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This is me back in my college days. And this is my roommate, Mark. Together, we founded Facebook in 2004. Now, 15 years later, I think Facebook has grown too big and too powerful. Every week brings new headlines about privacy violations, election interference or mental health concerns. I haven't been at the company in over a decade, but I feel a sense of responsibility to account for the damage done. Americans have the power to right the ship through government action. We need new regulations. It's time to break up Facebook. The early days of Facebook tell a classic American story of innovation and entrepreneurship. From our college dorm room, we started a little social network for our friends that exploded in popularity and connected the world. Mark's hustle in those early years made it possible for Facebook to dominate our rivals like Friendster, MySpace, Tumblr and many others. These competitors made us better. And then we beat them out. This is how it's supposed to work in America. Hard work leads to economic success. You start a small business and compete on the merits to provide a better product. Today, nearly three billion people use Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and they're all owned and controlled by the same company. Of every dollar spent buying ads on social media, 0.84 goes to Facebook. It's now worth over half a trillion dollars. That's roughly the size of the G.D.P. of the bottom 65 countries in the world combined. It's not just that Facebook is a really big social network. It's everything. When a single company dominates any market, they become susceptible to abusing their power. Social networking is like most other American industries. There used to be plenty of healthy competition. But now many industries are controlled by just one or two companies. Companies often create an illusion of choice. You think there are hundreds of beer brands out there, but they're all made by one or two companies. Why is this a problem? Well, when companies get too big, they get sloppy and careless, and that leads to things like poor privacy practices, enabling foreign actors to meddle in elections, the spread of violent rhetoric, fake news and the unbounded drive to capture more of our data and attention. I often hear people say, "I'm shutting down my Facebook account. Thank God for Instagram," not realizing that Instagram is owned by Facebook. People are powerless in this situation because there's nowhere else to go. Monopolies stifle innovation. Facebook snatches up competitors by buying them before they get too big. Or, by copying their innovations. Despite all the money and hype being poured into new startups, there hasn't been a single major social media platform launched since 2011. The harm goes beyond he economy though, it goes to democracy itself. When companies become empires, people are stripped of power. Facebook's employees write complex rules called algorithms that decide what you see in your News Feed. Facebook can decide what messages get delivered and which don't. And what exactly makes for violent or inappropriate content. Even Mark himself has said that he and the Facebook team have too much power over speech. Facebook does have a board of directors. But Mark owns the majority of the shares. Unlike the leader of a democracy there are no checks and balances on Facebook. Mark has no boss, and he cannot be fired. Listen, it'd be great if Mark can fix this himself. But this, ironically, is a problem he cannot solve. We need the government to intervene with two steps. First, the Facebook empire needs to be broken up. America's regulated corporate empires before, and we can do it again. This isn't unprecedented and surprisingly, it often boosts the value of these companies in the long run. The Federal Trade Commission can force Facebook to unwind its acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram. Then we'll see real competition around social media and digital messaging. Breaking up Facebook isn't a punishment for its economic success. It's a way to guarantee that other new companies can compete. We also need a new government agency to protect Americans from the overreach of Facebook and other companies like it. Think about it. We don't trust airlines or pharmaceutical companies to regulate themselves. We shouldn't trust social media companies either. We need basic privacy protections and the ability for people to move their data around as they please. Right now Facebook makes free speech decisions on its own with little accountability. Instead, we need government to set guidelines, not Facebook employees in Menlo Park. I don't think Mark's a bad guy and I've made this decision to speak out because I feel a sense of responsibility for what Facebook has become. And to be honest, I'm angry that Mark's obsession with growth led him to sacrifice security for clicks. I think we all want to live in a country where David can take on Goliath, where a kid with a smart idea in a dorm room can start a billion dollar company. We've strayed from that ideal, and breaking up and regulating Facebook will help put us back on that path.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
This is only one of the film's pointlessly uncomfortable elements. Another is Cam's idea to kidnap Mazz's young child. Cam is not cut out for kidnapping he's barely cut out for convenience store shopping. Things go grotesquely wrong from the start, but Cam has an out, of sorts. When Mazz wants to go on a wild goose chase looking for the toddler, he calls on Cam not knowing that his offspring is unconscious in the trunk of the car from which he's conducting the search. "American Dreamer" turns over several repellent plot points before settling on a cheap ironic ending. Not even a month after the John Travolta travesty "The Fanatic" seemed to have secured the title of Worst Film of 2019, up comes this movie to overtake it. By several lengths.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
How Smart TVs in Millions of U.S. Homes Track More Than What's On Tonight The growing concern over online data and user privacy has been focused on tech giants like Facebook and devices like smartphones. But people's data is also increasingly being vacuumed right out of their living rooms via their televisions, sometimes without their knowledge. In recent years, data companies have harnessed new technology to immediately identify what people are watching on internet connected TVs, then using that information to send targeted advertisements to other devices in their homes. Marketers, forever hungry to get their products in front of the people most likely to buy them, have eagerly embraced such practices. But the companies watching what people watch have also faced scrutiny from regulators and privacy advocates over how transparent they are being with users. Samba TV is one of the bigger companies that track viewer information to make personalized show recommendations. The company said it collected viewing data from 13.5 million smart TVs in the United States, and it has raised 40 million in venture funding from investors including Time Warner, the cable operator Liberty Global and the billionaire Mark Cuban. Samba TV has struck deals with roughly a dozen TV brands including Sony, Sharp, TCL and Philips to place its software on certain sets. When people set up their TVs, a screen urges them to enable a service called Samba Interactive TV, saying it recommends shows and provides special offers "by cleverly recognizing onscreen content." But the screen, which contains the enable button, does not detail how much information Samba TV collects to make those recommendations. Samba TV declined to provide recent statistics, but one of its executives said at the end of 2016 that more than 90 percent of people opted in. Once enabled, Samba TV can track nearly everything that appears on the TV on a second by second basis, essentially reading pixels to identify network shows and ads, as well as programs on HBO and even video games played on the TV. Samba TV has even offered advertisers the ability to base their targeting on whether people watch conservative or liberal media outlets and which party's presidential debate they watched. The big draw for advertisers which have included Citi and JetBlue in the past, and now Expedia is that Samba TV can also identify other devices in the home that share the TV's internet connection. Samba TV, which says it has adhered to privacy guidelines from the Federal Trade Commission, does not directly sell its data. Instead, advertisers can pay the company to direct ads to other gadgets in a home after their TV commercials play, or one from a rival airs. Advertisers can also add to their websites a tag from Samba TV that allows them to determine if people visit after watching one of their commercials. If it sounds a lot like the internet a company with little name recognition tracking your behavior, then slicing and dicing it to sell ads that's the point. But consumers do not typically expect the so called idiot box to be a savant. About 45 percent of TV households in the United States had at least one smart TV at the end of 2017, IHS Markit data showed. Samba TV, which is based in San Francisco and has about 250 employees, competes against several companies, including Inscape, the data arm of the consumer electronics maker Vizio, and a start up called Alphonso. It can be a cutthroat business. Samba has sued Alphonso for patent infringement. Last year, Vizio paid 2.2 million to settle claims by the Federal Trade Commission and the state of New Jersey that it was collecting and selling viewing data from millions of smart TVs without the knowledge or consent of set owners. In December, The New York Times reported that Alphonso was using gaming apps to gain access to smartphone microphones and listen for audio signals in TV ads and shows. Samba TV's language is clear, said Bill Daddi, a spokesman. "Each version has clearly identified that we use technology to recognize what's onscreen, to create benefit for the consumer as well as Samba, its partners and advertisers," he added. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Still, David Kitchen, a software engineer in London, said he was startled to learn how Samba TV worked after encountering its opt in screen during a software update on his Sony Bravia set. The opt in read: "Interact with your favorite shows. Get recommendations based on the content you love. Connect your devices for exclusive content and special offers. By cleverly recognizing onscreen content, Samba Interactive TV lets you engage with your TV in a whole new way." "The thing that really struck me was this seems like quite an enormous ask for what seems like a silly, trivial feature," Mr. Kitchen said. "You appear to opt into a discovery recommendation service, but what you're really opting into is pervasive monitoring on your TV." Ashwin Navin, Samba TV's chief executive, said that the company's use of data for advertising is made clear through the reference to "special offers," and that the opt in language "is meant to be as simple as it possibly can be." "It's pretty upfront about the fact that this is what the software does it reads what's on the screen to drive recommendations and special offers," Mr. Navin said. "We've taken an abundance of caution to put consumers in control of the data and give them disclosure on what we use the data for." Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said few people review the fine print in their zeal to set up new televisions. He said the notice should also describe Samba TV's "device map," which matches TV content to mobile gadgets, according to a document on its website, and can help the company track users "in their office, in line at the food truck and on the road as they travel." Mr. Brookman of the Consumers Union, who reviewed the opt in screen, said the trade off was not clear for consumers. "Maybe the interactive features are so fantastic that they don't mind that the company's logging all the stuff that they're watching, but I don't think that's evident from this," he said. Citi and JetBlue, which appear in some Samba TV marketing materials, said they stopped working with the company in 2016 but not before publicly endorsing its effectiveness. JetBlue hailed in a news release the increase in site visits driven by syncing its online ads with TV ads, while Christine DiLandro, a marketing director at Citi, joined Mr. Navin at an industry event at the end of 2015. In a video of the event, Ms. DiLandro described the ability to target people with digital ads after the company's TV commercials aired as "a little magical." The Times is among the websites that allow advertisers to use data from Samba to track if people who see their ads visit their websites, but a Times spokeswoman, Eileen Murphy, said that the company did that "simply as a matter of convenience for our clients" and that it was not an endorsement of Samba TV's technology. Companies like Samba TV are also a boon for TV makers, whose profit margins from selling sets can be slim. Samba TV essentially pays companies like Sony to include its software. Samba TV said "our business model does subsidize a small piece of the television hardware," though it declined to provide further details. Smart TV companies aren't subject to the stricter rules and regulations regarding viewing data that have traditionally applied to cable companies, helping fuel "this rise of weird ways to figure out what someone's watching," said Jonathan Mayer, an assistant professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University and a former technology adviser at the Federal Communications Commission. The smart TV companies are overseen by the Federal Trade Commission, Mr. Mayer said, meaning that "as long as you're truthful to consumers, even if you make it really hard to exercise choices or don't offer choices at all, you probably don't have much of a legal issue." Mr. Daddi said the trade commission had held up Samba TV as "an exemplary model of data privacy and opt in policies," pointing to its participation in a smart TV workshop the agency held in late 2016. A commission spokeswoman said that it invited a diverse array of panelists to events and that "an invitation to participate in an F.T.C. event does not convey an endorsement of that company or organization." She added that the agency does not "endorse or bless companies' practices."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Click here to read more on how to craft the perfect wedding toast. In theory, giving a wedding toast is easy. Just say a few nice words about the bride and groom, then ask the assembled crowd to raise their glasses. But such toasts often come up short or worse, become the low point of the wedding weekend. Should you be asked to give a toast, there is no need for it to live in infamy. Here are a few guidelines with some memorable toasts from television and movies as examples of what to avoid. 1. Keep the alcohol at bay. Even Dean Martin sipped apple juice when performing. If there is one common denominator for the world's worst wedding toasts, it could probably be measured in blood alcohol content. Giving a good toast is tricky enough without trying it with half of your wits about you, so wait until afterward to enjoy your favorite beverage. 2. Don't wing it. Think about what you are going to say long in advance. Then write it down. "You should start writing a wedding toast months before," said Peggy Klaus, a speech and presentations coach in Berkeley, Calif. And practice your toast in front of a mirror several times to nail the delivery. "If you don't prepare, your nerves will take over, and it just won't work," Ms. Klaus said. Everyone needs an editor, and if you don't have one handy, ask a friend or a spouse to play one for a few minutes and show them what you plan to say. 3. Keep it short and simple. No more than three minutes. (Lincoln finished the Gettysburg Address in less time, and that seemed to turn out O.K.) "You basically want to tell one nice story about the couple and wish them well, and that's all anyone wants to hear," said Sarah Parker, who wrote a how to book on wedding toasts. "But you should find time to identify yourself and your relationship with the newlyweds, and perhaps remark upon the beauty of the ceremony. " 4. Don't rush it. Speak slowly and loudly enough for everyone to hear. Nonprofessional speakers tend to rush through a speech, or talk so softly that many people strain to hear what they are saying if they can hear it at all. Some speakers post a friend at the back of the room to signal whether the speech is being heard there. 5. Tell one story about the bride and groom. An embarrassing anecdote may be funny but this may not be the time to share it. Try to say something the couple would enjoy hearing. It's their day, not yours. Some toastmasters seem to gravitate toward roasting the couple, rather than praising them. But sarcasm is overrated, and often focuses on shortcomings rather than strengths. Concentrate on what is particularly nice about the bride and groom, and try to celebrate that. 6. If you want to get fancy by staging a skit, singing a song or performing some elaborate dance, be careful. Most of us dance more like "Seinfeld's" Elaine than the Jackson Five's Michael. And remember who are the real stars of the show. Ms. Klaus cautions anyone going in this direction, since she thinks it can be a little self indulgent: "Remember, the toast is not about you, it's about the couple." And there is a risk of trying to do too much: There was a reason they kept a hook just off the stage during the old vaudeville shows.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Generally speaking, the younger the baby, the more dangerous some diseases can be. Influenza, for example, can be severe in young babies, and we don't start vaccinating till the child is 6 months old. A community with low immunization rates is a more dangerous place for small babies (and elderly adults and anyone with underlying medical problems) when flu season comes around. Measles, mumps and chickenpox are all very much present in the United States, especially in underimmunized populations, and the vaccines for those diseases are usually not given until a baby is at least 12 months old (sometimes earlier if there's an outbreak). Like flu, these are extremely contagious diseases, and measles in particular can be dangerous in small babies. Starting at two months, your baby will be getting vaccinated against a whole range of diseases, some of them less likely to turn up in the United States (polio, diphtheria) and others far more common, like whooping cough (pertussis), again particularly dangerous in young infants, and also Streptococcus pneumonia and Haemophilus influenza Type B, which can cause pneumonia, meningitis and bacterial sepsis. The early doses of vaccine do offer some protection, but it's not complete. A child who stays on schedule will complete the basic series of immunizations by 15 to 18 months, but will still need a flu shot every fall to stay as protected as possible against influenza. More booster shots at 4 years old reinforce those childhood vaccines. Do you have a health question? Ask Well	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
On Wednesday at the Park Avenue Armory, toward the end of a solo on sopranino saxophone that had lasted more than 10 minutes, Roscoe Mitchell made it seem as though the intimate dimensions of the Armory's Veterans Room were in the process of being jackhammered. After the solo's gradual introductory section full of rough textured honks and droning harmonics Mr. Mitchell started dispensing a stream of lightning quick traditional notes, each one full of robust authority. And then, thanks to some gales of circular breathing, he managed to thread one of those earlier, overblown harmonics atop the ongoing, bebop influenced flurry. This time the droning pitch was pealing, and ecstatically clear. The room shook with the swelling overtones of amplified, electroacoustic music. But Mr. Mitchell's funhouse was a fully acoustic one. Then, switching back to his rougher extended technique pitches, he once again sneaked in that liquid legato line of traditional notes, this time in a raspier style. The cumulative impact of this solo tour de force involved two different ways of looking at his polyphonic capability. The piece, "Sustain and Run," was the highlight of Mr. Mitchell's presence as an instrumentalist on Wednesday. But it wasn't the apex of the two concerts of his music that were presented at the Armory as part of the Artists Studio series organized by the pianist and composer Jason Moran. In the evening's first set, Joseph Kubera brought intensity and warmth to the toccata style central movement of Mr. Mitchell's piano piece "8/8/88." In the second concert, a collection of players drawn from the Wavefield Ensemble showed off a lovely group blend when navigating the sympathetically swirling melodic motifs in "Cutouts for Woodwind Quintet." Mr. Mitchell was heard in a larger chamber ensemble that closed the second concert, as well as in the Trio Space, a new version of a past group with the baritone Thomas Buckner. (The band now also includes the multi instrumentalist Scott Robinson.) It was possible throughout these performances to hear the wide vistas of near silent poise, in between peaks of intensity, that characterized Mr. Mitchell's more widely heard work with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the pathbreaking group he co founded 50 years ago. This year Mr. Mitchell and another longtime Art Ensemble member, Famoudou Don Moye, will lead a new lineup of the group at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tenn., and will release a double album on Pi Recordings. Later this month, Mr. Mitchell will also release a new set of his orchestral music, on the Wide Hive label. Aspects of that record "Littlefield Concert Hall Mills College" were similarly reflected in the sets Mr. Mitchell presented on Wednesday. On the recording and at the Armory, it's clear that Mr. Mitchell's presence as a soloist is not required for performances of his music to sound idiomatic, and that his past work is continuously open to radical revision. At the second show on Wednesday, his stridently strutting 1970s "Nonaah" was played in a more lyrical later arrangement for piano, oboe and flute. And on the "Littlefield" recording, a 25 piece orchestra plays newer versions of pieces that the Wide Hive label has already released, like "Frenzy House." The journey of "Frenzy House" to its current state also works as a useful summary of Mr. Mitchell's versatility. The piece began as a riotous improvisation by Mr. Mitchell, the pianist Craig Taborn and the percussionist Kikanju Baku. But after that improvisation was transcribed and rearranged for its first orchestral recording, its composer was not yet finished exploring it. In its latest version, there is some fresh opening thematic material that adds a surprising, if characteristically tart, quality of Americana. Unlike on prior recordings of "Frenzy House," Mr. Mitchell doesn't play on this new recording but in all its unpredictable mergers of style, it sounds completely of a piece with his back catalog. "The thing I like about this process," Mr. Mitchell said in an email this week, "is that it's ongoing."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
LONDON For 25 years before her death in 2009, Pina Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal were an international phenomenon. But her singular genre of dance theater reached many countries for the first time in the 1980s. Her London debut, in 1982, was the full length "1980," a stage work that, as a whole, was unlike anything the city had known. It was a Gesamtkunstwerk (Wagner's "total work of art") in which performers spoke, sang and acted. Though they were listed as dancers, dance hardly seemed their prime activity. The stage was covered in grass, with one artificial deer placed near the back. I was in the opening night audience here at Sadler's Wells, have never forgotten how startling it was, and have always wanted to see it again. Thirty two years later, it returned this month to Sadler's Wells, which was again as packed as it had been for that opening performance; it lasted three and a half hours, with one intermission. At Saturday evening's performance, many were plainly watching it for the first time; some exhibited the same expressions of wide eyed smiling wonder that have recurred over the decades. For me, "1980" is both the same and different; I recognized most features but missed a few. What has become familiar, to me and many, is Bauschism itself, and the law of diminishing returns applies. But so many of its features are so unusual that it takes time to absorb. The Bausch company has always been an international phenomenon, not just because of its renown but because of the way it's composed of people from many countries, who all emerge as vivid and dissimilar personalities. You know them, as a London critic remarked at the time, better than you know your own friends. Some of the outrageousness with which they address the audience recalls Dame Edna Everage (who had become a West End phenomenon in the mid '70s). They do, four times in all, a little routine dance walking, but with rhythmic upper body gestures and the same fixed, sly smile and bright eyes that leads them down into the auditorium. They buttonhole, and flirt bizarrely with, individual audience members from the stage; they serve cups of tea; they relate apparently autobiographical tales. But the quantity of simultaneous incidents onstage, and the multiple focuses, also recall something very different: the dance theater of Merce Cunningham. Sometimes there are five or even 12 things going on at once, and though these dancers certainly direct part of their performance at us, much is played as if the fourth wall were down. In one of the most striking parts of "1980," all this coincides. Though the rest of the stage seems like chaos, with everyone else shouting and acting out to nobody in particular, one row of three or four forward facing performers suddenly coalesces and slowly walks to the front of the stage, where the dancers take solemn bows; then another row; then another all amid the surrounding bedlam. What is much easier to see now is that in "1980" and most other works, Bausch like Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter and (though this has seldom been recognized,) Cunningham is part of the Theater of the Absurd. The craziness of the separate parts of "1980" makes it a sustained study in absurdism, and an especially characteristic subgenre of Bauschism is what should be labeled the Ritual Theater of Humiliation. In "1980," one dancer places matches between the toes of another and lights them; women are lined up as in a Miss World contest (men soon join in), and are asked to show as much leg as possible (the men hoist the legs of their trousers) and to perform increasingly bizarre tasks (like saying, "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"). In later Bausch works, some of these humiliations grow more violent (lighters applied to the soles of dancers' feet, tomatoes pelted at their faces). This is one reason "1980" today seems tamer than it did when new. But a particular point here is that the sadistic side of humiliation breeds a taste for masochism. A dancer doing a solo is suddenly sprayed by water; dancing on, she then needs to keep returning to the spray like a moth to a flame. The man with the flaming matches between his toes later performs the same exercise by himself, singing, "Happy birthday to me" (a "1980" motif). Behind this craziness, however, is an Expressionist urgency, and it is here where Bauschism grows most ambiguous and troubling. Though this isn't simple to identify at first, what emerges from Bausch's talk act dance pieces is a particular kind of psychodrama in which the parts of the Freudian psyche superego, ego and id are all manifest. You see the dancer who organizes and bullies; the dancer who maintains social behavior, whether polite or exhibitionist; and the dancer who reveals, in dance terms alone, some inarticulate driving impulse, and you see how these parts are mutually dependent. And there are at least three dress codes to match these: We see dancers in various kinds of formal social attire, in informal dress, in their underwear or naked. But there are few Bausch works in which these three elements of the psyche provide poetic meanings. What are instead unmissable are the splashy effects. On a surface level, as long as you don't try to understand it, Bausch theater proves remarkably accessible and entertaining; there's lots of talking, lots of comedy and plenty of theater games. Some sections go on too long, but that's deliberate; they're usually the humiliation exercises, which are extended until their point is bludgeoned into you. Is what underlies "1980" a meditation on lost innocence? Not only is Judy Garland's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" played as an anthem, but the main solo (the one whose performer is sprayed with water the first time) is also repeated: a private, gentle dance in which we see a quieter level of the self than anywhere else. Yet that solo dance is just unremarkable. And "1980" proves a disappointingly unrewarding piece to revisit.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Rufus Wainwright remembers June 14, 2006, as the night he climbed a musical Mount Everest. Or jumped off one. "I'd never done it from top to bottom until the first night I performed it," the singer songwriter recalled of "Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall," his song by song re creation of a legendary concert that Judy Garland performed at the same space in 1961. Backed by a 36 piece orchestra, Mr. Wainwright summoned Garland's restless spirit in jazzy anthems like "That's Entertainment" and openhearted ballads like "Stormy Weather." He even repeated some of Garland's original banter ("Sing it with me, please!"), like a Talmudic scholar reciting a sacred text. The result was part showbiz stunt, part postmodern happening, part fanboy dream come true. It was a 32 year old pop star claiming Judy worship for a new, post Stonewall generation of gay men. And it has lived on in its live album incarnation, for which Mr. Wainwright received his sole Grammy nomination. Now, 10 years later, he is resurrecting the concert at Carnegie Hall: a homage to a homage. After playing New York on June 16 and 17, he will take the show the following week to the Luminato Festival in Toronto, where his husband, Jorn Weisbrodt, is the outgoing artistic director. But Mr. Wainwright is not the same performer, or person, that he was a decade ago. He is now 42, four years older than Garland was when she mounted the original concert. Still louche and languid, he has acquired a touch of silver on his sideburns and a glut of life experiences, both joyful and bruising. Mr. Wainwright is no stranger to turmoil himself. The product of an eccentric musical clan (his father is the troubadour Loudon Wainwright III, and his mother was half of a Canadian folk duo with her sister Anna McGarrigle), he released his self titled debut album in 1998, when he was 24. He once memorably described his 20s as "gay hell": a haze of alcohol and drug abuse, anonymous sex and emotional nihilism, which he touted obliquely in songs like "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk," his ode to decadence. His debauchery went hand in hand with an obsession with Garland. "I kept having these blackouts where I would go to record stores looking to buy the latest Radiohead album and walk out with yet another 'Greatest Hits of Judy Garland,'" he said on a recent Thursday at the Whitney Museum's eighth floor cafe. Part of the reason he staged the Carnegie Hall show in 2006 was "to exorcise her." For the most part, it worked. After New York, he took the concert to the London Palladium. But by the time he got to Paris, he had lost his voice, and the show was "a complete disaster." He limped to the Hollywood Bowl but had "this real sinking feeling that I couldn't continue." Then life got even more complicated. Mr. Wainwright and his mother, he said, were "one of the most classic gay son mother duos ever," speaking every other day. Even Mr. Weisbrodt, who had become Mr. Wainwright's first serious romantic partner, acknowledged: "I never challenged her position. To me, it was always clear she was No. 1 and I was No. 2. But I would sleep with him." His mother also urged him to pursue fatherhood, perhaps sensing that he would need an emotional anchor when she was gone. That Ms. Cohen came from another Canadian musical dynasty may have given the idea some extra appeal, like a medieval alliance. "My mother was a very ambitious woman, but mostly for her children," Mr. Wainwright said, still palpably affected by his mother's death but cleareyed about her flaws. "She wasn't really able to be that way for herself, and in fact was always somewhat haunted by not being blessed with that cutthroat instinct that a lot of her colleagues had, whether it's Bonnie Raitt or Linda Ronstadt. They were better at maneuvering the system than she was." Sadly his mother didn't live to see the plan come to fruition. She died on Jan. 18, 2010, nearly a year before her granddaughter, Viva Wainwright Cohen, was born. Suspended between grief and renewal, Mr. Wainwright sought to solidify his newfangled family. A few months after his mother's death, he proposed to Mr. Weisbrodt over Indian food in London. (He announced the engagement the next night, onstage at the Royal Opera House.) The couple had met in Germany, when Mr. Weisbrodt was working at the Berlin State Opera and approached Mr. Wainwright about a commission. "Rufus was very nervous about having a committed relationship," Mr. Weisbrodt recalled. "The longest relationship he had been in was I think four weeks." They married in August 2012, in Montauk, N.Y., with the cabaret chanteuse Justin Vivian Bond officiating and little Viva as reluctant flower girl. Mr. Wainwright is Viva's legal parent, but he only sees her every few months; she lives in Los Angeles with her mother, while Mr. Wainwright and Mr. Weisbrodt split their time between New York and Toronto, though they are thinking of moving out west. (He is reticent about the complicated parenting dynamic with Ms. Cohen but said, "We're getting better all the time.") A death, a birth and a marriage, all in the span of two and a half years: It did a number on Mr. Wainwright. "Having my mother's death and my daughter's birth coincide, it was very traumatic for everybody," he said with a rueful, nasal laugh, the kind he tends to affix to moments of gravitas. His melancholy, along with his waggish humor, goes more unguarded in his songs. Musically, he resists categorization. His last album, "Take All My Loves," was an adaptation of nine Shakespeare sonnets, with vocal cameos by singers like Florence Welch and William Shatner. He has spent the last few years immersed in opera, which he calls his "favorite art form." His first opera, "Prima Donna," was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center Theater, but he and the Met parted ways before it was staged. The official line was that Mr. Wainwright, who wrote the libretto in French, refused to bend to the Met's insistence that it be in English. Though "Prima Donna" eventually opened at the Manchester International Festival in 2009 (Mr. Wainwright came dressed as Verdi), the opera establishment never fully embraced him. In 2012, Zachary Woolfe of The New York Times described its American debut as "a tasteful, well intentioned, ultimately mystifying failure." (He is now working on a second opera, about the Roman emperor Hadrian.) His forays into classical music sidetracked him from pursuing the pop megastardom he once envisioned. Though he admits to enjoying the "slings and arrows and diva hissy fits and conductors smashing batons" of the opera world, he acknowledges that it has "distanced me from the pop world." In a de facto rehearsal run for Carnegie Hall, Mr. Wainwright arrived in Annapolis, Md., last month as part of a three night mini tour that took him to the Rams Head on Stage, a smallish concert space adjoining a tavern. Wearing a foppish striped blazer adorned with a twinkling brooch, he played a few of his own brooding, folky ballads, before telling the audience: "We're going to do a few Judy songs for you. I'm not sure if you were expecting that, but that's what you got." At Carnegie Hall 10 years ago, he dedicated the number to Mr. Weisbrodt. "I don't think he would dedicate 'Alone Together' to me anymore," his husband says now. "It sort of stands for someone who's accepted that he's in a relationship, but at the end of the day you're always still alone." That isn't the only Garland song that has shifted resonance over the decade. When Mr. Wainwright sang "The Man That Got Away" in 2006, he thought of it less as an ode to romantic abandonment (as when Garland sang it) than as a gay man's cry of longing for a father. "My dad and I are in a much better place than we were 10 years ago," he said of his fraught, at times openly competitive relationship with his father. "But nonetheless, when I was singing that at that time, we were struggling." Now, Mr. Wainwright says, "The Man That Got Away" is more about mortality, whether his father's (who is 69) or that of his musical father figures like David Bowie and Lou Reed. Then again, mortality seems to pervade the entire repertoire. "Death has sort of entered the fold a little bit," Mr. Wainwright said. The generation that grew up with the original Garland album has "thinned out a bit," meaning that the crowd that shows up this time will be even further removed from the source material. And, of course, the loss of his mother haunts the set list, particularly Garland's signature number, "Over the Rainbow." When Mr. Wainwright sang it in 2006, he brought his mother out to accompany him on the piano, joking about how she would volunteer him to sing it as a child "to sober up adults at 3 in the morning." This time around, Mr. Wainwright plans to start singing the song a cappella, letting his mother's absence linger before the orchestra floods in. "That's still her song, and now she is over the rainbow," he said, before letting out another mournful laugh.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
"Von Dutch is so iconic," Mr. Emmanuel said. "I wish I had a Juicy Couture velour suit on me." The show, "Nicole Richie's 2007 Memorial Day BBQ," is named after a party Ms. Richie threw in Beverly Hills, the invitation to which reportedly imposed a weight limit ("No girls over 100 pounds allowed in"). Mischa Barton and Ms. Lohan were among the guests, and the party became tabloid fodder after Ms. Barton was rushed to the hospital for what her publicist said was a bad interaction of alcohol and antibiotics. Despite its idiosyncratic reference point, the exhibition paints with a broad brush, examining the many night life fixtures and scandal magnets of the early aughts. It is the museum's fourth exhibition, and the second in its current location: a 450 square foot space in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Started by Viviana Rosales Olen, 30, and Matt Harkins, 29, in the Williamsburg apartment that they shared, the museum moved in the spring to its new space. Its inaugural exhibition, in Williamsburg, was based on the ESPN documentary "The Price of Gold," about the figure skaters Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. (The museum's name stands for the Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan 1994 Museum, with 1994 being the year Ms. Kerrigan was attacked just days before the Olympic trials.) Subsequent exhibitions have had a similar focus on niche pop cultural moments.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
How good is one teacher compared with another? A growing number of school districts have adopted a system called value added modeling to answer that question, provoking battles from Washington to Los Angeles with some saying it is an effective method for increasing teacher accountability, and others arguing that it can give an inaccurate picture of teachers' work. The system calculates the value teachers add to their students' achievement, based on changes in test scores from year to year and how the students perform compared with others in their grade. People who analyze the data, making a few statistical assumptions, can produce a list ranking teachers from best to worst. Use of value added modeling is exploding nationwide. Hundreds of school systems, including those in Chicago, New York and Washington, are already using it to measure the performance of schools or teachers. Many more are expected to join them, partly because the Obama administration has prodded states and districts to develop more effective teacher evaluation systems than traditional classroom observation by administrators. Though the value added method is often used to help educators improve their classroom teaching, it has also been a factor in deciding who receives bonuses, how much they are and even who gets fired. Michelle A. Rhee, the schools chancellor in Washington, fired about 25 teachers this summer after they rated poorly in evaluations based in part on a value added analysis of scores. And 6,000 elementary school teachers in Los Angeles have found themselves under scrutiny this summer after The Los Angeles Times published a series of articles about their performance, including a searchable database on its Web site that rates them from least effective to most effective. The teachers' union has protested, urging a boycott of the paper. Education Secretary Arne Duncan weighed in to support the newspaper's work, calling it an exercise in healthy transparency. In a speech last week, though, he qualified that support, noting that he had never released to news media similar information on teachers when he was the Chicago schools superintendent. "There are real issues and competing priorities and values that we must work through together balancing transparency, privacy, fairness and respect for teachers," Mr. Duncan said. On The Los Angeles Times's publication of the teacher data, he added, "I don't advocate that approach for other districts." A report released this month by several education researchers warned that the value added methodology can be unreliable. "If these teachers were measured in a different year, or a different model were used, the rankings might bounce around quite a bit," said Edward Haertel, a Stanford professor who was a co author of the report. "People are going to treat these scores as if they were reflections on the effectiveness of the teachers without any appreciation of how unstable they are." William L. Sanders, a senior research manager for a North Carolina company, SAS, that does value added estimates for districts in North Carolina, Tennessee and other states, said that "if you use rigorous, robust methods and surround them with safeguards, you can reliably distinguish highly effective teachers from average teachers and from ineffective teachers." Dr. Sanders helped develop value added methods to evaluate teachers in Tennessee in the 1990s. Their use spread after the 2002 No Child Left Behind law required states to test in third to eighth grades every year, giving school districts mountains of test data that are the raw material for value added analysis. In value added modeling, researchers use students' scores on state tests administered at the end of third grade, for instance, to predict how they are likely to score on state tests at the end of fourth grade. If, when actually taking the state tests at the end of fourth grade, the student scores higher than 70 percent of fourth graders, the leap in achievement represents the value the fourth grade teacher added. Even critics acknowledge that the method can be more accurate for rating schools than the system now required by federal law, which compares test scores of succeeding classes, for instance this year's fifth graders with last year's fifth graders. But when the method is used to evaluate individual teachers, many factors can lead to inaccuracies. Different people crunching the numbers can get different results, said Douglas N. Harris, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. For example, two analysts might rank teachers in a district differently if one analyst took into account certain student characteristics, like which students were eligible for free lunch, and the other did not. Millions of students change classes or schools each year, so teachers can be evaluated on the performance of students they have taught only briefly, after students' records were linked to them in the fall. In many schools, students receive instruction from multiple teachers, or from after school tutors, making it difficult to attribute learning gains to a specific instructor. Another problem is known as the ceiling effect. Advanced students can score so highly one year that standardized state tests are not sensitive enough to measure their learning gains a year later. In Houston, a district that uses value added methods to allocate teacher bonuses, Darilyn Krieger said she had seen the ceiling effect as a physics teacher at Carnegie Vanguard High School. "My kids come in at a very high level of competence," Ms. Krieger said. After she teaches them for a year, most score highly on a state science test but show little gains, so her bonus is often small compared with those of other teachers, she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
Hemophilia, which affects 20,000 Americans, is a genetic disorder in which the body lacks a clotting factor needed for blood to coagulate. Depending on severity, it can lead to life threatening, seemingly unprovoked bleeding episodes or it can go undetected for years, until a serious injury or a routine medical procedure suddenly touches off uncontrolled bleeding. Hemophilia is more common in boys and men. But some girls and women have the disorder, and it can cause complications during menstruation and childbirth. Hemophilia (actually a group of disorders, marked by different missing blood factors) has no cure. But treatment has improved substantially in recent years. Today many bleeding episodes are prevented by prophylactic injections of the missing factor; until this treatment was developed, patients had to rely on transfusions after a bleeding episode, leaving them vulnerable to infectious diseases and chronic joint damage. We had a family history of hemophilia, as my mother's father was a hemophiliac. So my mom knew that if she had boys, hemophilia would be an issue. Well, she had twin girls and thought, "If anything, they are carriers, just like me." When we were growing up, I was always bruised. But it wasn't until I had my teeth pulled at the age of 11, and I bled for 10 days afterward, that I was diagnosed with hemophilia B. I injured my shoulder my sophomore year of college, and now that's a joint that I'm going to have to be very careful with the rest of my life. It's a matter of being more aware of the activities that I do. It doesn't mean I don't do those activities; I just need to be a little more cautious than the average person. The hemophilia community has a unique relationship with the nation's blood supply. Early on, the products used to control our bleeding disorder were plasma based. So we have been exposed to over the years to hepatitis B in the '70s, H.I.V. in the '80s and hepatitis C in the '90s. We like to call it the "alphabet soup," and I have it all. I have H.I.V. I have hepatitis C. I was infected by hepatitis B as a child and cleared it. And all the complications of living with H.I.V. and hepatitis C, I suffer from. Today's blood supply is much safer, and maybe safer than it's ever been in the history of mankind. When you belong to a disease group that is as small as hemophilia, it's best that you provide some example that you exist, and that you're living a full life. I'm from Texas, and I guess that I thought as every mom might from down here in the South that my sons are going to play football and be strong, virile young men. And it really scared me. I didn't know if my son Scott would live. I didn't know what his life would be like. My first thought was that it sure wouldn't be normal, and the idyllic life that I thought that I would have was shattered. My job as his mother is to teach him how to take care of himself. And his being able to be confident and have enough courage to face this head on at such a young age I know that we're moving in the right direction.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
STEP SISTERS (2017) on Netflix. "Perfection over excellence, sister over self" is the motto of the predominantly African American sorority that Jamilah (Megalyn Echikunwoke) a Type A, driven college senior belongs to. Every year, they compete in a stepping competition. (Stepping, a form of percussive dancing, has its American roots in historically black sororities and fraternities.) When Jamilah is asked to teach a mostly white sorority how to step, she worries that her "black card would get revoked" if she were to agree. But the person asking is the dean (Robert Curtis Brown), who can help her get into Harvard Law School, so she has to say yes. That's the premise of this Netflix comedy, directed by Charles Stone III, that raises questions about cultural appropriation and stereotyping even as it progresses with the playful feel of a jokey teen drama. Most laughs come from cultural collisions, but in the final, inevitable competition between the two sororities, the rival groups avoid a head on crash. What they find instead is mutual understanding. UNREST (2017) on iTunes, Amazon and Netflix. This documentary from Jennifer Brea is about chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition that hasn't been fully accepted by the medical world but that affects millions of people. The symptoms which can include loss of energy and muscle control, an inability to speak and intense pain are on harrowing display as Ms. Brea, who suffers from the condition, shows how it has affected her life. She also interviews others coping with the illness. In his review for The New York Times, Daniel M. Gold wrote that the film "powerfully insists on giving a voice to victims whose greatest challenge, apart from their symptoms, is surmounting a world of indifference." INDECENT on Broadway HD. Paul Vogel's play explores the controversy that surrounded the early 20th century Yiddish drama "God of Vengeance." Ms. Vogel's play closed last August (after an out of the ordinary extension of its closing date), but a film of the production is now streaming on Broadway HD. The Times's Ben Brantley called the show "virtuous, sturdily assembled, informative and brimming with good faith." THE NUMBER ON GREAT GRANDPA'S ARM 6 p.m. on HBO. Celebrating Holocaust Remembrance Day, this short documentary, presented by HBO with the Museum of Jewish Heritage, captures a conversation between a boy and his great grandfather, a Polish Holocaust survivor who was imprisoned at Auschwitz. ELTON JOHN: THE NATION'S FAVORITE SONG 8 p.m. on Reelz. This documentary about the voice behind "Your Song" and "Tiny Dancer" features interviews with big names like Rod Stewart, Ed Sheeran and Lulu. Mr. John himself is also interviewed by the British comedian David Williams.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
