Louis Leterrier , a longtime Henson fan whose films include Marvel's "The Incredible Hulk" and the 2010 remake of "Clash of the Titans." When Leterrier first came to Hollywood, his agent asked him whom he would like to meet in the American film industry. "I told him there's just one company," Leterrier said. "It's the Hensons. I was in awe of them." Lisa Henson, in turn, invited Leterrier to help with various "Dark Crystal" film and series concepts she had been trying to develop . Her father, she noted, had worked on developing the film for "an exceptionally long time, so the world had a reality and a mythology to it that were comparable to places like Middle earth and Westeros." "You had the sense that things were happening in other parts of the world which you didn't see in the movie," she continued, "and that you could go back in time many years." They ended up with a two pronged project: Leterrier, desperate to work with puppets, was to direct a live action sequel for the big screen, while an animated television series was to tell the tale of how Thra's peaceful, matriarchal civilization had crumbled in the first place, leaving behind the wasteland depicted in the film. Unsurprisingly, Hollywood studios didn't fall over themselves to bankroll a cartoon about genocide and ecological catastrophe. "Everyone was scared of it," said Leterrier. But Netflix was interested, Henson said, because it was looking for something children and parents could watch together . So the two projects were combined into one live action prequel TV series, to be made by Leterrier in "the most complicated way possible," he said. Henson's next call was to Brian Froud , a British artist who had been the conceptual designer on the original film. Back in the 1970s, Jim Henson had admired Froud's richly textured illustrations of woodland trolls and goblins (perhaps the soft, rounded faces struck a chord with the creator of the Muppets). They went on to collaborate on "The Dark Crystal" and "Labyrinth" (1986). Froud also met his wife, the American puppet builder Wendy Froud (then Wendy Midener) , in Henson's studios. Their son, Toby , played the baby who was abducted by David Bowie's goblin king in "Labyrinth." All three Frouds worked on "The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance," with Toby serving as the design supervisor in the production's "C reature S hop ." As he guided visitors around the menagerie of phenomenally detailed and spookily lifelike latex creations last August, his parents sat on opposite sides of a table, Wendy gluing feathers onto a puppet's head and Brian drawing runes in a notepad. "We thought we were done 30 years ago, or whenever it was," Brian Froud said, "and now here we are again." Visiting the sets of fantasy films or series can be disillusioning in the age of computer generated imagery they consist largely of green screens and tennis balls on sticks. But the "The Dark Crystal" headquarters was like a vast, immersive theme park ride. Room after room was stocked with swords, canoes, musical instruments, 3D printed model castles and alien fiends in various states of repair. (Some shots will be enhanced with C.G.I.) On the soundstages were caverns, laboratories and villages, all carved out of polystyrene blocks. Artificial trees stretched away into the artificial mist, toward distant mountains and valleys painted on backdrops the size of IMAX screens. And, of course, there were the puppets a gaggle of exuberant if battle weary Gelflings , each one carried and manually operated by its own individual handler. The puppeteers "are the show's true unsung heroes," said the tall and cheerful Leterrier, bubbling with energy on Day 153 of a 174 day shoot. "They are bent over, they can't feel their hands, they're too cold, too hot, too dirty, and no one will see them." As well as being the series's director, Leterrier was one of its two cinematographers, jogging alongside the puppeteers with a shoulder mounted camera for hours each day. As a result, the series has a whirling dynamism that was lacking in the static and sometimes ponderous film. "Louis has reinvented the genre," Lisa Henson said. The show's other masterminds were just as effusive. "We tried to write the biggest, craziest, most epic, most sweeping fantasy drama we could, not limited by time, by budget, or by puppets," said Matthews, one of the head writers. "And then Louis came in and said, 'O.K., that's a good starting point, here's how we can make it bigger and crazier.' Then Brian came in and said, 'Here's how we can add more to that,' and then Wendy came in and said, 'Here's how we fill in the cracks.'" "We were like the Gelflings," he added. "We all worked together for the greater good."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
When Netflix announced the trailer for Gwyneth Paltrow's "The Goop Lab" in early January, the media and medtwitter made dire predictions for both the streaming service and for humanity itself. The show would surely promote "dangerous pseudoscience," peddle "snake oil," and be "undeniably awful for society." Longtime Paltrow critic and health law researcher Timothy Caulfield was among the many opiners who warned on Twitter of the "spread of health misinformation" and the "erosion of criticalthinking." Other relevant hashtags included PostModernDarkAge and saynotogoop. Six episodes of the show finally dropped late last month, and so far civilization seems to be more or less intact. The show explores cold therapy, energy healing, longevity diets, and therapeutic use of psychedelics, all of which may sound esoteric to the uninitiated, but none of which actually lack sound evidence of benefit. The episode on female pleasure, led by masturbation queen Betty Dodson, is downright radical, featuring a vulva montage, naked women of various shapes and ages talking openly about their bodies, and a woman bringing herself to orgasm so that other women might learn how. "We're very dangerous when we're knowledgeable" says Ms. Dodson. Ms. Paltrow nods: "Tell me about it." So what underlies all the overwhelming, predictable, repetitive critiques? What exactly is so awful about a bunch of consenting adults seeking self knowledge, vitality and emotional freedom? Yes, the rich, willowy blonde at Goop's helm is an easy target. No, the average Jane can't afford plasma facials or a trip to Jamaica to drink magic mushroom tea under the guidance of a legitimate shaman. And sure, we know all about the Yoni Egg Debacle, wherein the company had to pay a hefty fine for making unsubstantiated medical claims. Disclaimers are now rightfully in place all over both the site and the show, and obviously we should always practice good hygiene, but it's worth repeating that so far there are no documented reports in the medical literature of yoni eggs causing anybody harm. The tsunami of Goop hatred is best understood within a context that is much older and runs much deeper than Twitter, streaming platforms, consumerism or capitalism. Throughout history, women in particular have been mocked, reviled, and murdered for maintaining knowledge and practices that frightened, confused and confounded "the authorities." (Namely the church, and later, medicine.) Criticism of Goop is founded, at least in part, upon deeply ingrained reserves of fear, loathing, and ignorance about things we cannot see, touch, authenticate, prove, own or quantify. It is emblematic of a cultural insistence that we quash intuitive measures and "other" ways of knowing the sort handed down via oral tradition, which, for most women throughout history, was the only way of knowing. In other words, it's classic patriarchal devaluation. When 19th century medicine men were organizing and legitimizing their brand new profession, they claimed the mantle of "science" even though there was no such thing as evidence based medicine at the time. In order to dominate the market, they slandered all other modalities as "quackery," including midwifery, which we know achieved safer birth outcomes back then, as it still does today. Pejoratives like "woo" or "pseudoscience" are still often applied to anything that falls outside of the mainstream medical establishment. (Think about this the next time you hear something harmless or odd or common sensical dismissed as an "old wives' tale.") Our society likes to conjoin the concepts of science and health, but the two do not always overlap. Peer reviewed, lab generated, randomized, controlled, double blinded evidence will always be the gold standard, but such studies aren't always fundable, or ethical. We kiss our children's boo boos even though there's no gold standard evidence that it will make them feel better. We just know that it does. Which in turn makes us feel better. That's "wellness." We understand the concern that a person with cancer might choose to forgo chemo in favor of Ayurveda. But just as there are wannabe gurus selling snake oil, there are irresponsible, unethical physicians, as well as physicians with a shameful incapacity for nuance or empathy. Reiki is not proven to shrink tumors in any double blind trials, but it, along with yoga and mindfulness and acupuncture, is being used in integrative cancer therapy at major institutions all over the world, because there is evidence that it has benefits, and no adverse side effects. To return to the yoni egg: Witness the public outcry over therapeutic use of polished gemstones to tone the pelvic floor, as compared with relative silence about the documented harms of gynecological devices like Essure and pelvic mesh. (To say nothing of what underlies our high rates of hysterectomy, cesarean section and untreated endometriosis.) To be clear, we aren't looking to Goop for scientific rigor (or political consciousness, for that matter). But it's condescending to suggest that if we are interested in having agency over our bodies, if we are open to experiencing heightened states of awareness and emotion, if we are amazed by and eager to learn more about the possibilities of touch and intention and energy, and if we'd like to do everything within our power to stay out of doctors' offices, we are somehow privileged morons who deserve an intellectual (read: patriarchal) beat down. Openness to intuitive measures that might help us avoid or ameliorate chronic despair and disease does not make us flat earthers. The word "science" has morphed into a virtue signal, but science is simply a tool, and it can be used for both good and ill. "Science" was used during the first half of the 20th century to stop women from breastfeeding, encouraging them to turn to highly profitable, shelf stable formula and jars of baby food instead. Traditionally, "woo" modalities have been practiced and taught in relative secret, which protected practitioners but limited their reach. When we become empowered to learn more about our bodies, our instincts, our emotional landscapes and the connections therein, maybe we'll begin to demand that our complex and (still!) mysterious physiologies are treated with respect, dignity, and humility in the realms of medicine and science. Until then, we'll take the curiosity and experimentation of a celebrity luxury capitalist whose good fortune it is not to have to worry about actual burning at an actual stake. Elisa Albert is a writer working on a new novel and a "wellness" polemic. Jennifer Block is the author of "Everything Below the Waist: Why Health Care Needs a Feminist Revolution." 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
George Orwell's classic book "1984," about a dystopian future where critical thought is suppressed under a totalitarian regime, has seen a surge in sales this month, rising to the top of the Amazon best seller list in the United States and leading its publisher to have tens of thousands of new copies printed. Craig Burke, the publicity director at Penguin USA, said that the publisher had ordered 75,000 new copies of the book this week and that it was considering another reprint. "We've seen a big bump in sales," Mr. Burke said. He added that the rise "started over the weekend and hit hyperactive" on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. Since Friday, the book has reached a 9,500 percent increase in sales, he said. He said demand began to lift on Sunday, shortly after the interview Kellyanne Conway, an adviser to Donald J. Trump, gave on "Meet the Press." When asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" why Mr. Spicer had said something that was provably false, Ms. Conway replied airily, "Don't be so dramatic." In the novel, the term "newspeak" refers to language in which independent thought, or "unorthodox" political ideas, have been eliminated. "Doublethink" is defined as "reality control." On social media and elsewhere on Sunday, the book's readers made a connection between Ms. Conway's comments and Orwell's language, and the attention on the book "kind of took a life of its own," Mr. Burke said. Even outside the United States, interest in "1984" has grown. So far this year, sales have risen by 20 percent in Britain and Australia compared to the same period a year ago, according to Jess Harrison, a London based editor at Penguin Books. The novel is usually a best seller, she said, and it sold 100,000 copies last year in English speaking countries outside the United States and Canada. "But we've definitely seen an uplift" in sales, she added. Dystopian novels are "chiming with people," Ms. Harrison said, adding that "The Man in the High Castle" by Philip K. Dick, an alternative history in which the Nazis defeated America to win World War II, is also selling well. A television series based on Mr. Dick's novel is now in its second season at Amazon. Penguin also published Sinclair Lewis's "It Can't Happen Here," about the rise of a demagogue, last Friday in Britain for the first time since 1935, "and we're already on to our third printing," Mr. Burke said. On Wednesday, that book was also ranking among Amazon's best sellers, as was Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," another dystopian classic. Prof. Stefan Collini, a professor of intellectual history and an expert on Orwell at the University of Cambridge, said that readers see a natural parallel between the book and the way Mr. Trump and his staff have distorted facts. "Everyone remembers '1984' as containing various parodies of official distortions," he said. "That kind of unreality that is propagated as reality is what people feel reminded of, and that's why they keep coming back."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Given all the talk about rule breaking and the appeal of extremes and the rejection of familiar codes of behavior (yadda, yadda, yadda) that has dominated the political and cultural conversation since the 2016 presidential campaign began, it wouldn't be too outlandish to expect that some of it might find expression in fashion. Designers are, after all, tasked with taking the pulse of the moment and translating it into clothes, so you can wear your mood on your sleeve, literally. New York Fashion Week as usual? As if. There was Kanye West, taking over Madison Square Garden for a 90 minute combined Yeezy Season 3/album introduction! Here was Rihanna, putting Puma on a runway! There was Moncler, having a moment in Lincoln Center Plaza when it was freezing! Here was Alexander Wang, the darling of downtown, showing in a Park Avenue church! It sounds juvenile but was rather a cleverly blown raspberry to the establishment. If last season Mr. Wang's show was an in your face embrace of the street, this was a smarter, more pointed deconstruction of a wardrobe's sacred cows. (Though occasionally it did trip over the line between subtle and silly.) But it also turned out to be the exception, rather than the rule. The promised subversion was, for the most part, more form than substance. When it came to the clothes themselves, designers were largely playing to their established constituencies. Mr. West, for example, after dangling the tantalizing promise of a political statement by modeling his performance piece after a photograph of refugees (albeit with artfully, as opposed to naturally, distressed sweaters and sweatpants and shearlings) and then sprinkling the onetime supermodels Naomi Campbell, Veronica Webb and Liya Kebede in black bodysuits and full length furs among them, suggesting some sort of fashion treatise on income inequality in the making, went precisely nowhere with the idea, and talked, rather, about himself. The cliche goes that female designers (Chanel, Donna Karan) create what they want to wear, but there is a difference between making what you want because no one else is making it and making what you already have. At least in Victoria Beckham's case, she took what was and gave it a twist to the left, mixing plaids and stripes, mustard and green and navy, not to mention a lot of stretchy ribbed knits. Her signature body conscious dresses were extrapolated into boneless corsets sliced at the stomach and under the breasts and worn with skirts buckled asymmetrically and slung low at the hips; Crombie coats given a Carnaby Street spin with exaggerated stripes and big mother of pearl buttons; and spaghetti strap plaid slips inset with a ribbed knit from ribs to thighs where they bubbled into a rounded skirt (bubble skirts and corsets, by the way, being something of a trend). "I wanted to go back to my core 10 dresses, and just evolve them a bit," Ms. Beckham said before her show. But to her credit, she didn't seem interested in sticking with the status quo. The odd colors and proportions of the clothes some skirts were cut straight on one side and inset with full, curving layers on the other; think schizophrenic skirt instead of circle skirt proved strangely compelling. By contrast, everything at Polo Ralph Lauren was clubby and caramel toned as usual, suede and cashmere with the deep pile patina of aspiration. Likewise, after a tedious display of sky blue ski jacketed dancers marching in formation, Moncler Grenoble was reliably slope ready chic (the performance art, once surprising, now par for the course). Public School took a maxiskirted, combat trousered, layered up detour to Fury Road (also Furry Road, given the amount of "Revenant" like shearling). And Derek Lam sent out the polished, clean lines for which he is known: best in a navy peacoat with big nutria pockets and matching cropped trousers, less so in puff sleeve high neck white shirting. There's nothing wrong with sticking to a familiar script, but (sic Marco Rubio) it does make it easier to look away. Fashion feels most relevant when it tries, in its own way, to engage with an actual issue. This doesn't mean sloganeering (though Mr. Wang did some of that, layering words like "strict" and "tender" strategically over otherwise sheer pointelle lace shirts), but it does mean using clothes to express an idea that goes beyond what has already been said. This could be Hood by Air's gender challenging cellophane wrapped corsets (see! again), shirts pulled over the head into hoods, and duffel bag sleeved, arm trailing greatcoats. Or it could be Sophie Theallet's melting pot of fabrics and influences and models of all sizes, ages and skin colors. Her point: Walls shouldn't be going up, they should be coming down. Just because it was presented with a smile doesn't make it any less sharp. A gray Prince of Wales sheath dress was ruched up on one thigh, worn under a matching gray bomber, a giant white flocked velvet leopard print parka over a long bronze wood print evening skirt sported big gold patch pockets, and 24 carat devore velvets came lushly draped under barely there silk bands. It was a little messy, but never less than generous; the embrace of the je ne sais quoi. And so it went at Jason Wu, where tailored men's wear fabrics (gray flannel and houndstooth) were juxtaposed against feathery lingerie looks, the whole topped by tie on mink collars and held together, often literally, by luggage strap detailing. And at Altuzarra, where Morocco and Turkey, India and Venice, little florals and bigger paisleys and pearl buttons and bandanna prints all got remixed within the context of a streamlined silhouette.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
The editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal accused strategists for President elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. of instigating a coordinated response to an op ed article published Friday evening that called on Jill Biden, Mr. Biden's wife, to refrain from referring to herself as "Dr. Biden" because she is not a medical doctor, but rather holds a doctorate in education. After earning two master's degrees, Dr. Biden received her doctorate in 2007 from the University of Delaware. She also taught English at a community college in Virginia, and has said she hopes to continue doing so while serving as first lady. "The Ph.D. may once have held prestige, but that has been diminished by the erosion of seriousness and the relaxation of standards in university education generally," Joseph Epstein wrote in the op ed item. In the response, published Sunday evening and for Monday's newspaper, Paul A. Gigot, the top editor for The Journal's opinion section for nearly two decades, pointed to negative notes about Mr. Epstein's article posted to Twitter by two Biden staff members as well as Douglas Emhoff, the husband of Senator Kamala Harris, the vice president elect, as evidence of a campaign. "Why go to such lengths to highlight a single op ed on a relatively minor issue?" wrote Mr. Gigot, who elsewhere said the responses reflected "what was clearly a political strategy." "My guess is that the Biden team concluded it was a chance to use the big gun of identity politics to send a message to critics as it prepares to take power. There's nothing like playing the race or gender card to stifle criticism." Mr. Gigot further said the press had generally backed the negative interpretation of the article (he referred to a New York Times article about it). And he defended the piece. "Mrs. Biden is now America's most prominent doctorate holder and is taking a leading role in education policy," Mr. Gigot wrote. "She can't be off limits for commentary." He also noted that Mr. Epstein's argument that holders of doctorates should not use the "Dr." honorific applied to men as well as women, and he said criticizing Mr. Epstein's use of "kiddo" to refer to Dr. Biden was misplaced, since Mr. Biden has also used the term in reference to his wife. He compared the Biden staff members' tweets to those in which President Trump has referred to the press as the "enemy of the people." A Wall Street Journal spokeswoman declined to comment further. A Biden spokeswoman did not comment. The Journal opinion page's conservatism which predates Rupert Murdoch's buying The Journal's parent company, Dow Jones Company, for 5 billion in 2007 has occasionally produced friction with The Journal's newsroom, which like most newspapers' is not officially political. As at other newspapers, including The Times and The Washington Post, The Journal's news sections and opinion pages are administered separately, each overseen by a top editor who reports to the newspaper's publisher. At least three times this year, members of The Journal's newsroom have sent letters criticizing Journal columns. In July, nearly 300 news employees sent a letter to The Journal's publisher, Almar Latour, identifying a "lack of fact checking and transparency" on the opinion desk. The letter referred to several op ed pieces, including Vice President Mike Pence's June 16 essay that was headlined "There Isn't a Coronavirus 'Second Wave.'" In response, The Journal published an unsigned editorial bemoaning the "progressive cancel culture" it said the letter typified. In June, the board of the union that represents Journal staff members sent a letter to Mr. Latour and Matt Murray The Journal's editor in chief, overseeing the news section asking that Gerard A. Baker, the previous editor in chief and now an editor at large, be reassigned to the opinion section, and criticized an op ed article of his as well as several of his Twitter posts. He was reassigned the day after the letter was sent, though a Journal spokeswoman said that move had been in the works. In February, the headline of an article by the columnist Walter Russell Mead criticizing China's response to the coronavirus prompted more than 50 news employees, many based in China, to sign a letter to the Dow Jones chief executive and the chief executive of Mr. Murdoch's News Corp. asking for a retraction. The headline, which referred to China as the "Real Sick Man of Asia," was "derogatory," the letter said. The headline, which was not retracted, prompted the Chinese government to expel three Journal reporters in what it said was retaliation.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
"I did not place my dreams of California inside a long history of dreaming," Shannon Pufahl wrote in her 2015 memoiristic essay "Interventions." Something similar might be said of her Odyssean debut novel, "On Swift Horses." It's a book about the midcentury American West, gambling and queer love; but it doesn't follow the plow of stories from any of these territories. Pufahl's voice is strikingly solid, timeworn but not nostalgic, as she unravels a cinematic story that avoids genre cliches or sentimentality. "On Swift Horses" begins in 1956, the young newlyweds Muriel and Lee having recently arrived in the suburbs of San Diego from their native Kansas. On the edge of Mission Valley, the Interstate nears completion, and Lee pushes Muriel to sell her late mother's house so they can afford a plot while the price is right. Muriel produces the thousands to buy the land, but from a different source: her secret horse betting at the Del Mar racing track. Muriel embarks on a conscious awakening in California; in an unmistakably yonic episode of foreshadowing, her new neighbor Sandra gives Muriel her first Mission Valley olive. "The taste is salty and the texture is fleshy," she notes, "disorienting, but under the saltiness something plummy, rich as jam." Sandra warns: "There's a pit." With some encouragement, Muriel spits it over the porch. Sandra says softly, "You've got it now." Lee's brother, Julius, arrives unexpectedly from Las Vegas, where he's been living for the last two years, playing the tables and watching atomic bomb tests out in the desert. He's met a lover, Henry, in the casino attic where they worked surveillance. During Julius's visit, Muriel feels an attraction to him that's visceral but amorphous. Julius disappears again to look for the vanished Henry in Tijuana, sending Muriel on her own search for traces of her brother in law in the queer haunts of San Diego. There she discovers a world she's been longing to find, but didn't know how to see.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
LOS ANGELES A bicoastal staff meeting of the Weinstein Company was hastily convened late Thursday. Staff members were scared and shaken after public complaints of sexual harassment against Harvey Weinstein, the entertainment company's pugnacious co founder. With the help of a video conferencing system, David Glasser, the Weinstein Company's president and chief operating officer, tried to rally the troops. "We are going to be O.K.," two people who attended the meeting recalled Mr. Glasser saying. He said his door was open to anyone who wanted to talk and encouraged everyone to stay focused on scheduled films. The problem: For all intents and purposes, there is no Weinstein Company apart from Mr. Weinstein, who has announced an "indefinite" leave of absence following a New York Times investigation that found at least eight settlements paid to women who complained that he sexually harassed them. Without Mr. Weinstein, this studio, already struggling at the box office and hobbled by an exodus of senior staff members in recent years, is in serious trouble. "Without Harvey actively managing, the Weinstein Company will become even more capital constrained tougher to find funding," Harold L. Vogel, a media analyst and the author of the book "Entertainment Industry Economics," wrote in an email on Friday. Even without a crisis, Mr. Vogel noted, the studio's "business model doesn't function as well as it once did." The Weinstein Company's board had a heated meeting on Thursday night. On Friday, three members of the board Marc Lasry, Dirk Ziff and Tim Sarnoff resigned, according to a board member and a company executive. In a statement, Bob Weinstein and three other board members said that a group of lawyers from Debevoise Plimpton, including one with experience prosecuting sex crimes, would lead an investigation into Harvey Weinstein's behavior. The Weinstein brothers first came to prominence with Miramax in 1989, the year they helped to activate the indie film boom with "Sex, Lies and Videotape." They sold Miramax to Disney in 1993 and left in 2005 to form the Weinstein Company. They unsuccessfully dabbled in side businesses, including a fashion label, but eventually found their film footing with releases like "Inglourious Basterds." Lately they have hit a dry spell. Although they have a fast growing television division, the Weinsteins have not had a mainstream hit at the North American box office since 2013, when "Lee Daniels' The Butler" took in 116.6 million. David Glasser, the president of the Weinstein Company, convened a staff meeting on Thursday night. David Walter Banks for The New York Times So far this year, the Weinstein Company, a boutique studio that specializes in sophisticated, small budget dramas like the 2011 Oscar winner "The King's Speech," has released six films, which have taken in a combined 123 million at the domestic box office. (The biggest hit has been "Wind River," a well reviewed murder mystery that has collected about 33 million.) Last year, the Weinsteins had seven films, with combined ticket sales of just 65 million. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. To compare, major studios like Warner Bros. and the Walt Disney Company generally take in 1 billion to 2.5 billion annually at the domestic box office. The Weinstein Company has also found itself sidelined at film festivals, where Mr. Weinstein has long shopped for movies to release, helping to discover auteurs like Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh. For years at the Sundance Film Festival, for instance, his wallet was the only one that mattered to agents, who would track his team relentlessly. Netflix and Amazon dominate now. At the same time, a new cluster of independent movie companies some better financed and with more contemporary sensibilities arrived on the scene. They include A24, which released the reigning Oscar winner for best picture, "Moonlight," and Megan Ellison's Annapurna Pictures, which has emerged as a favorite home for the kind of rebel filmmakers that Mr. Weinstein used to have to himself. Ms. Ellison, whose films include "American Hustle" and "Zero Dark Thirty," has been one of the few Hollywood executives willing to comment about the accusations against Mr. Weinstein. "Women face serious repercussions for sharing their experiences and deserve our full support," she wrote on Twitter on Thursday, with a link to the Times report. "I admire the courage of these women." Mr. Weinstein acknowledged in a statement on Thursday that his behavior had "caused a lot of pain" and vowed to "do better." On Friday, a lawyer advising him, Lisa Bloom, said in a television appearance that he had acted inappropriately and agreed with an interviewer who characterized Mr. Weinstein's reported actions as illegal. And on Saturday, Ms. Bloom said that she had resigned as an adviser to Mr. Weinstein. Mr. Weinstein's power in Hollywood has always come with his ability to capitalize on the Academy Awards. He was at his height in the late 1990s, when he drove films like "Shakespeare in Love" to best picture wins and huge ticket sales. Even in his more recent diminished state, he remained a player, prodding a tiny, largely subtitled art film, "Lion," to six nominations this year. (The last time a Weinstein film was a force at the Oscars was in 2012, when "The Artist" collected five awards, including best picture.) In this year's Oscars cycle, the company's big hopes are "Wind River" and "The Current War," a period drama about the rivalry between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse that is scheduled for a late November release. It received a tepid response at last month's Toronto International Film Festival, but Mr. Weinstein has personally helped to re edit the movie since then. Several agents and producers said that, without Mr. Weinstein's all or nothing campaigning style, those films would probably be stranded on the awards trail.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
