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When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. The Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann's teenage years overlapped almost precisely with the official beginning and end of World War II. Her father was a Nazi. The one novel Bachmann finished, "Malina," is very much a war story, if not in conventional ways. Originally published in German in 1971, and in English first in 1990 and now in an extensive reworking by the same translator, Philip Boehm, "Malina" is also a psychological thriller of a tormented, existential sort. And it's a love triangle, though a triangle most accurately drawn with dotted lines, given that it's debatable how many of its members are real. The unnamed narrator, a woman writer, lives in Vienna with a man named Malina who works at a military museum, and she is conducting an affair with a Hungarian man named Ivan, who lives nearby and has two young children. The first of the book's three distinct sections, its longest, is devoted primarily to the narrator's relationship with Ivan, whom she met outside a florist's shop. She implies that love is a "virus," and thinks: "I've accumulated more antibodies than you need to be immune mistrust, indifference, the fearlessness which comes from too much fear, and I don't know how Ivan coped with such resistance, such impregnable misery." There are brief flashes of the narrator's wartime trauma in this first section memories of being evacuated to a border town in 1945, and of someone threatening to shoot her and a young friend but this trauma fully lights up the book's blazing second section. It's a stunning stretch, filled with the recounting of vivid nightmares, which include gas chambers and incest and being slowly poisoned. The narrator dreams of being left alone to die in a gas chamber after her father disappears through a door he hadn't shown her. "While I am dying my wish to see him once more and tell him just one thing dies as well," she writes. "My father, I say to him who is no longer there, I wouldn't have told anyone, I would not have betrayed you. There's no resistance going on here." 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. In this section, in a technique that will begin to appear more frequently throughout the rest of the novel, the narrator and Malina have conversations formatted as scripts. "Malina: There is no peace in you, not even in you. "Me: Don't say that, not today. You're terrible. "Malina: It's war. And you are the war. You yourself. "Malina: We all are, you included." It's worth noting, before the anguish piles up too high, that Bachmann can be funny, her humor another shade of darkness on her palette. "Sometimes a person gets lucky, but I'm sure most women are never lucky. What I'm talking about has nothing to do with the supposition that there are some men who are good lovers, there really aren't," she writes. "At most there are men with whom it is completely hopeless and a few with whom it's not quite so hopeless." You might wonder while reading "Malina" who is really in it and who isn't. Rachel Kushner, in a new introduction to the novel, writes: "The male characters in the book, some have speculated, are mere alter egos, not 'real' men, but part of her own psyche." One can make a convincing case that Malina especially is, in fact, just a facet of the narrator's mind. "He never forgets," the narrator writes, "I never have to ask him to do anything." When Ivan suddenly asks, "Who is Malina?" she thinks, seeming more stumped than secretive: "I don't have an answer for that." In lines frequently cited as evidence, she writes: "I don't want to lead Ivan astray, but he'll never realize that I am double. I am also Malina's creation. Unconcerned, Ivan sticks to the appearance, my living bodily self gives him a reference point." Reading Malina this way, he seems like a civilizing drive inside the narrator, for better and worse both protecting her from the full rawness of her traumatic memories and wanting her to begin making an uneasy peace with them. Ivan, given his children and other details, seems more reliably corporeal, but who knows. Nothing is nailed down in this book, not even at the very end. Its terse and chilling final line lands with enduring ambiguity. (Bachmann planned this to be the first in a trilogy, but the other books were unfinished when she died, at 47, from injuries sustained in a fire at her apartment.) Taken in bites, Bachmann's prose is often lucid and powerful, enlivened by her poetic gifts. At length, she can be tough chewing. She wrote a doctoral dissertation on Heidegger and was a devoted reader of Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico Philosophicus," though she's nowhere near that tough. For every aphoristic dart she throws at the human condition ("the world is sick and doesn't want a healthy force to prevail"), there is a sentence or meaning that remains tightly knotted, and a general lack of clear orientation prevails. Whatever verifiable facts about the plot and characters might exist beneath the novel's psychological static, you can imagine Bachmann insisting, are none of your business. The churn of the narrator's mind and the absurdist exchanges between characters earned the novel comparisons to Virginia Woolf and Beckett. This revised translation appears at a time when the book feels quite contemporary. Though even innovative mainstream fiction now being published reads like "A Is for Apple" compared to "Malina," there's no question that the book shares a spirit with any and all books about the unsought psychological challenges of being a woman in this world. ("Can a man understand this book? Completely," Kushner writes in her introduction, which gave me the courage to continue.) "Women face an unhappiness which is particularly inevitable and absolutely unnecessary," the narrator says. She envisions that she will become "an unknown woman murdered by some unknown man." The specters not just of the father figure, but of fascism and patriarchy on scales large and small, hang over every line of the novel. Like a lot of existential literature, "Malina" has digressive depths and charms impossible to summarize in such a small space, including the start of its final section, which begins: "At the moment my greatest fear may be the fate of our postal officials." In the closing pages, the narrator's thoughts accelerate toward breakdown. "I am completely incapable of thinking straight, but who ever did think straight?" she wonders. Her racing confusion seems to confirm something Malina has earlier explained to her: "Once one has survived something then survival itself interferes with understanding."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Linda Bloodworth Thomason, the creator of that 1980s and '90s sitcom about the employees of an Atlanta design firm, has reimagined the show as a stage play. The play, also called "Designing Women," will bring the TV show's characters into the present day. It will have its premiere this summer at TheaterSquared in Fayetteville, Ark. "What I really wanted to do was take those women as we last saw them and set them down right now," Bloodworth Thomason said in a telephone interview last week. "They'll have the same history, be the same people, have the same attitudes, the same philosophies," she added, "but they'll be talking about MeToo and the Kardashians, and Donald Trump, and all that's going on right now." The sitcom debuted on CBS in 1986. Its original cast was led by Dixie Carter, Jean Smart, Delta Burke, Annie Potts and Meshach Taylor. The show picked up numerous Emmy nominations over the course of a seven season run, and was widely recognized for taking on tough social topics including the AIDS crisis, which it addressed in a groundbreaking 1987 episode. "It was way ahead of its time on all sorts of issues," Martin Miller, executive director of TheaterSquared, said in an interview, "whether it's gay rights, reproductive rights, sexual harassment, gun control a whole host of things that continue to be profoundly relevant."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
There was something awfully appropriate about the fact that Michelle Obama's official for posterity portrait by the painter Amy Sherald was unveiled smack in the middle of the New York shows. In it, the former first lady and great champion of the American fashion industry is depicted in a Thinker like pose while wearing a halter neck evening gown in a geometric print by the designer Michelle Smith, founder of the accessible luxury line Milly. Milly? The times they are a changin'. During her tenure in the White House, Mrs. Obama was known for wearing clothes from approximately 90 percent of the names on the fashion week schedule, from up and coming designers to the tent pole brands of the industry, providing all of them with an enormous boost to their name recognition. This choice was fully in line with that legacy. She had always treated the most formal outfit with a certain throwaway ease, and had no truck with traditional hierarchies. They are breaking down nonetheless. New York fashion is suffering some sort of identity crisis, and not just because designers are decamping for foreign shores (that's the easy excuse), or making movies instead of shows (get ready for Monse) but because it's in the midst of generational shift both internally, with founders of a certain age preparing to hand over power, and externally, when it comes to what the customer may want. Athleisure? Streetwear? Gender fluidity? Ball gowns? All of the above? As a result, the big brands that used to dominate the city no longer have quite the same aesthetic authority. When Ralph Lauren cruises from barefoot in Jamaica (where he has a vacation house) in lovely blue and white and faded denim sundresses to Cap d'Antibes in bright red, yellow, blue and green sequined minidresses, patent leather sweats, and an Art Deco ocean liner print, it's hard not to feel a little lost. The clothing compass is pointing in too many directions at once. It also got a little wiggly at Carolina Herrera who is herself sailing off into the sunset, at least sort of, by becoming the brand's global ambassador, and anointing Wes Gordon as creative director made the admirable, if not always successful, decision to look forward instead of back, swapping her usual florals for a lame leapin' leopard print in glinting lame. The awning stripes she favors were still in there, as were the polka dots (sequined, on a flowing cape), but the mixing of ostrich feather and silver ribbon on a skirt and coat had less direction than the parade of floor sweeping faille skirts in a rainbow of shades paired with crisp white shirts and belted in contrasting colors that closed the show. A homage to Mrs. Herrera's signature style, it was the best look on the runway. There's often a lot of pressure on new designers to "youthify" older brands, but here's hoping that Mr. Gordon who presented his boss with a giant bouquet of red roses during her bow sticks with it. In this, he might take a page from Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia, who have been smartly diplomatic about updating Oscar de la Renta without reinventing it. This season, a trip to the Cloisters inspired a host of tapestry prints, parchment shades and stylized florals, not to mention chain mail and silver filigree embroideries, all balanced by a stripped down silhouette: narrow pants with deep cuffs and squared off jackets; pencil skirts with slouchy sweaters sporting jeweled bouquets. There were lots of the usual party dresses, to be sure. Presumably, many will end up on the red carpet at the Met Gala in May, for the opening of "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination" (or even at the Oscars' next month). But hidden among all the sparkle was one genuinely new idea: Many of the untucked shirttails poking from under the jackets were not actually shirts at all. They were fake tails that belted around the waist, so they read as casual without the construction of layers. They made sense more so than the horses and ... wait, was that a cow? that reared across the linen serapes and shirts of Derek Lam's otherwise understated and sporty Western inspired suedes and slouchy trousers. Just as the lyrical, swaddling suiting in earthy shades at The Row makes sense. (The more ecclesiastical evening wear would also be good for the Met Gala, if anyone is feeling a little party Puritan.) For Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, the brand's designers, it's all about the inside, and the tiny detail: jackets cut in a classic hourglass or pulled just off center, a single lapel flying out like a scarf; a trench coat secured by one button just above the waist. The show was held in a makeshift gallery spotted by 13 Isamu Noguchi sculptures on loan from the artist's foundation. That's a pretty ambitious connection to imply. But as the old order shifts, there's room at the top.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
POSTCARD FROM NEW YORK A view of the 29th Street side of the 12 story Hotel Martha Washington, circa 1910. The hotel was exclusively for women from 1903 to 1998. AT the turn of the last century, single professional women had a difficult time finding places to live in which they were free from the suspicion of immoral behavior. A group of reformers responded in 1903 by building a hotel exclusively for women, the Martha Washington, at 30 East 30th Street through the block to 29 East 29th. Though quite average architecturally, it is one of New York's newest landmarks. That it was the object of derision and amusement in newspapers including The New York Times is only a document of the age. It was a man's world, but women were on a roll, flocking to the city to fill previously male only jobs in business and the arts. Educational institutions were taking more and more female students into advanced programs, and the strictures on women's behavior were easing. But women had little in the way of what was considered respectable housing. Men, of course, had no such concerns. The 12 story Martha Washington accepted both overnight and long term guests, charging 1.50 a day for rooms not much larger than servants' quarters, each with a sink. About three dozen women a floor shared four baths and four toilets. When the hotel opened, there were 500 guests, with 200 on a waiting list. The Times noted that the work of carrying suitcases to and from the rooms "would be too heavy for girls, so boys are to be employed." Men also ran the elevators. Male guests were not permitted past the first floor. In 1904, 14 women replaced the bellboys, Mark Cadwell, the manager, calling them more reliable. The New York Herald's take on the new bellhops was "she looks demure enough in her black gown, with plain white collar and cuffs." A letter to the editor of The Times in 1904 complained that the press had covered the new hotel as an object of mirth, and now "observation automobiles" came by, as if the guests were "a new kind of freak." The correspondent said the Martha Washington was "so superior to the New York boarding and lodging house that it cannot be considered in the same breath." Unfortunately, the "observation automobiles" only increased after a Times account a few days later of "a real old fashioned horsewhipping" at the hotel. A woman with a 4 year old girl assaulted someone she thought was romancing her husband who did not stick around to see who won. In 1907, the Martha Washington announced that the Duchess of Marlborough, the former Consuelo Vanderbilt, would be staying there for an indefinite period, sending her furniture in advance from England and requesting a 10 room suite, decorated in old rose and blue. But even though the hotel threw together its normally small rooms for her, she decided to stay in Europe. The Martha Washington was a center for suffrage events. In 1908 the activist Carrie Chapman Catt, at a benefit in the hotel, took charge of a display showing how women could leave their homes to vote while electrical appliances took care of cooking, cleaning and rocking the baby. The 1910 census shows that the Martha Washington was for working women but not working class women. There were artists, an insurance broker, stenographers, teachers, editors and other professionals. Just a few were in their 20s; the average age was 45 or 50. Some were in their 70s, like Helen Longworthy, who had been secretary to the financier Spencer Trask until his death in 1909. There was also Jean H. Norris, 37, a Fordham trained lawyer and Tammany Hall official who in 1919 became the first woman to be appointed magistrate in New York. (In the Seabury investigations of the Walker regime in the early 1930s she was removed for altering records, proceeding without evidence and other violations.) Miss Norris was living in the Martha Washington in 1917 when it switched to female elevator operators. The Cincinnati Times Star found them hilarious, remarking that "not even an aviator could equal the antics of the petticoated elevator artists." The Martha Washington remained a women's hotel until 1998, by which time it was a musty, definitely old fashioned place. Now the King Grove Hotel, it is a trendy spot with glove leather upholstery, chrome and theatrical lighting. The other day, a woman and man were in the lobby in intimate conversation; there was no chaperon stationed at the elevators. Indeed, the elevators are self service. Last month, the Landmarks Preservation Commission described the Renaissance style Martha Washington, designed by Robert W. Gibson, as having a "sense of dignity." It is not materially different from two dozen other Midtown hotels. But the Martha Washington certainly does have a "special character" a requirement for landmark designation even if that character lies in its history, not its architecture.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
As a boy, Bradley Scott Silverbush had a knack for breaking up schoolyard fights in his hometown, Syracuse. His strategy was simple: Collect 1 from the child who was about to be pummeled and split his winnings with the bully to end the dispute. From these grade school negotiations Mr. Silverbush acquired some valuable information. "I knew from second grade that I wanted to be a lawyer," he said. Now 60, he is a senior litigation member at Rosenberg Estis, a top landlord law firm in New York. And he is still negotiating for the bigger kids on the playground; he lists among his clients Douglas Elliman and Carnegie Management. It would not be difficult for many people to revile a landlord lawyer, yet over dinner at the Palm Too, a Midtown East steakhouse near his apartment, this lawyer with a penchant for racecars came across as unexpectedly likable as he told stories in sometimes off color language about risks he has taken, like racing at 140 miles per hour on the interstate but talking himself out of a traffic ticket. In court, however, he has a reputation for being bare knuckled, with a fervent desire to win. An evening with Mr. Silverbush provided a window into the mind of one of the lawyers charged with persuading judges and juries to evict tenants from their homes. His father, a Ukrainian Jew who survived five years in the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, worked as an upholsterer in Syracuse. The younger Mr. Silverbush put himself through community college, the University at Buffalo and law school at Pace University. He cut his teeth as a landlord lawyer in the South Bronx in the 1980s. "Those were rough times," he said. "I loved it." He now has three grown children and is separated from his wife, who lives in Westchester County. Mr. Silverbush speaks with unabashed enthusiasm about his legal victories, regardless of how sympathetic the opponent might be; a heavily pregnant woman who was evicted the week before Christmas with her 8 year old son comes to his mind. Yet, paradoxically, he supports rent stabilization, a position uncommon among landlords and their advocates. Rent stabilization "has its place," he said. "There are probably unscrupulous landlords that will take advantage of whatever they can for gain." His philosophy about litigation is rooted in another lesson learned in that schoolyard: Disputes can be expensive and sometimes life altering, but they need not be entirely unpleasant. "Just because I'm trying to evict you doesn't mean I have to be" unlikable, Mr. Silverbush said, using a far saltier descriptor. Talk to the other side and the picture is not nearly as jolly. "He can be very aggressive," said James B. Fishman, a partner at the New York law firm Fishman Rozen who represents tenants and has sparred with Mr. Silverbush in court. "He's certainly got a pretty substantial ego." In New York, a landlord lawyer is often the feared and hated hammer that delivers a landlord's crushing blow. But where tenants see a Goliath, in Mr. Silverbush's opinion David does not always deserve to win. Some tenants should be evicted, he insists, like those who are unable to pay the rent or who violate the lease. Consider the case of a woman with dementia. According to Mr. Silverbush's recollection of the matter from the 1980s, the woman's son had placed her in a hotel room rather than a nursing home. Once she had been there for more than 30 days, her son claimed that she was a tenant, citing New York State occupancy laws. Then he stopped paying the hotel. Mr. Silverbush moved to evict. "What jury's going to evict a bedridden woman right before Christmas?" he said. But the jury sided with Mr. Silverbush's argument that the son, not the hotel, was the Grinch and granted the eviction. As for the pregnant woman, Mr. Silverbush proved to a jury that she knew about the drugs her boyfriend was storing in the apartment to sell, a violation of her lease. "He's smart, he's inventive," said David Rozenholc, one of the top tenant lawyers in the city, of Mr. Silverbush. "It's sort of fun to deal with him." Mr. Fishman added: "He really, really likes to win. He has to win at almost any cost." Mr. Silverbush's relentless desire for victory might help explain a heated and oddly personal exchange he had in 2015 with a shareholder at East River Housing, a co op that Mr. Silverbush represented. The co op had been embroiled in protracted litigation over its pet policy, with several residents facing eviction for bringing dogs into the no pet complex. Tommy Loeb, a shareholder who was not involved in the lawsuits, sent a letter to the board president, inquiring about the mounting legal fees. "I would like to remind you that you have an obligation to accurately inform" residents about co op finances, Mr. Loeb wrote. Mr. Silverbush, who represented the co op in the litigation, responded with a 1,300 word vitriolic letter in which he wrote, "rude and crude people like you criticize, second guess, insult, and incite others to engage in similarly reprehensible and unfair innuendo." The letter went on to say, "You are an angry and calculating individual with your own personal agenda." Mr. Loeb was stunned. "It was pretty shocking," he said. "I just asked them for basic information." The letter from Mr. Silverbush "struck us as so incredibly unprofessional," said Jeremy Sherber, another shareholder who operates a website, CooperativelyYours.org, which posted the exchange online. Mr. Loeb found his answer in the co op's financial statements: The co op spent 1.52 million on legal fees in 2014 and 2015, with only 332,000 covered by insurance. Shareholders were left to shoulder the remainder of the bill, according to Mr. Loeb and Mr. Sherber. Mr. Silverbush described his response to the Loeb letter as "somewhat out of character," but stands by it. Mr. Silverbush's love for fast cars, which persisted in spite of a crash into a tree at 90 miles per hour in 1979, benefited from a bit of unexpected luck in 2009. His father won 35 million in the New York Lottery. The payout was divided among his parents and their six adult children. The older couple bought a Subaru Legacy and a 250,000 house. With part of his 1.4 million share, their son Bradley bought a 160,000 Lamborghini. His motto for driving, which he heard during a racing course he took in Italy, is: "Don't brake until you see God."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Midway through a lackluster freshman year at the University of San Diego, I called my parents and told them I planned to leave school after the spring semester. They took the news pretty well considering they had just shelled out more than 50,000 in tuition and living expenses at one of the ritziest private universities in the country, a university where the gym bears the name of the dietitian Jenny Craig and some dorms feature an ocean view. Here, you could easily graduate unaware that 1 in 10 students at surrounding California State universities is estimated to be homeless. I listened to my father's objections as I walked to the west edge of campus, passing the university's big, whitewashed buildings, its meditation garden and its infinity pool, before I reached a spot where I could see San Diego's entire Mission Bay and, beyond that, the Pacific. The idea that gap years are inherently elitist may be due to the potentially high cost of travel and of independent programs, which offer a structured experience typically of adventure, service and more or less education that can cost upward of 20,000. But that criticism cuts against the realities most students already face that is, average in state tuition and fees of 8,940, or 28,308 at private colleges, according to the College Board. When factoring in room, board and other expenses, this would mean spending about 100,000 over five years at public colleges and more than double that at private ones. After five years, only 53 percent of students at public colleges have graduated. The remaining students will have racked up absurdly high expenses on the way to earning, or not earning, a degree. For them, regardless of what socio economic background they come from, time away from campus seems prudent. I certainly wasn't alone in failing to think carefully before committing to college. I sometimes took three trips a day to the beach with other students. By second semester, most of my friends were less concerned with final exams than with finding the coolest house the fewest steps from the beach to live in the following year. And I would have been too, if I had stayed. I was already failing at least one class. And although my grades were not poor enough to be asked to leave school, I had lost the motivation to do anything but fulfill the minimum course requirements. I felt guilty for wasting so much money and I couldn't see doing the same thing for three more years. I had managed to avoid thinking about why a degree mattered to me or how I hoped it would enrich my life. When applying to colleges, I had put down whatever fluff my high school counselors suggested for my admissions essays and was accepted by a few schools whose campus scenery had attracted me far more than the course offerings. A gap year presented itself as a chance to claim the independence that formalized education had not encouraged. It was an opportunity to discover a sense of purpose outside of school, to prompt some thinking on those questions before graduating. Without classes and the path to a degree as a crutch that gave structure to my days, I'd be forced to create a structure of my own. But my father wasn't convinced that a gap year was the right decision. He let me know that if I left school, I wouldn't receive any financial support. At the time, I viewed this as a threat. Now I see it as a first step toward allowing me the freedom I needed. I knew this wasn't an easy concession for him. The dependence that many parents encourage throughout college and even after their children leave home is now commonplace. In her book "Parenting to a Degree," the sociologist Laura T. Hamilton documents cases in which a parent comes to the rescue with homework help or buys a daughter clothes so she fits in better with her sorority sisters. What's often lost in these stories and the predictable rants on the negative effects of helicopter parenting is the question of what responsibility children have, as they get older, to put an end to patterns of dependency. It was difficult making a clean break from those patterns to figure out what I wanted to do for the unstructured year ahead. Most of the information I found on gap years was written for parents, by parents. It seemed to miss the point, at least the point as I saw it: to loosen the parental grip so that students can develop an educational framework of their own. While working summer jobs to save money, I found an internship at Surfer magazine in Orange County and reported for duty in late August. I slept in my car the first two nights and rinsed off in the ocean before work until I found an affordable place to rent, and because the internship was unpaid, a job at a gluten free store where I could work evenings. As I quickly learned, a food store that defines itself by what it doesn't have tends to attract a high maintenance clientele. I took turns providing customers with my faux expertise and stocking shelves, which I did with a recent college graduate who could not find employment that put his degree to good use and with a woman who claimed to hate the taste of water so much that she drank only juice. This wasn't the kind of job I wanted to hold for the rest of my working days. Showing up at the store after a day at Surfer, where the editors had some level of engagement with the tasks at hand, prompted career reflection like never before. It was refreshing, after a school year filled with so much apathy, to meet people who seemed to actually care about their work. At the same time, entering the work force made the burden of assuming debt and my own privileged ability to attend college free of loans visible in ways that continuing on in school would have never allowed. I came to realize what it meant to take a college education for granted. Aside from opportunities for unpaid internships, I found few low cost options for learning experiences during my gap year. According to the nonprofit American Gap Association, about 1 percent of students in the United States take gap years. By contrast, in Australia and certain European countries, gap years are encouraged as part of the educational process; 17 percent of students in the United Kingdom participate in a gap year, according to one study by its department of education. More colleges in the United States are encouraging applicants to consider a "bridge" year before enrolling, and many independent programs and some campuses like Florida State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Princeton and Tufts even offer fellowships and financial aid. Ethan Knight, the executive director at the American Gap Association, still sees the need for greater support to encourage a more diverse set of students to participate. "You can get access to Pell funding to go to beauty school," he said. "There's certainly as much learning to be had in a gap year as there is in beauty school. So why shouldn't students be able to earn access to Pell and other government grants for certain gap year experiences?" Mr. Knight pointed to gap year opportunities that could be valuable, such as traveling abroad to learn languages that the State Department views as critical. But federal grants are contingent on receiving college credit, making them unavailable to anyone taking a year off school. In its own way, my limited options became a rewarding educational challenge. In the winter, I moved to Puerto Rico, scrubbed dishes in a locally owned hotel restaurant for 5 an hour, found a used car for 450, and shared a one bedroom for 400 a month. I ate leftovers off dirty dishes in the restaurant. I cleaned the deep fryers, the maggot infested garbage bins and the vomit left in the bathrooms by hard partying East Coast vacationers. All the other employees at the restaurant spoke in Spanish, and I was perceived as dumb for not speaking fluently. I'd seen the same thing happen at home to co workers whose first language was not English, although it had never fully registered until our roles were reversed. Experiencing these humiliations was a lot easier knowing I had the freedom to leave at any time. Still, it poked holes in my comfort with, and blindness to, some of the inequalities I had grown up with, making them harder to ignore when I left the restaurant behind. And I did leave the restaurant behind, as soon as I had saved enough money to travel for a few months. I bought a plane ticket to Indonesia, rented a motorbike there, and traveled island to island by ferry. The trip was not without its mishaps. To name a few: I was bitten by a monkey; got in a motorbike accident; lost a good amount of skin on my hands, chest, back, legs and feet in numerous brushes with coral while surfing; got a raging ear infection surfing too close to a polluted river mouth after it rained. I did not want my parents to worry, and so I took care to avoid mentioning these hiccups in sporadic calls and emails home from Bali, Lombok, Sumbawa, Java and Sumatra. What I did mention to my parents, much to their satisfaction, was that I actually looked forward to returning to college in the fall. Time free from the obligations of schoolwork had enabled me to realize my passion for writing, and to apply this to an English major, where I would discover the most formative classes and professors of my education. With this newfound interest I experienced many of the benefits that gap years are said to provide: Studies show that students who take time off before graduating increase their grade point averages, drink less when in college, and go on to find more fulfilling career paths. It also helped me graduate in only two and a half more years one semester behind where I should have if I'd stayed in school. After graduating, too, I found satisfying work (for a few years, editing a surf magazine). Looking back, though, it would be hard to identify anything from that year as a formula for success. But that was exactly the point. I stocked shelves, scrubbed dishes, did an unpaid internship and traveled. My performance in school did improve afterward, but if I'd thought about chasing those results, or recommended those experiences to others, there's just no way the same benefits would follow. While there's certainly a place for making those kinds of calculations, a gap year was about removing those expectations, at least temporarily. It was a time when education ceased to be an act of dependence, an act of fulfilling my parents' wishes. Only then could the act of graduating from college become a move toward independence. Only then could I make space for education to have value of its own.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