In his thoroughly researched and reported book, replete with human detail and probing insight, DePalma, a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, renders a Cuba few tourists will ever see. He burrows deep into one enclave of Havana, the historic borough of Guanabacoa, some three miles southeast of the capital. "Lying across the famous harbor from the city center, Guanabacoa is close enough to have ties to Havana's businesses, politics and culture," he writes. "Yet it operates at its own speed, with its own idiosyncrasies and an overriding sense, as one Cuban told me, of 'geographic fatalism' that comes from being so close to the capital, yet so very hard to reach from there." Famous for its Santeria and Indigenous history, with grand 18th century mansions now gone to ruin, Guanabacoa is home to the diverse and colorful individuals who populate this book. At the heart of its tightly braided narrative is Caridad Limonta, whose complicated story we trace from a childhood of abject poverty to her engineering studies in Kyiv and, finally, to a triumphant rise to the post of Cuba's vice minister of light industry, one of few Afro Cuban women in that lofty realm. A fierce revolutionary dedicated to the communist vision, she passes from euphoria to disillusionment, given the racism and machismo she finds along her way. Finally, she comes to the gnawing recognition that hers is a life of unimaginable privilege (the coveted apartment, the superior medical attention, the special favors, the car and chauffeur). Suffering from a failing heart, Caridad removes herself from her exalted position and reinvents herself as a seamstress. There is Arturo Montoto, a Moscow trained artist, whose trajectory from nowhere to internationally known painter confirms the Cuban lesson that if you become famous beyond your borders, you become untouchable can do what you like, live well. Or Jorge Garcia, a veteran of the Angolan wars, who, in the course of one starless night, lost all faith in the system. It was during 1994, the nadir for Cuba's struggling economy, that 14 members of Jorge's family stole out of Havana's harbor in the night in a tugboat named the 13 de Marzo. As they frantically tried to escape toward Florida, their rickety vessel was rammed and sunk by the Cuban Coast Guard, killing more than half the passengers. The episode provoked fury around the globe. And then there is the hard working, no nonsense hospital worker Lili Durand Hernandez, who has no other recourse in lean times than to lock her demented father in a closet and muck it out every morning as if he were a caged beast. If this sounds like something out of Charles Dickens or Victor Hugo, it is because it is. During what Castro called "the special period," after the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States imposed a punishing trade embargo and Cuba was abandoned to rampant shortages and deprivation; the people of Guanabacoa did what all Cubans had to do to survive: fry up banana peels to dull hunger, grind a few dried peas to brew "coffee," scrounge a scrap of gristle from a slaughterhouse and roam the streets, luchando Cuban for stealing, cheating, hustling or subverting the system.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Many awaken wishing they'd drunk less the night before. Many fewer wish they'd drunk more. Shortsightedness is also common among nonhuman animals. Birds, for example, often choose small but immediately available portions of food over much larger ones that arrive after a brief delay. How might we mitigate losses caused by shortsightedness? Bina Venkataraman, a former climate adviser to the Obama administration, brings a storyteller's eye to this question in her new book, "The Optimist's Telescope." She is also deeply informed about the relevant science. The telescope in her title comes from the economist A.C. Pigou's observation in 1920 that shortsightedness is rooted in our "faulty telescopic faculty." As Venkataraman writes, "The future is an idea we have to conjure in our minds, not something that we perceive with our senses. What we want today, by contrast, we can often feel in our guts as a craving." She herself is the optimist in her title, confidently insisting that impatience is not an immutable human trait. Her engaging narratives illustrate how people battle and often overcome shortsightedness across a range of problems and settings. Decisions about saving money, for instance, are heavily distorted by impatience, which helps explain why so many struggle in retirement. Pigou's perspective suggests that saving might be easier if we could somehow imagine the future more vividly, a hypothesis supported by the work of the U.C.L.A. economist Hal Hershfield. As Venkataraman describes his experiments, he showed subjects in one group of volunteers photographs of themselves that had been digitally altered to simulate their appearance in old age, but no such photographs to a second group. When he then gave all his subjects some money they could either spend or save, members of the first group saved significantly more. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Another strategy focuses on boosting the payoffs of future oriented choices. Here Venkataraman describes a trade off between farming practices with high current yields and those that better protect land's long term fertility. Midwest grain farmers, for example, typically plow their fields each spring to plant annual grain crops rather than perennial varieties, which have lower yields but deeper roots that limit erosion. Attempting to encourage a more future oriented approach, a Kansas scientist, Wes Jackson, has spent decades developing perennials whose current yields come closer to those of annuals. To date, Venkataraman writes, his strains have won only niche adoptions, but his research continues. One hurdle is that although many farmers own their land and would thus benefit directly from preventing erosion, the behavior of other farmers can make perennial adoption prohibitively costly. Land prices are determined disproportionately by earnings from high yielding annuals, Venkataraman explains, which makes it harder for perennial adopters to carry their mortgages. This problem arises in extreme form in the fishing industry. Venkataraman is on firm footing when she writes, "What makes sense in the short run because it is rewarded by the marketplace, like fishing all the red snapper out of the ocean, is not what's good for the long run, because it destroys the fishery forever." Note, however, that overfishing has little to do with shortsightedness. Even if almost everyone had perfect foresight and self discipline, those who restricted their current catch would be rewarded only by seeing the fish they'd left behind harvested instead by others. Problems that have this structure, known as "tragedies of the commons," are solved by punishing those who violate collectively imposed quotas, not by appeals to show greater respect for the future. Nor will individual acts of self discipline parry the biggest existential threat we face the climate crisis. Because eliminating greenhouse gases is costly and people can now emit them without penalty, the increasingly powerful storms, droughts, floods and wildfires of recent decades would keep growing worse even if we could magically endow everyone with complete foresight. Our only hope is to adopt stiff emissions fees and invest heavily in renewable energy and carbon capture. That's why many who share Venkataraman's sense of urgency about threats to our future fear that our current political gridlock portends doom. But although individual steps like installing solar panels or buying an electric vehicle won't by themselves solve the climate crisis, taking these actions has far more impact than might be apparent. For one thing, they increase the likelihood that others will take similar steps. (Aerial photos show that most houses with solar panels are adjacent to others that have them.) Such behavior also deepens people's sense of identity as climate advocates, in the process increasing the likelihood that they will support political candidates who favor strong climate legislation and knock on doors to help them get elected. Those who doubt behavioral contagion's power might consider California's recent experience. Not long ago, its leaders were focused on cutting taxes, bashing immigrants and slashing investment in infrastructure and education. But voters pushed back. Under new leadership, the state now enjoys a budget surplus, despite large increases in public investment. The state's population has continued to grow, yet its greenhouse gas emissions have declined substantially. And despite predictions that top earners would flee the state in droves, outmigration by the top 1 percent has been lower than for any other income group. That what happens in California often determines what happens in the rest of the country is a persuasive reason to heed Venkataraman's impassioned call for making a commitment to future change. Alterations in our behavior may in themselves appear insignificant. But because even small actions are amplified by behavioral contagion, sweeping change is far more possible than many of us dare imagine.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Glenn Allen Sims and Linda Celeste Sims did something many couples do: They had a baby. But they're no ordinary couple. As two treasured veterans of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater Glenn for 23 years, and Linda for 24 they have long persisted in jobs that have pushed them to their physical limits. With the birth of their son, Ellington James Sims, in April 2019, they faced a new challenge. Their last season at City Center, in December 2019, was exhausting not that you would have known by their dancing: refined, impassioned and, as always, vibrating with life. Their coping mechanism? "We would go to the theater and fall asleep," Mr. Sims, 45, said in a joint interview with Ms. Sims. "We would nap in our dressing room." At the time Ellington now nearly 20 months old and happily chirping in the background wasn't sleeping through the night. "Initially, our plan was to continue to dance and stay with the company," Ms. Sims, 44, said. "But with the Ailey company, the travel is really the issue." It's not just the dancing that takes a toll on Ailey dancers; it's the touring, which in a normal year can last five months or more. As they were making their decision to retire before the pandemic hit one question became increasingly easy to answer: "Do we take him on the road?" "Why would I raise my child in a hotel?" Ms. Sims said. "And don't get me wrong touring two weeks, three weeks? That's doable. But not months at a time. It was like we need the best for the baby." This Ailey season, a virtual one, will feature the couple's farewell performance on Wednesday, which will include an array of video excerpts from their repertoire; as well as a new film of the romantic central duet in "The Winter in Lisbon," a celebratory work to Dizzy Gillespie by Billy Wilson; and a discussion with the pair led by the choreographer Ronald K. Brown. But it's not like they will never dance again. "Guest artist?" Ms. Sims said. "I'll be there if they need me. Or performing for certain special events." As for Mr. Sims, who said his "career has been spent in minimal clothing," he won't miss the those body hugging unitards. Just before the pandemic, in January, the couple moved from New Rochelle to a house in Mahopac, N.Y., where Ms. Sims has been teaching remotely at Marymount College, Ballet Hispanico and the Ailey Extension. Mr. Sims is working on a degree from S.U.N.Y. Empire State College, where his focus is performing arts management. In an odd way, the timing of their decision to retire from Ailey during the pandemic has worked out. "We were able to leave and not feel the pressure of having to be in a workplace during this time," Ms. Sims said. When life returns to normal, Ms. Sims will become the rehearsal director for Ballet Hispanico, where she trained and danced. Mr. Sims is in discussions to become the company manager. "I don't feel that I am leaving anything or that I haven't fulfilled my career," Ms. Sims said. "I feel very well nourished and fed. And I still feel like there still could be another story." They married in 2001 and eventually began to be cast together. Sometimes couples don't have the same chemistry onstage, but their partnership was a striking example of support and sophistication. In the most regal, understated way, they both remained in service to the choreography and showed themselves to their fullest power. While Ailey has given them much along with traveling the world, they've danced in nearly 100 works each over the years Mr. Sims can pinpoint what he's missed out on: family. "Our family has always been a part of us and around us, but now there are more opportunities to just talk to them whenever I feel like I want to talk to them," he said. "And now we have our own." What follows are edited excerpts from a recent interview. You filmed "The Winter in Lisbon" for the virtual gala just last month. What does that performance say about you? GLENN This is who we are today. LINDA When I watched it the second time, I thought, oh my goodness: How many people can actually say that at 44 they dance like this? As dancers we're so hard on ourselves that we forget that we also have to be grateful. And so I am very grateful to still be able to do the things that I can do physically, even after a child. What stood out in your last New York season together, when you were actually onstage? LINDA Being away from the stage a whole year, it felt different. I was like, I hope I fit into all my costumes. And I did! But being onstage with Glenn was just beautiful. Dancing fixed me. We did a lot of "Revelations," and the way I would just hear the music would be different. I just felt very mature. LINDA I did "Cry." The Ailey solo is dedicated "to all Black women everywhere especially our mothers." I had two chances to perform it in the season and the first time I had so much to say like when you're dying to eat something and you eat it so fast, but you didn't have time to savor it. I didn't allow it to simmer. So I was like, what are you holding back? What are you afraid of? Why don't you just go for it? LINDA It was everything. I think I cried throughout the whole piece. I don't know what it looked like! Laughs Sometimes ugliness can be beautiful; I allowed myself to be that vulnerable. There's the whole experience of giving birth and women don't talk about it how exhausting motherhood is. There are really ugly moments where it's not just joy. It's like your baby's born, you're going to feel this joy and love. And it's like, no, it doesn't instantly happen all the time. I was like, well, I'm going to talk about it. Laughs Are you obsessed with Duke Ellington? LINDA No! We weren't obsessed at all. But one of the pieces I feel like we were molding onstage every time we performed it was "The River" set to Ellington . The musicality, the choreography of Mr. Ailey's it's just one of our favorite pieces. We fell in love with Ellington's music; it's not that we hear it every day, but we actually get to perform with his music. So we just thought, how do we find a name that is a connection between the two of us, but also unique enough for him to be himself? GLENN This is also about the partnership that Ailey had with Duke Ellington and tying in the way that we met through Ailey. It was something that we could always carry with us. So how do we honor our own careers and honor our son as well? With a great name.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Incorruptible, idealistic Cara Russo teaches "Beloved" to high school English students in affluent Stillwell, Mass. Across the river, where she lives in working class Patchett, her daughter's class reads foxed old copies of Leon Uris's mass market melodrama "Exodus." And that, according to "Dan Cody's Yacht," a new play by Anthony Giardina, is the tragedy of American inequality writ small. If the setup seems a bit reductive and possibly condescending, just wait. "Dan Cody's Yacht," a Manhattan Theater Club production that opened at City Center Stage I on Wednesday, means to be a truth telling thought experiment about wealth and opportunity but never gets close to a credible argument. Worse, it seems to have caught a bad case of entitled obnoxiousness from its main character. That main character is neither Cara (Kristen Bush) nor Dan Cody a passing figure in "The Great Gatsby" invoked here as a talisman of aspirational wealth. Rather, the story is set in motion by Kevin O'Neill (Rick Holmes), a private equity manager and arrogant buttinsky who takes an interest in Cara. His interest isn't sexual: Kevin is, for plot convenience, gay. What really turns him on is messing around in other people's money. This he does first by flashing a wad of bills at Cara, his feckless son's English teacher. (She has given the boy an F on his "Great Gatsby" paper.) When this feint at bribery goes nowhere, Kevin invites Cara to join his once a month investment party, at which he and three rich friends study the market, pool their money, drink good wine and get even richer. His immediate aim is to influence Cara's vote on an advisory committee considering whether the two school districts Stillwell's and Patchett's, both fictional should merge. Or, as Kevin puts it, whether the communities should decide "to join the drug addicted, poverty ridden, low achieving children of your little town to the drug addicted but still high achieving children of mine." He's against. It would be hard to overstate how unlikely this plot is, and how much more so it gets. Soon Kevin's attention turns from buying Cara's vote to helping her daughter, a smart girl known as the "class poet" at Patchett, achieve her dreams of attending Vassar. In the play's cosmology, this can happen only if she transfers to Stillwell for her senior year; otherwise she faces the horror of a state university or, even worse, community college. Leave aside Kevin's snobbery, which the play implies is not just a charismatic antihero's pose but an actual virtue shared by anyone smart and honest. (Only Cara's old friend Cathy, played by Roxanna Hope Radja, dares to suggest that there may be merit in working class culture and Cara dismisses her as an impediment to progress.) Also leave aside the myriad logical holes in the plot, so gaping that they make you wonder whether "Dan Cody's Yacht" is meant as satire. But no, Mr. Giardina is apparently quite earnest about rethinking the roots of class immobility. Cara and Kevin are his test case: she the ambivalent protegee he tries to refashion in his own image. (Kevin too grew up poor, and is, like her, a single parent.) Her initial resistance to this makeover is depicted as petty, a matter of self defeating scruples and proletarian lack of gumption. "What's it like to sell yourself short," Kevin asks her with typical boorishness, "and then force that legacy onto your daughter?" That Cara might have a reasonable fear of the markets, and be more risk averse with her tiny savings than a man with millions, is an annoyance Kevin treats as a character failure and not Cara's alone. That supposed failing is shared by everyone "dumb about money," which is to say anyone not in possession of it. This is all so loathsome that I found myself desperate to find even the smallest gap between Kevin's position and the play's. But if that gap exists, it is too overgrown with love of the villain for anyone else to enter. Mr. Giardina lets Kevin win every battle, even those he at first seems to lose, in the process endorsing his economic realpolitik as good medicine and his bullying as a badge of authenticity. The production, directed by Doug Hughes, is too tasteful and basically naturalistic to offer much pushback. On John Lee Beatty's gliding sets, everything is silky and serene, a combination that seems to endorse the values of the wealthy. Kevin's high spirits, especially in comparison with the anxiety and down market gloom of Cara's, underline those sympathies. Mr. Holmes, who recently played the victim of a leveraged buyout in Mr. Hughes's production of Ayad Akhtar's "Junk," now gets revenge as the alpha moneybags gleefully fiddling with someone else's balance sheet. I'm not sure it's a compliment to say that he's convincingly soulless here. But then the play's attempts to provide him with depth are feeble: He listens to jazz. Ms. Bush gets closer to something human. Her Cara is instantly likable in rejecting Kevin's crass economic come ons; you root for her priggishness. But she's wilier than you expect, bringing to the part the same vulpine alertness to opportunity she demonstrated as a political Eve Harrington type in "The City of Conversation," also by Mr. Giardina.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Looking for a new apartment last spring, Justyna Kedra, 28, knew she would never find a place that compared to one she had just left: a big, bright, reasonably priced two bedroom on Central Park that she had been sharing with a great roommate. But talking to her brother, Janusz, who was then 17 and living with their father in the Chicago suburbs, she came up with an idea. Sure, the physical loveliness of the last place would be hard to match, but she could still have an amazing roommate. That is, as long as her parents agreed to let her brother move to New York for his senior year of high school. "It got pretty boring in the suburbs," said Mr. Kedra, who was more than happy to leave Rosemont, a western suburb of Chicago, a year earlier than expected. Perks like a pool in the backyard had been great when they were children, but over the last few years, since their parents divorced, Mr. Kedra and their father had been rattling around in the family's dark, antiques filled house. Their mother, who has remarried, now lives in Poland. Their parents were open to the plan. "Dad trusts me, and Mom is in Poland," Ms. Kedra said. The only condition? They wouldn't bankroll the move. "They were kind of like, 'If you want to live in the city together, figure it out,'" said Ms. Kedra, who works in marketing for American Express and is the founder of WE Rule, a start up for female entrepreneurs. Their parents did agree to offset some of the costs by letting them put the income from a Chicago investment property 1,200 a month toward rent, and Ms. Kedra took on some extra clients at her start up, giving the siblings a budget of 1,400 a room. That was not, Ms. Kedra soon discovered, enough to live in anything but very cramped quarters on the Upper East Side. And while she knew she would miss being within walking distance of Central Park and the Equinox gym she loved on Lexington and 63rd, Queens seemed like a good compromise. "I feed off the energy of Manhattan, but my brother likes it chiller," said Ms. Kedra, who found a 4,200 a month three bedroom in Astoria on Craigslist. The siblings moved in last June, and a friend of Ms. Kedra's rented the third bedroom until recently. Occupation: Ms. Kedra works in marketing for American Express and is the founder of WE Rule, a start up for female entrepreneurs; Mr. Kedra is a senior at Long Island City High School. The commute: "People think Astoria is so far away. But if it's Manhattan, it's convenient," said Ms. Kedra. "Compared to other cities, everything is convenient." Mr. Kedra has a 20 minute walk to school. Her Equinox gym in Manhattan: "I still go," Ms. Kedra said. "I do the pool, the sauna, the cold plunge pool. There's a sauna crew; everyone knows everyone. The people there went to that gym before it was an Equinox. It's a squad." Because the landlord had been renting the apartment through Airbnb, the space was furnished, even if not exactly to Ms. Kedra's taste. "It was very mismatched," she said. "But it's slowly looking better." Still, not having to find furniture was helpful, as it gave them time to focus on other things, including registering for school. "The deadline was, like, two days after we moved in, which I didn't know," Ms. Kedra said. "I'd been scrambling trying to figure out where to live, then we had to scramble to get the transcript, go to a family center in time. Fortunately, there was space." Mr. Kedra, who started attending Long Island City High School in the fall, admitted that starting at a new school in a new city for his senior year took some adjustment. "It was weird, but I got used to it," he said. "High school is high school." The main challenge has been the long days, which last from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., because of the New York State requirements he must complete to graduate on time. Their apartment, although sunny and spacious, is not in the same league as the one on Fifth Avenue that Ms. Kedra had to leave after new owners, who plan to convert the 54 unit building to a condominium, pushed everyone out. "It was nice, it was so nice. Everyone was, like, 'This is the nicest apartment I've ever seen,'" said Ms. Kedra, who also loved the building's vibe. Many tenants had lived there for decades, and the old owners, whose other properties were luxury buildings, would hold happy hours on the roof. "You'd go to do laundry, and they'd be, like, 'Win free Beyonce tickets,'" she said. "It was the saddest thing to leave. I was sad, my friends were sad, the super was sad, everyone in the building was sad." But she is glad that moving out laid the groundwork for another fantastic experience: getting to live with her brother again. "We're friends and siblings it's great," Ms. Kedra said. In the evenings, they eat dinner together, then watch movies or play video games, if work allows. "Before, I never had anything in the fridge," Ms. Kedra said. "Now we cook together all the time. Although he says I'm not a good cook." Mr. Kedra countered: "We make sandwiches; it always turns out good." On the weekends, they take the train into Manhattan to bike around Central Park, go to movies at South Street Seaport or eat noodles at Xi'an Famous Foods on St. Marks Place.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
The penthouse at the distinctive apex of the Pierre Hotel, a triplex confection graced by a grand black marble staircase, arched cathedral windows that replicate a Versailles chapel, 23 foot ceilings, and fireplaces embraced by mantels designed in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries is poised for a return to the market at a price that reflects its irreplaceable heritage; if met, it would set another record for trophy residences in New York City. The asking price of 125 million does not include the opulent furnishings and fine art belonging to the estate of the investor, author and stock market pundit Martin Zweig, who died in February at age 70. A market savant who traded stocks as a teenager, Mr. Zweig held a doctorate in finance and, appearing on "Wall Street Week With Louis Rukeyser," predicted the 1987 market crash three days before it happened; he bought the 16 room penthouse in 1999 for a record setting price of 21.5 million. Naturally it was an all cash transaction: then, as now, the Pierre, the 1930 Schultze Weaver designed hotel at Fifth Avenue and 61st Street, prohibits financing. The five bedroom six bath residence occupies the 41st, 42nd and 43rd floors of the Pierre, once owned by J. Paul Getty, who bought it in 1938 and converted it to a co op in 1959. The building underwent a 100 million renovation in 2005, and is now a luxury hotel and residence managed by Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces. The monthly maintenance of 47,000 covers electricity and a two person housekeeping staff. The top floor has two bedrooms with en suite baths as well as a Swedish sauna. The penthouse possesses 360 degree views of Manhattan, Central Park, the Hudson and East Rivers and beyond. It has three powder rooms, a private elevator that connects its three levels in addition to interior stairs, and five distinctive fireplaces, the only wood burning ones at the Pierre.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
How Much Watching Time Do You Have This Weekend? None Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, our TV critic Margaret Lyons offers hyper specific viewing recommendations in our Watching newsletter. Read her latest picks below, and sign up for the Watching newsletter here. This weekend I have ... 20 minutes, and I like soft comedy 'The Dress Up Gang' When to watch: Now, on the TBS website or app (cable login required). This dreamboat little comedy sat in TV purgatory for a while, but now its happy, offbeat 10 episodes are finally available. The show is about two roommates, their extended social circle and their unusual dynamics, and its through the looking glass hyper sincerety is both enchanting and warmly deranged. It uses a lot of sketch structures, but it isn't paced like a sketch show, nor is it like any of the indulgent stand up auteur comedies. Instead, it feels like the modern version of the shows one discovered on obscure channels in the middle of the night in 1999. If you like "At Home With Amy Sedaris" and "Joe Pera Talks With You," watch this. A moment from "Mass," as seen on "Great Performances: Leonard Bernstein Mass." 'Great Performances: Leonard Bernstein Mass' When to watch: Friday at 9 p.m., on PBS (check local listings). If you miss live performances and large outdoor gatherings, watch this broadcast of the 2019 production of "Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers" at Ravinia, starring Paulo Szot and conducted by Marin Alsop. "Mass," commissioned for the opening of the Kennedy Center in 1971, recreates aspects of a Catholic mass, and it's considered one of Bernstein's more divisive works. It's a lot on a lot on a lot, and occasionally involves literal preaching to the choir though of course, that's how you make 'em sing. Elle Fanning and Nicholas Hoult star as Catherine the Great and Peter III in this cheeky spin on period drama. Lush, elaborate, vulgar, cartoonish, grand moment to moment, "The Great" can have the pomp of "The Crown" and the devilishness of "Drunk History" or "Miracle Workers." Fanning is terrific, and she is often captured looking just offscreen, which adds to the sense of disorientation and imbalance that fuels the first arc of Catherine's story. There are 10 episodes, which is a few too many, but when it's firing, "The Great" is pretty darn good.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
He began broadcasting in New York in 1960, when he was 30, and he never stopped talking even when he was briefly off the air to run for Congress and mayor. Barry Farber, a popular talk radio host whose winsome Southern burr, insatiable curiosity and barbed wit sustained a nearly continuous six decade career in broadcasting, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 90. His death was confirmed by his daughter Celia Farber. He had been losing weight and appetite from complications of a series of disfiguring operations beginning in the 1990s to remove a facial tumor, the family said, and he had also fractured ribs while moving to a new apartment last month from the Apthorp, a West Side landmark, where he had lived for 56 years. Mr. Farber inaugurated his first solo radio program in 1960 after arriving in New York from North Carolina with journalistic ambitions and remarkable multilingual talents. He went on to interview guests for longer than any other living, continually broadcasting radio host, according to Todd Nebel, a radio archivist for the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago. Mr. Farber's only major contemporary competitor for longevity on the air, according to the National Radio Hall of Fame, was Art Laboe, a disc jockey who started broadcasting in the 1940s and, at 94, still has a weekly radio show in the Southwest. Mr. Farber spoke into a live microphone for the last time on Tuesday, from his home, during an on air 90th birthday tribute by his family on his CRN Digital Talk Radio program, which had been broadcasting reruns while he was ailing. Over the decades Mr. Farber interviewed celebrities, political figures and flying saucer buffs. He staged debates between adversaries on issues ranging from the rights of Palestinians to abortion. And he welcomed skeptics like Mark Lane, the lawyer who challenged official accounts of President John F. Kennedy's assassination. He contrasted his style with that of many latter day talk radio hosts, whose shows, he said, "are just extensions of the ego of the host." His only goal, he said, was to stimulate revealing conversation. His Southern gentlemanly demeanor on the air also stood in contrast to the bellicosity Mr. Farber, a fervent anti Communist, later demonstrated when he twice campaigned for office. Running for Congress in 1970 as a Republican with Liberal Party endorsement (despite the label, he explained at the time, the party's leaders were "among the best anti Communists"), he held the Democratic candidate, Bella Abzug, to 52 percent in a solidly Democratic district. In 1977 he ran for mayor of New York, writing in The New York Times that the city had "declined in some sort of hideous direct proportion to the amount of money wasted on liberal illusions." "Let's take our town back from terror, trash, taxation," he declared. Mr. Farber lost the Republican mayoral primary to State Senator Roy M. Goodman of Manhattan. But, running as the Conservative Party candidate that November, he trailed Mr. Goodman by barely 1,200 votes. (The Democratic candidate, Edward I. Koch, won the mayoralty convincingly.) The two campaigns were the only major diversions from Mr. Farber's radio career, except for brief stints as a television interviewer and as a restaurateur. (His Times Square barbecue joint flopped, in part because the ribs were anomalously served on toasted bagels). Mr. Farber's first talk show, "Barry Farber's Open Mike," aired on WINS in New York and made its debut when he was 30. He was later heard on WMCA and WOR in New York and on the ABC Radio Network in various time slots over the years, including after midnight. At one point his program live, taped and repeated occupied 25 percent of the weekly airtime of WOR, a station heard well beyond the metropolitan area. Since 2008, he had been broadcasting, on Talk Radio Network and most recently on CRN Digital Talk Radio, from his Upper West Side apartment and contributing weekly to the World Net Daily website. He was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2014. In his 2012 memoir, "Cocktails With Molotov: An Odyssey of Unlikely Detours," Mr. Farber recalled achieving his biggest journalistic coup during a pre dawn program in the 1970s, when two "pro Stalinist professors" insisted that Josef Stalin had never threatened an invasion of Yugoslavia. "Oh, yes, he did," volunteered another guest on the program, a former Hungarian general, "because I was supposed to lead it!" Recalling the provocative guests who peppered his post midnight program, Mr. Farber wrote, "I was told I kept more people up nights than Mexican food." Barry Morton Farber, a grandson of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, was born on May 5, 1930, in Baltimore to Raymond and Sophie (Marcus) Farber. His father traveled the South representing the Jay Ray Sportswear line, which he manufactured with his brother in law. His mother helped with the business from home. The family moved to Greensboro, N.C., then a racially segregated city, when Barry was 5. "My parents were politically on the left," he wrote. "I'm on the right. But we agreed totally that racial injustice had to end." He became an enthusiastic linguist when he was about 14, learning Mandarin Chinese in school and, on his own, Italian, Spanish and French before the 10th grade. In high school he took French and Spanish classes and, again on his own, learned Norwegian. He eventually "adventured," as he put it, into more than 20 foreign languages, including Finnish and Korean. He studied journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While there, he attended what was billed as a peace conference organized by Marshal Tito, the Yugoslavian Communist dictator, as a delegate to the National Student Association, an American organization that was later revealed to have been supported by the C.I.A. He had arrived in New York in 1957 looking for work in journalism when by chance he struck up a conversation with William Safire the future presidential speechwriter, author and New York Times columnist at the scene of a bus crash in Midtown Manhattan. At the time, Mr. Safire was working for a radio show in town hosted by the husband wife team of Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenburg. If Mr. Farber lacked experience in broadcasting, he was brimming with self confidence. Here was a former campus newspaper editor, college wrestling champ and Army translator who had done some world traveling and, perhaps most impressively, could speak nearly two dozen languages. "Sorry," Mr. Farber replied. "I was absent the day we had Korean." Mr. Safire hired him, introducing him to radio as a producer for the "Tex and Jinx" show, as it was called, broadcast on WRCA from Peacock Alley at the Waldorf Astoria. Mr. Farber's big break as a booker came when he lured a reluctant Bob Hope onto the show one January by claiming that Hope would be doing him a giant favor because it was Mr. Farber's birthday. His first on air interview, filling in for Tex McCrary, was with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1959. Mr. Farber went on to broadcast his own show for a while from Mamma Leone's restaurant in Midtown. He published his first memoir, "Making People Talk: You Can Turn Every Conversation Into a Magic Moment," in 1987. His first marriage, to Ulla Fahre in 1960, ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Celia, a journalist, he is survived another daughter, Bibi Farber, a singer and songwriter both from his first marriage; his wife, Sara Pentz, a journalist who hosted the CRN show with him; a brother, Jerry, a comedian and musician; and a grandson. Mr. Farber was not always a winning host. Among those who walked off his show was the actress Shelley Winters, who left after he asked her if she had personally vetted some of the left wing groups he said she supported. Another who stormed off was the conservative author Ayn Rand. "Ayn Rand walked out on me because I opened the interview by saying, 'Ms. Rand, let's pretend I'm a student of your philosophy of Objectivism and you be the teacher and give me a grade when I describe Objectivism,'" Mr. Farber recalled in an email in 2018. "'No,' snapped Rand. 'Nobody else describes Objectivism when I am around.' And away she went!" But like any deft interviewer, he was never at a loss for questions that might evoke an unforgettable rejoinder. As he told The Times in 1963: "I was once interviewing Alfred Hitchcock and I asked him to figure out a way in which a radio interviewer might murder a famous film director of mysteries with only the two of them in a studio. Hitchcock looked about the studio and said, meaningfully, 'He might be bored to death.'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
The apartment building in which the composer Lei Liang grew up, in Beijing in the 1970s, was a musicological beehive. Its residents worked at the Music Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Arts, which had an archive of rare historical recordings that had been saved, often at great personal cost, from destruction in the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Liang's father was an authority on Chinese opera; his mother, an expert on American music. Many evenings, a Mongolian friend of the family would drop by for drinks and impromptu performances of war songs, dances and epic poems. On one wall of the apartment hung a photograph of Mr. Liang's mother interviewing Aaron Copland in his Westchester, N.Y., home. Years later, as a young composer, Mr. Liang came to live and work there when he won a residency at Copland House, now a foundation. "Because of that photo," he said in a recent phone interview, "I found that environment strangely familiar." Over 30 minutes, the work unfurls a fluid stream of instrumental colors, from shimmering filaments of sound to broad sighing gestures that build with unrelenting momentum into muscular blocks of dark matter. A series of brutal percussive slashes leads to scorched silence. In the end, droplets of sound evoke a fragile rebirth. The work is intended as a reflection on the man made destruction of both natural landscapes and cultural ecosystems, and highlights the power of art to preserve them at least in memory. Mr. Liang teaches at the University of California at San Diego and has collaborated with scientists on innovative ways to record the sounds of Pacific Ocean coral reefs and Arctic fauna. "We have the external world that we need to protect," he said in the interview. At the same time, he warns against the kind of self inflicted damage to a culture's spiritual heritage that he feels left lasting wounds in his native China: "There is also an internal world that we need to nurture, because it can vanish very rapidly." What drew you to the painting that inspired "A Thousand Mountains"? Huang Binhong painted this particular set of magnificent landscapes late in life, when he was almost blind. I was fascinated by how a person could use his inner vision to create something even more beautiful than reality, with the environment collapsing. What are some aspects of the painting that made it into the music? Huang Binhong made this remark that you have to use white as black. He was referring to void and emptiness that are as substantial as that which is painted with ink. I apply that to my music in a very concrete way. I have a lot of emptiness and silence in the music. I think of those moments as containers of memory and historical resonance. The end of "A Thousand Mountains" recalls water, with plucked strings and subtle percussion effects, but without using the amplified sounds of actual water, as some of your colleagues might do. Why? That's a lesson I learned from traditional Peking Opera: You do not portray anything realistically. In Peking opera alone there were more than a hundred kinds of coughing sounds. Depending on the role types and what the cough symbolizes whether you're entering or interrupting a conversation it was expressed in a particular vocal way. I was very inspired by this idea to not portray things realistically, but to find an imaginative way to filter an idea and distill it using purely instrumental means. "A Thousand Mountains" is itself the result of a process of distillation, isn't it? Yes, and it's very much about recovering and reimagining my own history. I was acutely aware of how fragile my own cultural and spiritual landscapes are. After I started working on this project, which started with the analysis of the landscape painting and going through electronic music experimentation and transforming that into an experience using purely acoustic instruments, I discovered the connection of the inner landscape that was disappearing before our eyes and how that parallels the environmental landscape that is collapsing around us. Were there specific examples of environmental depredation that came to mind? The first time I went back to China, six years after moving to America, I lost my voice because of the pollution. I didn't recognize my own city. I also think of Mongolia, whose music was one of my earliest loves, and of the sand storms that now come in from the desert there, which some researchers have attributed to the overconsumption of beef in China. And, of course, now in California there are the fires that affect us and personal friends. You have spoken of the cultural epiphany you experienced when you arrived in the United States at 17. How did the move change you? I discovered China in America. It was only in Austin, Tex., and then during my 14 years in Boston studying at the New England Conservatory and Harvard, that I really reconstructed my family's past, my culture's past. These were things that we hadn't been taught in fact things that were denied. I hand copied Buddhist and Taoist classics and treatises on paintings. I learned the traditional Chinese characters on my own because I had not been taught them in mainland China. It takes some effort and even struggle to earn a membership in a cultural community. I mean, I was born a Chinese citizen. But to be Chinese culturally and spiritually? That is a process, a cultivation and, in the end, a path of self discovery. It's about what we choose to inherit. The study of calligraphy, poetry and traditional painting were central to the Chinese concept of the wenren, or Renaissance man. How do you identify with that term? It's a challenge to see myself as a vessel, as an imaginative and creative force that has a place in history so that you create while you preserve at the same time. Today, in a different world, that encompasses the environmental, cultural and spiritual responsibilities an artist has.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Mariano Rivera III and Alyssa Picinich enjoy their first dance as husband and wife. They Saw a Sign and Didn't Shake It Off For much of the last three years, Mariano Rivera III and Alyssa Picinich were kept apart by Mr. Rivera's first love. "I was very sad every time he left me," said Ms. Picinich, 24, who met Mr. Rivera in November 2014, when they were students she a junior and he a senior at Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y. "As time went on, he started saying how much he really loved me and missed being with me," she said. "Although I felt the same way, I told him that before he decided to come home for good, he needed to consider the consequences." Mr. Rivera, now 25, had not been chasing another woman. He had been chasing a Major League Baseball dream across minor league ball fields in the long shadow of his father, Mariano Rivera, the retired Yankees closer who was a key contributor to five World Series titles during his 19 year tenure in the Bronx. For Mr. Rivera, the thoughts of such loneliness involving a child of his own got him wondering, if what he had been pursuing was his dream. "I've been blessed to have a father who has provided so much for our family, but I don't want my own son to grow up the way I did, and not have a father around because of baseball," he said. "There were days when my father took us to school and spent time with us doing other things, and those are memories I cherish. But I rarely saw him after he left for spring training, and when he played night games at Yankee Stadium, I'd be asleep before he came home." "I actually saw him more on television than in person," Mr. Rivera said. In April, Mr. Rivera, a relief pitcher like his father whose fastball had topped out at 97 miles per hour, decided to slow things down, permanently. "I don't want to live the life my parents have lived," he told Ms. Picinich. "They wanted to make sure I wasn't one of those girls getting involved with their son for all of the wrong reasons," she said. "I wasn't mad or angry because I understood that if I were in their position, I might act the same way." "But I wasn't about to give up on our relationship just because of what his parents thought," she added. "I was determined to show them that I was here for all the right reasons, to support Mariano and to care for him and love him for who he is, and not for who his dad is, or anyone else for that matter." Ms. Picinich had been to many of Mr. Rivera's games throughout his minor league career, including multiple trips to spring training in Florida. She was there for his very last game, against the Wilmingtom Blue Rocks in Delaware. "It was a very sad, emotional day for me," she said. "But Mariano was actually happy, which told me that he had considered the consequences, and that he was truly comfortable with his final decision." After the final out, they drove home together. The couple were married Oct. 13 at the Refuge of Hope Church in New Rochelle, with a reception that followed at the Rockleigh Country Club in Rockleigh, N.J. Later at the reception, Mariano Rivera basked in the glow of a new role, father in law, going table to table to meet and greet many of the 321 guests in attendance (though no Yankees, past or present). Some of the guests were thrilled to pose for photographs with him. "She's a great girl, really amazing," he said of Ms. Picinich. "As a young couple, she and my son have their whole lives in front of them, and as parents, we ask the Lord to bless them with many, many years of health and happiness, and we pray that their family will grow." And then the groom's father closed with this: "There is life after baseball."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
THE L WORD: GENERATION Q 10 p.m. on Showtime. It's been more than 10 years since "The L Word," Showtime's groundbreaking series about lesbian life in West Hollywood, went off the air. Now, a new cast representing a younger, more diverse and more fluid group of L.G.B.T.Q. characters has been tapped for a revival. "Generation Q" also stars the original cast members Jennifer Beals, Leisha Hailey and Katherine Moennig. SILICON VALLEY 10 p.m. on HBO. The Pied Piper gang signs off for the final episode of this sendup of the Bay Area's tech gold rush. Writing about the sixth season for The New York Times, Farhad Manjoo points out that the show has grown over time to acknowledge the gloominess of the tech industry by asking: "Can good coexist with greed? Is it O.K. to act unethically in the service of ethical ends? Does money necessarily ruin everything and how much does that matter, if we're talking billions?" But as the series approaches its finale, Manjoo writes, "I'd rather Richard and the gang fail honorably, letting Pied Piper die, than succeed by selling out. But that, too, would be unreal." MADAM SECRETARY 10:30 p.m. on CBS. From Secretary of State to the Oval Office, Elizabeth McCord (Tea Leoni) has governed with honor, intelligence and candor. Now, in the show's series finale, President McCord will embark on a new political initiative with help from members of the World Cup champion United States women's soccer team, while also trying to plan a family celebration.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
LOS ANGELES About a month ago, in the middle of the night, someone repeatedly rang my doorbell and banged on my security gate. I grabbed a robe and rushed to find out what was going on. Police car lights were bleeding in through the window and pops of color circled the darkened dining room. I opened the inner door and saw an officer illuminated by porch light. "Ma'am, did you hear any shots earlier?" he asked. "Yes, I did," I told him. I'd been awake and feeling rattled ever since. We have a running joke on my neighborhood's Facebook page: Gunshots or fireworks? Most of the time it's the latter, kids goofing around down by the Los Angeles River. But not that night. "How many shots, would you say?" he asked. "About 10 or 12," I guessed, and then asked: "What happened?" He said that the driver of one car had shot into another. The victim had driven himself to the hospital, which triggered a call to the police. The next day I read a news item online that said they'd found about 10 shell casings on the street near my home. While we get the occasional graffiti tag on a neighborhood wall, any gunshots are usually in the distance. At the same time, we Southern Californians are never completely surprised by anything that happens in a car. It's where we pluck whiskers from chins, brush teeth, change our clothes and occasionally take out aggression on one another. Sometimes even on the freeways at top speed. But in this quieter time of the coronavirus pandemic, where we're home and mostly keeping our hands to ourselves, a funny thing has happened on the way to smacking the next guy: Crime is down. The Associated Press reports that around the world, man's inhumanity to man has taken a back seat to Covid 19. Drug arrests in Chicago had plummeted by 42 percent in the weeks since the city was shuttered, and across Latin America, crime had been reduced to "levels unseen in decades," it said. A construction worker in El Salvador remarked, "Killings are down, and the gangsters aren't harassing so much.'' And in my hometown, Los Angeles, the article noted, the crime statistics were similar to last year's until the week of March 15, when they dropped by 30 percent. Unlike the gunman who awakened me that night, more people in my neighborhood have been using their cars to show love. A few weeks ago, my sister and I were quarantining in the living room, using our devices, when we both looked up to see a parade of cars passing. At first I thought it was a funeral procession, but some drivers had bouquets of balloons streaming from the windows. Handmade signs affixed to the doors read, "JRob," and the drivers honked festively. The parade was for a neighborhood school, Jackie Robinson Academy. The administrators and teachers were riding through our streets to let students know they missed them, but also that they wanted them to stay home and be safe. I posted a couple of hastily snapped pictures of it on my neighborhood Facebook page, sharing that I wished I'd taken better photos of the cars and asking if anyone else had any good shots. My neighbor Kevon replied that she didn't but added, "There was a birthday parade for neighbor Rick Friday night! It's been very touching experiencing/witnessing these beautiful displays." On the neighborhood Facebook page, people chat animatedly about birthday, teacher and graduation drive bys. My neighbor's son, standing in his cap and gown, was feted when the local chapter of a national organization created mini parades for four members' children. A memoirist in my writing group missed our meeting because, he said, "we are doing a drive by Mother's Day celebration with my in laws." These mini parades feel small town and wholesome. While many of us have conceded the need to flatten our lives during the pandemic, we still hunger to commemorate the milestones, applaud essential workers on the front lines and acknowledge losses, such as the bond between students and teachers broken when the school year ended abruptly. We can't give parties or hugs, but we can use the modest resources we have our cars, homemade signs and horns so that this deadly virus doesn't kill off treasured traditions. I don't think I'm the only one thankful for this break from the traffic in this city, where commuter hell can chip away at quality of life. In fact, a month and a half back, I joked on social media: "GOOD NEWS: With traffic slowed to a trickle, I almost have my road rage under control." I know one day, Southern California will get back up to speed. We'll be too busy for the friendly drive by, and the streets will be too crowded to accommodate them. So I'm enjoying this time, while our repair crews expedite their highway improvement projects. And yet, there are always those who try to take advantage. In the month after people began staying home, The Los Angeles Times reported, the California Highway Patrol issued 2,493 tickets to drivers going more than 100 m.p.h., an 87 percent increase over that same period last year. The authorities said that one Southern California motorist clocked in at 165 m.p.h. No doubt he was going nowhere fast, while back in my neighborhood the drivers who slow their roll, decorate their cars and call us to the porch with riotous honking take our minds off what the future may hold and let us revel in the now. 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
Ose, a hands free sex toy designed by the company Lora DiCarlo, won a CES Innovation Award, only to see it revoked, and then reinstated. Sex Toy Award Is Restored by Trade Show After an Outcry Over Sexism The country's largest consumer electronics convention has restored an award that it had promised to give but then rescinded to a high tech sex toy for women and gender nonconforming people. The convention, CES, is held each January in Las Vegas to great anticipation. An appearance and certainly, an award at the show can give a company a crucial boost and help it attract investors. That's why the owners of Lora DiCarlo, a start up based in Oregon, were gobsmacked in October when they were told that their hands free personal massager, the Ose, would win an Innovation Award in the robotics and drones category only to learn weeks later that the decision had been reversed. In an open letter that spurred an outcry when it was published on the first day of the conference in January, the company's founder and chief executive, Lora Haddock, accused the show of sexism and stifling innovation. In initially rescinding the award, the organization that sponsors the show, the Consumer Technology Association, had cited a clause in the awards' terms and conditions that disqualified products deemed "immoral, obscene, indecent, profane or not in keeping with CTA's image." Association representatives said later that the device did not fit into any product category. In her letter, Ms. Haddock pointed out that the show had featured a sex doll and virtual reality pornography, and accused the organization of having "an obvious double standard when it comes to sexuality and sexual health." The episode unfolded after other accusations of sexism against the male dominated show. In 2018, it was criticized for not initially booking any female keynote speakers, for the second year in a row. Some companies also hire promotional models (often called "booth babes") to attract attendees. In reversing its stance on Wednesday, the Consumer Technology Association said it "recognizes the innovative technology that went into the development of Ose and reiterates its sincere apology to the Lora DiCarlo team." Jean Foster, the association's senior vice president for marketing and communications, said in a phone interview that after the outcry about the Ose during CES, the organization realized it had made a mistake and reached out to Ms. Haddock and her colleagues. Ms. Foster said association officials recognized that they had unevenly applied rules barring sex tech companies. "We realized we didn't handle it well," she said. Ms. Foster added that the show was revisiting a number of practices related to sex tech, gender and inclusion. Ms. Haddock said that her company was helping the association to rewrite its policies, with an eye toward fostering greater diversity at the gatherings. "We want to open it up to other founders who may not have felt that they would be welcome," Ms. Haddock said. She added that the restoration of the award was heartening for her engineers, who are focused on creating microrobotic functions that simulate human movement. The product is scheduled to become available in the fall, tentatively priced at 290. Made of medical grade silicone, it is designed to simultaneously provoke vaginal and clitoral orgasms. (In its marketing materials, the company calls "blended" orgasms "the holy grail.") It does not vibrate rather, it makes a "come hither" motion inside the body, the company says. It can also be programmed to fit a user's preferences. Its marketing materials say the device is intended for anyone with the relevant anatomy, regardless of gender identity. Ms. Haddock said the company had patents pending related to robotics, biomimicry and engineering of the device, and hoped to integrate sensors and reactivity in the next iteration.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Vaccine experts peppered officials at the Food and Drug Administration with a range of questions on Thursday about its guidelines for approving a coronavirus vaccine, pushing the agency on whether it should wait longer to collect more safety data and whether an emergency approval could jeopardize the outcome of the broader clinical trials. The stakes, the experts said, could not be higher. Even as a vaccine is seen as crucial to ending the pandemic, opinion polls have shown that Americans are increasingly skeptical about the products and worry that the vetting process is being rushed. "In this particular case, public trust equals success," said Sheldon Toubman, the consumer representative on the advisory group. "Lack of trust means no success." The meeting, which lasted all day and was broadcast on YouTube, also included a presentation by a nonprofit group that interviewed people about their views about a coronavirus vaccine. Several people of color expressed concern about whether the vaccine had been studied in people who are Black, Latino or Native American. Others said their skepticism had historical roots dating to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which government scientists lied to Black men and allowed them to go untreated for syphilis. "I firmly believe that this is another Tuskegee experiment," one participant said. The expert panel was not asked to evaluate a specific vaccine none of the companies developing one so far have results from large clinical trials but rather to weigh in on how the F.D.A. should vet the candidates. The agency has said that it will ask the panel for its opinion before approving any coronavirus vaccine for emergency use. The agency typically, but not always, follows the advice of its outside experts. Four companies are conducting late stage clinical trials in the United States, and some have estimated they will have preliminary data that may allow them to apply for emergency authorization in certain high risk groups by the end of November. One of the companies, Moderna, said on Thursday that it had fully enrolled its trial of 30,000 participants, the first company to do so. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. Several of the experts said that they believed the agency should ask the companies to wait for more safety data. They said the agency's current guidelines, which require two months of safety data after a volunteer has received the last dose of a vaccine, were not good enough. Collecting longer term data would allow them to evaluate potential risks, such as whether immunity to the virus wanes after a few months, or whether rare side effects emerge. The experts were also asked to give their opinions about what should happen to the clinical trials if the F.D.A. were to approve a vaccine for emergency use based on promising early data. Pfizer has said that if a vaccine is approved for emergency use, the company will be ethically obligated to offer the vaccine to people in the trial who received a placebo instead of the actual vaccine. But this would "unblind" the trial by revealing who was in each group, jeopardizing the broader results. Many of the experts said that the results of the clinical trials which include 30,000 to 60,000 people were crucial to understanding whether the vaccines would work and would be safe to give to millions and possibly billions of people. "It seems to me that continuation of the blinded phase is absolutely critical, and so we should do all that we can to make sure they continue," said Dr. Luigi Notarangelo, chief of the Laboratory of Clinical Immunology and Microbiology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the National Institutes of Health. Some members said that if emergency use of the vaccine was limited to a small group of high risk people nursing home residents or older adults, for example then the trials should continue, since most people in the placebo group would most likely not be in those high risk groups. Some F.D.A. officials, including Marion Gruber, the director of the Office of Vaccines Research and Review, raised another possibility: that instead of an emergency approval, the agency could make the vaccine available in an even more limited way, through something known as "expanded access." Such programs are typically used to give experimental drugs to severely ill patients, but have been used with some vaccines. By limiting access to the vaccine in this way, some said, the clinical trials could continue while people who were at extreme risk of dying from Covid 19 could be vaccinated, although precise details were not provided. But a restricted access program could carry political risks. President Trump has pushed for vaccines to be widely available, boasting that they would be ready "immediately" as soon as there was positive news. Top federal health officials, however, have said the vaccines if they are successful are unlikely to be widely available to all Americans until well into next year.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