The bombs that fell across London's theater land damaged some playhouses more than others. The Queen's Theater on Shaftesbury Avenue (now called the Sondheim) remained shut for almost 20 years. "The artist's lot is not a happy one at present," opined a 1941 editorial in the trade newspaper The Stage, pointing to "unemployment, uncertain duration of engagement, and food rationing difficulties" as problems that theater people faced. Those concerns are being echoed today, as a profession accustomed to living from job to job wonders how it will survive a prolonged pause. The British government has announced financial measures and cash grants to help small enterprises, including theaters, and a plan is afoot to pay self employed people 80 percent of their earnings, up to 2,500 pounds, or about 3,000, a month. But those gestures, however welcome, will not allay the anxiety felt by the theater professionals encountered on social media who were appearing on the West End a month ago and are now applying for jobs in grocery stores a growth industry in Britain, as it is elsewhere. It's impossible not to feel deeply for those whose livelihoods hang in the balance. It's rare these days for an artist to be in the position of Shakespeare, who enjoyed not just the royal patronage of Queen Elizabeth I and then King James I, but also of various nobles who facilitated and supported his work. And so, surveying a diary full of crossed out events, I yearn for what is not to be: next week's deferred opening of Timothee Chalamet's London stage debut in "4000 Miles" at the Old Vic, or the enticing "Jack Absolute Flies Again." This joint authorial riff from a seasoned playwright, Richard Bean, and a fine actor, Oliver Chris, on Sheridan's 18th century comic classic "The Rivals" was due any minute at the National Theater. Instead, my email inbox is bulging with notices of new writing initiatives inspired by the pandemic, alongside online readings, cabarets, virtual opening nights, and all manner of attempts to keep the cultural conversation alive during lockdown. (The public is doing its bit, too: One family on lockdown came together to deliver a very sweet rendition of the song "One Day More," from "Les Miserables," which quickly became a social media sensation.) The goal, of course, is to keep writers writing and actors busy until we can all reconvene inside those auditoriums that have weathered the financial storm. On the one hand, the musicals heavy West End will probably reopen without the volume of tourists it needs to keep many of the tried and true hits going. The nonprofits, from the National Theater down, will have to live ever more by their wits, relying on individual largess to top up government funding. Already, many of the state subsidized theaters are asking patrons whose performances have been canceled not to take a refund, and to think of it as a donation.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Jacques Louis Monod, a French composer, conductor and pianist known for his fierce dedication to new music, died on Sept. 21 in Toulouse, France. He was 93. His death was confirmed by his friend and former student, Harry Bott. Mr. Monod, who made his career primarily in New York and London, was a champion of the Second Viennese School, the group of 20th century composers comprising the titan Arnold Schoenberg (1874 1951) and his acolytes. As both pianist and conductor, Mr. Monod helped their work difficult, complex, often atonal gain wider currency outside the European continent. He was known in particular for helping to introduce American audiences to the music of Anton Webern (1883 1945). A disciple of Schoenberg, Webern was among the most ardent adherents to his mentor's 12 tone, or serial, compositional technique. Under its dictates, a musical work must deploy all 12 notes of the chromatic scale in precisely equal proportion throughout, foregoing the stable tonal center that had underpinned Western music for centuries. As a composer, Mr. Monod hewed to serialism while retaining, in the view of most critics, a healthy measure of lyricism. He was especially esteemed for his vocal music, much of it performed in collaboration with the American soprano Bethany Beardslee, to whom he was married for a time in the 1950s. Reviewing a local performance of Mr. Monod's choral music in The New York Times in 1987, Tim Page wrote: "Mr. Monod has gone beyond the formal games that have typified so much 'post Webernian' music to create works that have the clarity, delicacy, poetry and economy of means of Webern's own music; he has, in fact, created music as exquisitely beautiful as any this listener has heard in some time." Jacques Louis Monod was born in Asnieres, a suburb of Paris, on Feb. 25, 1927. His was a distinguished family of Swiss origin. His father, Pierre, was a surgeon; his cousins included the Nobel Prize winning biochemist Jacques Lucien Monod, the Nobel Prize winning pharmacologist Daniel Bovet and the celebrated film director Jean Luc Godard. A musical prodigy, Jacques Louis was just 6 years old when he enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire. During his years there he received a doctorate from the conservatory in 1952 his teachers included the composer Olivier Messiaen and the visiting conductor Herbert von Karajan. At 17, he began private study with Rene Leibowitz, a Polish born composer and conductor who was an adherent of the Second Viennese School. In 1949, the young Mr. Monod made his debut as a pianist in Paris at a concert, conceived by Leibowitz, to honor Schoenberg's 75th birthday. In about 1950, Mr. Monod joined Leibowitz on a visit to New York. He remained there, studying at the Juilliard School and at Columbia University, from which he earned a second doctorate in 1975. In the early 1950s, recruiting players from the New York Philharmonic, Mr. Monod established and led the Camera Concerts. Presented in Town Hall in Manhattan, the series was widely described as the first in the United States to focus on modern music. Mr. Monod married Ms. Beardslee in 1951, and in the years that followed they toured widely together in recital, performing his music and that of other modernists, including American composers like Milton Babbitt. Babbitt, for whom Ms. Beardslee was a longtime muse, wrote "Du," a song cycle for soprano and piano, for them. The couple continued to collaborate musically long after their marriage ended. During much of the 1960s, Mr. Monod worked in London, conducting for the BBC, before returning to New York. His best known work as a composer is very likely the cycle of works collectively titled "Cantus Contra Cantum." Among the pieces in the cycle, which can be performed singly or in combination, are "Cantus Contra Cantum I," for soprano and chamber orchestra; the second installment, for violin and cello; and the third, for a cappella chorus. Several of his works, including "Cantus Contra Cantum I," have been released by New World Records. Mr. Monod was a founder of several organizations devoted to contemporary music, including the Guild of Composers and the Association for the Promotion of New Music. Over the years, he taught at Columbia, Harvard, the New England Conservatory and elsewhere. His second marriage, to Margrit Auhagen, ended in divorce. Mr. Monod is survived by a daughter, Caroline, from his marriage to Ms. Auhagen, and two grandchildren. As a conductor, Mr. Monod was, by his own account, as forceful a taskmaster as the rigorous works under his baton demanded. "Roughly speaking," he told The New York Times in 1985, "my experience has proved that you need at least one hour of rehearsal for every minute of music. Less than that, and you cannot do justice to the piece." But for concertgoers who needed to be persuaded of the merits of modern music, Mr. Monod, it appeared, had far less time. "My job," he said in the 1985 interview, "is not to deal with the audience. My job is to deal with the piece."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The director of a Pennsylvania museum was forced out of his job on Monday in the wake of allegations about a pattern of misconduct at his former job as a manager at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The director, Joshua Helmer, "is no longer employed at the Erie Art Museum," the Erie museum's board said in a statement. It did not elaborate on whether Mr. Helmer was fired or asked to resign. The action against the museum director, who had been appointed to the Erie post in 2018, followed a New York Times article on Friday that reported that multiple women had accused Mr. Helmer of making advances toward them in the workplace while he was at the Philadelphia museum and that an intern had made a similar complaint in Erie. Two women he dated during his four years in Philadelphia directly reported to him, an apparent violation of museum policy, and said in interviews that Mr. Helmer had warned them not to report it. Two others who said they had relationships with him were not direct subordinates, but he outranked them and represented to them that he could hire, fire and promote whom he pleased, the women said. Some of them also described Mr. Helmer berating them in view of other employees. "This is a victory for women," said Gina Ciralli, who dated Mr. Helmer. She said she had left the institution because of his mistreatment. "Removing Josh from his position of authority creates a safer work environment for everyone in the field. We can all breathe again." Mr. Helmer, 31, did not respond to requests for comment. In an interview last month, he declined to discuss accounts of his conduct or his relationships with women, but he said he had always followed museum policy. The Philadelphia Museum had no comment on Monday. It said last week that Mr. Helmer had been "separated" from his post there in February 2018, but that it could not discuss the reasons for his departure because such matters were confidential. It was unclear what information the Erie Museum had about Mr. Helmer's tenure at Philadelphia before it hired him. But in a statement on Friday, it had defended the thoroughness of its hiring process. "Prior to offering Mr. Helmer the position at the Erie Art Museum, the board, with the help of an employment consultant, conducted due diligence including background checks," the statement said. "No issues were identified during our due diligence." Shortly after joining the Erie staff, Mr. Helmer sent texts to a college student working there, suggesting she come to his house. "Coffee my place I have a cool back deck," it said, according to a screenshot the woman, Asla Alkhafaji, provided to The New York Times. After she told him she could only meet in public, Ms. Alkhafaji said, he began ignoring her at work and one day told her, "You're the most useless intern we have." The museum said that it had investigated a complaint by Ms. Alkhafaji and found no reason to discipline Mr. Helmer. "I hope the board will be honest and transparent," said Kelly Armor, a former Erie Art Museum manager who had reported Mr. Helmer's treatment of Ms. Alkhafaji, and who left the museum after clashing with Mr. Helmer. "They need to rebuild a lot of trust." The pressure on the museum had grown in recent days. The Times's report led to the circulation of an online petition calling for Mr. Helmer's removal in Erie. "Whatever benefit this man provides the art museum pales in comparison to the damage that he has done to women," the petition said. In addition, more than 250 current and former workers at the Philadelphia Museum signed a statement in solidarity with the women who worked there. Much of the concern focused on whether the cultural institutions had done enough to scrutinize Mr. Helmer's behavior and work history. On Facebook, the Museum Studies Program at the University of Delaware called the Philadelphia Museum's response and the Erie museum's vetting procedures "inadequate." At the Philadelphia Museum, Mr. Helmer was made assistant director for interpretation in 2014, just four months after arriving. Last October, ARTNews named him one of the country's museum directors under 40 who were shaping their institutions. Several women interviewed by The Times described Mr. Helmer as repeatedly building them up and breaking them down. At least three employees who were familiar with these accounts said they reported their concerns to museum managers, starting as early as 2016. In recent days, another woman, Ashley Scrivener, has come forward to say that she resigned in 2016 from her position in the information technology department at the Philadelphia Museum because of the "toxic work environment" created by Mr. Helmer. She said he had repeatedly asked her out to drinks. "During my exit interview with the head of human resources, I told them everything about Josh that was disturbing me," she recalled. "H.R.'s response was, 'Oh my God, that's crazy, he shouldn't be saying that.' But in reality, he worked there for another two years."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
When Trump campaign officials scheduled a rally in Tulsa, Okla., on June 19, they sent what looked like a signal of approval to white supremacists. For June 19 is Juneteenth, a day celebrated by African Americans to mark the end of slavery. And Tulsa was the site of the 1921 race massacre, one of the deadliest incidents in the long, violent offensive to deny blacks the fruits of their hard won freedom. It's now being claimed that the Trump campaign didn't understand the date's significance, but I don't believe that for a minute. President Trump did, grudgingly, push the rally back one day, but that was surely because he and his inner circle were surprised by the strength of the backlash just as they've been surprised by public support for the Black Lives Matter protests. But let's talk about Tulsa and how it fits into the broader story of racism in America. If America had treated former slaves and their descendants as true citizens, with full protection under the law, we would have expected the legacy of slavery to gradually fade away. Freed slaves started with nothing, but over time many of them would surely have worked their way up, acquiring property, educating their children and becoming full members of society. Indeed, that started to happen during the 12 years of Reconstruction, when blacks briefly benefited from something approaching equal rights. But the corrupt political deal that ended Reconstruction empowered Southern white supremacists who systematically suppressed black gains. African Americans who managed to acquire some property all too often found that property expropriated, either through legal subterfuge or at gunpoint. And the nascent black middle class was effectively subjected to a reign of terror. Which is where Tulsa fits in. In 1921 the Oklahoma city was the center of an oil boom, a place to which people in search of opportunity migrated. It boasted a sizable black middle class, centered on the Greenwood neighborhood, which was widely described as the "black Wall Street." And that was the neighborhood destroyed by white mobs, who looted black businesses and homes, killing probably hundreds. (We don't know how many because the massacre was never properly investigated.) The police, of course, did nothing to protect black citizens; instead, they joined the rioters. Not surprisingly, violence against African Americans who managed to achieve any economic success discouraged initiative. For example, the economist Lisa Cook has shown that the number of blacks taking out patents, which soared for several decades after the Civil War, plunged in the face of growing white violence. Violent repression helped drive the Great Migration, the movement of millions of blacks from the South to Northern cities, which began five years before the Tulsa massacre and continued until around 1970. Even in Northern cities, blacks were often denied opportunities for upward mobility. For example, in 1944 white transit workers in Philadelphia went on strike disrupting war production to protest the promotion of a handful of black workers. But discrimination and repression were less severe than in the South. And one might have hoped that the terrible saga of black repression would finally have wound down after the Civil Rights Act, enacted a century after Emancipation, put an end to overt discrimination. Unfortunately, for many African Americans Northern cities turned into a socioeconomic trap. The opportunities that lured migrants disappeared as blue collar jobs moved first to the suburbs, then overseas. Chicago, for example, lost 60 percent of its manufacturing employment between 1967 and 1987. And when the loss of economic opportunity led, as it usually does, to social dysfunction to broken families and despair all too many whites were ready to blame the victims. The problem, many asserted, lay in black culture or, some hinted, in racial inferiority. Such implicit racism wasn't just talk; it fueled opposition to government programs, up to and including Obamacare, that might help African Americans. If you wonder why the social safety net in the U.S. is so much weaker than those of other advanced countries, it comes down to just one word: race. Strange to say, by the way, that you didn't hear many people engaging in comparable victim blaming a few decades later, when whites in the eastern heartland experienced their own loss of opportunity and a rise in social dysfunction, manifested in surging deaths from suicide, alcohol and opioids. As I said, then, while slavery was America's original sin, its dire legacy was perpetuated by other sins, some of which continue to this day. The good news is that America may be changing. Donald Trump's attempt to use the old racist playbook has led to a plunge in the polls. His Tulsa stunt appears to be backfiring. We are still stained by our original sin, but we may, at long last, be on the road to redemption. 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
A doom doo wop band should be an impossibility: Doom is a plodding, earthbound style of metal while doo wop harmonies are lighter than air. But against all odds, a combo called the Chemotherapy Marionettes pulls off that unlikely hybrid toward the end of "The Hollower." There are plenty of other counterintuitive juxtapositions in Liza Birkenmeier's aggressively quirky new play at Access Theater, but they are not nearly as successful as that brief Chemotherapy Marionettes tune. The main one brings together the laconic middle aged lesbian Otto (Patrena Murray) and her hyperactive, voluble 16 year old roommate, Bit (Reyna de Courcy), an odd couple thrown together by the arbitrary gods who rule Off Off Broadway. How they ended up sharing a hovel You Shin Chen's set features the dirty dishes, empty soda bottles and crusty takeout containers that have come to represent American desperation onstage is not convincingly explained.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Any good sci fi recs for people who don't usually like sci fi? (I did love "Battlestar Galactica" and "The Expanse.") Other sci fi I've seen feels cheesy or not grounded enough in how people and societies actually work. Like, I don't want "The Jetsons," I want "The Wire" in space. Latif Try "Humans," a British series that aired on AMC in the United States in 2015. (It's streaming on Amazon.) It's set in the present day, more or less, except there's a servant class of humanoid robots known as "synths," and it appears some of them are not quite as robotic as they're supposedly programmed to be. Gemma Chan stars as Mia, one of the sentient synths, and the physicality of the performance is extraordinary and essential all the synths have a similar stilted gait, a subtle lack of body fluidity, and Chan and other actors' ability to snap in and out of robot mode is the foundational trick of the show, something that makes it feel real. But robot stories aren't to tell us about robots, they're to tell us about humanity and how we construct and understand it. What I like about "Humans" is that it's often a domestic drama, and we see how different people interact with synths on a simple day to day basis, not just "here I am in the lab, doing my bleep bloop robot science!" (There is some bleep bloop lab stuff as the series goes on, but it's not just fake science jargon.) A young girl asks a synth what kind of doll games she played when she was little. "I was never little," the synth replies, and it's this beautiful and haunting small exchange. Maybe not "The Wire" in space, but sometimes a bit "Our Town" with robots. If you want sci fi about culture, the original run of "The Twilight Zone" (on Netflix) is still one of your best moves, and if you've never watched it, or only remember it from New Year's Day marathons, I encourage you to give it a go; obviously the special effects are of their era, but the show's questions, its sense of mischief and its directness about American xenophobia remain relevant. Follow that with "The X Files" (again, just the original run on Hulu), and as a fun take home assignment, consider the ways some sci fi reinterprets the social fear mongering of its time, and which fears are reflected in "The Twilight Zone" and in "The X Files" and what this all says about our society. Try some "Black Mirror" (on Netflix) too, but the pilot is by far the best episode, and the show eventually just grinds you down.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Though most Oscar contenders don't debut until the fall, last year's Cannes Film Festival launched several films that became awards season players, including Spike Lee's "BlacKkKlansman" and Pawel Pawlikowski's "Cold War." With this year's edition of Cannes all sewn up this weekend, which films should Oscar watchers look out for? The biggest contender from the festival has got to be Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood," with Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt as faded showbiz figures navigating 1960s Hollywood. For its spot on re creation of that era, Oscar nominations in production and costume design are almost assured, and the film has a good shot in cinematography as well. The biggest question is how Sony will handle DiCaprio and Pitt, who are two of the biggest stars in the industry and just about evenly split in terms of screen time. Studios rarely run two lead performances in the same category, so Sony may try to classify Pitt as supporting. DiCaprio's washed up actor has the biggest emotional arc, and Pitt's stuntman character is in his employ and thus technically subordinate to him. It would be bunk, but after Mahershala Ali won a supporting actor trophy just months ago for what was essentially a colead performance, the gambit would at least give Pitt a strong shot at his first acting trophy. Read about the Cannes winners this year. In the supporting actress category, Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate has an affecting second act scene in which she sneaks into a theater to watch herself on the big screen. But the character is more of a symbolic presence than a really fleshed out role, and Robbie doesn't speak her first line until at least an hour into the movie. She'll need to hope that Oscar voters respond so strongly to Tarantino's film that it cracks the picture, director and screenplay categories, a show of force that would help sweep her in.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
With the pandemic making packed red carpets and large, glitzy gatherings impossible, almost no one knew what the 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony would look like going into Sunday night's telecast. Turns out it reflected what much of life has looked like for the past six months or so: People sequestered in their homes, interacting awkwardly over glitchy broadband connections. Along the way, there were awards show hallmarks, like a monologue from a tuxedoed host (albeit in a mostly empty arena), some stilted banter, bits that fell flat and a few moments of genuine poignancy. But in general, the 2020 Emmys, like most of us, did the best it could under extraordinarily challenging circumstances. Here are some of the night's defining themes, shows and moments. JEREMY EGNER "You know what they say," he began. "You can't have a virus without a host." But the applause? Fake. The cuts to the crowd? Those were clips filmed during past awards shows. After a few minutes, Kimmel dropped the ruse as cameras revealed an empty Staples Center: "Of course we don't have an audience," he said. "This isn't a MAGA rally." The seats weren't entirely empty, though. Spread among the front rows were life size cutouts of several nominees, who in any other year would have attended the ceremony. Among them, however, was the real Jason Bateman, sitting stock still and trying to pass for cardboard. "I haven't left the house for six months," he pleaded when Kimmel advised him to leave for safety reasons. "I want Mario Lopez to ask me about my pants." SOPAN DEB The Emmys lined up dozens of live feeds from nominees in locations all over the world, but in the first part of the show, the only one it needed was in Toronto: The Canadian sitcom "Schitt's Creek" swept the comedy category, taking home seven wins. The show won a total of nine Emmys for its sixth and final season, the most ever for a comedy in a single year. Catherine O'Hara kicked things off with her first acting Emmy win for playing the wig obsessed diva Moira Rose. "I will forever be grateful to Eugene and Daniel Levy for the opportunity to play a woman of a certain age my age who gets to fully be her ridiculous self," she said as she accepted her statuette at the show's party in Toronto. Then came "Schitt's Creek" wins in every comedy category presented on Sunday, including acting awards for the rest of the Rose family Eugene Levy, Daniel Levy and Annie Murphy and others for writing, directing and best comedy series. "This has been the greatest experience of my life," Daniel Levy said of making the show. "This is completely overwhelming." SARAH BAHR The limited series category was even more stacked than usual this year. HBO's "Watchmen" turned one of the most hallowed comic book titles into pulpy disquisition on systemic racism and police brutality, months before both issues exploded (again) into the national consciousness. The star studded "Little Fires Everywhere," on Hulu, explored white privilege and class conflict with great nuance. FX's "Mrs. America," about the '70s clash over the Equal Rights Amendment, was loaded with exquisite performances, led by Cate Blanchett's portrayal of Phyllis Schlafly. But in the end it wasn't even close. "Watchmen" took home four awards on Sunday, including best limited series. It also collected limited series wins for best actress (King), best supporting actor (Yahya Abdul Mateen II) and best writing (Cord Jefferson and Lindelof, the series creator). It won a total of 11 Emmy awards, including those given out during the Creative Arts Emmy ceremonies last week. Tyler Perry received one of the Television Academy's top honors on Sunday, the Governors Award, which for him was effectively a lifetime achievement award. In his acceptance speech, he told a rousing story about a quilt his grandmother gave him and the ways it was emblematic of his own life, and of the broader Black experience in America. Perry didn't understand the quilt's significance when he received it at age 19, he said, but years later he finally did. "I became so embarrassed," he confessed. "Here I was, a person who prides myself on celebrating our heritage, our culture, and I didn't even recognize the value in my grandmother's quilt," he explained. "I dismissed her work and her story because it didn't look like what I thought it should." He added: "I stand here tonight to say thank you to all of the people who are celebrating and know the value of every patch and every story and every color that makes up this quilt that is our business, this quilt that is our lives. This quilt that is America. Because in my grandmother's quilt, there were no patches that represented Black people on television." SOPAN DEB "She's younger than Baby Yoda and she already has an Emmy," Jimmy Kimmel said after a visibly shaken Zendaya, 24, became the youngest Emmy winner for best lead actress in a drama. She won for her role as Rue on "Euphoria," the HBO drama about high school students navigating love, sex, drugs and identity conundrums. "This is pretty crazy," Zendaya said as she clasped her hands over her statuette. The Disney actress turned drama star beat out the category's other nominees Jennifer Aniston, Olivia Colman, Sandra Oh and Laura Linney to claim the award not to mention the incumbent winner, Jodie Comer, who set the record last year when she won for "Killing Eve" at age 26. "Thank you to all of the other incredible women in this category," Zendaya said. "I admire you so much." The actress also said she was inspired by others her age who were working to make a difference in the world. "I just want to say that there is hope in the young people out there," she said. "To say to all our peers out there doing the work in the streets: I see you, I admire you, I thank you." SARAH BAHR When it was time to give out the award for best drama, the last clumsy bit of the night gave way to one of the ceremony's wittiest speeches. Sterling K. Brown is as charming as they come. But as the presenter for the big award of the night, he went with or was saddled with, depending on whose idea it was an overlong gag in which he pretended he thought his show, the weepy NBC drama "This Is Us," had won the award. (It wasn't even nominated.) The actual winner was HBO's acid dynastic saga "Succession," which dominated the drama category. Fortunately Jesse Armstrong, the British writer who created the show, turned things around with a clever, politically barbed acceptance speech that inverted the usual platitudes by "un thanking" some of the pandemic's major players.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Having a pandemic is really bad. Having a pandemic and a civil war together is really, really bad. Welcome to Donald Trump's America 2020. If you feel dizzy from watching Trump signal left issuing guidelines for how states should properly emerge from pandemic lockdowns while turning right urging people to "liberate" their states from lockdowns, ignore his own guidelines and even dispute the value of testing you're not alone. Since Trump's pronouncements are simultaneously convoluted, contradictory and dishonest, here's my guess at what he is saying: "The Greatest Generation preserved American liberty and capitalism by taking Omaha Beach in Normandy on D Day in the face of a barrage of Nazi shelling that could and did kill many of them. I am calling on our generation to preserve American liberty and capitalism today by going shopping in the malls of Omaha, Neb., in the face of a pandemic that will likely kill only 1 percent of you, if you do get infected. So be brave get back to work and take back your old life." Yes, if you total up all of Trump's recent words and deeds, he is saying to the American people: Between the two basic models for dealing with the pandemic in the world China's rigorous top down, test, trace and quarantine model while waiting for a vaccine to provide herd immunity and Sweden's more bottom up, protect the most vulnerable and let the rest get back to work and get the infection and develop natural herd immunity model, your president has decided on Sweden's approach. He just hasn't told the country or his coronavirus task force or maybe even himself. But this is the only conclusion you can draw from all the ways Trump has backed off from his own government guidelines and backed up his end the lockdown followers, who, like most of the country, have grown both weary of the guidelines and desperate to get back to work and paychecks. But, in keeping with my D Day analogy, Trump has basically decided to dispatch Americans into this battle against this coronavirus without the equivalent of maps, armor, helmets, guns or any coordinated strategy to minimize their casualty count. He's also dispatching them without national leadership, so it's every platoon, or state, for itself, maximizing the chances of virus spread between people who want to go shopping and those who still want to shelter in place. He's also dispatching them without a national plan to protect the most vulnerable, particularly the elderly, and without setting the example that everyone should wear a face mask and practice social distancing whenever at work or in a public setting. Finally, he's dispatching them without a plan of retreat if way too many vulnerable people are infected and harmed as we take to the malls of Omaha and beyond. Other than all that, Trump is just like F.D.R. I fear that when these shortcomings become apparent, it could trigger a low grade civil war. On one side would be those who ask their neighbors, "Who gave you the right to ignore the guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and heedlessly go to a bar, work or restaurant and then spread the coronavirus to someone's grandparents or your own?" And on the other side would be those who ask their neighbors, "Who gave you the right to keep the economy closed in a pandemic and trigger mass unemployment, which could cost many more lives than are saved, especially when alternative strategies, like Sweden's, might work?" A new Mason Dixon line could emerge between states led by governors who want to equip their people with the maximum protective gear and safety guidelines and those governors who are keen to reopen their states for business as usual gear and guidelines be damned. According to a new poll from the Pew Research Center, more than two thirds of Americans worry that their respective states are reopening too quickly, while pro Trump demonstrators have taken to the streets to demand that businesses get people back to work, now. So, I can imagine the possibility of the governor of Maryland, who has been very careful about lifting lockdowns, banning cars coming north on Interstate 95 with Georgia license plates. And this is not just my imagination. South Dakota's governor, Kristi Noem, "sent letters Friday to the leaders of both the Oglala Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe demanding that checkpoints designed to prevent the spread of coronavirus on tribal land be removed" or risk legal action, CNN reported Saturday. The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe rejected the ultimatum. Stay tuned. The tragedy of all of this is that a better president would never have allowed us to get to this edge of pandemic civil strife. A real president would be framing the issues for the nation and then arguing for and guiding us on the least painful course. He'd start by explaining that we are up against a challenge no one in our generation has ever faced the challenge of a pandemic in which Mother Nature is silently, invisibly, exponentially and mercilessly spreading a coronavirus among us. And, unlike a human foe, you can't defeat Mother Nature, negotiate with her or spin her. All you can do is adapt in the least harmful way possible to whatever she throws at you. And when it's a pandemic, it means there are only hellish moral and economic trade offs no matter which path you choose: Too closed, she'll kill your jobs. Too open, she'll kill your vulnerable. The job of leadership is to choose the path that offers the most sustainable way to balance lives and livelihoods and then create and stick to the conditions that make it workable. So, as I said, China has chosen the pathway of locking down and then opening its economy, but with strict social distancing, masks everywhere and highly intrusive testing, tracing and quarantining anyone with the coronavirus to prevent further spread while it waits for a vaccine to create herd immunity. Sweden has chosen moderate social distancing, keeping a lot of its economy open, while trying to protect the most vulnerable and letting those least vulnerable those most likely to experience the coronavirus either asymptomatically or as a mild or tough flu continue to work, get the virus and develop immunity to it. Then, when enough of them are immune, they can sound the all clear for the vulnerable. That's Sweden's strategy, but it is too early to say it's the right answer. If you listened to Trump last week you heard a president who was all over the place. One day he talked as though he wanted to follow Sweden in getting a lot of people back to work, even if many more would get infected. Another day, he boasted that we're testing just like China only more so. Another day he disputed the need for testing at all. In brief: Trump talks like China, envies Sweden, prepares for neither and insists that his strategy is superior to both. But the fact is he is not prepared to impose the kind of strict surveillance tracing and quarantining system that makes China's reopening work. And he is not ready to consider strategies like moving vulnerable people living in crowded homes to empty hotels or surrounding every nursing home with a public health testing unit that might make a Swedish style opening less dangerous. So, I fear that we are heading for a roiling mess. Our coronavirus infections will be exacerbated by Trump's incompetence, while our hyper political partisanship will be fed by his malevolence. After all, his whole political strategy is to divide us into red and blue, Republicans and Democrats, open now advocates and go slow advocates. That's the only politics he practices. In sum, Covid 19 is sapping our economic and physical health, while Trump is undermining our institutions and national unity. We desperately need a vaccine and a 2020 election outcome that can give us herd immunity to this virus and this president. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom. Iran is in terrible shape. It is among the countries worst hit by the coronavirus more than 27,000 documented cases to date. Sanctions have choked its economy. Tensions with Washington remain high and the government is incompetent. Does that mean the United States should tighten sanctions further in the hope that the "maximum pressure" strategy will compel Tehran to toe Washington's line? Or should it loosen sanctions to help Iranians and show them that America's argument is not with the people? The choice seems obvious. Demonstrating compassion in times of crisis is good foreign policy, and in this case it may actually help achieve the goals the Trump administration is pursuing. Yet last week the Trump administration tightened its sanctions, blacklisting several companies around the world for "significant transactions" in petrochemical products with Iran. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin issued a statement stressing that the United States would continue to target those who support the Iranian regime, even as it "remains committed to facilitating humanitarian trade and assistance in support of the Iranian people." He has insisted all along that sanctions do not prohibit humanitarian contributions. Such arguments are specious in these terrible times. Iran has been overwhelmed by confirmed cases and fatalities, and they're climbing by the day and that's according to the Iranian government's dubious numbers. The reality may be far worse. Iran has appealed to the International Monetary Fund for 5 billion in emergency funding and a long list of essential equipment ranging from gloves and masks to portable respirators. It should get all this immediately. No, the United States and its sanctions are not responsible for the rapid spread of the coronavirus in Iran, as Iranian hard liners have claimed, though the economic hardships from the sanctions could not have helped. Last year, before the current crisis, Human Rights Watch wrote in a report that sanctions had "drastically constrained the ability of the country to finance humanitarian imports, including medicines." But the Iranian government carries primary responsibility for the plague by initially denying the outbreak and then reacting far too slowly. The Trump administration says it has offered to help the "Iranian people" and to facilitate the delivery of medical supplies to Iran. But the offer is said to carry many conditions, and importers say they still have a major problem finding banks willing to maneuver through the daunting compliance processes to finance the trade. In any case, piling on more sanctions while Iran bleeds is morally wrong and looks terrible. Setting aside arguments over whether scuttling the Obama administration's nuclear deal with Iran and resuming sanctions made sense to begin with this editorial board argued that it did not the crisis should be treated by President Trump as a diplomatic opportunity. On the most elemental level of humanitarian compassion, the United States should be at the forefront of offering what help it can. That may not mean sending medical supplies like respirators, which are in short supply everywhere, but at the least it should mean clearing the way for the I.M.F. loan. The United States could also offer to send experts to help with technical assistance, a measure that would have the added benefit of providing American medical officials with experience on the coronavirus epidemic at its most devastating. The Trump administration should also loosen or lift sanctions for a limited time and offer technical assistance to Tehran. There should not be a quid pro quo, which Mr. Trump is so fond of demanding humanitarian aid should be without strings but American generosity might be the best way of persuading Iran to release American and other foreign detainees. Ideally, that could lead to a lowering of tensions, a reduction of attacks on American targets in Iraq by Iranian allies, and even, down the line, serious discussions on freezing Iran's nuclear escalation. That's a lot of maybes, given a regime that has shown no inclination to back down before the United States. But if Iran refused American help or continued in its ways despite it, the sanctions would go back into place and the Islamist leaders would be hard put to convince their people that the United States was blocking humanitarian aid. More important, there's no evidence that the "maximum pressure" strategy the administration has followed will achieve any of these goals. On the contrary, for the past year the Iranian government has retaliated with repeated nuclear and regional provocations in the evident conviction that this is more likely than restraint to get results. Writing in Foreign Policy magazine, Robert Malley and Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group argued that in the current crisis, desperate hard liners in Tehran might take even more dangerous risks. That was the warning from Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, head of the military's Central Command, who told Congress earlier this month that the outbreak of the virus "probably makes them, in terms of decision making, more dangerous rather than less dangerous."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