They Were Meant to Be the Season's Big Books. Then the Virus Struck. Months ago, in what now feels like another era, publishers planning their 2020 schedules hoped to avoid releasing books in the fall, typically the industry's biggest season. Editors and writers worried that new releases would be lost in the deluge of political news leading up to the presidential election, so publishers jammed some of their biggest titles into the spring. Now, a reverse exodus of sorts is taking place. Publishers are pushing back the release of dozens of books to summer and fall, in hopes that by then the coronavirus outbreak will be waning, bookstores will reopen, and authors will be able to tour and promote their work. Some of the most anticipated titles of the spring have been delayed by weeks or months including the latest by the best selling children's book author Jeff Kinney, literary novels by Graham Swift and Ottessa Moshfegh, and nonfiction books by Representative Eric Swalwell of California, the Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings and the comedians and late night television hosts Desus and Mero. "Bookstores are shuttered, everyone right now is worried about their health and their livelihoods, there's so much anxiety," said the writer Laila Lalami, whose new nonfiction book, "Conditional Citizens," was scheduled to come out from Pantheon in April, but has been moved to the fall. "It makes sense to postpone it until there's a bit more clarity, until we know what's going to happen." Some publishers are even moving books to next year: Atria pushed the release of Charlotte Bismuth's "Bad Medicine," a nonfiction account of a criminal case involving a pill pushing New York doctor, to January 2021. "We are hopeful this new date will give readers an opportunity to consider this worthy book with less distraction," an email announcing the date change said. Such moves are a gamble, given the uncertainty surrounding the course of the epidemic and the economic crisis. Some publishers worry that the situation could be even worse in a few months, if more warehouses and distribution centers close, and if publishers have to confront reduced capacity at printing presses. Paper shortages could also become an issue, as more paper stock gets consumed making cardboard for deliveries of essential products. "For authors, it's really tough," said Daniel Halpern, the publisher of Ecco. "You work on a book for two or three years, and suddenly you find it coming out in a plague. There's so much unknown, and there's so much changing every hour." 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. Publishers who are delaying books now, in hopes that they can sell more copies in the future, are facing revenue shortfalls in the meantime. Abrams Books decided to postpone books by several of its prominent authors, most notably the next entry in Mr. Kinney's Wimpy Kid universe, "Rowley Jefferson's Awesome Friendly Adventure," which was moved from April to early August. Abrams was anticipating a massive hit, with an announced first printing of three million copies. "It was kind of a war room decision," said Michael Jacobs, the president and chief executive of Abrams. "We moved it with our fingers crossed that in August we'll be back to some semblance of normal." Artists in every field, from musicians, dancers and opera singers to actors and television writers, have seen their livelihoods and income disrupted, or in some cases evaporated, as theaters, comedy clubs and studios have closed in the face of the epidemic. In some ways, the publishing industry is better positioned than many other businesses to weather the impact of the coronavirus. Books are in a way an ideal medium for this moment: Reading is a solitary act, and people who are sheltering in place may turn to books for escape, solace and connection. There are some encouraging signs for publishers. Unit sales of print books remained steady in the week that ended March 21, after dropping by 10 percent the previous week, according to NPD BookScan. Sales of children's nonfiction were especially strong, rising by nearly 70 percent that week, a spike that resulted from millions of children being home schooled. But the longer the economic and public health crisis lasts, the harder it will be for publishers and book retailers to keep their companies afloat. New York City, which has become the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in this country, is in many ways the center of the literary world, home to the biggest publishing houses and literary agencies. In a stark example of the toll the epidemic is taking on the industry, the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, where every May tens of thousands of publishers, librarians and writers normally gather for BookExpo, the publishing industry's biggest annual convention, is being converted into a makeshift hospital. BookExpo has been postponed until late July, but even that may be untenable. Major publishing companies, including Simon Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette and Macmillan, have withdrawn from the event. There's a growing fear that the temporary closure of bookstores around the country may in many cases become permanent. Beloved stores like Powell's in Portland, McNally Jackson and the Strand in New York, and The Tattered Cover in Denver shops that are fixtures of their communities and cultural landmarks as much as retail outlets have laid off employees or put them on unpaid leave. Barnes Noble, which was already struggling before the pandemic hit, has closed hundreds of stores for the time being. "The very functions of the literary world have been put in an induced coma," said James Daunt, the chief executive of Barnes Noble. "There's going to be a barren period when all the books that were to be published now and over the next few months are going to be shunted forward into the calendar. Fewer books will see the light of day." Some smaller publishers have begun laying off staff. Rowman Littlefield, which specializes in academic and educational publishing, has furloughed all of its employees, according to Publishers Lunch. Skyhorse Publishing, an independent press, laid off 30 percent of its employees this week, a result of declining sales and lost revenue resulting from moving titles to the fall. Another looming concern for publishers is disruption to warehouses and book distribution centers, which could cause the book business to grind to a halt. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt closed its Indiana distribution center until April 6 and placed a hold on all orders. The children's publisher Scholastic, which relies in part on school book fairs for revenue, has temporarily closed warehouses and distribution centers, the company announced last week. Ingram Content Group, which runs print manufacturing and book distribution centers in five states, is still operating all of its centers, even in states that have issued shelter in place orders and directed nonessential businesses to close. For the moment, Ingram's services are "considered essential," and the company has been encouraged to continue operating, Ingram said in a statement this week. Publishers and booksellers hope that a rise in online sales and e books could help offset losses from store closures. Bookshop, a new e commerce site where customers can buy print books directly from independent stores, has seen sales surge since the coronavirus outbreak hit, to 380,000 in sales this week, up from an average of 28,000 a week in February, according to Andy Hunter, the founder and chief executive of Bookshop. More than 350 independent bookstores are selling books through the site, which ships directly to customers through Ingram, allowing stores to sell books even when their physical outlets are closed.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
CRISPIN HELLION GLOVER at IFC Center (March 18 19). Perhaps still best known for playing Marty McFly's awkward dad in "Back to the Future," Glover spent the 2000s refashioning himself as an outsider auteur, with the result being these two unclassifiable curiosities. "What Is It?" (on Tuesday), which is substantially cast with actors who have Down syndrome and features blackface and apparently unfaked snail killings, is calculated to offend and completely unwatchable. But the subsequent "It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine" (on Monday), written by Steven C. Stewart, who appears in "What Is It?" as a man being sexually pleasured in a clamshell, at times has a sensitive undercurrent. Borrowing its structure from "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," it depicts the sexual fantasies of a man (Stewart) with cerebral palsy fantasies that sometimes end in murder. Staying far away is an understandable response, but Glover, who will present what he calls the "Big Slide Show" at each screening, doesn't let these otherwise unavailable U.F.O.s out often. 212 924 7771, ifccenter.com Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. INFRASTRUCTURE ON FILM at Anthology Film Archives (through March 28). While this retrospective may not have the sexiest title and, yes, it does feature documentaries on the construction of the autobahn ("Reichsautobahn," on Friday and March 22) and the interstate highway system ("Divided Highways: The Interstates and the Transformation of American Life," on Friday) it offers a heady collection of movies that concern the social, political and economic implications of how humanity moves. The minimalist filmmaker James Benning observes trains across the United States in "RR" (on Saturday); Bernardo Bertolucci's documentary "The Path of Oil" (on Wednesday and March 23) traces its journey from the Middle East to Europe; and Frederick Wiseman's "Canal Zone" (on March 24) is an essential chronicle of incongruities during the United States' control of the Panama Canal Zone. 212 505 5181, anthologyfilmarchives.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
MY generation of dancegoers has gone through successive stages of painful loss. When we discovered dance, many of the choreographers who had given the art form its peak definitions were still alive: Martha Graham, George Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, Jerome Robbins, Merce Cunningham. We can say that the deaths of these master choreographers sent us into mourning, but we were really manifesting withdrawal symptoms: We had been used to regular fixes of dance energy, and found good cause to complain about the remaining suppliers. But perhaps nothing has been more extraordinary about recent decades than the ever increasing availability of the artistic past. Many performances that we thought lost forever turn out to have been captured on film or video, and the archives keep yielding treasures that even predate our time. No, nothing matches being in a theater when dance is happening in no other art form is the difference between Friday's performance and Saturday's so frequently momentous, even with the same cast but to watch dance on film gives us lasting evidence that powerfully supplements our memories and broadens our knowledge. Here, the dance critics of The New York Times address a small selection of such DVDs. I confine my own survey to just a quick sampling of works by two choreographers dear to my heart, Ashton and Cunningham. And I begin with a single example of how a DVD may substantiate hearsay. In 1977 I spent an hour or more asking the dance photographer and writer Keith Money about the ballerina Margot Fonteyn, whose work he had lovingly recorded since the early 1960s. I have never forgotten how he told me of watching from the wings when, in the second act of Ashton's "Cinderella," the heroine does a backbend while on point: Only in the wings, he said, could you grasp how phenomenal her backbend was. Such accounts usually become the stuff of myth; we weren't there to check them out, and we may choose to believe or not. But Fonteyn's "Cinderella" was recorded for television (in 1957, a few years before the 1960s performances that Mr. Money observed), and the camera, directed by the choreographer, moves round to show us that very backbend as if we, too, were in the wings a phenomenal but fleeting moment from the past made forever present. Check it out: Video Artists International DVD 4296. Another kind of history lesson comes with three successive Royal Ballet casts (1962, 1981, 2005) in Ashton's classic two act ballet "La Fille Mal Gardee" (1960). Here you can watch the original cast (led by Nadia Nerina and David Blair) in black and white, filmed in studio conditions with exemplary long takes and dance revealing camera framing by the BBC TV producer Margaret Dale (herself a former Ashton dancer) on ICAD5088. You can also see a color broadcast of a live 1981 performance, by which time "Fille" had been in the annual Royal Ballet repertory for 21 years (Kultur, D2966), and a color one of a live 2005 performance with the best cast of this century to date, led by Marianela Nunez and Carlos Acosta (Opus Arte OA 0992 D). Excellent as each cast is, it's fascinating to see how much faster tempos were in 1962, and how some aspects of the choreography have become smudged. (Look at the melodic phrasing and upper body details of the wedding pas de deux.) When I joined hundreds of dancegoers in bidding farewell to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company at the end of 2011, I had no clue that soon I could watch those valedictory Park Avenue Armory performances all over again, yet here they are in an exceptional three DVD set (Artpix). The second disc is the gem: It allows you to watch each of the three separate stages on which the dancers performed (with different works on each one), so that an event that lasted 45 minutes yields 135 minutes of material. Tanaquil Le Clercq, whose career was cut short by polio, in "Coppelia," on "Balanchine: New York City Ballet in Montreal" (Volume 3). Historic in a different way is the Cunningham Company's three DVD set of collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg (Artpix), from "Suite for Five" (1956) to "Interscape" (2000), in 21st century performances. The Titianesque colors and the Hitchcock like filming make "Interscape" especially exciting. The decor is Rauschenberg's most stunning theatrical creation; against it, the dancers look all the more heroic. IT'S May 13, 1954. Tanaquil Le Clercq sits rigidly on a stool with her knees bent and the tips of her point shoes pressing into the floor. Her eyes, framed by those unmistakable arched brows, are glassy and fittingly so. She's Swanilda, pretending to be a doll in scene from "Coppelia." As part of the third volume of "Balanchine: New York City Ballet in Montreal," a treasure trove of DVDs from the archives of Radio Canada the French language division of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Le Clercq and Andre Eglevsky perform a rarely seen pas de deux by George Balanchine. Twenty years later, Balanchine, with Alexandra Danilova, would create a full length version of this comic ballet, but this duet, part of a new series released by Video Artists International, was choreographed especially for the telecast. Despite the grainy black and white footage, the performance, like others in the collection, is remarkably alive. (More is on the way; the fourth DVD, scheduled for release in September, includes "The Four Temperaments," "Ivesiana" and "Afternoon of a Faun.") Before the dancing gets underway in "Coppelia" and it's lightning fast Eglevsky, as the fickle Frantz, shakes Le Clercq's shoulders. She wilts as if made of air. He kisses her; she slaps him. It's pure Le Clercq, who has it all: wit, timing, an air of insouciance, legs and that ever unfurling elegance. After the couple's final supported pirouette, she brushes him aside and dashes back to her stool: a doll once more. When you've read about dancers yet have never seen them perform live, DVDs are priceless tools, and Le Clercq, in particular, mesmerizes. Her career was cut short when she contracted polio during a European tour in 1956, but through the historical performances on the Montreal discs she is also featured in "Concerto Barocco" as well as through Nancy Buirski's moving documentary "Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq," this dancer, who died in 2000, is becoming three dimensional for new generations. But Le Clercq is hardly the only ballet star to undergo a reawakening in the telecasts, which reveal Balanchine's crystalline musicality and ability to find the essence of a dancer through movement, not poses. Maria Tallchief, opposite Eglevsky in scenes from Act II of "Swan Lake," reveals a wild brand of avian sleekness; "Serenade," featuring Patricia Wilde and Diana Adams, exposes a thrilling mix of urgent speed and luscious port de bras. And the "Agon" pas de deux for Ms. Adams and Arthur Mitchell is spine tingling; there may be wobbles, but the air between them crackles. You sense that Balanchine, who was most likely present for all the telecasts and tweaked his choreography accordingly is somewhere behind the camera. The ballets not only retain their spirit, but in these strangely thrilling performances, everything else also comes to the fore: sparkling and unmannered technique, fearlessness, an air of mystery, decorum and personalities. The dancers, performing with a deep sense of purpose, strive for one thing: to please Mr. B, and even on a DVD, that makes all the difference in the world. NEW YORK got a double dose of "Swan Lake" this summer, between American Ballet Theater at the Metropolitan Opera House and, a few weeks later, the Bolshoi Ballet at the David H. Koch Theater. I saw Ballet Theater's production a dizzying five times in six days (critics do that sometimes) and the Bolshoi's once. There were delectable, memorable performances Polina Semionova's transporting Odette/Odile at Ballet Theater, Denis Medvedev's gravity defying jester at the Bolshoi but the ballet as a whole never quite filled me up. I couldn't pinpoint why, until I viewed a more satisfying "Swan Lake" in a less lavish format: on DVD. Live performance is always superior to performance viewed on your 13 inch laptop screen, right? So I thought. But when I acquired a recording of the Royal Ballet's "Swan Lake" (released by Opus Arte), I saw what those other productions had been lacking: simply, good storytelling. In my marathon viewing of drearier interpretations, I had forgotten that narrative ballet, at its best, can grip you like a book you can't put down, even if details of the plot remain elusive. The Royal's rendering, staged by Anthony Dowell and starring Thiago Soares and Marianela Nunez, does just that on DVD. Music, design, dancing and mime all served by elegant, unobtrusive camerawork cohere into a story with high emotional stakes and bright touches of humor. In Act I, a sense of real revelry, as opposed to compulsory merrymaking, animates Prince Siegfried's birthday party. The camera helps, capturing interactions you might not catch from the audience, as when Siegfried's friend Benno (David Pickering) swipes a flask from his cheerfully drunk Tutor (Alastair Marriott), who, in this version, has some actual depth of character. Close ups of the corps reveal clear, strong lines; unaffected acting; and, lakeside, a poignant solidarity between Odette and her legions of swan women. The dramatic momentum sputters only in Act IV, when Siegfried clashes with the evil Rothbart (Christopher Saunders), a fight that seems more like fatigued fumbling. Yolanda Sonnabend's extravagant sets and costumes, meant to evoke Tchaikovsky's late 19th century Russia, are at once garish and lusciously cinematic. What had I been missing in the realm of "Swan Lake" on other DVDs? Some films restored my faith in the live experience. I'd rather see Ballet Theater's version five more times than watch the Mariinsky's 2007 video (Decca), in which the corps looks uncomfortably glum, and the lead couple (Danila Korsuntsev and Uliana Lopatkina) lack electricity. A series released by Video Artists International features the Bolshoi's great Maya Plisetskaya in a 1976 performance, but the grainy, unfocused footage and garbled sound (is that coughing?) diminish her grandeur. ONE part of the history of tap dancing is amply represented on DVD: the Hollywood part. It's not just the classics of Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. You can find obscure movies worth seeing only for cameos by the Nicholas Brothers or lesser known hoofers, dancers who shuffled into the immortality of film back when tap was ubiquitous in American popular culture. Of what happened after that tap's decline and revival far, far less is available. But some of that gap has been filled with the recent and important release of a five DVD set of live performance clips by the Jazz Tap Ensemble (jazztapensemble.org). At its founding in 1979 in Southern California, the company was at the forefront of a generation of dancers who sought to take the branch of tap that developed with jazz and transfer it to the format of modern dance, with touring troupes and repertories of choreography. Some of that history is recounted on Disc 1, which, in focusing on early material, most strongly conveys both the excitement and the awkwardness of the enterprise. (The light touch and pixie charm of one founding member, Camden Richman, pops out.) But tap history speaks wordlessly throughout. Lynn Dally, the company's stalwart artistic director, made the selections, and her voice over is mostly unobtrusive. Much of the video footage, shot from 1979 to 2012, is less than ideal in technical quality, and short excerpts turn sections of the discs into mere highlight reels. On the upside, splicing together performances of the same work across the years yields insights into the function of repertory and how different dancers can change a piece. The sound is good, and the close connections between dancers and musicians are always clear. A salient feature of performances by this company and others like it was the regular inclusion of tap elders. Critics often noted how these seasoned guests tended to upstage the troupes that had invited them. Selflessly or inadvertently, these discs reproduce that pattern. On Disc 4, the Nicholas Brothers and the great Honi Coles, just by being themselves, though past their prime, outshine pale renditions of Hollywood numbers by younger company members. Disc 3 contains gorgeous performances by the West Coast master Eddie Brown and the incomparable Jimmy Slyde. Both, impossibly cool while complexly swinging, are captured here in a late but still great stage touched by the miraculous. The disc is also notable for the group compositions they created with, and for, the ensemble. Other examples of this genre collective choreography drawn from a soloist accustomed to ad libbing are underwhelming, but Slyde's "Interplay" finds a rare balance between set structure and prompts for individualizing improvisation. It's not all about the departed. There are younger dazzlers: Sam Weber, a mild mannered virtuoso whose artistry required a concert stage; eye and ear catching apprentices (Dormeshia Sumbry Edwards, Derick K. Grant and Michelle Dorrance, among others) who have since become leaders. Yet Disc 5 is bittersweet, with a mini documentary about Gregory Hines, who died in 2003 at 57. His modernizing musicality, his in the moment openness, his irreplaceable charisma this footage shows why the live performances of this movie star were so life enhancing. Thankfully, Jazz Tap Ensemble has preserved some of that on disc.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
New claims for benefits continued to flood state unemployment offices last week as the coronavirus pandemic inflicted further economic damage. Initial claims declined to a new low from the stratospheric multimillion levels reached in the spring, but they remained above records set in previous recessions. While there is a "gradual healing of the labor market," said Diane Swonk, chief economist at the accounting firm Grant Thornton, the number of laid off and furloughed workers collecting some form of unemployment insurance is still staggeringly high. A total of 723,000 workers filed new claims for state benefits, the Labor Department reported Thursday. On a seasonally adjusted basis, the figure was 709,000. Another 298,000 new claims were filed under a federal emergency program, Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, designed for freelancers, part time workers and others who are not normally eligible for state benefits. "Technically it looks like we're in a recovery," Ms. Swonk said, "but we're still so much in the hole." Prospects for digging out of that hole are shadowed by the alarming rise in Covid 19 caseloads around the country. And many people already collecting unemployment insurance have been hitting the 26 week limit on benefits that exists in most states. Those workers are eligible for an additional 13 weeks of benefits under a federal program called Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation, though the transfer from one program to the other is not automatic in some states. The number of filings in this program increased to 4.14 million for the week ending Oct. 24, from 3.98 million the previous week, according to the latest data available. "That's where you see the wounds festering and worry about how deep they are and how much they'll scar us," Ms. Swonk said. Most economists agree that controlling the pandemic is a prerequisite for an economic recovery regardless of any government ordered shutdowns. 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. News of the development of a vaccine that is 90 percent effective lifted hopes and markets this week. But Mary C. Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said on Tuesday, "The economy right now is being dictated by coronavirus's existence, and I think less by the potential for a vaccine." Several Fed officials, including the chair, Jerome H. Powell, have said Congress's failure to agree on another relief package for individuals and business will hamper any recovery. Both federal pandemic related jobless programs will expire at the end of the year without further action. With the coronavirus pandemic entering its ninth month, economists warn that the prolonged downturn could inflict long lasting wounds to U.S. employment. "There's a risk that we're going to see permanent damage to the labor market," said Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist for High Frequency Economics. She was referring to laid off workers who end up dropping out of the work force and to industries like restaurants, entertainment, travel and hospitality that are unable to return to full capacity. Roughly one third of unemployed workers have been without a job for 27 weeks or more, compared with 4.1 percent in April. The longer someone is unemployed, the harder it is to get back into the work force. Job losses that aren't reflected in the unemployment figures also exact a toll. Cindy Fraser used to work three jobs: as a church custodian in Redford, Mich.; as a house cleaner; and as a florist specializing in weddings and special events. When the pandemic hit, her housecleaning and florist gigs dried up. She held on to her custodial job, working about 25 hours a week at 10 an hour. But she has struggled to keep up with her monthly bills, including a 650 mortgage payment, a 350 car payment, 150 for car insurance and 300 for utilities. She applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, the federal program, but was told she did not qualify. Ms. Fraser, 54, is a single mother of four children and lives with her two younger daughters, 15 and 16, one of whom has a genetic condition and several autoimmune disorders that make her vulnerable to the coronavirus. Ms. Fraser has to be selective about taking additional work because she worries about exposure to the virus in a store or a restaurant. "I can't get sick, because if either one of my daughters gets sick, I am the only parent to take care of them," she said. "So I have to be extremely choosy as to what kind of jobs I can take so I don't bring the virus into my home. I can't just go get a job at Walmart." To make ends meet, Ms. Fraser has been relying on the 2,000 a month in survivor benefits she has received since her husband died and has spent nearly all of her savings, about 5,000. "I had wanted to save that money for my daughters' college tuition and driver's training," she said. "But now, it's just going toward keeping a roof over their head."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
This month's conversation in our series on how various religious traditions deal with death is with Leor Halevi, a historian of Islam, and a professor of history and law at Vanderbilt University. His work explores the interrelationship between religious laws and social practices in both medieval and modern contexts. His books include "Muhammad's Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society" and "Modern Things on Trial: Islam's Global and Material Reformation in the Age of Rida, 1865 1935." This interview was conducted by email and edited. The previous interviews in this series can be found here. George Yancy: Before we get into the core of our discussion on death in the Islamic faith, would you explain some of the differences between Islam and the other two Abrahamic religions, Christianity and Judaism? Leor Halevi: Like Judaism and Christianity, Islam is a religion that has been fundamentally concerned with divine justice, human salvation and the end of time. It is centered around the belief that there is but one god, Allah, who is considered the eternal creator of the universe and the omnipotent force behind human history from the creation of the first man to the final day. Allah communicated with a long line of prophets, beginning with Adam and ending with Muhammad. His revelations to the last prophet were collected in the Quran, which presents itself as confirming the Torah and the Gospels. It is not surprising, therefore, that there are many similarities between the scriptures of these three religions. There are also intriguing differences. Abraham, the father of Ishmael, is revered as a patriarch, prophet and traveler in Islam, Christianity and Judaism. But only in the Quran does he appear as the recipient of scrolls that revealed the rewards of the afterlife. And only in the Quran does he travel all the way to Mecca, where he raises the foundations of God's house. As for Jesus, the Quran calls him the son of Mary and venerates him as the messiah, but firmly denies his divinity and challenges the belief that he died on the cross. A parable in the Gospels suggests that he will return to earth for the judgment of the nations. The Quran also assigns him a critical role in the last judgment, but specifies that he will testify against possessors of scriptures known as the People of the Book. Some of these alternative doctrines and stories might well have circulated among Jewish or Christian communities in Late Antiquity, but they cannot be found in either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. The differences matter if salvation depends on having faith in the right book. Yancy: I assume that for Islam, we were all created as finite and therefore must die. How does Islam conceptualize the inevitability of death? Halevi: The Quran assures us that every death, even an apparently senseless, unexpected death, springs from God's incomprehensible wisdom and providential design. God has predetermined every misfortune, having inscribed it in a book before its occurrence, and thus fixed in advance the exact term of every creature's life span. This sense of finitude only concerns the end of life as we know it on earth. If Muslims believe in the immortality of the soul and in the resurrection of the body, then they conceive of death as a transition to a different mode of existence whereby fragments of the self exist indefinitely or for as long as God sustains the existence of heaven and hell. Yancy: What does Islam teach us about what happens at the very moment that we die? I ask this question because I've heard that the soul is questioned by two angels. Halevi: This angelic visit happens right after the interment ceremony, which takes place as soon as possible after the last breath. Two terrifying angels, whose names are Munkar and Nakir, visit the deceased. In "Muhammad's Grave," I described them as "black or bluish, with long, wild, curly hair, lightning eyes, frighteningly large molars, and glowing iron staffs." And I explained that their role is to conduct an "inquisition" to determine the dead person's confession of faith. Yancy: What does Islam teach about the afterlife? For example, where do our souls go? Is there a place of eternal peace or eternal damnation? Halevi: The soul's destination between death and the resurrection depends on a number of factors. Its detachment from a physical body is temporary, for in Islamic thought a dead person, like a living person, needs both a body and a soul to be fully constituted. Humans enjoy or suffer some sort of material existence in the afterlife; they have a range of sensory experiences. Before the resurrection, they will either be confined to the grave or dwell in heaven or hell. The spirit of an ordinary Muslim takes a quick cosmic tour in the time between death and burial. It is then reunited with its own body inside the grave, where it must remain until the blowing of the trumpet. In this place, the dead person is able to hear the living visiting the grave site and feel pain. For the few who earn it, the grave itself is miraculously transformed into a bearable abode. Others, those who committed venial sins, undergo an intermittent purgatorial punishment known as the "torture of the grave." Prophets, martyrs, Muslims who committed crimes against God and irredeemable disbelievers fare either incomparably better or far, far worse. Martyrs, for instance, are admitted into Paradise right after death. But instead of dwelling there in their mutilated or bloodied bodies, they acquire new forms, maybe assuming the shape of white or green birds that have the capacity to eat fruit. Yancy: What kind of life must we live, according to Islam, to be with Allah after we die? Halevi: The answer depends on whom you ask to speak for Islam and in what context. A theologian might leave you in the dark but clarify that the goal is not the fusion of a human self with the divine being, but rather a dazzling vision of God. A mystic might tell you that the essential thing is to discipline your body and soul so that you come to experience, if only for a fleeting moment, a taste or foretaste of the divine presence. Among other things, she might teach you to seek a state of personal annihilation or extinction, where you surrender all consciousness of your own self and of your material surroundings to contemplate ecstatically the face of God. Your local imam might tell you that beyond professing your belief in the oneness of God and venerating Muhammad as the messenger of God, you ought to observe the five pillars of worship and repent for past sins. Paying your debts, giving more in charity than what is mandated and performing extra prayers could only help your chances. A jihadist in a secret chat room might promise your online persona that no matter how you lived before committing yourself to the cause, if you beg for forgiveness and die as a martyr, you will at the very least gain freedom from the torture of the grave. As a historian, I refrain from giving religious advice. Muslims have envisioned more than one path to salvation, and their ideals, which we might qualify as Islamic, have changed over time. Remember, for example, that in Late Antiquity and the Early Islamic period, ascetics engaged in prolonged fasts, mortification of the flesh and sexual renunciation for the sake of salvation. This was a compelling path back then. Now it is a memory. Yancy: If one is not a Muslim, what then? Are there consequences after death for not believing or for not being a believer? Halevi: Belief in the possible salvation of virtuous atheists and virtuous polytheists would be difficult to justify on the basis of the Muslim tradition. But there is a variety of opinions about your question among contemporary Muslims who profess to believe in heaven and hell. Exclusive monotheists, those advocating a narrow path toward salvation, say that every non Muslim who has chosen not to convert to Islam after hearing Muhammad's message is likely to burn in hell. Exceptions are made for the children of infidels who die before reaching the age of reason and for people who live in a place or time devoid of exposure to the one and only true religion. On the day of judgment, these deprived individuals will be questioned by God, who may decide to admit them into heaven. What about Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama? Will saints and spiritual leaders also meet a dire end? This is sheer speculation but I imagine that a high percentage of Muslims, if polled about their beliefs, would readily declare that nobody can fathom the depths of Allah's mercy and that righteous individuals should be saved on account of their good deeds. In the late 20th century, a few prominent Muslim intellectuals, yearning for a more inclusive and pluralistic approach to religion, drew inspiration from a Quranic verse to argue that Jews and Christians who believe in one God, affirm the doctrine of the last day and do works of righteousness will also enter Paradise. Yancy: Does Islam teach its believers not to fear death? Halevi: I am not convinced that it effectively does that. Or that teaching believers to deal with this fear is a central aim. Arguably, many religious narratives about death and the afterlife are supposed to strike dread in our hearts and thus persuade us to believe and do the right thing. Even if a believer arrogantly presumes that God will surely save him, still, he may have to face Munkar and Nakir, contend in the grave with darkness and worms, stand before God for the final judgment and cross al Sirat, the bridge over the highest level of hell. All of this sounds quite terrifying to me. What Islamic narratives do teach believers is not to protest death, especially to accept the death of loved ones with resignation, forbearance and full trust in God's wisdom and justice. Yancy: Would you share with us how the dead are to be taken care of, that is, are there specific Islamic burial rituals? Halevi: Instead of giving you a short and direct answer, I would like to reflect a little on how the current situation, the coronavirus pandemic, is making it difficult or impossible to perform some of these rites. Locally and globally, limits on communal gatherings and social distancing requirements have devastated the bereft, making it so very difficult for them to receive religious consolation for grief and loss. In every family, in every community, the death of an individual is a crisis. Funeral gatherings cannot repair the tear in the social fabric, but traditional rituals and condolences were designed to send the dead away and help the living cope and mourn. The pandemic has of course disrupted this. In Muslim cultures, the corpse is normally given a ritual washing and is then wrapped in shrouds and buried in a plot in the earth. Early on during the pandemic, concerns that the cadavers of persons who died from Covid 19 might be infectious led to many adaptations. Funeral homes had to adjust to new requirements and recommendations for minimizing contact with dead bodies. And religious authorities made clear that multiple adjustments were justified by the fear of harm. In March of 2020, to give one example, an ayatollah from Najaf, Iraq, ruled that instead of thoroughly cleaning a corpse and perfuming it with camphor, undertakers could wear gloves and perform an alternative "dry ablution" with sand or dust. And instead of insisting on the tradition of hasty burials, he ruled that it would be fine, for safety's sake, to keep corpses in refrigerators for a long while. In the city of Qom, Iran, the coronavirus reportedly led to the digging of a mass grave. It is not clear how the plots were actually used. But burying several bodies together in a single grave would not violate Islamic law. This extraordinary procedure has long been allowed during epidemics and war. By contrast, burning a human body is regarded as abhorrent and strictly forbidden. For this reason, there was an outcry over Sri Lanka's mandatory cremation of Muslim victims of the coronavirus. Every year on the 10th day of the month of Muharram, Shiites gather to lament and remember the martyrdom of al Husayn ibn Ali, the third Imam and grandson of Muhammad the Prophet. This year Ashura, as the day is known, fell in late August. It is a national holiday in several countries. Ordinarily, millions gather to participate in it. This year, some mourned in crowds, in defiance of government restrictions and clerical advice; others contemplated the tragic past from home and perhaps joined live Zoom programs to experience the day of mourning in a radically new way. It is far from clear today if, when the pandemic passes, the old ritual order will be restored or reinvented. One way or the other, there will be many tears. The previous interviews in The Stone's series on religion and death can be found here. George Yancy, a professor of philosophy at Emory University, is the author, most recently, of "Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews From an American Philosopher." Now in print: "Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments" and "The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments," with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books. 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
Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. METTE INGVARTSEN at N.Y.U. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts (Oct. 25 26, 7:30 p.m.). Two years ago, this young Danish choreographer brought "7 Pleasures" to N.Y.U., in which 12 performers frolicked naked and simulated sex with the aim of examining the boundaries of private and public sexuality. Ingvartsen returns with "To Come (Extended)," which continues her exploration of those themes. This time, dancers are clad in head to toe blue bodysuits that make them look like plastic figurines, and they constantly rearrange themselves in orgy tableaus, all in service of challenging our prudishness. There's also swing dancing. Needless to say, these performances are for mature audiences. 212 998 4941, nyuskirball.org SAM KIM at Danspace Project (Oct. 31 Nov. 2, 8 p.m.). Three years ago, Kim presented a work, "Fear in Porcelain," that challenged the idea of a solo dance for what she saw as its intrinsic narcissism. Her new dance, "Other Animal," is a solo performance, but one made in collaboration with the filmmaker Stacey Steers. Kim incorporates St. Mark's Church into the piece, using parts of its altar as frames for Steers's whimsical animations, which flicker like silent films in gray scale, with hints of muted color. Kim responds to those evocative images with her own abstract gestures and actions. 866 811 4111, danspaceproject.org SARA MEARNS AND LORI BELILOVE at the 92nd Street Y (Oct. 28, 8 p.m.). Dance fans know Mearns as an electric force at New York City Ballet, where she is a principal dancer. But in recent years, she has become a serious student of modern dance as well, performing works by Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham. In the program "Goddess of the 21st Century: Transmission of Isadora Duncan Solos," Mearns revisits her recent well received concert of Duncan pieces from 1900 to 1924, in which Mearns's typically regal persona gave way to a more probing, sensitive side. She is joined by Belilove, artistic director of the Isadora Duncan Dance Company, and the City Ballet pianist Cameron Grant for an evening of dance and discussion. The performance is sold out, but a waiting list is available. 212 415 5500, 92y.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
The average lightning strike can pack a punch. But then there are superbolts. First identified in the 1970s by satellites designed to monitor nuclear explosions, they can be thousands of times more energetic than normal lightning. But you're even less likely to be struck by one: Scientists have mined data from the roughly 80 sensors of the World Wide Lightning Location Network to study where superbolts are found. They were surprised to discover that the most powerful lightning doesn't occur in known lightning hot spots, or at times of year when lightning usually strikes. Instead, they reported last week in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, superbolts predominantly occur over open water from November through February. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Robert Holzworth, an atmospheric and space physicist at the University of Washington, and his colleagues analyzed more than 1.7 billion radio frequency observations of lightning. Focusing on only the most robust detections of lightning strikes from 2010 to 2018, Dr. Holzworth and his team tagged 8,171 superbolts above one million Joules. That's about 0.0005 percent of the lightning recorded by the lightning detection network, which he leads. "It's a tiny fraction," Dr. Holzworth said. Superbolts are so rare that even he, one of the world's foremost lightning experts, has never witnessed one firsthand.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Viola Smith, who played a giant 12 piece drum kit and was billed as the "fastest girl drummer in the world" and who wrote a widely read essay during World War II advocating for big bands to hire female musicians in place of the male ones who had been drafted died on Oct. 21 at her home in Costa Mesa, Calif. She was 107. Ms. Smith, who hailed from a little town in Wisconsin, grew up playing in a jazz band with her seven sisters. Her entrepreneurial father had conceived of the group, the Schmitz Sisters Orchestra, and they performed at state fairs and toured the vaudeville circuit. After most of her sisters left the band, Ms. Smith started another all female outfit, the Coquettes, which rose to modest national fame in the late 1930s. Ms. Smith became the first female star of jazz drumming. She performed at President Harry S. Truman's inauguration gala, and she worked with Ella Fitzgerald and Chick Webb. Her showcase tune was a jazzy arabesque called "Snake Charmer," in which she exhibited her virtuosity in a flashy solo. As the ranks of predominantly male big bands thinned out during the war, Ms. Smith published an editorial in DownBeat Magazine titled "Give Girl Musicians a Break!," urging orchestras to hire talented female musicians who were eager to fill the slots of the absent players. "Why not let the girls play in the big bands?" she wrote. "In these times of national emergency, many of the star instrumentalists of the big name bands are being drafted. Instead of replacing them with what may be mediocre talent, why not let some of the great girl musicians of the country take their places?" "There are many girl trumpet players, girl saxophonists and girl drummers who can stand the grind of long tours and exacting one night stands," she continued. "The idea of girls being able to play only legitimately is a worn out myth now." Despite Ms. Smith's impassioned argument, the big bands didn't heed her calls for inclusion. Viola Clara Schmitz was born in Mount Calvary, Wis., on Nov. 29, 1912. Her father, Nicholas, ran a tavern and a dance hall and played cornet professionally. Her mother, Louise (Steffes) Schmitz, was a homemaker. Viola grew up in a musical household with nine siblings and attended a rural schoolhouse. Ms. Smith's sisters gradually left the band to raise families or pursue other occupations, and with her remaining bandmate, Mildred, she formed a new all female ensemble, billed as Frances Carroll (the frontwoman) and the Coquettes. Their picture appeared on the cover of Billboard magazine, and they performed in a Warner Bros. musical short. Mildred eventually also got married, and Ms. Smith became the last sister standing. The bright lights of New York, and the hot jazz coming out of the nightclubs on 52nd Street, called out to Ms. Smith, and she headed to the big city with her drumsticks. Opportunity abounded for her in New York. She studied timpani at the Juilliard School and played with the snare drum virtuoso Billy Gladstone at Radio City Music Hall. A young Frank Sinatra chatted her up one night at a chop house. She found a studio apartment in Midtown, where she ended up living for 70 years. Ms. Smith joined Phil Spitalny's all female big band, Hour of Charm, and stayed with the group for over a decade, appearing with them in the Abbott and Costello comedy "Here Come the Co eds." Ms. Smith also made several appearances on Ed Sullivan's popular variety show and signed endorsement deals with Ludwig Drums and the Zildjian cymbal company. By the 1950s, the big band era was coming to an end. A few years after performing on Broadway as a member of the Kit Kat Band in the original 1966 production of "Cabaret," she retired. She spent the following years getting good at bridge and enjoying the wonders of a rent regulated New York apartment. When Ms. Smith discovered much later that she was being hailed as a female pioneer of drumming, the news surprised her. "It's all amazing to me what I see now on the internet," she told Tom Tom, a drumming magazine, in 2013. "Everything comes as a great surprise. I'm very thankful that I'm accepted as a girl drummer because, one time, there was no such thing." Ms. Smith moved to Southern California in 2012 and lived there on a Christian commune in Costa Mesa, largely composed of older women, called the Piecemakers. The origins of the group, which operates a country store that sells homemade quilts and crafts, date to the 1960s. Earlier this year, the writer Emma Starer Gross visited Costa Mesa to interview Ms. Smith for The LAnd Magazine. Musing on her longevity, Ms. Smith said, "Maybe it's the drums that have kept me spry, or the wine, or going to the casino." The article described a trip Ms. Smith had taken a few years earlier to a Guitar Center with some Piecemaker friends to pick up musical equipment. A young woman helped them out, paying little notice to that petite centenarian. As it happened, Tom Tom magazine had recently run a piece about Ms. Smith, and that very issue was sitting on the shop's counter. When the young employee started flipping through the magazine, and one of Ms. Smith's friends casually mentioned the article, she quickly became star struck. "You're Viola Smith?" she said. "Every woman drummer knows who you are."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Millions of American Christians are likely to vote for President Trump on Tuesday because they believe it a religious obligation to support a president who will appoint "pro life" judges. But as I've observed before, there is an incipient rethinking underway in evangelical and Catholic circles about what it means to be "pro life," and let me try to add to that ferment. For the truth is that the litmus test approach to abortion on the part of many conservative Christians is anomalous, both religiously and historically. Historically, evangelical Christians supported allowing abortions in some situations, such as rape or the well being of the mother or family. Christianity Today, the newspaper founded by Billy Graham, held a symposium in 1968 that endorsed a right to some abortions. The National Association of Evangelicals and the Southern Baptist Convention both backed a limited right to abortion in the early 1970s, and an article in The Baptist Press welcomed the ruling in Roe v. Wade for advancing "religious liberty, human equality and justice." A 1970 poll found that about two thirds of Southern Baptist pastors supported allowing abortion in cases such as rape, deformity or a risk to the mother's physical or mental well being. So much has changed! Today the issue is infused with absolutism and is the paramount concern of many conservatives, and that's one reason Amy Coney Barrett is now a justice on the Supreme Court. What mattered to "pro life" Republicans more than respect for norms or institutions was getting justices confirmed who might overturn Roe v. Wade. And many support Trump, despite reservations about him, because their be all issue is the unborn. I'm pro choice, but I'm no more likely to change their minds than they are to change mine. So let me simply pose questions in hopes of sparking a dialogue. Why do so many see fervent opposition to any abortion as a religious dictate when the Bible never directly discusses abortion? Jesus talks a great deal about helping the poor and healing the sick, so I could understand a religiously driven passion for public health or for universal health coverage, but he never evinced an interest in the unborn. The biblical passage most relevant to abortion is perhaps Exodus 21:22: "When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined." That suggests that the Bible treats a fetal life as less than a human life. Probably for that reason, translations used by evangelicals often refer to a premature birth rather than a miscarriage. Amy Jill Levine, a Vanderbilt University scholar and co author of a new book, "The Bible With and Without Jesus," tells me that the original Hebrew is ambiguous. In any case, why the obsessive focus on abortion today when Christian thought for most of the last two millenniums was not deeply concerned with the topic? Abortion was legal in the United States up to the point of quickening (the fetal movements felt in the second trimester) until the 19th century, when states began to ban abortion. Abortion opponents counter that what changed was science: We now understand that a fetus before quickening is not inert. "Thou shalt not kill" should apply, they say, to a zygote, and not solely for religious reasons. But science also shows that up to half of zygotes never implant and establish a pregnancy, and we don't mourn those zygotes or establish national commissions to improve zygote survival. Another question: If the aim is to reduce abortions, why not treat the issue as a matter of public health? One particularly effective way to reduce abortions is to reduce unintended pregnancies through free access to long acting reliable contraceptives. Partly because Obamacare covers contraception, the number of abortions in the United States has plunged to its lowest level since Roe v. Wade, including in states that support a woman's right to an abortion. If you're troubled by abortions, shouldn't you thank President Barack Obama for reducing them? Then there are the tangled cases that cry out for the nuance that the "pro life" community historically appreciated. When a pregnant woman has a fetus with Potter syndrome destined to die in pain soon after birth, is it really for outsiders to force the mom to continue with the pregnancy? Senator Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, recently became the first sitting senator to share his story of an abortion. In the 1980s, his then wife, Heidi, was pregnant with their second child when Heidi's amniotic sac broke. The fetus could not survive, and doctors told them to await a miscarriage but it didn't happen, and Heidi's health deteriorated. The hospital refused to perform an abortion, Peters told Elle magazine. In the end, another hospital agreed to perform an emergency abortion that saved Heidi's uterus and possibly her life.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
A MAXIMIZED Mini, a Hyundai sport coupe with an extra door, a gullwing Kia minivan the creators of some notable designs at this year's Detroit auto show seemed determined to offer more for less. And for once, more for less wasn't just a pitch from the marketing teams and powertrain engineers. Car designers are promising more space within less length. In conversations on the show floor, "efficiency" was perhaps the most common word they used. Their latest designs reflect an attitude forged in response to a recession and lowered economic expectations, colored by anticipation of 4 or 5 gasoline and stricter fuel economy rules. Rather than inhibit designers, this new austerity seems to have inspired them. Embracing the box is also a metaphor for celebrating limits in expectations and in lifestyles. "A minivan is a box," Mr. Schreyer conceded, before noting what it had in common with a touchstone of chic. "But an iPhone is a box, too." The KV7 cleverly modulates its boxiness with a graceful bend at the rearmost side windows. This trick picks up on the tiger mouth grille, a characteristic of Kia's new design language. Mr. Schreyer said the KV7 was also about celebrating a time (the 1960s) when vans were groovy "before minivan became a stigma." But the designer resists another set of boxes the confining categories like minivan or S.U.V. into which vehicles are expected to fit neatly. "Designers work hard to create something that is not just another sedan or another S.U.V.," he said in an interview. "But marketing people and journalists want to know what to compare it to." Mr. Schreyer said new vehicles shouldn't be limited by old labels. And while he says he doesn't think new vehicle types should be packed into old boxes, he doesn't have a problem with the word minivan. But over at Ford, the M word still seems to carry a stigma of dull domesticity. At the company's display, a huge sign above its C Max proclaims it is a "clever compact family vehicle." With a relatively small footprint and sliding side doors, the C Max is an example like the Mazda 5 of a type of smaller, more efficient van popular in Europe. "Is this a minivan?" I asked the product specialist on the show floor. "No," she said, becoming flustered. "It's, well goodness, what do they call it?" Whatever you call it, the C Max offers maximum space for its length, with seven seats in a vehicle only three inches longer than a compact Focus sedan. In the same vein, Toyota is adding cargo space to its hybrid line. It introduced the Prius V, a longer wagonlike version that will be one of the offerings on its new Goldilocks menu of Priuses. More space is similarly a virtue at Mini, whose Paceman concept is hard to categorize. Billed as a crossover coupe, the Paceman suggests how Minis are likely to evolve. To counter the vehicle's increased height, darkened roof support pillars and a white top emphasize its horizontal lines, said Adrian van Hooydonk, who as design chief of all BMW brands watches over Mini. He also noted that the Paceman's horizontal taillights reverse the vertical format of previous Minis. Michael Warsaw, vice president for industrial design at Johnson Controls, said if there were a new phrase or category a new box that sums up these efficient designs it might be "small tall." He used the phrase to refer to compact ("B segment") vehicles whose size and shape resembled the Kia Soul and Nissan Juke. These may be the forerunners of many others, Mr. Warsaw suggested. With batteries filling their floors, electric vehicles are also likely to grow upward in the small tall pattern. Mr. Van Hooydonk said that description would fit BMW's coming Megacity electric car. Hyundai's Curb concept vehicle explores the small tall terrain with a vision of urban toughness rather than off road roughness. Hyundai calls its creation a compact urban activity vehicle. What does the name Curb signify? Curb crawler? Curb hopper? "Curb Your Enthusiasm"? I asked Phil Zak, head of the California studio where the Curb was designed. He said the inspiration was the curb of city streets a stepping stone to urban nightlife. The Curb was at home, he suggested, among "nightclubs and potholes." But interior space is the key to the concept. Mr. Zak showed how the center opening doors gaped wide to expose a cavernous interior. Even the Curb's stablemate, the Hyundai Veloster three door coupe that goes on sale next summer, is as much about efficient use of space as about sporty driving, Mr. Zak said. "The third door makes it easier to get in the rear seat," he said. Designers have concluded that younger drivers like to bring friends along. They want a real rear seat because, research suggests, they are more group oriented. The Curb addresses the difficulties of making efficiency appear sporty and making small tall seem dynamic. Its trick is to blend space efficiency with flowing lines. The Curb shares its design language not just with the Veloster, but also with the new Sonata and Elantra sedans. Yet it is strikingly different. This year's Detroit show hints that design may be moving out of an expressionist period when dynamic lines like the Sonata's convey speed and agility. In its place, designers are looking for efficiency, inside and out. Proving that efficiency can come from sleek, streamlined shapes is the Ford Vertrek crossover concept. This lightly disguised prototype for the next Escape (or Kuga, as it is called in Europe) was one of the most graceful designs at the show. J Mays, the Ford vice president in charge of design, said the Vertrek was developed with a design language the company called Kinetic 2.0, whose lines suggested power and motion. The Vertrek not only has more interior volume than the Escape, its aerodynamic efficiency is 5 percent better. Doing small tall well, Mr. Warsaw said, required "inspired efficiency," a company slogan for its designs. Johnson Controls supplies parts, instrument panels, seats and entire interiors to car companies around the world. The ie:3, whose ideas and technology could be reflected in production cars as early as 2015, is about the size and shape of a Kia Soul, its clear inspiration. Inside is futuristic technology: electric propulsion, lightweight natural materials and a better touch screen interface. But above all, Mr. Warsaw said, the ie:3 was about space. He showed the clever way the front passenger seat folded flat and how the rear seats even in such a short vehicle reclined for comfort. The future, he said, was about using interior space efficiently. Perhaps less can still be more.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
SAN FRANCISCO Apple has long positioned the iPhone as a secure device that only its owner can open. That has led to battles with law enforcement officials who want to get information off them, including a well publicized showdown with the F.B.I. in 2016 after Apple refused to help open the locked iPhone of a mass killer. The F.B.I. eventually paid a third party to get into the phone, circumventing the need for Apple's help. Since then, law enforcement agencies across the country have increasingly employed that strategy to get into locked iPhones they hope will hold the key to cracking cases. Now Apple is closing the technological loophole that let authorities hack into iPhones, angering police and other officials and reigniting a debate over whether the government has a right to get into the personal devices that are at the center of modern life. Apple said it was planning an iPhone software update that would effectively disable the phone's charging and data port the opening where users plug in headphones, power cables and adapters an hour after the phone is locked. While a phone can still be charged, a person would first need to enter the phone's password to transfer data to or from the device using the port. Such a change would hinder law enforcement officials, who have typically been opening locked iPhones by connecting another device running special software to the port, often days or even months after the smartphone was last unlocked. News of Apple's planned software update has begun spreading through security blogs and law enforcement circles and many in investigative agencies are infuriated. "If we go back to the situation where we again don't have access, now we know directly all the evidence we've lost and all the kids we can't put into a position of safety," said Chuck Cohen, who leads an Indiana State Police task force on internet crimes against children. The Indiana State Police said it unlocked 96 iPhones for various cases this year, each time with a warrant, using a 15,000 device it bought in March from a company called Grayshift. But privacy advocates said Apple would be right to fix a security flaw that has become easier and cheaper to exploit. "This is a really big vulnerability in Apple's phones," said Matthew D. Green, a professor of cryptography at Johns Hopkins University. A Grayshift device sitting on a desk at a police station, he said, "could very easily leak out into the world." In an email, an Apple spokesman, Fred Sainz, said the company is constantly strengthening security protections and fixes any vulnerability it finds in its phones, partly because criminals could also exploit the same flaws that law enforcement agencies use. "We have the greatest respect for law enforcement, and we don't design our security improvements to frustrate their efforts to do their jobs," he said. Apple and Google, which make the software in nearly all of the world's smartphones, began encrypting their mobile software by default in 2014. Encryption scrambles data to make it unreadable until accessed with a special key, often a password. That frustrated police and prosecutors who could not pull data from smartphones, even with a warrant. The friction came into public view after the F.B.I. could not access the iPhone of a gunman who, along with his wife, killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in late 2015. A federal judge ordered Apple to figure out how to open the phone, prompting Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, to respond with a blistering 1,100 word letter that said the company refused to compromise its users' privacy. "The implications of the government's demands are chilling," he wrote. The two sides fought in court for a month. Then the F.B.I. abruptly announced that it had found an undisclosed group to get into the phone, paying at least 1.3 million because the hacking techniques were not common then. An inspector general's report this year suggested the F.B.I. should have exhausted more options before it took Apple to court. Since then, two main companies have helped law enforcement hack into iPhones: Cellebrite, an Israeli forensics firm purchased by Japan's Sun Corporation in 2006, and Grayshift, which was founded by a former Apple engineer in 2016. Law enforcement officials said they generally send iPhones to Cellebrite to unlock, with each phone costing several thousand dollars to open. In March, Grayshift began selling a 15,000 GrayKey device that the police can use to unlock iPhones themselves. Apple has closed loopholes in the past. For years, the police used software to break into phones by simply trying every possible passcode. Apple blocked that technique in 2010 by disabling iPhones after a certain number of incorrect attempts. But the Grayshift and Cellebrite software appear to be able to disable that Apple technology, allowing their devices to test thousands of passcodes, Mr. Green said. Cellebrite declined to comment. Grayshift did not respond to requests for comment. Opening locked iPhones through these methods has become more common, law enforcement officials said. Federal authorities, as well as large state and local police departments, typically have access to the tools, while smaller local agencies enlist the state or federal authorities to help on high profile cases, they said. Law enforcement agencies that have purchased a GrayKey device include the Drug Enforcement Administration, which bought an advanced model this year for 30,000, according to public records. Maryland's state police have one, as do police departments in Portland, Ore., and Rochester, Minn., according to records. Hillar Moore, the district attorney in Baton Rouge, La., said his office had paid Cellebrite thousands of dollars to unlock iPhones in five cases since 2017, including an investigation into the hazing related death of a fraternity pledge at Louisiana State University. He said the phones had yielded crucial information, and he was upset that Apple planned to close such a useful investigative avenue. "They are blatantly protecting criminal activity, and only under the guise of privacy for their clients," he said. Michael Sachs, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, said his office uses workarounds he declined to specify which to access locked iPhones several times a week. That has helped solve a series of cases in recent months, including by getting into an iPhone to find videos of a suspect sexually assaulting a child. The man was convicted this year. In the first 10 months of 2017, the Manhattan district attorney's office said it had recovered and obtained warrants or consent to search 702 locked smartphones, two thirds of which were iPhones. Smartphones running Google's Android software have been generally easier to access, partly because many older devices lack encryption. The encryption on smartphones applies only to data stored solely on the phone. Companies like Apple and Google regularly give law enforcement officials access to the data that consumers back up on their servers, such as via Apple's iCloud service. Apple said that since 2013, it has responded to more than 55,000 requests from the United States government seeking information about more than 208,000 devices, accounts or financial identifiers. The tussle over encrypted iPhones and opening them to help law enforcement is unlikely to simmer down. Federal officials have renewed a push for legislation that would require tech companies like Apple to provide the police with a backdoor into phones, though they were recently found to be overstating the number of devices they could not access. Apple probably won't make it any easier for the police if not forced by Congress, given that it has made the privacy and security of iPhones a central selling point. But the company has complied with local laws that conflict with its privacy push. In China, for instance, Apple recently began storing its Chinese customers' data on Chinese run servers because of a new law there.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
LONDON The Royal Ballet has suspended Liam Scarlett, its artist in residence, after accusations of sexual misconduct involving students at the Royal Ballet School. The company was made aware of the accusations against Mr. Scarlett in August, it said in an emailed statement on Thursday. Mr. Scarlett was suspended immediately and an investigation is ongoing, the statement added. The accusations were first reported by The Times of London on Wednesday night. Mr. Scarlett, who was heralded as a "choreographic wonder boy of British ballet," has created work for the New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theater and Miami City Ballet, among others. The impact of the accusations is already spreading beyond Britain. On Thursday, the Queensland Ballet in Australia suspended Mr. Scarlett, an artistic associate of the company, and canceled its planned productions of his ballet "Dangerous Liaisons," The Australian newspaper reported. According to The Times of London, Mr. Scarlett, 33, is accused of inappropriate behavior with male students at the school, including encouraging them to send him nude photos. Citing anonymous sources, the newspaper said the Royal Ballet's inquiry heard that dancers who accepted Mr. Scarlett's advances, or didn't complain about them, were given better roles. The Times of London also said it had spoken with a former student who said Mr. Scarlett shared "sexual messages" with him through Facebook. The student was 18 at the time, two years above the age of consent in Britain, the newspaper said. "I'm speaking out because he should not be allowed to continue working with students," the dancer, who was not named, said, according to the newspaper. The Times of London also said the inquiry was also looking at accusations that Mr. Scarlett bullied dancers in the Royal Ballet's main company. Mr. Scarlett's agent did not respond to requests for a comment on Thursday. The accusations are the latest sexual misconduct scandal to hit the ballet world. In 2017, Marcelo Gomes resigned from the American Ballet Theater after he was accused of sexual misconduct. Just months later, Peter Martins, the leader of New York City Ballet, retired after accusations of abuse were made against him. (A company investigation did not corroborate the accusations, which Mr. Martins denied.) Last year, an arbitrator ordered New York City Ballet to reinstate two male dancers it had fired after they were accused of sharing sexually explicit photos of female dancers. "It's embarrassing that after all these allegations around the world nothing seems to have been done about such behavior," said Jonathan Gray, editor of Dancing Times, in a telephone interview. The accusations against Mr. Scarlett had been known about in London ballet circles "for several months," Mr. Gray said, but he had not expected the news to become public until the investigation was completed. The news was embarrassing for the Royal Ballet, he said, but it was also potentially "a really big problem for the Royal Ballet School," he added, if it turns out the school had allowed students to come into contact with someone accused of misbehavior. "We became aware this week that the investigation into Liam Scarlett may relate to some of our former pupils," the Royal Ballet School said in a statement on Thursday. "We will, of course, be offering our full cooperation to the investigation team, but since the inquiry is still underway we are unable to comment further at this stage." Mr. Scarlett attended the school from age 11, graduating into the Royal Ballet in 2005. His choreographic breakthrough came just five years later with "Asphodel Meadows," which played on the Royal Opera House's main stage. Reviewing the work in The Guardian, the dance critic Judith Mackrell said that "In Liam Scarlett, the Royal may have found the real deal." Mr. Scarlett was just 24 at the time; commissions from the Miami City Ballet and other companies soon followed. He became the Royal Ballet's first artist in residence in 2012, allowing him to concentrate full time on choreography, and he has had a string of hits since, most notably in 2018, when he made a "Swan Lake" for the company. Last May, the Royal Ballet announced a new work by Mr. Scarlett would receive its world premiere in February 2020. That production was postponed in August, the same month Mr. Scarlett was suspended. But other works by Mr. Scarlett are scheduled to be performed at the Royal Opera House soon. The Royal Ballet is set to perform his "Swan Lake" which Roslyn Sulcas, writing in The New York Times, called "respectful, tasteful" from March 5 through May 16. The entire run is sold out. It is also set to perform a triple bill including a work by Mr. Scarlett in June.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
For the past 36 years, Canyon Ranch in Arizona has had reputation as a desert getaway where guests enjoyed deep tissue massages and seminars about "the power of possibility." Now, the resort in Tucson is taking a turn toward tassels. For five days this summer, (June 8 to 12), the burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese will lead sultry sessions on empowerment that may involve taking off one's clothes. "We've never done anything like this before," said Sheryl Press, Canyon Ranch's director of public relations and the co creator of Sensuality and the Art of the Tease. "I'm confident it will be a huge success." The agenda will include activities like a FitStrip class, complete with tips on how to remove a garter and gloves, along with mastering the "Burlesque Strut" "a classic confident walk," said Ms. Von Teese.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Both elated and deflated by the news that a friend's expecting triplets, Susan initiates a marriage counseling session with a therapist, Judy Small (Michaela Watkins). Couples therapy becomes family therapy, then Judy starts seeing Bob and Susan separately and giving them dangerously contradictory advice. Judy, as it happens, is a rogue doctor. A former colleague (David Paymer) seeks her out to try to stop her narcissism fueled manipulations, but Judy's got her hooks in. Judy baits Susan with questions like, "Are you not aware that your husband is an exceedingly attractive man?" Bob, emboldened by Judy, engages in productive flirtation with a very game colleague, played by the former Dallas Cowboy cheerleader Sarah Shahi. Corddry has never had it so good in a movie as he does here. As the picture winds down into an extremely (not to put too fine a point on it) plain variation on "Fatal Attraction," one's inclination to question its implausibility diminishes as well. The movie's technical competence very few low to mid budget indie productions boast so many immaculately lit shots is commendable. But it also has the probably unwanted effect of preparing the viewer for the inevitable tidiness of the narrative's conclusion. "Bad Therapy" is the cinematic equivalent of lukewarm water. Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
It may be unpleasant to contemplate the ultimate fate of all the material from your own body that you flush down the pipes. But it's time we talk about biosolids the disinfected leftovers from the water treatment process. This sandy material contains nutrient rich organic content that's good for agriculture. But it also makes nice bricks, according to Abbas Mohajerani, a civil engineer at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in Australia. He's talking about the kind we use for building. "Biosolids bricks look the same, smell the same and have similar physical and mechanical properties as normal fired clay bricks," he said. And as long as it's done locally, he thinks that recycling stockpiles of leftover biosolids into bricks could save land and energy, and reduce carbon emissions. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Worldwide, humans produce vast quantities of biosolids. In a single day, New York City alone makes 1200 tons, or about 50 truckloads. And the amount of biosolids is growing as populations expand around the planet. The old solution was to dump them into the sea or a landfill. But more treatment plants and stricter regulations are prompting people to find clever ways to recycle the dried sludge. About 50 to 70 percent of it is now used, mostly to boost soil quality or fertilize crops. But the rest remains unused or stockpiled. In the United States, it's estimated that nearly a third of the 7 to 8 million tons of biosolids produced each year still end up in landfills. As organic particles in the waste decompose, greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide escape and can contribute to global warming. And then there are bricks. The world makes trillions of them each year. The soil it takes to make them is enough to fill 1,000 holes, each as big as a soccer field and nearly as deep as The Empire State Building is tall. And it takes a lot of energy, too. Other researchers have tried mixing bricks with biosolids and other waste products. Dr. Mohajerani had experimented already with cigarette butts. So turning waste into a building material didn't seem so far fetched. Over the course of half a decade, he and a team of researchers collected biosolids from two wastewater treatment plants in Melbourne and mixed them with soil to make hybrid bricks of varying proportions. They fired them for 10 hours, at nearly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and cooled them, then compared them in tests to normal bricks. The team's findings, published earlier this month in the journal Buildings, ranked the biosolid bricks similar in quality to those currently on the market. And the researchers proposed that incorporating just 15 percent biosolids into all the bricks made around the world each year would eliminate all of our leftovers. Depending on the amount of biosolids used, how they were treated and how long they sat around, the biosolid bricks were safe, durable and in some ways energy efficient. Because organic material burns up when placed in a furnace, biosolid bricks require as little as half the energy to fire as normal bricks do (depending on how much organic material is in the bricks). The burned organic material also leaves behind spaces in the biosolid bricks, making them lighter, more porous and filled with gas. And because gases are poor thermal conductors, heat passes through biosolid bricks more slowly. That makes them better insulators, which could result in savings on heating and cooling costs, Dr. Mohajerani said. But the trade off is strength. Although biosolid bricks met industry requirements, they were typically not as sturdy as regular bricks. In a related analysis of the potential production process, the research team determined that making bricks with biosolids would be better for the environment overall, even though biosolid bricks require more water and could produce other forms of pollution. To limit the carbon footprint and ensure sustainability, brick production ideally would take place close to treatment plants and biosolids stockpiles, said Dr. Mohajerani. "Otherwise, I don't think it is likely on a large scale in the near future." Want more Australia coverage and discussion? Join us in our Facebook group, sign up for the weekly Australia Letter and start your day with the Australian Morning Briefing.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