A federal judge on Sunday granted a preliminary injunction against a Trump administration order to ban the viral video app TikTok from U.S. app stores, in a reprieve for the Chinese owned service. The injunction halts only the element of the ban scheduled to take effect Sunday at midnight, which would have forced TikTok off app stores run by companies like Apple and Google. It does not cover a broader set of restrictions set to take effect in November "at this time," the judge, Carl Nichols of United States District Court for the District of Columbia, said in his order. The government had argued that the measures were responding to fears that the app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, could send data back to authorities in Beijing. A Justice Department official, Daniel Schwei, said that TikTok's "First Amendment rights are not implicated" by the ban. Lawyers for the app told Judge Nichols in a hearing on Sunday morning that forcing online stores to remove the app weeks before an election and at a time of increased isolation because of the pandemic would impinge on the rights of potential new users to share their views. TikTok had sought the preliminary injunction to temporarily halt the ban. A ban would "be no different from the government locking the doors to a public forum," said John Hall, a lawyer for TikTok. "We're pleased that the court agreed with our legal arguments and issued an injunction preventing the implementation of the TikTok app ban," a spokesman for TikTok said on Sunday after the judge's decision. "We will continue defending our rights for the benefit of our community and employees. At the same time, we will also maintain our ongoing dialogue with the government to turn our proposal, which the president gave his preliminary approval to last weekend, into an agreement." The Commerce Department said in a statement that it would "comply with the injunction and has taken immediate steps to do so, but intends to vigorously defend the E.O. and the secretary's implementation efforts from legal challenges." TikTok is fighting to continue operating in the United States. Mr. Trump has been hawkish on Chinese technology for the past few years and has said that Chinese backed apps like TikTok and the messaging service WeChat, owned by Tencent, pose national security threats because they could offer data about Americans to Beijing. In early August, Mr. Trump issued executive orders to effectively ban TikTok and WeChat in the United States. Citing those orders, the Commerce Department said this month that it would bar WeChat and TikTok from U.S. app stores, including those run by Apple and Google. TikTok is used by more than 120 million Americans, according to the company. The measures set to take effect on Sunday would have forced companies like Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores, making it difficult for new users to download the app. More restrictions are set to take effect on Nov. 12 that would make it more difficult for the app to operate for its existing users. To avoid a ban, TikTok has been in talks for months to strike a deal with an American technology company to defuse national security concerns. Earlier this month, TikTok hammered out an agreement with Oracle and Walmart to create a new entity, TikTok Global, in which the American companies would jointly own a 20 percent stake. ByteDance would initially own the other 80 percent. The companies did not detail how they would deal with national security questions. Oracle and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday evening. President Trump gave his preliminary blessing to the deal. But the companies have publicly disagreed over how much of TikTok Global will be owned by American entities. That led Mr. Trump to say he might not approve the deal if Oracle did not have control over TikTok. "If we find that they don't have total control, then we're not going to approve the deal," Mr. Trump said in an interview on Monday on "Fox Friends." Any deal may still be disrupted by Beijing. China Daily, the official English language newspaper of the Chinese government, recently called the TikTok deal "dirty and unfair and based on bullying and extortion." Last Wednesday, TikTok asked for a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration to prevent a ban from taking effect on Sept. 27. In its request, filed in United States District Court for the District of Columbia, the company said it had "made extraordinary efforts to try to satisfy the government's ever shifting demands and purported national security concerns."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Chrysler Group, recently merged with Fiat, said Thursday that it would no longer publish reports of its North American vehicle production figures. Because the reports include only North American Free Trade Agreement production numbers, Chrysler said that they were an inaccurate portrayal of the company's overall financial status. General Motors had announced that it would cease publishing monthly production numbers last June. (Automotive News, subscription required) Anticipating high volume production of Ford's all new aluminum F 150 pickup truck, automakers are scrambling to score deals with aluminum suppliers. Ford has already secured the supply it needs for the new aluminum bodied pickups, but in the short term that means a shortage for other manufacturers. Novelis Inc., a supplier of automotive sheet aluminum, and Alcoa, its rival, are adding production capacity to meet demand as more automakers switch from steel to lightweight aluminum in order to increase vehicle fuel economy. (The Detroit News) Investigating a Feb. 1 fire involving a Model S sedan in Canada, Tesla Motors said in a statement this week that the fire did not originate with the electric car's battery or charging system. The car's owner had parked the car after driving it, but it was not plugged into its charger when the fire started. (Business Insider) Bugatti has a problem no automaker wants: It has a huge surplus of cars. Although the stockpile of cars stands at about only 40, the convertibles have a sticker price of nearly 2 million each, meaning the automaker has more than 80 million worth of cars that it needs to sell. Bugatti executives say that until the cars are sold, the company will not build a new model. (Bloomberg)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Over just five days in New York, three distinctive pianists at three different stages of their careers offered exceptional performances. The first half of Jeremy Denk's fascinating recital at Carnegie Hall on Friday was devoted to themes and variations, beginning with Beethoven's cheeky Variations on "Rule Britannia," and ending with his astounding "Eroica" Variations," a warm up for the "Eroica" Symphony. The intricate manipulations Beethoven gives his themes in the symphony's finale are nothing compared to the gnarly gyrations of the piano variations, which Mr. Denk, 48, dispatched with a winning combination of pluck and intensity. Between the two, he performed John Adams's swirling, murky "I Still Play" Variations and Mendelssohn's darkly brilliant and, at times, vehement "Variations Serieuses," written in homage to Beethoven. Schumann's Fantasy in C, which Mr. Denk played after intermission, also nods to Beethoven by quoting a theme from the song cycle "An die ferne Geliebte" in the wistful final episode of the fantasy's teeming first movement. This 30 minute fantasy in three movements is one of Schumann's most ingeniously structured scores, yet Mr. Denk kept you engrossed every moment by fantastical, dreamy, and, in the rousing march movement, giddily energetic flights. This was one of the finest performances I've heard of an elusive and challenging piece. As an encore, Mr. Denk, who revels in mood shifting pairings, played Donald Lambert's 1941 take on the "Pilgrim's Chorus" from Wagner's "Tannhauser," which turns this solemn anthem into something close to boogie woogie. Schumann dedicated the Fantasy in C to Liszt. Years later, Liszt returned the favor by dedicating his daunting Sonata in B minor to Schumann. On Saturday, the 28 year old Uzbek pianist Behzod Abduraimov gave a stunning performance of the sonata at the 92nd Street Y. With prodigious technique and rhapsodic flair, Mr. Abduraimov dispatched the work's challenges, including burst upon burst of arm blurring octaves, with eerie command. I was even more impressed by how he conveyed the structure of this single movement yet boldly episodic piece. He began with an elegant account of Liszt's remarkable piano transcription of the "Liebestod" from Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde." There were danger signs from Mr. Abduraimov, however, in his account of Prokofiev's 10 Pieces from "Romeo and Juliet." Though Mr. Abduraimov sometimes played with captivating delicacy and milky colorings, he could not resist going for broke during the percussive, heaving episodes of these pieces. His sound was too often steely and harsh. Finally, on Tuesday at Zankel Hall, Leon Fleisher, who turned 90 in July, had a belated birthday celebration. A revered pianist and teacher, Mr. Fleisher has inspired several generations of younger musicians. He has also been a role model in the way he coped with infirmity. In the mid 1960s, hailed as one of the leading pianists of his generation, he suffered a debilitating injury to his right hand, apparently because of over intense practicing. In time, he channeled his energy into conducting, teaching and performing left hand piano repertory. In the 1990s, after a range of treatments, he emerged again as a two hand pianist, though never quite fully. There have been shortcomings to his right hand's functioning in recent years, but his playing has always been profoundly musical, as with his performance on Tuesday of Egon Petri's arrangement of Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze." Mr. Fleisher played this lovely piece with lilting sway and tenderness and brought out inner voices beautifully. He excelled in Leon Kirchner's "L.H." for left hand, written for him a piece of impetuous energy and tangy, atonal harmonies. Two devoted Fleisher students also took part. Jonathan Biss gave a fervent and insightful account of Beethoven's Sonata in E (Op. 109), marred by a couple of rough passages, and a glistening performance of Kirchner's restless "Interlude II." And Yefim Bronfman joined the Dover String Quartet in the dramatic first movement of Brahms's Piano Quintet in F minor. The evening ended with fitting intimacy. Mr. Fleisher played Mozart's soft spoken Piano Concerto No. 12 in A (K. 414), in a version for piano and string quartet (the Dover players again) and bass (Rachel Calin). If his right hand passagework did not always sparkle, it hardly mattered, for all the genial warmth and integrity of his playing.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
PARIS The Trump administration and leaders of other wealthy nations remain at odds over how to tax technology companies and other businesses that operate online, negotiators confirmed on Friday, an impasse that threatens to inflame global trade tensions if not resolved by year's end. Some 130 countries are engaged in the discussions, through the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, that are trying to set new rules for taxing multinational companies in an increasingly digital economy. Those rules could include international standards for which countries can tax activity that occurs online, and to what degree. They could also establish what would be an effective global minimum tax for multinational companies that shift their profits to low tax havens like Ireland and Bermuda. It also delayed the most contentious issue in the talks a demand by American officials that some companies be allowed to choose whether or not to be taxed under any new international system until the end of the negotiations. "Resolution of this issue is crucial to reaching consensus," negotiators said in a consensus statement released on Friday. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The talks carry high financial stakes for large companies that operate in multiple countries. Countries like France and Britain have approved so called digital taxes that hit large tech companies, like Google and Amazon, that have large online footprints in their countries but face little tax liability because their physical operations are concentrated elsewhere. The United States has objected to those taxes as discriminatory against American firms, which would be among those most affected, and it has threatened tariffs on imports from countries that impose the taxes. American and French officials reached a temporary truce on the issue last week in Davos, Switzerland, with the Trump administration pausing its tariff threat and the French delaying collection of the digital tax this year while the sides seek a deal through the O.E.C.D. Such a deal still appears difficult in large part because of the Trump administration's insistence that some companies be allowed to choose whether or not to subject themselves to the new tax standards. That could be an especially important option for nontechnology multinationals, like consumer products companies, which have grown increasingly concerned that they could be subject to new taxation under any agreement. Pascal Saint Amans, director of the O.E.C.D. Center for Tax Policy and Administration, told reporters on Friday that for "a very large spectrum of countries," the American position would make any agreement difficult or impossible. Negotiators agreed to delay any discussion on that question until all other issues surrounding digital taxation had been resolved. Still, Mr. Saint Amans said, there is "strong political commitment to work together" among negotiators, and he hopes that more progress can be made by July, when negotiators will meet in Berlin. Mr. Saint Amans said the process was moving fast "because what is at stake is a massive trade war" particularly between France and the United States. Angel Gurria, the O.E.C.D.'s secretary general, said in a news release that negotiators still faced a daunting task bridging "critical policy differences," but that a collapse of the talks risked economic calamity. "We are convinced that failure to reach agreement would greatly increase the risk that countries will act unilaterally" to impose taxes and tariffs, Mr. Gurria said, "with negative consequences on an already fragile global economy." Liz Alderman reported from Paris, and Jim Tankersley from Washington.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
For years, tenants have worked uneasily inside the Manhattan skyscraper formerly known as the Piaget Building, as federal prosecutors tried to wrest the prime real estate from Iranian related partners. The office tower at 650 Fifth Avenue, built in the late 1970s by the Shah of Iran, has been the subject of seizure proceedings by federal prosecutors who contended that the ownership groups engaged in money laundering for their government and also violated economic sanctions imposed against Iran. Earlier this month, a judge ruled in the prosecutors' favor, in what prosecutors described as the country's largest ever terrorism related forfeiture. The decision, which is likely to be appealed, has only added to the uncertain fate of the building, which is a highly coveted trophy property with notable tenants, like a Juicy Couture flagship store, offices for Starwood Hotels Resorts Worldwide and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Proceeds from a sale would probably be used to pay some of the 6 billion in damages claimed by family members of victims of terrorism, including victims of the 9/11 attacks, in which Iran has been found to have had some culpability. The court decision was issued at a delicate time in the strained relations between Iran and the United States, as both sides suggest diplomatic overtures. The new Iranian president, Hassan Rouhani, is in New York this week, as is President Obama. The building's ownership, under the legal name 650 Fifth Avenue Company, has consisted of the Assa Corporation and Assa Company Limited, which owned 40 percent of the property, and the Alavi Foundation, which owned the remaining 60 percent. The court ruled that the Assa entities are a front for Bank Melli Iran, an institution that is wholly owned by the Iranian government. It also ruled that both Assa and Alavi laundered money. "The court has found that, based on the uncontroverted record evidence, Assa was (and is) a front for Bank Melli, and thus a front for the government of Iran," United States District Judge Katherine B. Forrest wrote in her Sept. 16 ruling. In the late 1970s, the Pahlavi Foundation, a nonprofit group that was operated by the Shah of Iran to pursue the country's charitable interests in the United States, erected the building. It was financed with some 42 million from Bank Melli, which had been lent the money by the Central Bank of Iran, according to court documents. After the Iranian revolution in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran sought to take control of the Shah's property, including the assets of the Pahlavi Foundation, which was renamed the Alavi Foundation. "As a former property manager of the building, we never knew exactly who we were working for," said Michael T. Cohen, regional president for Colliers International. While he managed the building, in the 1980s, Mr. Cohen worked for a predecessor to Colliers International, Williams Real Estate. "We knew it was the Pahlavi Foundation, and we knew there were people in New York to whom we reported, but beyond that we couldn't be sure of anything." As for the organizations leasing space in the building, which included Marc Rich Company, Pahlavi "was a murky landlord who catered to murky tenants," Mr. Cohen said. (Mr. Rich, who died this year, was the financier who fled to Switzerland while under indictment on charges of fraud and illegal trading with Iran, among other charges. His pardon by President Clinton set off a firestorm of criticism.) Ivan F. Boesky, the Wall Street speculator convicted of insider trading in 1987, was also a tenant at one point. While the government has seized commercial buildings before, the sheer size of 650 Fifth Avenue presented challenges, mostly because of the number of tenants. In 2008, the government first filed a case against Assa, claiming it was a front for Bank Melli. Rents that had been paid to Assa were diverted into an account supervised by the United States Marshals Service. In 2009, the government also began pursuing Alavi. The United States attorney's office said on Tuesday that it would request the diversion of Alavi's rent income as well. Kathleen A. Roberts, a former judge and a mediator, was appointed by federal court to supervise decisions made by the Alavi Foundation. Ms. Roberts oversaw issues like lease negotiations and building upkeep. She also supervised the owner's decision last year to spend 11 million on capital improvements. The building also hired CBRE to oversee the office space and Cushman Wakefield to oversee the retail, replacing Jones Lang LaSalle, which had been managing the property. Jones Lang LaSalle did not return calls for comment, and CBRE and Cushman Wakefield declined to comment. The United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, which brought the case, declined to comment for the article. This week, in the aftermath of the court ruling, the government is petitioning the court to make Ms. Roberts the sole decision maker over the property. That request could raise some additional concerns for tenants already bedeviled by unknowns, real estate experts said. Gary M. Rosenberg, a founding partner at the law firm Rosenberg Estis, suggested that a government landlord might act more slowly than a private one. "If tenants need something outside the four corners of the lease for example, a fire knocks out the elevators a typical landlord would call the insurance company and then call the elevator company and say, 'Just fix it,' " he said. "The government isn't going to pay to get the elevators fixed until they get their insurance proceeds." Because of the expected appeal, Ms. Roberts will most likely continue to oversee the building, and any sale will probably be a few years away. But even talk of a potential sale of this property, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street, generates a lot of excitement in the real estate industry. "It is right in the heart of the most expensive retail real estate in New York City," said Robert K. Futterman, chairman and chief executive at the retail brokerage RKF. He added that "if it is put on the market, we are going to see an exciting bidding war from all the major retail players."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
A drone from the University of Zurich is an engineering and technical marvel. It also moves slower than someone taking a Sunday morning jog. At the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Madrid last October, the autonomous drone, which navigates using artificial intelligence, raced through a complicated series of turns and gates, buzzing and moving like a determined and oversized bumblebee. It bobbed to duck under a bar that swooshed like a clock hand, yawed left, pitched forward and raced toward the finish line. The drone, small and covered in sensors, demolished the competition, blazing through the course twice as fast as its nearest competitor. Its top speed: 5.6 miles per hour. A few weeks earlier, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, a different drone, flown remotely by its pilot, Paul Nurkkala, shot through a gate at the top of a 131 foot high tower, inverted into a roll and then dove toward the earth. Competitors trailed behind or crashed into pieces along the course, but this one swerved and corkscrewed through two twin arches, hit a straightaway and then blasted into the netting that served as the finish line for the Drone Racing League's world championship. The winning drone, a league standard Racer3, reached speeds over 90 miles per hour, but it needed a human to guide it. Mr. Nurkkala, known to fans as Nurk, wore a pair of goggles that beamed him a first person view of his drone as he flew it. But the real world can be an immensely noisy place, and many A.I. powered, and autonomous, vehicles still struggle to excel in it. In 2017, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory built three autonomous drones and pitted them in a race against Ken Loo, an expert drone pilot. He easily beat them all. Darpa's Fast Lightweight Autonomy program has been able to send drones through tight hallways at 45 miles per hour, faster than the one from the University of Zurich, but in a less complex setting and slower than a human pilot. A piloted drone swooping and arcing around a course while an autonomous drone hesitantly chugs through space is the difference between an N.B.A. point guard driving toward the basket and a toddler learning to walk. Onboard computers will get more powerful. Algorithms for developing optimal flight paths will become optimized. New image processing techniques will shrink the time it takes for a computer to understand what it sees from milliseconds to microseconds, while the human eye will always have 13 milliseconds of latency in processing visual stimuli. But that's in the future. Right now, an autonomous drone completing a racecourse at a speed faster than 5.6 miles per hour will be an accomplishment. This year, a new competition will try to make sure autonomous drones are more nimble and that they are truly able to act by themselves. "Right now, autonomous drones are a thing you'd only find in labs, being pioneered by a small, niche audience," said Keith Lynn, Lockheed Martin's program manager for AlphaPilot, an autonomous drone racing competition organized by the Drone Racing League. The AlphaPilot competition, which is sponsored by Lockheed Martin and part of the racing league's new Artificial Intelligence Robotic Racing Circuit, aims to drive interest and research into self driving, or autonomous, vehicles. Nine teams will compete this fall, out of 430 currently making their way through qualifying rounds students, A.I. researchers and independent drone enthusiasts, among others according to the organizers. The winning team will take home a prize of 1 million. If the A.I. drone can also beat a top human pilot in a head to head race, the team will get an extra 250,000. Competitors, the league said, will program a Racer3 that includes an artificial intelligence chip made by Nvidia, a partner in the competition. The nine qualifying teams will be announced this spring, according to the organizers. For autonomous drones to be useful in disaster zones, as delivery vehicles or in rural areas they will need to be able to fly far, fast and without human oversight, often in environments where they can't rely on external guidance systems, like GPS. And that's one of their biggest challenges. "Current autonomous drones have very little onboard decision making," said Kerry Snyder, a founder of KEF Robotics, a competing team from Pittsburgh. "They will almost always be following very specific human commands and rarely be able to accomplish higher level tasks such as 'Find a trapped person' or 'Fly through an open window and then explore.'" There's also a gap between code created in the lab and real world flying. "A lot of our A.I. is primarily developed in simulation," said Dr. Chelsea Sabo, technical lead of the AlphaPilot program at Lockheed Martin. "Going from simulation to the real world is going to be a big challenge in AlphaPilot." Eric Amoroso, another co founder of KEF Robotics, said that autonomous vehicles can also be more precise than human pilots. Autonomous drones can fly more precisely by making subtle alterations to how much thrust each propeller produces, for example, he said, and can use information from sensors that humans don't have, like an accelerometer, to estimate where it is in space. But where humans excel and A.I. in general falls short is in merging those individual skills into a cohesive whole, and doing it as fast as humans are capable. "Sensing the world, making decisions, acting on it, and doing that in real time, that's really the fundamental challenge of robotics," Mr. Amoroso said. Autonomous drones also struggle to make sense of visual information, particularly at high speeds, in part because of shortcomings in sensors. "The main challenge of autonomous drone flight is perception based on cameras," said Davide Scaramuzza, professor of robotics and perception at the University of Zurich and the creator of the autonomous drone that won the competition in Madrid last year. "The faster the drone goes, the more blurred the image gets." A drone flying in the AlphaPilot competition will only be able to fly based on what it can see in front of it, and must use that information to know where it is in physical space. At 90 miles per hour, even at the calculating speed computers are capable of, an autonomous drone won't be able to process images as fast as a human can, and may be thrown off course by something as simple as a shadow, leading it to miss a gate or believe it's one foot to the right of where it actually is. At best, this means the autonomous drone will need to course correct, slowing it down. At worst, it crashes. Players at the 2018 DRL Allianz World Championship wore goggles that beamed in a first person view of the race. Nurk flew faster than 90 miles per hour, navigating myriad obstacles, to win. There's also the issue of strategy. "A pilot with thousands of hours of flight time isn't just thinking about the gate in front of them," Mr. Nurkkala, the racing league champion, said. "They're thinking about the next five or six gates, and how to position themselves to keep the best racing line." Inside a simulator, an AlphaPilot drone might be able to make those same sorts of tactical and strategic plans. On a real world course moving at speed, it may just be doing its best to hit each gate. And going fast is a calculation of risk versus reward; if you're flying without ever crashing, Mr. Nurkkala said, you're not flying as fast as possible. For teams programming AlphaPilot drones, this will mean training those drones to make trade offs of when to speed up and when to play it safe decisions humans often make instinctually. "In our simulations, we can tune our system so that it finishes the course 100 percent of the time, but it flies pretty slow," Mr. Snyder said. "Or we can tune it to finish the course 20 percent of the time, but it flies much faster." The winner of the AlphaPilot competition and of its 1 million grand prize will likely be the team that not only optimizes its algorithms, but also take the smartest risks. And if an autonomous drone can outrace a human controlled one? "In my opinion, it would be very similar to Deep Blue or AlphaGo," Mr. Snyder said, referring to the chess playing computer and the DeepMind A.I. "It represents a major step in technical progress and innovation, even if in a limited environment where an autonomous robot could realistically outperform a human. That's in contrast to the infinite and fractal complexity of self driving cars." Mr. Lynn is more effusive: "Everyone will know the programmers behind that team. They'll be celebrities. Companies will want to endorse them. Kids will aspire to be them. That's exciting from a STEM perspective." And Mr. Lynn believes professional pilots will also take notice. "I think you'll also see the human piloted D.R.L. races change, as pilots learn from the efficiencies that only a computer and code can hone in on, and approach maneuvers in entirely new ways. That's exciting for the future of human and machine teamwork."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
When Blanca Li set out to choreograph a dance with robots, she never thought they would talk back. "The dancers work eight hours a day," she said in a recent interview at a restaurant in Chelsea. "The robots, after one hour, go, 'Low battery.' And then, bah." Ms. Li, a small woman with laughing green eyes and more strength than delicacy, lowered her voice and added, "We were not ready for all these problems." But Ms. Li figured them out. In "ROBOT," which begins performances on Tuesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Howard Gilman Opera House, seven robots share the stage with eight dancers and a 10 piece mechanical orchestra, activated by the dancers. Since its 2013 premiere at the Montpellier Dance Festival in France, "ROBOT," which uses dance to explore what it means to be human, has toured steadily. (The Brooklyn appearance is the Blanca Li Dance Company's first in New York.) That's no small feat. But Ms. Li, 51 and born in Granada, Spain, is no ordinary choreographer: Her work mischievous, precise and full of extravagant whimsy reaches beyond traditional dance audiences. For more than 20 years, Ms. Li has choreographed works for her company, as well as for film directors like Pedro Almodovar (the flight attendant dance in "I'm So Excited"). And she has choreographed runway shows and fashion events for designers including Jean Paul Gaultier and Stella McCartney. Last month, she created a dance out of a voluminous red dress for the debut of Azzedine Alaia's new fragrance. She has also choreographed music videos, including Daft Punk's "Around the World," which has its own robotic flair. The director Jonas Akerlund, who worked with her on videos featuring Beyonce and Coldplay, said: "As much as her work is serious and beautiful and artistic, there's always a sense of wit in there. And always a little weirdness to it." "ROBOT" considers the relationship between robots and humans: how characteristics of each like the vulnerability of a dancer and the rigidity of a robot can merge or mingle, even though one is inanimate, and the other is alive. "We never forget it's a robot, but we have a little bit of emotional connection with this little thing," said Ms. Li, who conceived "ROBOT" after considering how addicted we are to machines. "It's a great thing, but people are anguished a little bit. So it's a mix of the fantastic we can do all these things with machines now and fear." Ms. Li looked at many models before settling on NAO, a companion robot manufactured by the French company Aldebaran. "They are the size of a 1 year old kid, and I found them very cute," she said. "They talk, they can recognize you. They have a beautiful kind of movement, even though they are robots and have many limitations." Designing movements for the robots, she said, is like creating animation, but with gravity; since the machines have no time to readjust their balance, they frequently tip over. Ms. Li and her team devised a program to solve this: If a robot topples, it rights itself and catches up with the choreography. Ms. Li contrasts the robots' disjointed movement with her dancers' fluidity. The two modes meet in a pas de deux between the robot Pierre they all have names and the dancer Gael Rougegrez. "If I just showed, 'Look what I can do with robots,' there would be something wrong with the show," she said. Technicians are always on hand, and nothing is hidden from the audience. To Ms. Li, exposing the show's technical difficulties mirrors modern life, where smartphones break, and Wi Fi is never as reliable as you need it to be. "We are able to do so many amazing things and to be so efficient," she said, " but when there was the blackout in New York City, you couldn't even open the door of your hotel room." In the end, "ROBOT" is a celebration of the human body. "We can jump, we can turn, and our brain is constantly readjusting every movement so you don't fall," Ms. Li said. "No machine will ever be so amazingly rich in movement." And through the making of "ROBOT," she said: "I rediscovered dance. I realized how rich it is." Over the past year, Ms. Li has split her time between Paris and New York, where she lives on the Upper East Side with her two sons, 8 and 10, and her husband, a mathematician. This summer, Ms. Li will remain in New York to create an evening length production with the Paris Opera star Marie Agnes Gillot that will open in December in Paris. Ms. Gillot, a bold, modern ballerina with whom Ms. Li has worked before, first saw Ms. Li perform years ago. "She crossed the stage like an animal, slapping the floor with her hair," Ms. Gillot said. "It's a little bit stereotypical, how I'm describing this, but it was just sublime. She doesn't know that she makes me dance the way I do." Ms. Li is producing "ROBOT" at the academy herself. This doesn't come cheap it will cost about 500,000, she said, partly raised by her company's tours and her work in commercials, film and fashion but it's a dream, 20 years in the making. "There was this week at BAM, and I thought, 'Ah, yes!' " she said. "This show is beautiful in a big theater. If I only come once to New York, I want to show my work in the best possible way."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Connie Klube and Karsten Andrae were happy to trade their suburban family home in New Jersey for an apartment on the Weehawken waterfront, after Ms. Klube's round trip commute started stretching to more than three hours. In the fall of 2018, Connie Klube traded a commute from New Jersey that would sometimes devour three hours of her day for one that takes less than half an hour each way and includes a pleasant ferry ride. Although she can't enjoy the benefits of that commuting trade off during the pandemic lockdown, neither she nor her husband, Karsten Andrae, have ever looked back. The couple had lived in Fair Lawn, N.J., since 2005, when they moved to the United States from Frankfurt. They chose Fair Lawn largely because of the schools. But now their son is grown and living in central New Jersey, and their two older daughters live in Germany. Mr. Andrae, 57, a chemist who works in Totowa, N.J., was also happy to relocate, as the house had come to feel excessive for two people. "We had a bunch of rooms we weren't using we had a guest room, a room that didn't even have a purpose," Ms. Klube said. "It was a nice single family house, about 1,700 square feet. We had even put in a new kitchen the year before, but we didn't want to shovel snow anymore." They wanted to stay west of the Hudson River, so as not to saddle Mr. Andrae with an equally arduous reverse commute. Focusing their search on waterfront towns with ferry service to the city, the couple took a liking to the first building they saw, RiverHouse 11, in the Port Imperial neighborhood of Weehawken, about a three minute walk from the ferry terminal. "We were so impressed," said Ms. Klube, who liked that the building was still under construction. Not only did they warm to the idea of being the first tenants in their apartment, but she was also able to evaluate the construction quality. RiverHouse 11 met her standards, and the couple signed a lease on a two bedroom apartment, for which they pay 4,190 a month, which includes parking for two cars and amenities a pool, a gym, a spinning studio, a rooftop lounge and package lockers, among other things. In September 2018, as soon as their unit was ready, they moved in, and they sold their house a month later. Occupations: Ms. Klube is a construction manager; Mr. Andrae is a chemist. They moved to the United States in 2005: "We were feeling ready for a change," Ms. Klube said. Considering countries where Mr. Andrae could transfer with his job, they took a trip to New York, where they visited the Empire State Building. "I said, 'Why are we not moving here? Look at all these cranes. There is work for me here.'" Mingling at their building pre pandemic: "You could go up to the rooftop, drink a glass of wine," Ms. Klube said. "There are tenant events where you can meet people. There are a lot of young people, but also some older people who did the same thing as us." The rooftop garden: Ms. Klube is glad not to have to tend it. Invited to a gardening event by the building manager, she happily declined: "I said, 'I moved here so I don't have to do gardening.'" "We never regretted it," said Ms. Klube, who was delighted to regain several hours of her day by taking the ferry. "It's a commuter's dream. I leave here at 7:15 a.m. to catch the 7:20 ferry, and I'm at the office by 7:40." It is also a completely different experience than the Port Authority bus she used to take to and from work. Rather than being stuck in traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel, she now watches the sun rise and set from the upper deck. "Even people who are on the ferry every day take pictures," Ms. Klube said. It was an easy transition in other ways, too. Their apartment is about 1,200 square feet, so they brought furniture that would work in the new space, got rid of what wouldn't and bought a red designer chair to complement the modern look of the place. "We both grew up in apartments and lived in an apartment with our family in Germany, so we knew what apartment living was going to be like. For us, it's perfect," Ms. Klube said. "When we were at our house in New Jersey and heard it was going to be a very windy day, I'd be like, 'I hope we're not losing power.' Here, everything is taken care of. You're busy at work, and you don't want to spend time cleaning or taking care of leaves." She added: "Having your own house is the American dream, not the German dream. It's totally accepted to rent there." Of course, now that they leave the apartment only for exercise walks and grocery shopping she and Mr. Andrae have been working from home since the coronavirus struck she does miss her old backyard. "Not the house and the commute and all this, but having a lawn and a chat with the neighbors over the fence would be lovely," Ms. Klube said. They also slightly regret passing on a unit with a balcony. "Now I wish we had one," she said. "We thought, 'Oh, it's more money.'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Incomes are up. Poverty is down. And job openings have hit a record high. But if the economy is so wonderful, why are so many Americans still feeling left behind? The disconnect between positive statistics and people's day to day lives is one of the great economic and social puzzles of recent years. It helped fuel President Trump's political rise and underpins the frustrations that played out in calls to build a Mexican border wall, reopen trade agreements, and bring back well paid work in coal mines and factories. When the Census Bureau released its annual report on the country's economic well being on Tuesday, it showed unmistakable progress: For the second year in a row, household incomes clobbered by the 2007 recession had grown. More Americans were working, and more had health insurance, in 2016 than the year before. The findings suggest that the "American dream" in which each generation is richer and better positioned than the previous one is back on track. For many Americans, though, the recent progress is still dwarfed by profound changes that have been building for nearly a half century: rising inequality and rusted stuck incomes. "Over the past five decades, Middle America has been stagnant in terms of its economic growth," said Mark Rank, a professor of social work at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1973, the inflation adjusted median income of men working full time was 54,030. In 2016, it was 51,640 roughly 2,400 lower. A big chunk of that group white working class men formed a critical core of support for Mr. Trump, who spoke to their economic anxieties and promised changes in trade, immigration and tax policies as a solution. As in an Agatha Christie mystery, the potential culprits behind the long term trends are many global competition, technological advances, trade imbalances, a mismatch of skills, the tax system, housing prices, factory shutdowns, excessive regulation, Wall Street pressure, the erosion of labor unions and more. Most of the suspects, if not all, are likely to have played some role. Starting with 1957, the team looked at actual earnings during the prime working years the ages of 25 to 55. For a while, it saw a clear pattern: Younger men could expect to make more over their lives than older ones. Every year the starting rewards were higher and kept growing. So men who turned 25 in, say, 1960 would end up with a higher median cumulative income by 55 than men who had turned 25 in 1959. And the '59ers would, in turn, do better over three decades than those who had turned 25 in 1958. But that steady progress stopped in the late 1960s. Then, instead of increasing, lifetime earnings for men made an about face and began to decline. They have been dropping pretty much ever since. The result was that a 25 year old man who entered the work force in 1967 and worked for the next three decades earned as much as 250,000 more, after taking inflation into account, than a man who had the same type of career but was 15 years younger. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. "That's enough to buy a medium size house in the United States," said Fatih Guvenen, an economist at the University of Minnesota and a co author of the study. "That is what you are missing from one generation to the next generation." And the trend appears to be continuing. "Every new cohort made less in median lifetime income than the previous one," Mr. Guvenen said. The result is widening lifetime inequality as well. That's because nearly all of the financial gains have been funneled to those at the top of the income scale. For four out of five men, there was no real growth. "And it all starts at age 25," Mr. Guvenen said. The decline in lifetime earnings is largely a result of lower incomes at younger ages rather than at older ages, he said, and "that was very surprising to us." According to one conservative measure of inflation, in 1967, the median income at age 25 was 33,300; in 1983, it was 29,000. Twenty five year olds did better during the 1990s, but then the slide returned. In 2011, the median income for 25 year old men was less than 25,000 pretty much the same as it was in 1959. The picture for women looks different because so many more of them started at a disadvantage: Few worked full time in the 1950s, and those who did earned below average wages. As more women entered the work force over the decades, their lifetime earnings rose. But more recently, as the share of women working has leveled off, their lifetime income gains, too, have slowed. The result is that, since the 1950s, three quarters of working Americans have seen no change in lifetime income. Health and retirement benefits have made up some of the lost ground, but far from all of it. The recent progress reported by the Census Bureau doesn't conflict with this story. As the bureau explained, the income gains came mostly because more people were working full time. Roughly 2.2 million more adults had full time jobs in 2016 than in 2015. To Mr. Guvenen, the research indicates that the political debates in Washington centered on earnings and employment have been too narrow. Given the early roots of lifetime income disparities, he said, more attention should be paid to what is going on even before people start entering the work force. "Our findings suggest that both the stagnation of median lifetime income for men, and the increase in lifetime income inequality for men and women, can be traced to changes that newer cohorts have experienced before age 25," the research team concluded.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
New York buildings come in a variety of architectural styles, but typically each building has just one. A condominium under construction in Long Island City, though, will bring three styles into a single project. Named Galerie and designed by ODA New York for Adam America, the 11 story complex on Jackson Avenue, directly across from MoMA P. S. 1, will reference building types found throughout the Queens neighborhood. Concrete framed sections of the facade have factory style windows that hark back to the steel versions on the area's 19th century industrial plants. Sections with more traditional punched out windows are brick, like the older portion of P.S.1. And a curtain wall component at the top of the complex resembles the glassy structures prevalent across the city today (and provides unfettered views of the Manhattan skyline). The segments fit together like puzzle pieces, giving the large, 182 unit project the feel of a cluster of smaller buildings and thus bringing a more modest scale to an area that has seen its share of looming, straight up towers. Mr. Chen knew about the site which borders the Sunnyside rail yard long before he got the commission. He had already designed a rental building on the same block. Dvir Cohen Hoshen, co founder of Adam America, admired that building an 11 story tower with boxy segments that jut out from the facade, creating terraces for the apartments above them and asked ODA to design a condo version of it that would fill out the block. Instead, Mr. Chen came up with his three styles in one design, which has an H shaped footprint. The south facing opening in the H will become a grassy courtyard, with ground floor amenities, including an indoor pool, looking out onto the green space. Paris Forino, the interior designer for the project, is adding drama to this level with muscular arches in warm white oak. The building's name and certain features, like a display window for a rotating selection of paintings, prints and sculpture, play off the project's proximity to P. S. 1 and the many artists' studios in the area. Long Island City, which offers an easy commute to Midtown Manhattan on public transportation and which will soon become home to an Amazon headquarters, has been evolving as a residential community. Many buildings that went up after a 2001 rezoning were high rise rentals. Now condominium projects are being added to the residential mix. Galerie's apartments two thirds of them are one and two bedrooms went on sale in February, and over 30 percent are now in contract, according to Halstead Property Development Marketing, which is handling sales. The complex has been attracting renters in the area who are ready to graduate to homeownership, according to Brendan Aguayo, a managing director at Halstead. Galerie is luring out of towners, too. Buyers from New Jersey are making "a strong showing," according to Mr. Aguayo, who had a 3D printed map of the area made for the sales gallery to help outsiders get to know the neighborhood. Although condos elsewhere in the city have long offered finish options buyers often get to choose from a "dark" or "light" palette for kitchen cabinetry, for instance this may be the first time a project offers window options (all with special sound buffering glazing to address the noise from Jackson Avenue and the rail yards). Modernists may gravitate to units in the section with glass curtain walls, for instance. Or that's the theory anyway. According to Mr. Aguayo, buyers are focusing less on the window styling and more on apartment size, layout and, of course, price. Apartments range from 550,000 for a studio to 2,550,000 for a three bedroom penthouse.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
These Coronavirus Trials Don't Answer the One Question We Need to Know None Dr. Doshi is an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy. Dr. Topol is a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research. If you were to approve a coronavirus vaccine, would you approve one that you only knew protected people only from the most mild form of Covid 19, or one that would prevent its serious complications? The answer is obvious. You would want to protect against the worst cases. But that's not how the companies testing three of the leading coronavirus vaccine candidates, Moderna, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, whose U.S. trial is on hold, are approaching the problem. According to the protocols for their studies, which they released late last week, a vaccine could meet the companies' benchmark for success if it lowered the risk of mild Covid 19, but was never shown to reduce moderate or severe forms of the disease, or the risk of hospitalization, admissions to the intensive care unit or death. To say a vaccine works should mean that most people no longer run the risk of getting seriously sick. That's not what these trials will determine. The Moderna and AstraZeneca studies will involve about 30,000 participants each; Pfizer's will have 44,000. Half the participants will receive two doses of vaccines separated by three or four weeks, and the other half will receive saltwater placebo shots. The final determination of efficacy will occur after 150 to 160 participants develop Covid 19. But that is only if the trials are allowed to run long enough. Pfizer will look at the accumulating data four times, Moderna twice and AstraZeneca once to determine if efficacy has been established, potentially leading to an early end to the trials. Questions surrounding the Covid 19 vaccine and its rollout. If Covid 19 isn't going away, how do we live with it? Katherine Eban writes that a clear eyed view is required to organize long term against an endemic virus. Why should we vaccinate kids against Covid 19? The president of the American Academy of Pediatrics explains how vaccinating kids will protect them (and everyone else). Jessica Grose spoke with experts to find out what an off ramp to masking in schools might look like. Who are the unvaccinated? Zeynep Tufekci writes that many preconceptions about unvaccinated people may be wrong, and that could be a good thing. Knowing how a clinical trial defines its primary endpoint the measure used to determine a vaccine's efficacy is critical to understanding the knowledge it is built to discover. In the Moderna and Pfizer trials, even a mild case of Covid 19 for instance, a cough plus a positive lab test would qualify and muddy the results. AstraZeneca is slightly more stringent but would still count mild symptoms like a cough plus fever as a case. Only moderate or severe cases should be counted. There are several reasons this is a problem. First, mild Covid 19 is far more common than severe Covid 19, so most of the efficacy data is likely to pertain to mild disease. But there is no guarantee that reducing the risk of mild Covid 19 will also reduce the risk of moderate or severe Covid 19. The reason is that the vaccine may not work equally well in frail and other at risk populations. Healthy adults, who could form a majority of trial participants, might be less likely to get mild Covid 19, but adults over 65 particularly those with significant frailty might still get sick. This is the case with influenza vaccines, which reduce the risk of mild disease in healthy adults. But there is no solid evidence they reduce the number of deaths, which occur largely among older people. In fact, significant increases in vaccination rates over the past decades have not been associated with reductions in deaths. A test subject in one of Pfizer's early coronavirus vaccine trials in May. University of Maryland School of Medicine, via Associated Press Second, Moderna and Pfizer acknowledge their vaccines appear to induce side effects that are similar to the symptoms of mild Covid 19. In Pfizer's early phase trial, more than half of the vaccinated participants experienced headache, muscle pain and chills. If the vaccines ultimately provide no benefit beyond a reduced risk of mild Covid 19, they could end up causing more discomfort than they prevent. Third, even if the studies are allowed to run past their interim analyses, stopping a trial of 30,000 or 44,000 people after just 150 or so Covid 19 cases may make statistical sense, but it defies common sense. Giving a vaccine to hundreds of millions of healthy people based on such limited data requires a real leap of faith. Declaring a winner without adequate evidence would also undermine the studies of other vaccines, as participants in those studies drop out to receive the newly approved vaccine. There may well be insufficient data to address the aged and underrepresented minorities. There will be no data for children, adolescents and pregnant women since they have been excluded. Vaccines must be thoroughly tested in all populations in which they will be used. None of this is to say that these vaccines can't reduce the risk of serious complications of Covid 19. But unless the trials are allowed to run long enough to address that question, we won't know the answer. The trials need to focus on the right clinical outcome whether the vaccines protect against moderate and severe forms of Covid 19 and be fully completed. It is not too late for the companies to do this, and the Food and Drug Administration, which reviewed the protocols, could still suggest modifications. These are some of the most important clinical trials in history, affecting a vast majority of the planet's population. It's hard to imagine how much higher the stakes can be to get this right. Cutting corners should not be an option. Peter Doshi is an associate professor of pharmaceutical health services research at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy and an associate editor of The BMJ, a medical journal. Eric Topol is a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research, where he founded and directs the Translational Institute, which is focused on individualized medicine. 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