The streaming giant Netflix has become the first major Hollywood studio to publicly weigh in on Georgia's restrictive abortion law, with Ted Sarandos, its chief content officer, saying the company would "rethink our entire investment in Georgia" should the law go into effect. Signed on May 7, the so called fetal heartbeat law prompted calls for Hollywood to boycott Georgia, a major production hub for film and television that has generated 92,000 jobs in the state and 2.7 billion in annual revenues. While a small handful of productions canceled prospective plans to shoot in the state location scouting for the coming series "The Power" and a new Kristen Wiig movie have both been nixed large studios, including Warner Bros. and Disney, stayed mum, unwilling to risk alienating audiences by coming down on either side. Privately, studio executives said they are hoping that the law, which bans abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detectable, except in cases of rape or incest, gets struck down as unconstitutional, as has happened in other states. Read more about Hollywood and the Georgia abortion law. If unchallenged, the law will go into effect in January 2020. Should that happen, Netflix, which has productions in the state including the series "Stranger Things" and "Ozark," along with the coming film "Holidate," is suggesting it might consider boycotting, too.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
From left: Seu Jorge and Roge, friends and collaborators who remain inspired by the Brazil they left behind. Twenty five years ago, the actor and singer Seu Jorge began a determined rise from the slums of Rio de Janeiro. The band he formed with a group of friends, Farofa Carioca, released an important album, "Moro no Brasil" ("I Live in Brazil"), a danceable yet probing portrait of life amid Rio's crime, racism and poverty. Seu Jorge was the group's obvious standout he sang samba, reggae, funk and soul with swing, and rapped with theatrical expressiveness. One of his biggest fans was Roge, an aspiring samba funk singer songwriter from well to do Arpoador, a neighborhood that borders Ipanema. Having haunted Farofa Carioca's shows, Roge was stunned when Seu Jorge, who he'd never met, showed up at one of his gigs. "He stood right in front of the stage," he recalled in a recent interview, "gave me his hand, and said, 'Hi, Roge, how are you?'" For all their differences, the friendship still thrives. Now 49, Seu Jorge (born Jorge Mario da Silva; he has said his stage name means Your Jorge) is an international film and pop star he's best known to United States audiences for his onscreen work in the 2002 movie "City of God" as well as in Wes Anderson's "The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," for which he performed David Bowie songs in Portuguese. His hits are feel good dance tunes, but he has the brooding presence and mournful, bloodshot eyes of a man who has seen too much. The 44 year old Roge (born Roger Jose Cury) is known almost exclusively in Lapa, Rio's downtown night life hub. At Carioca da Gema, the club where he reigned for a decade, his high octane samba singing and bright spirits kept crowds dancing for hours. "He's a special person to me," Seu Jorge said in Portuguese last week. "He's a composer I saw grow." Now his "older brother," as Roge calls Seu Jorge, is trying to push him to the next level. They are about to play three concerts in the United States; the first, on Thursday at the Town Hall in New York, is part of Winter Jazzfest. The show's basis is "Seu Jorge Roge: Night Dreamer Direct to Disc Sessions," a stark and moody new album due out Feb. 7 that recalls the glories the nature, the food, the music, the folkloric gods of a country that both men have now left behind. In 2013, Seu Jorge and his wife moved from Sao Paulo to Los Angeles; last year, Roge followed, bringing his wife and their two boys. Asked about the change, Seu Jorge explained that his daughters live nearby "and wherever they are, it's my home." But Brazil holds troubling associations for him, including years of homelessness and the death of his brother from a policeman's bullet. His disgust with the country's corruption, high taxes and other woes exploded publicly in 2013, when he answered someone's critical post on Twitter: "What opportunity did this expletive country give me, imbecile? I live in Los Angeles. And your BRAZIL didn't help me with anything, you big fool!" A firestorm resulted, with responders branding him arrogant and ungrateful. He insists his words were taken "out of context," adding: "I was being provoked by haters and robots on the internet." Years later, the frustrations continue. Seu Jorge starred as the Brazilian guerrilla fighter Carlos Marighella in the 2019 film "Marighella"; its Brazilian release has faced a right wing boycott that Seu Jorge declined to discuss. The absence of political or social consciousness raising on the new album with Roge is striking. "We don't have any pretension of doing political things," he said. "We only want to do music that reflects the sentiments of us together, living far from our own country." It was Seu Jorge who urged Roge to move away from Brazil, which elected the far right president Jair Bolsonaro in October 2018 and has been weathering spikes in violence and a slumping economy. The current administration, Roge said, "is against culture. They don't like the samba." "It's a shame," he added, "because for me, samba is a religion. It's the most precious thing we have. When I grew up, a lot of people said, 'Why are you playing samba? You should play rock 'n' roll!'" His idols, he said, were all black, including Bob Marley, Stevie Wonder and the samba funk pioneer Jorge Ben. In Lapa, doors swung open when he and a venerated samba star, Arlindo Cruz, began collaborating: "He was the guy who took me by the hand and said to everybody, this guy wrote songs with me." From there, Roge made six albums and a DVD, and helped write the theme song for the 2016 Olympics in Brazil. His weathered beach boy looks helped make him a downtown heartthrob. But the big break never quite happened. In California, he started over as an unknown, playing weekly at the Townhouse, a club in Venice. Seu Jorge's career remains strong, although it is still tied to Brazil; he spent some of last year back home filming the Netflix series "Irmandade" ("Brotherhood"), in which he plays an aboveboard lawyer with a crooked brother. This year he plans to stick closer to music. Americans who come to hear him and Roge probably won't know Portuguese "but we expect the audience to feel the songs, not to try to understand," said Seu Jorge. Like him, Roge is loving California's embrace. "I came to the United States very proud to be a Brazilian. I am playing Brazilian music. When I meet guys from hip hop and other cultures, everybody respects that sometimes much more than our own people." Seu Jorge with Roge Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Town Hall, Manhattan; thetownhall.org.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Ever since the news of Major League Baseball's plan to overhaul the minor leagues emerged in October, major league and minor league officials have carried out a public relations battle, volleying statements and letters back and forth amid contentious negotiations. On Wednesday, M.L.B. issued a pointed and heated letter in response to a minor league message that cast doubt over whether the two sides could ever reach an agreement on the future of their relationship. Dan Halem, the deputy commissioner and lead negotiator for M.L.B., wrote that the minor leagues, known as MiLB, and its president, Pat O'Conner, were "doing significant damage to your relationship with the 30 clubs by attacking M.L.B. publicly and in the political realm." Halem added that M.L.B. teams were "united in our negotiating position and misinformation tactics you have employed have only made the 30 clubs more resolute." Halem's response on behalf of M.L.B. struck an exasperated tone: "Although we have fully explained our views on all issues both formally and informally to members of your negotiating committee, there continues to be a disconnect between MiLB's public messaging, government messaging and written communications on the one hand, and the views expressed by MiLB at the negotiating table on the other." M.L.B. insists the restructuring can be done in a way that still preserves some form of minor league baseball in those communities. It also asserted that MiLB was hypocritical because of how frequently its owners moved teams around on their own. "Minor league owners routinely leave communities because the team is not economically viable, or the owner receives a better offer elsewhere," Halem wrote. "And when they do leave, neither MiLB nor the owner, typically offers anything as a replacement to the community, such as the case in Pawtucket (2020), New Orleans (2019), Mobile (2019) and Helena (2018) in the last two years alone." Representatives of minor league baseball did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and a spokesman for M.L.B. said Halem's letter spoke for itself. M.L.B. has drawn widespread criticism for its proposal, including from federal lawmakers. Four members of the House of Representatives introduced a bipartisan resolution on Tuesday asking M.L.B. to abandon its restructuring proposal. "Minor League Baseball teams have had a major impact on small communities," Representative David McKinley, Republican of West Virginia, said in a statement. "These teams provide an enormous cultural and economic benefit to the communities they call home. Doing away with 42 teams is not a reasonable solution." Wednesday's letter underscored M.L.B. officials' belief that MiLB, instead of negotiating in good faith, had instead sought to build outside pressure to prevent any changes to the existing agreement. If a new deal is not reached by September, M.L.B. could choose to continue operating under the current P.B.A., or it could leave it to individual M.L.B. teams to act as they see fit. In that case, several major league clubs could cut their affiliations with their minor league teams on their own. Major league teams generally pay for the minor league teams' players and coaching staffs, and the farm teams cover everything else, including travel and equipment. In its letter last week, MiLB accused M.L.B. of false statements and outlined alternatives to M.L.B.'s proposals. Instead of eliminating teams that play in substandard facilities, it proposed that the owners of those identified teams should be given time to upgrade their stadiums. If they failed to do so, then MiLB would find other ownership groups or could even move the clubs. It also dismissed M.L.B.'s description of the support it provided minor league teams: "It is simply not true that M.L.B. 'heavily subsidizes' MiLB," the letter said. Halem, whose eight page letter attempted to refute the MiLB letter point by point, asserted that the players were the subsidy: M.L.B. clubs pay the players and assign them to the teams. He said the players were the most valuable commodity, in an entertainment sense, to the minor league teams. M.L.B. has all but abandoned the Dream League concept, according to a person with knowledge of the negotiations who requested anonymity to discuss private talks. It is instead floating a different league to be played in the cities of contracted teams consisting of players preparing for the M.L.B. draft, which is likely to be cut from 40 rounds to 20. In the conclusion of his letter, Halem issued something of a plea to his minor league counterparts: "I personally do not believe that exchanging of letters of this type is productive or increases the likelihood that the parties will reach a mutually acceptable agreement."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Alliance, a small Traverse City bistro serving vegetable forward shared plates, has been making waves in the northwest corner of Michigan's Lower Peninsula since opening in March. But a heads up: Alliance is not Tapawingo II. "It's important to me that people know that," said Harlan Peterson, 73, who is known as Pete and is the veteran chef and owner of the restaurant Tapawingo, which closed in 2009 after 25 years in this vacation area 255 miles northwest of Detroit. True, Mr. Peterson helped start and manage Alliance, teaming with James Bloomfield, 28, a graduate of the Great Lakes Culinary Institute in Traverse City, and a local couple, Meridith and Dan Falconer, who own the restaurant. And like Tapawingo, Alliance offers sophisticated concoctions that showcase locally sourced ingredients and, Mr. Peterson said, "challenge the taste buds."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
In 2018, Baron Cohen persuaded Roy S. Moore, a former Republican Senate candidate from Alabama, to grant him an interview for what he claimed was an Israeli television network, but which was actually his Showtime satire series, "Who Is America?" Baron Cohen posed as an Israeli antiterrorism expert before whipping out a device he claimed was a pedophile detector, which began chirping when he waved it in front of Moore. (Moore had been accused by several women during his unsuccessful Senate campaign of making sexual advances toward them when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s.) Moore became angry "Maybe Israeli technology hasn't developed properly," he said and walked out of the interview. Moore sued Baron Cohen, Showtime and CBS for 95 million in damages for defamation, fraud and intentional infliction of emotional distress. He argued that his signature on the release was obtained through fraud and was not valid. As of this month, the suit is still pending. But as Baron Cohen's previous track record in court demonstrates, it can be tough to win a lawsuit against him even if the assertions are true. (Experts have said that subjects who sign a release before the interview without reading the fine print as Moore did have little legal ground to stand on.) In 2018, Jason Spencer, a Republican state representative from Georgia, took part in what Spencer believed was antiterrorism training. Baron Cohen, playing an Israeli antiterrorism expert, convinced Spencer to drop his pants, yell a racial slur, and more, under the guise of learning effective tactics to ward off a terrorist. Spencer apologized, though he initially resisted bipartisan calls to resign and said he intended to finish out the final five months of his term. But, two days later, he reversed course and stepped down the first real life consequence of Baron Cohen's "Who Is America?" show. (Spencer threatened legal action, but did not ultimately pursue a case.) Baron Cohen, in character as the Israeli antiterrorism expert Erran Morad, persuaded the former vice president to grant him an interview in 2018. He asked Cheney to sign a "waterboarding kit," which was an empty plastic jug. "That's the first time I've ever signed a waterboard," Cheney told Baron Cohen's character. "Very valuable." (Baron Cohen listed the jug on eBay after the show aired, where bidding went as high as 3,801, though it was unclear if it was sold.) Cheney never publicly reacted to the interview. Baron Cohen disguised himself as a veteran who used a mobility scooter to interview Sarah Palin, the former vice presidential candidate and governor of Alaska, in 2018. Palin wrote in a Facebook post criticizing Baron Cohen for the stunt that he told her he was a disabled veteran and that she believed the interview was for a "legit Showtime historical documentary." But she said that the interview was filled with "Hollywoodism's disrespect and sarcasm" and that she walked out. She also said the production team intentionally dropped her and her daughter off at the incorrect Washington, D.C., airport after the interview, which caused them to miss their flights home to Alaska. Exactly what happened during the interview is unclear, as the episode was never aired Baron Cohen told The Daily Beast that "Just like her candidacy for vice president, Palin wasn't good enough to make the show." In 2018, Baron Cohen, again disguised as the Israeli antiterrorism expert Erran Morad, persuaded Daniel Roberts, a prominent gun rights activist, to bite on a sex toy he was wearing. Roberts was led to believe the stunt was part of an antiterrorism training exercise. Roberts said after the episode aired that he had no idea that he had been duped and threatened to pursue legal action, though he did not ultimately. (He told The New York Times that he did not remember whether he had signed a release before the segment, but that it was "highly likely.")	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Claire Denis, the world's greatest working filmmaker, is sitting on a couch drinking herbal tea. She is in New York promoting her new film, "High Life," an emphatic allegory about infants, incarceration and intergalactic space travel starring Robert Pattinson as one of several young convicts conscripted to a mission to a black hole. Denis, born in Paris but raised in West Africa by civil servant parents, is an auteur's auteur, uncompromising in her vision and singular in aesthetic styling. Hers is a cinema of everyday rituals, personal histories and a knotty reckoning with the lingering effects of colonialist aggressions. A longtime fan and student of her work, I spoke by Skype with Denis, now 72, about anxiety, "High Life" and the keen ways in which she portrays the lives and souls of black folks on screen. BARRY JENKINS How are you, Claire? CLAIRE DENIS I'm fine. Actually, I don't know. I am a little bit tired, a little bit full of anxiety, and yet, I am happy to speak with you. JENKINS And I am happy to speak with you. The anxiety, I understand. The movie's opening, right? I would imagine you get used to it. DENIS Oh, no. It's worse and worse. DENIS Yeah, because there is a sort of innocence at the very beginning. At least I did that, you know? And what if I never do another one? Then little by little, it became people are expecting something. I think it's worse, yes. JENKINS I was at the Toronto International Film Festival, where the film debuted and I think there were expectations. People had heard this movie is crazy. But it wasn't this very wild, far out thing. It was just your work. DENIS I think my movies have a certain tenderness, a certain humanity, and that's what counts for me. JENKINS I would agree. It's why I love your work. Whenever people say there's tenderness in my work, I say thank you, Claire, Denis. DENIS Oh, come on. I mean thank you, thank you for people to believe in making films with that content. I loved your last film. JENKINS Thank you very much. You said you were uncomfortable speaking in English, but I remember the first time I heard your voice, it was in English, and it had a very profound effect on me because you were so thoughtful in your answers. DENIS I think I am also slow in my thoughts. I'm not fast, even in French. JENKINS Is it something that you've discovered through your work? Or is just the way you grew up? You have a very interesting background, and clearly it's created a person who makes art in a way that's very different than the way the rest of us make art. DENIS I think so. Growing up in Africa at the end of the colonial era was so much for a child to grasp. I try to understand my parents, the people, the other white people, and I try to understand what it was to be watching this moment where freedom movements wanted the end of colony, you know? It was very naive probably, but I thought, well, things are getting better. And my parents, especially my father, he was very optimistic, and he was so much for the freedom of Africa, I think it gave us a freedom to think, a freedom to be independent, not to be so French. But when I get to France when I was 13, 14, I realized I was completely different. I had been educated for a different life. I could not be like my cousin, like my friend, but maybe I felt unfit for so many things in France. And therefore, cinema became a reason to live and to express my feelings. JENKINS You mentioned the optimism of your father, because I think, especially in your work that's set in Africa, there is this tension between the hope for what things could be and the reality of how things are. I would say, as a black filmmaker, my friends and I talk about the work you've made that's set on the continent and how something feels very true about it. Part of that's because you have personal experience there, but it just seems like you care, which is a very important thing for an artist. DENIS Not only I care, but I knew, even when I was 3, 4 years old that something was unfair, that this situation was terrible. I knew there was something wrong in being masters among people. This gave me a sort of forever guilt. JENKINS: You returned to France when you were 13, but you didn't make your first film until you were, I think ... DENIS I had not a very easy youth. I got married. I ran away from home when I was 15. I did a lot of crazy things, but you know, '68 Europe was a sort of vast change. Nothing would be the same ever, so we thought. I became interested in photos. I met someone who told me maybe you should try to go to a cinema school. I spent there three years, and then I divorced. I had to find work, and the headmaster helped me to find a job, and that's how I became an assistant director. I adored that. People always ask me, were you frustrated to be an assistant? No, the opposite. It was great. I wanted so much to be useful. And once or twice, with Jacques Rivette, the French director, he urged me to do my own thing. And in the end, I was with Wim Wenders doing "Paris, Texas," and suddenly, I knew my first film was going to be an evocation of my youth in Africa. Because I thought: If I don't start with "Chocolat," I will be always unbalanced. Something I have to say, it's me, and that's it. JENKINS "Chocolat" was the experience of having to express yourself? DENIS Yeah, but I was not expressing myself in the first person. I was trying to express a group of persons, black and white, living under the same roof. For good or bad reasons, I wanted to speak about that guilt, and that moment where this young domestic decides it was over for him to be serving white people. I remember very well some friend of Isaach de Bankole a star of the film told him, oh, Isaach, you're not going to play a domestic of white people, it's so humiliating. And I said, no, it's the main part. JENKINS There have been quite a few actors, black actors, in France, in Paris in particular, who have come to fame through your work, Isaach being one Alex Descas being another. Talk about working with those black men. I assume that feels no different than working with anyone else, but it is a very particular thing because, in French cinema, those actors don't typically get roles that are very central. JENKINS I want to shift and talk about time. The way you structure your films, it's very provocative to me. I have failed at trying to understand how you structure your films at times, and there are things I've written but I will never make because I was trying too hard to try to understand. "High Life" is about the longest span of time that anyone could possibly try to undertake in a film, but then the first film of yours that I saw, "Friday Night," is about one of the shortest spans, and they both come from the same mind. So, I'm curious. How does Claire Denis approach time? DENIS In terms of writing a script, I have to figure out moments, and if I see a moment that is fulfilled, I think, now I can start writing because at least I have this moment, and I know this moment will be a sort of sample of what the film should be made of. I tried to make diagrams this happened the day before, and this but it never worked because it's abstract. I need to feel those moments, and sometimes, maybe right or wrong, I don't need to say this moment takes place yesterday. I just go on, piece by piece like a wall, and it gives me, not freedom, but a sort of emotion that I will be able when I'm shooting to be inside the scene and not outside that moment. It's weird to explain it like that. JENKINS It's perfect. It should be weird because I've seen most of your work, and I'm still wrestling with it. In "High Life" you can send anyone into space, and yet you choose these kids whom society has discarded. There is something there very profound and emotional in this idea that Robert's character rehabilitates himself and becomes this father, and yet he can't return. It seems like a very political, activist thing. Did you know that going in? Or was it just about the character? DENIS I cannot stand the death penalty. This is, for me, so inhuman. I understand if someone shoots another person, but to organize a society where you have people that are waiting to be executed , this cruelty, it's so unnecessary because it doesn't make the world better. JENKINS I wanted to switch and talk about young people like my friend, Amy Seimetz, a wonderful filmmaker. Then I met you at the Safdie brothers screening of "Good Time" at Cannes a film that also stars Pattinson . How does it feel to know that all of us young filmmakers admire you and take such strength from your work? Do you feel a responsibility maybe? DENIS Of course not. I am proud that people, let's take Mati Diop an actress in "35 Shots of Rum" , for instance, the fact that she called me to say the film is finished. Of course, she did it all. She doesn't need me, but I felt, this is something I'm proud of. Not because I'm a woman and she's a young woman, no. It's because I know what she wants to do, and I am proud of that. JENKINS Yes, and you should be proud. I want you to own this, because when I had lunch with Mati, she told me you programmed her short film during an American tour Denis did , and she said it meant so much to her. So I think you're an inspiration. You should accept it. DENIS No, I accept it. I lost my mother in 2017 , and life is so short; it disappears just like that. To be showing Mati's film, it's a good thing I've done in my life. JENKINS Among a few other good things. You know, when I made my first film, "Medicine for Melancholy" about a would be young couple in San Francisco , it has a piece of score from "Friday Night" in it. And I remember talking to the composer Dickon Hinchliffe , and Dickon said, you can have the song but Claire has to approve it. And this is before "Moonlight." You said yes. This little guy, you can have the song, and you know nobody's ever going to see that film. A few people have seen it, but not many. DENIS You can have any song from me. Me, I own nothing. I hate the idea.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
WASHINGTON Meetings of finance ministers and central bankers here over the weekend started with a pledge by wealthy nations to significantly increase the lending capacity of the International Monetary Fund to defend against the possibility of worsening economic conditions in the debt laden euro zone. But they ended on Sunday without a consensus on just how to speed up the economic recovery, stamp out the European debt crisis or lower unemployment around the world, officials said. Heading into the meetings, Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the monetary fund and a former French finance minister, had called for a "Washington moment" a shared sense of purpose about the magnitude of the challenges facing world leaders, and building momentum to tackle those challenges. "I personally feel that that Washington moment was clearly in the room in the course of the meetings," she said at a news conference on Saturday. But Pascal Lamy, the director general of the World Trade Organization, said participants seemed more concerned with political considerations and poll numbers at home than with international cooperation, yielding little progress on hard questions about fostering stable, inclusive growth. "What's missing is a common road map," Mr. Lamy said in an interview. "International cooperation is about doing things you don't want to do for the common good. But they're all focused on the short term." To be sure, the additional 430 billion in lending capacity contributed by developed economies like Japan, Britain, Saudi Arabia and South Korea was seen as a major achievement. The contributions came after I.M.F. economists determined that countries around the world might require up to 1 trillion in new loans because of the combined effects of the sovereign debt crisis in Europe and sluggish global economic growth. The I.M.F. agreed to raise about half that amount if Europe would raise the other half. But finance ministers are still at odds over the effect of debt reduction on economic growth. Many governments, particularly in Europe, believe that indebted advanced economies need to cut their budgets to maintain stability in the financial system. "Fiscal sustainability in the United States and Japan weigh on the domestic and global outlook and require clearly spelled out consolidation strategies to reduce the risk of a sudden loss of market confidence," Jan Kees de Jager, the Dutch finance minister, said at an I.M.F. committee meeting on Saturday. "European countries mostly believe that you just need to carry on the fiscal consolidation and economies will adjust," he said. "But the I.M.F. showed a worrisome picture" if too many countries cut too fast. Robert B. Zoellick, the outgoing president of the World Bank, echoed those concerns in an interview. "Macroeconomic stabilization, both in fiscal and monetary policies, is necessary but not sufficient," he said, calling for more attention to the "equally important and under recognized" issue of reforms for stable, long term growth. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. Bank regulators released a 'road map' for crypto regulation that is short on details. Nor was the I.M.F. fund raising accomplished without dissent. Although a dozen countries came forward to join the euro zone in pledging money, there remained differing opinions on what the new pledges meant and how they should be used, and many countries remained on the sidelines. Canada, for instance, declined to contribute new money to the fund, arguing that Europe had more than enough money to handle its own sovereign debt crisis. "They need to step up to the plate and overwhelm this issue with their own resources," Jim Flaherty, the Canadian finance minister, told reporters. The United States also chose not to contribute to the I.M.F., though officials said that Washington supported the efforts to bolster the fund as long as Europe was playing the dominant role in preventing speculative attacks on European sovereign debt and stabilizing the Continent's financial system. "The success of the next phase of the crisis response will hinge on Europe's willingness and ability, together with the European Central Bank, to apply its tools and processes creatively, flexibly and aggressively," Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, said at an I.M.F. meeting on Saturday. Some European leaders bristled last week at the suggestion made as rising yields in Spain spurred worries that the country would need a bailout, like Greece, Portugal and Ireland before it that they had not tackled the crisis with sufficient force. "I'm always surprised when I read that Europe has not done enough," Klaus Regling, the chief executive of the European Financial Stability Facility, a temporary bailout fund, said at an event hosted by the European Institute on Friday. The I.M.F.'s financing drive has also been met with raised eyebrows from the cash rich, fast growing emerging economies that were expected to provide much of the new money. That expectation raised the thorny question of whether Brazilian farmers and Chinese laborers should be called on to help finance the debt of Italian office workers and Spanish retirees, especially if those developing nations would not win more voting power within the fund for doing so. The biggest and most powerful emerging economies Brazil, China, India and Russia said they would contribute to the fund. But they declined to specify how much. Mr. Mantega, the Brazilian finance minister, castigated the I.M.F. for being slow to initiate reforms agreed to two years ago that would reduce the voting power of Europe relative to big emerging economies. He said that the delay had been "deeply damaging to this institution" and called for voting to be strictly proportionate to countries' economic output.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