After three weeks in session, the United States Senate emptied out again on Friday, as lawmakers fled Washington for the Memorial Day recess. They left without even pretending to tackle the next round of coronavirus relief. This is how the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, wants it. Many Republicans, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, are reluctant to embrace more government spending, so Mr. McConnell is taking a wait and see approach. The Democratic led House passed a 3 trillion relief package on May 15. That bill was imperfect but it was something. Mr. McConnell, on the other hand, has repeatedly said he's in no hurry for the Senate to offer its own proposal. He has put talks on an indefinite pause, saying he wants to see how the economy responds to previous relief measures. The Senate may get around to putting together a plan when it reconvenes next month. Or perhaps it will in July. This course of inaction is unsustainable. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, warned this week that the economic damage from the pandemic could stretch through the end of next year. Over the past nine weeks, new jobless claims have hit nearly 39 million, and the official unemployment rate is expected to approach 20 percent this month. Behind these numbers are real people suffering significant hardship. The Senate's sluggish response in addressing this suffering has begun to discomfit even some of Mr. McConnell's fellow Republicans.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Mike Birbiglia has been unafraid to deal with interruptions to "The New One," his solo show on Broadway. Mike Birbiglia was just a few minutes into his one man Broadway show the other night when he spotted the woman in the front row, pecking away at her cellphone. He stopped his storytelling, walked toward her seat and addressed her from the stage. "A little housekeeping here: Maybe don't text," he said, before pointing out the obvious: He could see her, and her phone. Midway through the show, he saw a patron pointing a camera at him from the mezzanine. "I can see you videotaping," he said. Then, ruefully, he mused that in the future, theater might just consist of actors on a stage, staring at a sea of screens. "The New One," Mr. Birbiglia's well reviewed comedy about fatherhood, has been running only since Oct. 25, but already he's had several run ins with cellphone users, whose devices have at times gone off during intensely personal moments of revelation. His show is not alone: The sound of a ringtone or the sight of a glowing screen is a regular occurrence on Broadway, as in every other corner of the culture. But Mr. Birbiglia, because he is playing a version of himself and engages with the audience, is able to respond directly, and he does. In an interview on Tuesday, he talked about how he is managing the interruptions; he also provided audio clips of several interactions. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. How often have you had to call someone out for using their cellphone during a show? It's weird it's happened four out of the last five shows. People think I like it because I have jokes for it, but it's literally just years of battle armor road calluses built up from dealing with inappropriate audience behavior. How do you figure out what to say? I talked to Steve Martin about this once he's obviously a genius at dealing with audiences and he says the best way to respond to something happening in the audience is honestly, which is what I try to do. I basically try to bring people into my head as it's happening, which is to say: "O.K. guys, we all know this inappropriate thing has happened. We're all witness to it. We're not going to skewer the person because that's not in the spirit of theater, or kindness, but we're going to acknowledge it so that it doesn't ruin the shared experience we're all attempting to achieve together." And then you've got to get the story back on track. There is some school of thought that you should be furious or indignant or tell the person to screw off, but I don't think that that's quite right for a few reasons. One, it's probably an honest mistake there's 1,000 people in the room, and there's bound to be someone who had a lot going on in their day and it just escapes them and their head is jumbled or whatever and so to scream at somebody in a situation like that doesn't feel quite right. And with my show, the calibration of whether the audience likes me or doesn't like me is very delicate my character does things wrong and does things that are questionable and does things that the audience might not agree with so if I went nuts and said "You are a disgusting menace," people would be like, "You know, I don't think I like him too much." How does the audience react when you call someone out? The audience loves it. It's a selfish thing to let your phone go. And so when someone calls that out, and says, "Hey, maybe this isn't the best time," it's fun for the audience.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
An early moment in "Shawn Mendes: In Wonder" shows its pop heartthrob subject in the shower. You've seen this one before: a man in the raw, ready to reveal himself to the world. And so Mendes does, kind of, in the fragmented, glossy pieces of this coming of age tour doc that seeks to expand our understanding of where he is, where he's come from and where he's headed. The music video director Grant Singer's Netflix feature captures the pop sensation at a complicated time full of teen idol dualities, as he reconciles his explosive music career with his not so private life. He admits to longing for the mundanities of small town life as an Ontario nobody, where he could just get high, eat beef jerky, kick back and stare at the stars with his friends. But the purity of what made him the global somebody he is today performing covers of pop songs on Vine as a young teen is now disrupted by superstardom. His life as captured by Singer involves swarms of tween girls and boys pouring their adoring tears all over him. And when he can't perform a gig in Brazil because he has laryngitis, he beats himself up for disappointing 40,000 fans. All this pressure catches up to Mendes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
"Flights" is narrated by a nameless female traveler who is not so unlike the author herself. "The narrator is partly me and sometimes something more than me," Ms. Tokarczuk said. The Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk had to wait until she was 28 to receive a passport and make her first trip abroad. Like many Poles, Ms. Tokarczuk (pronounced To KAR chook) rejoiced when over 40 years of Soviet induced international isolation finally came to an end. The destination was hardly an exotic one East Germany in 1990 but it signaled the beginning of Ms. Tokarczuk's love affair with travel and a delectable way of writing about it that continues to evolve. In May, Ms. Tokarczuk won the Man Booker International Prize for her novel "Flights," which treats travel as a uniquely corporeal experience. "Flights" is made up of 116 vignettes both fiction and nonfiction ranging from a Polish man's desperate search for his wife and child after they disappear during a vacation in Croatia, to a historical account of Chopin's heart being smuggled into Warsaw beneath his sister's skirt. Critics have compared Ms. Tokarczuk's nonlinear novels and short stories, which are often punctuated by mysterious maps and diagrams, to the work of celebrated European authors like W.G. Sebald and Milan Kundera. With "Flights," Ms. Tokarczuk, 56, became the first Polish writer to win the British prize which is now awarded annually to a book in English language translation. The Polish born British writer Lisa Appiganesi, who chaired the judging, commended Ms. Tokarczuk's novel for its narrative voice "which moves from wit and gleeful mischief to real emotional texture." "Flights," which sold over 160,000 hardcover copies when it was published in Poland in 2007 and won the country's prestigious Nike Award, is being released in the United States by Riverhead Books on Aug. 14. A Dozen Years Ago, When the World Was Different In a recent Skype interview Ms. Tokarczuk said that when she began writing "Flights," more than a dozen years ago, she set out to describe a world very different from the one we are living in now. "I wrote this book when the world was looking to be open for everybody," she said. "Now we're seeing how the European Union will probably become weakened by the policies of countries like Poland and Hungary, which are focused on their borders once again." Speaking from her home in Wroclaw in southwestern Poland, Ms. Tokarczuk also referenced President Trump's plan to build a wall on the United States border with Mexico. "Twelve years ago there was no mention of the idea of walls or borders, which were originally adopted by totalitarian systems," she said. "Back then I must admit that I was sure that we had put totalitarianism behind us." Ms. Tokarczuk's first book was a volume of poetry ("Cities in Mirrors") published in Poland in 1989. She has since gone on to write eight novels and two short story collections, which have made her a literary celebrity in her native country. Many of these such as her breakthrough novel "Primeval and Other Times," which was published in Poland in 1996 have been written in the picaresque tradition and reflect the upheavals of Polish history. "Flights" is not her only book to be translated into English, but it is the first one to establish her international reputation. Its journey to translation owed everything to the persistence of its American translator Jennifer Croft who spent 10 years speaking to editors and publishing excerpts from the book in magazines like N 1 and Bomb. Ms. Croft, who received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to do the translation, eventually convinced the rising British independent publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions to gamble on "Flights," which was released in Britain in 2017 to glowing reviews. "A lot of 'Flights' is about forging human connections and considering the other," Ms. Croft said also via Skype. "So I think it happened to hit in the U.K. at a good moment right after Brexit, and I think probably that the reception in the U.S. is going to be similar." Ms. Tokarczuk, who worked for several years as a clinical psychologist after graduating from the University of Warsaw in 1985, spent time traveling alone during the period when she wrote "Flights." "I had just gotten divorced and had a huge need to change my life," she said. "I found that traveling on my own created a different state of mind because when you travel with your partner or a friend there is an endless tendency to exchange information, feelings and associations." "We Don't Travel in Such a Linear Way Anymore." While roaming Europe and Asia, Ms. Tokarczuk kept a logbook of her experiences but decided it was impossible to write a linear book of memoirs about traveling. "I realized that we don't travel in such a linear way anymore but rather jump from one point to another and back again," she said. "So I got this idea for a 'constellation' novel recounting experiences that were separate from each other but could still be connected on different psychological, physical and political levels." Ms. Tokarczuk likened herself to a tailor making a dress. "The dress is beautiful and comfortable to wear," she said. "But like the reader, the person who wears it is not expected to know precisely how all the materials that make it are connected." When Ms. Tokarczuk finished writing "Flights" she gathered all her pages and spent a week studying them spread out on the floor of her living room. "It was funny because I had to climb onto a table to see how they looked from a high vantage point," she said. "I trusted my intuition to find the book's order, and I wouldn't change anything now." "Flights" is narrated by a nameless female traveler who is not so unlike the author herself. "The narrator is partly me and sometimes something more than me," Ms. Tokarczuk said. What is the Booker Prize? The Booker Prize is awarded each year to the best novel written in English and published in Britain or Ireland. Learn more about the six novels shortlisted this year: Damon Galgut, "The Promise": This year's Booker Prize winner is a bleakly funny portrait of a white family confronting the seismic rumbles of a changing South Africa. Anuk Arudpragasam, "A Passage North": The most recent novel by the Sri Lankan author traces a journey across a country reeling from a decades long conflict. Patricia Lockwood, "No One Is Talking About This": In her latest work, Patricia Lockwood draws on a painful, private experience to explore the chaotic feel of the internet. Nadifa Mohamed, "The Fortune Men": The British Somali writer tells the real life story of a Somali sailor in Wales falsely accused of murder. Richard Powers, "Bewilderment": The Pulitzer winner's new book follows a man searching for life in the cosmos while raising a child. Maggie Shipstead, "Great Circle": "Great Circle" is a tale of two women an orphan who survived a sinking ship and the actress set to play her onscreen. As part of her research for "Flights" she enrolled at a university in Amsterdam to study the history of anatomy. Her narrator is obsessed by "trailing the errors and blunders of creation." So naturally "Flights" is full of fascinating excursions to dusty waxwork museums and laboratories where flayed bodies and anomalous human life forms are on display. More Translations of Her Books Are Planned If there is a central character in "Flights" then it is the human body, which is built to suffer. "It's a very delicate vehicle that we have to travel through the world with and through time," Ms. Tokarczuk said. In "Flights" "the bodies in motion" often belong to those on the fragile margins of society: an alcoholic ferry conductor with a penchant for "Moby Dick," or a frantic single mother who decides to abandon her home and child. "This is something you can find in my other books too," Ms. Tokarczuk said. "Reality is like a doughnut: Everything that is good and funny and juicy is outside the center, which is just emptiness." Since "Flights" won the Man Booker prize, Fitzcarraldo has begun to ramp up other translations of Ms. Tokarczuk's books. Foremost among these is "The Books of Jacob," another winner of the Nike Award, which is scheduled to be released in Britain, in an English language translation by Ms. Croft, in August 2019. This historical novel exploring the life of Jacob Frank, the Polish leader of a heretical Jewish splinter group that converted to Islam and then Catholicism, ranges nomadically across the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires. Its message of tolerance caused a certain amount of consternation when it was published in Poland in 2014. "It's about the freedom of not only changing the places you live in but also your culture and identity," Ms. Tokarczuk said of her latest novel. "I think the deepest level of our freedom is being able to change our identity."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
As for me, I wander down to the small stream at the ridge on the farm's edge, remembering my father's stories of rising up early to feed the cows and my mother's memories of the sweat on her brow from hours of picking coffee at a local plantation. Life here juxtaposes itself profoundly against the life I live in America; the scourge of poverty and flickering prosperity that never seem to coalesce. But these are the two worlds I have inherited, and my existence in one is not possible without the other. At the stream, I recollect my other life beyond this place. In America, I watch my father come home every night, beaten yet resilient from another day of hard work on the road. He sits me and my sister down, and though weary eyed, he manages the soft smile I know him for and asks about our day. My sister is quick to oblige, speaking wildly of learning and mischief. In that moment, I realize that she is too young to remember our original home: the old dust of barren apartment walls and the constant roar outside of life in the nighttime. Soon after, I find myself lying in bed, my thoughts and the soft throb of my head the only audible things in the room. I ponder whether my parents dregs floating across a diasporic sea before my time would have imagined their sacrifices for us would come with sharp pains in their backs and newfound worries, tear soaked nights and early mornings. But, it is too much to process. Instead, I dream of them and the future I will build with the tools they have given me. Realizing I have mused far too long by the water's edge, I begin to make my way back to the house. The climb up the ridge is taxing, so I carefully grip the soil beneath me, feeling its warmth surge between my fingers. Finally, I see my younger cousins running around barefoot endlessly and I decide to join their game of soccer, but they all laugh at the awkwardness of the ball between my feet. They play, scream and chant, fully unaware of the world beyond this village or even Nairobi, but I cannot blame them. My iPhone fascinates them and they ask to see my braces, intently questioning how many "shillings" they cost. I open my mouth to satisfy their curiosity, but my grandmother calls out, and we all rush to see what she has made. " While I then associated my conquests with 'being a better boy,' I now realize what I was really working toward was becoming a better farmer. " I always assumed my father wished I had been born a boy. Now, please don't assume that my father is some rampant rural sexist. The fact is, when you live in an area and have a career where success is largely determined by your ability to provide and maintain nearly insurmountable feats of physical labor, you typically prefer a person with a bigger frame. When I was younger, I liked green tractors better than red tractors because that was what my father drove, and I preferred black and white cows over brown ones because those were the kind he raised. I wore coveralls in the winter and wore holes in my mud boots in weeks. With my still fragile masculinity, I crossed my arms over my chest when I talked to new people, and I filled my toy box exclusively with miniature farm implements. In third grade, I cut my hair very short, and my father smiled and rubbed my head. I never strove to roll smoother pie crusts or iron exquisitely stiff collars. Instead, I idolized my father's patient hands. On a cow's neck, trying to find the right vein to stick a needle in. In the strength of the grip it took to hold down an injured heifer. In the finesse with which they habitually spun the steering wheel as he backed up to the livestock trailer. And I grew to do those things myself. When on my 10th birthday I received my first show cow, a rite of passage in the Hess family, I named her Missy. As I spoke to her in an unnaturally low voice, I failed to realize one thing: Missy did not care that I was a girl. She did not think I was acting especially boyish or notice when I adamantly refused to wear pink clothing (she was colorblind anyway). And she did not blink an eyelash at her new caretaker's slightly smaller frame. All she cared about was her balanced daily feed of cottonseed and ground corn and that she got an extra pat on the head. As I sat next to her polishing her white leather show halter, she appreciated my meticulous diligence and not my sex. When Missy and I won Best of Show a few months later, my father's heart nearly exploded. I learned to stick my chest out whenever I felt proud. While I then associated my conquests with "being a better boy," I now realize what I was really working toward was becoming a better farmer. I learned I could do everything my father could do, and in some tasks, such as the taxing chore of feeding newborn calves or the herculean task of halter breaking a heifer, I surpassed him. It has taken me four years to realize this: I proved a better farmer than he in those moments, not despite my sex, but despite my invalid and ignorant assumption that the best farmer was the one with the most testosterone. My freshman year, I left the farm for boarding school, where I was surrounded by the better off and the better educated the vast majority of whom had heard the word 'feminism' before. I began to pick up just what the word meant from my antagonizing English teacher and my incisive friends' furrowed brows when I described my hometown. Four years of education and weekly argumentative essays taught me the academic jargon. I learned the Latin roots of the word "feminism," its cognates and its historical consequences. But the more I read about it in books, and the more I used it in my essays, the more I realized I already knew what it meant. I had already embodied the reality of feminism on the farm. I had lived it. My cow had taught it to me. Embracing these differences, my dad has introduced me to diverse experiences, from molding statues out of toilet paper plaster to building greenhouses from the ground up. So you might be wondering: What does he do for a traditional 9 to 5 job? He's already captained a research vessel that's navigated across the Pacific, designed three patentable wind turbines and held every position imaginable, from sous chef to Motorola technician. The answer? Nothing. He's actually a stay at home dad right now. My family is a matriarchy in a patriarchal community. Accordingly, I'm greeted with astonishment whenever I try to explain my dad's financial status. "How lazy and unmotivated he must be!" Many try to hide their surprise, but their furtive glances say it all. In a society that places economic value at the forefront of worth, these assumptions might apply to other individuals, but not to my dad. When I look at the media, whether it be the front cover of a newspaper or a featured story in a website article, I often see highlights of parents who work incredible hours and odd jobs to ensure their children receive a good upbringing. While those stories are certainly worthy of praise, they often overshadow the less visible, equally important actions of people like my dad. I realize now that my dad has sacrificed his promising career and financial pride to ensure that his son would get all of the proper attention, care and moral upbringing he needed. Through his quiet, selfless actions, my dad has given me more than can be bought from a paycheck and redefined my understanding of how we, as people, can choose to live our lives. I'm proud to say that my dad is the richest man I know rich not in capital, but in character. Infused with the ingenuity to tear down complex physics and calculus problems, electrified with the vigor of a young entrepreneur (despite beginning his fledgling windmill start up at the age of 50) and imbued with the kindness to shuttle his son to practices and rehearsals. At the end of the day, it's those traits in people that matter more to me than who they are on paper. Stories like my dad's remind me that worth can come in forms other than a six figure salary. He's an inspiration, reminding me that optimism, passion and creativity can make a difference in a life as young as mine. It's those unspoken virtues that define me. Whether it's when I fold napkin lotuses for my soup kitchen's Christmas dinner, or bake challah bread French toast sticks for my chemistry class, I'm aware that achievement doesn't have to be measured empirically. It's that entrepreneurial, self driven determination to bring ideas to life that drives me. My dad lives life off the beaten path. I, too, hope to bring that unorthodox attitude to other people and communities. All too often I'm left with the seemingly unanswerable question: "What does my dad do?" But the answer, all too simply, is that he does what he does best: Inspire his son. " While I have not changed the tax system (though someday I plan to), I have changed how my clients interact with it. " "Nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." Not only do Benjamin Franklin's words still resonate today, but, if you are like most, filing income taxes is simply unpleasant. For me, however, preparing taxes has been a telescopic lens with which to observe the disparate economic realities present in our society. In looking through this lens, I have seen firsthand how low wages and, at times, regressive public policy can adversely impact the financially fragile, and how I can make a difference. This coming year will be my third volunteering every Saturday during tax season with AARP's Tax Aide Program. In the basement of the Morningside Heights Library in Manhattan, we help the elderly and low income individuals file their taxes. During my first season, I handled organizational tasks and assisted intake counselors with the initial interview process. When I told the AARP manager that I wanted to return the following season and do actual tax preparation, she was skeptical, especially since the next youngest tax preparer at my location was 37. That, however, did not deter me: Though I would be just 16 before the start of the season, I diligently studied the material and passed the advanced I.R.S. qualification test. As a volunteer, my goal is to help my clients obtain every credit they are entitled to and place vitally needed money in their pockets. To do this, I need much more than just technical knowledge. It is also essential to connect on a human level. I make it a point to put each person at ease by actively listening to his or her story. For example, the young woman, who is a recently minted United States citizen and barely speaks English, mentions that her disabled grandmother lives with her. Her story allows me to determine she can claim a dependent care credit for her grandmother and a 1,000 earned income credit. These credits represent approximately 20 percent of her income and will go toward buying her grandmother's medications and other necessities. My grandmother's rings had not only been stolen by her son, my father, but she was constantly in the state of fear that he would steal from her once again. When my father was incarcerated, she wore her rings every day of the week; however, when he was home, her hands were bare. As it became increasingly common over time, she learned to hide her treasures in a jewelry box under her bed. As a small child, I watched my grandmother's hands move in an inward and outward motion, noticing her rhythm. This rhythm was like the cha cha music I heard every Sunday when I went with her to the pulga, the flea market. Every week, she bargained on the vendor's products and brought home "unnecessary necessities"; luckily, some weeks it just happened to be thread and new sewing outlines. As my grandma sewed my outfits for school, I was always trying to complete the outline of La Rosa de Guadalupe just so I could impress her. I would sing along to her favorite Prince Royce songs, use the same color of thread as her and try to go at the same cha cha. With my father incarcerated, the women in my family went to work. At the age of 11, I started working for the very first time as a cleaning lady with my grandparents. Even though I wanted to help my family, I was ashamed to be a cleaning lady. I argued with my mother against living a life like that, a life in which I gave up my childhood for my family's stability. After being called "malagradecida" ungrateful several times, my grandmother reacquainted me with the idea that "todas las cosas buenas vienen a los que esperan" all good things come to those who wait. Sewing was no longer a hobby, but a necessity, when it came to making my own apron, seaming together rags and pushing for a better future for my family. My grandmother, too, had to put down her quilt and go to work, but she never complained. In recent years, my grandmother has become increasingly ill, so I took her unfinished quilt to my home, planning to complete it. My grandmother did not choose to leave this project unfinished; her age and constant contribution to her family through work did not allow her to. Often, obstacles have not only redesigned my course, but have changed my perspective and allowed for me to see greater and better things present within my life. The progression of each patch depicts the instability present within my family. However, when you put all these patches together as one, you have a quilt with several seams and reinforcements keeping it together to depict the obstacles we have faced and have overcome to show resilience. Now, when she visits our home, as she reaches for her glasses and pushes her walker away from the table, my grandmother asks me to bring her the quilt. The jeweled hands that were once accustomed to constant stitching are now bare, and the scars are hidden under every wrinkle. With a strong grip on the quilt, my grandmother signals me to get her sewing basket that sits in the corner collecting dust. She runs her hands over the patches one last time and finds an unfinished seam. She smiles and says, "Cerrar la costura y hacer una colcha de su propio" close the seam and make a quilt of your own.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every Friday for new suggestions on what to watch. This Weekend I Have ... 5 Minutes, and I Like Sci Fi 'Love, Death Robots' When to watch: Now, on Netflix. This sci fi anthology series is a true grab bag: Some of its 18 short form episodes look like modern video games, some like old school cartoons. Some are gritty and dark, others bright and wry. Some are dazzlingly clever, and others are far less appealing. Your mileage will vary, but if you like your apocalyptic fare sweet and silly, start with "When the Yogurt Took Over," a tale of sentient dairy. Or, if you like magical realism and vintage appliances, try "Ice Age," about a lost civilization inside an old freezer. ... 80 Minutes, and I Want to Hang Out	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
DUBLIN Europe's effort to crack down on tax havens gained momentum during the weekend as the number of countries agreeing to share more bank information doubled. Miroslav Kalousek, the Czech finance minister, pledged to join the push for more automatic exchanges of bank records that already had the backing of Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, a spokesman for the Czech representation to the European Union said Sunday. The spokesman said the Czech minister made his overture on Saturday during a two day meeting of European finance ministers where Poland, followed by Belgium, the Netherlands and Romania, also signed up, bringing the number of countries supporting the initiative to 10. The campaign is being strongly backed by the French finance minister, Pierre Moscovici. For France, the issue has taken on greater urgency since Jerome Cahuzac resigned as budget minister after acknowledging he had foreign holdings in Switzerland that he had previously denied. "The surge in member states' appetite for progress and action in the fight against evasion is extremely welcome," Algirdas Semeta, the Union's commissioner for taxation, said Saturday after two days of meetings in which ministers discussed adoption of Europe wide laws modeled on the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, a U.S. initiative to find hidden accounts overseas. "The tools are already on the table, waiting to be seized," Mr. Semeta said, referring to plans in Europe to provide greater exchanges of information on interest earned on savings, including from trusts and foundations. Mr. Semeta said that the European crackdown against tax evasion could eventually extend to dividends, capital gains and royalties, significantly expanding the revenue earned by national treasuries. He also encouraged countries to set an earlier date it is currently foreseen as 2017 for when those revenues are meant to fall under the microscope. Europe is also being pushed toward greater transparency by the recent release of an investigative report on thousands of offshore bank accounts and shell companies, and by the prospect of a meeting of finance ministers from the Group of 20 leading economies on Thursday in Washington, where tax transparency is expected to be discussed. In the French case, the Socialist government of Francois Hollande was deeply embarrassed by the revelations that Mr. Cahuzac had foreign holdings at a time of economic hardship for many citizens, and Mr. Moscovici led the calls for reforms at a hastily assembled news conference on Friday evening. Taking leadership on the issue of tax havens "is very important for ensuring that citizens can trust the efficiency and fairness of our tax systems," Mr. Moscovici said, flanked by Wolfgang Schauble, the German finance minister, and George Osborne, Britain's chancellor of the Exchequer, and by ministers from Poland, Spain and Italy. The initiative should eventually cover "all kinds of revenues" and would be similar to the American tax compliance act, Mr. Moscovici said. One European tax haven, Luxembourg, bowed to such pressure on Wednesday and said it would begin forwarding the details of its foreign clients to their home governments. Standing in the way is Austria, which has resisted agreeing to an automatic exchange of banking information between E.U. countries. Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. Chancellor Werner Faymann of Austria recently suggested that talks were possible, and European officials said they thought that Austria eventually would offer concessions. But the country's finance minister, Maria Fekter, has showed no signs of backing down. "We will fight for bank secrecy," Ms. Fekter said on Saturday. "We are no tax haven," she said. A day earlier she sought to portray Britain as one of the Union's biggest tax havens. Mr. Osborne said on Friday that he was pushing for more transparency from the Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands. More European countries are expected to join the campaign in coming weeks after Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, said on Friday that the bloc's 27 leaders would discuss the issue at a summit meeting of leaders next month in Brussels. Another focus of the meetings in Dublin was the bundle of initiatives known under the umbrella name banking union intended to break the vicious circle involving indebted sovereign governments and shaky banks that helped unleash a string of crises repeatedly threatening to sink the euro over the last three years. Ministers made some progress by overcoming disagreements with Germany, which had raised demands for a change in the Union's treaty to ensure that the cornerstone of the project placing the European Central Bank in charge of regulating the biggest lenders would not lead to a blurring of lines between monetary policy and banking supervision. The single supervisor must be in place before other elements of a banking union can be put in force including a system for euro area countries to share some of the burden of shutting down failing banks that would have a clearly defined hierarchy of creditors, including shareholders, bondholders, uninsured depositors and funds contributed by banks and governments. During the finance ministers' meeting, the Germans conceded that supervision by the central bank could go forward during 2014 without the change, but they won agreement that there should be steps to lock in the separation of the two areas of responsibility the next time that the union's treaties are revised. But Mr. Schauble, the German finance minister, insisted during a news conference on Saturday that setting up European institutions to share the burden of restructuring and closing banks "will need a treaty change."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
RICHARD ALSTON at the Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University in Montclair, N.J. (Feb. 20 21, 7:30 p.m.; through Feb. 23). Alston has been making vibrant, lyrical dances for a half century and has been a pillar of British dance for nearly that long, serving as the artistic director of the Place, an important center of dance training and performance in London. For more than 25 years, the Richard Alston Dance Company has made its home there, but the company is closing this year. Its final performances in the United States take place in the coming week in New Jersey with a bill that includes the recent works "Brahms Hungarian," "Voices and Light Footsteps" and "Shine On," the last dance that Alston made for his company. 973 655 5112, peakperfs.org COMPAGNIE HERVE KOUBI at the Joyce Theater (Feb. 18 19, 7:30 p.m.; Feb. 20 21, 8 p.m.; through Feb. 23). For the past 20 years, Koubi and his all male company have presented intensely physical performances that draw on hip hop and contemporary dance, martial arts and capoeira to celebrate and analyze the many facets of masculinity. In his latest work, "Les Nuits Barbares ou les Premiers Matins du Monde" ("The Barbarous Nights or the First Dawns of the World"), Koubi exposes the biases against cultures that are perceived as "barbarian," looking to his own French and Algerian lineage. His dancers flip and spin in skirts and don glittering masks with horns made from knives, which laces the elegance and athleticism with a sense of menace. 212 242 0800, joyce.org	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