Redesigning an American museum's Asian wing is no mean feat. How to convey the very real throughlines that make terms as broad as "Chinese art" and "Japanese art" meaningful, while also doing justice to the staggering variety of these ancient, and hugely populous, cultures? And what if you are also, like every other museum, under pressure to demonstrate the relevance of your antique artifacts to the present moment? The Brooklyn Museum, a leading collector of Asian art for more than a century, satisfies these thorny curatorial problems about as well as anyone could in the virtuosic new reinstall of its Japanese and Chinese exhibits. ("Arts of Korea," with a fascinating array of stark, monochrome ceramics including an 800 year old sea green cup with a scalloped rim, opened in 2017; sections on South Asian, Southeast Asian, Buddhist, and Himalayan art are still to come.) Contemporary pieces, including some of the 50 paintings and sculptures by Chinese or Chinese descended artists the museum has acquired in the last five years, are now integrated into brisk historical surveys, while a specially commissioned work by the Chinese artist Xu Bing, a curious mash up of Chinese calligraphy and the Roman alphabet, occupies its own room. Not all this contemporary work is equally strong. But altogether the curators have succeeded in pulling five millenniums of art into a single, thrilling conversation.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Thursday's Air France strike involving the carrier's pilots, cabin crew and ground staff has ended, and as of today, the carrier's operations are slowly returning back to normal, according to a statement on its website. The one day strike disrupted the travel schedules of thousands of Air France passengers all over the world and will likely continue to do so for the next day or two, according to Michael Holtz, the owner of SmartFlyer, a global travel consultancy specializing in airlines. "It usually takes an airline 24 to 48 hours to get back on track after a strike," he said. In the case of Air France, since the carrier anticipated the strike because workers had made clear that they would take action, Mr. Holtz said that the it likely held most of its planes in Paris, its home base. "Since the planes are sitting in Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports, outbound flights from Paris should be up and running today or within the next day," he said. In bound flights to Paris from long haul destinations, however, could still be delayed for 48 hours, Mr. Holtz said, because the planes need to fly from Paris to reach those destinations in order to operate the routes. "Air France has a flight from Bangkok to Paris," he said. "The plane needs to reach Bangkok from Paris, which takes more than ten hours, before it can fly the scheduled route."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Nine months ago, the estate of Harper Lee sued a theater producer, alleging that a planned stage adaptation of her beloved novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird," was unacceptably different from the book. Next week, that play will open on Broadway, without many of the elements that concerned the estate, but with dramatic changes a new narrative structure, black characters who express anger and frustration, and a running tension between civility and confrontation that could make the story resonant for contemporary audiences. Atticus Finch, the genteel white Alabama lawyer who agrees to defend a black defendant in a rape case, grabs a racist by the hair and threatens to break his arm. Calpurnia, the Finch family cook, questions why prison guards shoot so many times when that defendant tries to flee. And Tom Robinson, the man on trial, gives voice to the racial inequity that has always been at the heart of the story, saying to Atticus in a new jailhouse scene, "I was guilty as soon as I was accused." The play's fidelity to the 1960 novel has been a matter of public controversy since the Lee estate sued in March. Shortly before she died, the novelist had authorized a leading contemporary screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, to write the adaptation, but after her death a draft script alarmed the lawyer who represents the estate. Following some initial fireworks the producer, Scott Rudin, not only countersued but also offered to stage the script in a courthouse so a judge could decide the case was quietly settled. But the dispute served as a reminder of the challenges inherent in adapting a cherished work in this case, one that has sold tens of millions of copies. "It has a unique role in American literature, so any person trying to adapt it is going to have their hands full," said Joseph Crespino, a professor of American history at Emory University and the author of "Atticus Finch: The Biography." "Whatever you do, you're going to disappoint some people." Because the case was privately settled, with neither side describing the terms, and Mr. Rudin has declined to release a script, only now that the play is in previews is it possible to assess how the lawsuit and the questions it raised about how the book's generations of die hard fans might view a contemporary stage adaptation affected the play's development. (The play could be further tweaked before it opens Thursday). The biggest changes from the book are structural the play uses the trial as a narrative scaffolding from which everything else hangs but there are also shifts in thematic emphasis. In the play, other characters question Atticus's insistence on seeing goodness in his racist neighbors ("Being polite is no way to win a war," counters Atticus's son, Jem), and introduces an impatient yearning for social change expressed by both Atticus and Calpurnia. With litigation threatening the future of the production, each side made concessions, according to public remarks by the writer, Aaron Sorkin, as well as comparisons of the words now being spoken onstage with quotations from the draft script cited by the estate in a letter detailing their objections. The production dropped depictions of Atticus drinking alcohol, keeping a gun in his house and using the name of God disrespectfully; now, as the estate wanted, he is a clean living hero throughout, who is described in the play's opening moments as the "most honest and decent person in Maycomb." And some of the specific language and plot deviations that the estate objected to were removed. For example, a once contemplated new character a black physician testifying at the rape trial was dropped before the show got to Broadway. The estate had complained that the character "introduces numerous highly charged political issues into the trial." But the production prevailed in its insistence that the two main African American characters Calpurnia and Tom have more opportunities to speak up, particularly about racial injustice and often with considerable emotion or anger, than they do in the novel. And the production preserved the influence of Mr. Sorkin, who unlike most writers, is a pop culture figure in his own right, a distinctly contemporary writer with a penchant for rapid fire dialogue. Some of the lines she criticized are gone, but many remain, and there are plenty of recognizably Sorkinesque touches characters talking while walking; soaring emotional speeches by secondary characters; zingers that are witty and pointed. In a March letter to Mr. Rudin, Ms. Carter, who declined to be interviewed for this story, objected to about 80 elements in the script; she later dropped some of those objections. Overall, it now appears, based on two visits to the show in previews, that about 40 percent of those elements are gone. Mr. Rudin declined to make Mr. Sorkin available for an interview. In statements by email, Mr. Rudin said many of the estate's concerns were with an early draft of the play, and "a vast number" were inaccurate. He said that the current production reflects "exactly the play we want to present" and that no artistic compromises were made as a result of the litigation. "A small handful of issues were simply not important to us, and out of deference to the estate's wishes, we agreed to them," he said. This project with a capitalization cost of up to 7.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission had some particular risk factors from the start: Lee died shortly after agreeing to allow Mr. Sorkin to write the adaptation, leaving her legacy in the hands of Ms. Carter, who had already created controversy with her role in the publication of "Go Set a Watchman," an early draft of "Mockingbird," while Lee was in declining health. On top of that, the production had to tread carefully in its treatment of the novel's main themes about a child's awakening to the realities of injustice, violence and bigotry while at the same time attempting to stage a decades old work that has outdated views on race and is shot through with racial slurs.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Controlling blood pressure in middle age may reduce the risk for dementia. The benefits of reducing blood pressure to lower the risk for cardiovascular disease are well known, but the role of blood pressure control in dementia has been less certain. Now pooled data from six large observational studies suggests that antihypertensive medicines may lower the risk for Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia. The review is in Lancet Neurology. The studies involved more than 31,000 participants older than 55, with follow ups ranging from seven to 22 years. In all, there were 1,741 diagnoses of Alzheimer's disease and 3,728 cases of other dementias. Among the 15,537 people with high blood pressure, those using antihypertensive medicine had a 12 percent reduced risk for dementia and a 16 percent reduced risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. The 15,553 people with normal blood pressure had the same risk for dementia as those who controlled their blood pressure with medicine. The type of medicine used diuretics, beta blockers, calcium channel blockers, ACE inhibitors or angiotensin II receptor blockers made no difference.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
Slower economic growth throughout Europe, and probably in the United States. Huge losses by major European banks. Declining stock markets worldwide. A tightening of credit, making it harder for many borrowers to get loans. As concerns grow that Greece may default on its government debt, economists are starting to map out possible outcomes. While no one knows for certain what will happen, it's a given that financial crises always have unexpected consequences, and many predict there will be collateral damage. Because of these fears, Greece is working frantically in concert with other European nations to avoid default, by embracing further austerity measures it has promised in return for more European bailout money to help pay its debts. But some economists believe default may be inevitable and that it may actually be better for Greece and, despite a short term shock to the system, perhaps eventually for Europe as well. They are beginning to wonder whether the consequences of a default or a more radical debt restructuring, dire as they may be, would be no worse for Greece than the miserable path it is currently on. A default would relieve Greece of paying off a mountain of debt that it cannot afford, no matter how much it continues to cut government spending, which already has caused its economy to shrink. At the same time, however, there is a fear of the unknown beyond Greece's borders. Merrill Lynch estimates that the shock to growth in Europe, while not as severe as in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, would be troubling, with overall output contracting by 1.3 percent in 2012. While other countries have defaulted on their sovereign debt in recent times without causing systemic contagion, analysts weighing the numbers on Greece note that its debt is far higher, so the ripple effects could be more serious. Total Greek public debt is about 370 billion euros, or 500 billion. By comparison, Argentina's debt was 82 billion when it defaulted in 2001; when Russia defaulted, in 1998, its debt was 79 billion. Economists also warn that a Greek default could put further pressure on Italy, the euro zone's third largest economy, which, though solvent, is struggling to enact austerity measures and find a way to stimulate growth. Moreover, Italy's government debt is five times the size of Greece's, and concerns about Italy's ability to meet its obligations could grow if Greece defaults. In a new sign of trouble for the country, Standard Poor's on Monday cut Italy's credit rating by one notch to A, citing its weakening economy and limited political response. "Orderly or not, we have no idea what the effect of a default would be on other countries, especially Italy," said Peter Bofinger, an economist who advises the German Finance Ministry. "If there is just a 5 percent chance that this affects Italy, then you don't want to do it." In part, what would happen in the wake of a Greek default would depend on whether European leaders could create a firewall to control the damage from spreading widely. That would require officials to come together in ways they so far have not been able to, because it is politically unpopular in some countries to spend many billions more bailing out Greece. In particular, work on transforming Europe's main financial rescue vehicle, the 440 billion euro European Financial Stability Facility, would have to be fast tracked so that it would be in a position to buy European bonds and, crucially, provide emergency loans to countries that need to inject money into capital starved banks. Differences over the best way to go forward so far have delayed approval of the expanded fund. Bailing out the banks will be crucial if Greece either defaults or imposes a hard restructuring, whereby banks would be forced to take a larger loss on their holdings compared with the fairly benign 21 percent losses that they are now being asked to accept as part of the second, 109 billion euro bailout package set for Greece in June. "We believe losses could be substantially larger through deleveraging and second round effects, contagion from failure of individual banks from or outside the periphery, exposures of the nonbank financial sector," the Merrill Lynch report concluded. While a 60 to 70 percent debt write down seems extreme, it actually represents the market expectation, with most Greek debt now trading below 40 cents on the dollar. A Greek default also would be costly to the European Central Bank, the Continent's equivalent of the Federal Reserve. To help prop up Greece, the central bank is believed to have bought about 40 billion euros in Greek bonds at much higher prices than where they now trade. If the central bank were forced to take a major loss on its Greek bonds, it too would need a capital infusion. And the burden would most likely fall on Germany. Analysts also say the seriousness of the crisis will depend on whether Greece stays within the euro common currency zone or is forced to leave it, and return to the drachma as its national currency. Willem Buiter, the chief economist at Citigroup, presents two possible default outcomes. In the first, Greece forces private sector creditors to take a loss on their bonds of 60 to 80 percent but manages to stay inside the euro zone by keeping current on the smaller amount that it owes its official lenders, like the European Union and the I.M.F. While technically a default, the loss would not be an outright repudiation of Greece's debt and the contagion could, in theory, be contained. One big unknown revolves around the fact that, unlike other countries that have defaulted on their debts in the past, Greece does not have its own currency. The potentially more dangerous default outcome is if Greece decides to leave or is forced to leave the euro, according to Mr. Buiter. Then, Mr. Buiter believes, the debt write off would approach 100 percent and the effects on international markets could be much more serious. Offsetting this, to some extent, is the fact that exiting the euro zone and re adopting the drachma would enable Greece to devalue its currency versus the rest of Europe, and help it become more competitive, perhaps spurring economic growth. For the moment, Greek officials are adamant that neither a default nor a euro exit and devaluation is in the cards. One senior policy maker in Greece's Finance Ministry, who declined to be identified because of the delicacy of the matter, even offered to send his questioner a case of 2005 Dom Perignon Champagne if Greece ever repudiated its debt. But close followers of Greece's budget dynamics point to the fact that, despite the country's deficit woes, by next year Greece is likely to have achieved a primary budget surplus, meaning that after taking out the high levels of interest it pays on its debt, it will be running a surplus. History shows that a country tends only to take such a drastic step as cutting ties with its international lenders when it has tightened its belt enough to achieve a budget surplus, and it is only payments to its bankers that is keeping it in the red. Such was the case in most of the recent country defaults, including Argentina, Ecuador, Indonesia and Jamaica, economists at the I.M.F. found in a paper published last year that addressed when a country finds its interest is served by default. "My view is that it is very much in Greece's interest to default now, as there is no prospect that it can repay its debt," said Desmond Lachman, a former I.M.F. economist at the American Enterprise Institute. "If it is inevitable that an insolvent Greece is going to have to restructure, it would be better for Greece to do it now."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos and anything else that strikes them as intriguing. This week, Courtney Barnett gets revved up about harassment, Gregory Porter covers the Beatles and Tinashe tries to give in to love. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. For his Valentine's Day statement, Frank Ocean rescues "Moon River" from the world's cocktail lounges by embracing its strangeness: its leaping melody, its idea of love as a shared, unpredictable, mystical journey. "Two drifters off to see the world/There's such a crazy world you'll see," the lyrics say, and he knows how crazy it can be. The recording sounds like just a guitar or is it a synthesizer? It changes holding down the chords, with all the vocal parts he could layer atop it: melody, harmony, countermelody, commentary. It's as if the song is comprehended through the compound eye of an insect, each vocal overdub a new perspective. JON PARELES A spectrum of harassment, from internet trolling to physical assault, is the backdrop to "Nameless, Faceless" from Courtney Barnett's next album, scheduled for May. In the folk rock verses, she's almost sympathetic: "With all the pent up rage that you harness/I'm real sorry 'bout whatever happened to you." But the chorus gets noisier and punkier as she sings about walking "through the park in the dark" and paraphrases a widely cited Margaret Atwood passage to sing, "Women are scared that men will kill them," and goes on to announce, "I hold my keys between my fingers." Some deliberate wrong guitar notes stick out like those humble weapons. J.P. Gregory Porter released this Spotify Single on Valentine's Day. The B side is a reworking of "L O V E" (which also appears on Mr. Porter's latest full length, "Nat King Cole Me"), but the single itself is the Beatles' "Blackbird," a song that's less calendar appropriate yet just right for Mr. Porter. A second person ballad of individual uplift and measured grace, it plays to his brand of munificent charm. Performing live in the Spotify studios, the bassist Jahmal Nichols keeps this quintet steadily bobbing with a simple clave pattern. Mr. Porter tosses off gospel inflections with ease, responding to the sighing arc of Chip Crawford's piano chords. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO The R B songwriter Moss Kena has kept an admirably low public profile, steadfastly evading photos; the video for the single "Square One," from an EP called "Found You in 06" due March 2, features a dance troupe. The song, about learning from mistakes and starting over, moves between spaciousness and saturation: verses that often suspend her high voice over just a beat and a bass line, proceeding slowly and unflappably toward a chorus infused with churchy chords. The backup suddenly falls away when she sings, with utter equanimity, "That's why I'm back at square one." J.P. Brandi Carlile pours on the drama in "The Joke," an anthem for the belittled and bullied. It begins with quiet empathy and decorous music, a parlor piano ballad with piano. "They come to kick dirt in your face/to call you weak and then displace you," she commiserates, on the way to a chorus that promises deliverance. With the band gearing up, swelling strings and a melody that keeps on rising, she deliberately evokes the grand crescendos of "A Day in the Life" and the finale of "Abbey Road" when she insists that in the end, tormentors will find "the joke's on them." J.P. You've never heard Indian raga rendered quite like this. Sameer Gupta a drummer, tabla player and organizer of the Brooklyn Raga Massive collective has just released "A Circle Has No Beginning," an album of aqueous and entrancing compositions featuring his seven piece ensemble. (To give you a sense: The group includes the digital synths of Marc Cary, the cello of Marika Hughes and the bansuri flute of Jay Gandhi.) On "Run for the Red Fort," the melody and improvisations are rooted in the chandrakauns raga, meaning the notes are chosen from that harmonic vocabulary. Chandrakauns, like a tweaked Western minor key, has a mysteriously comforting effect, served especially well here by the sitarist Neel Murgai. Throughout the track Mr. Gupta pushes the band ahead with a loose, insistent clatter, using his entire kit. G.R. Take that paperback Sartre novel off the shelf where it's been sitting since high school. Turn off everything but a lone focused reading lamp. Turn to Chapter 1 and click on "Pointlessness" by the Voidz, the band Julian Casablancas formed after the Strokes. "What does it matter?" he sings over mechanical seeming drums and glum synthesizer chords, eventually working up to a power ballad chorus that never finds release. Oh, the existential futility. J.P. On "Interplay," the first album from this singer bassist duo, the roles are somewhat upturned. Kavita Shah is an articulate and attentive vocalist, and she serves as the pacesetter and the keeper of the songs' centers. Meanwhile, Francois Moutin, a reedy toned bassist, is constantly fluttering and teasing and quickly finding new directions. On Horace Silver's "Peace," a third member joins the exchange: Sheila Jordan, the octogenarian vocalist. Trading verses with Ms. Shah, then eventually trading off line by line, Ms. Jordan brings a welcome new lightness to the session, in both timbre and affect. G.R.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
IF you're ready to file your 2013 federal income tax return, you can do so starting now. The official start of tax filing season arrived later than anticipated because of a delay caused by last year's government shutdown. If you are expecting to seek help from the Internal Revenue Service with your tax questions, you may find this to be a frustrating year. Taxpayers are likely to encounter reduced service from the agency because of continued cuts in its budget and staff, according to the annual report of the National Taxpayer Advocate, the office charged with representing the interest of taxpayers. The reductions mean the I.R.S. is "significantly hampered" in its ability to offer "top quality" service, the report said. What does that mean in practice? Longer waits to have your questions answered, for one thing. In fiscal year 2013 that ended Sept. 30, the I.R.S. received 109 million phone calls, according to the advocate's report. Only 61 percent of those callers reached a customer service representative, and their average wait time was nearly 18 minutes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Scientists in Australia use robotic crab claws to explore the attributes female fiddler crabs look for in a mate. Male fiddler crabs are lopsided. Females have two claws of about the same size. Males have one regular size claw and one outsized claw, really outsized. "The other is huge, it's greatly enlarged to the point that it can be approximately half of his body weight." They use the large claw for fighting, communicating and courtship. That little mud colored crab getting all the attention, that's the female. Yes, females do prefer males with larger claws. But they also care about how males wave those big claws when they're trying to attract mates. They prefer faster waving, probably because it indicates a more fit potential mate. That was shown very clearly in an earlier experiment when a robot claw left living crabs struggling to keep up. But as scientists in Australia found out in a new experiment, also using robot claws, females prefer males that accelerate their waving when they see a female approach. "So we had robot replica males that we could then program to either escalate, as if they are increasing their signaling effort, or de escalate as if they're getting fatigued." Sure enough, faced with a choice of robot claws, females notice the acceleration and preferred it. That's if they were even paying attention. To be fair, that's not the robot claw's fault. The very same thing happens with real crabs. Better luck next time. Male fiddler crabs are lopsided, with one claw that seems about the right size and one very large claw. As you might expect, one function of the larger claw is to attract females. The males drum with it and wave it when they see a female among them. The wave means: Come hither, and I will dig a burrow for us and our eggs, and we will populate the mud flats with fiddler crabs uncountable. Females prefer larger claws, as you might expect from looking at the males, and they have a thing for really fast wavers. Sophie L. Mowles of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, and her colleagues ran some tests with a robot claw to learn whether females noticed when males sped up their claw waving. As the team reported in Biology Letters, females preferred males who picked up the pace. The conversation with Dr. Mowles was edited for length and clarity. Q. What is a fiddler crab's life like? A. They live in burrows, and you only see them at low tide. At high tide, they go back into the burrow and they seal it up. They feed on mud flats by sifting the sediment through their mouth parts and eating microorganisms. The female has two little claws two normal size claws for her which she uses to help that feeding, to help pass the sediment up to her mouth. The male has one that it uses for feeding. And the other is huge. It's greatly enlarged, to the point that it can be approximately half of his body weight. It's often really brightly colored as well. Now, what the males do is that they wave this claw in a species specific pattern. So each species of fiddler crab has its own kind of wave, and they do this to maintain a territory, but also to attract a female. What do females like in a male crab? Size does matter. The females like larger claws. They likely indicate a male that's big. He can offer her a big burrow, because she goes into that to incubate her eggs. Also, crustaceans continue to grow for their majority of their lives, so a bigger male is older, which means that he's a survivor so he'd be a good one to mate with. He's probably got good genes for survival. They like males that wave and drum more rapidly. And what we showed in an experiment published in 2017 was that these vigorous displays, they're actually very energetically demanding and deplete a male's stamina. But despite this, males that wave rapidly or drum rapidly actually have greater stamina. And we tested this by putting them into a sprint track. We made them run after a bout of these vigorous displays. Males that signalled more vigorously were speedier in the sprint trials. We had robot replica males that we could program to either escalate, as if they are increasing their signaling, signal at a constant rate, or de escalate, as if they're getting fatigued. And we caught females wandering on the mud flat, which means that they're usually looking for males, and then presented them with these robots and looked at the choices. What we actually found was that they did, indeed, prefer the escalating males over the ones that were slowing down. So they do pay attention to those changes in rate. Were the females terribly disappointed when they realized they had been tricked? Once they got to the robot, they would touch the base plate of it and realize there's something wrong here it's not real. And they would usually at that point stop moving or run away. Some of them actually responded as if he were a real male crab, which is by tickling him. What the females do is go up to the male and use their legs on one side of their body to tickle him. This communicates to him that she's interested in him as a mate, and she's not just trying to steal his home. Is there more to find out about fiddler crab mating? The fiddler crabs are like little invertebrate peacocks. Why is so much going on there? Why has he got the huge tail with all the colors, why does he have to do a dance? The same is true with the fiddler crabs and many, many other animals throughout the animal kingdom that perform either complex or even quite simple courtship displays, like our waving claw. It'd be really interesting to tease apart which bits exactly are important to females.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
WHEN Joan Carlson started teaching high school biology more than 30 years ago, the Advanced Placement textbook was daunting enough, at 36 chapters and 870 pages. But as an explosion of research into cells and genes reshapes our sense of how life evolves, the flood of new material has been staggering. Mrs. Carlson's A.P. class in Worcester, Mass., now confronts a book with 56 chapters and 1,400 pages, along with a profusion of animated videos and Web based aids that supplement the text. And what fuels the panic is that nearly every tongue twisting term and microscopic fact is fair game for the year end test that decides who will receive college credit for the course. "Some of the students look at the book and say, 'My gosh, it's just like an encyclopedia,' " Mrs. Carlson says. And when new A.P. teachers encounter it, "they almost want to start sobbing." As A.P. has proliferated, spreading to more than 30 subjects with 1.8 million students taking 3.2 million tests, the program has won praise for giving students an early chance at more challenging work. But many of the courses, particularly in the sciences and history, have also been criticized for overwhelming students with facts to memorize and then rushing through important topics. Students and educators alike say that biology, with 172,000 test takers this year, is one of the worst offenders. A.P. teachers have long complained that lingering for an extra 10 or 15 minutes on a topic can be a zero sum game, squeezing out something else that needs to be covered for the exam. PowerPoint lectures are the rule. The homework wears down many students. And studies show that most schools do the same canned laboratory exercises, providing little sense of the thrill of scientific discovery. All that, says the College Board, is about to change. Next month, the board, the nonprofit organization that owns the A.P. exams as well as the SAT, will release a wholesale revamping of A.P. biology as well as United States history with 387,000 test takers the most popular A.P. subject. A preview of the changes shows that the board will slash the amount of material students need to know for the tests and provide, for the first time, a curriculum framework for what courses should look like. The goal is to clear students' minds to focus on bigger concepts and stimulate more analytic thinking. In biology, a host of more creative, hands on experiments are intended to help students think more like scientists. The changes, which are to take effect in the 2012 13 school year, are part of a sweeping redesign of the entire A.P. program. Instead of just providing teachers with a list of points that need to be covered for the exams, the College Board will create these detailed standards for each subject and create new exams to match. Trevor Packer, the College Board's vice president for Advanced Placement, notes that the changes mark a new direction for the board, which has focused on the tests more than the courses. The rollout of "the New A.P.," as the board describes it, will actually start this year with a new curriculum taking effect in two smaller programs, German and French language. Major revisions to physics, chemistry, European history, world history and art history will follow, with the hope of being ready for exams in 2014 or 2015. "We really believe that the New A.P. needs to be anchored in a curriculum that focuses on what students need to be able to do with their knowledge," Mr. Packer says. A.P. teachers made clear that such a shift was impossible unless the breadth of material covered was pared down. Courses in English and math are manageable, Mr. Packer says, and will not be revised until later. And here is one indication of how pumped up the College Board is about the revitalization: If Mr. Packer were a high school junior next year, would he take the old A.P. biology or wait till his senior year for the new one? "I would absolutely wait," he says. WHEN A.P. testing began in 1956, memorization was not yet a dirty word, and it was O.K. if history classes ran out of time just after they finished World War II. The College Board created the first exams at the behest of elite preparatory schools, which wanted to convince colleges that their best students could dart right into advanced work. The board based the exams on what colleges taught in freshman survey courses. As the testing expanded over the next several decades, the board began providing a brief description of college course themes and breaking down the percentage of those courses and thus the A.P. exam devoted to each topic. But it was up to each high school to flesh out its own curriculum. And it did not take long for instructors to start teaching to the test, treating the board's outline as the holy grail for helping students achieve the scores of 3 or higher, out of 5, that might earn credit from a college. That obviously became harder to do as breakthroughs in genetic research and cellular organization, and momentous events like the cold war, the civil rights movement, Watergate and the war on terror, began to elbow their way onto the lists. College professors could pick and choose what to cover in their introductory survey classes. But because the A.P. test can touch on almost anything, high school juniors and seniors must now absorb more material than most college freshmen. So perhaps it is no surprise that while the number of students taking the A.P. biology test has more than doubled since 1997, the mean score has dropped to 2.63, from 3.18. On the exam last May, slightly under half of the test takers scored at least a 3, which equates to a C in a college course. And while 19 percent of students earned 5's, almost twice that many got 1's, which could be a failing grade in college. A committee of the National Research Council, a part of the National Academy of Sciences, called attention to these problems in 2002. It criticized A.P. science courses for cramming in too much material and failing to let students design their own lab experiments. It also said the courses had failed to keep pace with research on how people learn: instead of listening to lectures, "more real learning takes place if students spend more time going into greater depth on fewer topics, allowing them to experience problem solving, controversies and the subtleties of scholarly investigation." A few top universities have become more choosey about giving credit. In 2007, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for instance, stopped giving credit for A.P. biology, and developed its own placement exam. Stuart Schmill, M.I.T.'s dean of admissions, says the biology department found that even some of the students who scored 5's did not have the problem solving skills needed for higher level courses. The University of Texas has also tightened its rules for biology placement, giving credit for 5's only, though many large universities still accept 4's or 3's. Several elite private high schools have also dropped A.P. courses. In defiance, the public school district in Scarsdale, N.Y., created its own in depth courses called Advanced Topics. (For college credit, students still have to do well on the A.P. or another placement exam.) The College Board took the criticisms to heart, and has been working with hundreds of college professors and high school teachers to develop the new approach. For biology, the change means paring down the entire field to four big ideas. The first is a simple statement that evolution "drives the diversity and unity of life." The others emphasize the systematic nature of all living things: that they use energy and molecular building blocks to grow; respond to information essential to life processes; and interact in complex ways. Under each of these thoughts, a 61 page course framework lays out the most crucial knowledge students need to absorb. Similarly, the new plans divide United States history into nine time periods and seven overarching themes. But instead of requiring students to memorize the dates of the Pequot War which, for those of you who forgot, occurred from 1634 to 1638 and eliminated the Pequot tribe in what is now Connecticut teachers will have more leeway to focus on different events in teaching students how to craft historical arguments. Scarsdale High School sees some synchronicity. "It appears to be clearly much more in line with what we are trying to emphasize this year," says Beth Schoenbrun, the school's' co director of Science Research. "It certainly seems to allow for a good deal more flexibility in terms of what is covered in the classroom." William Wood, who teaches biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, was a key member of the National Research Council panel that criticized A.P. science. He says now: "I like the way they've tried to make it clear what the boundaries are, what they want students to actually remember and what can be left out." He says he's "pretty impressed" with what he's seen so far. MRS. CARLSON, who teaches A.P. bio at the Bancroft School, an affluent, private academy in central Massachusetts, has always made her lab an inviting place. A chalk white skeleton watches over the students. So does Al, a rare clear gummy bear, in a paper clip chair, surrounded by presents from students who view his lack of color as analogous to genetic mutations. He has a bag of mud from the Dead Sea, trinkets from Mount Fuji and a model of a fish from Bermuda. Mrs. Carlson knows she is fortunate to have a board of directors that will buy whatever equipment she needs for the lab and a generous nine class periods a week for her A.P. course. Many teachers have to cover all the material in just five or six periods, and some must hold their labs after school or on holidays, if they have them at all thanks to insufficient slots during the school day, and too many after school activities. Mrs. Carlson says several students drop her class each year after they realize how hard it will be. She is also frustrated by the predictable nature of many of the "dirty dozen," the teachers' nickname for the basic lab exercises now recommended by the College Board. In one that her class did last fall, the students looked at pre stained slides of onion root tips to identify the stages of cell division and calculate the duration of the phases. She and her students, who historically score 4's and 5's on the exam, were one of several schools asked by the College Board to road test one of the proposed new labs to see if it brought back the "Oh, wow!" factor. The basic question: What factors affect the rate of photosynthesis in living plants? The new twist: Instead of being guided through the process, groups of two or three students had to dream up their own hypotheses and figure out how to test them. Caroline Brown, a senior who stages the school's plays, connected the lab to her passion for theater. She borrowed green, sky blue and "Broadway pink" filters from the playhouse to test how different shades of light affected photosynthesis in sunken spinach leaves. The pink surprised her by narrowly edging out the blue in triggering photosynthesis. Ms. Brown had started to take both A.P. biology and A.P. United States history as a junior, but says she quickly realized that school counselors were right in warning "that's one combination that will just about kill you." So she stuck with history and went back to biology this year. Robert Turley, a junior, created little disks of spinach with a hole puncher and dropped them into two beakers. He and his partner thought photosynthesis would occur more quickly in a slightly acidic solution, prompting those disks to shoot to the surface. But as they watched through safety goggles, all 10 of the disks in the basic solution rose, while none of disks in the more acidic solution budged. Even though Alyssa Kotin's experiment was inconclusive, she and her partner presented a colorful poster with a graph of their findings to the class, just as the other groups did, to stimulate more discussion. College Board officials say the new labs should help students learn how to frame scientific questions and assemble data, and the exam will measure how well they can apply those skills. When the new test is unveiled in 2013, biology students will need, for the first time, to use calculators, just as A.P. chemistry and physics students do. The board plans to cut the number of multiple choice questions nearly in half on the new test, to 55. It will add five questions based on math calculations, and it will more than double the number of free response questions, to nine. "There won't be any more questions like: here is a plant, and what is this tissue?" says Professor Uno of the University of Oklahoma, who is helping to decide what will be asked. Instead, early samples show that the multiple choice questions will be more complex. They will require students to read short passages, or look at graphs, and pick the answers that explain why something happened or that predict what will occur next. One sample essay question provides a chart with the heights of plants growing in either sunlight or shade and a graph that misinterprets the results. Students must decipher what went wrong, re plot the data and design a better experiment to determine which grew faster. WHILE many educators agree with the tack A.P. is taking, they also recognize that the change is going to be difficult for many teachers and schools. Athena Vangos, who teaches A.P. biology at a public high school in Leicester, Mass., a blue collar town where many students have part time jobs, loves the idea of less memorization and more conceptual thinking. As is the case with many public schools, hers does not limit A.P. courses to only the top students. So while six of her students earned 4's or 5's on the exam last May, six others "just throw up their hands" at the amount of work and settled for 1's. While Ms. Vangos believes the program could inspire students who "like to think outside the box," she worries that the new math requirements will discourage others. And with so many cutbacks these days in education budgets, she says, the need to improve lab facilities at many public schools "is absolutely going to pose a big problem." Labs in resource strapped urban schools often don't have enough of even basic tools, like dissecting microscopes, for their students. Studies indicate that relatively few high schools have laboratories equivalent to those used in first year college courses. Professor Uno says that the new A.P. lab experiments will rely mostly on the same equipment as the old ones, and that program designers will provide "some low cost alternatives where we can." Another concern is how well teachers across the full range of A.P. subjects will adjust to an approach that will require them to give up some control and let the students dictate more about where the class discussions go. Mr. Packer says the College Board is investing substantial resources in creating professional development programs and online tools to help teachers make that transition. In many ways, the changes will complete a broad turn for the College Board, from its origins as a purveyor of tests to a much more deliberate arbiter of what the nation's top students will study. Its exams had already set that agenda indirectly, of course, and turned A.P. classes into a way of life for top students. Yet as the board trumpets its new plans, it is also acknowledging how much the process had gotten out of hand. Students will still have to put in long hours, and there is no sign that the arms race will slow among students trying to pile up as many A.P. classes as they can to impress college admissions offices. But, Mr. Packer says, the College Board supports the idea of schools' placing limits on the number of A.P. classes students can take. And, he says, it sees the new courses as a step toward relieving some of the burdens.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
The world has opened up for the poisonously insular mother and daughter of Martin McDonagh's "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," which has been given an expansive revival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. For starters, the rural Irish digs shared by Mag and Maureen Folan, one of the nastiest family units ever to grace (or disgrace) a stage, are larger than when this satanically funny pair first arrived in New York nearly two decades ago. As seen at the Atlantic Theater Company and subsequently on Broadway in 1998, "Beauty Queen" placed its characters in a clammy, coffinlike home that seemed a natural breeding ground for mildew and hostility. In this latest version directed, as the original was, by Garry Hynes for the Druid company their shabby living quarters stretch beneath a vast expanse of sky, hinting hopefully at life beyond the tight little town of the title. Such a change in perspective, the work of the set designer Francis O'Connor, fits the cathedralic dimensions of the stage at the Academy's Harvey Theater, where the production runs through Feb. 5. But the enlargement isn't only physical. In other words, they're more companionable than they used to be. That means they're also less likely to creep into your nightmares and break your heart. For anyone who saw the first incarnation of "Beauty Queen," it's hard not to miss Mag, Maureen and the fellas who came calling on them when they were bad. That version was about as ideal an introduction to New York as a young playwright like Mr. McDonagh, then still in his 20s, could wish. (His other work includes "The Cripple of Inishmaan" and the brilliant, brutal "Pillowman.") That "Beauty Queen" was as tightly wound as a Hitchcock movie, and when it finally unspooled, it shocked hard. The play was showered with prizes, and three of its four cast members won Tony Awards. The one who took best actress was Marie Mullen, who portrayed Maureen, a 40 year old virgin shackled to her imperious, housebound mother, Mag (the splendidly slatternly Anna Manahan). That Ms. Mullen has returned in the role of Mag makes this latest "Beauty Queen" a must see for theater geeks. How often, after all, do you get to watch a first rate actress testifying so concretely to the notion that all women turn into their mothers? In this case, that cliche takes on an especially cruel resonance, since the last thing Maureen (now played by Aisling O'Sullivan) wants to hear is that she's morphing into Mom. So perhaps it might be of some comfort to the Maureen whom Ms. Mullen originated to learn that her Mag is not like Ms. Manahan's. Seated immobile in her rocking chair, she's still a sight to sear eyes, an ungodly hybrid of Gertrude Stein and a Cabbage Patch doll. This Mag, too, is a maddening model of passive aggression, especially when she's hinting that she knows more than her daughter does. But Ms. Mullen endows Mag with some of the same vulnerability that made her Maureen so affecting. With her conspicuously burned hand and slightly cowed demeanor, this Mag isn't the baleful, suffocating force that Ms. Manahan was. She even has a granny ish twinkle at times. In contrast, Ms. O'Sullivan's Maureen appears more confident, competent and less beaten down than Ms. Mullen's did. She is also conventionally pretty enough that when an unexpected suitor, Pato Dooley (a charmingly bashful Marty Rea), enters her life, it doesn't seem out of place when he gallantly describes her with the epithet of the title. This gives Maureen more of an upper hand than before in the Punch and Judy (or Judy and Judy) show of power plays and recriminations that defines her daily existence. Barbed witticisms land with stinging efficiency. (Ms. O'Sullivan does beautifully with my favorite, when she refers to a fire poker as an object "of sentimental value.") But you're more aware of the jokes as jokes, and also of the dramatist's calculations behind the twists of plot. And on occasion, the performances especially that of Aaron Monaghan as Pato's goofy brother, Ray summon the presence of an unheard laugh track. When the show creeps and then plunges into pitch darkness in its later scenes, some audience members may feel betrayed. Perhaps not, though. In this age of censorship free cable and streaming comedy, we've become used to shows that uncover and flaunt the sadism that always lurked beneath classic laugh fests of domestic dysfunction. If this "Beauty Queen" lacks the power to rattle as its first version did, it still makes for a smooth, easily digested evening's entertainment. In 1998, though, I'd have been astounded to think that I'd ever describe this sharp, sinister jewel of a play in such terms.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
"I haven't heard applause like that for one of Zac's shows in a long time," said Bethann Hardison, a former model and agent, and an industry gadfly for diversity. "Zac set the tone for the rest of the week." At Mr. Posen's show on Monday night and in those of a telling handful of others this week, fashion, so it seemed, had performed an abrupt about face. Well before the Oscars stirred a diversity debate, Seventh Avenue had been the target of stinging criticism for the sin of omission, routinely parading mostly white models on its runways. In this latest round of shows, which ended on Thursday, many designers appeared to have taken a hard look at the highly charged issue of casting, stepping up their efforts to hire racial and ethnic minorities and sounding a chord for inclusiveness. That note resonated throughout the week. Multiracial runways may have been expected in willfully subversive collections like Puma x Fenty by Rihanna, Hood by Air, Telfar and Gypsy Sport, their producers scouring Instagram, Twitter and Facebook for models of varying ethnicities. Yet elsewhere it took spectators by surprise. Shows like those of Rosie Assoulin, Sophie Theallet and Tory Burch offered a bracing cocktail of skin tones. There is no official tally of African Americans populating the catwalks this week, but show by show estimates range in number from four or five at Anna Sui to 25 at Zac Posen and Xuly.Bet, whose designer, Lamine Kouyate, had been vocal earlier this month about his intention to cast an all black show. But his mission proved daunting. On the eve of his show on Wednesday, Mr. Kouyate had signed only 15 young women. "Even that wasn't easy," his publicist Kelly Cutrone said. "There still aren't that many black models at the agencies, and the ones that there are tend to be inexperienced. They haven't had an opportunity to walk in many shows." Mr. Kouyate was frustrated. "Since the 1970s, women of color have given input to the industry," he said, referring to racially mixed runway extravaganzas of designers like Yves Saint Laurent. "Where are girls like that now?" In Paris, Mr. Kouyate noted, Olivier Rousteing of Balmain made a striking contribution to multiracial casting. Why not here? he asked. "So much inspiration has been taken from black culture," Mr. Kouyate said, ascribing a rekindled fascination with African American style and culture to the popularity of stars like Alicia Keys, Rihanna and Beyonce. "They are the ones who have the power," he said. For all that, Ms. Hardison is seeing signs of progress. "Today there's a market for these models," she said from her front row perch at Xuly.Bet. "That says something." "Some of those women are booked season after season, and that says something. And when the marketing people are not afraid to put girls of color in their campaigns, that says something, too." A heightened resolve to mingle skin tones on the runways was heralded by a spate of fashion advertisements in the spring glossies dark skinned models featured in previously white dominated campaigns of Celine, Kate Spade, Chanel and Valentino, among others, the marketers apparently redoubling their efforts to be inclusive and to court a black consumer. "Young people of color still are underrepresented on the runway," said Kevin Amato, a casting guru for labels like Telfar, V Files and Calvin Klein. "They're the ones who want to wear the clothes, so we should be reflecting back to them versions of themselves on the runway." As Mr. Kouyate insisted on doing at Xuly.Bet, bringing out, to the muted strains of a cello, a parade of restitched and recycled athletic jerseys, parkas, vibrantly colorful catsuits and faux furs to an audience that was, in roughly equal parts, white and black. Spectators leaned forward in their seats to gather an eyeful of the searingly bright street inspired clothes. Ms. Hardison was ebullient. Black models have indeed made advances since she began agitating for racial inclusiveness in a town hall gathering of industry leaders nearly a decade ago. She is watchful, just the same. "Racism lays so dormantly, but it's there," Ms. Hardison said. "That's why you have to keep after it, poking away."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
It is, by most measures, a standard issue parking space, albeit one tucked under the Sterling Mason, a handsome building designed by the architect Morris Adjmi in TriBeCa. But the 12 by 24 foot spot below the lobby may well be the key to finally securing a buyer for the 15.5 million Penthouse C, the last unsold condominium in the 32 unit building. Or at least that's what the broker, Leonard Steinberg, president of the residential real estate brokerage firm Compass, believes. Mind you, the penthouse, a four bedroom, 4,986 square foot duplex, has a lot going for it on its own, including interiors by Gachot Studios and French doors leading to a roomy terrace. But Mr. Steinberg, who was brought in by the building's developer, Taconic Investment Partners, to market the holdout, is aware of the abundance of luxury condos on the market in TriBeCa. So he has decided to throw in the parking space as an added enticement, on the theory that buyers with the wherewithal to purchase the apartment might also own a vehicle. "You can take the elevator down to your car," said Mr. Steinberg, estimating that the parking spot is worth about 1 million, based on the sale price for a similar perk in a nearby building. After returning from a trip, "you can unpack comfortably and privately, without the hassle of holding up traffic on the street."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Like other men with a passion for watches, Cade Mlodinoff began his obsession by coveting one model. It was a Tag Heuer. It cost him 400 when he bought it at age 10. "At the time, it was every dime I had," said Mr. Mlodinoff, 33. "My obsession kind of grew from that." You can credit technology for shining a light in dusty watch shops. An auction for vintage and modern watches this week at Sotheby's raised more than 9 million, while Christie's plans to hold an auction of rare watches in Hong Kong on Monday. Last year, Paul Newman's Rolex Daytona sold for 15.5 million, not including the auction premium. Until recently, collectible or vintage watches were generally bought at watch shops or through auction houses. Mr. Mlodinoff, who lives in Chicago, said he remembered going shop to shop, trying to find what he was looking for. "There was the Rolex guy, the Cartier guy, the Omega guy that's what you did back in the day," he said. "I didn't have the disposable income for five or 50 watches. I had the income for one, two or three watches, so if I wanted something new, I sold something old." He now has about 20 watches, but he is still selling as well as buying. Websites like WatchBox and Hodinkee go beyond just selling watches and aim to create greater transparency for people who buy watches for thousands, not millions, of dollars. They want to increase visibility in a market that has often been opaque. "We're monetizing a wristwatch as if it's an asset," said Danny Govberg, the chief executive of WatchBox. "Watches have an underlying value, just like a diamond. You can take a diamond anywhere in the world and sell it. We're creating a worldwide market for watches." Mr. Govberg, whose family has been in the jewelry business for three generations, said certain watches trade like the most liquid of stocks. A Rolex Submariner is popular in new and vintage styles, so its price range is tight, he said. WatchBox recently had nine on offer, from 9,000 to 13,000. But markets for brands like Audemars Piguet or Breguet are not as fluid. Those companies make fewer watches, but their brands also lack the easy association with luxury that Rolex has. Mr. Govberg said part of his hope was to make markets for these and lesser known watch brands. He wanted his site to serve as a platform to certify vintage watches, similar to the way a luxury automaker sells certified pre owned models of its cars. Its fee for doing this varies depending on the watch. But Mr. Govberg said if he bought a Rolex for 8,500, he'd sell it for about 10,000. "We're basically saying we are going to value these timepieces and support the prices of them," Mr. Govberg said. "But we're also going to resell them at a high standard, not like it's some flea market." Rolex watches span the gamut from affordable to exclusive, starting at less than 6,000 and soaring to limited edition models that cost more than 300,000. It's like the range of Mercedes cars between a basic C Class sedan, which has no rarity value, and a more coveted AMG Cabriolet that tops 300,000. "Rolex has become a cultural symbol and a status symbol," said Benjamin Clymer, founder and chief executive of Hodinkee. "The quality you receive in a Rolex is above most other watches at that price point." Patek has invested heavily in marketing campaigns that focus on its watches as heirlooms. But Mr. Clymer said the brand does not translate immediately into appreciation. He said that the company's signature watch, the Calatrava, which costs about 20,000, is like any new car. "If you bought it and tried to sell it the next day, you'd take a bath," he said. Discerning the investment potential of watches can be as complex as the intricate machinery that runs them. "Things can change very rapidly in the watch world, the way they can with other investments," said Daryn Schnipper, chairwoman of Sotheby's international watch division. "One of the things I suspect people should be tuned into is production quantities and trends of a company is it a solid company or a new company?" As with most investments, she said, supply drives watch prices. For instance, new Rolex Daytonas are not easy to find, so the price for vintage ones has ticked up. Watches that are known beyond aficionados have a tendency to increase in value, Mr. Clymer said. Mr. Newman's Rolex Daytona is one. The Omega Speedmaster, which astronauts wore on the Apollo 11 moon mission, is another. "That Speedmaster has a place in world history," he said. But sometimes the high prices that watches fetch have as much to do with luck as anything else. At a recent Sotheby's auction in Geneva, Ms. Schnipper had a Rolex Daytona with a dial that had faded to a brownish color, an aging process that results in a rare "tropical dial." The person who had consigned it paid less than 200 for it in the 1970s. Ms. Schnipper expected the watch to fetch 200,000 to 400,000; it went for 950,000 with the auction fee. A regular Daytona from that time would sell for around 150,000. Dave Terry, a watch collector and chief executive of Hub International Insurance Brokers, tries not to get swayed by auction prices. He said he focuses on collecting four brands: Rolex, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet and F. P. Journe, which he thinks will hold their value. He tracks the values of many models in different conditions on a variety of sites and at auction to get a sense of their worth, but he believes the value at auction is not always accurate. "You get a bunch of boys in a room with testosterone who've had a few drinks and they can bid up a watch," he said. As Mr. Mlodinoff bought and sold watches over the past decade, he experienced both the highs and lows of the investments. On the plus side, he has an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, a large sports watch that he bought three years ago for 23,000. He believes the model he has is worth about 30,000 because the demand for the watch has remained strong. Yet seven years ago, he bought an IWC Big Pilot's Watch for 40,000. He said it's probably worth half that much today. "If we'd had this conversation back then, I'd say it was a historical watch," Mr. Mlodinoff said before listing his reasons for buying it: "It was a reissue in a precious metal, they only made 500 of them, it's going to be super valuable." So what happened? He said the company had made too many of them. "They kept doing different limited editions, and that hurt the market for it," he said. "It's where I learned I'm not the smartest."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