With coronavirus infections soaring across the nation, federal health officials on Friday urged Americans in the most forceful language yet to take steps to protect themselves starting with consistent, proper use of masks and pressed local governments to adopt 10 public health measures deemed necessary to contain the pandemic. The guidance reflected deep concern at the agency that the pandemic is spiraling further out of control and that many hospitals are reaching a breaking point, potentially disrupting health care across the country. Agency officials have issued increasingly stark warnings in the waning weeks of the Trump administration, and President elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has promised a new national strategy to turn back the virus. On Thursday, Mr. Biden said he would call on Americans to wear facial coverings for 100 days. To some experts, the C.D.C.'s appeal appeared to augur a more comprehensive and coordinated national approach to controlling the pandemic one consistent with messages from Mr. Biden and his advisers. "We're seeing C.D.C. and other public health institutions awaken from their politics induced coma," said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, who served as the agency's director under President Barack Obama. "This is them aligning themselves more with science, which also aligns them more with the Biden administration," he added. While none of the directives are new, experts said the rising case numbers demonstrated a need for a more uniform approach, rather than the patchwork of restrictions adopted by states. "The role of the C.D.C. is to lead with the science," said Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease physician and member of Mr. Biden's Covid advisory group. "In the absence of strong national guidance from the C.D.C., we've had a variety of responses across the country, some more scientifically grounded than others." The scientific evidence supporting the effectiveness of certain health measures, such as wearing masks, has been accumulating, and those measures are urgently needed now to stop the spread, C.D.C. officials said. Though the agency has issued all of the recommendations in earlier guidance, the new summary represented the first time the C.D.C. had published a multipronged list of strategies for states, a sort of battle plan. "This idea of a 50 state solution is completely impractical when we live in one nation," said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. "We are not going to get past this pandemic unless we have a concerted national approach." The new recommendations place high priority on keeping schools open, from kindergarten through 12th grade, saying schools should be both "the last settings to close" and "the first to reopen" because of the critical role they play in providing meals and support services to children. Closures take a disproportionate toll on low income families, the agency noted. Officials warned that eating at indoor restaurants was one of the "particularly high risk scenarios" because diners had to remove their masks. The C.D.C. urged communities to require face coverings on mass transit, something Mr. Biden also has endorsed, and to expand routine screening to identify asymptomatic individuals, who are responsible for about 50 percent of transmissions. Failure to implement the preventive measures will lead to continued spread of the virus and more unnecessary deaths, said Margaret A. Honein, the first author of the C.D.C. report. She emphasized that Americans could take many important steps on their own: wearing masks, physically distancing from others, limiting their contacts and avoiding nonessential visits to indoor spaces. "We want to make sure every person is aware that it's within their power to take this critical step: Wear a face mask and prevent transmission, and maintain physical distance from others," said Dr. Honein, a member of the agency's Covid 19 emergency response team. Scientific evidence that masks can both prevent an infected individual from spreading the disease and protect the user from infection is "compelling," she added. "Clearly, not everyone is hearing how important that is," she said. "It's an action everyone can take to protect each other." Americans also should avoid indoor spaces outside the home, as well as crowded outdoor spaces, the C.D.C. said. That includes restaurants and could also apply to some with outdoor dining: The report suggests switching to takeout food service instead. Americans should be tested if exposed to the virus and should cooperate with contact tracers if infected, the agency said. They should stay home and postpone travel, air out and ventilate rooms, wash hands frequently and get vaccines as they become available. Exercise should be done outdoors, with a mask and social distancing, the agency said. Working remotely should be encouraged, and social gatherings should be limited. In a shift, the C.D.C. also urged states and local jurisdictions to encourage and enforce these behaviors, including mandating the wearing of masks in public spaces and on public transportation. The Trump administration in September blocked a C.D.C. order that would have required passengers to wear masks on planes, buses and subway trains and in transit hubs. Officials in some states continue to resist mask mandates in public spaces. In Florida, which has reported over a million coronavirus cases, Gov. Ron DeSantis reiterated his opposition to mask mandates earlier this week. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The C.D.C. urged officials to limit the use of high risk nonessential indoor spaces, to erect physical barriers and visual reminders underscoring the need for social distancing, and to begin planning now for the distribution and administration of vaccines. The agency is also pushing for increased testing of essential workers who come into contact with the public and people who are otherwise at high risk. Even with mass vaccinations apparently imminent, Dr. Honein emphasized the need to implement such measures. "We are seeing that light at the end of the tunnel, but need time to get to that," she said. Dr. Nuzzo, of Johns Hopkins, and other experts praised the agency's new emphasis on prioritizing schools over venues like restaurants and bars, a recommendation echoed by Mr. Biden and his advisers. The C.D.C.'s previous guidance, issued over the summer and doctored by the White House, also pushed for schools to reopen but was not balanced by a scientific assessment of the accompanying risks, Dr. Nuzzo said, adding, "It felt more like a treatise rather than an analysis." Having all 10 measures in one document is helpful and underscores the message that no one strategy can hinder the spread of the virus, experts said. But the document was thin on some details, said Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, medical director of the special pathogens unit at Boston Medical Center. Dr. Bhadelia was struck by the suggestion that there might be a coordinated program to hand out masks to people. "I haven't seen that before, particularly for those who are at high risk," she said. But the C.D.C. did not specify whether states or employers should provide the masks, she noted. The new guidance also emphasized the importance of improving ventilation in indoor spaces, where airborne virus is a threat. But the agency could have detailed best practices to minimize confusion, Dr. Bhadelia said. She cited fully enclosed outdoor dining "cabins" as an example of the misguided solutions that can result from unclear guidance. The agency also did not clarify what the triggers should be for restaurants or schools to shut down or which groups were recommended for increased testing because of their greater interactions with other people. "I would have loved to see a little bit more detail," Dr. Bhadelia said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
In late February, as data on the coronavirus pandemic continued to unfold, I started making calls to friends and family to prepare them. I told them to get ready to hunker down for three months. For many then, it was hard to believe that a virus we couldn't much see evidence of, less understand, would require us to shut down our economy. I also spoke with C.E.O.s and governors, urging them to close nonessential businesses and enact stay at home orders to stop the spread of the virus. Other public health advocates called for the same and fortunately government and business leaders responded. Their actions saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives and spared American hospitals the horrors of rationing care. Shutting down was the right policy at the time. As circumstances have evolved, so has my thinking. We have survived the surge in hospitalized cases and suffered immense economic trauma. The full lockdown made sense weeks ago. But the situation is changing, and more data on the virus are now available to inform our next steps. The choice before us isn't to fully lock down or to totally reopen. Many argue as though those are the only options. As a physician, I firmly believe that the primary goal of our reopening strategy should be to maximize the number of lives saved. But virus mitigation can take many forms, ranging from effective to excessive. Extreme forms of mitigation can have diminishing returns. Projections of the death toll produced by the current economic shutdown are often politically motivated, but the effects on human life are real. In late April, the United Nations World Food Program reported that 250 million people may face starvation as a result of the economic impact of Covid 19. In America, local food banks are already congested with record wait times. There are other serious consequences of continuing stay at home orders and prolonging economic disruption. Deferred medical care, mental health problems, domestic violence and one of the biggest pre Covid 19 public health problems in the United States loneliness are all magnified by in home sheltering. The economic and public health harm associated with sheltering is yet to be fully measured. At the same time, the coronavirus will persist. We must take proper care in how we reopen, lest we discount human life in the race to prosper. That would worsen already troubling trends, given that Covid 19 disproportionately affects disadvantaged communities dependent on public transit and in congested living conditions. Our path to reopen should protect those at high risk. The current "normal," with its economic anxiety, skyrocketing unemployment and social isolation, can't carry on we should work toward a new status quo until there's an available, mass produced therapeutic. So what does a new, safer status quo look like? It looks different in different parts of the country. Not all reopenings are created equal. Areas with continuing outbreaks or rising cases should postpone nonessential activity, and those with a declining case trend should engage in some basic practices. We need universal masking. China gives the earliest preview of a reopened society after a harsh wave of the virus. And while the Chinese Communist Party has not been honest about its coronavirus handling, Chinese doctors and citizens have largely been transparent. I recently called some prominent Chinese doctors to ask why they believe the infection is being controlled in most of their country. In their clinical judgment, they believe the main reason is universal masking. I've worn a mask most of my adult life as a surgeon, and I had been skeptical that masks would play a large role in fighting this pandemic. Most masks don't have the seal and filtration to protect us from inhaling the coronavirus. But that's not the only way they work. Masks reduce aerosolized droplet transmission to others and to surfaces that others may touch. They protect your mouth and nose from the droplets of others, and they prevent you from touching your nose and mouth. Spend more time outside. Since April, we've learned a lot about indoor versus outdoor transmission of the coronavirus. Early on, we closed parks and told people to stay inside their homes. But studies have since shown that being outdoors with appropriate distancing carries a lower risk of getting the infection than being indoors. These findings have implications for restaurants and other businesses and activities that are able to use outdoor areas. Yoga and other fitness activities should resume outside when possible. Similarly, instead of having someone to your home for a meal, consider having a meal in your yard or at a park, six feet apart. Business must adapt. One busy consumer facing industry has already demonstrated how adapting to a virus mitigation approach is feasible. Most grocery stores have been safely operating through the pandemic. Many are doing so by limiting the number of shoppers in a store, requiring masks, spacing out lines and alternating registers, installing plexiglass guards, cleaning incessantly and discontinuing some services like self serve salad bars. The grocers have strict policies for workers with symptoms to not report to work, and some continue to pay them to avoid creating a financial incentive to not disclose symptoms. By adhering to distancing and hygiene standards, these businesses have proved that even at the peak of the pandemic, they can operate without becoming hot spots of contagion. These practices should be expanded to smaller businesses. If it's not feasible for a business such as a cruise ship or an arcade to function with strict distancing, masks and impeccable hygiene, then that business should remain closed until it's safe to reopen. We must prioritize safeguarding nursing homes. Throughout April, several studies using antibody testing found that asymptomatic infections are 10 to 20 times more common than previously observed, lowering the true case fatality rate. The data also taught us that young, healthy Americans have a fatality rate similar to that of the seasonal flu. Deaths among those young and healthy are rare. (In fact, community immunity from seasonal viruses is often achieved through younger people developing antibodies.) About one third of all Covid 19 deaths in America occurred among nursing home residents. In New Jersey, half of all deaths have been among long term care residents or workers. Nursing homes are often short staffed and the last in line when it comes to getting needed resources.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
A rendering of the interior of 53W53 , the Jean Nouvel designed ultraluxury residential tower being built next to the Museum of Modern Art. In an industrial section of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where the street ends at the waterfront, an unassuming door opens to a cold and cavernous warehouse. There, beyond a labyrinth of boxes and dark hallways, lies an unexpected piece of Midtown Manhattan: a full scale mock up of a 10 million apartment planned for 53W53, an ultraluxury residential tower being built next to the Museum of Modern Art. Complete with a gleaming metal and glass facade, the prototype seems as if it had been sliced from a skyscraper and plunked down on the gritty warehouse floor. But prospective buyers won't be touring this model unit. It was built as a laboratory of sorts, to work out any kinks presented by the unusual architectural elements of 53W53, an asymmetrical 1,050 foot high tower designed by Jean Nouvel that will taper as it rises like a shard of glass. Thierry W. Despont, the French born designer based in TriBeCa whose resume includes the restoration of the Statue of Liberty and, currently, the interiors of the Woolworth Tower Residences, is crafting the interiors of the 140 condominiums for 53W53, which will rise at 53 West 53rd Street. "Welcome to our playground," he said, during a recent visit to the Brooklyn warehouse. "Many people do model apartments when they have a finished product. This is way beyond that." "Can you imagine?" said David Penick, the managing director at Hines, which is developing the tower with partners, Goldman Sachs and the Pontiac Land Group of Singapore. "As the walls taper up, you can't even keep the same basic plan. You have to move a bathroom or a kitchen. It's very complicated." Hence, the warehouse model, or "the lab," as the design team refers to it. Set on a plywood platform, the model unit approximates what a two bedroom two and a half bath apartment on the 32nd floor will look like. The developers chose to build this particular unit because they felt it would allow them to examine most of the challenges posed by the building's unusual design. At one end, stage lights shine on the exterior facade. At another, a carpenter's workshop sits adjacent to the entryway to the model a tall, thick walnut door with an onyx side panel backlit to give off a warm glow. "This is going to be a bronze frame," said Mr. Despont, describing the entryway. "This will be a little model of the building," he added, pointing to the entry doorknob. Inside the unit, a sprawling living and dining area, encased in glass, connects to a kitchen, which can be sectioned off with sliding pocket doors. Bedrooms are nicely split off the foyer. The en suite master bath features dual vanities with round medicine cabinets and a deep soaking tub, lit from underneath to create a floating effect. But like a stage set for a play, and unlike actual model units, many of the details are purely cosmetic. Whitewashed plywood stands in for high end kitchen appliances. A wall in the master bath, splashed with paint for effect, represents one of three marbles that will adorn the space. The point of the laboratory was more about function than finish, said Mr. Despont, who compared the process to haute couture. "Before a couturier does the real dress they wrap and stitch the models in muslin, pinching there and saying, 'No, let's loosen the pins in the back,' " he said. "That's what we're doing here." Movable columns that lean slightly askew were constructed to allow Mr. Despont and his design team to see how they might fall across a window and make tweaks wherever necessary to floor plans to capitalize on views and layouts. Automatic window shades were fitted with guide wires and calibrated to eliminate any gaps created at the base of angled windows a technique borrowed from high end yachts. The air conditioning was concealed behind a detailed cornice to make sure it fit in the ceiling of the adjoining room. Three samples of parquet flooring were laid out and stained to see which worked best next to the geometry of the windows. Herringbone was nixed in favor of straight, wide oak panels with a border running perpendicular and stained a slightly different hue. "The challenge was to find a vocabulary that befit the architecture of Jean Nouvel," Mr. Despont said. "I think we've been successful. You have all the function of a classically designed apartment in a very contemporary building." Decisions were also made about more subtle issues. So as not to interrupt the large windows, which measure 11 feet high and nearly 6 feet wide and cannot be opened, a ventilation system was designed for the adjacent wall panels. A recessed panel was rejected in favor of one that is flush with the wall. Similarly, ceiling lights designed to create a halo effect were placed in the kitchen and hallway. The original ones in the hallway, which revealed their light source, were rejected in favor of those placed in the kitchen that were more easily concealed. "We thought the shower didn't feel wide enough," said Jerome S. Karr, a tall and broadly built real estate investment consultant for Goldman Sachs, stepping inside for effect. By moving the nozzles to the right and setting the body sprays into the wall, he said, "we basically picked up another two or two and a half inches in terms of the perception of depth just by rearranging things." Fine tuning such details, from the size of the shower to the location of power outlets, long before the sales process begins has become increasingly important to developers of high end buildings. After all, with apartments at 53W53 expected to range from around 3 million to well above 50 million, buyers will expect flawlessness. "We've worked on a lot of luxury apartments, and I think they've only gotten more sophisticated, more complicated as time goes by in terms of the finished details," said Mr. Karr, noting that the industry has been slow to adopt the idea of building full scale models for design purposes. "We should have been moving in this direction 10 years ago," he added. Lately, however, the idea has been catching on. For 135 East 79th Street, an Upper East Side development designed by William Sofield for the Brodsky Organization, prototypes of a living room, master bath and kitchen were built in a Brooklyn warehouse before the building went to market in 2012. Tweaks were made along the way to kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities based on the mock ups. Similarly, for 1 John Street, a development by Alloy Development and Monadnock Construction underway on the waterfront in Dumbo, Brooklyn, a kitchen and bathroom were constructed down the hall from Alloy's studio, to test and perfect the finishes. In the kitchen, which features a double island, the design team tinkered with drawer hinges and appliance placement. The updated space is now being shown to prospective buyers. Yet few have gone to the lengths of the team working on 53W53, with a model that replicates the exterior as well as the interior of a given unit. Excavation recently began on the actual building, yet construction on the warehouse model (which is, coincidentally, on 53rd Street in Brooklyn) began nearly a year ago. Once the model has served its purpose, it will be demolished.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
At Tomorrow's Paris showroom, the box concept was made literal clothes hung in and on a giant trunk, and piles of recycling boxes to pique the imagination of store buyers. (Some interested stores have asked for the displays as well as the clothes.) It is the first iteration of a new project organized by the Japan External Trade Organization (Jetro), Daisuke Gemma (an all purpose connector and sounding board for Japanese brands) and the consulting arm of Tomorrow, which runs showrooms and offers business development services. Mr. Kogi chose pieces from designers less known outside of Japan, including suiting by Auralee (he was wearing it himself, underneath a white leather Louis Vuitton harness as he showed visitors through the offerings); T shirts by Midorikawa with stipple portraits of the minimalist avant garde composer John Cage; and sweatshirts from Mr. Kogi's own Poggy the Man collection embroidered with the letters L O V E in a familiar but unplaceable bubbled logo. "Do you know Devo?" he said. Ah, yes there it is.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Where would you go if you had more than 40 million points with an airline? Hawaii 96 times? Seoul 40 times? Federal District Court in Atlanta? Gennady Podolsky, a travel agent based in Chicago, was charged on Wednesday with 12 counts of wire fraud in connection with what prosecutors describe as a 13 month scheme in which he accrued 42 million Delta SkyBonus points, valued at more than 1.75 million . SkyBonus points are earned through a corporate loyalty program through which companies can accrue points that can be redeemed for free flights and rewards from the airline. According to the indictment, filed on Wednesday in United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia , Mr. Podolsky created a SkyBonus account for a corporation called RGI International with which he is not affiliated. Mr. Podolsky, 43, would link flights that he booked for clients of Vega International Travel Services, where he worked as a travel agent, to RGI International's SkyBonus account, allowing him to "fraudulently accrue" points, the indictment said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The Cruising Pavilion on the periphery of the Venice Architecture Biennale offers a cultural study of nonnautical cruising: gay hookups. Scarlet lamplight gives the space the ambience of an illicit cathedral. In a staged event, the floor was scattered with condoms. VENICE On a recent night on the island of Giudecca, a water taxi ride across the lagoon from the many cocktail parties marking the opening of the Architecture Biennale here, the curators of a scrappy pavilion were focusing on cruising of a less nautical sort. In the main space of the so called Cruising Pavilion an exhibition devoted to the places and practices of casual sex sheets of plywood were pierced by a profusion of glory holes, a hallmark of anonymous gay hookups. A dapple of scarlet lamplight shone through the holes, giving the space the ambience of an illicit cathedral. The floor was littered with colorful condoms and other sexual accouterments. The effect was maximal, but in this show on the periphery of the Biennale, it was accomplished with economy. Mr. Perrault and the pavilion's other curators Pierre Alexandre Mateos, Rasmus Myrup and Charles Teyssou landed on the idea for the show based on their shared experiences with cruising and curating. It seemed right, they said, at a time when L.G.B.T. people face enduring violence and oppression around the world, not to mention difficulties getting a gay wedding cake made in the United States. "Cruising was a common subject for us, but we noticed there wasn't a culture of exhibitions devoted to the topic," Mr. Mateos, a Paris based curator, said. "There wasn't much interest from institutions, especially architectural ones, so we wanted to confront this subculture through architecture." Yet even in a Biennale inspired by the theme "Freespace," the Cruising Pavilion stands out as an event with skin in the game. In a manifesto that served as a guiding light for the exhibitors, the Biennale's organizers, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, partners in the Dublin based firm Grafton Architects, described their portmanteau as a "space for opportunity, a democratic space, unprogrammed and free for uses not yet conceived." That theme has a political edge, but few exhibitions go as far as the Cruising Pavilion. The team found the venue, a former warehouse called Spazio Punch on Giudecca, away from the pressing crowds of the city's tourist hot spots. Getting there involves a trip by vaporetto and a stroll among buildings that once comprised one of Venice's industrial centers. As visitors step through the entryway, they are greeted by a shadowy atmosphere evoking archetypal cruising sites. Two wood framed towers each three stories high and accessible by internal stairs flank the expansive interior at the architectural and artistic heart of the pavilion. "We didn't want this to necessarily look like an exhibition," Mr. Perrault said. "We wanted to get our hands dirty, to show projects and artworks, but also to work with the space directly." The exhibition captures some of the thrill of its subject matter. On the opening night, poppers inhalants sometimes huffed during sex for a quick high were passed around like hors d'oeuvres, and a D.J. played heavy beats for a fashionably dressed crowd dancing in the balmy air. In foregrounding the history of this overlooked place on the sidelines of the Biennale, the exhibit made a point of reclaiming queer history and made a case for its place as a topic in contemporary architecture. Still, the pavilion predominantly focuses on cruising between gay men, though other members of the L.G.B.T. community are represented, too. But the concept for the exhibition is, by its nature, limited. The curators who began planning the show in February, a relatively short lead time wanted to demonstrate the balance between historical ideas of cruising and its modern forms found in hookup apps like Grindr. For the Spanish architect Andres Jaque, director of the Office for Political Innovation and a professor at Columbia University, who designed one of the exhibits in the Cruising Pavilion, Grindr is key to understanding how social media allows "users to create another reality that is not necessarily following the existing rules of offline space," he said. Mr. Jaque (pronounced HA kay) recreated a domestic scene inside one of the towers. An inflatable mattress is installed on the plywood floor, accompanied by a MacBook laptop that screens films by his architecture firm. The videos illustrate Grindr's use as more than a technical expedient to hooking up. One film follows Syrian refugees living in Europe, who used the app to share hard won wisdom with new arrivals. There, the app fostered connections between refugees, who exchanged tips for facing fundamental challenges like navigating immigration bureaucracy, looking for a job or finding a place to live. The curators of the Cruising Pavilion included the full sweep of cruising's past, comparing the exhibition's recent works to historical instances of cruising. It departs from the Biennale's mainstream in both subject and format; critics have said as much, describing it as a world apart from presentations in the Giardini and a provocative but not frivolous take on a once taboo topic. As it happens, the pavilion's exhibition space is not far from one of Venice's most notorious historical hookup spots: a 19th century garden on the east side of Giudecca. "It's literally the Garden of Eden," Mr. Teyssou said, referring to the garden's onetime owner, the English aristocrat Frederic Eden. In its heyday, the spot was visited by the likes of Rainer Maria Rilke, Henry James, Marcel Proust and a young Jean Cocteau, whose recollections of the garden are captured in a 1909 poem dedicated to his lover Langhorn Whistler, the nephew of Oscar Wilde. The curators were able to briefly reopen the garden, which has been shuttered for decades, on the first day of the exhibition. "This," Mr. Perrault said of the garden, "is where these gay heroes were going."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
There will be no asterisk for the 2020 baseball season because the year itself is an obvious outlier in every way. Whoever wins the World Series if the season makes it that far will overcome the challenges of a three month sprint inside empty ballparks during a pandemic. No other champion, to be sure, will have faced those obstacles. "The teams that lose, they'll be the ones going, 'Well, it's not for real, they didn't play 162, they didn't have the marathon,'" Mike Stanton, a former pitcher who played in six World Series and won three with the Yankees, said on Tuesday. "But for the team that wins, it'll be just as special as any other and in some ways even more so, because of the trials and tribulations that everybody has gone through to get to that point." "This will be a year that everyone remembers," Stanton added. "Everyone." Baseball, of course, will be just a small patch on 2020's tapestry of the weird. But for a sport with such a deep and enchanting history, it will stand out as a singular phenomenon, by far the shortest season since the 1870s before the invention of the pitcher's mound, the catcher's mitt and the infield fly rule. Now, though, every team will reach late July as a contender, with a trade deadline to be determined. Think of it as forced competitive balance, when even the worst teams can dream of getting hot for nine weeks and stealing a playoff berth. Every game will count 2.7 times more than usual, infusing daily urgency to a sport in which teams often have time to coalesce. After 60 games last season, the Washington Nationals were 27 33 two games worse at that point than the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Nationals surged up the standings and won the World Series. The Pirates spiraled and finished in last place. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. Then again, last year's postseason field did not change much after the 60 game mark. At that point, the playoff teams would have been the Yankees, Minnesota, Houston, Tampa Bay and Texas in the American League, and Atlanta, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, the Chicago Cubs and the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League. Seven of those teams wound up in the postseason; only the Rangers, the Phillies and the Cubs faded. For a while, it seemed as if this year's postseason was destined to be like a preschooler's birthday party, where everyone in the class gets invited. The last proposals by the players and the owners added three wild card teams in each league, allowing more than half of all teams to take part. Both sides agreed on that change, so why not implement it this October? Negotiating is the reason. The players believed that if Commissioner Rob Manfred was going to give them 60 games at full prorated salaries with or without an agreement, it would be foolish to give up a valuable bargaining chip by authorizing the lucrative expanded playoff package owners covet. Rejecting the owners' offer was a calculated gamble by the players, who turned down more money upfront for the chance to claim a lot more perhaps 1 billion through a grievance accusing the owners of bad faith negotiating. The rejection meant that other proposed innovations would be shelved, too, like in game broadcast enhancements and (thankfully) advertising on players' uniforms. The universal designated hitter might be retained as part of a 2020 rules package the sides must still discuss. Teams might also start extra innings with a runner on second base to spark offense and allow games to finish quicker. The schedule will be limited to divisional play, plus interleague games with teams in the corresponding geographic division. So the Yankees, for example, will play their American League East rivals Baltimore, Boston, Tampa Bay and Toronto, but also the National League East teams: Atlanta, Miami, the Mets, Philadelphia and Washington. Doing so without fans will be jarring, but perhaps not for long. "You're playing the Red Sox, you're at Yankee Stadium or Fenway, the place is rocking and rolling it's hard not to get excited in those situations," Stanton said. "It's going to be missed, but the passion for the game, the reason you're playing, the competitiveness of every player that doesn't go away because there are no fans in the stands. The first week or two will be different, but then it's going to be, 'We're just playing baseball.'" Stanton continued: "You may have to go back to college or high school, or even prior to that, but at some point, everyone was playing with just the people on the field. I played in Atlanta when we had 1,500 people might as well have not been anybody there and select games around the league, same thing. There were always a few fans, but there was never any energy coming out of the stands, so it really didn't matter all that much. They're going to have to adapt, but I think they'll do it quickly."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The tent is moving. The preshow picnics and riverside views are staying. The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, a bucolic staple of New York summer theater at the Boscobel House and Gardens in Garrison, N.Y., will move about two miles south to a new and permanent home in 2022. The sprawling performing arts campus is expected to feature an upgraded open air structure and, eventually, a second indoor stage for year round performances. If such a thing is possible, this move will offer even more gorgeous vistas. Kate Liberman, the festival's managing director, said an acoustician who evaluated the new site initially had his doubts about the move. "He was like, 'You already have the most beautiful space,'" she said. But then he paid a visit and backtracked big time. "I was wrong," he told her in a call while standing atop a ridge. "It's even more spectacular than I could have imagined." For 33 years, the nonprofit professional theater company has been renting space on a grassy knoll overlooking the Hudson River about an hour north of Manhattan. But last October, Christopher Davis, a conservationist and philanthropist who lives in Garrison, reached out about gifting the company land to build a new home. A spokesman for the company said he could not estimate the value of Davis's donation, but that it included more than 50 acres of land. Davis had been a longtime donor and audience member.