In the ungainly, interminable pageant of public apologies of late, one statement about misbehavior is proving strangely popular. "This is not who I am," a student at American University pleaded after a video circulated of her using a racial slur. "That's not the real me," the YouTuber Shane Dawson said, acknowledging his long history of wearing blackface in videos. "That's not who I am," the Patriots kicker Justin Rohrwasser swore after his tattoo of the logo of a right wing militia sparked outrage. It's not me, not the real me, not the true me. Others afflicted by this sudden spate of bodily possession: the U.F.C. fighter Conor McGregor, filmed last year punching a man in the head at a pub. The rapper Trina, who recently compared protesters to "animals." A Missouri woman, captured in a video last month, draped in a Confederate flag, shouting "K.K.K." and telling a Black Lives Matter supporter, "I will teach my grandkids to hate you all." "The implication, not always made explicit, has to do with character; the mistake was 'out of character' for me," Marjorie Garber writes in her hectic and absorbing new book, "Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession." "The phrase 'That is not who I am' becomes a feedback loop, in which the speaker becomes his own character witness." What is the notion of character lurking behind these apologies? How are we conceiving of the self if we can insist: Never mind what you've seen on the video, never mind what I wrote or said, my true character exists independent of my choices and behavior an intangible (and stainless) essence? 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. "'Character' remains one of the least understood of all modern terms," Garber writes. She prods at the cloud of confusion surrounding the word its philosophical roots, literary history, political uses and inadvertent comedy. "Character" has fallen out of scientific usage, but it's brandished at the pulpit and podium, often, in Garber's telling, by those employing it for protective camouflage. See Charlie Rose, Donald Trump and, most eloquently, Richard Nixon. ("You must not give power to a man unless, above everything else, he has character," Nixon declared in a television advertisement for Barry Goldwater's campaign. "Character is the most important qualification the president of the United States can have.") Garber is a celebrated Shakespearean scholar who has been heralded as "the queen of American cultural studies" and "one of the most powerful women in the academic world." She has written widely on gender and sexuality, the academy and criticism. She marries high and low culture, using theory to dilate on the cultural significance of Jell O, faked orgasms and dog ownership ("Is caninophilia an erotics of dominance?"). "My work is all about boundaries," Garber said 20 years ago. "My hope is to unsettle boundaries." It's an approach now so mainstream that it's become an orthodoxy of its own; it's difficult to think of a writer today, of any genre, who doesn't congratulate herself for traducing artificial binaries. But how bitterly Garber was rebuked in the '90s, for her interest in zines and Madonna. "She cares nothing for gravitas," the critic Frank Kermode sniffed. Her appearance on "Geraldo," discussing her study of cross dressing, was a scandal. Marjorie Garber, whose new book is "Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession." The through line in her eclectic body of work has been an interest in the proper use of literature, which exists, Garber argues, not as a tool of moral instruction but as "a way of thinking." To think in a literary way is to privilege the question over the answer, to embrace uncertainty and associative imagination. "I do not propose to diagnose culture as if it were an illness of which we could be cured," she has maintained, "but to read culture as if it were structured like a dream." To read culture, mind you, not interpret it. To hunt meaning is to squeeze art of its value, subtlety and pleasure. Her new book is the complicated fulfillment of this credo. Garber begins with Aristotle, whose conception of character contrasts with our modern idea of an inward, fixed essence. In his "Poetics," he emphasized character as "deliberate moral choice" in language and behavior. This notion of character as a quality that can be cultivated even instilled can be traced through the rise of the self help movement of the 19th century and the establishment of the Boy Scouts movement, described by its founder, Robert Baden Powell, as a "character factory." Garber is at her most fluent and thorough in this section as she traces Baden Powell's fusion of Spartan military training and Arthurian chivalric codes into a method of instruction, in which character became synonymous with an idealized form of "manliness" expressed in thought, attire, even movement. Baden Powell compared the "fussy, swaggering little man paddling along with short steps with much arm actions" with "the smooth going and silent step of the scout." Garber draws out how the ideology of empire infused the philosophy of the Boy Scouts to tame oneself before taming the world. From this careful, attentive treatment, the book picks up speed. References whiz by, like uprooted trees in a cyclone. There goes the ancient philosopher Theophrastus with his taxonomy of social types; there goes the caricaturist William Hogarth, who believed the face to be "the index of the mind." Phrenology, exclusionary college admission policies, Freud, inevitably, with his idea of character as the "outward sign, so to speak, of an inward personality" there's plenty to paddle around in, but do we arrive anywhere? I have a high tolerance for rapid, associative, hunch based writing, but I began to crave an argument, or at least a more explicit examination of the roots and consequences of character's evolution. Garber will occasionally sidle up to tracing some point of continuity before parachuting away on the gusts of digression. It's not merely that Garber valorizes description over analysis; it's that this method strips ideas of their historical context and function. As a critic, she has written powerfully about how life follows art our understanding of character, for example, owes much to the construction of character in fiction and drama (to Shakespeare, in particular). But ideas aren't merely "suggestive"; they don't live only in the pages of novels or op ed columns. They are put to particular uses in the service of particular ends. That the self help movement in England, with its sense of personal responsibility and the perfectibility of character, overlapped with the Industrial Revolution seems salient, to put it mildly, as well as how conservative ideology has inflected the term not that this book bothers much with such details. Take her description of Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation hearings and Christine Blasey Ford's testimony that he sexually assaulted her when they were high school students. Sixty five women who knew Kavanaugh signed a document in support of his character. Twenty four hundred law professors submitted a letter arguing that he lacked the temperament to sit on the court. Kavanaugh protested "character assassination" by the Democrats, and President Trump weighed in, praising him as "a man of great character and intellect." We're invited only to marvel at the copiousness of the term; Garber abstains from exploring how differently each party privately defines "character," and why. Her governing ethic is always to pose "literary questions: questions about the way something means, rather than what it means." In this instance, it's not merely a case of bringing the wrong weapons to a fight, but also, perhaps, a fitting capitulation to a word whose vacancy remains its power.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
After last week's booze soaked wallow in the creator Nic Pizzolatto's worst instincts, it felt great to see "True Detective" move forward on the case again, even with the occasional hitch in its step. There are important revelations about what ended the investigation in 1980, new wrinkles to its reopening a decade later and a gathering of elderly forces to revisit it again 25 years after that. For the first episode since the opening two, the show gathered power from a meaningful convergence of timelines and the dysfunction of a community more interested in closure than in getting the facts right. The melee in 1980 that ended last week's episode, gently labeled "the Woodard Altercation," turned out to be the breakthrough that put a neat little bow on the original investigation. Brett Woodard was already under suspicion from the police, but his neighbors had gone a step or two further in linking him to the crimes because of his eccentric behavior and his overly friendly way with children. His ambush by a cadre of redneck vigilantes was so inevitable that he had already prepared like Jamie Lee Curtis in the new "Halloween," hunkering down on a property equipped with trip wires, land mines and assault weapons. Survival doesn't appear to be an expectation for Woodard he just wants to take out as many hostile forces as he can before he goes. Life was too much for him to bear even before the Purcell kids went missing. For Hays, a fellow veteran, shooting Woodard is another burden he is forced to carry, which would be a more compelling idea if it weren't explicitly vocalized or if Hays's psychic rucksack weren't already bursting at the seams. But making Woodard the fall guy for Will's murder and Julie's disappearance does bring "True Detective" back to the Arkansas of the West Memphis Three, where the desire to find justice quickly prevents a more thorough and credible investigation especially when the person or persons involved are societal outcasts. In fact, there hadn't been much follow through from Hays and West since the early hours of the investigation, at least from what we're privy to seeing on the show. As Freddie confirms in the 1990 timeline in this week' episode, Woodard was puttering along in the opposite direction from where the children were headed. At the time, the one damning piece of evidence connecting Woodard to the crime was the discovery of Will's backpack in his crawl space, but in 1990, with Julie still alive, Hays notes that the bag was left conspicuously undamaged by the explosion. This indicates that someone planted it during the few days in which police were combing through the scene. "Nobody was compelled to look too hard," recalls Hays of the original finding, but the politics of exonerating Woodard 10 years later are equally undesirable. The desire for justice isn't always the same as the desire for truth: Careers made by a high profile conviction can be upended by its unraveling. There's a reason it took over 18 years for the West Memphis Three to be released from prison and under a peculiar plea deal, too. Unsettling a settled case has consequences. Those consequences are particularly substantial for Tom Purcell, who spent 10 years grappling with the uncertainty of his daughter's whereabouts before she suddenly resurfaced. The best scenes in this week's episode zero in on Tom's anguish, which the superb Scoot McNairy plays as three parts authentic to one part performative, an emotionally devastated father who may still be hiding something. His estranged wife Lucy died of an overdose outside Las Vegas two years earlier, and Dan O'Brien, the cousin who briefly lived with the Purcells (and perhaps carved a peephole into Julie's room), passed some bad checks and spent time around Vegas, too. Tom is alone in pleading publicly for tips on his daughter's whereabouts, and he is alone, too, when confronted with a hotline message from a young woman claiming to be Julie, who wants "the man on TV, acting like my father" to leave her alone. That hotline call and the news that Lucy and Dan spent time in Las Vegas isn't incriminating, exactly, but it does strongly suggest that one of Will and Julie's parents had a role in what happened to them. Add to that the ransom note, which echoes Lucy's thoughts about how "children shud laugh," and there's plenty of cause for speculation, all the way up the most recent timeline, when Hays finally gets around to reading his wife's book. In the decade between the first and second timelines, however, there's a bond between Tom and West that the show has introduced without yet defining how it developed. At a minimum, West seems persuaded by Tom's grief and more willing than his partner to protect him from additional stress. It's possible to read West's sad state at the end of the episode a potbellied recluse with stray dogs and a drinking problem as indicative of regrettable choices, although it's also possible that Tom had nothing to do with it. The bounty of clues and disclosures this week do much to counteract the continued friction between Hays and Amelia, which repeats itself from last week. The signs of Hays's hostility and emotional remoteness are present in 1980, when he refuses to accept Amelia's comforting gestures while West is recuperating from gunshot wound. In 1990, with Amelia's book on the verge of publication, he lashes out again at a suburban dinner party with West and his girlfriend, which becomes yet another prelude to makeup sex. Hays's denial of her insight and agency is a fault the show acknowledges he wouldn't have missed the ransom note clue if he'd bothered to read her book but their scrapes have the effect of marginalizing her in the story, too. Like Woodard, she is reduced to another burden for him to carry. "There surely exists a mutable area of soul where grief is indistinguishable from madness." In fairness to Hays, I would not have made it far into Amelia's book, either. Pro tip: When going over sensitive evidence of a recently reopened murder/kidnapping case, keep the door closed. Hays isn't a welcoming ear to the hardships of others, especially a guy like Freddie, who accuses him and West of ruining his life by browbeating him in the interrogation room. ("Please explain to me the trials and tribulations of being a white man in this country.") Pizzolatto heroes are turned off by the weaknesses of others, even as they drown their own sorrows in whiskey. "We do not say 'good night' without 'I love you" is a genuinely lovely sentiment, patching together the holes that keep opening up in the Hays household. It's more touching still with the knowledge that the bond between father and daughter will not hold.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
On most of the technical merits the acting, the design, the smartly integrated live video that adds a dimension to the performance it's a fine production. But its answer to the question, "Why adapt this work right now?" seems to have nothing to do with what we've been pondering lately about women, post MeToo. For a piece that made its premiere earlier this year, that feels like a tremendous waste of potential. The play's catalytic event is the same as the film's. A teenage fan dies in an accident right after getting Myrtle's autograph, and Myrtle rehearsing a play about aging, and fearful that if she's too good in it she'll doom her career can't shake the memory of the girl, who reminds her strongly of her younger self. (In taped video flashbacks, she is played by Zoe Adjani, Isabelle Adjani's niece.) And the central theme of the film, the blurring of the boundary between actor and role, between life and art, remains palpable. Yet Mr. Teste's retelling of the story, in French with English supertitles (conveniently placed as long as you don't sit too close to the stage) , is most concerned with paying homage to directorial technique. It's hard to tell, on one viewing, how much difference it makes that stage directions for this production change every night a nod to the improvisatory feeling of the film. But this is a work of auteur theater, and in paring the film's dramatis personae down to just three roles (the playwright is among those who didn't make the cut), Mr. Teste has shifted the story's balance to focus on the character who most intrigues him: the director.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
LONDON Basically, Mr. Darcy, the dark, brooding hero of one of Jane Austen's most famous novels, "Pride and Prejudice," would not have looked at all like Colin Firth. Rather, the "real" Mr. Darcy would have been pale and pointy chinned, and would have had a long nose on an oval, beardless face. His hair, strangely, would have been powdered white. And he would have been slightly undernourished, with sloping shoulders "more ballet dancer than beefcake," according to one of the authors of a new study. Hardly a steamy romantic hero, then, in modern eyes. Ahead of the 200th anniversary of Austen's death, Fitzwilliam Darcy, the much fantasized hero of her novel "Pride and Prejudice," was given an unflattering makeover in a study published on Thursday, shocking fans and possibly forever altering their adoration of English literature's most eligible bachelor. The study by John Sutherland, a professor of modern English literature at University College London, and Amanda Vickery, a professor of early modern history at Queen Mary University of London was billed as the first historically accurate portrait of the fictional character. It came attached with a series of illustrations that show what a gentleman, one who shunned fieldwork, would have looked like in 1813, when the novel was published. A real life Mr. Darcy in that era would have been a "far cry from muscular modern day television representations" portrayed by actors like Mr. Firth, Elliot Cowan and Matthew Macfadyen, the study concluded. Mr. Firth, who is most often associated with the role, is broad shouldered, with short, dark curls framing a square jaw. One of the most memorable moments in the BBC's 1995 adaptation of "Pride and Prejudice" showed Mr. Firth, as Mr. Darcy, emerging from a lake in a soaking wet shirt that displayed the contours of his ripped torso. 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. Had he actually existed in 19th century Britain, Mr. Darcy would not have been "Colin Firth emerging like Venus from the waves," Professor Sutherland said. Nor would he have resembled Laurence Olivier "looking diabolical" in a 1940 film adaptation. It is likely, he surmised, that a proud Mr. Darcy "expressed very little except mild contempt." The scholars conducted a monthlong investigation into the norms of male beauty during the Georgian period (roughly 1714 to 1830), as well as the author's romantic relationships, thought to have provided inspiration for her hero. Austen offered readers little description of Mr. Darcy, introducing him only as someone who drew "the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien." The dearth of details allowed filmmakers and television producers to adapt his looks to modern beauty standards. Mr. Darcy, said Professor Sutherland, is the "beau ideal, the male star of Austen's fictional world." But, he added, "we don't know what he looks like." The absence of details was intentional, he said. "This is not because she couldn't write, but because she knew the important thing that fiction is not what you say, but what you don't say," he said. "Good practitioners of fiction know how to use this expertly." Yet, even the professor admitted being unable to remove Mr. Darcy's association with the actors who have portrayed him. "Colin Firth does dominate my visual field, which is a pity," he said, "because TV and film fix an image of a character whom Jane Austen, for artistic reasons, left vacuous." Delia Cazzato, 50, from North London, was understandably upset when she read the study. She was so aghast, she said, that she almost fell off her chair. "I love 'Pride and Prejudice,' and when I saw the illustrations, I was disillusioned," she said. "Mr. Darcy looked like a shorter version of Napoleon." She remains a firm fan of Mr. Firth. The study's findings that Mr. Darcy probably had a pale complexion and a long oval face were in keeping with the qualities associated with wealth and privilege during Austen's time because aristocrats usually avoided the sun. "In the late 1790s, square jaws were practically unheard of amongst the upper classes," the study said, "with the pointy chin and small mouth evident on Mr. Darcy very common features of the gentlemen of the era." The slim, sloping shoulders of the "real" Mr. Darcy were often found in the landed gentry of the era, with strong legs and "well modeled thighs a sign of virility, a good fencer and horseman." And gasp! he would have had only a "modest chest," because having a muscular chest was often associated with a "laborer, not a gentleman," the study said. In drawing their conclusions by considering Austen's own romantic interests, the academics studied in particular John Parker, the 1st Earl of Morley, and Thomas Lefroy, who are both thought to have inspired Mr. Darcy's character. Both men "sported powdered hair and had long, youthful faces with pale complexions," the study said. Other noblemen who were considered sex symbols of the period had similar features, including Lord Nelson, who led Britain to victory against the French in the Battle of Trafalgar, and Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington, another British military hero. Some readers, however, remained unfazed by Mr. Darcy's drastic reimagining. "This is what the real Mr. Darcy looks like, except for the fact that he is a figment of the imagination," Stig Abell, editor of The Times Literary Supplement, wrote on Twitter. "And so it is bollocks."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
After hosting the Summer Olympics in 2008, Beijing was recently picked for the 2022 Winter Games, the first city to organize both events. The last games fueled a major construction boom and offered the Chinese capital a chance to build world class hotels. Since then, the pace of construction has not slowed much and, despite the recent economic slowdown, more hotels are planned ahead of the Winter Games. There were 68 five star hotels and a 130 four star hotels in Beijing at the end of 2014, according to the Beijing Tourism Administration. While skiing competitions will take place in Zhangjiakou, about three hours away, new developments are likely to remain in the center of town. Bobby Zur, the founder of Travel Artistry, a travel consultancy based in Franklin Lakes, N.J., and an authority on Beijing properties, said there is a huge premium for hotels built in the center of town. "The traffic is so horrendous in the city, and getting around isn't easy, so the hotels define themselves by what district they are in and what they are close to," he said. Here's a snapshot of some of the main luxury hotels and a preview of what is in the pipeline.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Illuminated like ghosts on an LCD screen, figures pop out from behind parked cars in the darkness, and apparitions walk shadowy dogs across the street. Then, suddenly, a yellow icon of a cyclist appears in the head up display on the windshield, and a warning alarm sounds. It's all part of the latest generation of night vision technology appearing as on option on several vehicles this year. Primarily intended to prevent collisions with pedestrians and deer, the latest systems use infrared cameras and software designed to recognize the heat signatures of humans and animals. The night vision system that I recently tested was installed in a 2015 BMW X5 as a 2,095 option, but it is also available in a variety of vehicles from Audi, Mercedes Benz and Rolls Royce. Early versions of infrared night vision, like the system on the 2000 Cadillac DeVille, produced murky green images projected onto a head up display. The picture didn't make it obvious when a living thing was in danger of becoming road kill, and some drivers found it distracting. The improvements in the current technology, according to Richard Seoane, general manager of Autoliv Night Vision Systems, the company that developed the BMW system, include the use of far infrared cameras, higher resolution displays and more sophisticated software that can recognize the heat signatures of pedestrians, cyclists and animals, highlighting them in yellow and, when they are close enough to be in danger, displaying alerts. The software has been programmed, for instance, to recognize deer from a variety of angles.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
SOMEBODY WITH A LITTLE HAMMER Essays By Mary Gaitskill 272 pages. Pantheon. 25.95. Mary Gaitskill's first book of nonfiction a cool and formidable collection of essays, reviews and other matter takes its title from a sentence in Anton Chekhov's short story "Gooseberries." "At the door of every contented, happy man," Chekhov wrote, "somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him illness, poverty, loss and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn't hear or see others now." In her novels and short stories, Gaitskill has often been that somebody. Her fiction taps and cracks the veneer of life. She displays viscera, moral and otherwise. About sex she is an especially distinctive writer. She catches cruelty and inexplicable desire, what she has called "the dirt within," as well as any writer we have. Once you've read her, her little hammer continues to tap in your head. Gaitskill has not written a memoir and may never do so. A few of the personal essays here may be as close as she wants us to get. She's led a life that has often put her at a distance from Chekhov's "contented, happy" person. She dropped out of high school and left home at 16. She sold cheap jewelry on the streets of Toronto. She worked as a stripper. She attended community college. She was date raped and later, in Detroit, in her words, "raped for real." About that second rape, she writes: "The terror was acute, but after it was over, it actually affected me less than many other mundane instances of emotional brutality I've suffered or seen other people suffer. Frankly, I've been scarred more by experiences I had on the playground in elementary school." 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. Gaitskill is the second writer I've read in the past year (the other was Jenny Diski, in her memoir "In Gratitude") to say about rape something I hadn't before heard and would not have expected: that it was not a defining event in her life. There are essays in "Somebody With a Little Hammer" about sex and gender, about music (Talking Heads, Bjork, Celine Dion), about writers (Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Nicholson Baker), about travel and about politics. For the French newspaper Liberation, she kept a diary during the 2008 presidential election. The portions of it printed here make you wish Gaitskill commented on politics vastly more often. "When I saw Sarah Palin speak at the Republican National Convention," she writes, "the hair on the back of my neck stood up." She's looking, she realizes, at a sadist. "By 'sadist' I don't mean a costume wearing fetishist, and if I did I wouldn't be as appalled," she writes. "I mean something more basic, a person whose driving motive in life is to dominate, control and inflict pain." Gaitskill is no stranger to writing about sadism and masochism. One of her short stories became the movie "Secretary," in which James Spader spanks and sexually dominates a submissive Maggie Gyllenhaal. She was displeased with that movie, she writes. It was breezy and upbeat, absent of darker shading. The takeaway, she writes, "is that S/M is not only painless; it's therapeutic: It has made both characters more confident, better looking, happier, freer, and self actualized. Best of all, it has led them straight to marriage!" She notes, "This insistence on the positive may seem compassionate, but it rarely is, for it cannot tolerate anything that is not happy and winning." Elsewhere she writes, in a similar vein, about reviewing, words every critic should tattoo on his or her knuckles: "To overpraise is a subtle form of disrespect and everybody knows it." I will overpraise and complain at the same time by noting that Gaitskill's best and most widely anthologized essay, about the twisted sexual allure of Axl Rose ("his rapt, mean little face, the whole turgor of his body, suggests a descent into a pit of gorgeous, carnal grossness"), is omitted from this volume. This may be because it was written in 1992, before Rose had been sued for sexual abuse. The essay is ferocious, as potent as anything I've read about the appeal of bad boys. I wish she'd printed it and added a rapt, mean little postscript. It was Samuel Johnson who said, wrongly but amusingly, that no one except a blockhead writes for any reason but money. I held Johnson's apercu in mind while reading "Somebody With a Little Hammer." So many of its essays appeared in small journals that I began to fear Gaitskill had never seen a check with a comma in it for her nonfiction. Yes, one piece appeared in Harper's, another in Elle, another in The New York Times Book Review. But more appeared in places like Asymptote Journal, Stone Canoe, Post Road and SF360.org. There's an appealing sense that she composed these essays because she wanted to, not because a payday was on offer. "I am a person who often chooses pain," Gaitskill writes in one essay here. Yet an observer can't help noticing that she has begun, for the first time, to smile in her dust jacket photographs. What's more, her most recent novel, "The Mare" (2015), was a tear jerker at times, with an upbeat ending. Is American literature's dark swan, its Odile, mellowing? The news these essays bring is, I am happy to say, not at all. She continues to wield a remorseless little hammer.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Issues related to sexual harassment continued to plague 21st Century Fox as its Fox Business Network subsidiary confirmed on Thursday that it had suspended a longtime anchor, , pending an investigation into his conduct. The development came exactly a year after a sexual harassment scandal at Fox News first burst into public view with a lawsuit against Roger E. Ailes, the network's former chairman. As claims of widespread harassment continued to surface, 21st Century Fox has tried to clean house, ousting Mr. Ailes, the former star Bill O'Reilly and several other employees. The suspension of Mr. Payne came after The National Enquirer published an article on Wednesday in which he acknowledged and apologized for an extramarital affair with a former CNN and Fox News contributor. That woman made claims of misconduct against Mr. Payne to lawyers for Fox, according to a person briefed on the matter. "We take issues of this nature extremely seriously and have a zero tolerance policy for any professional misconduct," a spokeswoman for Fox Business said in a statement. "This matter is being thoroughly investigated and we are taking all of the appropriate steps to reach a resolution in a timely manner."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Jack Ferver wielding a disco ball as Tinker Bell in a new production of "Peter Pan," with a score by Leonard Bernstein, at the Bard SummerScape festival. As a child, the director Christopher Alden was obsessed with the musical "Peter Pan." "My twin brother, David, and I begged our parents to let us audition to play the roles of the twins," Mr. Alden recalled recently. "They wouldn't let us do it." Now, decades later, he gets to direct "Peter Pan." The show Mr. Alden is staging as part of the Bard SummerScape festival at Bard College, starting on Thursday and running through July 22, is not the Mary Martin blockbuster of his youth but an earlier adaptation of J.M. Barrie's play with a wonderful, undeservedly obscure score by Leonard Bernstein, whose centenary is being celebrated this year. That production which starred the unlikely combo of Jean Arthur as Peter and Boris Karloff as Captain Hook closed in 1951 after a respectable 321 performances, but then essentially disappeared. The project came about when Gideon Lester, the artistic director for theater and dance at Bard, searched for a rarity to celebrate Bernstein's centennial year and stumbled onto "Peter Pan." "I was so surprised because I'd never heard of the show," Mr. Lester said. He was not the only one: Mr. Lester said that when he approached the Great Ormond Street children's hospital in London, which holds the rights to Barrie's play in perpetuity, the administrators did not seem aware of Bernstein's version. It's hard to blame them, especially since the score's tortuous path limited its exposure. Wendy's 11 o'clock number, "Dream With Me" a lovely song in the vein of "Some Other Time" from "On the Town" was cut before the Broadway premiere. While "Who Am I?" (eventually covered by Nina Simone), is as close as the show gets to a standard, it's still under the radar of many Bernstein fans. According to most sources, Bernstein was originally commissioned to compose only instrumentals, but became so enamored with the play that he volunteered songs, for which he also penned the lyrics. Unfortunately, there was a hitch: Ms. Arthur wasn't much of a singer. This is probably why only Wendy and Hook have solos. To make matters worse for Bernstein's legacy, new instrumentals by Alec Wilder took over on the recording. "That album has a lot of dialogue, and I think they may have needed music that was just more friendly to function under those spoken words, so they commissioned this other score only for the recording," said Garth Edwin Sunderland, vice president for creative projects at the Leonard Bernstein Office. No matter the reason, large segments of the score went unheard until they were restored for the first complete recording in 2005, undertaken by the conductor Alexander Frey, with Linda Eder as Wendy. Some edited materials created for a 1980s production popped up on that album, but a few years later the discovery of the originals in the Leonard Bernstein Collection at the Library of Congress allowed for the creation (finally) of a performing edition. For Bard, Mr. Sunderland has created a new orchestration for five musicians. "Although on the surface the music feels very simple, it is impressive how complicated a lot of it is," Mr. Sunderland said. "Structurally and technically there are a lot of things he is doing that are quite clever, which I think were just for himself." "In a way," he added, "you could make a case that the score was a little bit of a study for 'Candide.' That show is entirely pastiche, and you can see the germ for that in 'Peter Pan,' particularly in 'Captain Hook's Soliloquy.'" (That song was actually written for the post Broadway tour, which at one point paired the popular baritone Lawrence Tibbett's Hook with Veronica Lake's Peter). The score evokes influences as diverse as Gilbert and Sullivan and Kurt Weill, and is often suffused with an evocative, melodic wistfulness. Bernstein "had such a strong feeling for his family, for needing to have a family and children, even though his life went in so many different directions," said Mr. Alden, who directed an acclaimed production of Bernstein's opera "A Quiet Place" for New York City Opera in 2010. "I think the story really moved him on a very personal level. The childlike innocence, the naivete he brought to this music are somewhat unique in his oeuvre." Much of that mood is connected to Wendy, the show's key character; Mr. Alden has even written out her siblings and made her an only child. (The focus on the father daughter relationship is also underlined by Mr. Michals play both Hook and Mr. Darling, Wendy's father.) Meanwhile, the casting of Erin Markey (who prefers Mx. as an honorific) reinforces the idea of a questing Wendy.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