"Working" is a squib for Robert A. Caro. It barely tops 200 pages. His first masterpiece, "The Power Broker," 1,336 pages published in 1974, investigated how ruthlessly Commissioner Robert Moses, never elected to anything, concreted the metropolis of Manhattan, tying it to distant suburbs by expressways, bridges, parkways and beaches. Caro's four subsequent biographies, thousands of pages about the life of our 36th president, Lyndon Johnson, await only the capstone of the fifth to complete the chronicle of the last great social political reform movement of the American century. So this new Caro is not the long promised fifth volume, not about the collision with Bobby Kennedy, or the much misreported advent of the Great Society, or the president's years of war in Vietnam, where Caro left us with young G.I.s wading through the Mekong River, holding their rifles above their heads waist deep in the Big Muddy and, as Pete Seeger lamented, the "big fool" said to push on. And so they did. "Working" is Caro's selection of observations, as its subtitle tells us, on the arts of researching, interviewing and writing. Some are drawn from his experiences writing about Robert Moses and Johnson, some freshly minted, some culled from earlier interviews. Inevitably, with selections, there are repetitions and occasional lapses of style: Before we have warmed up, there's a head spinning single sentence of almost 170 words. And yet Caro's squib about working is iridescent, so many brilliant refractions of light from his hard slog of discovering what life has really meant for the people in his narratives, the powerful and the powerless. At Princeton the acerbic literary critic R. P. Blackmur precisely identified a course correction for his undergraduate short story aspirant: "You're never going to achieve what you want to, Mr. Caro, if you don't stop thinking with your fingers." What Blackmur meant was that Mr. Caro couldn't just type "The young congressman Lyndon Johnson's rural electrification program was a boon" and leave it at that. He had to work out how Johnson got it done and won the adulation of more than 200,000 Texas Hill Country people what their lives had been like working "dark to dark" before "the lights" arrived at their isolated homes, with maybe 30 miles of dirt road to the next place. Caro is steeped in humility. He took Blackmur's advice. He slowed down. Thought takes time. Truth takes time. When the research had filled in the blanks, he compiled first drafts in longhand, second and third and fourth drafts, too, and on a Smith Corona Electra 210, writing 1,000 words a day. Philip Larkin observed that "someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious." This is what Caro responded to. One sometimes feels he might have followed a religious career, but the origin of his empathy is more prosaic. He discovered within himself a redemptive hunger that still perplexes him even after decades of literary and popular triumph. He can't stop asking questions. He suspects that behind every answer there is another question. Most good reporters I know have a full quiver of "whys?" but Caro is insatiable. He is incapable of dispensing bromides. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. As a newspaper reporter, he came to hate having to write a story while there were still questions, still documents he hadn't checked. Wasn't it just meaningless to tap out the phrase "the human cost of highways" if he hadn't himself walked the New York City neighborhood called East Tremont, which was razed for the Cross Bronx Expressway; if he hadn't spent days interviewing black and poor tenants evicted from apartments now derelict, "the stench of urine and of piles of feces in corners ... so thick in the lobbies it made your eyes tear"? The Caros were "plain broke" from the seven years working on "The Power Broker." While Caro worried and worried, Ina, his wife, Argus eyed researcher and intellectual twin, sold their house in Roslyn, Long Island. One day, when a few dollars came from The New Yorker for excerpts from "The Power Broker," she was able to break the news of their predicament: "Now I can go to the dry cleaners again." For his work on Lyndon Johnson, Robert and Ina went to live on the edge of the Hill Country to learn from ranchers and farmers about Johnson's boyhood and young manhood. Of course Caro could not stop asking questions about everything, every day of everyone. He had the tables turned on him by a taciturn woman whose exasperation with tomfool questions forced her to blurt out: "You're a city boy. You don't know how heavy a bucket of water is, do you?" He had to understand what it meant in the 1930s and 1940s, when every day, for hand washing clothes and cooking, the wives had to bring up water from a deep well a way down from the house. Then they'd have to stand over a hot wood stove to press the heaps of washing with heavy iron bars. So Caro took the woman's old bucket with a long frayed rope, dropped it in the deep well and heaved it up again. Heavy, yes! Being Caro, he took his questions to a 1940 Agriculture Department study. It told him he'd have to haul up 40 gallons a day for each person. He had to imagine a Hill Country family of five collecting 200 gallons a day, carried back to the house two buckets at a time, with the people yoked like cattle to a heavy bar of wood across the shoulder. Caro insists that the three years he and Ina spent in the Hill Country weren't a sacrifice. "Getting a chance to learn, being forced to learn really learn so that I could write about it in depth" was "an opportunity to explore, to discover, a whole new world when you were already in your 40s." It was "a privilege, exciting. The two of us remember those years as a thrilling, wonderful adventure." The phrase Caro recited in his sleep (I'm guessing) was "Papers don't die; people do." So he had to get to the right people as soon as he could to know where to look for the papers. And the papers were all too often the only source for identifying the individuals who might have answers to his proliferating questions. The papers! Consider walking into the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin for the first time, past the presidential armored limousine, and the assault on your senses of thousands and thousands of boxes of papers, 40,000, each with a capacity of 800 pages. As the archivist said, yessir, that's 32 million pages awaiting your attention. Somewhere unflagged in the millions was a Western Union telegram to George Brown, a Texas contractor. Faded since its transmission on Oct. 19, 1940, it was the key to how the obscure 32 year old Johnson had suddenly acquired power and prestige and won the ear of "the Boss," Franklin Roosevelt. But George Brown at 79 was determined to honor a lifetime pledge to his adored late brother, Herman: Never, never on any occasion talk to an interviewer. How Caro finds what he needs to know about the secrecy of Johnson's ascent from Brown is par for the author's tenacity, his charm and his investigative genius, no other word for it. So is the way he settles Johnson's famously controversial senatorial election victory over Gov. Coke Stevenson by 87 votes in 1948. The imbroglio of gossip in the Rio Grande Valley, of different colored ballots and court rulings, had led to a federal investigation finally closed by a Supreme Court justice in Washington with orders that it never be reopened. That wasn't good enough for Caro. Nearly 40 years later he tried to find Luis Salas, a big bruiser of a deputy sheriff who had once killed a man in a barroom brawl. Salas was the election judge who, under oath, had certified 200 disputed votes for Johnson in the notorious Ballot Box 13. But Salas was nowhere to be found. He was said to be living in Mexico. Caro was able to stop looking in March 1986. He knocked on the door of a mobile home near Houston, and the frail old man of 84 who answered was only too pleased to fish out from a trunk a 94 page history titled "Box 13," which described how he had switched votes from Stevenson to Johnson. He was proud of deceiving everyone. "We put L. B. Johnson as senator for Texas, and this position opened the road to reach the presidency." Never again would Caro have to equivocate, "No one will ever be sure if Lyndon Johnson stole it." Now, in "Working," he writes yet another definitive sentence: He stole it. Nearly 200 years ago, James Madison commanded that a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives. Robert Caro, the young man who gave up thinking with his fingers, has performed great deeds in that cause, but he has also measurably enriched our lives with his intellectual rigor, his compassion, his openness, his wit and grace.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Sometime around 1904 or 1905, the company conceived of building the tallest building in the world on the site, but Flagg, who had already designed model tenements, persuaded Singer to build a model skyscraper. Flagg envisioned a New York of free standing towers, with light and air on all sides, that would not block the light of neighbors. In addition, the facades would be developed on all four sides, freeing the skyline of the brutally raw side and rear elevations typical of tall buildings. Flagg thought construction should be allowed to rise from the building line for 100 or 150 feet, and that any further construction should be limited to a tower covering a fixed portion of the lot, say 25 percent. Meanwhile, Robert E. Dowling, a developer of office buildings, had entered the scene. As part of a consortium, he was already putting up the Trinity and U.S. Realty buildings, flanking Thames Street on Broadway. Although Dowling did not build on the cheap, he was not extravagant with space: his buildings had all gone straight up real light blockers, relying on streets and low rise neighbors for illumination and ventilation. Dowling acquired an L shaped plot right next to Singer's at the corner of Cortlandt Street and retained Francis H. Kimball to design what became the City Investing Building. Except for a six story central tower section, Kimball put the outside walls smack against the lot line, with only a small light court on Cortlandt Street. But Dowling's tenants needed light and air, too; he bought a corner holdout building and kept it as a light protector, along with another corner across the street. The square footage of the Singer Building is unknown, but no one challenged the claim that City Investing, at 460,000 square feet, was the largest office building in New York, and perhaps the world. The two buildings rose almost simultaneously, opening within a month of each other in 1908. Was there a competition between them? The principals surely were aware of all plans before they were made public. Flagg never directly commented on the City Investing Building, nor Kimball on the Singer. But Dowling's building came right up to Singer's north building line, leaving only 10 feet for light and air for the tower's offices; Kimball put his elevators, which needed no windows, in that section.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
The ultra prolific director Takashi Miike already had about 30 films under his belt at the end of the 1990s, when the one two punch of the art horror date picture "Audition" and the ultraviolent art horror gangster movie "Dead or Alive" wowed Western audiences. Now he's beyond his 100th movie. Not all of his efforts make it to the States but his latest, " First Love ," demonstrates that his energy and inventiveness are still intact. The movie doesn't breathe new life into the genre conventions of Masa Nakamura's script. But Miike choreographs and executes the proceedings with such deftness and enthusiasm that the movie feels like a standard revisited by a particularly inventive jazz pianist: the changes are familiar, but the variations set them in an exciting new environment. Once the air of crime is established with a beheading , the next 20 minutes of "First Love" are devoted to an unhurried introduction of the key players. Leo (Masataka Kubota) is an intense, taciturn young boxer who is scolded by his trainer for declining to rejoice in victory. He makes ends meet by assisting the owner of a tiny restaurant; after taking an unexpected fall in the ring, he learns that he has an inoperable brain tumor.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The revelers gathered Saturday evening outside a store on the Upper East Side with taxidermied parrots in the window: women in floor kissing gowns and little black dresses, men in suits. A party bus arrived and the revelers crowded on. The blinds were drawn, so they could not see out. The traffic bucked and lurched and eventually thinned, and then the revelers were hurtling up a highway somewhere, eating cucumber sandwiches and drinking sparkling wine. They were headed to the Illuminati Ball. They were financiers and lawyers and creative professionals and a psychiatrist, Patricia Frey, 33, whose 450 ticket was a mystery wedding gift from her three sisters. "I was just told to wear a gown like you're going to the opera," Dr. Frey said. The revelers did not know that the ball was also a morality play about animal welfare, genetic manipulation and veganism. It is the creation of Cynthia von Buhler, an illustrator, performance artist, wildlife rehabilitator and provocateur who has been holding it at her home in Connecticut on select Saturdays since April. (This performance was the summer's last, though a bigger ball, without dinner, will be Oct. 20 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.) The attendees had to fill out an application that included questions concerning their attitudes about animals and meat, and Ms. von Buhler said she saw a "great disconnect" in that people said they loved their pets but also loved eating meat. She hoped to open a few eyes. The bus discharged the guests onto a hillside speckled with naked dancers and fire twirlers and people in livestock masks. Throbbing music ushered the partygoers into a sprawling hunting lodge with a pitched roof out of a fairy tale. In the dining hall, animal heads lined the walls and a taxidermied raccoon stared down from a chandelier. Jeweled teardrops hung from its eyes. A masked man called the Pig King welcomed the revelers and introduced his pregnant wife, an antlered baroness. "Let the candidates seeking the true light make the first journey," he proclaimed. The evening fast forwarded toward sensory overload. A soprano in a chicken costume sang a Lehar aria as aerialists twirled on silks. The 30 guests were briefly blindfolded and fed an improbably rich morsel that turned out be a salted date simmered in olive oil. Everyone was assigned to wear a monkey mask, a pig mask, a chicken mask, a cow mask or a mouse mask. The baroness's water broke. We watched her give birth in a bedroom. A drug addled monkey led his followers into a basement and swore treason against the Pig King. A cow woman with breast pumps affixed to her like bondage gear filled a bathtub with her milk. In the Contemplation Room, a naked dancer gyrated while wearing large black wings. Clues about the animal rights agenda were there for the harvesting: The monkey, a veteran of lab experiments, was addicted to painkillers. The androgynous mouse had multiple human ears embedded in his back. The cow woman was kept continually lactating like a commercial dairy cow. But in the swirl of spectacles and craft cocktails, it grew difficult to keep track. During the fourth course, charred broccolini with forbidden rice and sweet sriracha lime sauce, the Pig King and the monkey got into a shouting match. After the fifth course, watermelon gazpacho, the Pig King announced: "The candidate willing to dance and swim naked in the moonlight is the sign of a candidate with nothing to hide." Ms. von Buhler took some of us outside to meet her actual pet pig, Persephone. We fed her baby carrots. Then everyone went down to the dock. Many disrobed and jumped in the lake. A man in a captain's hat took us out on a boat. Someone called for a song, and one of the psychiatrist's sisters, Melissa Frey, 29, offered an aria by Rimsky Korsakov. Back in the lodge, several guests reclined on a faux fur spread bed while others cavorted in the milk bath. "Let us all eat the duck together," the Pig King said. Something flaky and delicious that tasted like Peking duck was served. A guest named Travis Brendle who works in the travel entertainment industry interpreted the food. "Each course was right for the action," said Mr. Brendle, 30. "The gazpacho was a little bit heavier, so it went with the more dramatic part. We're getting to the climax now, so we need protein." After the passion fruit mango cashew cream parfait, hell broke loose. The cow woman grabbed a gun from the formerly naked dancer and shot a chicken man. The Pig King revealed that his babies' organs had been stolen to be transplanted into humans. He pleaded for compassion. "We all want to be freed from our cages," he said. Persephone the actual pig walked through the dining room. There was a final fire ritual.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Earlier this month, the creators of "Westworld" announced a plan to foil the online theorizers who had guessed so many plot twists during the first season: They would post a video on Reddit that spoiled the entire second season. The curious fans who couldn't resist pressing "Play" were instead treated to the star Evan Rachel Wood singing Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up." The gag a twist on a decade old internet prank, Rickrolling didn't give up the goods. But it turned out to be a preview of how the new season carries over the flaws of the first, as well as some tentative steps it takes toward fixing them. 'Westworld': Here's What to Remember for Season 2 On the down side, "Westworld" still treats itself more as a game to be beaten than as a story to be told. If the show has been plagued by zealous decoders, that's because it hasn't created characters nearly as involving as its labyrinthine plot. On the encouraging side, the video was a joke, and even a dusty attempt at humor was a welcome change of pace coming from a show whose first season was relentlessly dour, ponderous and stuck up its own maze. The new season expands the playing field of "Westworld," but it also expands its spirit. There are glimpses of a version of the series that's more sportive, less self serious. It's as if the serial's creators, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, realized that watching a series that's about a game should occasionally feel like playing. The season premiere, Sunday on HBO, begins in the aftermath of a rebellion at the title theme park, where robot "hosts" played roles in a range of Wild West "narratives" for the bored and bloodthirsty rich of the future. After a bit of sneaky code granted some of the hosts sentience, they went Terminator on their keepers. The first season was full of ideas about consciousness, exploitation (especially of women, or robo women) and the seductiveness of gory entertainments. But without fully drawn characters to embody them, they remained only ideas art as algorithm. The hosts began as literal characters in a narrative, their personalities malleable, their memories erasable. This made for tour de force, turn on a dime performances from Ms. Wood as Dolores, programmed as a starry eyed rancher's daughter, and Thandie Newton as Maeve, a brothel's savvy madam. I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords. Dolores has become radicalized, roaming the badlands to liberate her "people," and Ms. Wood makes as commanding a zealot as she did a naif. Maeve, meanwhile, is seeking her lost daughter, dragging along Lee (Simon Quarterman), the park's cynical head writer, as a hostage. Ms. Newton plays her with dry wit and swagger, like a Bond girl transformed into James Bond. When Maeve gives Lee an anatomically graphic threat, he can't help pointing out that he wrote the line. "A bit broad, if you ask me," she says. Another host, Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), a Westworld scientist who until recently believed himself human, has a more subdued role, accompanying a security force from Delos (the park's shadowy parent corporation) on a mission that relates to the company's real ambitions for its A.I. technology. All these peregrinations reveal new areas of the vast park. One, based on Edo period Japan, has already been previewed, but suffice it to say that the blood and dominance fantasies of the guests vary little by either geography or historical era. This monotonously bleak outlook made the real human characters of "Westworld" its most dull, from the boorish park visitors to the corporate villains. That hasn't changed, especially as regards the tedious, spattery quest of the Man in Black (Ed Harris in the present, Jimmi Simpson in flashbacks). Delos's majority owner and Westworld's most inveterate gamer, he continues to travel the park in search of I don't know, something something mankind's brutal nature. Don't expect too much improvement too fast from "Westworld" 2.0. It's still overly focused on balletic blood baths and narrative fake outs, and much of the dialogue still sounds as if it were written as a tagline for a subway poster, like Dolores's "I have one last role to play: myself." But "Westworld" remains a glorious production to look at, and there are stretches where it feels invigorated by its new, expanded world freer to breathe, relax, invent. It's 50 percent better when it takes itself 25 percent less seriously. This pays off, for instance, in an episode where a band of escaped hosts, journeying into a different park, becomes invested in the "narrative" of another host group even though it resembles one they themselves played out, over and over. They know it's a show, but they can't help but be transported anyway. Isn't that what being human is?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Credit...Janie Osborne for The New York Times On U.S. 2 in North Dakota, just west of the turnoff for Tioga, you will spot two little brown highway signs pointing left: It would be natural to assume that the historic site has something to do with Lewis and Clark, but it doesn't. Drive too fast or ignore your odometer and you will miss it: a narrow dirt drive that leads to a stout monument of reddish stone, maybe seven feet high. It reads: Oil was first discovered in North Dakota by Amerada Petroleum Corporation April 4, 1951. This Williston Basin discovery, Clarence Iverson No. 1, opened a new era for North Dakota and reaffirmed the confidence of her people in the opportunities and future of this great state. The monument was dedicated on Oct. 25, 1953, just two and a half years after the event it commemorates, but people had wildcatted for oil in North Dakota since 1916. After 35 years of fruitless drilling, you can understand why contemporaries would have regarded that first strike as historic. Now, for some, the notion of this as a "historic site" could be jarring; oil might seem to mix with history as poorly as it does with water, or waterfowl. But in North Dakota, an oil boom is indeed historic. It does not look like history, at least not as we think of it; it looks like storage tanks, and gas flares, and towering derricks. Most of all, it looks like pump jacks, alone, in sets, always in motion. "That one's from 1959," a longtime farmer told me, pointing to a small black pump jack south of Lignite (named for the type of coal that used to be mined near there). "And that one, over there" it was blue green, like an old Chevy Bel Air "that's from 1957. Still pumps 30 barrels a day," he added, with respect. Janie Osborne for The New York Times These remnants of earlier booms look almost quaint. The city of Williston, the unofficial capital of the current boom, has grown in the past decade from about 12,000 residents to as many as 60,000, and some predict it will hit 100,000 before too long. Developers have built sprawling neighborhoods where everything apartments, townhouses, free standing houses, maybe thousands of units in all is rented by oil companies. A stylish new apartment complex several miles east of town, surrounded by absolutely nothing, harks back to a mid 1880s photo of a towering apartment house at 72nd Street and Central Park West, a location then so remote that the edifice was named the Dakota. The open plains are dotted with modular "man camps": The shabbier ones are haphazard collections of RVs, trailers and cabins; the nicer ones look like mobile home parks with scores of units, perfectly aligned and identical down to the placement and angle of their satellite dishes. The largest resemble military bases. The roads, flat and endlessly straight, can be a pleasure to drive, as long as all the newly rendered potholes have been patched adequately. Traffic is a function of the price of oil; above 80 or 90 per barrel, and it could start to look displeasingly metropolitan. At 50 something, though, as it was when I last visited, you can cruise and pass at leisure as you seek out that giant gravel pit you overheard someone talking about in your hotel's breakfast room, or that cluster of 250,000 barrel oil tanks across the way from a towering old grain elevator, a scene that in the gloaming brings to mind King Kong squaring off against Godzilla. Admittedly, this is a strange form of ecotourism. Then again, people have been drawn to North Dakota for strange reasons at least since Lewis and Clark's time. In 1866, Col. Delos B. Sackett of the Army's Office of the Inspector General, having made a tour of the area, declared it would "never be settled by the white man." "The more I see of Dakota," he wrote, "the more I am convinced the government should donate every foot of it to the Indians, and the Indians should be well recompensed ... if they agree to remain." The white man came anyway, as he had been doing since Lewis and Clark. Those two and their Corps of Discovery arrived at the spot that is now their eponymous state park on Lake Sakakawea (not truly a lake; it is part of the Missouri River basin) on April 17, 1805. "A delightfull morning," as they noted in their journals; they were pleased to find "immence quantities of game in every direction ... consisting of herds of Buffaloe, Elk and Antelopes, with some deer and woolves." They bagged three beavers that day, their favorite game. "I eat very heartily of the beaver myself, and think it excellent," Lewis noted. "Particularly the tale, and liver." Perhaps it was an omen. Colonel Sackett, who was sent there to survey the area for a new fort, certainly thought so. Thirty years later that fort was shuttered, and the number of white men in the area fell close to zero. But then the railroads came through, and the government opened the land up to homesteading. Settlers came many of them immigrants from Norway, where the climate and terrain were said to be similar and found the land well suited for certain crops, especially durum wheat. The railroads established towns, spacing them out more or less evenly along three parallel lines, which today hew to the three main roads in this corner of the state: U.S. 2, Highway 50 and, closest to the Canadian border, Highway 5. Like Lewis and Clark and Sackett before them, the settlers quickly learned that life here was hard. Most failed at homesteading; many of the rest were crushed by the Dakota version of the Dust Bowl, remembered as the "Dirty Thirties." If you drive up and down those three roads and turn at every little green sign, you never know whether you will hit a ghost town or a boom town. Some are odd combinations of the two, like Fortuna, which has maybe two dozen residents but which recently turned its long empty schoolhouse into a community center called the Teachers Lounge. It features a bar, a convenience store and an extended stay motel for oil workers where rooms rent for 1,500 a month. The next town east, Colgan, is littered with semicollapsed houses and rusting automobiles; an older man I spotted working on some kind of machine in his yard told me there were six residents left. I didn't see one in Ambrose, the next town over, though my cellphone registered several texts while I was there, inviting me to talk on a Canadian network for just 89 cents per minute. The next town after that, Crosby, expanded so quickly that it planned a commercial district and housing development on the other side of the highway. It laid out a wide dirt boulevard, lined it with street lamps, and then stopped. That was years ago. Downtown Williston seems unsure of which way it wants to go. Main Street features a glitzy new office of Raymond James Investment Services, but the marquee of the movie theater next door, the New Grand, still proclaims: "Our Screen Talks." A block away, a sprawling edifice under construction promises glittering retail, office and residential units by the end of the year. But the biggest structure in the neighborhood, by far, is the old city grain elevator. Twenty five miles southwest, near the Montana border, is the spot where the Yellowstone River flows into the Missouri. When Lewis and Clark arrived here on April 26, 1805, Lewis recorded that the Corps was "much pleased at having arrived at this long wished for spot," breaking out fiddles and bottles. Great cities often spring up at such sites, but the area around this confluence is close to empty, featuring only a modern interpretive center and the remains of two forts. The older of these, Fort Union, was built in 1828 by John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company as a trading post. Known among Native Americans as the Great White House on the Prairie because of its whitewashed walls, Fort Union, 1,600 miles upriver from St. Louis, drew Indians and trappers from all around to barter beaver and buffalo pelts for East Coast and European delicacies, furnishings, armaments, trinkets and liquor. In high season, upward of 120 employees might stay at the fort, while many more Indians camped just outside its walls. There was violence this was the frontier, after all but for nearly 40 years, until the frontier pushed west and beaver hats went out of fashion, it was a largely congenial, and entirely profitable, enterprise. The fort itself, built of cottonwood the only timber available locally had long since disappeared before the National Park Service undertook to reconstruct it starting in the 1960s. If you go, there's a very good chance you will share it only with a couple of park rangers. You'll probably see even fewer people if you go to the remains of Fort Buford, a couple of miles away. This was the fort that Colonel Sackett had come to set up in 1866, an Army post intended to protect settlers passing through the area on their way to newly discovered gold fields in Montana, and later, to supply soldiers fighting the Indian Wars. In its first two years, there was a single company of infantry stationed there; they withstood relentless attacks from Sitting Bull's Hunkpapa Sioux, who were determined to eradicate them. But then the Army expanded the fort, which at its peak had more than 600 soldiers, and Sitting Bull moved on. He returned in 1881 to surrender. It was built, in modern times, to house a pair of granite boulders covered with petroglyphs: circles and polygons, craters and rays, and thunderbirds, "sacred figures to Late Prehistoric Plains Indians," according to a plaque at the kiosk. No one's quite sure when they were carved the kiosk says it was between 300 and 1,000 years ago, though possibly even earlier or by whom. Modern visitors might have a Rorschach experience (I'm pretty sure I saw Homer Simpson on the smaller one), but the Indians believed they offered visions of the future, at least until around World War I, when someone hauled the smaller one off to the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, nearly 400 miles away. It was returned in the 1960s; too late, they say. The power was gone. But turn your back on the hut and the playground and picnic tables, the power line and the lamppost, the radio tower and the grain silos and you will see the past. The site sits on a humble rise; it's all you need. Spread out before you, for untold miles into Montana and Saskatchewan and endless North Dakota, are the Great Plains, beige ground and blue water. That's it. For 270 degrees around you, there is nothing that Lewis and Clark, or for that matter the Indians who patiently carved those petroglyphs, wouldn't have seen, too.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
When Bruce Morrow, the octogenarian disc jockey, announced recently that he was leaving SiriusXM after 15 years, his fans mourned the loss, filling his Facebook page with memories of how his booming voice has entertained them since childhood. Many assumed he was retiring, putting a cap on a career that lasted more than 60 years. Mr. Morrow or Cousin Brucie, as he is more often called has decided, at 84, that there is time for another gig. So he is returning next month to his roots, to WABC AM (770), where he worked for 13 years starting in 1961 when John F. Kennedy was president and D.J.s used turntables. "I needed a new adventure, something to tickle me a bit," Mr. Morrow said in a phone interview from his home in Ulster County, where he has been living during the pandemic. "Some people think, My gosh, at this age aren't you going into retirement?" he added. "I have more energy than anyone I know!"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
After announcing a recall last June over a rear impact collision fire hazard, Chrysler is finally preparing to recall nearly 1.6 million 1993 98 Jeep Grand Cherokees and 2002 7 Jeep Liberty S.U.V.'s. The fix the automaker is using to correct the problem the vehicles' fuel tanks are exposed to rear impacts is controversial: Chrysler will install trailer hitches to protect the fuel tanks and reduce the chance of fires caused by rear impact collisions. "Chrysler Group has finalized replacement part design and is initiating the tooling process to deliver the required volume," Chrysler said in a statement Thursday evening. "Launching a safety recall demands complex engineering and close collaboration with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration well before we accumulate replacement parts. Chrysler Group takes seriously its commitment to customer safety." In addition, letters that Chrysler plans to send to owners have been posted on N.H.T.S.A.'s website. Eric Mayne, the Chrysler spokesman who issued the company's statement, declined to answer questions about the timing of the recall. Nathan Naylor, a spokesman for N.H.T.S.A., said in a telephone interview that the investigation into Chrysler's remedy was continuing.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
Drug Companies Are Focusing on the Poor After Decades of Ignoring Them Twenty years ago, thousands of Africans died of AIDS each day as pharmaceutical companies looked on, murmuring sympathy but claiming that they could not afford to cut the prices of their 15,000 a year H.I.V. drugs. It's hard to imagine such a nightmare unfolding today. Vast changes have swept the drug industry over the last two decades. Powerful medicines once available only in rich countries are distributed in the most remote regions of the globe, saving millions of lives each year. Nearly 20 million Africans are now on H.I.V. treatment for less than 100 a year. Top quality drugs for malaria, tuberculosis, hepatitis C and some cancers are now sold at rock bottom prices in poor countries. Once demonized as immoral profiteers, many of the world's biggest 20 pharmaceutical companies now boast about how they help poor countries and fight neglected diseases. They compete on the Access to Medicine Index, which scores their charitable efforts. Several of them even cooperate with the Indian generics companies they once dismissed as "pirates" by sub licensing patents so the generics makers can produce cheap drugs for Africa, Asia and Latin America. But there is still opportunity for growth. Most of the industry's remarkable progress is limited to a few companies, and their efforts are too reliant on donor dollars, according to a report issued last month by the Access to Medicine Foundation, which publishes the index, and interviews with experts. As people live longer in the developing world, deaths from cancer, diabetes and heart problems are rising. Drug companies have not been as quick to provide treatments for chronic conditions. "The situation is still fragile," Jayasree K. Iyer, executive director of the foundation. "A retreat by one company, or a drop in health care investments, will jeopardize the progress made so far." "I was horrified," said Dr. Tadataka Yamada, who worked at GlaxoSmithKline . "In those days, they went from being one of the most respected industries in the world to one ranked just above tobacco companies." Dr. Yamada eventually became one of the central figures in the industry's transformation. He served as president of global health at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and then as chief medical officer for Takeda, helping it rise in the Access to Medicine rankings. There were other important inflection points, experts said . One was the about face by the Clinton administration in 1999. After Vice President Al Gore was pressured by AIDS activists during his presidential campaign, the administration decided to support South Africa's efforts. Another turning point came in 2001, when Cipla, an Indian company, offered H.I.V. drugs to Doctors Without Borders for 350 per patient per year. The offer revealed the huge markups the brand name drug makers had been profiting from, and introduced the Indian pharmaceutical industry as a rival. "Cipla was a driver for change," said David Reddy, chief executive of the Medicines for Malaria Venture, one of many public private partnerships created to guide industry research. The George W. Bush administration founded or supported the agencies that became the biggest buyers of generics: the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief; the President's Malaria Initiative; and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. A trade group, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, persuaded its members to stonewall him. He proceeded anyway with information from public sources. Raising money was a separate struggle. With some backing from the Dutch government, Mr. Leereveld flew to Seattle to appeal to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. "They said 'no' so fast that I flew back without even a second cup of coffee," he said. Before publication of the first rankings , he let all 20 companies know how they would be portrayed. "Eight of them said some of our answers were wrong, so they broke the ban and participated," he said. "Two years later, all 20 responded." "As investors," he said, "we ask companies to think about the business opportunities in emerging markets, instead of seeing them as feel good, money losing philanthropy." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Mr. Leereveld, who said he was "very happy, very proud" of the effects of his index, went on to found others ranking mining companies on their environmentalism and seed companies on getting their product to small farmers. Dr. Iyer, his successor, feels progress has just begun. "Two billion people still don't have access," she said. "And in the first five years after a launch, new products reach less than 10 percent of those who need them in developed countries, and less than 1 percent in poor ones. That's underperforming both as a business and in social impact."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Troy Dillinger was having a good month. A working actor in Los Angeles, he played in June a lawyer in a Lifetime movie, a coach in a public service announcement about opioids, and a judge in Cardi B's video "Press." He also slid into his best creepy smirk and sexually harassed an underling in a corporate training video. "Not only are you a solid candidate," his character said to a woman up for a promotion, "but I've been watching you move around out here, and you're solid everywhere." This project may not win Mr. Dillinger any trophies, but office workers around the country are seeing a lot of him or other actors playing odious characters just like his. New or expanded laws mandating sexual harassment training in states like New York and California, as well as a nationwide awakening to a very real problem , have fostered a market for workplace training videos and for actors who can bring MeToo to life, usually in roles lasting just a minute or two. These videos do not, naturally, have a reputation as great cinema , which is not surprising considering that, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, they can have a lot of legal ground to cover. In New York, for example, training programs have to define sexual harassment, give information on state and federal sexual harassment laws and lay out avenues for handling complaints. There must also be interaction, so there are often little quizzes along the way to keep viewers paying attention, or at least keep them from wandering off completely. They are made by law firms, human resource outfits and companies that specialize in compliance training, which may also be making videos on topics such as respectful communication and bribery. Some keep the whole operation in house, with a small team of people wearing multiple filmmaking hats (director today, producer tomorrow), while others contract with outside film companies to hire actors and put the videos together. "When I get a new crew they look at the call sheets and go, 'Are you out of your mind? You're giving us 45 minutes to shoot two pages!'" said Lori Richardson, the producer and director of video content at Emtrain, a compliance training company. In a typical film, it might take at least half a day to shoot that amount, she said. "But I'm pretty quick on set and I keep it moving along." Laura Faye Smith, the actress who was harassed by Mr. Dillinger's character, said it took about half a day to shoot her scenes. She didn't have to use too much imagination to get into character. She said she once had a real life job as a human resources manager, which included giving sexual harassment training. Then, one day, it happened to her: one of her superiors, who was also the boss's father, put his arm around her, got right in her face, and said her high heels made her the perfect height for him to kiss her. "No matter how much you know about this," she said, "when it happens to you, it's hard not to go into this thing of 'did I bring this on somehow?'" In an effort to make the scripts more relatable to these real life experiences, film companies say they are trying to make videos more engaging, with better acting and higher production values. They also change up where scenes are set to make them more relevant to the companies who may be buying the films. Mr. Dillinger's character harassed Ms. Smith's twice once in a printing plant and once in a retail setting. Emtrain said it has created scenes that riff off current events, like the memo written by a Google engineer that said "personality differences" between men and women helped explain why there were fewer women engineers and high ranking executives at the company. Some companies have started to use virtual reality. Mursion, a San Francisco start up, allows managers as well as prospective teachers, Air Force captains , executives from finance and tech to practice difficult conversations with an avatar. In one training, you are a commanding officer in the armed forces and a woman comes to you because she hooked up with a subordinate who is now defying her authority. There is a range in quality and approach in these programs, though they tend to charge in roughly the same way. Traliant, which produced the videos with Mr. Dillinger and Ms. Smith, said it starts at about 25 per user , but that price can drop to less than 5 for companies with more than 10,000 people. Emtrain generally charges 47 per person for the year, dropping to about 20 for an organization of 3,000, and it includes additional services like a way for people to ask anonymous questions on tricky issues like bias, ethics and harassment, and feedback for companies on potential problem areas based on what employees say. The actors themselves generally make a few hundred dollars per video, not a large sum, but also not bad for what often amounts to a few hours of work. While many executives and lawmakers have embraced these training videos, there are questions about how effective they can be. For years , companies have used such videos to try to defend themselves from any lawsuits saying they didn't do enough to ensure safe working environments. Whether workers took the training to heart was not necessarily the top concern. "My worry is that there will be some category or organization who believes they have checked the box by conducting training, whether or not there is any commitment from leadership to actually change the culture," said Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women's Law Center. "I don't want to suggest that training itself is harmful, but I also think that training alone is not likely enough to actually change organizations." Frank Dobbin, a social science professor at Harvard, said that while research in this area is thin, there is some evidence that training for managers can be helpful, as can bystander intervention training. But he said there are also studies that suggest typical harassment training might make some men more hostile than they were to begin with, perhaps because they feel a threat to their way of thinking. "It's possible that training for whole populations of employees, which is what the states are now moving toward, is going to backfire," Professor Dobbin said. "I don't think there's any evidence that it reduces harassment and there's some evidence that it's likely to increase harassment." Michael Del Polito , a media producer and director at LRN, an ethics and compliance company, said that the company realized that in most cases, employees are mandated to watch the videos. "It's not necessarily something they're electing to do," he said. Still, he said, the company tries to make them watchable. Last year, one of LRN's sexual harassment videos won a Telly award, which honors video and television production. In it, a woman tells a colleague she was groped by a superior in Las Vegas after a conference; the flashbacks to what happened in Vegas were illustrated by animated people made of neon lights. Mr. Del Polito said: "We try to approach it as, we respect our audience and try to put something out that within reason, of course, given time and budgetary constraints try to put out the best product possible because we think our audience is sophisticated."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
WASHINGTON The Federal Reserve is preparing to raise its benchmark interest rate in December despite the concerns of some Fed officials about the persistent weakness of inflation, according to an account of the Fed's most recent policy meeting. The account, which the Fed published Wednesday, described officials as united in confusion about the reasons that inflation is weak but divided about the consequences. While some officials favored watching and waiting, a majority of Fed officials including the chairwoman, Janet L. Yellen have made clear that they are inclined to keep raising the Fed's benchmark rate. At the two day meeting that ended Nov. 1, those officials were "reasonably confident that the economy and inflation would evolve in coming months such that an additional firming would likely be appropriate in the near term," the Fed said. The group made no changes to monetary policy at the meeting; it had signaled in advance of the meeting that it would not act before December. It left its benchmark rate in a range of 1 percent to 1.25 percent, and did not alter the instructions for the gradual reduction of its 4 trillion portfolio of Treasury securities and mortgage bonds now underway. But the meeting account, released after a standard three week delay, is likely to solidify investor expectations that the Fed will raise rates by a quarter point at the December meeting. The continued debate about the weakness of inflation has divided officials into two broad camps. Most, including Ms. Yellen, regard slow inflation as somewhat mysterious but not a cause for great concern because they expect tightening labor market conditions to eventually drive up prices. As a result, they want to keep raising interest rates at a gradual pace. The unemployment rate fell to 4.1 percent in October and the pace of job growth remains strong. The account described it as "well above the pace likely to be sustainable in the longer run." The minutes said that some of those officials are reluctant to vote for additional rate increases until they are convinced that inflation is indeed gaining strength. The officials "indicated that their decision about whether to increase the target range in the near term would depend importantly on whether the upcoming economic data boosted their confidence that inflation was headed toward the Committee's objective." Some Fed officials also want to raise rates because they are concerned that financial market conditions have not tightened adequately this year, meaning credit is easier and cheaper to get than the Fed would have anticipated. The Fed raises its benchmark rate to make it more difficult to borrow money. But the rates on consumer and business loans have not climbed in response, prompting worries that investors are taking excessive risks. Fed officials also want to stockpile ammunition against future economic downturns. The Fed's primary medicine for weak growth is cutting rates, which it can do only if it has a high enough rate to cut from. The minutes described the program to reduce the Fed's bond holdings as off to a good start. The Fed had announced in September that it would begin to reduce those holdings by 10 billion a month during the final quarter of 2017, a show of confidence in the health of the economy. It plans to slowly increase the pace until it reaches a monthly rate of 50 billion. On the current schedule, it will arrive at that plateau in October 2018. The Fed has said that it intended to stick to its schedule barring significant economic disruptions, and to underscore that the unwinding is on autopilot, it may stop providing updates in its post meeting statements. Expectations about the course of monetary policy have held steady even as the Fed prepares for a change in leadership. President Trump announced earlier this month that he would nominate Jerome H. Powell as the next Fed chairman. If he is confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Powell would replace Ms. Yellen in early February. Mr. Powell, a Fed governor, has consistently supported the gradual unwinding the Fed's stimulus campaign. The Senate Banking Committee has scheduled a confirmation hearing on Tuesday. Ms. Yellen is also scheduled to testify before the Joint Economic Committee on Wednesday.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
BARRY 10:30 p.m. on HBO. One week removed from a triumphant return to "Saturday Night Live," Bill Hader kick starts a new era of his career with "Barry." He plays a weary and tightly wound hit man who learned the skills of the trade in Afghanistan. But when he digs into the life of his next mark, an aspiring actor, he finds a passion for acting bubbling to the surface, and begins to take classes, much to the chagrin of his handler. "You don't expect this comedy to find its target in the way it does," James Poniewozik wrote about this series in his New York Times review; he named it a Critic's Pick. GREAT PERFORMANCES AT THE MET 12 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Last fall, the Met Opera was besieged by live sheep, ghostly violins, slamming doors and shattering dishes in Thomas Ades's "The Exterminating Angel." "This riveting, breathless, score full of quick cutting shifts, pointillist bursts, and episodes of ballistic intensity may be his best work," Anthony Tommasini wrote in his Times review. The opera, inspired by the classic Luis Bunuel film of the same name, follows a hellish dinner party, where the guests find themselves unable to leave; the opera includes the highest note ever sung at the Met.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
LOS ANGELES In the weeks since Kobe Bryant's death, the sprawl of Los Angeles has been covered in murals of the longtime Laker. It would be hard to find a local basketball court without a player wearing a Kobe jersey. Flowers, candles and other tributes have piled up outside Staples Center. As the city prepared for a memorial service on Monday to celebrate the lives of Bryant and his daughter Gianna, who were among nine people killed last month when their helicopter crashed into a hillside near Calabasas, Calif., many were finding the most meaningful tributes to be the ones on the court. That is especially true for a team that was close to him: the Anteaters from the University of California, Irvine. The university's Bren Events Center, a 10 minute drive from Bryant's home, became an unexpected training ground for the player in 2007, thanks to the coordination of Ryan Badrtalei, who was then the director of basketball operations. During the Lakers' off season, Bryant would train with Badrtalei, who became a member of his inner circle. "If you worked with him, he would wear you out," Badrtalei said. "I took pride in that, bouncing back every day and being back every day. There's a lot of people that came and went." A number of venues in Orange County, where Bryant lived and was frequently spotted at restaurants, stores and movie theaters, have organized gatherings so Bryant's community members can watch the memorial service together. The city of Santa Ana is hosting one at city hall. The city of Irvine plans to show the service at a soccer stadium that seats 2,500. It wasn't unusual to see Bryant, an icon for players in college basketball, training alongside players from the N.C.A.A. Division I team. The team took it in stride. "Kobe is a hero to everybody for the way he's elevated the Lakers, and everybody here respects that," the team's coach, Russell Turner, said. "We showed that respect in large part by letting him do his own thing. He was comfortable here around us, and I feel good that we provided that environment for him." From 2007 to 2013, the Bren Center was Bryant's off season home. He was relentless, Badrtalei said, to the point that off season almost sounded like an oxymoron. "I can honestly say there wasn't a day where he gave a half effort," Badrtalei said. "That was his approach every single day of every off season: 'What can I do to get better? How can I do more to continue to evolve?'" Badrtalei, too, was relentless. He became the assistant coach of the Anteaters in 2009 as his relationship with Bryant deepened. "Being around him, not wanting to let him down, kept that drive going," he said. One of the last texts Badrtalei sent to Bryant was about that persistent mentality. While listening to an interview with Bryant, Badrtalei realized he could predict every answer. "I said: 'Man, I can't believe how much you have impacted my thought process. Every question they asked, I kind of knew the answer.' I know how he thinks and how it's shaped the way I think in terms of my approach to training and competition." "And that's unfortunate for everybody I'll be coaching they'll feel that," he added, laughing. It was evident on the court Saturday night when Turner and Badrtalei led the Anteaters against California State University, Northridge. The Anteaters are in their championship push with hopes of an N.C.A.A. berth, and it shows. At one point in the game, the Anteaters were leading by 32 points. But they were playing with an intensity as if the score were reversed, their coaches shouting as if the N.C.A.A. championship were on the line. Most of this year's squad did not interact with Bryant as much as some previous teams. In 2013, after Bryant ruptured his Achilles' tendon, his off season became dedicated to rehabilitation. His time at the Bren Center became sporadic, and he retired three years later. But his relationship with U.C. Irvine remained strong, and the Anteaters intend to honor him the best way they know how: on the court. The Anteaters won their game on Saturday, 87 64, to improve to 19 10. They are 11 2 in the Big West Conference.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