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Want more basketball in your inbox? Sign up for Marc Stein's weekly N.B.A. newsletter here. Gregg Popovich will not be happy with this. I know, I know: Popovich made it clear years ago, in a memorable interview with my old friend David Aldridge on TNT, that there is no such thing as happiness for N.B.A. coaches. Yet I suspect he would be even more dismayed than usual to hear me offering up any measure of sympathy after Tuesday's announcement that this summer's Tokyo Olympics have been postponed to 2021. It had become clear that the Games could not go on this year in the midst of our global health crisis. Popovich, in full "get over yourself" mode, would surely note that the world has much bigger problems to consider and that Olympic postponement affects the athletes far more than the coaches. Hoop stars, of course, fall far down the list of athletes hit the hardest. It was swimmers, gymnasts, track and field participants and all those who have been training in sporting disciplines in which Olympic competition is the pinnacle for whom this news was, on many levels, devastating. I do feel for him, though, since Tuesday's postponement is a significant development in the basketball domain, with all sorts of potential consequences. Although Jerry Colangelo, U.S.A. Basketball's 80 year old managing director, said that he and Popovich, 71, intend to remain in their roles through at least 2021, N.B.A. players and Pop himself might not even be available when the Olympics take place next year. Tokyo was supposed to be an opportunity for Popovich to finally taste triumph after nothing but disappointment in his various dalliances with U.S.A. Basketball. In stark contrast to last summer's World Cup team in China, which finished a humbling seventh after the most severe rash of player withdrawals ever, he was going to have a starry roster in Japan and a clear shot at a gold medal. Instead? Mark it down as yet another deflating entry on his national team resume, which is the antithesis of the charmed life he knows he's had in San Antonio for nearly a quarter century. As a player in 1972, Popovich was one of the last cuts for the U.S. Olympic team. As an assistant coach on the teams that finished sixth at the 2002 world championships in Indianapolis and settled for bronze at the Athens Olympics in 2004, Popovich was on the bench for what were widely regarded as this country's two low points in the modern era of the international game. Then came China, where Popovich after waiting more than a decade to finally serve as head coach could not overcome his team's shortage of playmaking, shooting and rim projection in his first tournament after succeeding Mike Krzyzewski. Good luck predicting now what sort of squad (or coaching staff) will be available next year. If it becomes feasible for the N.B.A. to restart in June or July, it's quite possible that the beginning and end dates of the 2020 21 season will be pushed back and could overlap with the delayed Olympics. So it's no stretch to say that Olympic basketball itself may face an uncertain future with little appetite in league circles to spend much time on it now when so many domestic issues are unresolved. I realize all of the above falls under the heading of it's only sports. We're likewise talking about a postponement of the 2020 Olympics rather than an outright cancellation. Seeing what is happening all over the globe, in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic, none of this should be treated as tragic. Yet we are sports fans. Lots of us obsess and anguish over the trivial. My life has revolved around sports since I was 5 years old, and I bet many of you, like me, are not exactly sure how to switch that off. As an unabashed (and overly nostalgic) hoops nerd, I still find myself wrapped up in all sorts of Olympic hoops hypotheticals. Will Pop, the former Air Force cadet, ever experience one dose of red, white and blue glory to go with all that San Antonio success? Will the Golden State superstar Stephen Curry, who has yet to appear on the Olympic stage, get that chance someday? And what about LeBron James? He had not committed to play this summer, but he did acknowledge that "my name is in the hat" when U.S.A.B. announced a 44 man preliminary roster in February. If, again, the 2021 Olympics are still an option for N.B.A. players, James will have to be even more careful, at age 36 and in his 18th season, about overtaxing his body. And if I may: I am also prone to think of my own father whenever the patriarch of the San Antonio Spurs comes up. It has been this way for me ever since June 15, 2014, when Popovich, Tim Duncan and the Spurs clinched the franchise's fifth N.B.A. championship with a Game 5 victory over LeBron's Miami Heat. That same day Father's Day Reuven Stein succumbed to non Hodgkin's lymphoma after a seven year battle with the cancer. He was 74. While still at ESPN, I wrote a story about "The Reuvs" a year after his passing to explain that Father's Day had changed for me forever, and to share some stories about his colorful life. He greatly preferred, for example, to be referred to as "Father" rather than "Dad." But one anecdote I did not include was how he obsessively implored my brother, Orren, and me to "wash hands." Children on our street, and all the way into high school for me, delighted in razzing us about Mr. Wash Hands and the thick Romanian accent he couldn't quite shake even though his English vocabulary was next level. You ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I'll field three questions posed via email at marcstein newsletter nytimes.com. (Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you're writing in from, and make sure "Corner Three" is in the subject line.) Q: Before you talk about the Coach of the Year Award, we should be talking about General Manager Sam Presti. He set up Billy Donovan to succeed in a way few G.M.s could. As a fan, it's reassuring to see such a balanced team, not one that has just two superstars and a middling supporting cast like in so many years past. Broc Hite (Rogers, Ark.) Stein: Presti really is on a ridiculous run. It's no mystery why the Clippers gave up so much for Paul George how many other teams would have said no once they found out acquiring George would also bring them Kawhi Leonard? But the price was astronomical. Extracting five future first round picks from the Clippers and a young player as talented as Shai Gilgeous Alexander, with Danilo Gallinari on top of all that, was A maneuvering by Presti. It only got better for Presti and the Thunder, who had seemed to be in a dire situation after George requested a trade. Presti traded Russell Westbrook to Houston for Chris Paul and two more future first round picks and was widely expected to spend the next few months trading away veterans for more future assets. The stubborn, uber motivated Paul has instead led the surprising Oklahoma City to a share of fifth place in the West, thanks to a 40 24 record that matches Houston's. Add that all up and it's a very strong case for the Executive of the Year Award. It's difficult to properly handicap the race amid an indefinite shutdown, but I don't see any serious threats to Presti beyond Miami's Pat Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers' Rob Pelinka with the mandatory caveat that the executives do their own voting for this award. The Clippers face multiple factors that work against their front office team even after acquiring Leonard and George. They are unlikely to earn the West's No. 1 seed even if regular season play resumes, and they have had a fully healthy roster in only 11 games so far. Further disappointment (and pressure) stems from the knowledge that Leonard and George can return to free agency after next season, meaning that Steve Ballmer and Co. potentially gave the Thunder with an unprecedented trade haul for only one guaranteed playoff run if the 2020 postseason gets wiped out by the coronavirus. The Lakers' 64 win pace and surge to the top of the West certainly give Pelinka a shot, since he traded for Anthony Davis and hired another leading Coach of the Year Award contender in Frank Vogel. I will be curious to see how much credit Pelinka gets from his voting peers for the Davis trade given the role that Rich Paul, Davis's (and LeBron James's) agent, played in steering him there. Riley, who shared the executive trophy for the 2010 11 season with Chicago's Gar Forman, looks like Presti's toughest competition. The Heat certainly cooled in 2020 (17 15) after a 24 9 start to the season, but they have been restored to the East's top four faster than many N.B.A. prognosticators envisioned. That's all because of Riley and his trade for Jimmy Butler last summer in the face of considerable salary cap constraints, followed by the February acquisition of Andre Iguodala in a three team deal, which also shed the unwanted contracts of Dion Waiters and James Johnson. Q: You've worked for different companies within journalism. JaiKai14 from Twitter Stein: My pal Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports roped me into that five jobs/five tags game that has been circulating on Twitter recently. This respondent took issue with my listing of only two other jobs before referring to my journalism career as one job, as opposed to highlighting some of the individual stops. I assumed that the audience was looking to read about interesting (or uninteresting) jobs I may have held outside my current industry rather than my various stops as a sports reporter. Maybe I misunderstood the premise of the exercise, but it made little sense to me to simply list newspapers I worked for in the 1980s and 1990s. Because I was fortunate enough to get on my eventual career path so early, I had only two gigs in my life that did not involve news organizations. As covered in my tweet on the matter, I worked as a pro shop attendant at a tennis club, then as an employee in a sporting goods store, before I was able to fully focus on journalism at the Orange County Register, the Washington Post and the San Bernardino Sun before eventually moving on to N.B.A. jobs at the Los Angeles Daily News, the Dallas Morning News and ESPN. Stein: All good thanks for asking. Hope you and everyone are doing as well as they feasibly can under the most disruptive circumstances I can remember. Social distancing is rarely a problem for a loner like me, but it's certainly a major adjustment to spend so much time in the home office for someone accustomed to traveling and someone who does a lot of writing in coffee shops and restaurants even when at home. But I wouldn't dare complain. I am with my wife and two boys every day amid the most serious worldwide crisis of my lifetime. Covering the N.B.A. is a dream job, but my sons are both teenagers and work travel has meant missing so much that I can never get back. As scary and unsettling as this pandemic is, every day with them is precious. San Antonio's Gregg Popovich remains 64 wins shy of exceeding his good friend Don Nelson's N.B.A. record of 1,335 victories as a coach. The Spurs, whose league record run of 22 consecutive playoff appearances is in jeopardy, entered the N.B.A.'s hiatus in 12th place in the West at 27 36, four games out of a playoff spot behind Memphis (32 33). Seven teams can claim a plus/minus rating of at least 10 in the standings, which is calculated by subtracting a team's total home losses from its total road wins. The Bucks lead the league at 22, followed by the Lakers ( 18), Raptors ( 14), Clippers ( 12), Celtics ( 11), Nuggets ( 10) and Jazz ( 10). The Knicks' Mitchell Robinson is on course to break the league record for single season field goal percentage, with 74.2. The current record is Wilt Chamberlain's 72.7 for the Los Angeles Lakers in 1972 73 and you can count Robinson among those curious about how the league plans to address record book matters if the coronavirus crisis prevents the season from resuming. Dallas' Seth Curry, shooting 45.3 percent from 3 point range this season, has moved into the top spot in career 3 point percentage among active players at 44.3 nearly a full percentage point ahead of his older brother. Golden State's Stephen Curry (43.5 percent) has slipped to third on that list behind Seth and Miami's Duncan Robinson (43.8). It's only fair to point out that Stephen Curry, who has played in just five games for the Warriors this season, has attempted 5,739 3 pointers in his career 4,753 more than his younger brother's 986. The Heat's Robinson, in his second N.B.A. season, has just 578 career attempts.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The Italian soprano Anna Caterina Antonacci's recital at Zankel Hall this week was full of surprises: rarities by Respighi, Nadia Boulanger and Poulenc, as well as some angular patter music by Britten than seemed to prefigure Stephen Sondheim's "Company," decades before its premiere. For one of her encores, Ms. Antonacci sang the "Habanera" from "Carmen," but this foray into the extremely familiar was as eye opening as the rest of the program: Her voice rarely rose above a mezzo piano, which lent a beguiling mystery to a performance that verged on cabaret. In this video from the Opera Comique in Paris, Ms. Antonacci is louder, out of necessity, but is still seductively restrained in key moments, such as when she sings, with a tinge of horror: "If I love you, beware." JOSHUA BARONE Anna Caterina Antonacci's recital this week at Zankel Hall was a quietly shattering yet deeply satisfying evening, a study in aging, nostalgia and death pursued through ripe Respighi songs, autumnal Nadia Boulanger, changeable early Britten, wryly pained Poulenc. (And, as encores, exquisitely shaped Frescobaldi and that almost murmured "Habanera.") No program notes, no speeches from the stage; she treated her audience like adults, sharing with them an intimacy charged with mystery. All was lucid yet subtle, the emotions true and never overplayed. One of my favorite Antonacci moments, of many, is similar: Her entrance as Cassandre in a justly celebrated 2003 staging of Berlioz's "Les Troyens," and a first line "The Greeks have disappeared" delivered with shellshocked starkness. ZACHARY WOOLFE Andy Akiho's spirited concerto "Ricochet," which had its American premiere this week with the New York Philharmonic, is written for violin, percussion and ... Ping Pong. At David Geffen Hall, the dramatic table tennis passages unfolded on a platform behind the orchestra, a staging that lacked some of the drama of the concerto's world premiere in Shanghai. There, as you can see in this video, balls were free to fall anywhere, which made the chaotic finale all more thrilling as tubs of Ping Pong balls were dumped onto the table. The percussive sound of the balls lingers as they bounce and roll, falling onto the floor and into the audience. It's like a fermata on the final chord of a symphony, put through the prism of Mr. Akiho's imagination. JOSHUA BARONE I was sad to miss the performance this week of Christopher Rouse's Organ Concerto, with Paul Jacobs as the soloist, to inaugurate the newly installed Noack pipe organ at St. Paul's Chapel downtown. But I heard the concerto last spring, when the Los Angeles Philharmonic performed it with Mr. Jacobs playing Hurricane Mama, as Walt Disney Concert Hall's stunning organ is known. The piece is three movements and roughly 20 minutes, though it has the feel of one long, rollicking finale, in which Mr. Rouse repeatedly subverts centuries old cliches of the organ repertory. You can hear an example in this clip from the concerto's 2016 premiere with the Philadelphia Orchestra. The organ briefly stands alone with a calming drone reminiscent of ecclesiastical music only to be smashed away by loud tone clusters in the orchestra. In St. Paul's, moments like this must have been all the more exhilarating. JOSHUA BARONE "An Organ and Soon Another Lands on Broadway" A big week for organ music in New York began even before Trinity Wall Street's Organ Inauguration Festival celebrating the new St. Paul's instrument, which began on Monday. On Sunday, the excellent Renee Anne Louprette performed a recital on the superb Mander pipe organ in the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola on the Upper East Side, celebrating the 25th anniversary of its installation. She concluded an eclectic program with Maurice Durufle's Opus 5 Suite and its blockbuster Toccata. One virtuosic run follows another, perhaps best typified by finger busting scurryings gathering speed along a single keyboard, soon countered by deft clambering on the pedals. Then it's on to any number of other stunts. JAMES R. OESTREICH This week, I asked the superstar trio of Yo Yo Ma, Leonidas Kavakos and Emanuel Ax to choose a favorite page from the three piano trios written by Johannes Brahms, as they began an American tour with the pieces. One of the most striking things about spending time with them was to see just how much these three artists enjoy one another, how easy their camaraderie is and then to understand how that mutual confidence translates into their playing, with the merest glance, or the flicker of a smile, keeping them as one. DAVID ALLEN The eminent veterans Christoph Pregardien, tenor, and Julius Drake, pianist, came together a week ago in the 92nd Street Y's intimate Buttenwieser Hall to perform Schubert's shattering song cycle "Winterreise," the tale of a spurned young lover. Both artists brought deep insight to their roles, combining beautifully in sound and spirit, and creating no end of poignant moments. But I always find it hard to get past the first song, with its spoiler of sorts. The onset of gloom is dispelled for a moment a minute, actually with a shift to the major key that seems to bespeak a burst of optimism. But it can't last, and the return to gloom, the entire cycle in microcosm, is inevitably crushing. Here Mr. Pregardien performs the song with Michael Gees in a 2013 release. JAMES R. OESTREICH The bright acoustics of Gilder Lehrman Hall at the Morgan Library Museum seemed to pose problems, especially for sopranos, at the 47th annual George London Foundation Awards Competition Finals last week. A strong field of mezzo sopranos fared better. Among them, Samantha Gossard, 29, from Sidney, Ohio, gave a fine account of "Wie du warst," Octavian's Act I aria from Strauss's "Der Rosenkavalier." But the singer who most impressed me overall was the mezzo Rihab Chaieb, 30, from Montreal, who performed an aria from Tchaikovsky's "Jeanne d'Arc" and took one of six 10,000 awards. Here she sings four numbers, starting with "Wie du warst," at the 2014 Mirjam Helin International Singing Competition in Finland. JAMES R. OESTREICH	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The planned opening of the Shed, a new arts center in Manhattan, is still one year off, but its programming will begin this May with a free, 12 day collaboration between the architect Kunle Adeyemi of NLE Works and the artist Tino Sehgal. On an undeveloped lot at 10th Avenue and West 30th Street, a block away from the Shed's permanent home which is currently under construction "A Prelude to the Shed" will explore the integration of architecture and choreography in a temporary space where dancers move and reconfigure the structure. " 'Prelude' begins to demonstrate the Shed's mission to nurture artistic invention by commissioning and presenting new work for a wide audience," said Alex Poots, the founding artistic director and chief executive, in a statement. The program will feature a collaboration between Mr. Sehgal and the choreographer William Forsythe, as well as dances by Reggie "Regg Roc" Gray. In the evening, concerts will be held by the rapper Azealia Banks, the R B singer songwriter Abra and the producer Arca. Also included will be panels organized by Dorothea von Hantelmann, a writer and curator, and the Shed's artistic adviser, Hans Ulrich Obrist.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
SAN JOSE, Calif. Over the past year, Apple purged iPhone apps that helped people limit the amount of time they and their children spent on Apple devices, drawing accusations of anticompetitive behavior. On Monday, as news broke that federal officials were stepping up antitrust scrutiny of Apple and its peers, the Silicon Valley giant abruptly reversed its policy and quietly disclosed that the apps' practices were allowed. After promoting its latest software updates in a splashy two hour presentation on Monday morning, Apple articulated its new policy in a short blog post on a section of its website for developers. The post said parental control apps could now use two technologies that Apple had recently cited as grounds for their removal from iPhones. One technology, mobile device management, or M.D.M., enables parents to take control of a child's phone. The other is a virtual private network, or V.P.N., which parents can use to block certain apps on a child's phone. In the post, Apple said the apps could use the technologies if they didn't "sell, use or disclose to third parties any data for any purpose" and included that promise in their privacy policies. "These apps were using an enterprise technology that provided them access to kids' highly sensitive personal data," an Apple spokeswoman said in a statement. "We do not think it is O.K. for any apps to help data companies track or optimize advertising of kids." She did not say whether Apple had found evidence of the apps doing so. The app makers deny such activity. The spokeswoman declined to say why Apple had changed its mind. Fred Stutzman, the chief executive of Freedom, an app that helped people track and limit their time on iPhones, said, "My reaction is: Why this last year of pain? And we end up exactly in the same place." Apple removed Freedom from iPhones in August for using a V.P.N., without much explanation, Mr. Stutzman said. The move cost his business more than 1 million, he said. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. Apple's move followed an April report by The New York Times that it had purged some apps. On Monday, The Times and other publications reported that House lawmakers said they would step up their antitrust scrutiny of big tech companies and that the Justice Department would consider antitrust complaints against Apple. Apple's tight control over its App Store is likely to be central to any antitrust investigation of the company. Spotify and two parental control apps recently complained to European regulators that Apple was abusing its dominance of the digital marketplace, which has become one of the world's largest centers of commerce. Dutch regulators are also investigating the issue. And the Supreme Court recently allowed an antitrust class action to move forward, ruling that consumers can try to prove that Apple used the App Store to raise apps' prices. In response, Apple published a new webpage aimed at explaining its App Store policies and defending its practices. Apple said it tried to make the App Store a safe place for consumers and a good business opportunity for developers. It said it welcomed competition. Apple's reversal on Monday concluded a yearlong struggle for some app developers. At its annual developers conference in San Jose on June 4 last year, Apple unveiled a feature to help people limit the time that they and their children spend on the iPhone. Around that time, Apple quietly began removing or restricting apps in its App Store that offered similar services. In April, The Times reported on Apple's app removals. The makers of several banned apps told The Times that Apple was acting unfairly and had severely damaged their businesses. Apple responded to the article by saying it had removed the apps because they "put users' privacy and security at risk." The company added: "Contrary to what The New York Times reported over the weekend, this isn't a matter of competition. It's a matter of security." At the encouragement of Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive and one of the iPhone's creators, 17 of the affected app makers joined together and last week proposed a technological solution, called an application programming interface, or A.P.I., that they said would enable them to continue to help parents limit their children's screen time without invading their privacy. While the companies could offer a road map for resolving the issue, it would be up to Apple to create the A.P.I. Apple often creates A.P.I.s so software made by other companies can work well with its popular products, like the iPhone. "It's been a hellish roller coaster," said Dustin Dailey, a senior product manager at OurPact, which had been the top parental control iPhone app, with more than three million downloads, before Apple pulled it in February. OurPact, which had counted on its iPhone app for about 80 percent of its revenue, lost roughly 3 million from Apple's move, a spokeswoman said. In response to Apple's stance that the apps could gain too much control over a child's phone, Mr. Dailey said, his team shared information with Apple about how it handled user data. "We'd be open to an audit," he said. The affected parental control and screen time apps are not yet back in the App Store. Several had appealed Apple's decision to remove them, while others will probably have to reapply for entry.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
In format, though, "Bobbie Clearly" is a mockumentary in which the locals spend a lot of time answering questions about Casey and Bobbie from an unseen, unheard PBS reporter. Among those interviewed are Casey's earnest mother, taciturn father and gay brother, Eddie; two of Eddie's doofus classmates; Casey's friends Megan and Meghan, who think they are just alike but aren't; and Derek, an enthusiastic glad hand who was, at the time of the murder, Bobbie's Big Brother. The interview framework a tired shortcut for the hard job of developing character through action has the paradoxical effect of distorting character instead. When people rehearse facts they have no other reason to mention, and perform versions of themselves for unseen interlocutors, they come to seem thick and often foolish. The playwright's comic opportunism doesn't help. When Derek, speaking of the documentary, wonders whether it might get "nominated for an Oscar like 'Lord of the Rings'," he is plainly being painted as an idiot. And when the survivors band together to produce a series of "Milton's Got Talent" fund raising shows that we are roundly invited to mock, the play's more serious concerns are contaminated with a farcical off taste. These are standard freshman problems, the kind the Underground program, now in its 11th season, is designed to help playwrights learn to solve in the most efficient way possible: in front of a sophisticated audience. Even so, I wish the production, directed by Will Davis, achieved better control of its tone, which seems to wander wherever it wants instead of heading beelike toward its goal. On the other hand, Mr. Davis makes the most of the small Black Box space, configured by the set designer Arnulfo Maldonado as an encompassing corn crib. Mr. Davis also does right by the play's moments of highest tension and emotion, neither pushing them toward unwarranted resolution nor batting them away. He thus keeps us engaged in the unanswerable questions it is a dramatist's job to pose. Why does grief work so differently in different lives? Why is life so impossible for some people?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
BEACON, N.Y. At Dia:Beacon last weekend, Richard Serra's massive Torqued Ellipses shared a gallery with an exhibition that was much smaller, somewhat less stationary and far less permanent. It was the dancer and choreographer Steve Paxton, performing in a two weekend showing of "Steve Paxton: Selected Works." The museum has housed dance before, notably works by Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown, Mr. Paxton's contemporaries and former colleagues in the radical experiments of the 1960s and '70s. But Mr. Paxton, of comparable importance and influence, has been much more committed to the freedoms and strictures of improvisation: different every time, here and gone. So while the four works presented here span nearly 50 years, they are all in some sense new: remade in and of the present. What is reproduced are various shells, the structures once created by Mr. Paxton's uncommon and ever molting mind, now reinhabited by him and other dancers. The oldest is "Flat," from 1964. In this solo, a vintage "What is dance?" work, Mr. Paxton explored the ordinary movements of walking and sitting, focusing attention with freeze frame poses, some drawn from sports. Dressed in a sober suit, he took it off, hanging the pieces on hooks taped to his skin. The title of the work named its affect. The wit is beyond deadpan, and it was heightened by the staging at Dia:Beacon. Mr. Paxton tripled the solo, having three dancers (K. J. Holmes, Jurij Konjar and Polly Motley) do it at once, each at his or her own pace. The discrepancies emphasized timing and choice, while the dancers' spacing at receding distances down a long gallery inhabited by John Chamberlain's sculptures of crumpled car metal gave "Flat" depth.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Christine Goerke at the Metropolitan Opera, where she sings Brunnhilde in Wagner's "Ring" cycle this spring.Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Times Christine Goerke, who is getting ready to join the long, storied line of Brunnhildes who have scaled Wagner's epic "Ring" cycle at the Metropolitan Opera, walked into Valhalla. No, not the majestic castle in the sky where her character, a Valkyrie warrior, brings slain heroes to serve her father, the mighty god Wotan. This Valhalla is a bar in Hell's Kitchen, a few blocks south of the Met, that bills itself as "craft beer heaven." "I'm going to be a total jerk and have sparkling water," Ms. Goerke said at the bar, bowing to the coming marathon she faces in rehearsing and performing one of the toughest assignments in opera: her first complete "Ring" cycle, a sprawling 17 hour, four opera saga of gods, dwarfs, giants and humans that she will star in between March 25 and May 11. "But on May 12, I'm getting so drunk having all of the things." It's a triumphant return to the opera house where Ms. Goerke trained as an insecure young artist in the 1990s. When she sang the small role of the Third Norn in "Gotterdammerung," the fourth "Ring" opera, at the Met in 2000, she recalled, she would linger in the wings after her exit, watching the soprano singing Brunnhilde and thinking: "Some day." "I think if you talk to anyone who's ever been a young artist in any house, it's always hard to come back and feel like a grown up," Ms. Goerke said over her seltzer, remembering her young fears that she had not trained at the fanciest conservatories. "I'm going to be 50, and I still feel like I'm 24." "But then you wander out to get a cup of coffee," she added, "and you go across the street and there's a gigantic banner of yourself hanging on the side of the building which is beyond freaky." Raised on Long Island, Ms. Goerke overcame her self doubt to achieve success singing Mozart and Handel. Then catastrophe struck, in the form of a vocal crisis that nearly led her to quit opera. The problem, she found, was that her voice had grown too large for the roles she had been singing. She slowed down, retrained, and re emerged, against the odds, as one of the leading dramatic sopranos in the world singing the heavy, nearly impossible to cast Wagnerian parts that she sometimes calls "the 'spear and magic helmet' ladies," borrowing a line from the classic Bugs Bunny "Kill the Wabbit" parody. Great Wagnerian sopranos are few and far between. Only one or two may emerge each generation with the power to be heard over some of the largest orchestras in all of opera without amplification, the precision to hit the high notes, and the artistry to break your heart. Ms. Goerke's success has been big news in the opera world, which is usually grateful for singers who can merely get through such parts relatively unscathed. And the Met "Ring" will be her biggest test yet. A larger than life personality with an irreverent streak imagine a cross between the great Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson and Tina Fey she works hard and plays hard. While singing Brunnhilde last fall in Wagner's "Siegfried" at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, she and her Wotan, the bass baritone Eric Owens, dressed up for Halloween as the animated superheros of "The Incredibles." Some find it all a bit much. Others see it as a welcome antidote to opera's reputation for being elitist or snobby. "I got into it with one of my colleagues a little bit, who was like, 'I feel like that's dumbing down things,'" Ms. Goerke recalled. "And I was like, 'I think it's fun.' And you know, it's not 1945, and things are different. People are always trying to talk about how to make opera more accessible. And I feel like the way to make it more accessible is to let folks know that it is accessible. It's not the thing that's stuffy, and for your grandparents." In person Ms. Goerke comes across as warm, funny and unpretentious the kind of diva you would like to get a beer, or sparkling water, with. And her unusually frank, often humorous social media accounts offer glimpses into what it's really like to be a 21st century opera star, which rarely bears much resemblance to popular pearls and furs prima donna stereotypes. Sometimes she shares her hacks for life on the road: She travels with her own spices to cut the expense of stocking a kitchen in each new city, and always packs a supply of stick on hooks that allow her to rig curtains in rental apartments lacking blinds. Brunnhilde is, in many ways, the hero of the "Ring." She defies the gods, falls in love with a heroic dragon slayer and ultimately redeems the world through love before immolating herself. She appears in the final three of the cycle's four operas "Die Walkure," "Siegfried" and "Gotterdammerung" and although Ms. Goerke has sung them each individually, this will be her first time performing them together in complete cycles, as Wagner intended. "Ring" cycles tend to draw Wagner fans from around the world, who can be as obsessive as Deadheads. This one will likely draw plenty of critics, who will be measuring her performance against the legendary Brunnhildes of the past, as well as some of her old friends from Patchogue Medford High School on Long Island, where she once played in the band. All will be listening to hear whether Ms. Goerke lives up to her potential. She has surpassed expectations before. Patrick Summers, the artistic and music director of the Houston Grand Opera, conducted some of her earliest successes in Mozart and Handel. He remembered how devastated she was 15 years ago when those of kinds of roles were no longer comfortable for her. Her decision to reinvent herself was initially met with skepticism: When Mr. Summers cast her in Wagner's "Lohengrin" in Houston in 2009, he recalled, "I had some of my colleagues tell me it was crazy to think such a thing." But she triumphed, and he invited her back as Brunnhilde. "She so connects to Brunnhilde, because she's a warrior herself," he said. Andris Nelsons, who conducted her in breakout performances of Strauss's "Elektra" at the Royal Opera House in London and with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (including at a searing Carnegie Hall performance in 2015), said he was awed by her ability to sing with power, but also with chamber music like intimacy and by her dramatic intensity. "She lives on the stage, she loves on the stage, she hates on the stage," he said. "It's breathtaking." Mr. Neef said that Ms. Goerke was the only singer he had ever cast based on a video after watching a recording of an "Elektra" she had sung in Madrid in 2011. "I went into my artistic administrator's office, and said you have to hire Christine for all three Brunnhildes right away," he said. "Because if we wait, other people will figure it out, too." They did. When Peter Gelb, the Met's general manager, heard the frenzied ovation after Ms. Goerke sang the Dyer's Wife in Strauss's "Die Frau Ohne Schatten" staged there in 2013, he immediately offered her this season's "Ring." It is as formidable an assignment as opera offers, yet as she unwound at Valhalla the bar, that is she was already thinking about what comes next: She is studying the score of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde," perhaps the only work that matches the "Ring" in its demands on its lead singers. "That's my Everest at the moment," Ms. Goerke said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