NOTHING in Lyndsey Butler's background suggested that she would create some of the fashion world's more celebrated jackets. The daughter of a Texas couple who ran a construction company, Ms. Butler grew up in San Antonio and at her parents' ranch in Argentina. Starting at age 8, she began riding horses competitively and along the way won a lot of blue ribbons. At 18, she moved to New York to study philosophy and religion at New York University "like most fashion entrepreneurs, right?" Ms. Butler said. "I thought I'd stay in academia and that I'd eventually teach or do research," she added. "But I graduated a semester early, and since I hadn't actually applied to grad school yet, I figured I should get a job." She went to work as an intern in a fashion showroom, and by her own admission, she wasn't brilliant at the selling part of the job. "I didn't love sales," said Ms. Butler, who is 29, "maybe because I'm a little shy." But she did love the design end of the business, and in 2006, when the internship led to a job offer from a Los Angeles company where she could learn everything from design to production, she jumped at the chance. At that point things started happening fast. Two years later, Ms. Butler started her own company, called Veda, after the Sanskrit word for ancient Hindu texts. With Ms. Butler at the helm as owner and designer, Veda made its name with soft but stylish leather jackets coveted by many a fashionista "superchic" and "amazingly innovative," as the fashion blog FabSugar described them and quickly branched out to other items of high fashion clothing. The jackets, the line's signature item, range from about 700 to 1,000. Ms. Butler's boyfriend, Alex Klein, also knows a thing or two about career arcs with unlikely swerves. Mr. Klein, who is 30, spent eight years traveling the globe as a professional skateboarder, doing flips and slides in 21 countries from Lithuania to New Zealand. "I was never injured," Mr. Klein said proudly. "But I wanted to get out while I still had my knees intact." An English major at Berkeley, Mr. Klein had always liked to write, and when he was 26, he turned his hand to filmmaking. A skateboarding trip to Israel in 2004 provided the inspiration for "God Went Surfing With the Devil," a documentary about efforts by Israeli surfers to send surfboards to their Palestinian counterparts in Gaza. "The Jewish surfers were trying to meet the Palestinian surfers, who live just a few miles away but are totally separated by war," said Mr. Klein, who produced and directed. That meeting never happened, but the film led to his current day job, making videos for the Web. Ms. Butler and Mr. Klein met in 2006, when he was living in Los Angeles and she was shuttling between Los Angeles and New York; they reconnected three years later. On that second meeting, chemistry kicked in, and Mr. Klein promptly followed Ms. Butler back to New York. Their first home was her 450 square foot apartment in the West Village. For a year they gingerly negotiated the limited square footage, an especially challenging task because Mr. Klein works at home. "It was lucky he has only three T shirts and a pair of jeans," Ms. Butler said. Their current apartment, a 1,000 square foot loft on Mulberry Street that they rent for 4,200 a month, is considerably more commodious. As befits a century old building, the space is also rich in period details, among them original brick walls, doorways topped with brick arches and metal pipes that once led to a gas furnace. Mr. Klein is particularly enamored of the old fashioned freight elevator, which requires a key to bring it up from the ground floor. "That was one of the selling points of the apartment," he said. "It makes you feel like Batman." While officially a loft, the space seems oddly cozy. This is partly because Mr. Klein and Ms. Butler have created nooks for sleeping, eating and cooking, but also because of such homey touches as gauzy white curtains and family memorabilia and thrift shop finds that add warmth. From Ms. Butler's office, a few blocks away on Canal Street, comes an ancient black leather trunk with brass fittings and the initials F.I.B., which she treasures because those are her father's initials. The gray velvet love seat with curved arms dates to the late 19th century, and in the wooden dining table, which started life as a desk, you can see old nail holes. Her array of family photographs paints a lost world. One image shows relatives from her father's side posed with bags of cement in front of a garage. Another, dated 1951, depicts her Great Aunt Mary, wearing a jumpsuit and high boots and sitting astride a Harley Davidson. "I like to think of her as the inspiration for my jackets," Ms. Butler said. Because Mr. Klein is an avid collector, particularly of works by young Bay Area artists, the loft functions almost as a minigallery. Works on view include a drawing of a jaguar by Walton Ford, who creates large scale images that have the precision of Audubon's but show the clash between nature and human civilization, and a photograph by Eric Chakeen of a landscape reflected in a double rearview mirror. From Chris Johanson comes a depiction on a slab of found wood of two figures walking, and from Jay Howell three pen and ink drawings from a series titled "Beasts of the Apocalypse" a cat holding nunchucks, a figure with a goat's head flashing a peace sign, and a man devil strumming a guitar. Outside lies a very different environment, and one that not everybody would find appealing. The couple's block is among the last remnants of an increasingly shrunken Little Italy. Pellegrino's, the restaurant on their building's ground floor, is mobbed well into the night. There can also be occupational hazards to living above a restaurant; Ms. Butler remembers the brief but pungent occasion she found herself sharing the lumbering elevator with the man who delivers the fish. But both Ms. Butler and Mr. Klein are charmed by the noisy, bustling crowds. "I kind of like the crush of tourists," he said. "They're there with their families, they're taking pictures, they're happy to be eating an Italian meal. You see them and you feel as if you're witnessing great joy."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
THE past couple of years have left many people staring in disbelief at the returns on their individual retirement accounts. Consider last year, when the Standard Poor's 500 stock index finished the year essentially where it started. So it makes sense that people are looking for ways to earn more for retirement or to make up for losses. Yet when I heard that an increasing number of people were moving money from traditional I.R.A.'s to self directed I.R.A.'s that focused on real estate, I was skeptical that this was a good idea. First, I wondered, how could this be done with retirement money? Was it even legal? And were people who had worked and saved money for their retirement really putting it into real estate so soon after the bubble burst? It turns out there is nothing illegal about using a self directed account to buy real estate or many other things, for that matter. But this does not mean it is easy. There are dozens of caveats on how to do it, and the specter of running afoul of the Internal Revenue Service looms large. (And to be clear, this is still a niche, with only about 2 percent of the 4.8 trillion in I.R.A.'s in self directed accounts, according to Equity Trust, one of the big players in the industry.) This week, a lawsuit was filed against two custodians of self directed I.R.A.'s, the Equity Trust Company and the Entrust Group, accusing them of failing to do due diligence on investments, even though that is something that custodians do not do. Still, the investors I spoke with were not starry eyed evangelists, but pragmatists trying to find an investment that they hoped would appreciate but would certainly provide income from rents. "I got the year end statement for my I.R.A. and it was within 2,000 of where it was the year before," said Mark Rusnak, a real estate agent in Virginia Beach. "I thought there has to be a better place to put my money." He moved money into a self directed I.R.A., bought a house this year for 80,000 cash and spent 23,000 more fixing it up. He said it was assessed for 147,000, but he was happier with the 13,200 in yearly rent a 13 percent return on his money. This makes sense, but how many people are willing to bet that real estate will provide a comfortable retirement, especially since the value of their own homes has not yet recovered? Here is a look at what some investors who have become comfortable with this niche are doing. WHAT The most common kinds of real estate in self directed I.R.A.'s are apartments and multifamily homes. That should be no surprise. They can easily be rented out. But Kurt Amundson, who sells insurance and real estate in Minnewaska, Minn., said that type of investment seemed too labor intensive to him. So in 2010, he bought an 80 acre parcel of farmland in Iowa. When the price appreciated, he sold it in 2011 for a 50,000 profit, bought a 120 acre plot in a different part of the state and rented out half to a local farmer. "I looked more for land because I felt it was easier to find a renter," Mr. Amundson said. "I'm also not too handy. An apartment complex wouldn't fit into my comfort zone." Roger Voisinet, a real estate agent and the former men's hockey coach at the University of Virginia, made a different sort of purchase based on his expertise: he bought part of an ice skating rink. The rink, Main Street Arena in Charlottesville, Va., where he had coached the team, was on the verge of closing. He got together with six other investors and committed 300,000 of his own money. "I wondered how I was going to get the money to do that," Mr. Voisinet said. "I was told I could transfer the money from my I.R.A. through a simple form." He set up a self directed I.R.A. with Equity Trust. Since that investment in 2010, Mr. Voisinet, who developed an interest in solar energy as a student at Miami University in Ohio, said he pushed to get a grant to put solar panels on the roof to power the arena. He has also bought three other pieces of real estate for his I.R.A.: rental houses in Jacksonville, Fla., and Charlottesville, and a mortgage on a medical building. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' WHY Lorraine Walls, 56, and her husband, Richard, 47, recently adopted a 7 year old girl and three 8 year old boys. The couple, who live in Midlothian, Va., not far from Richmond, decided to use their retirement money to buy homes in southwest Florida as security for their children should anything happen to them. They now own seven homes, all in Lehigh Acres, Fla., through their I.R.A.'s, accounting for about half their retirement money. The homes are 2,500 to 3,000 square feet, and they bought them for about a quarter of what the original owners paid. "The best one was completely tiled with granite," she said. "The poor guy paid 289,000 for it; I paid 60,000." She said two months of rent covered their taxes, insurance and property management fees, with the rest going back into their I.R.A. When they said three of the homes were on the same street, I asked if that level of concentration scared them. On the contrary, Mrs. Walls said, the neighbors looked after one another to keep the street from deteriorating like many around them. Greg Rand, a former real estate agent and now chief executive of OwnAmerica, a company that teaches people how to invest in real estate, said he was an advocate of using real estate as an alternative way to finance college educations. He bought a condominium for both of his children when they were born. "I didn't care what they were worth in 2007," he said. "I care what they're worth in 2019." By then, he said, both condos will be paid off from a mix of rental income and money he has put in. HOW Like any I.R.A., a self directed one comes with plenty of rules. It must be held at a custodian. The legal title of a home must be in the name of the I.R.A. Any expenses incurred on the property need to be paid by the I.R.A., just as all income generated from rent or the sale of a property need to stay in the I.R.A. Jeffrey Desich, chief executive of Equity Trust, the custodian for 11 billion of self directed I.R.A.'s, said most of its clients were in their 40s or 50s and had accumulated enough in retirement accounts to put a portion into a self directed I.R.A. and buy a property outright. "The typical account comes from a rollover I.R.A. from corporate America," he said. "The second most popular type is from someone who is self employed." His company provides tax documents just as Schwab or Fidelity does, he said. Unlike them, it offers an online bill paying function for expenses under 5,000. "We're subject to the same rules they are," he said. He said the average account size was 100,000 to 125,000, with an annual management fee of 300 to 400. But he noted that a nontraditional investment was going to be more time intensive hence the name, self directed. And the investor is going to be responsible for evaluating the worth of the investment, without any safety net. PROBLEMS While there is no I.R.S. statement about self directed I.R.A.'s, there is a rule against "prohibited transactions." "Among other things, this means the property held by the I.R.A. can't be for your own use or that of a family member, and you can't buy the property from yourself with the I.R.A.," said Eric Smith, a spokesman for the I.R.S. Mr. Rusnak, the real estate agent in Virginia Beach, said he knew he could not pay himself a commission on the house he bought. He also made sure that all the bills for the renovation were paid by the I.R.A. and that the tenant had his lease with the I.R.A. The I.R.S. penalties for mistakes are severe. "If you do something that is a prohibited transaction, you could invalidate the I.R.A., and that makes it payable to you as ordinary income," said Richard S. Aronson, director of special fiduciary services at PNC Wealth Management. "If the I.R.A. owner directly or indirectly achieves a benefit from the assets, that's a red flag and a big problem." Mr. Amundson owns his farmland half inside his I.R.A. and half outside it so that he can hunt white tailed deer on the property. He said he was aware of the I.R.S. rules and careful to keep his hunting land separate from the rented land. Then, there is the issue of what to do with the rental income. Presumably, when that income reaches a certain amount, the owner would invest it in more real estate. But until that point, the money could just be sitting there. Mr. Desich said Equity Trust deposits rental money at federally insured banks, which pay close to zero in interest. But those trying this type of investment believe the returns are worth the more stringent guidelines. At the least, they will own something tangible when they reach retirement. "I don't plan on selling any of them," Mr. Voisinet said of his properties. "I think of every one like an annuity."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
William J. Small, who built the Washington bureau of CBS News into a journalistic powerhouse and protected his correspondents from the grievances of President Richard M. Nixon and other government officials, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 93. Mr. Small arrived at CBS News in 1962, soon after the era embodied in the work of Edward R. Murrow. That same year, Walter Cronkite became the anchorman of what would soon be called the "CBS Evening News." Over more than a decade, Mr. Small hired, or recruited from within CBS News, prominent correspondents like Dan Rather, Marvin Kalb, Eric Sevareid, Bob Schieffer and Bruce Morton. He also championed the hiring of women, among them Lesley Stahl and Connie Chung. With a soft voice but a steely demeanor, Mr. Small was known for his absolute control of the bureau on M Street, and for his ardent defense of his correspondents' work in particular that of Mr. Rather, who routinely angered President Nixon. "When President Nixon sought to have me removed as White House correspondent during the height of our Watergate reporting," Mr. Rather wrote on Facebook soon after Mr. Small's death, "Mr. Small flatly refused on the spot, then repeatedly did so again, after enlisting the support of his superiors in New York." Mr. Schieffer recalled that early in his time as CBS News's Pentagon correspondent, he learned that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was upset with one of his reports. "I called Small immediately and he said, 'I'll take care of it,' and he called and reamed out the chairman," Mr. Schieffer said in a phone interview. "When anyone anywhere got mad at us, he took the criticism. If we had a problem with the government, he was right in the middle of it." "There were three of us in the bureau whom Mr. Small hired and nurtured: Connie Chung, Bernie Shaw and me," she said in an interview. (Mr. Shaw is black.) "If you have a boss who saw affirmative action as a burden, I'm not sure we would have been promoted. He didn't hire us to see us fail." When Mr. Small received a lifetime achievement award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 2014, he recalled the negative response within CBS News to his hiring of Diane Sawyer. "I got a lot of flak from the staff because she had worked for Nixon," he said, "and the only one who later came to me, Dan Rather, said: 'I was wrong. She's terrific.'" He also hired Ed Bradley, Rita Braver, Susan Spencer and Martha Teichner, as well as Susan Zirinsky, now the president of CBS News, who started there in 1972 as a weekend desk assistant. "He was the right man for the times we were in," Ms. Zirinsky said in an interview. "The press was under great pressure. He became the buffer. He stood up. He was the champion we needed." Mr. Small was promoted to senior vice president of CBS News in 1974, making him a strong candidate for the job he wanted: president of CBS News. But four years later, after William A. Leonard was named the president designate of CBS News to succeed Richard S. Salant, Mr. Small moved to a job outside of CBS's news gathering operation as the chief Washington lobbyist for the CBS Corporation. William Jack Small was born on Sept. 20, 1926, in Chicago. His mother, Libby (Mell) Small, was a teacher, and his father, Louis, owned a bakery. William dropped out of high school to enlist in the Army soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and served on the Philippine island of Leyte. Following his discharge, he graduated from a five year interdisciplinary master's program at the University of Chicago. After working as the news director of the Chicago radio station WLS, he was hired in 1956 for the same position at WHAS TV, a CBS affiliate in Louisville, Ky. Under his leadership the station was named the nation's outstanding news operation by the Radio Television News Directors Association (now known as RTDNA, or the Radio Television Digital News Association). Mr. Small's success at WHAS led CBS News to appoint him its assistant news director at the Washington bureau in 1962. He was elevated the next year to director and manager. "His bureau would be the breadbasket of the CBS News operation," Roger Mudd, a longtime CBS correspondent, wrote in "The Place to Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News" (2008). "The appetite of the evening news and the morning news and the midday news, and later the Saturday news and the Sunday news, would be insatiable, and Small's bureau would have to be prepared to satisfy it." Mr. Small's jobs after he left CBS did not bring him as much success or renown. He resigned from NBC News in 1982, after less than three years. He apparently had difficulty blending his experience at CBS along with that of Mr. Mudd and Bernard and Marvin Kalb, former CBS correspondents he lured to NBC with NBC's news tradition, which included stars like Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, who teamed on the evening news for 14 years, and John Chancellor. He was then the president of United Press International for four years. In 1986, he began an 11 year tenure at Fordham University as a professor of communications and the director of the center of communications at the university's Graduate School of Business. From 2000 to 2010, he was the chairman of the news and documentary Emmy Awards at the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. In addition to his daughter Tamar, Mr. Small is survived by another daughter, Willa Small Kuh; six grandchildren; and a sister, Florence Small. His wife, Gish (Rubin) Small, died in 2005. In 1978, Mr. Small brought his experience with free speech issues to testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the Constitution. He excoriated a recent Supreme Court ruling that gave police officers permission to enter newsrooms if they had an easily obtained warrant, and he spoke in favor of a bill to codify newsroom protection (which Congress passed in 1980). Predicting newsroom disruptions if the law did not pass, Mr. Small asked: "Could you ever have another Watergate exposed? The management of The Washington Post is too tough to be intimidated, but what about Deep Throat? He was the most important element, the key lead, in the reports of Woodward and Bernstein. Would he be as forthcoming if he knew that law enforcement officials could pick their way through everything those reporters had?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Ed Carpenter hasn't run an IndyCar race since last October, but was back in top form Sunday as he posted a 231.067 mile per hour qualifying average that earned him the pole position for the 98th Indianapolis 500. Carpenter, who also was the fastest qualifier for last year's Indy 500, collected a 100,000 prize for his wild ride around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway's 2.5 mile oval. James Hinchcliffe was second fastest in qualifying, at 230.839 m.p.h. Hinchcliffe was knocked unconscious during a mishap in the Grand Prix of Indianapolis on May 10 and was only cleared to drive again on Thursday. Will Power was the third fastest qualifier and will be the other front row starter among the 11 rows of the 33 car field. Also of interest, Kurt Busch, a Nascar regular, qualified 12th. Busch flew in early Sunday from Concord, N.C., where he had been racing a stock car the previous evening. He is attempting to compete in both the Indy 500, on May 25, and the 600 mile Nascar event in North Carolina on the same day, a feat accomplished by only three other drivers. Jamie McMurray held off Kevin Harvick to win a 1 million prize in Saturday night's Nascar Sprint All Star stock car race at Concord, N.C. The event, which is not a points paying component of the season long Sprint Cup series, features past winners, with champions and others competing in a 90 lap exhibition divided into four separate segments.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
As I hiked through the village of Oia in Santorini, Greece, slightly out of breath from navigating the hilly streets, I was certain that I had seen few places in the world as attractive. Majestically perched atop a cliff, Oia faced the sparkling Aegean Sea and was awash in gleaming white villas built into the hills. Many travelers think of Santorini as a beach destination, similar to Mykonos, but locals have long known that the magic of the island is the gorgeous views to be had from its many steep cliffs. And the best way to take in these views is through Santorini's more than 12 scenic walking routes, ranging from between two to eight miles each. Markos Chaidemenos, the affable owner of Canaves Oia, a luxury hotel in the village that offers guests maps of walking trails, was my unofficial guide on my two hour walk. It began at Ammoudi Port at the base of Oia and followed a path of about 300 steps up into the heart of the village. We walked past art galleries lining the main thoroughfare and up and down narrow lanes, where he pointed out locally owned boutiques and seafood restaurants with water views. Eventually, we stopped at the widely photographed blue domed churches and I, too, snapped the requisite tourist shots. "Walks like these," Mr. Chaidemenos said, "are the essence of what Santorini is about." According to Mr. Chaidemenos, cars weren't common on the island until the late 1950s, following the 1956 earthquake that destroyed much of the island. "Before then, Santorinians got around by foot or on a donkey," he said. Aressana Spa Hotel and Suites, in the town of Fira, also encourages guests to walk, said the hotel's co owner and island native Evangelia Mendrinou. Guests are sent off with maps, complimentary bottles of water and in house dried figs as well as cellphones, which they can use to call the hotel in case they tire out or lose their way. "We'll pick them up if that happens," Ms. Mendrinou said. Ms. Mendrinou's favorite island trail is the roughly six mile, sea facing route between Oia and Fira, along the rim of the island's volcanic caldera. She told me that I would finish in two hours. While the steep hills I encountered slowed me down, it was the stunning vistas that brought me to a standstill. I had started on the outskirts of Oia and trekked on a trail snaking along the sea and past terraced, blooming gardens and the picturesque villages of Firostefani and Imerovigli. I ended up in Fira nearly four hours later. Travelers who like some hand holding or want to venture off marked trails can hire a guide to lead the way. The Greece based travel company TrueGreece, for one, has new private half day to multiday walking tours of Santorini. And at Santorini Walking Tours, a small company offering both group and private excursions, the owner and lead guide, Nikos Boutsinis said that his business was born when he came to Santorini on vacation a few years ago and discovered the rich network of walking paths. "I got inspired to start my company while I was on one of the walks," he said. That same walk more like a challenging full day hike is what Mr. Boutsinis took me on. We met in the village of Pyrgos, situated in the center of the island, where he showed me the ruins of a 15th century Venetian castle from the era when Venetians ruled Santorini and pointed out the medieval architecture along the maze of slim streets. Then, we trekked into the countryside through groves of fruit trees and along fields of barley and white eggplants. We paused for a break at an abandoned Byzantine church then hiked for another hour to reach the gallery and winery, Art Space Winery, set in a 19th century building in the foothills of Pyrgos. There, I admired paintings, sculptures and other local works while tasting the owner Antonis N. Argyros's crisp white wines and a sweet vinsanto wine. Lunch at Metaxi Mas, a taverna in the village of Exo Gonia, came an hour later, and our meal of pomegranate salad, pan fried feta cheese and prawn and mussel orzo was a highlight of the day. The sharp climb to the Mountain of Prophet Elias began at the restaurant and had my heart racing. Mr. Boutsinis and I then walked along a path on a mountain ridge and found ourselves encircled by sea views. We arrived in the village of Kamari as the sun was setting, casting an enchanting glow over Santorini. This was the last of my three walking filled days on the island, and given more time, I would have done more walking still.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The awards, announced on Monday at the A.L.A.'s midwinter conference in Atlanta, were given to books published in 2016, a year in which sales of children's books were strong, continuing to outpace books for adults. The winning titles reflected a vibrant and increasingly expansive children's books landscape. After several years of calls for books reflecting more racial and gender diversity, for example, the three top awards the Newbery, Caldecott and Printz went to two African American men, Lewis and Steptoe, and a white woman, Barnhill. Coming just a little more than a week after many were shocked by then President elect Trump's sparring on Twitter with Representative Lewis, who is considered an icon of the civil rights movement, the awards for "March" seemed to make an especially strong impact on the Atlanta audience of librarians, educators and book publishing professionals. As each award for "March: Book Three" chosen by separate committees that do not communicate with each other was announced, it was cheered loudly. Many also noted the political overtones of the Newbery winner, "The Girl Who Drank the Moon," a fantasy novel about a country that mistakenly believes it must sacrifice its youngest child to an evil witch every year. Barnhill's book, said its editor, Elise Howard, the publisher of Algonquin Young Readers, is "about asking questions and making choices and daring to question an authoritarian version of the truth, which makes it a perfect book for our time." The Caldecott Medal for Steptoe, who is the son of the seminal African American children's book author illustrator John Steptoe, also elicited emotional responses. Steptoe worked on the book for six years, immersing himself in the settings of Jean Michel Basquiat's life. Without using any of Basquiat's own work, Steptoe evoked the artist's style and world by painting and making collages on large pieces of found wood from discarded Brooklyn Museum exhibits as well as the streets of Brooklyn, Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side. "If you are lucky enough to one day see the art in person," said David Caplan, Little, Brown Kids' vice president and creative director, "you can fully understand the care and patience Javaka took in creating this stunning imagery." Newbery Honors went to "Freedom Over Me: Eleven Slaves, Their Lives and Dreams Brought to Life," a picture book by Ashley Bryan, published by Atheneum; "The Inquisitor's Tale: Or, The Three Magical Children and Their Holy Dog" by Adam Gidwitz, illustrated by Hatem Aly, published by Dutton; and "Wolf Hollow," by Lauren Wolk, published by Dutton.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
On Friday Iran held its 11th parliamentary elections since the foundation of the Islamic Republic in 1979, and the first since the Trump administration renewed sanctions on Iran and battered its economy. The voting turnout 42.5 percent was the lowest since 1979, and a loose alliance of conservative candidates won. In Tehran, the capital, where about 75 percent of the voters chose not to vote, all 30 seats were won by the conservative candidates loyal to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. The Iranian electorate faces a perpetual dilemma on whether to participate or boycott the elections as the choice of candidates is limited and the Guardian Council a constitutional committee made up of six clerics and six jurists that vets the electoral candidates bars those seen as critical of the regime or deviating from its positions. More than 7,000 candidates, most of them reformists and moderates, including 90 members of the current Iranian Parliament, were disqualified from Friday's elections by the Guardian Council for having insufficient ideological loyalty, a move that reduced voter participation. The turnout was higher than Tehran in smaller cities, where citizens have more incentive to vote if the candidates promise better schools and hospitals, improved roads, faster internet, more ethnic inclusion and even individual patronage. As the American sanctions have debilitated the Iranian economy, greater participation in parliamentary elections offers the provinces an opportunity to bargain for a better share of the shrinking pie from Tehran. In Tehran and other major cities, the parliamentary elections signal not only the citizens' preferences for particular factions within the regime but also its legitimacy as a whole. Participation rates in the major cities fluctuate more often and reflect the political diversity of the candidates. In the 2016 parliamentary elections, a high turnout enabled moderate reformist candidates to secure Tehran's 30 seats in the Parliament. The conservative winners in Tehran, this weekend, were led by Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, the former head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' air force wing, who is expected to be the speaker of the incoming Parliament. Victories like Mr. Qalibaf's demonstrate that the Revolutionary Guard is ensuring its presence and domination of the Parliament as well. Iranians who refused to vote expressed their anger and their disappointment with the Revolutionary Guard's bloody crackdown on protesters in November, and its cover up of the accidental shooting of a civilian airplane near Tehran in January. But the trouble with boycotting the elections is that it opens the doors of the Parliament for the most conservative wing of the political system. Iranian society stands at an uncharted crossroad and the regime is bringing the apparatus of the state under the control of what it considers to be its most loyal elites, one election at a time. In a politically, economically and regionally tumultuous environment, doing so would allow an orderly transition to the next supreme leader. The brutal response to the November protests across the country showed the will and the capacity of the security apparatus to put down unrest. And a multinational army of proxies under the banner of the Revolutionary Guard's Quds Force operating from Lebanon and Syria to Iraq and Yemen, have demonstrated Tehran's will and effectiveness in defending its sphere of influence and fighting threats from hostile states to nonstate participants. Iran's constitutional design places the Islamic Republic in a win win position. High voter participation helps legitimize the regime and a boycott invariably leads to a conservative victory. Elections also serve as a convenient device for the state to learn about and manage popular sentiments before they turn into a mass revolt. Despite these institutional constraints, Iranian citizens have often outmaneuvered their leaders and stunned the world by using elections as a tool to coordinate nationwide social and political movements. After the 1989 death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, and with the gradual decline of revolutionary fervor, competition among Mr. Khomeini's followers provided a narrow political opportunity for Iranian citizens. By choosing candidates who appeared furthest from the establishment, Iranians revealed their preference for radical change not only to the ruling elites but also to each other. Far from strengthening the regime, elections often turned into national protests, deepening the gap between the state and the society and further polarizing factional politics. The student uprising in 1999 over the government's crackdown on the media and the Green Movement against what millions viewed as a rigged re election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009 were direct results of electoral politics and popular frustrations with the regime's suppression of the people's struggle for civil rights. The ruling elites managed this 30 year cycle of elections and protests through a sequence of crackdowns, concessions and more crackdowns. Disillusioned citizens sometimes boycotted elections only to return to the ballot box with vehemence. Parliamentary elections in Iran have become a consistent predictor of relations between the state and the society. The low turnout in the 2004 parliamentary elections signaled popular disillusionment after the failure of the reform movement that started in the 1997 presidential election to protect civic rights, which led to the 2005 election of Mr. Ahmadinejad to the presidency. The high turnout in the 2016 parliamentary elections confirmed the high approval rate of President Hassan Rouhani and the nuclear agreement he signed with the United States and other world powers, predicting his landslide re election the following year. The conservative victory in the recent parliamentary elections indicates that the Iranian people are disenchanted with electoral politics that deliver nothing. It sets the stage for the ascendance of a hard line president in the 2021 election if the population's apathy persists. And the absence of public pressure and elite bargaining will determine the appointment of a possibly even more hawkish supreme leader after Ayatollah Khamenei. Yet after this electoral cycle, Iranian voters may not easily return to the ballot box. Friday's election could be the beginning of the death of Iran's limited electoral politics. Frustrations against the political system run deep in the country. So do anxieties over external threats to the nation's security and territorial integrity. It is unclear which direction Iranian society will take. Elections in the past have laid the ground for cultural exchanges, diplomatic negotiations and a nuclear agreement between Iran and the United States. After the starkly low turnout and the conservative victory, we might be inching toward a more turbulent phase between the two countries. Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar is an associate professor of international affairs at Texas A M University's Bush School of Government and Public Service and a fellow at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
The veteran painter Ross Bleckner is a wised up sort when it comes to matters of perception and reputation. "So this is a comeback story?" he asked, perhaps hopefully, during an interview in his Chelsea studio last month. Mr. Bleckner, 69, made his name in the 80s and 90s by channeling the anger and sorrow of the AIDS crisis into somber, abstract paintings. Since then, he has been painting steadily, lately from his base in the Hamptons. The large scale compositions are mostly black and white, with flowers, faces and hands emerging out of the abstract swirls in some places. The burned areas turn white, creating a hazy, ghostly effect. "My work is really about consciousness more than anything," said Mr. Bleckner. These days, he meditates and takes, as he says, "consciousness drugs." Not that he's too touchy feely when it comes to making the new paintings: He burns them with a blowtorch as part of their creation, so that in one sense, they're "destroyed," he said. "I think about it as a resurrection," he added. For some, the show may be haunted by Mr. Bleckner's longtime dealer, Mary Boone. He showed with her for 40 years, and she helped make him a star. Ms. Boone was recently sentenced to 30 months in prison for filing false tax returns, and her gallery is closing in May. Even closer to home for Mr. Bleckner, they were both ensnared in a drawn out scandal involving the actor Alec Baldwin. Mr. Baldwin claimed that Ms. Boone sold him a copy of a work by Mr. Bleckner, "Sea and Mirror," while falsely claiming it was the original he sought, from 1996, when Mr. Bleckner was at the height of his popularity. Mr. Baldwin sued, and the matter was settled with a payment of at least 1 million, and by Mr. Bleckner providing two works to Mr. Baldwin. "Lot of people evade taxes," Mr. Bleckner said about Ms. Boone. "A lot of people don't get caught. I was surprised. Mary's a very smart woman." But he added, "She shouldn't have done it. And she's paying the price." As for "Sea and Mirror," was Mr. Bleckner aware that Mr. Baldwin thought he had bought the original? "I did not know that," he said. "And I thought she would say that it had been painted as close to the original as possible." Mr. Bleckner added that he thought the actor was seeking a new commission that would match the older work. Rarely have two art world careers been so intertwined. But Mr. Bleckner said that last year he began the process of setting up the Petzel show with Ms. Boone's help. As for his decision to move officially to another gallery, Ms. Boone said, "Change is good, even when it's uncomfortable." Mr. Bleckner has a way of not seeming too bothered by awkwardness or rather, he's bothered by enough things that a single one doesn't really stand out. Eric Fischl, a fellow painter, close friend and another former artist of Ms. Boone's who decamped from her gallery in 2015, said that Mr. Bleckner was famous for his "humorous neuroses." Less amusing are the lawsuits Mr. Bleckner is trading with a former associate, Cody Gilman. In his suit last year, Mr. Gilman said he was sexually harassed and assaulted by Mr. Bleckner while in his employment as a studio aide. Mr. Bleckner called that "absurd" and is suing Mr. Gilman, accusing him of attempting to extort 2 million by threatening to portray their consensual relationship as a case of sexual harassment. Mr. Bleckner turns 70 in May. Mr. Fischl, a member of the same generation, said that he thought that the passage of time was central to the new work. "He's thinking about himself as a person aging, and in relation to mortality and nature," Mr. Fischl said. Mr. Bleckner is not slowing down. He paints most every day. "I want to be as good as I can, for as long as I can," he said. "And hopefully break through that darkness with a little bit of light once in a while. If people like it, great. If they don't, well, that's life."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