What would the first female president wear? As Angela Merkel, erstwhile model of a modern female leader, prepares to step down as head of her party in Germany, and a wave of potential presidential candidates emerges in the United States , like Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand , the question is worth considering. It speaks to what female leadership might look like in a new era, one less defined by trouser suits and bright fruit bowl colors; one tailored for a different majority. We may well have the answer in a few years, but for those who don't want to wait, there is always "House of Cards." The show has put a lot of thought into this. Season 6 a.k.a., the final season, and the one without Kevin Spacey as President Francis Underwood (he has been killed off, after Mr. Spacey was fired in the wake of sexual abuse allegations) dropped on Friday with Claire Underwood (Robin Wright), the former vice president, in the Oval Office. The show is as dark and twisted as ever, both in terms of plot and the corrupting psychology of power, but it's also a pretty convincing take on how the first Madam President might present herself. "We obviously didn't have a female president as a model, but I revisited the male American presidents of the past to look at their daily wear, their travel wear, and then thought about how that might translate to Claire," said Kemal Harris, who is responsible for Ms. Wright's wardrobe. (Jessica Wenger is the show's head costume designer.) It began with colors: the blue that dominated ties in the Clinton and Obama administrations, army green, black and gray. Also tailoring: In a symbol of control over her environment, everything Ms. Wright's character wears has been exactingly seamed to fit. And there are two unexpected accessories (along with her usual vertiginous black patent leather Louboutins). Or rather, one unexpected accessory (cuff links) and the unexpected absence of another: the handbag. "Many presidents wear cuff links from the White House Gift Shop, so I wanted to get a pair for Claire," Ms. Harris said. She contacted the gift shop (which was once run by the Secret Service but is now a separate for profit business no longer affiliated with the executive branch) to ask if it had any samples that had never been used. The gift shop's director, Anthony Giannini, sent her a pair of prototypes given to him by a Secret Service agent, now retired, who had acquired them under Ronald Reagan. Never produced, they are slightly smaller than usual, more recessed and "elegant" and, according to Mr. Giannini, "the only ones of their kind." As a result, Ms. Wright wears a lot of shirts and dresses with French cuffs, the better to show them off. "But you never see a male president with a briefcase or a wallet," Ms. Harris said. "So even though I had a lot of designers reaching out to me to offer their new bags, I thought: 'Claire is not carrying a bag. She has people for that. She's president.'" Indeed, for the first time in the series, fashion labels play a relatively small role in Ms. Wright's wardrobe. (In the past they made up two thirds of her clothes, with one third designed especially for her.) The problem, Ms. Harris said, is that "a lot of stuff you see on the runway now is street wear, and it just didn't translate." She ended up making about 80 percent of Ms. Wright's wardrobe herself, she said, with the tailor LaVonne Richards. The few brand names that do show up are Chloe ("They do the perfect boot cut trousers," Ms. Harris said), Equipment (a button down shirt) and, notably, Celine (a black satin trench from a recent Phoebe Philo collection that Claire wears as a kind of Ninja cover up when she is spending time outside the White House). "I bought it at Bergdorf and then had it streamlined because I knew it would transform her character," Ms. Harris said. "It should be in a museum now." Unfortunately, political hopefuls looking to borrow Claire Underwood's style probably can't get that coat anymore, Philo philes having gone into hoarder mode when the designer left the label earlier this year. And Ms. Harris said that the chances she would commercialize her efforts, step into the fashion gap and create a Claire Underwood inspired product line a la "Kingsman" suits, were small to none. Which is too bad, because what she came up with is interesting, in an understated, provocative way: a focus on high neck, long sleeve silhouettes, body aware but severe, often with epaulets or belts to evoke the military. It's not the classic power suit by any definition the look is both too austere and too feminine for that but label less and logo less as the wardrobe is, it is at once deceptively accessible and replete with the power of refusal. That's not a bad message, really, for someone with a nuclear football.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Henry ( David Call ), the doctor in Larry Fessenden 's "Depraved," isn't actually called Frankenstein, but he's the contemporary equivalent. A onetime Army surgeon, Henry suffers from post traumatic stress disorder and a maniacal need to make positive use of his harrowing experiences. What he learned about death, he believes , he can use to create life. The result of this obsession is a bundle of stitched together body parts known as Adam ( Alex Breaux ), whose brain we meet while it's still inside the skull of its about to be murdered previous owner. That organ's memories often surrounded by bright bubbles of light, as if trapped in a lava lamp help bond Adam to his creator, whose battlefield flashbacks are equally destabilizing. In time, their relationship grows quietly touching; yet if Henry's motives seem pure, those of his cynical business partner ( Joshua Leonard ) are anything but.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
A piece of furniture dedicated solely to drinks might seem like an extravagance. But when it comes to entertaining, a well functioning bar cabinet can be useful for both host and guests. "It's a matter of convenience," said William Sofield, the interior designer who founded Studio Sofield in New York. "I tell everyone, 'I'll make you the first one, but after that you're on your own.' I really can't be the bartender for eight people for an evening." Setting up the bar and allowing people to serve themselves makes everyone more comfortable, said Mr. Sofield, who has designed custom bar cabinets for clients complete with refrigerators, ice makers and skewer storage as well as a production cabinet for Baker, with gold finished doors and pullout serving trays. Even teetotalers appreciate it. "It's nice for them to be able to pour themselves a mocktail," he noted, without calling attention to it.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Photo Illustration by Jessica Pettway for The New York Times Photo Illustration by Jessica Pettway for The New York Times Credit... Photo Illustration by Jessica Pettway for The New York Times These delicacies and more were packed inside Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's lunar lunchbox when Apollo 11 hurtled them into space 50 years ago this month, landing humankind on the moon for the first time. Read our full coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. A little unpalatable, perhaps, but it was enough to get them through their eight day excursion in space. The next time astronauts make a giant leap in space travel, it could be with a mission to Mars, making the question of nutrition a lot more difficult. The round trip journey is expected to take up to three years, and the astronauts may have to grow some of their own food. NASA has already harvested a variety of edible leafy greens, grown without earthly gravity or natural light. Soon, researchers plan to expand to a more difficult crop, Espanola improved chiles, in their quest to answer one of the most pressing questions of a Mars mission: How will astronauts get enough nutritious food to survive years in the unforgiving depths of space? Scientists believe the project, if successful, could open the door to growing similar crops in space think tomato plants and strawberries and perhaps eventually to more advanced foods, like potatoes. "This is the most complex crop we have done to date for food purposes," said Matthew W. Romeyn, who is leading the pepper experiment for NASA. The peppers are being tested on Earth, he said, and could be sent to space as early as next spring. Scott Kelly, a retired astronaut who set an American record in 2016 when he returned after spending 340 days in space, said he received a shipment of fresh fruit and vegetables every few months while on the International Space Station. But that would not be possible on a trip to Mars. 50 years of space food: from 'moisture bite' brownies to blueberry crumble The first moon landing took place in the "tube and cube days" of space food, when a typical menu included items like peanut cubes, turkey and gravy wet packs and brownies that were described as an "intermediate moisture bite." The beverage Tang also had a long association with spaceflight. Many people mistakenly believe NASA invented it. Read the story of Michael Collins, the third astronaut on Apollo 11, who remained in orbit while his crewmates walked on the moon. Today, about 200 food and drink items are available on the International Space Station, according to Stephanie Schierholz, a NASA spokeswoman. The food, which is much like camping food and has to be reheated or rehydrated with water, ranges from your basics, like cereal and eggs, to more complex dishes like chicken fajitas, macaroni and cheese and blueberry crumble. "Shrimp cocktail is a longtime popular dish," she said. Tortillas are also a staple, Ms. Schierholz said, because NASA does not use bread in microgravity in order to avoid pesky crumbs. While scientists use the space station as a test kitchen for long term space travel, there is another necessity to consider: water. The station uses a sophisticated water recycling system, which collects humidity, sweat and even urine and turns it into drinking water. (In 2008, a New York Times reporter was brave enough to test it: "How does distilled urine and sweat taste? Not bad, actually.") Ms. Schierholz said the system would need to be smaller and to work more reliably on a mission to Mars, because there would be no option to send shipments of water from Earth. But the same ethos would hold true: "Yesterday's coffee," she said, "is tomorrow's coffee." No matter how many options there are, packaged food alone would not be enough to fuel a mission to Mars. "We don't really have a food system that we are confident will be good for the entire duration of a Mars mission," she said. "We feel plants are a very good way to help solve that problem." Scientists have experimented with growing plants on board the International Space Station for years. The Russians grew peas in the early 2000s, for example. More recently, NASA harvested red romaine lettuce, which had been nurtured under the purplish, LED lighting of a special vegetable garden known simply as "Veggie." For a tasting in 2015, astronauts used extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar to dress the leaves. "Kind of like arugula," Mr. Kelly said at the time. NASA has since grown other types of leafy greens, including Chinese cabbage and mizuna mustard. The Espanola improved chile, a durable pepper native to New Mexico, represents the next frontier. The peppers are, in many ways, the perfect test case: They are more difficult to grow than lettuces. They are a good source of vitamin C. And they pack a punch in spice, great for astronauts who have reduced senses of smell and taste in space. If this space gardening plan works, scientists say, it could help combat "menu fatigue" among astronauts, who typically lose weight while spending months in space. Maintaining a garden could also serve as a hobby for crew members during monotonous months. "It's kind of like, why do people like flowers?" Mr. Kelly said. "When you are living in an environment that is very antiseptic or laboratory like, or on Mars, it would be pretty devoid of life with the exception of you and your crewmates. Having something growing would have a positive psychological effect." "If the next supply ship from Earth doesn't land properly, can you do enough with your own systems already in place?" said Raymond M. Wheeler, a plant physiologist at NASA. So what might a menu for Mars look like one day? It is a little soon to tell, but it would probably include a variety of packaged food, with fresh greens on the side. "It might be having some lettuce on your cheeseburger," Dr. Massa said, "or having a handful of tomatoes to go in your hummus wrap."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Each quadruple bill at City Center's Fall for Dance Festival is admirably eclectic and warmly applauded, which gives us all the illusion that most of the audience truly enjoys all four items. Intermission talk quickly reveals otherwise. At Program 2, one couple enthusiastically told me how much more they were enjoying everything than they had in the dim Program 1; whereupon another couple told me that, after the rich delights of Program 1, this one was wholly annoying. On Tuesday night (Program 3), in the intermission following Sara Mearns Company's performance of Joshua Bergasse's "Stairway to Paradise," one woman was eagerly telling me how much she admired this, her first sighting of Ms. Mearns, while, over her shoulder, a man gave me a fixed and accusatory stare as if "Stairway" were his first sighting of the cracking of the Arctic ice cap and I were responsible. Well, the Mearns Bergasse item was the cliche cluster of the evening. Eight good looking men did most of the things you expect eight good looking showbiz men to do when waiting attendance on the leading lady: They shook their hands, shoulders and heads to indicate their infatuation. Ms. Mearns, dressed in a dismayingly unsubtle black and silver plunge neckline number with little beneath the hip but tassels, did high kicks, used their hands as the steps of the song's staircase, and threw herself into any number of acrobatic lifts and splits. She gave off light; her glamour at times recalled Ginger Rogers. But Rogers, with or without Fred Astaire, appeared in numerous dances that still have infinitely more interest than this one; and Ms. Mearns, in her Balanchine repertory at New York City Ballet, has been giving performances of such splendor and fascination in recent weeks that it was impossible not to find this item banal and cheesy. The other three works, were all more rewarding. Vuyani Dance Theater is from South Africa; it was easy to like the eight dancers of its "Umnikelo," choreographed by its artistic director, Luyanda Sidiya, and to love its three musicians. The dance style mixes African forms with Western contemporary ones. The beginning alone, with the eight dancers each facing in a different direction and starting a solo at a different speed, was compelling. The dancing that followed often played two groups against each other in separate rhythms and formations. Loose two piece costumes, by Luvuyo Msila, made it hard to tell men and women apart in a good way. (Some differences nonetheless became apparent.) The musicians were at first out of view; when Oliver Hauser's lighting revealed them, it was hard to believe there were only three, providing drums, violin and several kinds of singing. (One of the dancers sometimes lent his voice to theirs.) The National Ballet of China's production of "The Peony Pavilion" was a puzzle. The original "Peony Pavilion" play, by Tang Xianzu, was first performed in 1598. It has been adapted in many different stage productions. (I remember getting the giggles disgracefully at the supertitle translation "Timid lest night breeze stir my belt ornaments" in a Peter Sellars staging.) This version was produced by Zhao Ruheng, adapted and directed by Li Liuyi and choreographed by Fei Bo, to Guo Wenjing's collage of pieces by himself, Debussy, Ravel, Respighi, Holst and Prokofiev. I only read the ballet's synopsis after the performance, and found I had been totally wrong in my deduction of the narrative depicted by the action onstage. But there is a theatricality here that often makes a vivid impression, even when the story is unclear and when the dance styles, which marry ballet to Chinese forms, are quaint or precious. Emi Wada's costumes are spectacular. An intimate dream bedroom scene for two sundered lovers, though without particular choreographic originality, has real poignancy. In one public procession, the circular path of the ensemble is marvelously crossed by the slow advance of four central characters. I suspect that for many audience members the program's most challenging item was the one by its most esteemed local choreographer. This was Trisha Brown's "Son of Gone Fishin' " (1981), a piece that was revived earlier this year but which I had not seen in 31 years. It needs a space more intimate than City Center. Ms. Brown's barefoot idiom democratic dance at its most sensuous, with nonvirtuoso moves coordinated into liquid crosscurrents, through the body ripples and cross stage ricochets can have a deeply affecting kinesthetic quality, but that's best appreciated without a proscenium arch. Even so, moments of bewitching physical phrasing stay in the memory. A man hitches a knee in front of him (his lower leg hangs loose) while letting his torso undulate powerfully from side to side. The mere straightening of a leg into a low arabesque sends off compensatory currents through the rest of the body, and so does the squaring of a raised elbow. Tiny jumps on the spot, the raising of a shoulder, the sharp turn of a head, the shimmying of a body from knee up to neck or vice versa: There are many beauties here. What this staging revealed gorgeously was Ms. Brown's endlessly changing mastery of stage geometries. Most of the time, six dancers perform. (A seventh joins them for the beginning and the end.) The six shift seamlessly between three twos, two threes, six solos, a four and a two; their stage patterns change, not least in focus. In a recurrent image, they become the two spokes of a wheel rotating around a central pool of light (lighting by John Torres), but you've hardly noticed this before the pool dissolves. Everything is in a state of flux, and nothing lasts.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The decision to move into a studio apartment was not a difficult one for Kris Avery. Nor was the decision to stay after acquiring a dog and a husband. She does admit to some concern, though, when she learned that she was expecting a baby less than a month after renewing her lease this spring. The space at 34 Berry, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where she took up residence two and a half years ago was pleasant and unobjectionable as apartments in new buildings tend to be with a bank of windows overlooking McCarren Park. It was large for a studio, at 560 square feet, and though not large by any other metric, plenty big for a single woman in her mid 30s. "We figured we'd save some money," said Ms. Avery, 38, who works as the director of marketing for the real estate developer Steiner NYC. She and Mr. Avery, who had been living in a studio in Chelsea, purged their possessions, and then they purged some more. The apartment has two closets one of which is largely occupied by a washer and dryer which they had planned to supplement with a good size storage system from the Container Store. Less than a month later, Ms. Avery found out she was pregnant. The nook near the bed where the storage system was to have gone was hastily reassigned to nursery duty, and the storage system was itself sent to storage, along with most of the couple's remaining possessions. They started renting a 3 by 3 by 7 foot storage unit in the building's basement in September, just in time to accommodate the bassinet that arrived, courtesy of Ms. Avery's mother. The baby is due in January. "It's good that we'll have a few months to figure out how to work around it," said Ms. Avery, as she scooted sideways past the bassinet to open the doors of a full but uncluttered closet. Initially, it had taken her a little while to adjust to not being able to throw things in another room when people came over, she explained, but then she realized that a storage locker just an elevator ride away was another room. "It feels like it changed our lives," said Mr. Avery, 31, who works in new development sales for Town Residential. The couple met when he attended a workshop Ms. Avery was hosting last year at the Oosten, a condominium in Brooklyn where she was the director of sales. "I don't know why we didn't rent one sooner." They agreed that storage was one of the best values going in many new developments. Their unit costs 75 a month, which they pay in addition to their 2,330 a month rent. Real estate is a favorite topic of conversation for the couple; a friend visiting from San Francisco once overheard them discussing price amendments in the kitchen and remarked wistfully that he'd like to find a partner who worked in the same industry. "We'll often find ourselves talking about what a great deal some 10 million sale was; and here we're coming back to our nice studio," he said with a laugh. "There's a disconnect for most people who work in luxury real estate." "You really have to have furnishings that fit the space one night stand, not two," said Ms. Avery, who previously lived in an Upper East Side studio, a one bedroom apartment in Greenwich, Conn., a house in Putnam County, N.Y., and a condo in White Plains that she shared with her first husband. The couple moved in together after they'd been dating for only a few months. "One day I was like, 'When are you bringing the rest of your stuff over?' " Ms. Avery said. "He hadn't been back to his apartment for so long. We went over and loaded up a few bags. Moving in together was so easy." Mr. Avery said: "Everything happened so fast, it's sometimes like, 'How long have we been married? When is the baby due?' " A chalkboard by the kitchen island adorned with a drawing of an elephant provides a helpful countdown: 13 weeks. The baby won't take up much space at first, Ms. Avery pointed out, though the same cannot be said of baby paraphernalia. She has pleaded with her mother not to send any other oversize gifts, especially because she knows her mother has her eye on a "gigantic stroller." "I'm like, 'We don't live in a 5,000 square foot suburban home!' " Ms. Avery said. "We're doing a wrap. Everyone in Brooklyn does a wrap.' "	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
When Titles Are Tarnished by Cheating but Not Taken Away In years to come, this might be the week this age of sports came to be known as the "asterisk era." During a decade that brought eye in the sky cameras, rogue chemists, executives with malleable morals and Soviet era spy craft, those two fisted disrupters science and technology have given cheaters seemingly limitless tools to secure victory on playing fields as diverse as the Olympic Games, Major League Baseball, the N.F.L. and horse racing. The Houston Astros' signs stealing scheme, laid bare in a sober yet searing report from the baseball commissioner on Monday, is the latest embodiment of that old sports saw, "If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying." The 2017 World Series champions mixed high tech with the low fi using a television monitor near the dugout to watch the opposing catcher give his pitching signs, then having teammates bang a trash can to let the batter know what was coming. Carlos Beltran of the Mets became the third manager to lose his job over the Astros scandal For supporters of clean sports, this looked like just one more powerful weapon that athletes, teams and organizations used to win games and skirt the fair play police, one more instance of the truth about a champion spilling out too late. In 2014, the Russian Olympic Committee augmented its medal haul by having doping experts collaborate with the country's intelligence services to switch out urine samples through a hole in the testing laboratory's wall. On their way to six Super Bowl championships, the New England Patriots have been found guilty of using clandestine video surveillance and of somehow ending up with deflated footballs that allowed their quarterback to get a better grip in foul weather. A horse that staged a historic run to the Triple Crown was found to have chemicals associated with performance enhancing drugs in his system. "It doesn't take a philosopher to know that if you cheat to win, you're not really a winner," said Travis Tygart, the chief executive of the United States Anti Doping Agency, who is perhaps best known for bringing Lance Armstrong's extensive doping operation to light. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. Tygart and international Olympic officials have taken back gold medals and handed out lifetime bans for cheating. Yet Tygart knows there are athletes who keep trying to become faster and stronger through performance enhancing drugs. The usual rationalizations: Everyone else is doing it, and winning is worth the risk. Vacating titles and ending careers are powerful deterrents, but in America's professional sports leagues, the commissioners have been resistant to mete out such punishments. M.L.B. Commissioner Rob Manfred handed down yearlong suspensions for Astros Manager A.J. Hinch and General Manager Jeff Luhnow. Both were subsequently fired by the team's owner, Jim Crane. The Boston Red Sox' owners, John Henry and Tom Werner, also parted ways with their manager Alex Cora, who was a bench coach with Houston during its sign stealing operation and was identified as a major part of the scheme. In addition, M.L.B. stripped the Astros of their first and second round draft picks for the next two years and fined the team 5 million. The Red Sox, who remain under investigation for similar violations, may soon be penalized, too. On Thursday, Carlos Beltran, the lone Astros player named in the report, parted ways with the Mets, who had hired him in November to manage the team. "I couldn't let myself be a distraction for the team," Beltran said in a statement. Still, Houston retains its title as the 2017 World Series champion. Presumably, Boston will retain its 2018 title. Would stripping those titles make a difference? "If the goal was to uphold the honesty and sanctity of the game for a broader community, the ultimate penalty is to vacate the wins and the titles," said Ann Skeet, a sports and leadership ethicist for the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at the University of Santa Clara in California. "But there are some built in conflicts the commissioner works for the owners. They share revenue. Their fortunes are tied together." It's true that lines between right and wrong have become blurry. Stealing signs in baseball is as old as the game, though using electronics (or stationing a scout with binoculars and signaling equipment in the center field stands) is illegal. N.F.L. teams study endless hours of video of opponents, but filming opposing coaches is a no no. Performance enhancing drugs are illegal, unless officials grant an exemption for a drug that, say, treats asthma. But the rules are there, and F. Clark Power worries that by flouting them, more is being lost than a sense of fair play. Power is the founder of the Play Like a Champion program, which promotes character education through sports and focuses on proper coaching instruction in youth sports, especially for at risk children. He likes to reference what he sees when he witnesses the joy of 7 year olds playing hide and seek. "Every one of them knows that to have a fair game, you've got to keep your eyes closed while you count," said Power, who has taught at the University of Notre Dame since 1982. "We need to understand, if we are going to endorse cheating as a means to an end, the children are watching," he said. "So it becomes a question of how do you want to raise your kids? We can't get much lower as a culture if cheating is no longer a moral issue but a form of coping. We need to change the conversation." Accountability rolled downhill when an investigation into the Patriots found it "more probable than not" that quarterback Tom Brady was "at least generally aware" that the balls used in his team's victory over the Indianapolis Colts in the 2015 A.F.C. Championship Game had been deflated. The franchise, which is owned by Robert K. Kraft, had tangled seven years earlier with N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell over a sign stealing scheme. Scouts filmed the sidelines of upcoming opponents and matched play calls to actual plays so Patriots players would know what was coming. The scheme and investigation became known as "Spygate." The N.F.L. fined Bill Belichick, the head coach, fined the franchise and took away the team's first round draft pick.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
ALEXANDRIA, La. I've been working at Dollar General here for more than two years. My manager is wonderful, and I have a great relationship with my customers. But when I took this job I never planned to become a worker on the front line of a pandemic. I close the register many nights, so I know my store's revenue has practically doubled since the coronavirus hit. But we workers haven't gotten any extra money, even though we're risking our health, and our families' health, to keep the stores running. Louisiana's governor is expected to lift parts of the stay at home order soon. I don't think our state is ready for that and I know my co workers aren't. We often work alone because of bare bones staffing. I'm a full time worker and on a typical day, I work from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m., and for the first three hours of my shift I'm by myself. When my relief shows up at 4, I often can't take lunch right away because the line is around the corner. I often have to pause the checkout line to run outside and grab ice or propane, or help a customer retrieve a product from one of the top shelves, then reopen the register. But now it's a lot more dangerous to work alone. Retail workers have always faced high risks of workplace violence. Before I started my job here, one of my co workers was robbed at gunpoint. I'm afraid we'll become more of a target for robberies because everyone knows we don't have any security and people are getting desperate. The unemployment office is overwhelmed, so a lot of people haven't gotten any relief yet. And of course, I'm afraid to catch the coronavirus. More than 300 customers come in each day. I'm constantly reminding people to stay six feet apart, but there's no way to limit the number of people in the store, especially when I'm the only person working. We've always had a lot of homeless customers and I make sure to treat them with respect. But it's scary to have so many people in close quarters who can't take care of basic hygiene, especially since we don't have enough protective equipment. We receive small shipments of gloves every couple of weeks, but always run out within a few days. We didn't receive any masks until mid April. There are no plexiglass barriers around the registers. When someone coughs, I joke with them "We have a strict one cough per customer limit!" to let them know I'm watching and they need to keep their distance. But I'm on edge throughout my shift. I was bringing my own mask to work with me, and I got a sinus infection. But I didn't want to call out, because I don't have any paid sick leave; and 92 percent of surveyed Dollar General workers believe they don't either. Recently the company, which owns many of the dollar stores in the state, announced that we can take paid time off if we contract the coronavirus, but we still can't get tested, so I don't know how much that's worth. Now that my 4 year old daughter Harmony's school is closed, I have to quickly line up child care when I get my work schedule. My manager posts the schedule in advance, but it changes often, so I always have to check it. My better half has worked the same job for 10 years and our family counts on that income. Since he works nights, I try to make sure he gets enough rest during the day. It would be great to work only when he can take care of Harmony, but I was hired with "open availability" which means I have to be ready for any shift. If I tried to limit my availability now, my hours would probably be cut in half and we can't afford that. Like many parents in retail with unpredictable work hours, we rely on close friends and family members to watch Harmony while I'm at work. Harmony's aunt, my cousin, my sister and even my hairdresser all pitch in. But I try not to ask anyone to watch her more than once or twice a week. Several of them have their own children, and Harmony is on the autism spectrum so she has special needs; she's still potty training and her language skills aren't as developed, so that can make it more difficult to care for her. For all of this stress, Dollar General is planning to give me a one time bonus of 300, which will be much less after taxes. Part time workers will only get half of that. A one time bonus is insulting when I still make just 10.75 an hour, and some of my part time co workers just 9 or 8 per hour. The company's chief executive, Todd Vasos, earns more than 10 million a year. The bonus doesn't even compensate me for the time I spend cleaning myself and my clothes after work so I don't get my family sick. It doesn't come close to fair compensation for the risks we're taking. And we can't count on stable hours or income, even though dollar stores are incredibly busy right now. As lead sales associate, I'm officially full time but I'm not guaranteed any hours. My manager tries to make sure I get at least 32 hours each week, but some weeks I work just 29 hours. Things can't go on like this. We deserve hazard pay and better scheduling. We deserve to be taken care of just like we do for our customers. 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
At the start of "The Professor," a glib portrait about a dying academic, the title character, Richard (Johnny Depp), receives a diagnosis of stage four lung cancer; without treatment, he has probably six months to live. His plan to tell his family is upstaged after, in a single evening at the dinner table, his daughter (Odessa Young) comes out and his wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) reveals that she's having an affair with his university's chancellor (Ron Livingston). So he keeps the news to himself. And the cancer, far from debilitating him (too much), transforms Richard into a free man. He drives around with shades on and his dog on his lap. He smokes a cigarette he wasn't a smoker before and experiments sexually. To his students, he becomes a mad prophet, dismissing any members of the class who aren't truly interested in literature and fashioning himself into an unhinged "Dead Poets Society" figure for the rest. ("Do not give into mediocrity like the other 98 percent of the world," he advises his students, with whom he also smokes pot and drinks.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
What's Faith Got to Do With It? Strolling through the Cloisters in Upper Manhattan on Wednesday, Wim Wenders paused, fixing a discernibly toxic gaze on a crystal encrusted Viktor Rolf evening ensemble, part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibit "Heavenly Bodies," on fashion and Roman Catholicism. "It looks like a Christmas decoration," Mr. Wenders said, his tone deceptively resigned. He was in New York to introduce "Pope Francis: A Man of His Word," his documentary exploring the life and philosophy of the Argentine pontiff, but found time nonetheless for a detour to the museum's sprawling exhibit, which occupies several galleries at its Fifth Avenue address as well as the stone and stained glass Cloisters. There was a time when such extravagance was intrinsic to the faith. "In the Middle Ages, people were more used to representation," Mr. Wenders said. "This spectacular way of dressing among the cardinals and bishops, the incredible Gothic architecture they were all a representation of man aspiring to get closer to God." For Mr. Wenders, that view has lost its relevance. Like some of his earlier movies "Paris Texas," "The American Friend" and "Kings of the Road" come to mind his documentary is, in some respects, a road movie. The film, which opens in theaters on May 18, follows Pope Francis from prisons, refugee camps and favelas to the halls of Congress and the United Nations without losing its stringent focus on a pontiff seeking to model himself on his namesake, Saint Francis of Assisi, the son of a rich textile merchant who cast off his finery for mendicants' robes. If you ask Mr. Wenders, that's a gesture worth emulating. "More than anything Pope Francis tells us that we don't have to dress up to appear before God," he said. "He tells us, 'Let's look at people. Let's not look at disguises.'" All that finery: The effect can be alienating, Mr. Wenders suggested, his voice just audible over the insistent strains of Ave Maria piped over the sound system. "Pope Francis said this very clearly in the film, and I want to emphasize this now, 'In a church that seeks wealth, Jesus is not there,'" he said. Mr. Wenders himself looked fastidious, dressed with stylish austerity in a deep blue Jil Sander suit. He paused often and ruminatively as he spoke. But he was far from somber. His shirt, pristine and tieless, was a concession to expediency, he said, part of a tuxedo ensemble he wore to the movie's premiere at Cannes. "This morning I was looking for a clean shirt and this was it," he said roguishly. He kept up the mischievous banter as we left the museum, heading in a lumbering limousine toward Mr. Wenders next stop, a screening of his documentary in Midtown, followed by a Q. and A. "We don't want to be late," he fretted. "If you make them wait, people leave." The Vatican had approached him to make this documentary. "I think they are in the process of changing," he said. "Their way of communicating has become a little stale." The prospect of a one on one with the pontiff had unnerved him, but not for long. "The way he came in and took time with everybody and didn't make a distinction between the electricians, the producer, and director," he said. "He made it clear right away, 'I'm like everybody else; don't make a big fuss.'" "He really has a powerful way of looking you in the eye," Mr. Wenders added, "a way of being entirely concentrated and present. It took all the anxiety away, that's for sure." En route we passed a kennel near West 56th Street. Studying its sign, Mr. Wenders waxed sardonic: "Look at that, "The world's first doggy spa,'" he said. Before long, though, he had reverted to the topic at hand. Yes, he'd seen the footage from the recent Met Gala red carpet with its over the top interpretations of the exhibition's' sacred and secular themes. Reviewing cellphone images of Rihanna in a towering jeweled miter and Cardi B. encased in a pearl studded Moschino gown that showed off her baby bump, he stopped short of an indictment. "A lot of these people are living sculptures," he said mildly. "They are sculptured with makeup and scalpels."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
It is the worst of all worlds, for an incumbent president seeking re election, to have the country feel as if its coming apart under his leadership. Trump can deflect and cast this chaos as a preview of "Biden's America," but the public usually punishes those who preside over disorder, from Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968 to President George H.W. Bush in 1992. Trump is on the same path, with low approval ratings of his handling of "crime" (46 to 52 percent) and even lower approval of his handling of "race relations" (37 to 62 percent). Compounding this problem is his rhetoric. The president speaks as if he approves of violence in the streets. Kenosha would be quiet if not for an incident of police brutality and abuse. The same is true for other cities where rioting and disorder have taken place. And yet, just last Friday, the president lamented the extent to which officers can't use excessive force against protesters: "The reason they didn't fight back too much," Trump said of the police confronting protesters at his acceptance speech in Washington, D.C., is "they don't want to lose their pension" and "they don't want to lose their job" because "we've become too politically correct. Everybody's afraid to do anything now." Trump said something similar several years ago, telling David Muir of ABC News that he would send federal "help" to Chicago to handle its homicide problem. "I will send in what we have to send in. Maybe they're not gonna have to be so politically correct," he said. On Monday, Trump held a news conference. Asked to condemn the killings in Kenosha, he said the shooter acted in self defense; otherwise, "he probably would have been killed." Asked to condemn the Portland caravan for harassment, he refused. (Over the weekend, on Twitter, he called them "GREAT PATRIOTS!") Trump said nothing, in other words, to disprove Biden's claim that he "looks at this violence and sees a political lifeline" and that he "adds fuel to every fire." It's not too late. With a little more than two months until the election, the president can still reverse course. But he cannot do so as long as he and his campaign indulge the fantasy that he is blameless and untouched by the crisis in "Democrat cities." The solution is for Trump to disavow the instigators. His trip to Kenosha today should include tough words for police officers who insist on using lethal force when it's not necessary. He should urge police departments to reject the use of tear gas, rubber bullets and military style equipment against protesters, understanding, as the Kerner Commission report explained in 1968, that "the harmful effects of overreaction are incalculable." Face to face with law enforcement at the site of a terrible tragedy, Trump will have the chance to rebuke both bad policing and the self styled militias who raised the heat on an already tense situation.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
More than 100,000 saigas in Central Asia have died in recent weeks of an unknown disease. Before the end of the last Ice Age, saigas roamed by the millions in a range stretching from England to Siberia, even into Alaska. Eventually they moved to the steppes of Central Asia, where they continued to thrive until the 20th century, when these strange looking antelopes began flirting with extinction. Hunted for its horns, 95 percent of the population disappeared, and the saiga was declared critically endangered. After the implementation of strict antipoaching measures, the population recovered, from a low of 50,000 to about 250,000 last year. "It was a big success story," said Eleanor J. Milner Gulland, the chairwoman of the Saiga Conservation Alliance. Now that success is in jeopardy. Last month, a mysterious disease swept through the remaining saiga herds, littering the steppes with carcasses. The so called die off claimed more than a third of the world's population in just weeks. "I'm flustered looking for words here," said Joel Berger, a senior scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society. "To lose 120,000 animals in two or three weeks is a phenomenal thing." An international team of wildlife biologists is now examining tissues taken from dead saigas, hoping to figure out what killed them. Whatever it is, it has the potential to undo years of conservation efforts, further endangering the species. "Once we know what's causing it, then we need to think very hard about how to avoid it in the future," said Aline Kuhl Stenzel, the terrestrial species coordinator of the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals. Naturalists are quick to note their improbable, cartoonish faces, anchored by enormous noses somewhat resembling elephant trunks. "It's a remarkable structure, really," said Dr. Kuhl Stenzel, who has studied saigas since 2003. "In the rutting season, the male's nose swells even more, and then they shake their heads and it makes a squishy sound." Females may be attracted to the fleshy noses of males. But scientists also suspect these noses protect saigas from dust rising up from the dry ground. "To some extent, the nose is a filter," she said. "But it probably also cools the air in the summer, and in winter, it probably heats the air, as well." From time to time, saigas have faced widespread die offs. The last major one occurred in 2010, when 12,000 animals died. The causes are still uncertain, because biologists did not reach the animals until long after they expired. "There's no data at all, and so people go on speculating," said Richard A. Kock, an expert on wildlife disease at the Royal Veterinary College in London. The die off is now 10 times bigger than the 2010 event. And because the saiga population was at a precariously low level, the die off has claimed an astronomical proportion of the species, from one third to perhaps a half. As soon as the reports of the die offs began emerging, Dr. Kock and other wildlife disease experts swung into action, traveling to Kazakhstan to study the outbreak as it unfolded. They examined dead animals, performing necropsies on 15 of them. Dr. Kock was astonished by the deadliness of the disease, whatever it is: Once it struck a herd, every animal died, in a matter of days. "It is an extraordinary thing to get 100 percent mortality," Dr. Kock said. He and his colleagues found that the saigas were infected with two species of deadly bacteria, Pasteurella and Clostridium. But Dr. Kock says he suspects that these infections became deadly only when something else crippled the animals. There are two reasons for this suspicion. One is the speed with which the animals died: so fast that they would not have enough time to spread a virulent strain of Pasteurella or Clostridium to other animals. And Pasteurella and Clostridium are common in healthy animals. Only when the animal becomes weakened do these microbes turn deadly. The number of deaths is still rising as emergency teams find carcasses to bury. "But there are no fresh mortalities," Dr. Kuhl Stenzel said. Dr. Berger said that it was urgent to figure out what killed the saigas to ensure long term survival of the species: "We're not going to get ahead of the curve if we don't understand what's doing this."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
The American Academy of Pediatrics on Friday urged pediatricians to screen all patients for food insecurity and to refer parents to appropriate agencies so children do not go hungry. Sixteen million children live in homes where there is consistently not enough food, according to the Agriculture Department. Those children get sick more often, have poorer overall health and are hospitalized more frequently than peers who are adequately nourished. So called food insecurity has also been linked to behavioral and emotional problems from preschool through adolescence. "It's high time," Mariana Chilton, the director of the Center for Hunger Free Communities at Drexel University, said of the new policy. "We know food insecurity drives up health care costs, and is associated with more hospitalizations, and is related to poor childhood development and health." Few pediatricians research childhood hunger, said Dr. Chilton, a principal investigator with Children's HealthWatch, a national network tracking the impact of public assistance programs on pediatric health. "It's been very difficult to get the broader pediatrician community to pay attention to food insecurity, and yet it's one of the most important vital signs of a child's health and well being," Dr. Chilton said. The academy's new policy also encourages pediatricians to familiarize themselves with local food banks and federal nutrition programs. "If you think about meeting families where they are, they are in schools and in doctors' offices," said Melissa Boteach, a vice president of the poverty to prosperity program at the Center for American Progress. "Having pediatricians connect them to resources they need could really have a big impact." The academy said that pediatricians might identify hungry children with a screening tool that posed two questions to parents: whether, in the last year, they worried that their food would run out before they had money to buy more, and whether the groceries they bought lasted until they had more money available to buy more. The answers to these questions identify 97 percent of families that are insecure about food, said Erin R. Hager, a nutritional epidemiologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who helped validate the tool. Across the board screening may encourage worried parents to step forward, experts said. "A big barrier to accessing resources for families is they are scared and embarrassed to ask," said Maryah Fram, an associate professor of social work at the University of South Carolina who has researched food insecurity in children. Pediatricians can not only share information on resources, but also reassure parents. "They can let them know it's not just them, and this is a common situation," Ms. Fram said. The questionnaire may also take the guesswork out of trying to identify children forced to skip meals or go to bed famished. "People think you can recognize food insecurity when you see it, or that people with food insecurity look poor," said Dr. Sarah J. Schwarzenberg, a lead author of the new policy statement and director of pediatric gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition at the University of Minnesota Masonic Children's Hospital. "People who look just like you and me have food insecurity," she added. "Income is more unpredictable than it used to be." Unemployment, underemployment and poverty are all linked to food insecurity, the academy noted, helping make chronic hunger a problem for millions of families. Asia Thompson, a 22 year old mother of two and a student at Misericordia University in Dallas, Pa., never told her children's pediatrician that the family sometimes lacked food, even though she worried about it frequently. "Imagine having two children who are equally if not more hungry than you are, and only having one ration of food to split between three of you," Ms. Thompson said. "That's what is happening in homes in America right now." Ms. Thompson said she hoped universal screenings for hunger "would take away the embarrassment of having to reach out yourself, because it does take a lot of courage to talk to your pediatrician about not being able to feed your kids. It's embarrassing as a parent." Food stamps have been "incredibly helpful," she said, but they still run out early. The new policy also urges pediatricians to use their influence beyond their offices. "It's very important that pediatricians advocate for programs that provide food, particularly healthy food, for children," Dr. Schwarzenberg said. Assistance programs "are always under pressure to be cut, diminished or changed," she said. "Pediatricians know about children's health. They should be right up there saying you've got to make them stronger and to keep them in place."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
The dancer Gabor Zsiros (top) and the acrobat Renato Illes in "Non Solus." The hardest thing for dancers? The grip. "You have somebody's life in your hands. You can't fail." An Acrobat and a Dancer Walk Into a Circus (and Do Ballet in the Air) In "Non Solus," a dancer becomes an acrobat, and an acrobat becomes a dancer. Recirquel Company Budapest may be a circus company, but its meditative, evening length production is no circus spectacle. It's more like ballet in the air. "It's not a story of two men," said Bence Vagi, the work's choreographer and director. "It's a story of the body and the soul, or the mirrored image of ourselves." "Non Solus" ("Not Alone"), which comes to the Brooklyn Academy of Music beginning Thursday, brings to life a dreamlike world that evokes, with aerial feats of daring, the cycle from birth to death. In the show, set to a score that includes electronic music and Bach, the acrobat Renato Illes sees himself as the soul to the body of the dancer Gabor Zsiros. "But at the end," Mr. Illes said in an email interview, "just like in life, the body perishes and the soul keeps on wandering alone in ethereal space." Working on this piece has changed him. "It has strengthened me in my belief that you do not always have to do very dangerous tricks," he said. "They might make you an outstanding acrobat, but will not make you a great performer." By taking two types of performers and two traditions and melding them together, Mr. Vagi has given dance a powerful athleticism and circus movement a subtle and supple fluidity. But beyond the piece itself, "Non Solus" asks a bigger question: What can the dance and circus worlds teach each other? "When we look at ballet from the 1920s to today, we see huge progress," Mr. Vagi said. "This is happening now in circus because schools in Montreal, in Belgium or even in Budapest have started to give more dance and movement classes to circus artists. So they start to find the freedom of movement, which enables abstraction, and abstraction can form more story." There is a loose narrative in "Non Solus," which Mr. Vagi sees as more than an ordinary duet. "It's a show with only two people, but actually the set multiplies everything," he said. "It is constructed with mirrored walls that face or tilt toward the audience. So it always reflects an image of the choreography." Mr. Vagi, 38, grew up dancing and choreographing he studied ballet and was also influenced by Bob Fosse but as he grew older, he immersed himself in the artistry and history of circus and cabaret theater. He never was a member of a circus company, but he spent time researching circus freak shows, and was particularly drawn to the work of Tod Browning, who directed the 1932 film "Freaks." Mr. Vagi directed dance shows that were inspired by circus themes, but he said "I never had circus artists I just created scenes that had the atmosphere of circus." Gradually, he began to incorporate circus artists in his pieces and made his way his own way to the ring. Recirquel, his dance circus company based in Budapest, is now in its seventh year. In a phone interview, Mr. Vagi, in Budapest, spoke about the thrill of live danger, the importance of grip and what dance and the circus have in common. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, one thing is the backstage misery. "The suffering is the same," Mr. Vagi said. "The amount of hours. Your understanding of the body, the respect of the body. The life." Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. For a dancer, what is the main challenge in acrobatic and aerial work? It's the grip. You have somebody's life in your hands. You can't fail. You can't let go of that person. Of course, there is a period where you have big mats, but then they are removed and in that moment you take responsibility for that other person's life. What is the difference between dance and circus, and what do you find similar? I feel the answer, but to describe it is not easy. From my perspective, both are theater genres, and the beauty of theater is communication. Circuses are becoming more and more an art form that can speak like dance, and this is very beautiful because it's opening a new perspective. The vocabulary of dance is much more broad because there are so many different dance styles, and the variation of movement is endless. When you look at circus and you are on a tightrope 10 meters high, your vocabulary is much more limited. You can't let go, you can't close your eyes, you can't just spin: You need to keep your balance aligned because your life is at stake. That never happens in dance. You can get injured, but your life is not really at stake. How did "Non Solus" come to you? I was in Chile at the Atacama Desert watching this really incredible sunset. Deserts are really similar to theaters it's a huge empty place. You're left alone with your thoughts. You see this red sand turn even redder by the sun and suddenly there is no one around you. It brings you back to some sort of ancient feelings of humans. "Non Solus" is this. What was the working process like for you and the performers? A lot of crying. In the end, it's like, "I'm not a dancer, I know I look stupid, I don't want to become a dancer!" Laughs There was a lot of insecurity. In a way, the whole piece is about letting go of your ego and finding your own faith. Only when they let go does the show start to work its magic.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