The Avon, Ind., garage of Ed Ragsdale holds some of the 60,000 vintage license plates that he supplies to collectors and owners of vintage cars. AVON, IND. For some car collectors, completing a vehicle restoration with tires, wheels and paint that look period correct is just not enough. Even such details as the license plates must be the correct vintage. "It's the last detail," Jeff Minard, a license plate collector in Pasadena, Calif., said. "You get the owner's manual and then you really want the license plate." Mr. Minard, 65, explained that while antique plates could be valued collectibles on their own, they also made an ideal finishing touch for an old car. "It's part of the car's furniture," said Mr. Minard, who was a curator for "License Plates: Unlocking the Code," an exhibition of 220 plates on display through March 30 at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. The show celebrates the centennial of California's first state issued plate, which arrived in 1914. Like California, most states began issuing plates their original role was less about law enforcement and more about verifying that the car's owner had paid a tax in the early 1900s. Today, all but a handful of states let car collectors register vintage plates to their old cars, but some basic qualifications must be met: Vehicles generally need to be at least 25 years old, and the year on the plate must match the model year of the car. The requirements to qualify for year of manufacture, or Y.O.M., plates vary. In California, for example, all letter and number combinations must be cleared first. Cars in Illinois must be at least 25 years old to qualify, while Washington State requires them to be more than 30 years old. In Indiana, collectors may use vintage plates but are required to buy a historic vehicle plate, keep it in the car and renew it each year. Finding vintage plates can be challenging, but swap meets and websites like eBay and Craigslist help connect buyers and sellers. While some plate years, county codes and states are difficult to find, not all vintage plates are rare. Over the years, many plate collectors have rescued surplus plates ones that were never issued before their expiration from state motor vehicle offices before they were scrapped. "At the end of the year, I'd bring my pickup truck and start loading boxes of plates," said Greg Gibson, a collector in Fenton, Mich. Mr. Gibson is also the president of the Automobile License Plate Collectors Association, which counts among its members about 3,000 hobbyists from around the world. For Ed Ragsdale, 50, what began as a hobby turned into a business. After collecting for several years, in 2009 he found himself out of work, so he began selling vintage plates full time from his garage here in suburban Indianapolis. "I'm actually doing this as my job now," Mr. Ragsdale said. "I normally sell a plate every day, if not 10." His holdings include some 60,000 plates, many of which are the unused vintage examples called new old stock by collectors, that he and others saved from the trash. Some of his work is restoring and selling especially desirable plates that were in poor condition when he found them. Most of the business comes from car collectors looking for a Y.O.M. plate, he added. Parked outside the garage was a 1957 Pontiac Chieftain with a 1957 yellow and black Indiana plate. Perhaps no vintage plate has attracted so much mystique among mainstream car collectors as California plates issued in the mid 1960s. The simple design bears raised gold lettering on a solid black background. A seller offering a muscle car of the 1960s wearing a pair of California black plates brings to the bargaining table instant credibility even if the plates were not original to the car, experts say. "Black plate cars draw a premium because it is one and the same as saying it is a California car," said Randy Nonnenberg, 36, co founder of the San Francisco based website Bring a Trailer. "Our cars are on the whole pretty dry and not affected by the rust." Virginia first allowed old cars to wear vintage plates in 1983. "It was an alternative to the antique vehicle plates, which were available in all states," Mr. Gibson of the collectors group said. Many states allow old plates to transfer from owner to owner, potentially increasing the value of the vehicle. "It's an asset," Mr. Minard said. Market values of vintage plates differ widely. The earliest plates, which can sell for thousands of dollars, were not issued by states; motorists were assigned a number and then hand made their plates out of leather or iron. Early state issued plates are also valuable, including the flat, porcelain variety that, by the late 1920s, was replaced by embossed lettering. A state approved matching set of black plates regularly sells for hundreds of dollars though California's "legacy" plate program, signed into law last year, will let registrants buy a replica vintage plate and assign it to their car. Mr. Minard said he recently sold through eBay a pair of California black plates bearing the combination VVN442. Normally, the plates would have been worth about 200, but one bidder perhaps a fan of Oldsmobile muscle cars paid 600 for the pair. Prices have taken off as more states have adopted year of manufacture programs. "It's really changed the dynamic of the plate market," Mr. Gibson said. "To me, the holy grail was finding a 1901 New York plate because it was the very first plate that was issued in this country." He bought the handmade leather plate in 1983 for 125. Today, it is worth at least 1,000, he said. While vintage plate registration programs have made it easier for car collectors to put that authentic touch on their prized vehicle, plate collectors complain that their hobby is more challenging and more expensive. "What it did is raise the prices," Mr. Minard said. "As the car guy, you are going to want the nicest plate you can get. So, you'll pay 50, but the license plate collector will only pay 10."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
On a Sunday night Ms. Pelosi, a documentary filmmaker, was at the 92 Street Y to hear her mother, Representative Nancy Pelosi, in conversation with Paul Krugman, the economist and New York Times columnist. The next afternoon, she attended a fund raising lunch for Democrats, at a hotel on the East Side with Hillary Clinton. Then she popped over to the HBO headquarters at Bryant Park, where she has an office in a power corridor next to Ronan Farrow's and across the hall from Sarah Jessica Parker's. Later, she hurried down to N.Y.U. to hear her mother speak on a panel about women in power. Maybe it's just what you'd expect from the daughter of the House Democratic leader. But the younger Ms. Pelosi's cable news viewing habits may surprise you. "If I hear the term 'blue wave' one more time, I am going to personally walk up to MSNBC and punch someone in the face," she joked, between sips of coffee in the HBO cafe overlooking the New York Public Library. "Yes, there's a blue wave coming out of Manhattan and Los Angeles, where people are sitting home knitting their vagina hats. There's no blue wave in Alabama. There's no blue wave in Ohio." This year she brought her two sons, who are 10 and 11, on an odyssey across what Sarah Palin once called "real America." Together they went to Trump rallies ("Far more interesting than anything you'll hear at a Manhattan dinner party"), to the fabled and still under construction border wall, and into the homes of Trump voters. The result is "Outside the Bubble," as in Beltway, Ms. Pelosi's 12th film for HBO, to air on Monday. It's not just another episode of the learned cosmopolitan descending from the ivory tower to produce anthropological discourses on that strange creature known as the Trump voter and make it back to the big city in time for a martini. Though she is Democratic royalty, Ms. Pelosi has spent much of her career dissecting, with compassion, the psyche of the political right in America. "Everything she does, she immerses herself in doing," said Sheila Nevins, the grande dame of documentary who, when she was president of HBO Documentary Films, was Ms. Pelosi's champion. "She swallows her subjects whole and spews them out the way they should be spewed." For her part, Ms. Pelosi refers to Ms. Nevins as her "TV mom." Ms. Pelosi's first film, released in 2002, was "Journeys With George," shot during her time as NBC's embed on George W. Bush's campaign plane. Later, she parsed the beliefs of evangelicals in "Friends of God" (2007) and chronicled the rise of the Tea Party with "Right America: Feeling Wronged" (2009). "I was indoctrinated into a Democratic Party cult from a very early age," Ms. Pelosi said. "But I know that's not the only America and we need to understand the other side." She seems like one of the few trying. President Trump now refers to Democratic voters simply as "mobs." Hillary Clinton said in an interview with CNN this month that "you cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for." Even Michael Moore, the blue collar troubadour who foresaw Trump's path to victory, portrayed the president as a Hitler like manque in his most recent film, "Fahrenheit 11/9." If bridging today's partisan chasm seems an Augean endeavor, Ms. Pelosi believes cable news is to blame. "There's too much profit being made right now on the divide," she said. "How many people in those cable news studios ever really go spend the night in America, not just in the Four Seasons in wherever Trump is at the moment, but I mean really go to somebody's house, have dinner and talk to them?" Still, she remains a kind of bipartisan Wilkins Micawber, the optimistic clerk in"David Copperfield." "I don't think it's as bad as people are saying," Ms. Pelosi said. "I just don't know that we're as filled with hate as cable news leads us to believe. It's hard to hate up close." The film, which examines the issues on which Americans are most divided (immigration and abortion, for starters), is testament to her sunniness. In one remarkable exchange, a fanatical supporter of the president tells Ms. Pelosi, without realizing exactly to whom he is speaking, that his ilk refer derisively to the far left as "Nancy Pelosi's grandchildren." But, after the documentarian produces the actual grandchildren of Representative Pelosi for his perusal, he lowers his dukes and the unlikeliest of friendships is able to blossom. However, the younger Ms. Pelosi does concede that the connection between the president and his aggrieved electorate is unlike anything she's ever seen before. "It is cultlike, and there's nothing you can do to break it," she said. "The more outrageous he gets, the more they love him. They're like 'That's our guy!'" As for Ms. Pelosi's sang froid outside the bubble? "I get that Republicans have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to turn my last name into a curse word," she said. A blanket of ads works. "It's like, duh, you turn on the TV and you see McDonald's makes good fries. You can't blame them." She was once spit on by a Republican voter, she said, while filming at the Iowa state fair during John McCain's 2008 run. Later, in a room backstage at N.Y.U. before the panel, Representative Pelosi, not one hair out of place, chastised her daughter for not having brushed her own long, dark mane. Also in the room, chuckling at this perhaps familiar scene, were Ms. Pelosi's father, Paul; her sons; and her husband, Michiel Vos, a Dutch journalist she met at a film festival in Amsterdam. The younger Ms. Pelosi was wearing the green plaid skirt she first wore at Catholic girls school in San Francisco, a plum colored jacket and lilac glasses. She has long had an affinity for the color purple and said she is known as "the purple sheep" in the family. "What you have to know about Alexandra," Representative Pelosi said, "is that when she was a teenager in high school we didn't know this until later but at night she used to sneak out and go up to the University of San Francisco, where they had a radio station, and she used to go and do the graveyard shift." Alexandra said she remembers playing grunge and punk rock on the radio ("anything by SST records"), and having "the biggest loser boyfriends," who she defined as "dirty unwashed wannabe rock stars that never went anywhere but I thought they were the greatest guys in the world." She is the youngest, the fifth child born in six years, and it wasn't until she was nearly out the door that her mother seriously contemplated a run for office. The elder Ms. Pelosi remembers first broaching the topic with Alexandra, saying: "I'd probably be gone about three nights a week. Whatever answer you have is O.K. with me." To which her daughter replied: "Mother, get a life. What teenage girl wouldn't want her mother out of the house three nights a week?" It's been said that the younger Ms. Pelosi partly inspired the camcorder wielding character of Catherine Meyer on "Veep," the daughter of Julia Louis Dreyfus's Selina Meyer. "I can neither confirm nor deny," Ms. Pelosi said with a shrug. She almost never tells her mother about her work until she is finished with a project because, she said, "you don't want Nancy Pelosi editing your movie." This latest film is no exception. "I don't even know what it's about," Representative Pelosi said, with a look toward her daughter. Told it was about Trump voters, she said with convincing surprise, "Oh, is it?" then paused. "She holds these things very close to the vest." Has her youngest always been fascinated by "the other"? "Well, she's interested in the American people, she's not particularly interested in politics," Nancy Pelosi said. "She thinks, basically she's told me that we're talking heads and were largely boring." First elected to Congress in 1987, Representative Pelosi has seen many iterations of the divide. Is she as hopeful as her daughter about the state of the one we find ourselves in today? "Well, I do think that there were differences of opinion in our country and that's a healthy thing, our founders told us it's O.K. to disagree," she said. "But I do know what the president presents, and I think it's a message of fear that exacerbates any differences that we may have in our country." Does she mind that her grandchildren have been catching that president's roadshow? "It's great, it's great,'' she said. "They should see America in all of its manifestations." But then, like a good pol, she concluded with a cautious note: "I again haven't heard very much about all of this yet, because I haven't seen the movie."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
"Hillary and Clinton," a Broadway play that explores the relationship of a political power couple, will close on Sunday, four weeks earlier than scheduled. The play, by Lucas Hnath, stars Laurie Metcalf and John Lithgow and is directed by Joe Mantello. It opened in April; at the time of its closing it will have played 37 previews and 77 regular performances at the John Golden Theater. Set a hotel room in New Hampshire in 2008, the play imagines an interaction between Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton not the real ones, but characters with the same names in an alternate universe talking about her struggling campaign for president that year. The play, with Scott Rudin as a lead producer, cost 4.2 million to capitalize; that money has not been recouped. It is the third play that Mr. Rudin has shuttered in rapid succession this spring, following the early closings of a "King Lear" revival and the new play "Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
The Council of Fashion Designers of America gave top honors to Raf Simons, The Row, Narciso Rodriguez and the man behind Supreme? Fashion Gives Its Top Award to a Man Who Says He Isn't a Designer What does it mean to be a "designer"? What is the real role of an "influencer" in fashion? The CFDA awards a red carpet gobstopper of a night of mutual appreciation and Champagne for American fashion is not normally the place for big macro questions about how the industry defines itself. But Monday night at the Brooklyn Museum, that is exactly what happened. The questions were raised by the winners themselves. Especially the well, what do we call him? company founder whose win as Menswear Designer of the Year was the biggest upset of the night: James Jebbia of Supreme. A.k.a. the skate lifestyle brand known for its highly anticipated limited product drops, and ability to splash its red and white logo across everything from sweatshirts to baseball caps and bricks (also, in a collaboration, Louis Vuitton products). On stage, in his gray suit, almost imperceptible against the vibrant video backdrop, Mr. Jebbia thanked the CFDA for his statuette and noted: "I've never considered Supreme to be a fashion company or myself a designer." Earlier in the day Narciso Rodriguez, who took home the Lifetime Achievement Award for his 20 years in business, had acknowledged a different side of the same evolution. He said that, as an independent, "I always worked more from the heart than from the balance sheet. I don't have anyone telling me I have to show in a different country, with a collection made by a 'creative team.'" The point being, a lot of others now do. For most, though, it's not just about the clothes any more; the ability to drape or cut along a razor edge. It's also about buzz and communication and membership in a group; it's about the street and comfort and cool and how to get it (or fake it). And it is "hard,'' as Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen of The Row said when accepting their award for Accessory Designer of the Year (for the second time.) Think of it this way: While receiving his Members Salute from a host of designers including Donna Karan, Michael Kors, Diane von Furstenberg and Thom Browne a new award created, Ms. von Furstenberg said, because Mr. Lauren had "already won everything else" Ralph Lauren wore a tuxedo jacket, his signature faded jeans, and sneakers. That's why this year, for the first time at the CFDAs, an Influencer award was created. Probably that's the one Mr. Jebbia, whose business approach has had more effect on the way fashion is sold than any other brand, should have won. But he didn't; Kim Kardashian West did, largely it seemed because of her millions of Instagram followers. (Instagram being a metric deeply beloved perhaps misguidingly beloved of the fashion community.) Busy Philipps introduced Ms. Kardashian West, noting she was the woman who convinced everyone that "bike shorts and heels" was a good look (though actually it hadn't worked for Ms. Philipps personally). The Wife of Kanye arrived in a long white skirt and white top knotted under her bust, exuding humility and, in a moment of sly humor and self awareness, saying pointedly she was "kind of shocked I'm getting a fashion award when I'm naked most of the time ." Hard to argue with that one. Was her prize really about her influence on fashion, or using her influence to get a lot of people to pay attention to fashion at that moment? Probably the latter, if we are being as honest as she was. Going into the evening, the expectation had been that the issue of diversity would be at the heart of the night. Issa Rae was the first person of color to ever host the awards; Virgil Abloh, the first black man to be named artistic director of Louis Vuitton men's wear, had been nominated as Designer of the Year for both men's and women's wear (he's so celebrated at the moment, the other big surprise of the night was that he didn't win either prize); Edward Enninful, the first black man to ever run British Vogue, received the Media Award (from Oprah Winfrey!); and Naomi Campbell, the Fashion Icon award. And they did call the industry out, kind of, with Mr. Enninful saying, "We must learn that we are more alike than we are different," and noting that acceptance of diversity of all kinds, including point of view and body size, was his goal. Ms. von Furstenberg, given the Swarovski Award for Positive Change, charged everyone in the audience to start each day with an email to help someone else.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
In most places, a dollar is a dollar. But in the tax code envisioned by Republicans, the amount you make may be less important than how you make it. Consider two chefs working side by side for the same catering company, doing the same job, for the same hours and the same money. The only difference is that one is an employee, the other an independent contractor. Under the Republican plans, one gets a tax break and the other doesn't. That's because for the first time since the United States adopted an income tax, a higher rate would be applied to employee wages and salaries than to income earned by proprietors, partnerships and closely held corporations. The House and Senate bills vary in detail, but both end up linking tax rates to a whole new set of characteristics like ownership, day to day level of involvement, organizational structure or even occupation. These rules, mostly untethered from income level, could raise or lower tax bills by hundreds or thousands of dollars for ordinary taxpayers and millions of dollars for the largest eligible businesses. "We've never had a tax system where wage earners were substantially penalized" relative to other types of income earners, said Adam Looney, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former Treasury Department official. So a decorator, an artist or a plumber would have a higher tax rate than an owner of a decorating business, an art shop or a plumbing supply store. A corporate accountant could have a higher rate than a partner in an accounting firm. And under the House bill, which differentiates between active and passive investors, the head of a family business who works 60 hour weeks would have a higher rate than her brother, who doesn't work there and can spend his days sleeping on the couch. The proposals' impact rises steeply as paychecks grow. High income earners roughly the upper 10 percent who can take advantage of the new distinctions would be rewarded with substantial gains compared with those who can't. Supporters argue that the revised tax regime is an attempt to update the code to reflect changes in the economy. Rather than depend primarily on individual rate cuts to further power the economy, the Republican plans focus on cutting taxes on certain types of business income. The idea is that these businesses will reinvest those higher returns and stimulate growth. Corporations and other types of businesses get the biggest cuts. Employees don't. "Theoretically, this makes a certain amount of sense in a vacuum," said Jared Walczak, a senior policy analyst at the conservative Tax Foundation. "It's just difficult to define what constitutes wage income compared to business income." Indeed, economists and tax experts across the political spectrum warn that the proposed system would invite tax avoidance. The more the tax code distinguishes among types of earnings, personal characteristics or economic activities, the greater the incentive to label income artificially, restructure or switch categories in a hunt for lower rates. Expect the best paid dentists to turn into corporations so that they can take advantage of the new 20 percent corporate tax rate, instead of having to pay a top marginal rate of nearly 40 percent on some of their income. Individual income taxes can be deferred on profits left inside a corporation instead of deposited in a personal account. What's more, corporations can deduct local and state taxes, which individual filers can't. Look for a wave of promotions as staff lawyers on salary suddenly turn into partners to qualify for the 23 percent deduction the Senate bestowed on pass through businesses. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Pass throughs, which range from an ice cream stand to multibillion dollar operations like Georgia Pacific (a Koch Industries subsidiary) and Fidelity Investments, don't pay corporate taxes. Instead they pass through income to their owners or shareholders, who pay taxes at the ordinary rate on their individual returns. The Republican provisions applying to pass throughs have been singled out for some of the greatest scorn. Writing about the House version, Dan Shaviro, a professor of taxation at New York University Law School who worked on the 1986 tax overhaul, said it "might be the single worst proposal ever prominently made in the history of the U.S. federal income tax." Uneven treatment is compounded by other rules that unintentionally introduced preferences. To prevent certain professionals and specialists like investment managers, doctors, athletes, performers and others from reorganizing themselves as pass throughs, the Senate excluded households with joint incomes of 500,000 or more (and 250,000 for single taxpayers). But the peculiar way the income scale is phased out means that solo practitioners and partners who earn roughly 529,000 to 624,000 could face a tax of up to 85 percent on income between those two thresholds, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. A graph of the rate increase looks as if a skyscraper were plopped in the middle of an open field. That is a powerful incentive to search for tax shelters. At the same time, an unrelated rule that closes a loophole affecting highly paid corporate executives will have the effect of allowing pass through corporations but not traditional corporations to deduct compensation over 1 million. "The more you look at any of the major rules, the more ambiguities, glitches, clearly unintended consequences and tax planning opportunities you see," said Michael L. Schler, a lawyer in the tax department of Cravath, Swaine Moore. He has written a 50 page summary of the more glaring problems, scheduled to be published soon in Tax Notes. That included both earned income money generated by a day's labor and what is called unearned income, which includes dividends, interest on bonds, alimony, rent, royalties, licensing fees and pension checks. If anything, wage earners, at least in the popular imagination, were elevated above the original "coupon cutters" not thrifty housewives but those who lazed on the couch and collected income generated by securities, which they clipped at the corners to redeem. In the 1920s, steely capitalists worried that such indolent fat cats would undermine entrepreneurship while fiery radicals ridiculed their only work as picking up a ticket at the opera box office. But despite countless loopholes, exemptions and special breaks in the tax code, there was never a move to single out employee compensation from other earned income. Efforts to simplify the system and move closer to uniform rates were most successfully championed by President Ronald Reagan and congressional Democrats when they sharply lowered individual rates in the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Earnings and even long term investment gains were briefly taxed at the same rate for the top bracket. "There was a simple notion there," said C. Eugene Steuerle, a deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy during Mr. Reagan's second term and now an economist at the Urban Institute. "We said, 'Let's create a top rate that is as even as we can get it across all sorts of structures and most types of capital income.'" The source didn't matter. Long term capital gain rates were again lowered in the 1990s. And the tax code took a major step away from the reform act in 2003 under President George W. Bush when dividends, like long term capital gains, were taxed at a lower rate than wages. Relative to the Reagan approach, Mr. Steuerle said, the latest Republican bills are "moving in the opposite direction." In some eyes, the message contained in the bills is as disturbing as the practical impediments. Tax codes are as much about values as they are about accounting. And rates and breaks are deployed to encourage or discourage various types of activities. "Wage income will be the highest taxed income," said John L. Buckley, a chief of staff for Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation in the 1990s. That's what more than 80 percent of working Americans get. "I think it's grossly unfair." he added. "Somebody working for a wage gets a higher tax rate than somebody doing the same job under a different legal structure."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
"I'm up before the birds," said Simon Huck, sitting in his living room lined with velvet walls that change color depending on the light. It was 8 a.m., and Mr. Huck had already eaten lunch. Mr. Huck, 34, owns Command Entertainment Group, a company that connects brands (over 100 annually, he said, including the consumer goods giant Unilever) to celebrities and "influencers." His business has gotten a significant boost from his close friendship with Kim Kardashian West, who has 106 million Instagram followers, though she is not a client. "He's always been there at times when I've needed him," Mrs. Kardashian West said in a phone interview. "He's the definition of loyal. I feel like you need to surround yourself with people who make you laugh and keep your spirit alive as you grow and evolve." Also, "he's someone that will drop anything and everything to really talk you through something," Mrs. Kardashian West said. As it happened, Mr. Huck had just picked something up: a leather briefcase. Wearing Saint Laurent jeans and a black T shirt, he was walking the five minutes from his apartment in the West Village of Manhattan to the Soho House, where most mornings he does a few hours of emails or meetings before heading to his office a few blocks away. Mr. Huck has been the sole owner of his company since 2012, when he bought out his partner, Jonathan Cheban, the reality TV star. He now employs seven and travels frequently, often watching his deals come to life hey, there's Neil Patrick Harris for Heineken Light! on the television screen of an airport lounge or hotel room. "It's the most gratifying feeling, to see it all come together," he said. If Mr. Huck is awake, he is working, phone in hand even when vacationing in Greece or in the Middle East with Mrs. Kardashian West. "He could be on a camel in Egypt reciting a paragraph from the contract," said Carla Laur, a commercial endorsement agent at Creative Artists Agency who has worked on dozens of deals with Command Entertainment Group. Mr. Huck suggested his dedication arises from mistrusting his good fortune. "I still have moments where I feel like someone is going to pull the rug from under me and be like, 'You actually have to go to law school,'" he said. "It sometimes all feels like a dream." The seeds of success were sown during a snowstorm in 2005, when he was taking a break from studying political science at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, and flipping through the pages of US Weekly. The high profile publicist Lizzie Grubman had been spotted making out with the singer John Mayer at the New York City hot spot Marquee. "I went home, spent 24 hours on Google researching everything about P.R. and found Lizzie's number," Mr. Huck said. Two days later he was in Manhattan for the first time. Wearing a shiny khaki suit and square toed Diesel shoes, Mr. Huck, positive he looked "so New York," was given two minutes with Ms. Grubman's chief financial officer. "I was bumbling all over the place," Mr. Huck said. "I left the office and I remember doing a Myspace upload in the elevator." One hour later, Mr. Cheban, then Ms. Grubman's partner, called him to come back in. He had a job well, an unpaid internship. Mr. Huck abandoned his college apartment and everything in it, packed a duffel bag and stayed on friends' couches for two years. He worked putting together invitation lists and securing red carpet press. Sean Combs's White Party in the Hamptons was one of his first big projects.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
For apartment hunters who think that Brooklyn has become too glassy in recent years, with some buildings that look like as if they had floated up from South Florida, a new condominium in Boerum Hill may come as a relief, particularly its lower floors. Most of the facade of 465 Pacific Street, a low slung 30 unit condo now under construction, will be made largely of brick, a finish that recalls the 19th century Greek Revival townhouses on surrounding blocks, which are among the most coveted in the borough. Windows aren't the trendy curtain wall variety, but are sized more modestly, in keeping with the traditional spirit of the neighborhood. There will be some unusual touches at the building, which is being developed by Avery Hall Investments and the Aria Development Group. The upper stories are to be faced in dark metal and set back from the street. "It's appropriate, it's contextual, and it doesn't offend the neighborhood," Avi Fisher, a founding principal of Avery Hall, said of the overall design, as he led a tour of the L shaped block through site, which also is bordered by Atlantic Avenue and Nevins Street.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