In the first three months of the year, The New York Times Company added more digital subscribers than it had gained during any quarter since it started charging readers for online content in 2011. But that increase was driven by widespread interest in news of the coronavirus pandemic, which has ravaged the U.S. economy and cut deeply into The Times's advertising revenue. By the end of a dramatic quarter, Times employees had grown accustomed to working remotely, and readers were flocking to the newspaper's website, drawn by articles on the coronavirus and its effects that were offered at no charge. Many of those readers bought subscriptions. The company reported on Wednesday that it had netted 587,000 new digital subscriptions during the quarter. The majority 468,000 were for the core news product, and the remaining 119,000 were for other digital products, including apps like Cooking and Crossword. At the end of March, The Times had more than five million digital subscribers, a high. Of those, there were 3.9 million subscriptions for news and 1.1 million for apps. The total number of subscriptions, including those to the print newspaper, stood at 5,841,000. Overall subscription revenue rose 5.4 percent during the three month period, to 285.4 million. Total revenue rose 1 percent, to 443.6 million. By the end of April, into the second quarter, the company noted in a news release, the number of total digital and print subscriptions had surpassed six million. In keeping with a trend that has affected other news organizations during the pandemic, The Times attracted new readers while the money it brought in from advertising plummeted. Overall ad revenue fell more than 15 percent, to 106.1 million, in the quarter. Digital ad revenue declined 7.9 percent, while print ad revenue had a drop of 20.9 percent. Over all, adjusted operating profit for the quarter was 44.3 million, a decline from the 52.4 million the company made during the equivalent period last year. Looking ahead, the chief executive, Mark Thompson, said ad revenue would continue to fall by as much as 55 percent in the second quarter. But he predicted that the subscription business would bolster the company. "We saw advertising fall rapidly toward the end of the quarter and believe that advertising in the second quarter will fall between 50 percent and 55 percent compared to a year ago with limited visibility beyond that," Mr. Thompson said in a statement on Wednesday. "Nonetheless, we believe that the company will emerge from this global crisis with a distinctive and valuable advertising revenue stream to complement a digital news subscription business, which is now by far the largest and most successful in the world." Despite the bleak forecast for ad revenue, Mr. Thompson described the company as "financially sound" and said it would "safely invest in our digital growth strategy and continue to hire new talent to help execute it." 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. In a call with investors Wednesday, Mr. Thompson promised some cost cutting that would most likely include job losses. "We expect no such job reductions in journalism," he added, "and none that would impact our core growth strategy. We will continue to invest in that strategy, and to hire both in journalism and engineering, data and the other digital product functions. We expect the company's net head count to increase rather than decrease by year's end." The Times has grown more reliant on subscriptions than advertising on Mr. Thompson's watch, which began in 2012, after he had served as the director general of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Wall Street has rewarded that strategy, and the pandemic has accelerated it. "The Times's business model, with its growing focus on digital subscription growth and diminishing reliance on advertising, is very well positioned to ride out this storm and thrive in a post pandemic world," Mr. Thompson said in the statement. "We've seen historic audience levels and an unprecedented rate of subscriber growth as well as real pressure on advertising revenue." Adjusted operating costs rose 3.3 percent during the quarter, partly because of the production of the television newsmagazine "The Weekly," a coproduction between The Times and the FX cable network, and the addition of more newsroom employees. While panelists at media conferences have predicted the death of print for decades indeed, the number of Times print subscriptions fell 7.9 percent, to 840,000, during the quarter it still accounted for the majority of subscription and ad revenue. For the quarter, the print subscription business brought in 155.4 million for the company, while the digital subscription business accounted for 130 million. On the ad front, print generated 55 million, versus 51 million from digital. Roland A. Caputo, the chief financial officer, said on Wednesday's call that declines in home delivery circulation were in line with recent quarters. He added that Starbucks's decision in August to cease distributing Times copies at its locations had a greater year over year impact on the decline in print circulation in the first quarter than the decline in newsstand sales likely caused by the pandemic. The Times Company is one of the first publicly owned newspaper businesses to report quarterly earnings since the virus swept the United States. Gannett, the nation's largest newspaper chain, is scheduled to give its first report of the year on Thursday. The Times's headquarters in Midtown Manhattan have been all but empty since March 13, with employees working remotely. "The earliest day we will ask people who are currently working remotely to return to our offices in New York will be on Sept. 8, the Tuesday after Labor Day," said a memo to employees on Tuesday from the publisher, A.G. Sulzberger; the chief operating officer, Meredith Kopit Levien; Mr. Caputo; and Mr. Thompson. Employees at the main printing press, in College Point, Queens, have operated under socially distanced rules. Subscription revenue in the first quarter was aided by pricing changes. In February, some long tenured digital subscribers experienced the first increase in the cost of a subscription to the core news product to 17 from 15 every four weeks since the establishment of the paywall nine years ago. The number of Times readers surged in March. Ms. Levien said The Times had 240 million unique visitors internationally and 2.5 billion page views that month. According to Comscore, a measurement company, it had 153 million unique visitors that month in the United States more than half of all adults. In January, before the World Health Organization had proposed the official name Covid 19 for the disease caused by the coronavirus, that number was 101 million.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
On Memorial Day weekend, the Surf Lodge will kick off its beachside series of summer fashion and beauty pop ups, which includes Topshop and Studio One Eighty Nine, the Rosario Dawson and Abrima Erwiah fashion line that is ethically sourced and sewn in Ghana. First up is Milk Makeup, the paraben free, 60 percent vegan cosmetics line from the Milk Studios co founder Mazdack Rassi and his wife, the fashion editor Zanna Rassi. They have curated a summer product edit that includes a balm tint with SPF that can be used on the lips and cheeks for a dewy flush. At 183 Edgemere Street, Montauk. From June 2 to Labor Day, Gurney's Montauk Resort Seawater Spa will host the Fashion Collective at Gurney's, a rotating series of weekend events for established and up and coming fashion and lifestyle brands like Mara Hoffman and the crochet swimwear line Kiini. Situated on the spa roof deck, which also has activities like life size chess and shuffleboard, the space will offer exclusive products from a number of designers, including Edie Parker canvas pouches with whimsical motifs like flamingos, rainbows and cheeky words, and La Vie Rebecca Taylor T shirts made in collaboration with the illustrator Wayne Pate. At 290 Old Montauk Highway, Montauk. The Sunset Beach Hotel on Shelter Island is also getting into the pop up game, with an Oliver Peoples cocktail party and pop up on June 18 and a mobile trunk show from the rugged luxe accessories line Kempton Co., which will be selling beach bags, pouches and sunglasses from the trunk of vintage Land Rover on June 25. At 35 Shore Road, Shelter Island Heights. The aptly named POP Collective in Southampton, opening Memorial Day weekend, will offer Tata Harper skin care, Mi Ola bikinis and C.F. Bronfman fine jewelry. It will be a one stop shop for items like espadrilles embellished with anchors and elephants from House of Pom, and whimsical tabletop decorations, with napkins, tablecloths and place mats featuring lobsters, crabs and coral prints from Pomegranate. At 42 Jobs Lane. Tory Burch will open her second Tory Sport store in East Hampton on Memorial Day weekend, a clean space with white flooring painted with blue stripes, inspired by the casual vibe of a 1970s surf lodge. Located in proximity to the area's boutique fitness studios, it will have gear for very sport, including running, tennis, swim and golf and bar and spin, of course. At 47 Newtown Lane. Club Monaco will open an East Hampton shop on Memorial Day weekend with a vintage focus. Among the finds: antiques, including candlesticks and sterling silver frames. On June 10, the company will release a Club Monaco x Dannijo capsule collection of more than 40 one of a kind goods like 19th century lace camisoles, dresses, skirts and wraps in varying shades of summer white sourced from around the globe. At 17 Newtown Lane, East Hampton. Joey Wolffer, founder of the Styleliner mobile shopping truck and co owner of Wolffer Estate Vineyard, has opened a brick and mortar store in Sag Harbor. The Styleliner by Joey Wolffer, in a 19th century artist's studio kitted out with hanging whaling lanterns and boat rope, offers finds from Ms. Wolffer's travels, including Katerina Psoma carved stone earrings from Greece and vintage African Fulani textiles. Ms. Wolffer's own range of fringed and embroidered leather handbags are exclusive to the store. At 25 Madison Street, Sag Harbor. Armarium, the Trisha Gregory and Alexandra Lind Rose destination for luxury fashion and accessories on loan, will be at Baron's Cove in Sag Harbor in mid July with a pop up showroom. It will feature Missoni summer cocktail dresses and palazzo pants, brightly hued Sara Battaglia x Ferragamo clutches and vintage pieces from La Double J. all perfect for a summer night out. At 31 West Water Street, Sag Harbor. The baker Carissa Waechter of the Amagansett Farmers Market staple Carissa's Breads will join forces with her florist friend Missi Bullock on Bread Flowers, a flower and artisanal bread home delivery service offering essentials (a loaf of salty soured pickled rye and a bouquet of garden roses, say) from a '61 vintage Citroen van that will make its way from Wainscott to Montauk. The men's swimwear label Orlebar Brown, known for its colorful trunks, including artist editions created with images from the Hulton Getty archive, will reopen its store in the Hamptons this summer at a new location. At 55 Newtown Lane, East Hampton. Tony Melillo has opened a pop up for his luxe basics line ATM featuring the label's signature supersoft tees and special summery offerings like French terry sweats and a slub jersey beach cover up. There will be accessories, including sneakers from the Paris label Camille Tanoh. At 48 Newtown Lane, East Hampton. Greg Ammon (son of the investment banker Ted Ammon, whose 2001 East Hampton murder was the subject of a Lifetime movie and a documentary) has opened a shop for Big Flower, a resort lifestyle brand. It includes summer wardrobe stables like breathable button downs and unlined suiting, along with a women's wear capsule with relaxed tunics and beach dresses designed by his wife, Stacy. The gallery space showcases vintage photos of the landscape and community, including some of Mr. Ammon's own family, as well as the work of local artists. At 23 Newtown Lane, East Hampton.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
After an impressive debut season, Netflix's remake of the 1970s and '80s multicamera sitcom "One Day at a Time" returned for a second season and with it, more jokes about the joys and struggles of life as a modern Cuban American family. Rather than focus on one main through line, as the first season did, Season 2 spends more time getting close to its individual characters, all of whom are given a chance to face their problems. Penelope (Justina Machado) struggles to cope with her mental health and re enter the dating world; her daughter, Elena (Isabella Gomez), has trouble finding her romantic footing as well. Alex (Marcel Ruiz) maintains his post as his abuela's favorite grandchild, but even he's not safe from anti Latino discrimination. And despite having rejected the advances of Dr. Berkowitz (Stephen Tobolowsky), Lydia (Rita Moreno) comes down with a case of unbridled jealousy after learning he's been taking another woman to the opera. Led by the series's two showrunners, Gloria Calderon Kellett and Mike Royce, the writing team has created a compelling family sitcom that's in equal measures thoughtful, serious and funny. In a recent phone conversation, Ms. Kellett, who is herself Cuban American, talked about the stunning Season 2 finale, as well as some of the political challenges facing Latinos today and what's ahead for the Alvarez family in Season 3. Following are edited excerpts from the spoiler filled interview. After all the attention "One Day at a Time" got for its first season, what was it like to come back for Season 2? Oh, it was so nice. I love my cast, and I love my writers. We have such a great room. We just missed each other, so we just sat down and talked about where we were at in our lives. How that manifested into stories. Mike Mike Royce and I like to meet in between and get a sense of what we would like our season arc to be. We then get to talk to them the writers about "Here's what we're thinking," and we'll give them a rough skeleton of where we want to go. It was really nice to sit down and brainstorm about what's going on in this world and how that would affect this family. So you sketch out what's next for Season 2, then what happens? Going into Season 2, we knew we wanted to end with Lydia having the stroke and that the final episode would be an homage to the "Maud" episode that he and I both love. It's where everyone gets to do a monologue. So along the way, we knew we wanted to build in some of the stroke stuff. We knew we wanted to have Penelope in a relationship and for it to amicably over something like having children end. That just felt like something a lot of women I know who are nearing 40 are experiencing. Same with Elena. We knew we wanted her to have a girlfriend and to start this positive relationship with her. We knew we wanted to make a baby step with Victor Penelope's ex husband and the children's father, played by James Martinez . It's not a complete resolution, but something that seemed hopeful. We came in with those things, sat with the writers, and they tell us what's going on in their lives and what's been important. We find a middle ground and break the stories, and that's that. The country's politics have changed since the premiere of Season 1. How did you decide to incorporate that into the show like the episode when Alex gets called an ethnic slur? That was based on a real incident. That happened to my brother at a beach in San Diego. We've lived in San Diego for 20 years. He called me up post Trump, "I was just at the beach, and someone told me to go back to Mexico!" He was laughing about it because he doesn't care. But it's like, "What's happening?" We try on the show to show many points of view. Obviously, the show has a liberal bent, but we try to show all sides of an issue so all sides of the conversation can start. This is something we thought would affect this family, so how would they talk about it? What would that look like? Do you worry whether any of the characters might become unrelatable as you're preparing for the next season? I don't think so. It all starts from a real place. The Lydia stuff that's the most outrageous is stuff that's actually happened in my real life. My mom had a stroke and didn't tell me for 12 years! That's real! I was just talking with her and she said, "Aye, when I had a stroke ... " "Wait, what stroke?" "Ah, your wedding was happening, I didn't want to bother you." "Oye, mom, you better tell somebody!" All that is real. It seems dramatic, but in a wonderful way in the arms of Rita Moreno, it has that diva turn. A colleague of mine has written about how the show has this wonderful sense of joy. It feels like a celebration of Cuban culture, Latino identity, the immigrant experience and family. Is that a conscious choice when writing? Well, that's just my experience. Really, my house is not a sad place ever. We feel so blessed, we feel so grateful. We have a really good time. In the media, Latino families are always in crisis there's gang violence, people weeping. That's just not what I know it to be. I wanted to reflect my experience, too, and to throw that in the ring. It seems a lot of people relate to that, too. Last season, you addressed immigration with Elena's friend Carmen and her parents' deportation. This time, you have Lydia and Schneider (Todd Grinnell) going through the citizenship process. Was that something you wanted to keep exploring? In my family, not all of the Cubans became citizens. My parents became citizens, but I have aunts and uncles who did not. When you become a U.S. citizen, you have to renounce your Cuban citizenship. They're green card holders they pay taxes, social security and they can't vote. When Trump started deporting people, my cousins got really concerned. "Should we have mom become a citizen?" There was all this worry. What if Lydia had never become a citizen? Then it would be fun to have her and Schneider go on that journey together. Another story line you kept exploring this season was Penelope's depression, and how she's still struggling with the social stigma and the need to rely on antidepressants to help her. We really wanted to get that right. It also seemed like something veterans really struggle with; Latinos have a lot of issues with discussing it or going on medications. We wanted to explore what that was like for this character. Also, she's at a great point in her life, so it's that placebo of "Everything is going great, and I don't need to do any of this stuff anymore." Then, we saw what the reality of that looked like for her. She couldn't talk to her mom about it, and she couldn't talk to her boyfriend about it because she was embarrassed. It was also a way to deepen her relationship with Schneider because he was the only person she could talk to about it. Is there a story you're looking forward to continuing in Season 3? Well, we have a few things built in already. Penelope is in school, so she still will be in school, or maybe graduate. We get to see her journey to being a nurse practitioner. Seeing what else is out there for her dating life as well. Deepening Elena's relationship. Maybe Alex will get to have a little love in his life. And of course, we'll be taking into consideration what's happening in the next month or two months from now. The news is crazy.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Consciously watching for small wonders in the world around you during an otherwise ordinary walk could amplify the mental health benefits of the stroll, according to an interesting new psychological study of what the study's authors call "awe walks." In the study, people who took a fresh look at the objects, moments and vistas that surrounded them during brief, weekly walks felt more upbeat and hopeful in general than walkers who did not. The findings are subjective but indicate that awe walks could be a simple way to combat malaise and worry. They also underscore that how we think and feel during exercise can alter how the exercise alters us. There already is considerable evidence, of course, that exercise, including walking, can buoy our moods. Past studies have linked increased physical activity to greater happiness and reduced risks for anxiety, depression and other mental ills. Feeling a sense of awe also seems to up our overall feelings of gladness and improve health. A somewhat nebulous emotion, awe generally is defined as the sense that you are in the presence of something larger and more consequential than yourself and that this something is mysterious and ineffable. In past studies, people who reported feeling awe also tended to have less emotional stress and lower levels of substances related to body wide inflammation. But no studies had looked into whether mixing awe and activity might somehow augment the benefits of each or, on the other hand, reduce them. So, for the new study, which was published in September in Emotion, scientists affiliated with the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, and other institutions decided to start teaching older walkers how to cultivate awe. They concentrated on people in their 60s, 70s and 80s, an age when some people can face heightened risks for declining mental health. The researchers also had a ready made volunteer pool, consisting of men and women already participating in an ongoing U.C.S.F. study of how to age well. The scientists asked 52 of the study volunteers if they would mind adding a weekly 15 minute walk to their normal schedules. All of these selected recruits were physically and cognitively healthy. Fresh, baseline studies of their mental health showed they were psychologically well adjusted as well, with little anxiety or depression. The scientists randomly divided these volunteers into two groups. One, as a control group, was asked to start walking, at least once a week, for 15 minutes, preferably outside, but given few other mandates. The members of the other group likewise were asked to walk once a week, but also were instructed in how to cultivate awe as they walked. "Basically, we told them to try to go and walk somewhere new, to the extent possible, since novelty helps to cultivate awe," says Virginia Sturm, an associate professor of neurology at U.C.S.F., who led the new study. The researchers also suggested that the walkers pay attention to details along their walks, Dr. Sturm says, "looking at everything with fresh, childlike eyes." They emphasized that the awesome can be anywhere and everywhere, she says, from a sweeping panorama of cliffs and sea to sunlight dappling a leaf. "Awe is partly about focusing on the world outside of your head," she says, and rediscovering that it is filled with marvelous things that are not you. The awe walkers, like the control group, were asked to walk outdoors. Neither group was told to confine their walks to parks or to avoid urban settings, Dr. Sturm says. Both groups were asked to take a few selfies during their walks, in order to document locales, but otherwise to avoid using their phones while walking. The walkers in both groups uploaded their selfies to a lab website and also completed a daily online assessment of their current mood and, if they had walked that day, how they had felt during their strolls. After eight weeks, the scientists compared the groups' responses and photos. Not surprisingly, they found that the awe walkers seemed to have become adept at discovering and amplifying awe. One volunteer reported focusing now on "the beautiful fall colors and the absence of them among the evergreen forest." A control walker, in contrast, said she spent much of a recent walk fretting about an upcoming vacation and "all the things I had to do before we leave." The researchers also found small but significant differences in the groups' sense of well being. Over all, the awe walkers felt happier, less upset and more socially connected than the men and women in the control group. The volunteers in the control group reported some improvements in mood, but their gains were slighter. More startling, the researchers noted a variance in the groups' selfies. Over the course of the eight weeks, the size of awe walkers' countenances shrank in relation to the scenery around them. Their faces grew smaller, the world larger. Nothing similar occurred in the photos from the control group. "We had not expected that," Dr. Sturm says. The findings are subjective, though, since awe, like other emotions, is difficult to quantify, and there is, as yet, no other science indicating that becoming a punier part of your own selfies says something about you. The study participants also uniformly were older people in good health who walked. It is not clear whether young people or those with illnesses likewise would benefit, or if you can and should try awe runs, swims, hikes or rides. But Dr. Sturm thinks the possibility is enticing, especially now, when pandemic and other concerns are rampant. "It is such a simple thing" to look around for small wonders while you exercise, she says, "and there's no downside."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
Calm authority, an effortless intimacy with the facts, an empathy that's felt, not merely read off a page: When the American president becomes comforter in chief by dint of a national crisis, it's the toughest part of the gig. As millions of homebound viewers tune into daily coronavirus briefings, who can blame anyone for wanting to return to the leaders from our movies or TV? (No doubt having a screenwriter or two helps.) Setting aside performances based on actual White House occupants (sorry, Daniel Day Lewis in "Lincoln"), we prioritized big, bold conceptions including some wonderful weasels and arrived at 10 picks, roughly in order of best to worst. He's got an easy way with a teleprompter and a voice that could soothe a population facing down an extinction level event. Freeman's President Tom Beck is everything you want in a leader when a planet killing comet is hurtling toward Earth. Never mind that Beck hid this catastrophic news from the world for months, along with the secret U.S. Russian countermeasure, a nuke laden interceptor called the Messiah. "There will be no hoarding, there will be no sudden profiteering," Beck tells his flock, and you actually believe the words will stick. His prayer is sincere. The man knows his Bible quotes. Available to rent or buy on Amazon, FandangoNow, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu. Here is the president as "Die Hard" action hero (and maybe that's just what your quarantine binge needs). James Marshall President Trump's favorite onscreen POTUS is no ordinary commander in chief. He speaks Russian fluently, served in Vietnam with uncommon valor and knows his way around an airplane's cargo hold useful for when foreign hijackers make their move after takeoff. Shout all you want, Gary Oldman, but you're about to get booted mid flight. Ford's non growly scenes before the terrorist siege reveal a family man and college football fanatic. He's decisive. If only every national emergency were this clear cut. Available to stream on Fubo, and to rent or buy on Amazon, Fandango Now, Flix Fling, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu. A show that turned the presidency into a running conversation (and even developed its own piece of grammar, the walk and talk, to extend those chats), Aaron Sorkin's weekly drama did more to ennoble the inner lives of elected officials than most elected officials. Sheen's complex commitment to the role of Josiah "Jed" Bartlet, a two term Democrat, is the emotional anchor. While the material definitely skews leftward, there's no party affiliation to its intellect and fierceness of feeling. Bartlet has too many high points to name, but his weaker moments of shaken faith are the show's most lasting that and a piece of strategy scribbled on a pad: "Let Bartlet be Bartlet." Available to stream on Netflix, or to buy on Amazon, FandangoNow, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu. Bridges's Clintonesque Jackson Evans is a president of big appetites a gobbler of oatmeal cookies, a slurper of wine, a smooth talker, a screamer on occasion. Sweatshirt clad and hyperverbal, he falls in the likable column, mainly for channeling his passions when it counts. During the scandal tarred confirmation hearings of his vice presidential nominee (Joan Allen), he goes all in, relishing the gamesmanship and taking on Congress in a confrontation that's one of the most galvanizing final speeches of a political movie. "A woman will serve in the highest level of the Executive, simple as that," Evans declares. Available to buy or rent on Amazon, Google Play and Vudu. In the dumbed down, trash clogged America of 2505, the electorate is beguiled by a five time wrestling champ and ex porn star who ascends to the highest office in the land. (Note for posterity: The director and co writer Mike Judge meant this as unthinkable satire.) President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho is a man of his day. As played by Crews with a James Brown level amount of physical bounce, he electrifies the film, outshining everyone around him. Is he an idiot, though? Give Camacho credit: When facing a mass agricultural crisis involving the watering of crops with a sports drink, he puts the smartest person in charge (Luke Wilson) and heeds the results of science. Available to stream on Max Go or Amazon, or to buy or rent on Fandango Now, Google Play, iTunes or Vudu. Constantly aggrieved at snubs both real and imagined ("She's gone full metal Nixon," whispers an aide), Selina Meyer is, at root, a No. 2. It makes her potentially unsuited to this list. But she does fail upward, making it to the Oval Office via accidental fortune in the form of a resignation. Louis Dreyfus's multi season portrayal is consistently sharp, traipsing into uncharted realms of awkwardness even when the show's overall narrative wobbles. As president, though, Meyer gets low grades: sneaky slush fund improprieties, wild swivels on issues, voter suppression, even a war crime involving a drone strike and a dead elephant. Available to stream on HBO Now, HBO Go and Amazon Prime; or to buy on Amazon, FandagoNow, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu. Peter Sellers, 'Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb' Sellers's dithering President Merkin Muffley he of the nasal Midwestern accent and no spine is one of the actor's subtler achievements. High minded to a fault (the liberal politician Adlai Stevenson was an influence), the character represents the director Stanley Kubrick's flintiest bit of commentary: Niceties and manners won't matter when a rogue Air Force general orders a nuclear attack and the doomsday clock ticks down. Listen to how Muffley minces around the Soviet premier's bruised ego during a cringe worthy hotline call ("Of course, it's a friendly call!"), or how he openly worries about his ultimate place in history. He's also the one who insists, immortally, "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here this is the War Room." Available to stream on the Criterion Channel and Crackle, or to buy or rent on Amazon, FandangoNow, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu. The director Sidney Lumet's grittier films ("Serpico," "Dog Day Afternoon," "Prince of the City") were still on the horizon when he spearheaded this Cold War thriller, a bunker to bomber race against time that, for all its visual panache, couldn't avoid comparisons with the slyer "Dr. Strangelove," released only months earlier. Regardless, Fonda brings dignity to his nameless world leader sweating out the seconds. Shielding his face in shame, he orders the unimaginable and takes full responsibility. The film has a near cosmic sense of sacrifice; it exists in a political space where idealism is a president's main weapon. Available to stream on the Criterion Channel, or to buy or rent on Amazon, FandangoNow, Google Play and Vudu. Pleasence lent an icy gravity to John Carpenter's "Halloween" as a heroic psychiatrist, an atypical role for a man often cast as the heavy. For this film, their second collaboration (written by Carpenter as an oblique response to Watergate), he's back to being a worm, if an immensely watchable one. Converting Manhattan into a maximum security prison may have been this guy's idea to begin with, or so it's implied by the terrorists taking down Air Force One. The way Pleasence's aloof, unnamed head of state haltingly says goodbye to his staff as his emergency pod's door slides shut ("God save me ... and watch over you all") speaks volumes. Later, we'll watch him brandish a machine gun and give Kurt Russell's Snake Plissken the cold shoulder. Available to stream on IMDb TV, CBS All Access and Shudder; to rent on Amazon; or to rent or buy on Fandango Now, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Millions of American children have been exposed to a parasite that could interfere with their breathing, liver function, eyesight and even intelligence. Yet few scientists have studied the infection in the United States, and most doctors are unaware of it. The parasites, roundworms of the genus Toxocara, live in the intestines of cats and dogs, especially strays. Microscopic eggs from Toxocara are shed in the animals' feces, contaminating yards, playgrounds and sandboxes. These infectious particles cling to the hands of children playing outside. Once swallowed, the eggs soon hatch, releasing larvae that wriggle through the body and, evidence suggests, may even reach the brain, compromising learning and cognition. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention periodically tracks positive tests for Toxocara through the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The latest report, published in September in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, estimated that about 5 percent of the United States population or about 16 million people carry Toxocara antibodies in their blood, a sign they have ingested the eggs. But the risk is not evenly shared: Poor and minority populations are more often exposed. The rate among African Americans was almost 7 percent, according to the C.D.C. Among people living below the poverty line, the infection rate was 10 percent. The odds of a positive test rise with age, but it's unknown whether this reflects recent infections or simply an accumulation of antibodies from past encounters. Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, calls Toxocara both one of the most common parasites in the country and arguably the most neglected. While much is still unknown, "there's enough here to warrant doing a major study on a large number of children." At the moment, research into Toxocara among Americans is so lacking that the National Institutes of Health funding website lists no grants to study it. Even many of the most basic questions are unanswered, including how often ingested eggs progress to full blown infection. Among the country's overlooked parasitic infections, "Toxocara is probably the one that affects the broadest range of people," said Sue Montgomery, lead of the epidemiology team at the parasitic diseases branch of the C.D.C. "Dogs and cats are everywhere. Many of them may carry the parasites." Studies indicate that owned pets who receive regular veterinary care rarely carry Toxocara. Poorer neighborhoods bear a disproportionate share of strays. In one survey, 8,700 unowned dogs were said to be roaming parts of Dallas. A survey of New York City playgrounds, presented at a medical conference last year, sampled 21 parks across the city. Toxocara eggs were found in nine parks. Three quarters of samples taken in the Bronx contained eggs in the larval stage, which are more infectious. No parks in Manhattan had eggs with larvae. In some cases, larvae from Toxocara enter the eyes and cause blindness. They can also infect the liver and lungs, leading to a potentially damaging inflammatory reaction. Untreated, the infection may clear on its own after months or even years, "but we don't know for sure," Dr. Hotez said. A C.D.C. survey published in October found that 85 percent of pediatricians admitted to only passing familiarity with the infection, called toxocariasis; given a description of symptoms, slightly less than half of the doctors correctly diagnosed it. When infection is recognized, it can be treated with the anti parasitic drug albendazole, Dr. Hotez said. "Nobody is dying here," he said, "but it is potentially causing developmental delays that are affecting quality of life, and the economic impact is far greater. It could trap children in poverty." In 2014, he published his only contribution to a mental health journal, in JAMA Psychiatry, arguing that parasitic infections such as toxocariasis "likely account for a substantial yet hidden burden of mental illness in the United States." To what extent, no one can say. The scientific literature contains only scattered reports of Toxocara worms discovered in the central nervous system. Nonetheless, the impairment does not appear to be severe, which is likely why Toxocara receives little notice. "What we don't see is easy to ignore," Dr. Erickson said. "There isn't a story to wrap around it to make it emotionally salient for people. That's what tends to get political attention and financial attention." Dr. Hotez is more blunt: "If this were a disease of wealthy kids in Brookline, Mass., and Bethesda, Md., and Westchester, N.Y., we'd be all over it." After unsuccessful attempts to obtain government grants to research Toxocara, Dr. Hotez approached Congress, meeting in December 2016 with Sen. Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey. According to a spokesman, Mr. Booker plans to introduce legislation to further examine the impact of overlooked infections in the United States, Toxocara among them. "It's hard for people to accept that it could be having the effect that it is," said Dr. Holland, of Trinity College. "We don't really know its impact, which is frustrating. These are larvae burrowing through the brain. It's not something that any mother or father of a child would welcome."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