MAISACH, Germany The big fashion trend in Paris next week may be retro: internal combustion. Actually, with the engineering departments of the big automakers that will gather at the Paris Motor Show next week, gasoline and diesel engines never went out of style. It only seemed that way, given all the car show hoopla in recent years about electric vehicles. But with the European car industry in crisis and sales of battery powered vehicles drifting somewhere between disappointing and dismal, automakers are spending less time talking about futuristic visions. Instead, they are touting their prowess in cutting emissions and raising mileage the old fashioned way: by optimizing cars that run on fossil fuels. A prime case in point is BMW. The German carmaker has been one of the most visible champions of electric vehicles, with plans to introduce a battery powered, four seat city compact next year. But recently BMW has been re emphasizing its more conventional technology. In the short term, the company's executives contend, the most realistic way to cut fuel consumption and emissions, and save the planet, is through innovations like a three cylinder engine that BMW showed to reporters at briefings last week and again on Tuesday. BMW is also investing heavily in the use of lightweight materials like carbon fiber for body and chassis parts, and employing information technology to help drivers avoid wasting fuel. Herbert Diess, a member of BMW's management board who is in charge of development, said the company remained on track to introduce the BMW i3 electric car at the end of 2013. ''It will be a lot of fun to drive, I can promise you that already,'' he said Tuesday at a decommissioned military airport outside Munich that BMW has converted into a driver training center. But, Mr. Diess added, ''the internal combustion engine will be with us for a long time.'' On the surface these new fuel burning engines are not as revolutionary as battery power. But they could still represent a significant departure from what drivers are used to. After decades of conditioning consumers that more cylinders are better, the automakers are now arguing the opposite: that fewer cylinders are more efficient and yet still satisfying to drive. The pioneer in putting three cylinder engines into full size cars is Ford. A version of the Ford Focus with a three cylinder EcoBoost gasoline engine has been on the market in Europe since March. The engine has accounted for 13 percent of Focus sales since then, according to Ford, and 30 percent during August as fuel prices rose. This month, Ford announced plans to sell a version of its Mondeo, known in the United States as the Fusion, with the same three cylinder engine as the Focus. Ford has neither said when the new engine will be available in Europe nor announced any plans to sell it in the United States. Three cylinder engines are already common in very small cars made by Daimler's Smart division as well as by Toyota and Peugeot. But BMW faces an especially large challenge delivering the sportiness and luxury its customers expect, while also cutting emissions and fuel consumption. A three cylinder engine may not be as difficult to sell as an expensive battery powered car with limited range, but it is still a marketing challenge. 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. The three cylinder power plant will be produced in both gasoline and diesel versions and first appear in 2014 in the i8, a four seat hybrid coupe. The three cylinder may be especially well suited for hybrids, which combine internal combustion engines and electric motors. It takes up less space and leaves more room for batteries and other components of a hybrid system. Reporters took short test drives Tuesday in a BMW 1 Series compact equipped with prototypes of the three cylinder engine. The aim was to demonstrate that three cylinders can deliver the pickup that BMWs are known for. BMW would not disclose how fast the three cylinder 1 Series can accelerate. But the car certainly did not feel sluggish. The engines seemed smooth, except for a marked growl at high revolutions, which some drivers will enjoy. The motor, part of a general redesign of the BMW power plant lineup, is just one way the company is working on efficiency. It is also experimenting with lightweight materials like carbon fiber and magnesium. While costly, alternatives to steel can radically cut weight. For example, a carbon fiber shell that holds the rear passenger seats weighs only a quarter of the equivalent steel component. An aluminum bumper assembly weighs half as much as the steel equivalent. As cars increasingly become rolling computers, BMW has also been looking for ways to leverage information in a car's navigation system to save fuel. Some models of BMW already have a predictive assistant that signals the driver when, for example, a slow speed zone lies out of view ahead. The driver can then take a foot off the accelerator and coast rather than brake. Starting next year, versions of the BMW 5 Series will draw on the navigation database to anticipate curves and shifts. BMW says the systems can cut fuel consumption 25 percent. Many of the improvements are incremental: a plastic engine support instead of one made of aluminum, or a laser weld in a passenger seat that saves a few grams. Others are sophisticated but barely visible to drivers, like a grille with louvers that automatically close when less cooling air is needed, to reduce drag. BMW is building in plenty of cushion in case the three cylinder motor does not attract buyers. It will be part of a broader overhaul of the company's diesel and gasoline lineup. The company is using the same, standardized cylinder on all the new engines, and will be able to build different motors on the same assembly line.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Meet Malin Fezehai, who had the first iPhone picture to ever get a World Press Photo Award; Walter Thompson Hernandez, who worked on the very popular "Blaxicans of L.A." Instagram account and Stephen Hiltner, who reported a story from his motorcycle. We sifted through over 500 resumes looking for reporters who can tell visual stories about subcultures that flourish online and within their communities. We were looking for people who could write, take photographs, capture videos, post to Instagram, find stories on Reddit and more. We knew we were asking for a lot. As the editor on the project, I also wanted people with diverse backgrounds and storytelling techniques. Meet the three Surfacing residents who will travel the world to find interesting stories of hidden communities. Name: Malin Fezehai Age: 34 Hometown: Stockholm. Malin grew up in a suburb called Husby in a community of mostly immigrants. "It was my first entry to learning about the world through my friends because a lot of them were children of refugees, everybody I knew was coming from another place," she said of the multicultural community where she grew up, with people from Iran, Kurdistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Gambia. How she got started: In 2003, Malin attended the International Center of Photography. "I started photography by just shooting my friends," she said. She was also drawn to current events and wanted to combine both of her interests. Photojournalism seemed like the perfect fit, she says. After I.C.P ., she lived in Ethiopia for eight months volunteering and working on a project about child workers. "I familiarized myself with East Africa, and knew I wanted to continue working there in some capacity," she said. In 2006, she received a grant from I.C.P . and Global Fund for Children photographing grass roots organizations that were assisting marginalized children in Peru. What she has done: Malin knew she wanted to work internationally, and she has done it. She went to war torn Sri Lanka, to the Republic of Kiribati for a story about people being displaced because of rising sea levels and to Senegal for a story about surfing. She worked on a project about African refugees in Israel for two years that was ultimately published both in Time and The New York Times. She has been going back to Lalibela in Northern Ethiopia documenting Christmas celebrations. In 2015, she went to Selma, Ala., to photograph the people who witnessed the events on March 7, 1965, when the police attacked protesters that marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. "It was amazing to meet the generation that were there during the Civil Rights movement and hear their experiences and reflections," she said. She also has accompanied Malala on her annual birthday trip for three years in a row, where she travels to a place to highlight issues on female education. One year they went to Lebanon to bring attention to the Syrian refugee crises, one year to Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya to focus on girls' education. Last year they visited the refugee camps outside Mosul, Iraq. The latest project she did was for the United Nations documenting survivors of violent extremism across five countries in Africa, which she published in a book and showcased in three different exhibitions. Also, one of her images was the first iPhone picture to ever get a World Press Photo Award. What she plans to cover: Malin wants to explore stories about people who go against the grain and is also interested in documenting indigenous and traditional cultures that are fading because of modernization. "I want to do stories that are all different from each other." What he has done: Walter was a creator of the popular Instagram account "Blaxicans of L.A." in 2013, before enrolling in the master's program. "I was interested in thinking about my experience in Los Angeles being the child of a black father and Mexican mother," he said. "What it means to be both at a time when the communities were at odds with race riots." He used photos, videos and photo captions that explored multiracial identity in America through Instagram portraits. From 2015 to 2016, Walter embarked on a yearlong series for Fusion about Latinos who converted to Islam. "It drew awareness to a population that had very little voice in the media before that." In 2016, he spent four months in Cuba reporting for Fusion. His stories focused on race, Afro Cuban hip hop, and how the modernization of Cuba is changing the religious landscape of Santeria, an Afro Cuban religion with origins in the Caribbean. This past year, on assignment for The Root in Madagascar, he did a piece about child sex trafficking in the capital city. What he plans to cover: Walter wants to explore the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, music and popular culture. "I'm interested in what it means to belong and not belong to society, to a culture," he said. Off the clock: For three years, Walter taught and mentored inmates with the Prison Education Project. He also loves music including Kendrick Lamar, Kamasi Washington, Erykah Badu and says the best concert he ever went to was Nas and Lauryn Hill. How he got started: Stephen went to the University of Virginia and double majored in biochemistry and English literature in hopes of eventually going to medical school. After college, he decided to follow his passion for English literature instead and earned a master's degree at Oxford. His first job in writing was for The Paris Review, where he worked for six years as an editor of literary stories. Toward the end of his tenure there, he started writing his own stories and shooting photographs, a lifelong love since his dad and sister had outfit the basement of his childhood home with a studio to develop and print their own photographs. He realized that taking photos has been in the family when he discovered a trove of photographs by his grandfather, who captured his life as a child growing up on a farm in Ohio and his time stationed in the South Pacific during World War II. "It's just an incredible collection of photographic history, and I thought about it a lot, " he said. In 2016, he joined The New York Times as an editor on the Insider desk. What he has done: Stephen has a knack for finding an eccentric. Like this piece he did on Will Shortz, the crossword puzzle editor for The New York Times whose apartment is completely littered in crossword paraphernalia. "He's like the Willy Wonka of puzzles," he said. Or this one on Willa Kim, the theatrical costume designer behind Mikhail Baryshnikov's looks and more, whose apartment he described as, "an artistic menagerie." The idea for one of his first pieces for The New York Times came when he took a cross country road trip on his motorcycle. As he was somewhere in Missouri on U.S. Route 36, he noticed that most of the roadside signs were of Trump support and there were little to no for Hillary Clinton. "I pulled over and sent an email to Carolyn Ryan the editor who was in charge of presidential campaign coverage for The New York Times ," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The last time I was unemployed was in the depths of the Great Recession. I had recently moved in with my girlfriend, who suddenly found herself with an out of work partner who rarely left the house. But she gave me some surprising advice: Play video games. I would have a lot of time on my hands, she said, and while I could and should certainly do other things housework, exercise, searching for a job I would mostly be stuck at home with limited resources. Without something to occupy my mind, I'd go crazy. She was right. Playing video games helped ease my mind, elevate my mood and possibly saved our relationship. This year we'll celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. So now I'm going to give the same advice to anyone who is now out of work, or otherwise kept at home: Play video games. And don't feel bad about it. If you're not a gamer, you might think of video games as simple time wasters. But for those stuck mostly inside without work, killing time is a real problem. And in the world of big budget console games, 10 to 15 hours is a fairly short experience. Some can take hundreds of hours to complete. There are online games designed to be played and replayed for thousands of hours. But games are more than just empty time wasters. In periods of pain, boredom or personal emptiness, video games can serve as palliative care for both the body and the mind. Think of gaming as a personal stimulus plan for a nation of unexpected shut ins: It's not a long term solution, it won't work for everyone, and it won't solve the underlying problems but it can provide limited, temporary relief for some. Video games take many forms, but they are all essentially simulations. And when the real world is temporarily unavailable, a simulated version might be what we need. Among other things, video games simulate work: Even the simplest games give players tasks, objectives, lists of things they have to do, problems to solve and a sense of accomplishment upon completion. And the biggest modern games offer seemingly endless lists of quests and objectives, tasks and subtasks, systems to learn and skills to be mastered. A game like the online shooter Destiny 2 offers hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of play, exploration and study. Set in an intricately designed sci fi world, it tasks players with taking out wave after wave of alien enemies. It also rewards them for understanding a complex character progression system that involves completing ever more difficult goals and objectives, sometimes multiple times, in exchange for rarer and more powerful weapons and armor. You might not actually accomplish anything after a day spent checking off quests and gathering virtual materials, but you'll feel like you did. Game critics have noted the worklike nature of many modern games for years, not always favorably. But in a world of stay at home mass unemployment, even the illusion of accomplishment is probably better than none at all. Indeed, the particular shut in nature of our current crisis makes video games unusually relevant in a different way: What video games do better than any other medium is simulate places. Open world games like Skyrim, Red Dead Redemption II or The Witcher 3 are built around giant, explorable spaces, sometimes the virtual equivalent of hundreds of square miles, with elaborate geography and shifting weather. They can take days or weeks to fully explore and at their best can be unexpectedly beautiful, offering the opportunity to encounter animated versions of sun dappled vistas or foggy mountain peaks, to wander through crowded city streets or stroll past others on well trod footpaths. Games can give us someplace else to go. That makes games useful in another way. Some of us are shut in alone. But especially in cities, many are now effectively trapped inside modest apartments with family or roommates, and little private space. Games offer a form of personal escape, a way to simulate being elsewhere from the confines of your couch. And for those who are alone, games can also serve as social spaces, virtual fields of play for cooperative adventures or competitive contests. Many of today's most popular games are online experiences that allow players to engage with friends as well as strangers, to forge digital versions of the same sort of bonds with teammates that can develop in the real world. If you're new at this, the cost of entry is fairly low: There are thousands of high quality games available for phones, and many more available to download directly to your computer. Even better, many big budget games are free if you have a computer or game console on which to play them. Late last year, Destiny 2, released in 2017 as a full priced game, reinvented itself as a free to play experience, with the base game available at no cost (players can pay for expansions). Several of the "battle royale" games that have defined the new wave of first person shooters are also free: A relatively well reviewed recent entry, Call of Duty: Warzone, offers several clever twists on the popular last player standing formula. Not everyone wants to play online shooters, but for those willing to spend a little there are now subscription services that offer access to a large library of games for an annual or monthly fee. For little more than the price of a standard Netflix plan, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate offers access to dozens of games, from moody, philosophical puzzle games like The Talos Principle to richly animated platformers like Ori and the Will of the Wisps. There are sports games, strategy games, role playing games and simple twitchy diversions that recall the arcade games I pumped quarters into as a kid. And for those who not satisfied with our current quasi apocalypse, there even games about viral outbreaks and attacks, from the strategic epidemic simulator Plague Inc., to the deftly scripted post pandemic action game The Last of Us, to The Division 2, a military thriller set in emptied out recreations of downtown Washington and New York after a viral bioweapon wipes out most of the population. Maybe that one hits a little too close to home. Yes, games are frivolous. Yes, they are escapist. But the longer the coronavirus keeps social life and culture in isolation, the more we'll need frivolity and escapism. There's a limit, of course, to what video games can do: They can't serve as long term substitutes for real places, real work or real human interaction. But they can give us a simulacrum of all those things at a time when the real ones are in short supply, and tide us over until the world we actually need returns.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Seriously, just wear one. Almost any mask will do, really. N95, surgical, spandex, homespun cotton. For people who aren't front line health care workers, what matters is whatever you can get your hands on that fits over your nose and mouth. As the nation plunges for a second time into the depths of this brutal pandemic, officials worry we'll soon have as many as 100,000 new cases every day. Summer won't save us. Neither will bluster or bleach. It's easy to want to give up, but it would be wrong. Wearing a mask is not only simple and cheap, it's also proved to be effective in slowing the virus's spread. It will protect the health and even save the lives of your loved ones, your neighbors and people you don't know. This isn't hard. If the lower half of your face is not covered when you go out in public, stop searching for excuses and go mask up. Or think about it as the best path to economic recovery. If all Americans were required to wear masks in public, we could reduce the number of daily cases to a level that would otherwise require lockdowns that would slash nearly 5 percent, or 1 trillion, from the nation's gross domestic product, according to an analysis released this week by Goldman Sachs. Or, if you like, think about it as a gesture of patriotism as we mark a stark and somber Independence Day. But please, just don't think about it as so many Republicans do. "Mask wearing has become a totem, a secular religious symbol," Alex Castellanos, a longtime Republican strategist, told The Washington Post. "Christians wear crosses, Muslims wear a hijab, and members of the Church of Secular Science bow to the Gods of Data by wearing a mask as their symbol, demonstrating that they are the elite; smarter, more rational, and morally superior to everyone else." This is a bizarre way to talk about people who are guided by facts, science and reason. It's not about making a political point or asserting moral superiority; it's about saving lives and protecting one another which should be a basic element of citizenship in any democracy. And yet, like so many seemingly nonpolitical topics, donning a mask has become partisanized to the point that people are brawling in supermarkets over their right to infect others. "It's a free country; I can do what I want" sounds charming when it comes from a child. It can be far worse when it is shouted from the mouth of a possibly infected adult. It's a strange sort of freedom that includes exposing other people to a potentially deadly virus. What's to resist about showing respect to your fellow Americans? Why turn a straightforward public health issue into a political one? The virus doesn't care whether you're a Republican or a Democrat. It ravaged blue states in the spring, and now it's plowing through red ones. All it cares about is finding open mouths and nostrils. It's crazy that we are having this debate after all. Dozens of countries have already mandated mask wearing in public. It's not a coincidence that the United States remains the world's coronavirus hot spot. Only recently as the virus descends on the places where their political supporters live have some top Republicans come to their senses. On Thursday, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, whose state is currently being overwhelmed with new cases, issued a statewide mask mandate. (Indoor churchgoers are exempted, but outdoor protesters aren't.) There have been encouraging words from the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, Vice President Mike Pence, even Sean Hannity. Earlier this week, Steve Doocy, a host of "Fox Friends," which has as direct a line to President Trump's brain as any top White House adviser, pleaded with the president to "set an example" and wear a mask. MAGA should now stand for "Masks Are Great Again," he said. We're not holding our breath. Even with records being set daily, the White House refuses to issue a nationwide face mask mandate. Some resisters are still sore about the contradictory or incorrect messages about masks that came from health officials in early days of the pandemic. In late February, Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams tweeted: "Seriously people STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching Coronavirus." Anthony Fauci said a version of this a few days later. "There's no reason to be walking around with a mask," he told CBS. "When you're in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it's not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is." These were missteps, without question. But remember the context in which those pleas were made. In early March, hospitals across the country were preparing for a massive surge of patients, and masks were in perilously short supply. Considering the significant risks to front line health care workers, and the lack of sufficient protective gear, it was understandable even if misguided in retrospect to want to ensure that masks were available to those who needed them most. There's also the uncertainty inherent to the scientific process. In the early stages of the pandemic, for instance, it wasn't clear that infected people who had no symptoms could transmit the virus, so there didn't appear to be a need for the general public to wear masks. Now, of course, it's clear that asymptomatic transmission most likely plays a big role in the virus's spread. This doesn't mean we should ignore the scientists, or accuse them, as Fox News's Laura Ingraham did, of being part of "the medical deep state." Scientists generate hypotheses based on what they know at the time; some turn out to be incorrect, so scientists adjust and come up with better hypotheses. That is how science works, and most of the time it happens out of the public view. But now, with the whole world watching and on edge, every error is magnified. In any case, it's long past time to stop blaming health officials' messaging. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updated its guidance to recommend the wearing of masks on April 3; three months later, countless Americans are still refusing. Masks are not a cure all for the coronavirus pandemic. Countries that have gotten the virus under control have done so through a robust public health response, including aggressive testing and contact tracing. We also need to properly fund research into vaccines and other treatments. Instead, the Trump administration has wound down its coronavirus task force, perhaps because Mr. Trump still seems to believe that, as he put it as recently as Wednesday, the virus is "going to sort of just disappear, I hope." The buck stops anywhere but here. The White House continues to deny that it has any responsibility to lead in this effort. On Thursday, Kellyanne Conway, one of Mr. Trump's top aides, said: "People are not wearing masks. And I don't think they're not wearing masks because the president of the United States is not wearing a mask. They're not wearing a mask because nobody's saying put the mask on." And all this time we thought the presidency was a bully pulpit. Alas, the leader of the free world still refuses to cover his face in public, although he did claim he was "all for masks" earlier this week. The way to deal with an abject failure of leadership like this is at the ballot box in November. But the way to deal with the pandemic's daily assault on America today is to do the things regular people can do with little to no effort: Wash hands regularly, practice social distancing and wear a mask. On this July 4 weekend, consider it the least you can do for your country.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Zoom, the videoconferencing app whose traffic has surged during the coronavirus pandemic, is under scrutiny by the office of New York's attorney general, Letitia James, for its data privacy and security practices. On Monday, the office sent Zoom a letter asking what, if any, new security measures the company has put in place to handle increased traffic on its network and to detect hackers, according to a copy reviewed by The New York Times. While the letter referred to Zoom as "an essential and valuable communications platform," it outlined several concerns, noting that the company had been slow to address security flaws such as vulnerabilities "that could enable malicious third parties to, among other things, gain surreptitious access to consumer webcams." The New York attorney general's office is "concerned that Zoom's existing security practices might not be sufficient to adapt to the recent and sudden surge in both the volume and sensitivity of data being passed through its network," the letter said. "While Zoom has remediated specific reported security vulnerabilities, we would like to understand whether Zoom has undertaken a broader review of its security practices." With millions of Americans required to shelter at home because of the coronavirus, Zoom video meetings have quickly become a mainstay of communication for companies, public schools and families. Zoom's cloud meetings app is currently the most popular free app for iPhones in the United States, according to Sensor Tower, a mobile app market research firm. Even as the stock market has plummeted, shares of Zoom have more than doubled since the beginning of the year. As Zoom's popularity has grown, the app has scrambled to address a series of data privacy and security problems, a reactive approach that has led to complaints from some consumer, privacy and children's groups. The company updated its privacy policy on Sunday after users reported concerns, and on Monday, Eric S. Yuan, chief executive and founder of Zoom, posted a link on Twitter to a company blog item about the policy. In a statement for this article, the company said it took "its users' privacy, security and trust extremely seriously," and had been "working around the clock to ensure that hospitals, universities, schools and other businesses across the world can stay connected and operational." "We appreciate the New York attorney general's engagement on these issues and are happy to provide her with the requested information," the statement added. Last week, after an article on the news site Motherboard reported that software inside the Zoom iPhone app was sending user data to Facebook, the company said it was removing the tracking software. As many school districts adopted Zoom to allow teachers to host live lessons with students, some children's privacy experts and parents said they were particularly concerned about how children's personal details might be used. Some districts have prohibited educators from using Zoom as a distance learning platform. "There is so much we simply don't know about Zoom's privacy practices," said Josh Golin, executive director of the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, a nonprofit group in Boston. In the letter, Ms. James's office cited reports that Zoom had shared data with Facebook, and asked for further information on "the categories of data that Zoom collects, as well as the purposes and entities to whom Zoom provides consumer data."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
By midmorning on the Wednesday before Easter, the desert sun was gaining strength in Chihuahua, Mexico. So was the deep sound of beating cowhide drums in Oasis. This settlement, situated in the working class neighborhood of Colonia Martin Lopez, is home to approximately 500 Raramuris , commonly known as Tarahumaras, an indigenous people who are fleeing drought, deforestation and drug growers in Sierra Madre. In the city, their displacement is marked by other forms of hardship , which are magnified by the way the Raramuri stand out. The women dress in bright, ankle length frocks and often spend afternoons sewing traditional Raramuri dresses despite pressures from the people of mixed race who comprise most of Mexico's population to assimilate with Western style. For Raramuri people, assimilation is the same as erasure. But there's a pervasive idea among many in Mexico that progress is dependent on severing ties with the country's indigenous history. Her mother, Maria Refugio Ramirez, 43, sews each of her dresses by hand , following a dressmaking tradition that dates back to the 1500s, when Spain invaded the Sierra Madre mountains. Throughout the 1600s, Jesuit priests compelled Raramuri women to wear dresses that fully covered their bodies. Over time, Raramuri women adopted the cotton fabrics brought over by the Spaniards and made the dresses their own by adding triangle designs and colorful borders. Today they continue to hand sew the bright floral garments, which stand out when the women venture beyond the Chihuahua state funded settlement and into the urban landscape of gray concrete buildings and throngs of people in bluejeans. Their unwillingness to conform with contemporary style has, at times, come at the cost of economic advancement. But some women seek to challenge that notion. Ms. Ramirez, for example, believes that completing her nursing program in traditional dress will be an important statement that Raramuri people are a vital part of Mexico's future and present. Other Raramuris are monetizing their craft. For example, Esperanza Moreno, 44, embroiders tortilla warmers, aprons and dish cloths with depictions of Raramuri women in traditional garb, and sells them to Mexican nonprofits who then resell the items to shops and Walmarts throughout the country. Raramuri women have begun sewing traditional dresses to sell, as well. On Holy Thursday, Ms. Moreno had taken the day off from the workshop outside the settlement where she sews modern day garments that incorporate Raramuri designs. The job provides a steady income for Ms. Moreno, whose husband is a contractor whose jobs often take him outside Chihuahua. It's a line of work that has led to the kidnappings of some Raramuri men; in vehicles that look like work site shuttles, they have been taken instead to labor in marijuana and poppy fields, sometimes for entire seasons, leaving their families concerned for their safety and often without a source of income. Ms. Moreno sat on her front stoop playing with her 1 year old granddaughter, Yasmin, who took a few unsteady steps before turning to smile at her grandmother. She began sewing dresses for Yasmin soon after she was born. It's important, she said , to pass along the dressmaking tradition to new generations of women. "We want to be seen as Raramuri," Ms. Moreno said. Craft making and her current job in the workshop are a means for Ms. Moreno to provide her family with the income necessary not only to buy food and pay utilities, but to uphold Raramuri traditions. Fabric and sewing supplies for a Raramuri dress can cost upward of 400 pesos, more than some families earn in a month. While Raramuri men discard their traditional shirt, cloth and sandals upon arrival to the city in order to obtain jobs in construction, Raramuri women rarely trade their dresses for the uniforms required by employers. "I only wear Raramuri dresses," Ms. Holguin said, echoing the thousands of Raramuri women who strive to keep not only their dress, but their people's ways of caring for the natural world and one another. To supplement the men's income, Raramuri women sell crafts and ask people on the street for "korima" their word for reciprocity at busy intersections throughout Chihuahua. But they earn little money this way, and expose themselves and their children to heavy traffic, insults and threats. Ms. Holguin runs her own sewing workshop, or taller de costura, where she hopes to attract enough clients so that each Raramuri seamstress can earn money in a safe work space, without sacrificing her traditional dress and time with her children. Ms. Holguin used to take her daughters to sell crafts, candy, or ask for "korima" on the streets of Chihuahua. "Sometimes I was treated badly," Ms. Holguin said. "Not everyone is a good person." An avid runner, as so many Raramuri are, she displays in her kitchen a dozen medals won in marathons held in the Sierra. (She runs in traditional dress, as well.) Her conviction that Raramuri women should be proud of their heritage drives her to petition the government for support and rally the women around this new business venture. But gathering clients has proved to be a challenge. A large project, like the request for 2,000 bedsheets from a nearby hospital, kept the women busy for months at a time. Long spells with little or no work often follow. Low pay, too, keeps women working in the busy city streets. "If there's work in the workshop, the women don't go to the street. They sell on the street if they don't have work," said Ms. Holguin. Still, Ms. Holguin was hopeful that the workshop would provide Raramuri women with the opportunity to attain visibility as seamstresses with varied skills. She travels frequently to Mexico City to speak at government forums about the workshop and the importance of Raramuri culture. In 2018, when president elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was visiting Chihuahua to meet with state officials, Ms. Holguin and a small group of Raramuri women and government officials greeted him on the streets with calls of "AMLO, support Raramuri seamstresses." Mr. Lopez Obrador, who was promising to uphold indigenous rights as part of his presidency, ignored throngs of reporters to speak to Ms. Holguin and a few other Raramuri women about their employment of Raramuri women as seamstresses. In the end, though, government officials in high offices did not offer the support that Ms. Holguin hoped for. "No one helped us, not the president or the governor. Only clients have helped us," Ms. Holguin said. She also credits Raramuri women and the local officials who have supported the workshop. "Together we have lifted up this workshop," she said. In the face of historical violence, assimilation might appear to be a path toward economic progress, protection and safety. But to the Raramuri women, making and wearing traditional dresses is nonnegotiable. Even Raramuri women brought up under the influence of Chihuahua's urban culture, and who mix elements of Western dress like metal hoops and plastic necklaces, continue to wear traditional dresses for daily living and special occasions. The dresses are not only a marker of Raramuri identity, but protest. "This is how we were born, and this is the way our fathers and mothers dressed us," Ms. Holguin said. "We haven't lost our traditions."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Eight major works designed by Frank Lloyd Wright were inscribed alongside international treasures like the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids of Giza on the Unesco World Heritage List on Sunday, the first recognition by the United Nations cultural organization of American modern architecture. The announcement was made in Baku, Azerbaijan , where the World Heritage Committee had been meeting to review the sites currently on the list, and 35 others that had been nominated. Inscribed as "The 20th Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright," the addition encompasses eight of Wright's more recognizable designs, spanning the various American landscapes that served as his inspiration. The designation includes homes Wright designed for clients, like Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, Hollyhock House in Los Angeles, the Robie House in Chicago and the Jacobs House in Wisconsin, alongside the sites that served as his private residences and housed his architecture school Taliesin in Spring Green, Wis., and Taliesin West in Arizona. It also includes famous public works that bookend his career: Unity Temple, built between 1906 and 1908 in Oak Park, Ill., and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which was completed in 1959. The Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, an organization that works to preserve the nearly 400 remaining buildings Wright designed, embarked on the nomination process more than 15 years ago, after a suggestion from the International Council on Monuments and Sites, which advises Unesco.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Those rules meant to protect the privacy of your internet activity that you may have heard about? Never mind. In a 50 48 vote mostly along party lines on Thursday, the Senate moved to strip consumer privacy rules that had just been created in October. Next week, the House is expected to go along with the Senate measure, and the rule changes would then head to President Trump for his signature. The move by the Senate means telecommunications carriers can "continue tracking and sharing people's browsing and app activity without asking their permission," Cecilia Kang writes. "An individual's data collected by these companies also does not need to be secured with 'reasonable measures' against hackers." The rules were supposed to go into effect at the end of this year. Washington's zeal for privacy protection may have cooled, but that doesn't mean you don't have other means to keep what you do out of other people's hands.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Zika Data From the Lab, and Right to the Web MADISON, Wis. Of the hundreds of monkeys in the University of Wisconsin's primate center, a few including rhesus macaque 827577 are now famous, at least among scientists tracking the Zika virus. Since February, a team led by David H. O'Connor, the chairman of the center's global infectious diseases department, has been conducting a unique experiment in scientific transparency. The tactic may presage the evolution of new ways to respond to fast moving epidemics. Dr. O'Connor and his colleagues have been infecting pregnant female macaques with the Zika virus, minutely recording their symptoms, and giving them blood tests and ultrasounds. But then, instead of saving their data for academic journals, the researchers have posted it almost immediately on a website anyone can visit. The openness of the process thrills scientists, who say it fosters collaboration and speeds research. "David's work is very useful," said Dr. Koen Van Rompay, a virologist at the California National Primate Research Center at the University of California, Davis. "We all learn from each other and make sure we don't duplicate each other's work." Back to back epidemics of Ebola and Zika have driven some infectious disease specialists to embrace greater speed and openness. Until now, they felt forced to hoard data and tissue samples: Careers depend on being published in prestigious journals, which often refuse to publish work that has previously been released and may take months to edit papers. "We question whether this work needed to be done in the first place," said Kathy Guillermo, a senior vice president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which rejects medical research on animals. Early this month, 827577 was anesthetized and her baby delivered by cesarean section. The newborn was then dissected so 60 different tissues could be tested. The laboratory posted the barest possible description of the results. "If they want to be completely transparent, they should show it all," Ms. Guillermo said. "They should live stream 24/7 how the monkeys live, and how they die the C section, the euthanasia of the babies and what happens to their bodies." With their large brown eyes and bright pink skin, the macaques have very human faces, and Ms. Guillermo said she hoped showing the whole process would repel visitors enough to make them oppose the research. Dr. O'Connor acknowledged that pathology "involves a certain amount of gore." Even though 827577 was infected in her first trimester, her newborn did not develop microcephaly, a small skull and underdeveloped brain. Thus far, the lab has found Zika virus only in the optic nerves, bone marrow and one lymph node. This may suggest that monkeys are imperfect mimics of human infection, but Dr. O'Connor argued that using them was the only way to do experiments, for example, in which knowing the moment of infection was essential. Many labs capable of highly specialized tests need tissue samples, as well, and relatively few mothers infected with the Zika virus allow autopsies on their fetuses or babies. Monkeys are also used for tests too dangerous to do on humans such as infecting a pregnant woman with dengue then Zika to see whether the first worsens the second, as happens in patients with successive dengue infections. Dr. O'Connor's lab has already done one test that would be unethical in humans: It showed that monkeys who recovered from infection with an African strain of the virus could not be infected with the strain now circulating in the Americas. That suggests that the current American strain will not spread in Africa or Asia, because earlier strains, which have circulated on those continents for decades or centuries, are protective. Dr. O'Connor said he did not know whether that happens because pregnancy normally weakens a mother's immune system (so her body does not reject her baby), or because the fetuses cannot clear the virus and keep reinfecting their mothers. The veterinarians who run the primate center here argue that in making these discoveries, they cause the monkeys as little pain and suffering as they can and that posting their work publicly saves other monkeys' lives. "It helps people in other labs not do redundant studies," said Dr. Saverio Capuano, the center's attending veterinarian. Dr. Van Rompay, for one, has refrained from infecting pregnant macaques because he knew Dr. O'Connor did so; he infected only fetuses instead. But it took weeks to get Zika virus samples out of Brazil. Export regulations "were dubious and conflicting," said Dr. Esper Kallas, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Sao Paulo and one of Dr. O'Connor's collaborators. "Finally I said, 'This is an emergency I will share them, and if they want to arrest me, I'll call the media and they can film me being arrested,'" Dr. Kallas said in a telephone interview. It then took weeks for Dr. O'Connor to receive permission from his university's ethics board to run experiments on the monkeys. On Feb. 14, he announced on his Twitter feed that he had started. At first, "it was roundly ignored," he said. Then on Feb. 23, the journal Nature wrote about it. Other researchers congratulated him, asked for tissue samples and advice on growing the virus, and offered to be co authors on papers. He was inspired to defy the system, he said, by the work of Dr. Pardis Sabeti, an evolutionary geneticist at Harvard University and the Broad Institute. Early in the 2014 Ebola outbreak, her lab posted Ebola virus genomes it had sequenced on a public website. In a telephone interview, Dr. Sabeti said she was "completely honored" and thought Dr. O'Connor's decision was "just right on." Greater speed was worth losing the screening that the journal reviewers performed, she said, even if shaky data was sometimes picked up by the news media. "I imagine the system will self correct," she said. Dr. O'Connor's decision was the most radical manifestation of a trend already underway. In early February, more than 30 of the most prominent academic journals, research institutions and research funders signed a "Statement on Data Sharing in Public Health Emergencies" in which the journals agreed to make all articles about the Zika virus available free instead of charging their subscription fees, which can be hundreds of dollars. The journals also agreed to consider articles that had first been posted for comment on public forums like bioRxiv, which is hosted by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. The funders agreed to make everyone receiving their money share data as widely as possible. Now Dr. O'Connor is left shaking his head at his new celebrity. "I never planned to be an evangelist," he said. "I was happy toiling in anonymity, so this is a surreal experience. We all grew up in the same system: You do a study, you submit it to a journal, and your place in the hierarchy depends on the quality of the journal it appears in." "If it's all you've known, you assume it's the right way. But if you've got data that can contribute to the public health response during an epidemic is it really yours to hang onto?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
The Leibers Are Gone. But Their Bling Is Back. One summer day in the mid 1990s, as she recounts it, Beth Gorenfeld was at her booth at the Sag Harbor Whaling Historical Museum's antique show when two women made a beeline to her handbags. "They both stood looking at the bags for a while," Ms. Gorenfeld, a reseller of vintage fashion items, recalled earlier this month. "I told them, 'These are my Judith Leibers.'" "I know, dear," one of the women replied. "I'm Judith Leiber. Why are these bags so expensive?" The question was not theoretical. The handbag designer was, it turns out, on a mission to buy back as many of her fun crystal encrusted objets as possible. Over the years, Mrs. Leiber reacquired at least 1,700 pieces, including many purchased over eBay or acquired from collectors as donations, said Ann Stewart, the manager of the Leiber Collection and the chief negotiator of Mrs. Leiber and her husband, Gerson. Mrs. Leiber died on April 28 at 97, within hours of Gerson, 96, known as Gus. They were married 72 years. Their remarkable lifetime creative output a vast stash of handbags, purses and minaudieres, as well as thousands of oils, watercolors and prints is now housed in the Collection, which the couple built next door to their home in the Springs hamlet of East Hampton. Apart from sales to private collectors and museum acquisitions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, the bulk of Mr. Leiber's work was willed to the Judith and Gerson Leiber Foundation. Read the obituaries of Judith Leiber and Gerson Leiber. The Collection reopened on Saturday with an era defining exhibition, "A Marriage of True Minds Remembered," displaying about 380 rarely seen bags. There are also four new Gerson Leiber paintings on view for the first time. The show contains one of the few known Leiber to Leiber pairings, "The Much Admired," in which Mr. Leiber's oil portrait of two fashionable night owls inspired his wife's corresponding handbag. The wit and whimsy of the Leibers' work will be celebrated at the East Hampton Library on June 23. And the Leiber Collection will hold a memorial garden tea party for the Leibers on July 28. Mr. Leiber, serving in the United States Army, was stationed in the city as a Signal Corps radio operator. After the liberation, Miss Peto was outside peddling handmade purses when Sergeant Leiber strolled by. The two struck up a romance and were married the following year in the Petos' living room. Together they came to New York and moved into a hardscrabble work space near the Empire State Building. While Mr. Leiber completed his art studies, Mrs. Leiber worked for designers like Nettie Rosenstein, then opened her own label in 1963. Thanks in part to the publicity generated by a succession of first ladies toting her clutches to their husbands' inaugurations, the brand took flight. Mrs. Leiber wryly dismissed the notion that she was an artist; museum directors and gallery owners thought otherwise. Harold Koda, the longtime curator with the Costume Institute at the Met until he retired in 2016, was one of many influential collectors. The Leibers sold their business in 1993 for a reported 16 million to 18 million. In semiretirement, Mr. Leiber painted nearly every day while his wife haunted vintage markets, high end consignment shops and later online auctions to track down her creations. Over all, Mrs. Leiber designed about 3,500 unique handbags, purses and accessories, according to Ms. Stewart. "Mrs. Leiber wanted to own a copy of each original bag and eventually put them on display," she said. Kelly Ellman, a fashion enthusiast and philanthropist from Paradise Valley, Ariz., has donated about three dozen bags, including the Judith Leiber Hollywood bag a black carryall with silver stars recalling the iconic mountainside sign. Deftly preserving the tension between easy access pop culture and luxury consumerism her fanciest containers now fetch 6,000 and up Mrs. Leiber's Hollywood bag, like many of her others, is pop art you can carry stuff in. "The bags are whimsical," Ms. Ellman said, adding: "Judy was inspired by pop culture, as she was inspired by animals like frogs and pigs. Her bags are charming and beautiful, the craftsmanship impeccable. And yes, they are art."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
The 65 Best Songs of 2018 The 1975 capture the challenges of the social media age on "Love It if We Made It." Magdalena Wosinska for The New York Times In a swirl of harplike arpeggios over a stubborn beat, Matty Healy rails at hypocrisy and disinformation, complaining "Modernity has failed us," and admits to individual ambition despite it all: a millennial's plight. Desolate lost love haunts the verses before determined self preservation lifts the choruses, all at a tempo so slow only a singer like Sade would dare it. Roots rock goes noir, with tolling piano and reverbed guitar, in a ballad about a lasting trauma, unnamed but inescapable. Over mournful electric piano chords, Jorja Smith warns that in a rough neighborhood, panic can be deadly, counseling, "Don't you run when you hear the sirens coming." Post breakup revenge is served cold, unforgiving and viscous in "Look What U Started," from its skulking bass line and squishy rhythm guitar to the chilling whisper of Syd's vocal. A perfectly calibrated power ballad, with the Lady Gaga chorus trademark of repeated syllables, does movie musical triple duty as love song, vocal showcase and plot pivot. Far more ambitious than a movie theme has to be, and far more abrasive, "Black Panther" celebrates a broad African heritage over a track that broods, stomps and bristles. Fatouma Diawara, a Paris based singer who grew up in Mali, sings about love for an emigrant who may never return, lacing Malian rhythms with tendrils of guitar. Over a Bo Diddley beat, Richard Thompson longs for a cleansing apocalypse, and summons it with a wailing, clawing guitar solo. With guests from Puerto Rico and Colombia over a sample of Pete Rodriguez's 1966 boogaloo "I Like It Like That," Cardi B flaunts Latin roots while making designer label materialism sound like self realization. Loops of plucked violin and layers of vocals add up to a statement of no nonsense, matter of fact individualism from Brittney Parks, who records as the one woman electronic band Sudan Archives. The vamp is insistently jaunty, the rhymes are delivered with a jokey cadence and there are melodic interludes, but the recurring subject is serious: gun violence. The indie rock songwriters Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers, collaborating as boygenius, share a not exactly love song that passionately questions itself. As her production taps out cross rhythms like a flock of woodpeckers, Marie Davidson's spoken words demand nonstop work: a gig economy ultimatum. With no album or even a mixtape to speak of, Bad Bunny made himself indispensable this year by way of strategic collaborations and scene stealing, rug pulling moments. These songs represent only a fraction of his high points, but capture the range of his influence from the definitive Spanish language song of the summer to getting Drake to rap in Spanish to topping the Billboard Hot 100. In a year in which Spanish speaking artists teamed with English speaking artists in droves hoping to make an aftermarket "Despacito," Bad Bunny stayed his course, and the world came to him. 24. Travis Scott featuring Philip Bailey, James Blake, Kid Cudi and Stevie Wonder, 'Stop Trying to Be God'	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
From a young age, I learned that sick is comfort; sick is to be cared for. When I stayed home with an earache in second grade, my dad didn't double check my homework or make me practice piano exercises twice on each hand. He brought me a bell so I could ring him and gave me three M Ms for every dose of antibiotics that went down without a fuss. Undoubtedly, my penchant for minor ailments comes from a place of privilege. My physical body is healthy, which is why its occasional maladies have become phenomena that I get to relish. I recognize that chronic illness is another story, of course. But when I feel a cold coming on, I don't stir Emergen C and up my citrus intake, I lean in. My taste for illness solidified in high school, when I came down with mono. For two weeks, I lay in bed with a high fever while the kissing disease transformed my reputation. Along with the virus, I had contracted an air of mystery the possibility that I was locking lips with someone my classmates didn't know about. Though it had been a calendar year since I'd kissed Aiden Proner at the Valentine's Day dance, my diagnosis said otherwise. In a sophomore class of fewer than 30 people, the allure this conferred was invaluable. When you're sick, people applaud you for not failing; the bar is incredibly low. The unflattering truth of the matter is that I want to be the star without having to perform. At age 6, I fractured my left arm practicing cartwheels in my neighbor's backyard. The break was severe, and I had to go under anesthesia so a surgeon could reset the bone. Beneath the emergency room's searing white lights, nurses taped my crooked forearm to a board and attempted to draw blood from the linear one searching my opaque flesh for any shadow of a vein. My mom sat next to me, stroking my hair and smiling sympathetically. "You're being so brave tonight." In an attempt to distract me, she fished a catalog from her purse and let me pick a new phone for our kitchen. The sedative I'd been told to swallow on arrival was muting any potential pain, and I gleefully picked a silver faux rotary number to hang from our kitchen wall. In the operating room, a masked woman asked me to count backward from 10 as I inhaled cherry flavored anesthetic. Much like the toothpaste offered to a child at a dentist appointment (bubble gum, strawberry shortcake), pediatric anesthesia comes in kid friendly flavors. This news was to my delight and the disgust of my parents, who were morally opposed to artificial flavoring. I imagined an orchard in a thick red haze and drifted into oblivion. I woke up in a bright room with a dark window. Outside, it was past my bedtime. Inside, I had no curfew. The smiling faces at my bedside congratulated me for sleeping through surgery. In here, I was hospital gown clad royalty. I got to watch TV something I grew up without. My dad brought me Cocoa Puffs to cheer me up. As if I needed cheering! A whole hospital was calling me brave. Now I had my dad a man known to lecture my 7 year old classmates on how the hormones in their chocolate milk and chicken nuggets would induce premature puberty bringing me sugary breakfast cereal. This was my night. No questions asked, I ate the puffs. And, as any child who had grown up on organic fruit leathers would be, I was enamored. My dad poured himself a bowl and we watched reruns of "The Munsters" until I fell asleep. My ego is still fueled by ailment. And when it comes to diagnoses the rarer, the better. The only ailment I currently host has been a bit of a letdown. Its debut was promising enough: Pink spots began blossoming on my stomach. The polka dots grew in number, until I finally scheduled a doctor's appointment. The woman I saw thought it might be ringworm. "Like a cat?" I thought. "Gross, but I'll take it." She recommended a dermatologist, and when I got home I announced to my Ikea sectional: "She referred me to a specialist." The dermatologist was flummoxed, which was a five course meal for my sense of self importance. "You're different from everyone else," my ego whispered, buttering its fifth Parker House roll. "You're just as unique as you thought." The doctor took a biopsy, which came back inconclusive. I was flattered at first, until he prescribed a generic steroid cream that clears up "all sorts of stuff." I treasure being sick because it gives me a tangible reason for feeling like crap. Sickness is name brand an engraved plaque entitling you to complain, gifting you with a hoop in which to throw each and every one of your ailments. Suddenly, you're off the hook. Your bad mood isn't a character flaw, it's a symptom. A good diagnosis can alleviate the existential hamster wheel for the course of your antibiotics. Since my immune system is nowhere near as weak as I'd like it to be, I've forged some shortcuts. I regularly give blood, which gives me a day pass to the amusement park of ailment. The nurses invariably comment on my obscure veins a highly anticipated snack for my gluttonous ego. For the rest of the day, I parade my cotton ball and Band Aided inner elbow around like a martyr. Plus, the facade of altruism is flattering. Being sick forces me into the moment and it's the only thing that reliably does so. When I'm sick, I can watch TV with a concentration rarely seen outside of meditation centers in the Himalayas. My to do list is replaced with: "Stay alive." I can just be, in the simplest sense of the word. Of course, I am immensely grateful to house an immune system that lets me view illness as a rarity. A sick day is fun because it's temporary.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