In the debate over fracking of oil and gas wells, opponents often cite the risk that the process can set off nearby earthquakes. But scientists say that in the United States, fracking induced earthquakes are not common. In Canada, however, a spate of earthquakes in Alberta within the last five years has been attributed to fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, in which water, chemicals and sand are injected at high pressure into a well drilled in a shale formation to break up the rock and release oil and gas. Now, scientists at the University of Calgary who studied those earthquakes, near Fox Creek in the central part of the province, say the quakes were induced in two ways: by increases in pressure as the fracking occurred, and, for a time after the process was completed, by pressure changes brought on by the lingering presence of fracking fluid. "The key message is that the primary cause of injection induced seismicity in Western Canada is different from the central United States," said David W. Eaton, a professor of geophysics at the University of Calgary and co author of a paper in the journal Science describing the research. The findings could help regulators take steps to avoid such induced earthquakes, he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Tiffany Haddish said, "I had auditioned for 'S.N.L.' three different times, so to me it was, 'Finally, I'm here.'" Last year was a huge one for the actress, comedian and writer Tiffany Haddish, who starred in the hit "Girls Trip" with big name actresses Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith and Regina Hall, and stole every scene. Her performance earned her the best supporting actress award from the New York Film Critics Circle, which is handing out the prizes on Wednesday. (She was snubbed by the Golden Globes, to much surprise). She also became the first black female comic to host "Saturday Night Live," bringing down the house with her infectious energy and sly advice for men accused of sexual misconduct. ("Listen fellas. Listen, O.K.? If you've got your thang thang out, and she got all her clothes on, you're wrong! You're in the wrong!") In December, she spoke with me by phone, while dashing between media appearances in New York. TIFFANY HADDISH How are you doing, girl? I'm great. Thanks for chatting. This has been such a breakthrough year for you. It must feel dizzying. I wouldn't say it like that. It's more like breaking into song finally it is happening to me, right in front of my face and I know I'm excited. Finally it's happening to me, after all the hard work and now it's paying off. I just made that up. I'm in a car heading back to my hotel in New York. I'm doing press for my book "The Last Black Unicorn." I did "The View." It's so cool I got to be on with Whoopi. I got to meet Trevor Noah last night, then "Good Morning America." I got to dance with George Stephanopoulos . I'm going to "Sesame Street" today. It's a dream come true. I always wanted to meet the puppets. Were you nervous before going on "S.N.L.," worried about having to address the sexual harassment stuff? I was more excited and kind of ready to get it done. And I didn't feel like I had to address it, but the show was telling me I should talk about current events. That's the most current thing I know, and that's what everybody's talking about in the beauty shop. These nasty men being called out. Have you had to deal with sexual harassment? How did you deal with it? I always make fun of the guy. I make it a joke. If they touch me, I say, "Take your damn hands off me." Most of the time they get scared. And I let everyone know I'm a tattletale. That I will snitch. That might be why it took me so long to get where I'm at now. You hit big this year, but were you ever discouraged? There've been times I felt like, "I don't know if I want to do this." That maybe I should go back to school and become a special education teacher. But I love entertaining. You were so believable and spontaneous in "Girls Trip." Were you following the script, or was a lot of that your own stuff? They would let me play and do my own version of what they said. I would say 75 to 85 percent of it was me. Did you have to audition? I auditioned like four times. The final was a Skype audition with the director. It was super uncomfortable. I'm not used to auditioning over Skype. I'm used to doing other things on Skype. I said, "If I start coming out of my shirt or something like that, remind me where I'm out." They had me do the character four or five different ways, and two weeks later I got the job and had to fly to New Orleans in three days. Had you met your co stars before? Were you intimidated working with them? I hadn't met anybody. I was ready for it. I feel like they're people just like I'm a person, so why would I be intimidated? We're all the same. I was just excited. Very excited. You were the first black female comic to ever host "Saturday Night Live." What did that feel like, breaking that barrier? I had auditioned for "S.N.L." three different times, so to me it was, "Finally, I'm here." And I was super grateful to be there in that capacity, as opposed to as a regular performer. To be a host is a super big honor. I couldn't believe I was the first black woman comedian to do it. I Googled and saw that Whoopi Goldberg had been on it, so I reached out to her. I said, "Have you ever done "S.N.L."? She said, "Only a sketch." I said, "You never hosted?" And she said, "You the first, bitch, you better do a good job." Was it a surprise, winning the New York Film Critics Circle Award for best supporting actress? I didn't know that existed. I had to ask people, "What is the importance of it?" Jada called me and told me, "I'm so proud of you." I was like, "What do you mean?" She was like, "Girl, it is an honor." And I said, "Why is it an honor?" And she said, "It's an honor because they don't like people." I said, "Yeah they do, they gotta like somebody." And she said, "It's really hard to get in. You did a good job." I still had to Google them to try to figure out how prestigious they were. Well thank you for taking the time. It's been wonderful speaking with you. Thank you, it's wonderful speaking with you too, girl. I hope you get a million dollars or meet the man of your dreams. I hope something magical happens for you, girl.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Even as a pigtailed child, Ashley Gallagher was self conscious about a certain fullness in her face. "I was cute as button and there was my double chin," she said. As an adult, she faithfully performed facial exercises purported to tighten the area under the chin. She stood ramrod straight, head held high, to make the bulge less apparent. Nothing worked. By middle age, Ms. Gallagher, 51, the owner of a pet sitting business in Torrance, Calif., was avoiding mirrors and considering liposuction, but she worried about the effects of anesthesia and the recovery time. Then she discovered another option: a series of fat reducing injections intended to slim down a double chin. She enrolled in a trial, and by the third treatment session, "I noticed a dramatic difference," she said. "It was receding." The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved the injection, called Kybella, for the reduction of moderate to severe fat deposits under the chin. The active ingredient, deoxycholic acid, dissolves fat, permitting dermatologists and plastic surgeons to resculpt the chin area without surgery. "For highly selected patients who have under chin fat without sagging skin, this will work," said Dr. Rod J. Rohrich, a professor of plastic surgery at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. He was not involved in the clinical trials. Dr. Rohrich, editor in chief of the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, predicted that both men and women would want the procedure. "So many consumers don't want a knife; they want a needle," he said. Men in particular are not inclined to undergo cosmetic procedures that require long recovery, he said, but might be tempted by minimally invasive treatments in a doctor's office. "We are basically wimps," Dr. Rohrich said. Tiny needles containing deoxycholic acid up to 50 per session are inserted into the fat deposits under the jawline. Treatment entails two to six monthly sessions of roughly 20 minutes each. Patients must commit to multiple visits. In studies conducted for F.D.A. approval, the most commonly reported side effects were bruising, pain and swelling. Dr. Derek H. Jones, a dermatologist and a principal investigator in a trial of the drug's effectiveness, found that people with the most fat had the most swelling. It usually cleared up in 48 to 72 hours. "That makes sense, because you're destroying more fat cells," said Dr. Jones, a paid consultant who will teach injectors and who treated Ms. Gallagher. In his experience, the first treatment is the most painful. The injections will be commercially available in late summer, after doctors are trained to give them. The price for Kybella is not yet set. Not every patient is a good candidate for this treatment, several experts said. If a patient has excess fat and loose skin, Dr. Rohrich said, "you'll have a crepey neck and need a neck lift" after fat is reduced with the shot. Neck lifts can cost 5,000 or more. Ms. Gallagher before the injections to slim down her double chin. The drug does not target only fat cells. It will also destroy skin cells if inadvertently injected into the skin, the F.D.A. has warned. "If you inject into the dermis, you can hurt the skin," Dr. Rohrich said. "This drug needs to go into fat tissue to work." Misdirected injections could even harden skin, he said. Kythera Biopharmaceuticals conducted two randomized trials to assess the efficacy of Kybella. More than 1,000 patients at 70 sites in the United States and Canada participated. The pooled results from both trials found that 68.2 percent of patients who got the drug saw at least a one grade reduction in fat, compared with 20.5 percent of patients who got sham injections. Grading was determined by clinical examination and answers on a standardized form. Sixteen percent of patients who received the real injections saw a reduction of two grades in under chin fat. Only 1.5 percent of the placebo group saw that level of improvement. M.R.I. scans also showed that under chin volume had decreased more in treated patients than in ones who received placebos. Dr. Lynn A. Drake, a dermatologist and lecturer at Harvard Medical School, was the chairwoman of the F.D.A. advisory committee that unanimously voted in favor of approval in March. "The benefits outweigh the risks," said Dr. Drake, who does not speak on behalf of the F.D.A. Still, she cautioned, patients will need to choose a well trained doctor for the procedures. "When people put needles around your face, it has so many important structures that could be accidentally or inadvertently hit," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
"Julietta," a 1930s opera by the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu, has long been a rarity outside the composer's homeland. One problem may be the surreal story. The residents of an isolated coastal town have no memories of anything before the present moment. Whenever strangers show up, which isn't often, they are forced to tell the townspeople their stories; appropriating someone else's memories is at least better than having none. But, of course, those stories are soon forgotten. Then Michel, a bookseller from Paris, arrives in search of a girl he'd heard singing three years earlier. Her voice has haunted him since. The work was an auspicious success at its 1938 premiere in Prague. But, beyond its convoluted plot, the score, for all its harmonic lushness and myriad colorings, has been deemed frustratingly episodic and stylistically eclectic. Leon Botstein, the conductor and tireless champion of overlooked works, considers "Julietta" an operatic masterpiece that at least deserves a place in the repertory. On Friday at Carnegie Hall, he made his case by leading a winning cast and the American Symphony Orchestra in a vibrant concert performance. Martinu (1890 1959) is best known today for his orchestral works. But during his career, which took him to Paris between the two world wars and, in 1941, to the United States, he was absorbed by opera, including experimental works incorporating film. He adapted a Czech libretto for "Julietta" from a French play (subtitled "The Key of Dreams") by Georges Neveux, who pronounced the opera superior to his play. Given the popularity of television dramas and films steeped in phantasmagoria and creepiness, "Julietta" could fit our cultural moment. The opera's engrossing mix of bleak humor and Kafkaesque confusion starts in the opening scene, when Michel (the tenor Aaron Blake) encounters a young boy who accuses him of making things up. The stranger's arrival soon has residents abuzz during a bustling scene at a market. A police chief, impressed with Michel's memory, declares him the new town captain. Before long, though, the chief forgets this pronouncement, as well as his own position. Martinu's musical language is a hybrid. There are nods to the Czech heritage of Dvorak and Smetana. During hazy, atmospheric passages you hear echoes of Debussy. Scenes alive with pulsing frenzy recall the Stravinsky of "Petrushka" and "Les Noces." Martinu's vocal writing follows the cadences of the Czech words, even during romantic scenes that seem ripe for soaring melody. In the town, Michel finds the girl he's been searching for, Julietta (the soprano Sara Jakubiak). When she first sees him, she thinks her beloved, having sailed away, has finally returned. But they have never really been together, Michel tries to explain. Julietta's fraught vocal lines here almost take off into stretches of radiant lyricism buffeted by plush orchestral sonorities. Yet, like her memory, the melodies are short lived. The opera comes to a climax in Act II when Julietta, looking at postcards from a memory vendor, imagines the sojourns she and Michel have shared. This just provokes Michel to wrenching despair and, finally, fury. The orchestra does the heavy lifting in advancing the drama, including during many stretches of spoken dialogue, accompanied by a few solo instruments or a florid piano, or, at times, skittish symphonic bursts. Act III shifts to a Central Bureau of Dreams, where an official explains to Michel that he has just been dreaming. So it's all a dream? I found this revelation too pat. And it comes fairly late in a long score (nearly three hours of music) that sometimes feels inflated Mr. Blake an endearing and sweet sounding Michel, sung with youthful fervor and stamina led an excellent cast. Ms. Jakubiak brought a rich, earthy, expressive voice and disarming vulnerability to Julietta. The robust tenor David Cangelosi doubled as the police chief and the clerk. Other versatile cast members also sang multiple smaller roles, including Alfred Walker as the memory vendor and a mysterious man in a helmet; Rebecca Jo Loeb as the young boy and a bellhop; and Tichina Vaughn as an ominous palm reader who tells of the past rather than predicting the future. I hope these dedicated singers get a chance to perform their roles again. Mr. Botstein has done his part by bringing a worthy and original opera to attention.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
After fidgeting their way through six days of opening arguments in the impeachment trial of President Trump, rank and file senators were at last allowed to participate, as Wednesday kicked off up to 16 hours of question and answer time spread over two days. Roughly speaking, this was the impeachment version of a cross examination, minus the drama and edge of a regular trial. Impeachment Q. A.s are designed to avoid direct confrontation. Senators submit questions for counsel in writing, on small tan cards that are handed to Chief Justice John Roberts to read aloud. The only time the senators speak is when informing the chief justice that they're "sending a question to the desk." As such, Wednesday's proceedings must have been frustrating for lawmakers. On the one hand, they were getting to ask questions. On the other, they weren't allowed to pose the questions themselves, thus eliminating the opportunity for showboating. This is a little like forbidding your dog to bark at squirrels. It goes against the laws of nature. The chief justice, by contrast, was at last getting to do something other than gavel the sessions open and closed and try not to hoot at some of the outlandish legal arguments that have been floated this past week. Back and forth he went with the questions serving up one from the Republicans, then one from the Democrats round after round.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
In their respective genres ballet and contemporary dance the choreographers Justin Peck and Kyle Abraham have been blessed and cursed by critics as the potential voices of their generation. Both have highly anticipated premieres this week. Hype aside, both are smart and refreshing artists, consistently offering satisfying theatrical experiences. Uptown at Lincoln Center, Mr. Peck, recently named New York City Ballet's resident choreographer, unveils a new work at that company's fall gala on Tuesday. (David H. Koch Theater, 212 496 0600, nycballet.com) Downtown, at New York Live Arts, Mr. Abraham concludes a two year residency with an ambitious double program for which he's recruited the help of the visual artist Glenn Ligon and the Grammy winning experimental jazz musician Robert Glasper. One night features the evening length "Watershed"; the other program is a collection of three works. Cumulatively, they continue Mr. Abraham's exciting investigation into race, politics and identity. (219 West 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 924 0077, newyorklivearts.org)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
In May and June, conservationists discovered the carcasses of 356 elephants in Botswana's Okavango Panhandle. Some of the animals appeared to have collapsed and died suddenly, while walking or running. Others seemed disoriented, walking in circles before they died. While the elephant deaths have ceased, their cause has remained a mystery, creating fears among some experts about the future of the mighty mammals in a country where their conservation has largely been a success story. None of the bodies contained bullet holes and no tusks were removed, implying that ivory poachers were not involved. Some experts suspected that poisoning by local people might still be to blame, while others thought something in nature was the most likely explanation. On Monday, Botswanan officials announced their answer: Neurotoxins produced by cyanobacteria, a type of microscopic algae, caused the elephants to die after they drank from large puddles that formed after rains. While some conservationists accepted the explanation, others did not consider the mystery solved and feared that the elephants could again face renewed danger. Cyril Taolo, deputy director of Botswana's Department of Wildlife and National Parks, announced the government's findings at a news conference. "There's absolutely no reason to believe that there was human involvement in these mortalities," he said. "This is not a phenomenon that was just seen now, it is something that happens quite a lot when there are these environmental changes." Mmadi Reuben, the government's principal veterinary officer, added that "there are a lot of questions that still need to be answered," including why elephants were the only species that died and what caused the deadly outbreak. Some conservationists were also concerned that the government did not disclose the name of the lab that produced the findings, nor did officials reveal how many samples were taken and from where, which tests were performed and which species of cyanobacteria was implicated. Officials did not respond to interview requests. "There's just so many questions that are outstanding," said Pieter Kat, director of LionAid, a nonprofit conservation organization, and who has worked extensively in Botswana and researched wildlife diseases there. "They need to be completely transparent about the laboratories the samples were sent to and the lab reports." Most types of cyanobacteria that produce neurotoxins occur in marine environments, where they can cause red tides. A few species are found in freshwater around the world, and they sometimes kill dogs, cattle and other animals that drink from or swim in contaminated water bodies. "One of the biggest unresolved issues is why there seems not to have been collateral mortality," said Chris Thouless, head of research at Save the Elephants, an organization based in Kenya. "That is one of the reasons we originally said this was not a probable explanation, because other animals didn't seem to be dying." Elephants account for the majority of wildlife in the area, but cattle are also found there, Dr. Thouless said. He has not been able to verify, however, whether cattle drink from the same bodies of water used by elephants. That said, he added, "While no suggested cause is a perfect fit to observations, this one is less improbable than the others, so I am inclined to accept it, particularly since this is supported by lab results." There are several possible explanations for why only elephants died, said Roy Bengis, a veterinary wildlife specialist at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, who formerly served as chief state veterinarian at Kruger National Park. It could be that elephants are "exquisitely sensitive" to whichever particular neurotoxin killed them, whereas other species are more resistant, Dr. Bengis said. "We know this happens different species of animals have different tolerances." Elephants also drink copious amounts of water, up to 40 gallons a day, so they would be taking in a larger dose of toxin than a smaller animal. Additionally, unlike most other species, elephants "actually go and frolic in the water and roll in the mud and spray themselves," Dr. Bengis said. The neurotoxin might have been absorbed through their skin. Why vultures and other scavengers were not impacted is another unanswered question. A neurotoxin would most likely have been concentrated in the elephants' relatively small and inaccessible brains and spinal cords, making it less likely to be consumed, Dr. Bengis said. But not all conservationists are convinced that toxic algae are responsible. "The chance was lost to find out what has really happened to the elephants, because of the government of Botswana's unwillingness to collaborate with the research community at an early stage," said Keith Lindsay, a conservation biologist at the Amboseli Trust for Elephants in Kenya. "There remain big questions over whether any useful samples were collected." Dr. Bengis added that without seeing the lab results or knowing more about the samples, "I can't say yea or nay with regards to whether this diagnosis is correct or incorrect, or possible or impossible."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
After a judge dismissed the Viacom mogul Sumner Redstone's competency trial, a lawyer for his ex girlfriend said that his client was trying to protect the 92 year old billionaire from his daughter. LOS ANGELES The trial over the mental competency of the ailing media mogul Sumner M. Redstone was over almost before it began. Yet in the course of nearly six months, from the time it first burst onto the public stage in November until its abrupt dismissal on Monday after just one day of testimony, the legal battle provided a series of stunning revelations about Mr. Redstone's personal life as well as his reign over his 42 billion media empire. There were the embarrassing, prurient claims about the sexual desires and deteriorating health of Mr. Redstone, who had not been seen publicly since a party for his 92nd birthday last May. There was the investor turmoil over corporate governance at his two big entertainment companies, CBS, whose shares have plunged nearly 8 percent in the last year, and Viacom, down 39 percent. Mr. Redstone was forced to step down as chairman of both companies, a development he had long declared would never occur. And there was the return of his long ostracized daughter, Shari Redstone, who gradually worked her way back into his life. The decision on Monday by Judge David J. Cowan of Los Angeles County Superior Court to dismiss the suit closed one chapter of this drawn out saga of money, love, power and the future of Mr. Redstone's personal and business empires. The dismissal was a blow to Manuela Herzer, Mr. Redstone's former lover, who brought the suit challenging Mr. Redstone's mental capacity, and a clear legal victory for Mr. Redstone and, by extension, his daughter. "I am grateful to the court for putting an end to this long ordeal," Ms. Redstone said in a statement. "I am so happy for my father that he can now live his life in peace, surrounded by his friends and family." At that point, Mr. Redstone's interests in CBS and Viacom are to be held by an irrevocable trust that was created for the benefit of his five grandchildren. Among the trust's seven voting members are his daughter and Philippe P. Dauman, the chief executive of Viacom, who have disagreed on how the company should be managed. News emerged late Monday that members of Viacom's board of directors were evaluating Mr. Redstone's position at the company after considering the information about his condition that was made public during the trial, according to a person with knowledge of the deliberations. That information includes the transcript of the videotaped testimony from Mr. Redstone, along with the evaluation by a geriatric psychologist. The judge, in his evaluation of the testimony, said "it is also not in dispute that Redstone suffers from either mild or moderate dementia." The board is scrutinizing not only Mr. Redstone's pay his total compensation was 2 million in the 2015 fiscal year, down from 13 million the previous year but also his continued role at the company, this person said. It is not clear whether the board of directors at CBS is making the same considerations. Spokesmen for Viacom and CBS declined to comment. The development was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. The legal tussling and the potential for more salacious disclosures also appear likely to continue. Within minutes after the court dismissed the case with prejudice, Ms. Herzer filed a 100 million suit against Ms. Redstone, her adult sons, Tyler and Brandon Korff, and a team of nurses and other employees of Mr. Redstone. The new suit portrayed Ms. Redstone as being at the center of a network of spies that manipulated, abused, lied to and unduly influenced Mr. Redstone. Lawyers for Ms. Herzer also said they planned to file an immediate appeal of Judge Cowan's decision. Hours after the ruling, Ms. Herzer said in an interview that she was "a little bit emotional" on hearing the judge's decision. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. "I was thinking back at the video that I saw of Sumner and how vulnerable and confused and alone he was, his blank stare, his mumbling," she said. "It is sad and makes me want to protect him even more." Ms. Herzer was referring to the 18 minutes of videotaped testimony from Mr. Redstone that was shown on Friday, during the first and only day of trial. In the video, Mr. Redstone said that he did not want Ms. Herzer in charge of his care, or in his life at all, and that he was happy with the care he was receiving. Mr. Redstone had not been seen publicly for nearly a year and had made no public declarations related to the suit since Ms. Herzer filed it in November. In his ruling, Judge Cowan said that Mr. Redstone's videotaped testimony had completely altered the case. "Redstone's testimony ultimately defeated her case," the judge wrote. He stressed that he was not making a finding related to Mr. Redstone's mental capacity or the credibility of Ms. Herzer or Ms. Redstone, but was focusing on the issue of Mr. Redstone's health care. "The court is finding only that the 'proceeding is not reasonably necessary to protect the interests of the patient,'" Judge Cowan wrote. "Specifically, Herzer cannot be restored as his agent and Redstone is satisfied with the care he is receiving and to be with his family." While the video remained confidential, a transcript was made public. During the questioning, Mr. Redstone denigrated Ms. Herzer with obscenities multiple times and said that he hated her and wanted her out of his life. "He mustered everything he could to tell the judge what he wanted, and the judge respected that. Everything else was noise," Mr. Klieger said. The transcript also showed that Mr. Redstone's testimony was halting, and that he was not able to answer some basic questions, such as his birth name (Sumner Murray Rothstein) a point seized on by Ms. Herzer's side. "How this judge thought that all of this was normal and that Sumner was well taken care of to me is unbelievable and sad," Ms. Herzer said. "It is a sad day for Sumner." Lawyers for Ms. Herzer argued that the court should not have accepted Mr. Redstone's testimony at face value and needed to hear all the evidence before dismissing the case after just one day of trial. "My client came here to protect Sumner Redstone," Pierce O'Donnell, a lawyer for Ms. Herzer, said outside the courthouse on Monday, surrounded by reporters. "We think that we established overwhelmingly that he has serious mental defects and perhaps, more so that he has been the victim of undue influence, a campaign initiated by Shari Redstone." Mr. O'Donnell added that he had learned that Mr. Redstone was considering filing a suit against Ms. Herzer and his former girlfriend Sydney Holland, seeking to recover close to 150 million in gifts in recent years. "His two attorneys and a leading psychiatrist blessed these gifts as the result of Sumner's sound mind and free will,'' Mr. O'Donnell said. "This is obviously a desperate act." In the new suit filed on Monday, Ms. Herzer asserted that Ms. Redstone developed an "insidious two part plan" to turn her father against her and Sydney Holland, by first gathering intelligence then using her father's staff to influence him. "Shari's blind ambition was so furious, her animosity toward Sumner's two devoted caregivers so extreme, that she would stop at nothing to get her way," the suit says. In a statement, Ms. Redstone called the accusations "total fiction'' and said the suit "continues to speak volumes about Herzer's motivation and character."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
AIRBORNE FESTIVAL at the Manhattan Movement Arts Center (Sept. 15, 8 p.m.; Sept. 16, 2:30 p.m.). Robert Davidson was a much loved dance artist and teacher who championed aerial expressive dance, which fuses elements of contemporary dance with equipment like low flying trapezes to take the action aloft. Mr. Davidson died suddenly in 2016 and this year's Airborne Festival is dedicated to his memory. A number of aerial artists from around the country, several influenced by Mr. Davidson's teachings, will perform. 877 987 6487, manhattanmovement.com GABRI CHRISTA at the Theater Lab (Sept. 15 and Sept. 19 22, 8 p.m.). The choreographer and filmmaker Gabri Christa tells a very personal story in her new multimedia solo work, "Magdalena," based on the life of her mother, who survived the bombing of her hometown in Holland during World War II, married a black man from Curacao and, later in life, began suffering from dementia. Through stories, dance and film, Ms. Christa creates a narrative that, as she describes it, is "part family album, part story of love and race" and "a reckoning with the harrowing consequences of a devastating illness." 866 811 4111, DANSPACE PROJECT AT TIMES SQUARE (Sept. 20 23, 6 10 p.m.). Starting on Thursday, Times Square Arts and Danspace Project present three site specific contemporary dance works commissioned to remind us of the district's history as a generator of many types of performance. Beginning at 6 p.m. in Duffy Square, at the northern tip of Times Square, Laurie Berg presents "Scape," which nods to the 1991 musical "The Will Rogers Follies." At 7 p.m. in nearby Broadway Plaza at 44th Street, viewers will find Luciana Achugar's "New Mass Dance," a tribute to the New Dance Group, a collective that mixed left wing politics and modern dance in the 1930s. At 8 p.m., back in Duffy Square, the breakdance collective Full Circle Souljahs traces the development of street dance from the 1970s to today. danspaceproject.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
A Japanese language epic set in ancient China and based on a manga series, "Kingdom" draws on the best of several traditions. There are touches of Akira Kurosawa's "The Hidden Fortress" and perhaps of "Star Wars," for which George Lucas plundered "Fortress" freely and also of the wuxia spectacles of King Hu. The film acquits itself honorably, even if its ultimate message is disquieting. The plot involves two boys who are raised in slavery and train each other to fight, with the goal of becoming great generals. When they grow up, Piao (Ryo Yoshizawa) is taken to serve the king, while Xin (Kento Yamazaki) stays home until Piao returns, mortally wounded. The king's brother has moved on the throne, and Piao sends Xin to protect the deposed king, for whom Piao had been serving as a double. The film takes place in 255 B.C., during the Warring States period that preceded the unification of China. So it is a tale of ambition, factionalism and class rivalry. The king (also played by Yoshizawa) tolerates the propriety flouting Xin, whom Yamazaki plays as a rogue who is quick to speak and quick with a sword. The director Shinsuke Sato shows an eye for the geometry of action scenes, both in the large scale battle sequences and in two man bouts, as when Xin dodges poison darts in a bamboo forest.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The therapy, which will be tested in up to 86 patients, involves using stem cells from the placenta known as "natural killer" cells. An experimental stem cell therapy derived from human placentas will begin early testing in patients with the coronavirus, a New Jersey biotech company said Thursday. The treatment, being developed by the company Celularity, has not yet been used on any patients with symptoms of Covid 19, but it has caught the attention of Rudy Giuliani, President Trump's personal lawyer. Mr. Giuliani recently featured an interview with the company founder on his website and said on Twitter that the product has "real potential," while also criticizing the Food and Drug Administration for not moving more quickly to approve potential remedies. There is no proven treatment for the respiratory disease, but several experimental approaches, including old malaria drugs and H.I.V. antivirals, are being tested in patients around the world. Celularity has also enthusiastically publicized the news of its early stage trial for its treatment, known as Cynk 001. In an email Wednesday to a reporter, its public relations firm described a development as the "first F.D.A. approval for Covid 19 cell therapy." The agency's decision, however, merely gives a green light for its product to be used in a clinical trial, not widely prescribed to patients. In recent weeks, the established scientific process of evaluating a drug's safety and effectiveness has been upended by Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly promoted the potential of two long used malaria drugs that have shown mainly anecdotal evidence of helping patients. On Saturday, the F.D.A. took the unusual step of approving those drugs to treat hospitalized patients with coronavirus on an emergency basis, even though no significant clinical trials have yet been done. The early trial by Celularity which will primarily evaluate safety, as well as an initial look at efficacy will test its therapy in up to 86 patients with symptoms. They will receive infusions of the cell therapy, in the hopes it will prevent them from developing the more severe form of the disease, Dr. Robert Hariri, Celularity's founder and chief executive, said in an interview Wednesday. "The objective here is preventative," Dr. Hariri said. "If the timing of giving this can prevent those patients who have early disease from progressing to the more serious, life threatening form, it could be a very, very useful tool." The therapy involves using stem cells from the placenta known as "natural killer" cells that help protect a developing fetus or newborn from viruses that have infected the mother. Celularity has been testing these cells in cancer patients. Dr. Hariri said the trial, which would not include a placebo control group, will take place at academic medical centers around the country. He said the company expected to see initial results about 30 to 60 days after the first patients receive their dose. If this study is successful, Dr. Hariri said, the company would move to a placebo controlled study that would evaluate the drug's efficacy against the disease.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Mr. Zeckendorf, 54, is a principal, along with his brother, William Lie Zeckendorf, of Zeckendorf Realty, developer of luxury condominiums and retail space in Manhattan, like 15 Central Park West and 18 Gramercy Park, both in partnership with Global Holdings. The Zeckendorf brothers also serve as co chairmen of Terra Holdings, the parent company of several real estate services companies. Q. How do you and William divide up responsibilities for running your companies? A. Co chairs, co owners, equal footing, co decision making. I wish he was here for this interview, but apparently you have a policy that you only have one brother at a time. Q. I'm familiar with your titles, but what is your main focus, or strengths, versus your brother's? A. If you look at 15 Central Park West, I might have been more involved in the apartment design and he might have been more involved in the retail. We both work on the lobbies. He might have been more involved in the finance; I was more involved in the construction aspect. But it might've been 60 40, versus 50 50. Q. Speaking of 15 Central Park West, did you ever think it would be as successful as it has been? A. That was one project that I've never lost any sleep on. Other people around the world are now copying the "15" business model, which is a compliment. Q. How many units do you have left to sell at 18 Gramercy? Q. Let's talk about your two new condo projects, starting with 50 United Nations Plaza, in partnership with Global Holdings. A. It's going to be very similar to "15" in amenities, with a more modern feel. It's 88 apartments. They're four per floor, two per floor and one per floor in the penthouse; 43 stories. It's topped out. It's going to be a modernist building very much the Norman Foster school of architecture. Very much like the United Nations, which was conceived by my maternal grandfather and my other grandfather owned the land. So for Will and I it's a very important site. It should be ready by the end of next year. We're selling a parking spot with each apartment, for 150,000. Q. How much will you be selling the units for? A. For approximately 3,400 a square foot. Every apartment has a beautiful view of the United Nations, and there are river views and Midtown views. Sales are just starting. There have been quite a few sold; I don't have the numbers. Q. What's the status of your condo project at 44 East 60th Street, between Park and Madison? A. We have our building permit, started the foundations in September. Probably about a year from now the foundation should be done. It's like a 15 Central Park West, with the same architecture, same limestone, same windows. It's about 33 units, one per floor and duplex penthouses. It's a long process: one year for foundations, and then 24 months going up. Q. How much for those units? A. "15" is getting 12,000 a foot. It's a similar product. We think it's a fantastic location; it will have great views of Central Park. Q. Is it true that you paid 600 for the air rights at 44 East 60th Street? Q. There are many who are concerned about the abundance of luxury condos widening the gap between the haves and have nots. A. I don't think you could ask for a tougher business, so if we're going to spend our time building these buildings, it has to be worth our while. Unfortunately there's the cost structure of land and the cost structure of construction, union, nonunion. I think there's a lot of product being built that's 2,000 a foot. A lot of them in Brooklyn and Queens. Q. Would you ever consider developing more affordable buildings? A. It's just not our business model. It's not what we do. A. We don't really have much in the pipeline. We have looked at every single site in Manhattan, but we haven't found one that meets our criteria to be on a park. Q. Do you remember your first project? A. It was up at 96th and Broadway. I was project manager and my father was just getting into the development business. The '70s, as you know, were brutal for New York City. That location certainly opened people's eyes. It was not where one would build a condo, but it did extremely well. It sold out; it helped change that area.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Many of you asked questions about black holes so profound and clever I couldn't even start to answer them. Quite a few readers wanted to know what happens at the center of a black hole. Is there a wormhole to another space and time, another universe, another big bang, other dimensions? The short honest answer is that nobody knows. We have no accepted theory of quantum gravity, and that is needed to explain what happens when gravity is very intense and the distances are very short, as in a black hole or the Big Bang. According to Albert Einstein's classical equations of general relativity, the density of matter and energy becomes infinite under such circumstances, but the appearance of infinity in scientific calculations is usually a sign that something is being missed. That's why the work of theorists goes on. In the meantime you are free to imagine anything. And here are some of the great questions I was able to answer. Hello Dennis, my name is JJ Hennessy and I am 13 years old. I think the entire realm of black holes is completely fascinating, and I am dying to learn more about them in order to achieve a more fruitful understanding of these mysterious things. Since you are probably going to get a lot of questions about the scientific side of things, I thought I would instead ask you how you became interested in this complex field and where you began your pursuits. James Joseph Hennessy I read too much science fiction when I was about your age, and became fascinated with questions that had to do with the origin and destiny of the universe. I think we all want to know who we are and where we came from. And where this is all going. The idea that science could shed light on questions like this, that the laws of physics predict their own downfall, that matter could just disappear and that space and time could end is just too delicious. That is some powerful magic. If math is used to understand physics, what is the difference between the two fields, and how do physicists see this differently from mathematicians? Amy Sillman It is one of the great mysteries of nature (I know I have used this phrase a lot) that mathematics works so well to describe physics. The quantum physicist Eugene Wigner referred to the "unreasonable effectiveness" of math. Some of it seems miraculous, as when the British physicist Paul Dirac wrote down an equation for the electron in 1928 and found it had two solutions one with a negative charge like the electrons we already knew and loved, and the other with a positive charge, which had never been observed but would be. His equations predicted the existence of antimatter. How could we possibly detect whether or not a black hole is passing by our solar system? Or worse, how could we detect whether or not our solar system is in the process of being absorbed by a black hole? Richard Robinson Like anything in the universe, a black hole would be in motion, orbiting the center of the galaxy for example. Or in the case of the colliding black holes detected by LIGO astronomers earlier this year, orbiting each other. The solar system and planets are also in constant motion. In fact, one lesson of Einstein's relativity is that there is no absolute standard of rest in the universe. If a black hole came by, or we came by it, we would notice its gravity perturbing planets and spacecraft. And if it passed in front of, say Saturn, we would see the planet and its rings warped. Could someone briefly (from their perspective) orbit a supermassive black hole (with an event horizon with a huge radius) and thereby "jump" millions of years into the future? Michael Barnes Yes. As dramatized in the movie "Interstellar," time seems to slow down for someone deep in a powerful gravitational field. So you could get close to a big black hole and what would seem like a few hours to you would be thousands of years to an outside observer far away. This is in fact the basis of "Icarus at the Edge of Time," a book and film by Brian Greene, the Columbia University physicist and World Science Festival impresario. Could black holes be the seeds of galaxies? Jack Aitken It is indeed true that, as far as we know, every large galaxy harbors one or more supermassive black holes weighing in at millions or even billions of times more massive than the sun in its heart. Moreover, there seems to be a rough correlation between the masses of these black holes and the masses of the galaxies in which they live. The bigger the galaxy, the bigger its black hole. How this comes about is a mystery. What determines the life span of a black hole, and have we been able to record the final explosion of one? Coenraad van der Poel We have never seen a black hole explode. So far. According to Stephen Hawking's math, the temperature of a black hole is inversely proportional to its mass. So the smaller it is, the hotter it should be. For normal astrophysical objects this would be negligible. A black hole as massive as the sun would radiate with a temperature of about 60 billionths of a Kelvin colder than you'll ever be. We would not notice it now. But this is a runaway process. As a black hole of this size radiates, it shrinks slightly and thus gets hotter, which makes it shrink faster and hotter, and so forth almost until the end of time. I have always been thrilled by the quantum physics concept of particle entanglement. "Spooky action at a distance," to paraphrase Einstein, allows for two entangled particles to "inform" one another without being physically connected. This property is not just theoretical but is being proven at ever increasing distances. If one entangled particle went into a black hole, could we get information out of the black hole by watching the other entangled particle that was not in the black hole? Noah Arthur Bardach That not only can happen, but it is apparently required for information to escape from a black hole. Unfortunately, the particle outside the event horizon the invisible boundary that is a black hole's point of no return also has to be entangled with another particle that has already emerged from the black hole, and the laws of quantum mechanics prohibit such promiscuous arrangements, which leads to a paradox and the possibility that there is a firewall at the edge of a black hole. See my article from a few years ago for an additional explanation. I don't understand how astrophysicists talk of mega black holes being formed by swallowing stars. There is nothing to prevent black holes from coalescing but how can you make a black hole larger by swallowing stars when all possible observers are outside? Jay Spivack External observers will see anything that falls into a black hole basically freeze at the event horizon. The original term for these objects was "frozen stars." But their gravitational fields are still there, like ghosts of the disappeared star. And so whatever falls into a black hole just adds its own gravity to whatever was there in the first place. So the "hole" over time gets bigger as its field increases. More than one reader asked about the absence of Dr. Susskind from my most recent article. I am a great admirer of his work, and it would have been discussed had there been more space. Dr. Susskind has stressed that there is a deeper problem about information in black holes that soft hair does not solve. Namely there is a famous principle in quantum theory that says information cannot be cloned. We can make copies of The New York Times and spread them around, but quantum bits cannot be copied; they have to be one place or another. So a person can't be both on the horizon and inside of it at the same time. An outside observer might think all my information was stored in soft hair on the black hole's horizon, but if I fell into a black hole I would perceive that I am still the same person. Nothing drastic is supposed to happen when you cross the event horizon, according to the Einstein equations. But I can't be in two places at once. So am I in the black hole or spread out on its surface? I have to be one place or the other according to quantum theory. My understanding of Hawking Radiation is that quantum foam pops into its normally evanescent existence right on the event horizon, but before it can dissolve back into nothingness, one part gets sucked in, and the other blasted out into space. What I don't understand is why that causes the black hole to eventually evaporate. (My understanding comes from your great "Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos.") Stephen Foster	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Michigan State Heads to Final Four After Banding Together to Shock Duke WASHINGTON Cassius Winston held the ball and ran with it as time expired, looking more like an elusive Michigan State running back than a point guard as he evaded all last second attempts to foul him. The top overall seed, the one with the most dominant freshman in years, was about to fall. Winston had just played every second of the game. With 20 points and 10 assists, the junior was the second seeded Spartans' best player against top seeded Duke in Sunday's regional final. But without heroics from all its players, Michigan State would have been merely forgettable roadkill on Duke's inexorable path. There was Xavier Tillman. With just over a minute left, he scored 5 points on two shots and a free throw, cutting the deficit to 1 point. There was Kenny Goins, who swished a 3 pointer to create a 2 point lead with just 34 seconds left. Now, it's the Spartans who seem like favorites as an unpredictable second weekend winnowed the men's college basketball universe down to just four teams. And the Blue Devils are going home, with Zion Williamson likely heading to the N.B.A. "At the end, we made some winning plays," Winston said afterward. "That's what it's all about this time of year." Michigan State's 68 67 victory sent the team to Coach Tom Izzo's eighth Final Four, in search of its third national title following ones in 1979 and 2000. That latter came under Izzo, while the former was courtesy of point guard Magic Johnson, the legendary Los Angeles Lakers executive who could be seen cheering his alma mater on in the stands on Sunday. The Spartans (32 6), this year's Big Ten champion, will face third seeded Texas Tech (30 6), the Big 12 regular season co champion, in a national semifinal on Saturday, April 6, in Minneapolis. The winner of that game will play the winner of the other semifinal, between No. 5 seeded Auburn (30 9) and No. 1 seeded Virginia (33 3), in the championship game on April 8. After surviving its last two games by a combined 3 points, Duke's road ended in Capital One Arena, a place where, given the Washington Wizards' poor record, one of Duke's likely freshman lottery picks could well play home games next year. Maybe it will be R.J. Barrett, who finished with 21 points, 6 assists and 6 rebounds, going 3 for 6 from deep. Or perhaps the future Washingtonian will be Cam Reddish, who missed the Virginia Tech game with knee tendinitis but looked spry while contributing 8 points and 4 rebounds in 37 minutes. Of course, should Washington end up with the top pick, then the Wizard will be Williamson, who even in defeat proved to be the best player on the court, leading all players with 24 points (on 19 shots) along with 14 rebounds, 3 blocks and 3 steals. Barrett and Williamson appeared dazed at the postgame news conference. Duke had only two losses all season aside from the six games that Williamson missed when he sprained his knee after his sneaker blew out in the opening seconds of a game versus North Carolina. "You look around the locker room, see your teammates, your brothers," Williamson said. "You think, this group, they'll probably never play together again." It was a game of runs in the first half turned a nail biter in the second. Duke started slowly, then bolted back with a vengeance, at one point going on a 21 5 run and leading by as many as nine. Michigan State closed the half with 10 unanswered points, and entered halftime up by four.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Starting in 1945, when he was 17 and living in the Bronx, Stanley Kubrick worked as a New York based photographer for Look magazine. He joined the staff full time in October 1946, and he quit in August 1950. "By the time I was 21 I had four years of seeing how things worked in the world," Kubrick told an interviewer in 1972. "I think if I had gone to college I would never have been a director." The postwar years were the heyday of the popular American pictorial magazines, with Life and Look leading the charge. Life was the classier of the two, adopting an international scope and employing a heady lineup of photographers, including Henri Cartier Bresson and W. Eugene Smith. Look, which went out of business in 1971, was more provincial, focusing most of its attention on American pursuits and problems, and hiring photographers who were highly professional but rarely inspired. The Look archive resides at the Museum of the City of New York, where an exhibition titled "Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs," opens on May 3. The show and an accompanying catalog published by Taschen look at what is essentially Kubrick before he became Kubrick. Unless they were recording news events, photographers for the picture magazines were hobbled by a crippling constraint. Their photos were illustrating a preconceived story that had been formulated by the editors. The possibilities for discovery were limited. The topics that Kubrick explored are chestnuts so old that they smell a little moldy. Lovers embracing on a park bench as their neighbors gaze ostentatiously elsewhere. Patients anxiously awaiting their doctors appointment. Boxing hopefuls in the ring. Celebrities at home. Pampered dogs in the city. It probably helped that Stan Kubrick, as he was known at that time, was just a kid, so instead of inducing yawns, these magazine perennials struck him as novelties, and he in turn brought something fresh to them. Knowing what career path he would follow, we look for foreshadowing of his future greatness. In the rueful grimace of a mother on the subway, her hands enfolding a blond boy who could be a grumpy fallen angel, the strength of the expression and gesture convey an individual temperament. The diagonals of ropes, legs and arms in the portrait of the boxer Walter Cartier between rounds in the ring, along with the dramatic chiaroscuro lighting, remind us of the many black and white films that depict prizefighters, including Kubrick's "Killer's Kiss." (As a director, Kubrick's first film, the short newsreel format "Day of the Fight," in 1951, featured Cartier and his twin brother, Vincent.) A striking shot at the piano of Peter Arno, the New Yorker cartoonist and bon vivant, with eyes shut and mouth open, an ashtray holding down the sheet music, is composed with masterly precision. So is a humorous picture of a man at the track grappling with a windblown newspaper (probably Racing Form). Other photographs that emphasize the mise en scene could be movie stills: a shouting circus executive who takes up the right side of the foreground while aerialists rehearse in the middle distance, a boy climbing to a roof with the city tenements surrounding him, a subway car filled with sleeping passengers. Looking at these pictures, you want to know what comes next. Kubrick, who died in 1999, was an excellent magazine photographer. His pictures fall short, though, in one crucial way. They almost never surprise. When he said that he wouldn't have become a movie director without his apprenticeship at Look, he might have meant, in part, that after four years of depicting stories that were handed to him, he was ready to start writing his own scripts.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
When he set out to write a novel, Brandon Taylor, a former doctoral student in biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin, approached it like a scientist. "I have this very technical approach to almost everything," he said during a video interview from Iowa, where he now lives. "If there is a problem, I first determine the parameters of the problem, and then I try to lay out a very systematic way of doing it." He started with a series of lists: Reasons he had failed to write a novel (too concerned with inventing everything, problems with setting and time frame). Things he considered himself good at (tone, dialogue). Scenes he wanted in the book (a tennis match, a dinner party). He gave himself rules, setting a goal to write 10,000 words a day. "It began in this very mercenary place," he said, "but it moved to a place of genuine artistic interest." The result is "Real Life," which Riverhead is publishing next week, a novel that merges two versions of him: Brandon Taylor the writer and Brandon Taylor the scientist. When he was a boy growing up in a small community outside Montgomery, Ala., Taylor, now 30, dreamed of a career in medicine. "My entire life, I wanted to be a neurosurgeon," he said. "Because if you're a black boy from the South who is good at science, everyone is like, 'Oh, Ben Carson, you should be a neurosurgeon.'" For just as long, he has been writing. "As a kid, I was always writing little stories, or trying to, but I never considered myself a good writer," he said. It hasn't always been easy for him to reconcile these two aspirations. When he signed up for his first creative writing class, he remembers thinking, "They're all English majors, and I study chemistry." But it was Taylor's life as a scientist that enabled him to write "Real Life." He began working on it while he was in his graduate biochemistry program. He spent most of his days in the lab, working on his experiments on nematode worms, so he wrote mainly at night. It took him five weeks to finish a manuscript. At one point, he threw it in the trash after two agents rejected it. "It felt like the universe was telling me that I wasn't good enough, and that my work wasn't worth sharing with the world," he said. His roommate Antonio Byrd, a fellow Ph.D. student, fished it out. "I told him, I'm keeping this draft in my bedroom until you come to your senses," Byrd said. Taylor also deleted the manuscript files from his computer, attempting to scrub the book from his life. A few weeks later, he found out he had received a fellowship from the Tin House summer writing workshop. Encouraged, he went back to his novel, recovering it from one of his rejected queries. "That kind of seems like a sign, too," he said. Throughout his undergraduate years at Auburn University at Montgomery and graduate school in Wisconsin, he felt he had to choose between science or writing, and science often won. But when he received an acceptance letter from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he decided that, this time, writing would win. "I could survive not having science, but I couldn't survive not having writing," he said. "Real Life" follows one pivotal weekend in the life of Wallace, a black gay biochemistry Ph.D. student in the Midwest. Grappling with the death of his father, a nascent romance with a straight friend, the potential failure of his scientific work and a general sense that he doesn't fit into the predominantly white cohort of his university campus, Wallace must figure out whether he wants to continue on his path as a student or chart a different course. This book was one of our most anticipated titles of February. See the full list. Taylor knows that Wallace sounds a lot like him. Both are black gay scientists. Both are migrants to the Midwest by way of Alabama. Both have had confusing trysts with straight men. ("My life, in some ways, is just a series of inappropriate encounters with heterosexual men," Taylor joked.) And both have stood on the precipice of a scientific career and had to ask whether to walk back or leap. But Wallace whose name is based on Mrs. Wallis from Ann Patchett's novel "Commonwealth," Taylor said is not Taylor. Instead, Wallace is an amalgam of Taylor's own experiences as well as those of other queer black people on college campuses, he said. "We wanted to see us in a story, and we didn't have that," said Christopher Sprott, a friend and former roommate of Taylor's who is also black and queer. The academic setting is one that Taylor gravitates toward as a reader some of his favorite novels include "The Idiot," by Elif Batuman; "The Marriage Plot," by Jeffrey Eugenides; "Harvard Square," by Andre Aciman; and "Fates and Furies," by Lauren Groff but he rarely sees people like himself when he reads them. He hopes "Real Life" changes that. "What I wanted to do was to take this genre and this milieu that I really respond to as a reader and to sort of write myself into it," Taylor said. He channeled this desire into his first published piece of writing, the story "Cold River," which appeared in 2015 in Jonathan, a literary journal published by Sibling Rivalry Press. He wrote the story as an undergraduate student, after he had gone to a bookstore in Montgomery but couldn't find the queer books he was looking for. When he asked the clerk if they had them, he said, "the guy was like, 'We're a family store, we don't stock that kind of stuff here.'" Taylor considers himself primarily a short story writer, but the desire to see people like him represented in literature led him to make his book debut with a novel. "I had this feeling no one was going to take me seriously until I write this novel," he said. "I'm going to write a novel so that people will let me write short stories in peace." Stories are on the way. His next book is a collection, "Filthy Animals," which will also be published with Riverhead. But now that Taylor has made space for himself in the world of novels, maybe he'll stick around, he said. "Over the summer, I was like 'Oh, maybe I will write another novel.'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
"When I was growing up," Fremont writes in her crackling second book, "The Escape Artist," "my mother said that our family was held together by the great glue of suffering." Kovik, a doctor whose body bore the scars of six years in a Russian gulag, was a "colossus of efficient, if furious, energy," wolfing down his meals as though each one were his last, and often waking his family with "shrieking nightmares." Maria, warm but no nonsense, doled out a sanitized version of her wartime travails, but when anguished would cry out: "I should have died with my parents! Don't you understand? We shouldn't be alive!" Everyone, meanwhile, lived in the ferocious backdraft of Lara's misery. The blazing intensity of her sister's mental illness consumed Helen's childhood, and serves as the focal point for her current reappraisal of family history. "Lara's gone psycho." Such was the thought that came to an 8 year old Helen the night her parents at last decided to seek professional help for their elder daughter. A brilliant misfit, loved and loathed by Helen, Lara terrorized her family for years. Menacing her mother with a carving knife. Destroying Helen's belongings. Punching. Kicking. Wailing. At night, Helen listened through her bedroom wall as Lara engaged in obsessive compulsive rituals Helen would call her "Concerto for Lights and Drapes." Eventually Lara was committed to a psychiatric hospital. But in keeping with her suffocating need for secrecy, Maria insisted no one ever know. Not surprisingly, Helen learned to keep her own secrets an eating disorder, suicidal impulses and, for many years, her sexuality. Was her sister mentally ill? Was she? Or was their behavior, as Fremont muses, "simply the result of living in the contorted reality of a history that was hidden from us?" These are essential questions, but hard ones to answer when the truth is more crazy making than any imaginable lie. "The Escape Artist" is a stand alone work. Graceful, gracious and, with the exception of a few vamping detours, an engrossing tour through a dense, if troubling, landscape. Still, the portrait accrues meaning when viewed as a palimpsest. There are fresh revelations in the second book that illuminate events in the first. They make sense of some of the madness, and deepen the reader's compassion for an already compassion worthy clan. It feels worth noting that, in "After Long Silence," Fremont elided many facts. She did so at the behest of a family by which she still hoped to be embraced. "The Escape Artist," then, as the title suggests, is Fremont unbound. And yet the book's very existence confirms a stubborn, and more global, truth: When it comes to family, you're never truly free.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Mike Teal, who lives in Tallahassee, began developing symptoms of A.L.S. in 2016. He takes an experimental drug called AMX0035 which aims to slow the progression of the disease. Seven years ago, Joshua Cohen, then a junior at Brown University majoring in biomedical engineering, was captivated by the question of why people develop brain disorders. "How does a neuron die?" he wondered. After poring over scientific studies, he sketched out his ideas for a way to treat them. "I was sitting in my dorm room and I had kind of written out the research on these crazy looking diagrams," he recalled. A study published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine reported that the experimental treatment he and another Brown student, Justin Klee, conceived might hold promise for slowing progression of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the ruthless disease that robs people of their ability to move, speak, eat and ultimately breathe. More than 50 clinical trials over 25 years have failed to find effective treatments for A.L.S., also called Lou Gehrig's disease, which often causes death within two to five years. But now, scientific advances and an influx of funding are driving clinical trials for many potential therapies, generating hope and intense discussion among patients, doctors and researchers. The new study reported that a two drug combination slowed progression of A.L.S. paralysis by about six weeks over about six months, approximately 25 percent more than a placebo. On average, patients on a placebo declined in 18 weeks to a level that patients receiving the treatment didn't reach until 24 weeks, said the principal investigator, Dr. Sabrina Paganoni, a neuromuscular medicine specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital's Healey AMG Center for A.L.S. "It's such a terrible disease and as you can imagine, for the folks who have it or the family members, it's just desperation that something's going to work," said Dr. Walter Koroshetz, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, who wasn't involved in the new study. "Any kind of slowing of progression for a patient with A.L.S. might be valuable even though it's not a big effect." He and other experts were careful not to overstate the results and noted that the drug wasn't shown to improve patients' condition or halt decline. The study evaluated safety and efficacy in a Phase 2 trial with 137 participants, not as large and long as many Phase 3 trials often required for regulatory approval. Experts and the authors themselves said further trials were necessary. Still, doctors and advocates said the relentlessness of the illness and the availability of only two approved A.L.S. medications, neither significantly effective, gives urgency to finding additional treatments. The A.L.S. Association, an advocacy group, said that since the study found the drug to be safe and patients can die waiting for other trials, it should be made available to people with the disease as soon as possible. "That can mean the difference between being able to feed yourself versus being fed or not needing a wheelchair versus needing a wheelchair, and if we can delay that level of disability, that's a big deal for our community," said Neil Thakur, chief mission officer of the association, which helped finance the study. A.L.S., the most common motor neuron disorder, diagnosed in about 6,000 people worldwide each year, has drawn greater attention of late, bolstered by prominent people with the disease, like Stephen Hawking, the astrophysicist who died in 2018; Steve Gleason, a former professional football player; and Ady Barkan, a health care activist who used a computer generated voice at this year's Democratic National Convention because he can no longer speak. There is now legislation in Congress to accelerate A.L.S. therapy access and a 25 million federal research program. The Ice Bucket Challenge, a 2014 fund raising juggernaut featuring celebrities and others dumping icy water on their heads, generated about 220 million. More than 20 treatments are being tested, including stem cells, immunotherapy and genetic therapies for the 10 percent of cases caused by known mutations. Results from other trials are expected soon. "This is a really exciting time," said Dr. Robert Miller, director of clinical research at Forbes Norris MDA/A.L.S. Research Center at California Pacific Medical Center, who is involved in several trials, but not the new study. Most of the study's participants were already taking one or both of the approved A.L.S. medications: riluzole, which can extend survival by several months, and edaravone, which can slow progression by about 33 percent. It's possible the new drug, AMX0035, provided additional benefit. Dr. Merit Cudkowicz, the Healey Center's director and the study's senior author, said she envisioned the new drug combination would be taken alongside existing medications. The study is the first clinical trial supported by Ice Bucket Challenge money to publish results, said the A.L.S. Association. Amylyx financed the bulk of the study and agreed to use a percentage of income from sales of the drug to repay 150 percent of the association's grant to fund more research. The combination was christened AMX0035 because 3 and 5 are the favorite numbers of Mr. Cohen's fiancee. During YMCA basketball sessions with Dr. Tanzi, they discussed trying it for Alzheimer's. But investors weren't interested. Dr. Tanzi introduced the young men to Dr. Cudkowicz, who had once studied sodium phenylbutyrate and convinced them to test it for A.L.S. It's now also in an Alzheimer's trial. The A.L.S. study, called Centaur, conducted across the country by leading A.L.S. researchers, involved patients who developed symptoms within 18 months before the trial and were affected in at least three body regions, generally signs of fast progressing disease. Two thirds received AMX0035, a bitter tasting powder they mixed with water to drink or ingest through a feeding tube twice daily. The primary goal was slowing decline on a 48 point A.L.S. scale rating 12 physical abilities, including walking, speech, swallowing, dressing, handwriting and breathing. Over 24 weeks, patients on placebo declined 2.32 points more than those taking the drug combination. Fine motor skills benefited most. "The data that we see here indicates there may be some beneficial effect but it doesn't look like what you'd call a home run," Dr. Koroshetz said. Some patients experienced gastrointestinal side effects like nausea and diarrhea, but after three weeks those effects largely subsided, and overall, the drug was safe, researchers said. In most secondary measures, including muscle strength, respiratory ability and whether patients were hospitalized, AMX0035 appeared better than placebo, although it wasn't statistically significant. Another measure, a biomarker of neurodegeneration, didn't seem significantly affected. A few patients died in both groups, but experts said identifying the impact on mortality would require evaluation over a longer period. "This is very encouraging," said Dr. Neil Shneider, director of the Eleanor and Lou Gehrig A.L.S. Center at Columbia University, who was not involved. "The question is, is the effect on function sustained beyond the six month trial period and does it have an effect on survival?" Researchers said they would soon publish longer term data because most participants opted to take the drug combination after the trial, and some have now taken it for over two years. Experts were torn about whether F.D.A. approval should be granted, since Phase 3 results are often required. "From my heart, I'd say we are so desperate for meaningful treatment for A.L.S. that something that looks as promising as this might well be approved," Dr. Miller said. "From my head, I'd say it could be chance. We've seen that before where Phase 2 looked really good." Dr. Shneider noted that some patients have already been obtaining one or both components from Europe or Asia and taking it themselves. "There'll be a lot of interest from patients and families to get out this drug," he said. But experts also said that making the drug available soon might make it difficult to recruit patients for subsequent trials. And insurers may not cover drugs approved based on Phase 2 results, Dr. Koroshetz said. Some patients have had difficulty getting insurance coverage for edaravone, which costs about 148,000 a year and was approved after a Phase 3 trial of the same size and duration as Centaur. Amylyx officials declined to provide a price estimate for their treatment. Mike Teal, 52, of Tallahassee, Fla., began having symptoms in 2016 and has taken the drug since at least the spring of 2018, when his trial ended. Soon after, he also started edaravone. He currently has limited speech, needs a feeding tube, often uses a wheelchair and requires a breathing machine every few hours. Last year, he had to stop working at the gift and accessories store he owns with his wife, Lauren. He said he's had no negative side effects and believes the drug may have eased cramps in his neck, abdomen and legs. "I'm confident it has slowed my progression," he wrote in an email. "But it's difficult to measure." Jeff Derby, 61, a retired forest products company manager in Cloverdale, British Columbia, said that when he was diagnosed in July 2018, doctors described his disease as relatively slow progressing. He thinks his decline has become more gradual in the 18 months he's been taking the drug since his trial ended. Mr. Derby, who also takes the two approved medications, said weakness in his left hand isn't worsening as quickly. "I think AMX0035 will ultimately be part of a treatment cocktail like there is for other diseases where you'll take three, four or five different things, and as a group, they will help slow the progression to the point where you can live a somewhat normal life," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health

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