Some of the nation's leading public health experts are raising a new concern in the endless debate over coronavirus testing in the United States: The standard tests are diagnosing huge numbers of people who may be carrying relatively insignificant amounts of the virus. Most of these people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time. But researchers say the solution is not to test less, or to skip testing people without symptoms, as recently suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Instead, new data underscore the need for more widespread use of rapid tests, even if they are less sensitive. "The decision not to test asymptomatic people is just really backward," said Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, referring to the C.D.C. recommendation. "In fact, we should be ramping up testing of all different people," he said, "but we have to do it through whole different mechanisms." In what may be a step in this direction, the Trump administration announced on Thursday that it would purchase 150 million rapid tests. The most widely used diagnostic test for the new coronavirus, called a PCR test, provides a simple yes no answer to the question of whether a patient is infected. But similar PCR tests for other viruses do offer some sense of how contagious an infected patient may be: The results may include a rough estimate of the amount of virus in the patient's body. "We've been using one type of data for everything, and that is just plus or minus that's all," Dr. Mina said. "We're using that for clinical diagnostics, for public health, for policy decision making." But yes no isn't good enough, he added. It's the amount of virus that should dictate the infected patient's next steps. "It's really irresponsible, I think, to forgo the recognition that this is a quantitative issue," Dr. Mina said. The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample. The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious. This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are. In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found. On Thursday, the United States recorded 45,604 new coronavirus cases, according to a database maintained by The Times. If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing. One solution would be to adjust the cycle threshold used now to decide that a patient is infected. Most tests set the limit at 40, a few at 37. This means that you are positive for the coronavirus if the test process required up to 40 cycles, or 37, to detect the virus. Tests with thresholds so high may detect not just live virus but also genetic fragments, leftovers from infection that pose no particular risk akin to finding a hair in a room long after a person has left, Dr. Mina said. Any test with a cycle threshold above 35 is too sensitive, agreed Juliet Morrison, a virologist at the University of California, Riverside. "I'm shocked that people would think that 40 could represent a positive," she said. More Asian countries slowly reopen their borders and welcome vaccinated travelers. A more reasonable cutoff would be 30 to 35, she added. Dr. Mina said he would set the figure at 30, or even less. Those changes would mean the amount of genetic material in a patient's sample would have to be 100 fold to 1,000 fold that of the current standard for the test to return a positive result at least, one worth acting on. The Food and Drug Administration said in an emailed statement that it does not specify the cycle threshold ranges used to determine who is positive, and that "commercial manufacturers and laboratories set their own." The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it is examining the use of cycle threshold measures "for policy decisions." The agency said it would need to collaborate with the F.D.A. and with device manufacturers to ensure the measures "can be used properly and with assurance that we know what they mean." The C.D.C.'s own calculations suggest that it is extremely difficult to detect any live virus in a sample above a threshold of 33 cycles. Officials at some state labs said the C.D.C. had not asked them to note threshold values or to share them with contact tracing organizations. For example, North Carolina's state lab uses the Thermo Fisher coronavirus test, which automatically classifies results based on a cutoff of 37 cycles. A spokeswoman for the lab said testers did not have access to the precise numbers. This amounts to an enormous missed opportunity to learn more about the disease, some experts said. "It's just kind of mind blowing to me that people are not recording the C.T. values from all these tests that they're just returning a positive or a negative," said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York. "It would be useful information to know if somebody's positive, whether they have a high viral load or a low viral load," she added. Officials at the Wadsworth Center, New York's state lab, have access to C.T. values from tests they have processed, and analyzed their numbers at The Times's request. In July, the lab identified 872 positive tests, based on a threshold of 40 cycles. With a cutoff of 35, about 43 percent of those tests would no longer qualify as positive. About 63 percent would no longer be judged positive if the cycles were limited to 30. In Massachusetts, from 85 to 90 percent of people who tested positive in July with a cycle threshold of 40 would have been deemed negative if the threshold were 30 cycles, Dr. Mina said. "I would say that none of those people should be contact traced, not one," he said. Other experts informed of these numbers were stunned. "I'm really shocked that it could be that high the proportion of people with high C.T. value results," said Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. "Boy, does it really change the way we need to be thinking about testing." Dr. Jha said he had thought of the PCR test as a problem because it cannot scale to the volume, frequency or speed of tests needed. "But what I am realizing is that a really substantial part of the problem is that we're not even testing the people who we need to be testing," he said. The number of people with positive results who aren't infectious is particularly concerning, said Scott Becker, executive director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. "That worries me a lot, just because it's so high," he said, adding that the organization intended to meet with Dr. Mina to discuss the issue. The F.D.A. noted that people may have a low viral load when they are newly infected. A test with less sensitivity would miss these infections. But that problem is easily solved, Dr. Mina said: "Test them again, six hours later or 15 hours later or whatever," he said. A rapid test would find these patients quickly, even if it were less sensitive, because their viral loads would quickly rise. PCR tests still have a role, he and other experts said. For example, their sensitivity is an asset when identifying newly infected people to enroll in clinical trials of drugs. But with 20 percent or more of people testing positive for the virus in some parts of the country, Dr. Mina and other researchers are questioning the use of PCR tests as a frontline diagnostic tool. People infected with the virus are most infectious from a day or two before symptoms appear till about five days after. But at the current testing rates, "you're not going to be doing it frequently enough to have any chance of really capturing somebody in that window," Dr. Mina added. Highly sensitive PCR tests seemed like the best option for tracking the coronavirus at the start of the pandemic. But for the outbreaks raging now, he said, what's needed are coronavirus tests that are fast, cheap and abundant enough to frequently test everyone who needs it even if the tests are less sensitive.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Quiet may well be the new loud in the world of show tunes. Unexpectedly, one of last season's most acclaimed new musicals, "The Band's Visit," did not feature flashy choreography or cathartic 11 o'clock belters. Based on the 2007 art house film of the same title, the show, which played Off Broadway at the Atlantic Theater, is a low key charmer in which looking at someone in silence carries as much emotional weight as delivering one of David Yazbek's insidiously catchy songs. Mastering both was , as the sultry owner of the lone cafe in a dead end Israeli town, who has a brief encounter with a group of marooned Egyptian musicians, led by Tony Shalhoub. Fortunately, Ms. Lenk is now getting ready to reprise her performance at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, where the show starts Broadway previews on Oct. 7. Over lunch at the Israeli restaurant Balaboosta in Manhattan a couple of weeks after the closing of Broadway's "Indecent," in which she played the passionate prostitute Menke, Ms. Lenk was almost as wry as her "Band's Visit" character, Dina. Describing how she got cast, she simply said, with a shrug, "I went in, got a callback, then got the part." The actress combines classic beauty her face is dominated by striking wide set eyes and cheekbones worthy of a 1930s film star with easygoing friendliness, and her calm default setting seems contagious. When she did a stint as Arachne in "Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark" about five years ago, the famously accident prone production stayed out of the news. "There was no drama when I was there," she said, laughing. "It was the 11 months when nothing went wrong." Mr. Yazbek ("Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels") helped fill in the blanks on the casting process, recalling Ms. Lenk's early performance of one of Dina's songs. "At some point, she sang 'Omar Sharif,' maybe at a callback, and I thought she was Israeli," he said on the phone. "It was the whole package: the accent, the style, everything." He recently wrote on Twitter that Ms. Lenk's take was "one of my two favorite versions of anyone singing any of my shows songs. (The other is Lupone)." Being mentioned in the same social media breath as Patti LuPone is no small feat, especially for a relative unknown whose musical focus as a child was the viola. "We'd be like, 'You must have studied dance,'" said Rebecca Taichman, who directed Ms. Lenk in "Indecent." "And she'd go, 'Oh, a little bit' just to tell you how much she didn't talk about herself, or brag, ever. We'd push a little more, and she'd say, 'I started dance when I was 5.'" Actually, Ms. Lenk, who gives her age as "adult," started taking dance lessons when she was 3. She eventually got good enough to play Velma Kelly in a Los Angeles production of "Chicago." It was also there, in 2008, that she landed the title role in the bio musical "Lovelace: A Rock Opera," about the troubled former porn star Linda Lovelace. Critical acclaim and awards encouraged Ms. Lenk to try her luck in New York, where she was cast in the 2010 Broadway revival of "The Miracle Worker," understudying both Alison Pill's Annie Sullivan and Jennifer Morrison's Kate Keller. Ms. Lenk fared better in "Spider Man" and then in "Once," where she played the violin wielding Reza for a year and a half. (Around that time, she also settled in the tellingly down home neighborhood of Sunnyside, Queens.) "Indecent," which she joined for its 2015 premiere at Yale Repertory Theater, allowed her to draw on her many skills: Ms. Lenk smoothly navigated Yiddish dialogue, a song in German and occasional violin action, in addition to acting in emotionally intense scenes. Poking around the internet unearths more illustrations of this actress's versatility, from the pop rock stylings of her band, Moxy Phinx, to a haunting solo cover of Rufus Wainwright's "Pretty Things." Ms. Lenk also names the avant garde director Robert Wilson as someone she would want to work with. "I'm fascinated by what he puts on the stage," she said. "Like 'The Black Rider': What was going on? I loved it so much, I didn't want to blink." Still, she does not turn up her nose at traditional song and dance extravaganzas. "I have great respect and admiration for those shows and those performing in them," she said. "If anything, they are like the star football team, and I feel like the weirdo nerd who doesn't quite fit in." Many like her just the way she is. "I'm not a fan of the quote unquote typical Broadway voice, and Katrina has a very distinctive voice," Mr. Yazbek said. "A lot of people can push the buttons, but not many people can quietly break your heart." Mr. Shalhoub felt an immediate connection with his co star. "My very first impression was that she was someone I'd known my whole life," he said by email, "and at the same time, unlike anyone I'd ever met! An enigma. She seemed terribly shy and yet quietly confident. Deeply centered but just as vulnerable." Quietly unprepossessing in person, Ms. Lenk onstage projects a slightly opaque sensuality that does not feel forbiddingly aloof but warm and intriguing. "As an actress, she has the extraordinary quality of not explaining her emotional life," Ms. Taichman said. "She's not saying, 'Here's what my character is going through.' It makes an audience really lean forward." Hard work and extensive research go into making those performances look intuitive. Ms. Lenk creates back stories for her characters (she imagines Dina to be a former dancer), and for this show, she immersed herself in the music of the Egyptian superstar Oum Kalthoum, and in Israeli films and literature. Best of all, before beginning rehearsals, she joined Mr. Yazbek, Mr. Moses and the director David Cromer on a trip where they met the original film's director, Eran Kolirin, and visited Yeruham, the Israeli town that inspired the fictional Bet Hatikva. "It was a special thing to get to share the local residents' food (which was delicious), watch the original movie with them, sing songs from the show for them, and get to play music with them," Ms. Lenk wrote in an email upon her return. "How many times does this get to happen in one's life?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
In April 1965, Twyla Tharp spun a yo yo, stretched forward like a ski jumper while anchored by a pair of wooden shoes and stood in an extended releve. Such were the ingredients of her first piece, "Tank Dive," which lasted around 10 minutes and was performed in an art studio at Hunter College. "Woo hoo," she said in a deadpan voice that fooled no one. She's excited. In any field, but especially dance, working for 50 years is a feat, and she knows it. "Very few people make it this far," she said over a late lunch at a restaurant near Barnard College, her alma mater, where she is now teaching and rehearsing. "And what sustains you to do that?" For Ms. Tharp, 73, it comes down to a question, one she said she asks herself before starting any new project: What is dance? The question will inform two lecture performances, at Barnard on April 13 and Hunter College on April 16, that kick off Ms. Tharp's anniversary. She will discuss "Tank Dive" as well as "The Fugue," her 1970 breakthrough, and present a new work, set to Beethoven's late String Quartet No. 13, Opus 130. The new piece bursts at the seams, with a labyrinthine arrangement of steps and overlapping structures. The hero, portrayed by Matthew Dibble, may or may not be Beethoven near the end his life, but he is undoubtedly an artist. The dance ends, fittingly enough, with a fugue. Though Ms. Tharp will begin a 10 week national tour of all new dances in the fall it arrives at the David H. Koch Theater in New York in November her April presentations will be in a bare bones studio setting: no costumes, no lights, no sets. In her 1972 work "The Bix Pieces," Ms. Tharp spoke about her beginnings and ideas about art; this new program further reveals her philosophical approach. Ms. Tharp has sent an immense amount of spellbinding movement into the world, from her genre crossing dances, performed on stages, in museums and outdoors, to Broadway musicals like "Movin' Out" and "Come Fly Away." She's choreographed for films, including "Hair," "Amadeus" and "White Nights," and in 1973 created "Deuce Coupe," regarded as the first crossover work, mixing modern and classical dance. "In the Upper Room," "Push Comes to Shove" and "Bach Partita," to name a few, are now staples of classical repertory. She's written three books and is working on a fourth. Both erudite and a populist, Ms. Tharp has a little of a life coach in her, judging by the way she both nurtures her dancers and encourages others to find their own creative spark, as she did with her 2003 book, "The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life." (Even Howard Stern is a fan.) "You've got to be all things," she said. "Why exclude? You have to be everything." Along with exploring what dance means to Ms. Tharp, the lecture performances will also consider time. "I have this very large body of work," she said, in part "because I never maintained repertory. I hate repertory. It's always about, what's the next piece?" "Time moves in one direction only," she continued, "and that would be forward. To go back is very uncomfortable for me. Memory begins to enter the picture. It screws up my clock." And yet for all her commitment to the future, she doesn't believe her old pieces should die. The problem of dance reconstruction of legacy, essentially is one that keeps Ms. Tharp up at night. Her archiving system, which she will reveal in her presentation with "The Fugue," rejects the familiar notion that dance is solely an ephemeral art. As she explained in a lecture at Barnard last fall, she sees dances as entities and not merely experiences. In "The Fugue," a rhythmically intricate trio modeled on Bach's "Musical Offering" and based on a single 20 count theme, the accompanying sound is the dancer's feet. "We do all of the archiving now with a score running through it, which takes away any kind of arguing once I'm no longer with us among the ballet masters," she said. "This is what the phrase is, this is where it sits in the music, this is how it works." Her Barnard students are learning "The Fugue" based on these materials to prove how a dance, like other artifacts, can be rebuilt. "We could teach it to them directly," she said. "They wouldn't do it very well, but they'd sort of do a 'Fugue.' This way, they have to earn it." Ms. Tharp's choreography is challenging to grasp even for seasoned dancers like Savannah Lowery, a New York City Ballet soloist who has joined her group for the tour. (She will miss City Ballet's fall season.) "I had to let all inhibitions go, because it is so different than straightforward ballet," Ms. Lowery said. "She uses the ballet and you need it, but it doesn't feel anything like ballet." This points to Ms. Tharp's aversion to being exclusive toward ballet or anything else. Later at her apartment overlooking Central Park, she considered her coming lecture performances and sighed. "We have good dancing in our evening, but we don't have happy." She clicked on "The Screamer" by the Big Top Orchestra she likes to work out to circus music and zipped from one side of the space to the other with such brio you had to stare at her feet to make sure she wasn't really floating on air. She sat down again, barely out of breath. "Wouldn't everybody be happy?" she asked. In other words, what if her joyful apartment dance or something like it were to conclude the program? She tried out a line on an imaginary audience: "Folks, this is why we dance." Still, as Ms. Tharp knows, dance is about more than happy endings. "What can it offer us culturally and aesthetically?" she asked. "What kind of choices does it suggest politically? What's fair? What's just? This can all be reflected in a dance." Those questions weren't at the forefront of her mind when she created "Tank Dive," but after studying with masters like Martha Graham, Antony Tudor, Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor, she knew she needed to find a beginning for herself. "I loved all of their answers, but I needed my own question," Ms. Tharp said. "I didn't want to synthesize them. And I didn't want to rebel against them. I wanted to respect them and find a way where what I'd learned would be valuable to me. It was never for me about breaking their conventions. It was always about working in tandem to a new point."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
AMSTERDAM Vincent van Gogh may have been quite fond of painting his own portrait, but he was far fussier about his real life image. For years, only two photographs of his face were known to exist. Now, that number is down to one. A photographic portrait long believed to be of a teenage Vincent is not him at all, but rather his brother Theo, researchers at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam announced on Thursday. The photograph, taken in a studio in Brussels in the 1870s, was thought to be an image of the artist at 13 and has been displayed as such since a Belgian historian first publicized it in 1957. But a recent investigation by the museum, which owns the photograph, and a forensic scientist at the University of Amsterdam, found that it could not have been Vincent. "It was the archetype portrait of the artist as a young boy and it has been used all over the world as the Vincent youth portrait," said Teio Meedendorp, a senior researcher at the Van Gogh Museum. "It will be hard to get it out of the system, and that's part of the reason that we brought this news into the open, because it will likely keep on popping up as the image of Vincent for some time." The only remaining photographic portrait that experts believe is the artist is one taken when he was 19 at a photo studio in The Hague. Researchers at the museum also believe that Vincent van Gogh appears in a third photograph, a blurry image of the artist Emile Bernard, van Gogh's good friend, seated at a table. The figure across from him is believed to be van Gogh, but the photo shows him only from the back. All the other known images of van Gogh are paintings, including some 30 self portraits, and a few portraits of him by other artists, including Paul Gauguin. Some photos claimed to be of van Gogh as an adult have circulated over the years, but experts have cast doubt on them. "Vincent was not very keen on the medium of photography and didn't like having his photograph taken," Mr. Meedendorp said. "It seems like he avoided it. We have six or seven photos from Theo of different ages and we know of several photos of other family members. With Vincent there is now only one." The misidentified photograph was first displayed in 1957 at an exhibition organized by the Belgian art historian Marc Edo Tralbaut, who identified the image as Vincent at 13. For more than half a century, it went unquestioned. But in 2014, a Dutch television program tried to use experimental imaging technologies to age morph the image believed to be of Vincent at 13 into the image of Vincent at 19. The effort was unsuccessful, suggesting that perhaps they were not the same person. The museum's researchers decided to explore the history of the photo, and found that it was shot by a photographer named B. Schwarz, who moved to Brussels and set up a studio there in 1870. At that point, Vincent was already 17 and living in The Hague, so it was unlikely that the photo could be Vincent at 13. However, researchers knew that his younger brother Theo, moved to Brussels in 1873 at 15, to start work for the Belgian branch of the international art dealer Goupil Cie. The museum now thinks that the portrait of Theo was probably taken as a birthday gift to their father in 1873. The brothers looked alike, but Theo was more slender, had more delicate features and had light blue eyes, more evidence suggesting the photo was of him and not Vincent. The photo bears a strong resemblance to one taken of Theo two years earlier in Amsterdam. The Van Gogh Museum keeps the original photograph in storage, because it is fragile and light sensitive, but it displays a copy of the image in its galleries, in a section devoted to van Gogh's biography. Mr. Meedendorp said the museum will now move the image, and identify it as Theo. "We lost an image of Vincent, but we gained an image of Theo, so you can see it in a certain kind of positive light," said Mr. Meedendorp.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
My neurologist father maintained that hand washing was our family's single greatest obligation to one another and to the world. "As you know, it's the No. 1 way to prevent disease transmission," Dr. Beauregard Lee Bercaw would say to my brother and me every single night before sitting down to dinner. "Your hands are clean, right?" If we hemmed or hawed, we were banished to our bathroom to scrub as if we were surgeons, not children. Sometimes he'd stand behind us at the sink and provide a verbal inventory of ailments caused by poor sanitation and hygiene, throwing in the names of diseases he'd seen during his years spent practicing medicine in the tropics during the Vietnam War but found nowhere near our Florida home: "Meningitis ... Hepatitis ... Salmonella ... Staphylococcus ... Streptococcus ... Giardiasis ... Schistosomiasis ... Cholera ... Typhoid...". His litanies would last for at least 30 seconds, so there was no need for either of us to mumble through "Happy Birthday" twice. But as the years passed, I grew increasingly numb to my father's germ warfare tactics and ever more reluctant to follow his orders. By age 14, my focus was on improving my appearance with acne treatments and avoiding the watchful eyes of my father. By lingering in the bathroom, I was able to do both. After a protracted cease fire in the hand washing wars, I was ambushed one afternoon when I was 15 by a loud pounding on the bathroom door. I opened it to see my father's face twisted with fresh worries as he conveyed an ominous message in a matter of fact tone: "Kelly Dineen is going blind in her right eye because she didn't wash her hands." Kelly, who was my best friend and the daughter of my father's best friend, had woken up one morning with blurry vision in her left eye and, two days later, had lost most of her central vision in it. One of the early theories, propounded by my father, was that she'd contracted toxoplasmosis from cat feces, though later a leading eye doctor had diagnosed her as having an inflammatory disorder called multifocal choroiditis, a condition that had nothing to do with whether or not she had washed her hands. It wasn't until many years later, as a Peace Corps volunteer living in a rural village in Kenya, that I finally joined my father's army of fanatical hand washers. For the first few months in my rural village, I was plagued by diarrhea. Only by scrubbing methodically before every meal with boiled water and soap could I avoid getting sick. The correlation between cleanliness and health suddenly became clear and present in my life. Now, amid the coronavirus pandemic and a gradual loosening of restrictions as shutdowns ease, I find myself lamenting what seems to be reluctance among some people including my 16 year old son to wash their hands as if their lives depend upon it. Why do we have to keep reminding others to perform this one simple but potentially lifesaving act? Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University, who previously served as Baltimore's Health Commissioner, told me that it's indisputable that hand washing saves lives. "In the hospital, hand hygiene is strictly enforced to reduce the spread of infections," she says. "In the community, hand washing is key to reducing person to person transmission of many illnesses, from respiratory illnesses like the cold and flu to food borne illnesses like salmonella and cholera." Dr. Elaine Larson, professor emerita of nursing research and professor emerita of epidemiology at Columbia University, who is considered one of the world's leading authorities on hand hygiene, agrees. In 1980, Dr. Larson wrote her dissertation on hand washing and devoted the subsequent 40 years to studying infection prevention and spreading the message that "clean hands save lives." "I don't think that people are reluctant, but every decision we make occurs because of habit as well as a quick, unconscious risk benefit assessment, and then we 'decide' that we are safe," she says. "Most people from childhood 'learn' that they can often omit hand hygiene with no consequences, so that reinforces that it is not an essential habit." But even in times like these, she says it's "difficult to link the cause not washing and the effect getting sick when there is a time lag between the two and when it does not occur 100 percent of the time." Another obstacle to normalizing hand washing is what psychologists call "optimism bias," which leads many of us to believe bad things are more likely to happen to others. So is there any hope of convincing people that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, especially when it comes to Covid 19? Does hand washing stand a chance of becoming part of the new normal, like wearing seatbelts did once we fully realized their impact on saving lives? Dr. Larson explains that it's always easier to change a system than to change behavior. "Cars now beep to remind us of wearing seatbelts. In hospitals, we are testing ways to notify staff when they need to wash, but those systems still need a lot of work," she says. "Something like that may happen eventually in, for example, public restrooms and airports." In 2009, the London School of Hygiene Tropical Medicine studied the impact of intervention messaging in public bathrooms at rest areas along highways in England. Out of 14 different messages, "Is the person next to you washing their hands?" proved to be the most effective at changing behavior. So if we all start washing our hands more, others may be more likely to follow. I followed up with my old friend Kelly Dineen, now a clinical psychologist with a private practice in Chicago, for her take on the situation. She suggested that those who remain indifferent or resistant to the cause should hang notes in their bathrooms and around the house to establish and cultivate the habit. "Our minds are uniquely built to make things we do repetitively unconscious," she says. "Think about brushing your teeth. Do you actually have to think about the many steps involved? No, you can brush your teeth and think about the day ahead. Similarly, if washing your hands is linked to mealtimes, going to the bathroom, and coming in the door, it becomes an automatic behavior." "Challenge yourself," Dr. Dineen added. "This virus will remain with us. Don't become its unwitting friend. Commit to one change," she adds, "And if not for you, then for the people you love." If my father were still alive, he'd likely be knocking on bathroom doors everywhere wearing a mask and surgical gloves, of course to tell people that they can literally take matters into their own hands. I can hear him now: Thirty seconds of scrubbing from fingertips to forearms with hot water and soap could impact the course of a global pandemic. Why wouldn't you do it?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
A fan approaches Pablo Carreno Busta for a selfie outside the Pullman Paris Tour Eiffel, one of the hotels where players are staying during the French Open. PARIS The lobby was nearly empty at the Pullman Paris Tour Eiffel when Coco Gauff, the American tennis player, breezed through the front door with her parents on Sunday after her first round victory at the French Open. It was approaching 10 p.m., the witching hour when the hotel's restaurant, like many bars throughout the city, is required to close in compliance with restrictions imposed because of the countrywide rise in coronavirus cases. Situated at the base of the Eiffel Tower, near the Seine, the hotel has become for this Grand Slam tournament part of what organizers call its bubble, a term that has been casually embraced throughout sports for the exceedingly difficult goal of a controlled environment meant to prevent the spread of the virus. Yet unlike during the recent United States Open in New York, the tennis biosphere in Paris is also welcoming outsiders people who did not have to be tested for the virus upon arrival and who will not need to take tests or follow any of the tournament's protocols during their stay. At the Pullman, nearly half of the 430 rooms, with nightly rates starting at 335, have been made available to guests like the American Airlines captain who shared air and space with the players before piloting a Boeing 777 back to Dallas on Monday. Over the weekend, the outside guests included this reporter, who checked in for one night to observe how the protocol in place to protect the players worked. For those who oversee tennis, golf and other college and professional sports entities, the protective plans designed to satisfy local health officials often look very different when put into practice. The American Sam Querrey contended that the hotel was more of "a controlled environment" than a strict bubble. To create the perfect impermeable pod, he added, would require a megaresort large enough to house players, support staff, tournament officials and hotel staff everybody likely to come in contact with anybody whose office for the next two weeks is Roland Garros. "So it's actually impossible, I think, to make a true, 100 percent bubble where no one can come in and out," Querrey said after his first round loss on Tuesday to Andrey Rublev. Sunday at the Pullman might have been serene, but Britain's top ranked player, Dan Evans, was discomfited by what he observed the day before in one of the busier sections of the city. "There was a lot of people in our hotel," he said after his five set loss to Kei Nishikori in the opening round. "For me, that's not what I want to see in this situation, personally. If we're not allowed to leave, then we shouldn't be seeing the public in the hotel." Inside this tennis bubble, as in the world at large, the virus is encouraging not just physical distance between people. It is also opening a philosophical divide. The American John Isner said that he had been approached by fans outside the hotel seeking to take selfies with him and that he was happy to oblige. "Our masks are on, it's totally safe," Isner said, adding, "Normal behavior, in my opinion, is very much needed." Given that the Pullman has struggled to fill more than 60 rooms on an average nightly basis since its June reopening, management had no choice, a hotel spokesman explained, but to continue taking reservations during the French Open. To accommodate everyone, extra measures, such as the different dining areas, have been instituted to separate the players from the others like cottons and wools in the wash. There is no such division for the hotel employees, including the person on the breakfast shift in the public restaurant who was serving guests from outside the tennis bubble a day after waiting on Rafael Nadal in the players' separate dining area a floor below. Nadal, the defending men's champion, looms large in the lobby, where an enormous video screen loops highlights from last year's men's and women's finals. To walk into the lobby as a scene flashes on the screen of Nadal surrounded by admirers in a tight Philippe Chatrier corridor with ball kids squeezed in on either side of him is to be hit with the reality of how far this year's tournament has strayed from normal. "It's not easy to be stuck in the bubble," the Canadian Vasek Pospisil said, adding: "You can't even get fresh air. But it is what it is." The restrictions make sense on paper, but the moment players interact with guests who have not been tested or in my case, who were tested but were free to stray into potential hot spots across the city the integrity of the environment is compromised. Similar circumstances play out in the tournament's media setup, as players sit for interviews on tight sets with broadcasters that have paid millions to televise the tournament but yet do not socially distance or wear masks while they talk. The players aren't blind. They can see the gaps in the French federation's virus defense. "I'm a little bit nervous about the health situation," said the former women's world No. 1 Victoria Azarenka, a two time major winner. Azarenka stayed at a private house during the U.S. Open and paid for security to monitor her movements to ensure that she honored the quarantine when she was not practicing or playing. So did Serena Williams, another former world No. 1, whose plans to avoid the hotel scene in Paris by staying at an apartment that she owns in the city were thwarted by French officials. Other players who live in Paris were also forced to stay in one of the hotels to play. Like Britain's Evans, Williams failed to see the logic in not allowing the players out of the bubble while people who had not been tested for the virus were essentially being let in. She may not have agreed with the mandate, but the alternative was even less appealing: to pass up a major she has won three times when she is one year from age 40 and one title from Margaret Court's record of 24 Grand Slam singles championships. "I guess it's a must," said Williams, who added that she has created her own "personal bubble" and is doing everything she can think of to make it impenetrable. "It definitely beats staying at home," she said. Williams's older sister Venus, 40, has the autoimmune disease Sjogren's syndrome, which places her at higher risk for severe illness from the coronavirus. Asked her comfort level playing here, Williams, who lost in the first round, said, "I think at this point I have accepted that anyone can get it at any time, so I try my best not to." She added, "I'm a little more accepting that it could happen, and these are the risks you take when you leave home."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Moreover, one woman who works at the Weinstein Company described an operation in chaos on Friday, with phones going unanswered and some staff members in revolt. Nicole Quenqua, formerly the company's top spokeswoman, said she was no longer giving company statements to reporters. Over the past week, the Weinstein Company has been at the center of a widening crisis involving Mr. Weinstein's brother, Harvey. Investigations by The New York Times and The New Yorker revealed sexual harassment and rape allegations against Harvey Weinstein going back decades. Harvey Weinstein, who has denied "any allegations of non consensual sex," was fired on Sunday by Weinstein Company board members, which include his brother. Several other members of the all male board have quit, including Dirk Ziff, a billionaire investor; Marc Lasry, owner of the Milwaukee Bucks and chief executive of Avenue Capital Group, an investment firm; Tim Sarnoff, president of production services and deputy chief executive of Technicolor; and Richard Koenigsberg, an accountant, who resigned on Thursday. The Weinstein Company, with roughly 150 staff members in New York and Los Angeles, has assets that are potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It includes a television unit anchored by series like "Project Runway." A theatrical division has seven completed films, including "The Current War," a period drama about the rivalry between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse starring Benedict Cumberbatch, who said in a statement on Tuesday that he was "utterly disgusted" by Mr. Weinstein's "horrifying and unforgivable actions." As Hollywood has distanced itself from the company Apple ended plans for a series produced by the Weinstein Company, for instance, and other network partners have considered similar action questions have mounted about whether the studio can continue. On Thursday, bankruptcy speculation surfaced in Variety. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Weinstein Company was "exploring a sale or shutdown."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
The "Girls" creator, Lena Dunham, shown here stumping for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire during the 2016 campaign, now puts herself at odds with the former candidate. From the start, Lena Dunham and Hillary Clinton were something of an odd match. The millennial daughter of New York privilege known for her audacious public presence and frequent nudity on her HBO show, "Girls." And the baby boomer raised with a steely Midwestern reserve, a devotion to her Methodist faith and a fierce affinity for a "zone of privacy." But early on in a presidential election unlike any other, Ms. Dunham and Mrs. Clinton became a kind of package deal, with the campaign scrambling to reach young women and dispatching Ms. Dunham as one of its most visible ambassadors. On Tuesday, the generational tensions that hummed beneath the alliance during the presidential campaign exploded into public view. The rift came as a result of comments made by Ms. Dunham for an article published in The New York Times on Tuesday about the film mogul Harvey Weinstein and how he used a network of lawyers, publicists and journalists to protect his reputation and, in some cases, enable the sexual aggression of which he is accused. In the article, Ms. Dunham said she had warned two Clinton campaign officials against associating with Mr. Weinstein. "I just want you to know that Harvey's a rapist and this is going to come out at some point," Ms. Dunham said she told the campaign. In reply to Ms. Dunham's comments, Nick Merrill, the communications director for Mrs. Clinton, said, "As to claims about a warning, that's something staff wouldn't forget." Ms. Dunham's prominence in the Clinton campaign made her comments particularly resonant. Mrs. Clinton leaned on Ms. Dunham's support so heavily that the actress and writer was awarded a prime speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. ("Hi, I'm Lena Dunham and according to Donald Trump, my body is probably, like, a 2.") Ms. Dunham's statement to The Times that she had warned the Clinton campaign about Mr. Weinstein came not long after she had stirred controversy by publicly defending a "Girls" writer, Murray Miller, who had been accused of sexual assault. A torrent of criticism followed Ms. Dunham's words of support for Mr. Miller, whose lawyers "categorically and vehemently" denied the allegation. Three days after her defense of her colleague, Ms. Dunham posted an apology on Twitter. "Under patriarchy, 'I believe you' is essential," it read, in part. Her defense of the accused writer was not the first time Ms. Dunham had gone against the prevailing views of those in her circle. After a 2015 dinner party at the Park Avenue apartment of Richard Plepler, the chief executive of HBO, several guests said that Ms. Dunham had expressed discomfort with how the Clintons and their allies had discredited the women who said they had had sexual encounters with or had been sexually assaulted by former President Bill Clinton an issue that many Democrats have reassessed in recent weeks. The Times reported on Ms. Dunham's dinner party remarks last year. At the time, her spokeswoman, Cindi Berger, said the description of her comments was a "total mischaracterization." By then, the alliance between the candidate and the star had become critical, with Ms. Dunham touring the country to help boost enthusiasm in a Democratic primary season that saw many young women gravitate to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Mrs. Clinton had started her campaign by promising that her victory would lead to "an America where a father can tell his daughter: 'Yes, you can be anything you want to be. Even President of the United States.'" But as Mr. Sanders's anti Wall Street message took hold, the Clinton campaign realized millennial women were a stubborn demographic, less inclined to feel the same gender allegiance as their mothers. A Harvard Institute of Politics survey released at the time found that 38 percent of women aged 18 to 29 said they were supporting Mrs. Clinton in the primary, compared with 40 percent for Mr. Sanders. (In the general election, Mrs. Clinton would go on to overwhelmingly win young women 63 percent to Mr. Trump's 31 percent, according to exit polls.) In Ms. Dunham, the campaign had found a bona fide celebrity feminist spokeswoman who Mrs. Clinton's aides believed could connect to the younger women were Feeling the Bern. The "Girls" creator made stops in New Hampshire and Iowa, where she spoke to young women often wearing custom made dresses emblazoned with "Hillary." "My underwear say 'feminist' on the butt!" she told a crowd in Iowa City. Even in a campaign with no shortage of famous surrogates, Ms. Dunham stood out. She took over the candidate's Instagram account and conducted an extensive interview with Mrs. Clinton for Lenny Letter, the feminist online newsletter founded by Ms. Dunham and the "Girls" showrunner Jennifer Konner. Ms. Dunham also hosted fund raisers, including one at Soho House in Manhattan. She was also among the boldface names, including Billy Crystal, Bernadette Peters and Julia Roberts, who attended a Broadway gala that Mr. Weinstein helped produce. For years, Mr. Weinstein had been a loyal friend and donor to Bill and Hillary Clinton. In 2014, the Clintons rented a seven bedroom bluff side estate in Amagansett, N.Y., next door to Mr. Weinstein's Hamptons home. After the November election, the Clintons dined with Mr. Weinstein and discussed a possible documentary project. The talks fell apart soon after the first allegations against him were published in The Times on Oct. 5. On Oct. 10, as the accusations against Mr. Weinstein mounted with the publication of a second Times article and another in The New Yorker, by Ronan Farrow, Mrs. Clinton said she was "shocked and appalled by the revelations" and that "the behavior described by women coming forward cannot be tolerated." The inevitable second guessing that follows any election loss has set in like a chronic condition in Mrs. Clinton's world. While Ms. Dunham says she has questioned the campaign's close association with Mr. Weinstein, other Clinton allies have lately pointed to the reliance on liberal celebrities, and Ms. Dunham in particular, as evidence that the campaign had been out of touch with voters during an off with their heads election year. These allies have wondered whether, despite Ms. Dunham's hard work for Mrs. Clinton and the sprinkling of some millennial stardust on the campaign trail, the New York born star potentially turned off voters whom Mrs. Clinton needed to reach.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Watching scenery being changed is not, as a general rule, what you go to the theater for. But this basic necessity of stagecraft takes on such emotional weight in "Emma and Max," written and directed by the filmmaker Todd Solondz in his theatrical debut, that it becomes the production's most moving element, in far more than a literal sense. That's because the person who has been assigned the strenuous tasks of repositioning walls and furniture for this strident satire, which opened on Sunday at the Flea Theater, is not a stagehand but a character in the play. Her name is Brittany, and she performs her transformative duties with plodding exertion and a closed face. You figure that by the end Brittany, played by a compellingly centered Zonya Love, will either have collapsed with exhaustion or exploded in the kind of eruption that claims serious casualties. Since this a work by Mr. Solondz, whose willfully disturbing movies include "Happiness" and "Wiener Dog," you probably know which result to bet on. Brittany, an illegal immigrant from Barbados, works as an au pair to a rich, self centered Manhattan businessman, Jay (Matt Servitto), and his even more narcissistic wife, Brooke (Ilana Becker). The play's title characters are the couple's young children, who though seen only fleetingly in video, exert a commanding gravitational pull. Taking care of little Emma and Max is only part of Brittany's duties to make the world a more livable place for her employers. Hence, Mr. Solondz's inspired notion of having her open the panels of Julia Noulin Merat's ingenious set and set up the comfortable environments be they bedroom, swimming pool, hotel suite or airplane (business class) in which Jay and Brooke can complain about being uncomfortable. They do so with no acknowledgment that someone else has turned down the sheets or turned on the bedside lamp. Though Brittany, whom they fire as their nanny in the play's first scene, is frequently a topic of conversation for them, they seem no more aware of her efforts on their behalf than if she were a beast of burden. Or, to use an even more repellent term, a slave. Mr. Solondz's extracurricular use of his leading actress offers bright hope for his prospects as a man of the theater. Watching Ms. Love pulling heavy platforms and toting airplane seats creates a visceral, uneasy empathy in the audience that could never be achieved on film. Twinging at the back of our minds is the feeling that Brittany is laboring so unhappily on our behalf, too. In physical terms, Mr. Solondz has translated his cinematic eye view into a specifically theatrical vision with admirable success. There's not a misstep in the staging, from the queasy making projections of swirling water (by Adam J. Thompson) to the uncompromising and unflattering lighting (by Becky Heisler McCarthy). "Emma and Max" is always fascinating to look at, even if it's in a masochistic way. What he provided in his best films, though, was unexpected compassion for the very souls he excoriated. (Think of Dylan Baker's harrowing incarnation of the pedophile next door in "Happiness.") His American archetypes may often have been vicious, burnt out cases, but he also asked us to acknowledge the pain that crippled them. There are flashes of such insight in "Emma and Max." But from the moment we meet the whiny, needy, terminally solipsistic Brooke and Jay, it's clear that they're fish in a barrel make that big, frozen fish in a small barrel just waiting to be speared and gutted. In their opening scene, in which they tell Brittany they're letting her go, they are obviously so far up their own narcissism that the outside world is little more than their mirror. Firing Brittany becomes all about them their guilt, their anxieties, their comfort. When the scene ends with Brittany's having a seizure, Brooke and Jay look on in distressed passivity. They are also a garrulous couple, given to long spiels of self justification and self laceration. In a monologue delivered poolside at a fancy resort, the impeccably manicured and accoutered Brooke equates being the victim of racism with her own experience as an "ugly" girl. "It was like my own personal Kristallnacht only it went on for years!" she says. She adds: "I wish I'd been born black. Then I could've shared the pain, the injustice of it all." Though initially more taciturn, Jay soon becomes his wife's equal in anxious soliloquizing. In an insomniac's rant, delivered to a spectral Brittany, he gives a speech about the art of firing people (and, yes, the audience seemed to pick up on suggested parallels to America's reigning chief executive) that is rife with slips into reflexive racism. Mr. Servitto (of "The Sopranos") and Ms. Becker perform with an impressive lack of distancing irony. But given their lines, it's impossible for them not to register as grotesquely obtuse variations on the limousine liberal guilt junkies from the slyer, fuller plays of Wallace Shawn. (Rita Wolf's Padma, a conscientiously caring academic who interviews Brittany, is cut from the same coarse cloth.) Brittany has the advantage of keeping her mouth closed for much of the play. When she opens it in her own aria of self explanation, in the final scene, she is revealed to be a person of all consuming hatred, relieved by sad, piquant fantasies borrowed from the film of "Mamma Mia!" Ms. Love delivers this speech with virtuoso variations of shading and tempo. But it's hard not to feel that she's only making explicit what you've intuited before. It's not the late gruesome plot twist or broadside attacks on the rich and uncaring that sting and linger in "Emma and Max." It's the image of Ms. Love's Brittany, grim and obdurate and weary, as she wordlessly sets up scene after scene for our dubious entertainment.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. The N.B.A. announced Friday that Danuel House Jr., a reserve forward for the Houston Rockets, had breached the league's health and safety protocols by inviting an unauthorized guest to his hotel room and that he would be leaving the Walt Disney World campus, where the league has made a major investment to finish out its season inside its so called bubble. House did not play for the Rockets in Games 3 and 4 of their Western Conference semifinal series against the Los Angeles Lakers this week as the league conducted its investigation. The N.B.A. concluded that the guest, who was not identified by the league, had spent "multiple hours" in House's hotel room at the Grand Floridian Resort Spa on Tuesday, in direct violation of league rules. The league has stringent policies about who can be on campus or even interact with the players as it seeks to insulate itself from the coronavirus pandemic. The league said in a statement that "no evidence was found that other players or staff had contact with the guest or were involved in this incident" and that House "will not participate with the Rockets team in additional games this season." The Rockets trail the Lakers, 3 1, in their best of seven series, with Game 5 scheduled for Saturday night.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Ryan Jamaal Swain, Dominique Jackson and Jason A. Rodriguez talk about their experiences as dancers in life and onscreen in Ryan Murphy's show about the underground ballroom scene of the 1980s. "How am I supposed to learn how to do all that?" asks Damon, an aspiring dancer played by Ryan Jamaal Swain, on the pilot of the FX series "Pose." It's nighttime on a Greenwich Village pier, and Damon is discovering what it means to vogue. To music blasting from a boombox, dancers face off with strutting, swiveling moves, their limbs snapping into bold, hieroglyphic shapes. Recently kicked out of his childhood home for being gay, Damon has just moved to New York and found a new, more nurturing mother in Blanca (Mj Rodriguez). Vogueing, she explains to him, is a way of being seen and known: "It's a statement: 'I want a name in this world. I want to be on top.'" The show's most exuberant moments take place at balls, where members of houses, or chosen families, dress up and walk (compete) for trophies in categories like Royalty, Military and Executive Realness. To be real is to pass for a member of the wealthy, white, heterosexual society from which contestants are excluded to look as if they could walk right in. It's this subculture that gave rise to vogueing, a now thoroughly popularized and globally practiced dance form. Drawing its early inspiration from fashion models and its name from the magazine the style emerged as a kind of pantomimic combat performed at balls. As the vogueing pioneer Willi Ninja, the founder of the House of Ninja, says in "Paris Is Burning," "Vogueing is like a safe form of throwing shade." "Pose" has been heralded for its largely L.G.B.T. cast, crew and creative team, which includes five transgender actors in central roles. Also to be celebrated: the number of actors and dancers from the current ballroom scene. Danielle Polanco, who choreographed the ball and pier segments with Leiomy Maldonado (also known as the Wonder Woman of Vogue), said they made a point of hiring dancers acquainted with that world. "All we need is real, authentic ballroom generic doesn't fit with this show," said Ms. Polanco, formerly a mother of the House of Ninja. "We need people who really respect the culture, because if you don't respect it, you can't play it, you know?" To remain true to the period, she said, she turned to ballroom veterans like Hector Xtravaganza, Freddie Pendavis and Sol Williams, who were on set as consultants. Mr. Swain is not a ballroom native, but that's authentic, too. While rehearsing with Ms. Polanco for the scene in which Damon walks his first ball, he was, like his character, brand new to vogueing. During that high stakes scene, the upstart House of Evangelista goes head to head with its nemesis, the House of Abundance, led by the ultraglamorous Elektra Abundance (Dominique Jackson). Holding his own on the dance floor, Damon battles Lemar Abundance (Jason A. Rodriguez), a quiet character who is rarely front and center, but, when the time comes to vogue, steals the show. Behind these characters is a wealth of experience dancing or refraining from dancing that informed their roles on "Pose." Mr. Swain, Ms. Jackson and Mr. Rodriguez spoke in telephone interviews about dancing in life and onscreen. Though new to vogueing, Mr. Swain was not a dance rookie when he arrived on the set of "Pose." Growing up in Birmingham, Ala., and attending Howard University, he studied tap, ballet, modern and Afro Cuban dance. As a child, he said, he reluctantly devoted more time to sports than to dance class. "In the South, for African American males, unfortunately the stereotype is that you play sports," he said. Upon moving to New York with a musical theater degree, Mr. Swain, 24, tried to focus on acting. "Dance is such a very vulnerable way of expressing myself," he said. "I was trying to hide and run away from it." But he wound up serving as the dance captain for his first Off Broadway show. And then, to his surprise, he landed the role of Damon. "In some way, shape or form, dance always found me," he said. In "Pose," Damon finds himself pulled between two dance worlds. After joining the House of Evangelista, he successfully auditions with a heart on sleeve routine to Whitney Houston for the prestigious New School of Dance (a fictionalized Ailey School). At first his teacher praises him: "You weren't rehearsing today. No you were dancing," she says, rewarding him with a ticket to the ballet. But when a ball rehearsal makes him late for class, she disapproves: Ballroom, she insinuates, is not for serious dancers. Mr. Swain agreed that Damon's evolution as a dancer paralleled his own, especially when it comes to conquering insecurities. For Damon, a new chapter of self assurance might be in store. "By the eighth episode," Mr. Swain said, "you see him breaking out." The magisterial Elektra rarely vogues, excelling instead in fashion focused categories like Dynasty and Femme Queen in Pumps. She achieves realness at any cost. In Episode 1, her house dazzles in the Royalty category, thanks to costumes purloined from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ms. Jackson, 43, knows this world intimately. Born in Tobago (she moved to Maryland as a teenager), she found her way to ballroom in the early '90s. For transgender women like her, she said, vogueing was less common than it is today because it built muscle a mark of masculinity. Though she had taken dance classes in Tobago and performed with her high school dance squad, she tended not to vogue at balls, sticking to what are known as face and runway categories. "If you did anything that created muscles, then they didn't consider you one of the elite women," she said. "But times have changed." (An embodiment of that change: Ms. Maldonado, whose dramatic, hair whipping style has transformed the vogueing landscape.) Still, Ms. Jackson credits her early dance training with teaching her balance, poise and musicality. "It is dance that actually helped me master the runway," she said. And she happily owns it as part of her identity. "I'm claiming it," she said. "I am a dancer."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance

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