President Trump's reaction to the leak of incriminating details in John Bolton's forthcoming book shocked me. Not the part where the president said that Bolton was making up a Ukraine quid pro quo in the service of the best seller list that he was lying for lucre. Trump sees that transaction everywhere he looks, because he sees it first and foremost in the mirror. No, I was surprised that the president didn't dispute knowing Bolton, or at least didn't say that he was so slightly acquainted with his own former national security adviser that he couldn't pick him chinchilla bushy mustache and all out of a lineup. That's Trump's favorite ploy. Ask Michael Cohen, Anthony Scaramucci, Prince Andrew, Stormy Daniels, Gordon Sondland, Lev Parnas. Fall into disrepute, cross Trump or claim to have the goods on him and you're wiped clean from his memory, no matter the existence of contradictory forensics. Ivanka, beware. You're one bad manicure away from paternal amnesia. Bolton is the impeachment star of the week, whether he winds up testifying or not, and I can't shake the feeling that he plotted all of this out: keeping his head down during the hearings in the House; letting it be known only afterward that he'd be willing to testify in the Senate; the revelation this week simultaneous with assertions by Trump's defense team that there were no firsthand witnesses to the president's wrongdoing that his book indeed addresses Ukraine and fully backs up the charges in the articles of impeachment. When Trump came down that escalator in June 2015, the laws of political gravity were suspended, and Bolton's emergence as a darling of Democrats is the latest example. He was so far to the right and such a ferocious hawk that President George W. Bush bypassed the Senate to sneak him in as ambassador to the United Nations. He later feathered a nest at Fox News, also known as the Trump administration applicant pool. And at a time when most self respecting foreign policy mavens had concluded that Trump was toxic, Bolton opened his lips wide to the poison, signing on to become the president's third national security adviser. Of course, the president is now on his fourth. Trump can't dismiss Bolton's account of events as partisan. Bolton's conservative credentials prove otherwise. Trump can't bellow "deep state," not when he handpicked Bolton at a stage of his presidency when he'd already become sensitive to that supposedly pernicious force. All Trump can do is command his Republican minions in the Senate to fall in line. Sadly, most of them will. Don't be impressed by the possibility that now and, I stress, only now some Senate Republicans may press for witnesses, including Bolton, in the trial. This isn't a stirring of conscience. It's a cloaking of humiliation. If they ignore Bolton, their still unshaken commitment to acquitting Trump becomes even more naked. Besides, hearing from witnesses wouldn't erase Republican senators' awful behavior to this point in the trial: all the ugly gloating from the likes of Lindsey Graham that Adam Schiff's undeniable eloquence was for naught; Marsha Blackburn's pathologically exuberant attacks on the integrity of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman; Martha McSally's disgraceful sniping at a perfectly polite television reporter ("liberal hack," she spewed) and then her cynical use of that Trumpian outburst to raise money for her re election campaign. This is sycophancy at its most shameful. Scratch that superlative: I was forgetting Mike Pompeo. According to The Times's scoop about Bolton's book, he writes that Pompeo, too, was aware of the Ukraine pressure campaign the same Pompeo who did nothing to stop the vilification of Marie Yovanovitch; the same Pompeo who promoted the debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election; the same Pompeo who once warned that Trump would be "an authoritarian president who ignored our Constitution" and then, when Trump gave him a really neat job, decided that a little authoritarianism never hurt anyone. Of late he seems to be having a meltdown. I attribute it to his realization that his reputation and belief in his own rectitude won't survive Trump. He's assessing the bargain he made and understanding how completely his ambition eclipsed his integrity. It's hell when you're revealed to yourself. Bolton, meanwhile, is probably feeling pretty content. He knows how badly the Trump presidency will be judged and has positioned himself on the right side of history this time around. Maybe bitterness brought him here, maybe ego, maybe this quaint old thing called patriotism. He survived Trump. I'd read that book. I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter ( FrankBruni). The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
For American Airlines, the nation's largest airline, the mid to late 2010s were what the Bible calls "years of plenty." In 2014, having reduced competition through mergers and raised billions of dollars in new baggage fee revenue, American began reaching stunning levels of financial success. In 2015, it posted a 7.6 billion profit compared, for example, to profits of about 500 million in 2007 and less than 250 million in 2006. It would continue to earn billions in profit annually for the rest of the decade. "I don't think we're ever going to lose money again," the company's chief executive, Doug Parker, said in 2017. There are plenty of things American could have done with all that money. It could have stored up its cash reserves for a future crisis, knowing that airlines regularly cycle through booms and busts. It might have tried to decisively settle its continuing contract disputes with pilots, flight attendants and mechanics. It might have invested heavily in better service quality to try to repair its longstanding reputation as the worst of the major carriers. Instead, American blew most of its cash on a stock buyback spree. From 2014 to 2020, in an attempt to increase its earnings per share, American spent more than 15 billion buying back its own stock. It managed, despite the risk of the proverbial rainy day, to shrink its cash reserves. At the same time it was blowing cash on buybacks, American also began to borrow heavily to finance the purchase of new planes and the retrofitting of old planes to pack in more seats. As early as 2017 analysts warned of a risk of default should the economy deteriorate, but American kept borrowing. It has now accumulated a debt of nearly 30 billion, nearly five times the company's current market value. At no time during its years of plenty did American improve how it treats its customers. Change fees went up to 200 for domestic flights and to 750 for international. Its widely despised baggage fees were hiked to 30 and 40 for first and second bags. These higher fees yielded billions of dollars, yet did not help the airline improve its on time arrivals, reduce tarmac delays or prevent involuntary bumping. Instead, American's main "innovations" were the removal of screens from its planes, the reduction of bathroom and seat sizes and the introduction of a "basic economy" class that initially included a ban on carry on luggage. In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, which is wreaking havoc on the airline industry, American Airlines has not yet asked for a bailout at least not in so many words. Yet after a recent meeting with airline leadership, Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, said that "certain sectors of the economy, airlines coming to mind" might require assistance. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday that the airlines, including American, would be "on the top of the list" for federal loan relief. As the government considers what we, the public, should do for the airlines, we should ask, Just what have they done for us? The United States economy needs an airline industry to function. The industry is in that sense not a "normal" industry, but rather what was once called a common carrier or a public utility: a critical infrastructure on which the rest of the economy relies. The major airlines know that unlike a local restaurant, they will never be allowed, collectively, to fail completely. In practice, the public has subsidized the industry by providing de facto insurance against hard times in the form of bailouts or merger approvals. And now here we go again. We cannot permit American and other airlines to use federal assistance, whether labeled a bailout or not, to weather the coronavirus crisis and then return to business as usual. Before providing any loan relief, tax breaks or cash transfers, we must demand that the airlines change how they treat their customers and employees and make basic changes in industry ownership structure. Beginning with passengers, change fees should be capped at 50 and baggage fees tied to some ratio of costs. The change fees don't just irritate; they are also a drag on the broader economy, making the transport system less flexible and discouraging what would otherwise be efficient changes to travel plans. We should also put an end to the airlines' pursuit of smaller and smaller seats, which are not only uncomfortable and even physically harmful, but also foster in flight rage and make the job of flight attendants nigh unbearable. Finally, we have allowed too much common ownership, permitting large shareholders to take a stake in each of the major airlines, creating incentives to collude instead of compete. The airlines will argue that their ownership structure, cramped seats, high fees and other forms of customer suffering are necessary to keep prices lower. But after the last decade's mergers, no one should take that argument seriously. As any economist will tell you, in a market with reduced competition, and common ownership, there is limited pressure to reduce prices. Instead, as we've seen, the major airlines charge what they can get away with and spend the profit on stock buybacks and other self serving enterprises. The question of what the public should demand from an airline bailout raises questions that transcend the business of flying. The next several weeks will leave behind many economic victims, including nearly every provider of in person services. Many small retailers, restaurants and other businesses, like caterers or fitness instructors, face grim prospects. Yet it is the economy's big players, like banks and airlines, that are the best at asking for (and getting) government assistance. During the last economic crisis, we largely let individuals suffer while helping out the big guys, leaving behind deep resentments that still fester. This time around we should start from the bottom instead of the top. Tim Wu ( superwuster) is a law professor at Columbia, a contributing opinion writer and the author, most recently, of "The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age." The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters nytimes.com. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
The house for sale in the mid 200,000s in the Catskill Mountains was a cutie, no doubt about it. A midcentury shingled cottage just shy of 1,000 square feet, it had a freshly renovated interior with a vaulted ceiling. Two tiny bedrooms flanked a bathroom with double sinks and fashionable tile. The real estate pheromones wafting from this property were so powerful that eight days after it appeared on the market in mid May, it had received nine offers. All exceeded the list price, and about half were in cash. Two came from potential buyers who hadn't even set foot inside the home. The winning bid was 50,000 over the asking price. A buying frenzy is roiling the real estate markets in some of New York's most pastoral regions. And nowhere is the enthusiasm starker than in the Catskills. In Sullivan, Ulster, Greene and Delaware Counties, urbanites with the wherewithal to venture beyond the city are snapping up primary and weekend houses, many in what real estate sales agents say is a financial sweet spot from 200,00 to 450,000. They are forging ahead despite the inconveniences and uncertainties of buying in a pandemic (masked, self directed house tours; cautious lenders; virtual closings). "It is unlike anything I have ever seen. We're busier in May than we ever were in the height of the summer, which is our high season in the Catskills," said Robin Jones, an agent with Country House Realty in Sullivan County. "I've been in five bidding wars in the last few weeks." Although the market came to a halt with the statewide sheltering order in mid March, April house sales in Ulster County, the most active in the region, declined only 0.6 percent compared to April 2019, according to New York State Association of Realtors data. (That month, the statewide average plummeted 29.3 percent year over year.) But even these numbers don't tell the whole story, said Tim Sweeney, the president of the Hudson Valley Catskill Region Multiple Listing Service, because they reflect deals struck before the pandemic. More indicative of the market's fever are the 416 Ulster County houses that went pending or under contract in May. "Theoretically, most of these 416 houses will close in July or August," Mr. Sweeney said, a considerable increase over the 238 houses that closed from July 15 to Aug. 15 in 2019. Ms. Jones described her typical clients as New Yorkers who are lucky enough to have discovered (or renewed their appreciation of) the ease of working from home and see no point in paying astronomical city prices when they will likely be wary of attending cultural events when the events finally return or rubbing shoulders in bars and restaurants when they reopen. After being confined in tight quarters with their young children, they are eager to be liberated into open, green spaces. "The phrase I keep being told is, 'I'm ready to pull the trigger,'" she said. As demand rises, the supply of new Catskills listings has dwindled. Brokers say that many owners who had planned to unload their properties have been renting them instead, while keeping a watchful eye on the market or they are sheltering in the homes themselves. According to the state association, the number of new listings in Sullivan County shrank 77.4 percent in April compared with April 2019. In Greene County, the decline was 72.1 percent; in Delaware County, 62 percent; and in Ulster County, 59.5 percent. Among this vanishing inventory, buyers from Manhattan and Brooklyn are competing ferociously for a subset of houses "something funky, cute and creative looking," said Hilary Smith, who sells properties for Ruth Gale Realty, in Ulster County. Many buyers are willing to bid over ask, if it means laying claim to a property that is within their budget and using it immediately. "It's that price point," Ms. Smith said. For a certain committed group of shoppers, she added, "the difference between 250,000 and 310,000 is not that different." "The first several years I was here, I barely saw a multiple offer," said Peggy Bellar, a broker with Catskill Dream Team in Delaware County, who entered the business about eight years ago. As more city people discover the area, often as guests in one of the quaint local wedding venues, there have been some tussles over houses, she said, "but this is getting darned cutthroat." Among the instruments of savagery is the increasingly popular escalation clause, a statement submitted with an offer that automatically raises the bid a specified amount above the highest competing offer, with a cap. As a result, the highest standing bid can be edged out by a tiny increment. One of Ms. Bellar's clients was beat by only 500, she said. So Ms. Bellar developed her own clause. When clients fell in love with a house, she recommended that they bid aggressively over the asking price and wrote into the offer the demand that the seller respond within 24 hours and not accept any other offers in that time frame. "It worked," she said. "I think we're going to see a lot of creativity on how to do this." Some buyers appear to be driven more by the urge for victory in a heated bidding war than any true affection for a house. A modest two bedroom Catskills cabin near a river was listed in May in the high 200,000s. It received five offers within 18 hours and was awarded to a couple who tendered a cash bid, sight unseen, of more than 20,000 above the asking price. Then the deal fell apart. The listing agent said she was told the buyers' representative had seen the house and communicated details about it to her clients. In fact, the buyers' agent hadn't crossed the threshold. After the offer was accepted and the buyers had a look, they backed out without substantial penalty. By that time, the other four contenders had lost interest or bought elsewhere. (A couple who had been scared off by the bidding war stepped in later, and their offer was accepted.) Even with the relaxation of Covid 19 restrictions, Catskills brokers were still describing frantic activity in early June. "I am basically losing my mind," Ms. Bellar said. "It is so insanely busy." A listing she put up on June 5 had 15 showings slotted for the next day, every half hour, from nine to five. "It is nuts," she said. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: nytrealestate.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
The posts a curated series of videos, photos and musings pulled from players' social media accounts detail the mundanity, and sometimes absurdity, of life in quarantine for the players as they restart their seasons, at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla. (N.B.A.) and IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla. (W.N.B.A.). They have delighted basketball fans and garnered attention from the players and from ESPN, a broadcast partner of the N.B.A. So who is behind the wholesomecontent? Both accounts are run by a quartet of self described West Coast "hoop heads" and friends, some of whom work in the N.B.A. media world: Nick DePaula, who writes about the shoe industry for ESPN; Wells Phillips, who works in marketing for the Los Angeles Department of Convention and Tourism Development; Travonne Edwards, a podcast host for The Athletic and an elementary schoolteacher in Scottsdale, Ariz.; and Drew Ruiz, a staffer for the Drew League, the Los Angeles based basketball association, who has also written for Slam Magazine. They all met through the basketball and sneaker worlds in Los Angeles. Since launching on July 10, NBABubbleLife has accumulated more than 100,000 followers on Twitter, a large amount for such a short period of time. A companion Instagram account has more than 13,000 followers. The W.N.B.A. Twitter account, which started the next day, has about 2,300 followers. In an email, the group said that their employers were not aware of their involvement with the accounts. During a Zoom conversation with The New York Times, the four friends said the idea sprang from their group text. DePaula, 35, sent a message: "Account that would blow up on Twitter: nbabubblelife." Phillips, 38, wrote back after setting up the handle: "The account is open," he said, adding that it would be a "passion project." "This is something we'd be following and talking about among ourselves regardless," DePaula said. For this quartet of basketball aficionados, the accounts provide not just some laughs for the consumers, but also a welcome distraction from the daily deluge of troubling news, particularly rising case counts for Covid 19 and social unrest related to police brutality. Edwards, the teacher, said the account had helped him deal with the uneasiness of returning to school in the fall. Phillips's day job in tourism has ground to a halt because of the pandemic. "This project has helped me mentally to have an escape," Phillips said. "I get some fun versus six hours a day of seeing negativity. The timing has been perfect." They all create posts, based on their availability. Ruiz, 29, often posts in the morning, for example, and Phillips around noon. "We're really staying in communication. 'Hey, I've got to go work out.' Or 'Hey, I have to go step out for a bit.' Can somebody do this and watch this account? We really run this egoless," Edwards, 35, said. The accounts provide a wide ranging, heavily filtered glimpse into the lives of basketball players who, for at least a couple months, have few physical responsibilities outside of basketball and may not be in this situation again. They are away from the public and far from cameras that aren't their own. A video of Ben Simmons, the Philadelphia 76ers guard, posing with a fish he had just caught and then bungling the throw back into the water has more than 1.5 million views. It spawned several rounds of Twitter jokes about Simmons's shooting ability a brief return to normalcy for those who routinely follow basketball social media accounts. There was a picture of Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Milwaukee Bucks star, decorating a door for his brother Thanasis's birthday. A post from Sunday shows Simmons's teammate, Josh Richardson, being fascinated by a turkey on a golf course. "This is like 'Man vs. Wild,'" Richardson exclaimed in his Instagram post, which NBABubbleLife then reposted. "They're kind of kids, right?" Phillips said. "A lot of them are not that old, so I think the fun that we're seeing is a lot of these guys who were in A.A.U. in these same situations under 10 years ago. It's just back to living their teenage years out at 25, and they just happen to be millionaires now." On the W.N.B.A. account, there are posts highlighting the sneaker collection of Los Angeles Sparks guard Te'a Cooper; Chicago Sky players' dancing; and thoughts about the Florida weather from Candace Parker, the Sparks star and two time Most Valuable Player Award winner. "You step outside and the humidity does something to you, like to your soul," Parker says in a video. On the second day the N.B.A. account was up, New Orleans Pelicans guard JJ Redick was asked how many retweets it would take for him to shotgun a Bud Light. Redick responded, setting the bar at 10,000 a high number by Twitter standards. But the internet can be a powerful place: Redick's tweet surpassed that number within a matter of hours, and he kept up his end of the bet, posting a video of himself chugging a beer in an ice bath. "A bet's a bet," Edwards said. "When that rolled out, we were kind of like, 'We've got something, fellas.'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
How past dances live in the present is always on the mind of the choreographer and dancer Adam H. Weinert. His current project began after he reconstructed early solo works by the modern dance pioneer Ted Shawn. If, in dance, the body is a living archive doesn't a dancer store and preserve movement over time? Mr. Weinert's approach shows how a reconstruction can inspire a new work. With the premiere of "Monument," performed on Friday at the 92nd Street Y, he does just that. The program prepped the audience, fittingly, with three dances from the 1930s: Shawn's "Pierrot in the Dead City" (1935); "Four Solos Based on American Folk Music" (1930); and Doris Humphrey's "Two Ecstatic Themes" (1931). In "Pierrot," a swift and somber look at longing that conjures the soulful clown, Mr. Weinert, dressed simply in a white shirt and beige pants, uses his spiraling body to convey conflicting emotions. At the start, Mr. Weinert rests his hands on one hip, a stoic sight, before his arms rise and fall, propelling him across the stage with light jumps and pauses that hint at hope and hesitation. It's really not so much what he's doing but how he's doing it: Mr. Weinert, like a specter, sails along with floating delicacy. The same can be said of Logan Frances Kruger, who, in "Two Ecstatic Themes," enhances the circular and jagged shapes of Humphrey's movement with a body that never pauses to comment on her actions: She's liquid. In "Monument," Mr. Weinert and Ms. Kruger are joined by Brett Perry, Davon Rainey and Manelich Minniefee. Lights circle the center of the stage; within the spotlight, dancers, like magnets, are drawn toward one another before dashing apart.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
POGROM Kishinev and the Tilt of History By Steven J. Zipperstein Illustrated. 261 pp. Liveright Publishing. 27.95. In Kishinev, a provincial city of the Russian Empire (now Chisinau, Moldova), on April 19 20, 1903, 49 Jews were murdered, several among them children; as many (or more) were serially raped; very many more were injured. Synagogues were desecrated, shops were looted, and homes were destroyed or damaged. One woman said afterward: "I was pulverized, crushed like a vessel filled with shame and filth." The victims knew their assailants, many crying out their names while being beaten or raped. They were not protected by the civil authorities. In response to calls for help, one police officer told the Jews they were getting what they deserved; the police thwarted Jewish self defense efforts by confiscating weapons. Two thirds of the city was affected by violence. This was the "Kishinev pogrom," a "dreadful moment" in Jewish Diaspora life, Steven J. Zipperstein writes in his impressive, heart wrenching new book on the subject, "Pogrom." The episode is so little known now that its facts are likely to come as a shock to most readers. Yet until the late 1930s it was practically synonymous with anti Semitism. The word "pogrom," which Kishinev concretized, "was believed to capture accurately centuries of Jewish vulnerability, the deep well of Jewish misery," Zipperstein writes. It was the state directing mob violence, a phenomenon that would reach its apogee in the Holocaust. The genocide of World War II has come to act like a screen across the middle of the 20th century. But Zipperstein reminds us that it is important to understand the catastrophes that preceded. And there's no better place to start than Kishinev. Zipperstein gives us a strong, clear narrative as well as appalling details. Rumors of attacks on the Jews had been circulating; permission had been given, it was said, for three days of violence; there were accusations against the Jews of ritual murder. It began with random, nonlethal violence. The mob found meaning through its slogans, "Strike the Jews!" and "Death to the Jews!" They were cheered on by local officials who claimed, as one put it, that Jews "exploited the Christians in a hundred unscrupulous ways, to their own aggrandizement." But the book is much more than an account of these horrors. It is a history of the pogrom's reception, as well. Among his six chapters, Zipperstein addresses the impact on Russian anti Semites, who took the pogrom as proof not of Jewish weakness but of Jewish mendacity; on the Zionist movement and then on Israeli society, who saw in it the impossibility of diaspora existence; on the N.A.A.C.P., "energized by efforts to align the Russian pogroms against Jews with the American lynching of blacks," as well as in the United States generally, "the epicenter of pro Kishinev relief campaigns and demonstrations."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
When Trey Freund of Wichita, Kan., was 13, sleepovers and closed door hangouts were part of his social life. So when he told his family he was gay, his father, Jeff Freund, a principal at an arts magnet middle school, asked himself, "Would I let his sister at that age have a sleepover with a boy?" He thought about bullying, and about how other boys' parents might react. "If they knew for sure my son was gay, I doubt they were going to let them come over," he explained. Sleepovers for Trey ended after that. Now at 16, with his family in the audience, Trey performs in drag at a local club. Instead of sleepovers, he drives home after hanging out with friends. He knows that limiting sleepovers was his father's way of protecting him, but at the time, he recalled, "I felt like it was a planned attack against me." There are benefits to teen sleepovers. "It's a nice break from a digital way of connecting," said Dr. Blaise Aguirre, an adolescent psychiatrist at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "It's a trusting and bonding experience." "I think parents always want to make space for the stuff of childhood to happen," said Stacey Karpen Dohn, who works with the families of transgender and gender expansive youths as senior manager of Behavioral Health at Whitman Walker Health, a community health center focusing on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender care in Washington, D.C. While teens may see sleepovers as just a chance to spend a lot of time with their friends, parents may worry about their children exploring their sexuality before they are ready and about their safety if they do. For some, the intimacy of having their teens spend long stretches of unsupervised time in pajamas in a bedroom with someone they may find sexually attractive can be unsettling. Amy Schalet, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who studies adolescent sexuality, said that American parents tend to believe that by preventing coed sleepovers, they are protecting teens who may not be emotionally ready for sexual intimacy. Her book "Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex," compared the way Dutch and American teens negotiate sex and love. Unlike Americans, who feel that teen sex shouldn't happen at the parents' homes, Dutch parents think teens can self regulate their urges and often allow older teens in committed relationships to have sleepovers. Dr. Schalet warned when it comes to sleepovers, sometimes "prohibition takes the place of conversation." Parents can help children learn sexual agency and develop healthy sexual lives by talking to them about consent and whether experiences made them feel good or not. If they don't take this route, she said, parents of L.G.B.T.Q. kids risk sending the message that they disapprove of this part of their human experience and that they don't trust them to "develop the tools to experience this in a positive way," Dr. Schalet said. There is no one way to structure L.G.B.T.Q. sleepovers, but parents concerned about making sure their kids feel safe and free of shame can try to plan ahead. For example, children should decide if they want to share their sexual orientation or gender identity with their hosts. Or if the child is uncomfortable changing clothes in front of friends, parents can make a house rule that everyone changes in the bathroom. Dr. Aguirre suggested that parents who are concerned about possible sexual exploration to ask themselves: "What's the fear?" For parents of L.G.B.T.Q. kids, he said, often "the fear is: Is my child going to be outed? Is my child going to be bullied? Is my child going to be harassed? Is my child going to be attacked? Because we know L.G.B.T.Q. kids are more likely to be bullied and harassed," he said. It's critical for parents who want to keep their children safe at sleepovers to start building open, trusting, shame free relationships with their young children so that kids can freely ask questions about sexuality as they grow. "There shouldn't be an assumption that your son is attracted to all of his male friends. That's a sort of sexualizing of L.G.B.T.Q. youth," Dr. Karpen Dohn explained. If a teenager has a crush on a friend, Dr. Aguirre said parents can ask if they want to act on the crush and let them know sleepovers aren't the place to do that. Parents can also use the conversation, if appropriate, to talk about the importance of contraception and protection from sexually transmitted diseases. "When we're not open about our children's developmentally appropriate inquisition into their own identity, their own sexuality," Dr. Aguirre said, "then we begin to pathologize normal human experiences like love, like desire." Christie Yonkers, executive director at a Cleveland synagogue, said that when her introverted 13 year old daughter, Lola Chicotel, came out to her friends on Snapchat last year, she became "more socially active, has had more hangouts, more sleepovers." Sleepover rules haven't changed, but Ms. Yonkers allows them only at her home something Dr. Karpen Dohn suggests for families of L.G.B.T.Q. youths. The two have always spoken openly about personal safety and consent. Lola isn't interested in dating yet, and Ms. Yonkers said she is not worried about any potential sexual experimentation. "As normal healthy developing kids who will become increasingly interested in expressing their sexuality it just feels like normal healthy stuff," she said. "My focus is on keeping the dialogue open." She isn't sure, however, if Lola's future girlfriends will be allowed to spend the night. Logistical challenges create additional questions for transgender kids like 17 year old JP Grant, a high school junior who lives near Boston. When he started taking testosterone 10 months ago to transition from female to male, his parents ended sleepovers with girls and allowed them with boys. JP said he misses those playful experiences with female friends. "I'm still that same kid, that same person I was before I came out," he explained, "For things to change like that, it made it feel like my trans identity was a burden." JP serves on the National Student Council of the L.G.B.T.Q. youth organization, GLSEN, and volunteers with other groups that sometimes have events that involve spending the night away from home. Even with L.G.B.T.Q. groups, he says he still has to decide if he should disclose his trans identity with his roommates. He sleeps in clothing that isn't aligned with his male identity and has to think about changing out of his binder, a garment he uses to flatten his chest. "I have to make sure that I can get into and out of bed while feeling comfortable. I feel like that's one of my biggest hurdles," he said. No matter what, rules at sleepovers need to be consistent for all the kids present. Since L.G.B.T.Q. teens may deal with discrimination at school or in certain social situations, "We don't want to make home one more place where they don't get to experience what other kids get to experience," Dr. Karpen Dohn said. "We can't necessarily protect them from the world around them, but the way we love them can help build coping skills and resilience."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Well
In the video announcing his retirement on Tuesday, Luke Kuechly thanked his Carolina Panthers teammates and coaches, his parents and his two brothers, his girlfriend and all the fans who supported him as he became the best middle linebacker in the N.F.L. Left out of his speech were two men who almost certainly influenced his decision. By retiring at 28, at the apex of a career defined by consistent excellence as much as repeated concussions, Kuechly joined the former Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck and the former New England Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski as under 30 stars who in the last 10 months chose long term health over short term success. Before those announcements, players retiring in what seemed to be their athletic primes were regarded with singular shock. Calvin Johnson of the Detroit Lions, whose nickname is Megatron, retired in 2016 at the age of 30 and was forced to repay the team 1 million of his signing bonus. The San Francisco 49ers linebacker Patrick Willis, a five time, first team All Pro, was the same age when he retired in early 2015. These most recent retirements, taken together, represent a landmark shift in players' priorities. Ever so slowly, the league's warrior culture is eroding, dismantled by scientific research, individual financial security and an increasing awareness among players that continuing in the game they love may very well damage their quality of life. The Hall of Fame defensive end Carl Eller runs the Retired Players Association, which tries to prepare players for life after the N.F.L. He said the current generation has learned from older players who have been vocal about their health problems. "Players are definitely getting smarter," Eller said on Tuesday. "They are gathering information to make some tough decisions. I don't think we had some of that information." 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. "For myself, it was all fuzzy ahead of me," Eller added. "It was one step at a time. It was all hearsay. You were going blind into the dark. But today, there's a lot more light at the end of the tunnel." Unlike Luck, who when he retired in late August acknowledged how wary he was of enduring more pain and rehabilitation, Kuechly did not mention any specific injuries, or the multiple concussions he sustained over his eight year N.F.L. career. But he has spoken about struggling to recognize the difference between what he can tolerate and what he should. The N.F.L. glorifies playing through pain, a doctrine propagated by fans, the news media, coaches and, especially, the players themselves, who have been incentivized by the zero sum culture. Players never feel as fresh as they do as when training camp begins, and then they spend the next five months if they even last that long pummeling their bodies. Those who play through a torn knee ligament (Philip Rivers) or a broken fibula (Jack Youngblood), or elect to have part of a broken finger amputated to avoid an extended post surgery recovery (Ronnie Lott), are applauded for sacrificing, and ignoring, their well being for the good of the team. Just two weekends ago, Eagles quarterback Josh McCown played the second half of a loss to Seattle after tearing his hamstring off the bone. But McCown was playing only because the starter, Carson Wentz, removed himself from the game after absorbing a helmet to helmet hit, a real time decision between his health and calcified notions about postseason glory. Kuechly, who also had shoulder problems, missed seven games because of concussions between 2015 and 2017. In one frightening episode, during a game against New Orleans in November 2016, he was carted off the field, crying, his bewildered face a portrait of anguish. Alex Boone, a former N.F.L. offensive lineman, thought about that scene after learning of Kuechly's retirement on Tuesday night. Boone endured a dreadful concussion of his own in 2016, and likened the sensation to "hitting the reset button on your brain." He cried, he said, for two days straight. Crying excessively, as well as headaches, dizziness and vomiting, are some of the symptoms of a concussion. "If you actually had to be like, 'I can't take this anymore,' I can't imagine how much worse they get," Boone said. "This stupid game isn't worth your kids watching you drool over yourself." Boone played for San Francisco in 2015, when two linebackers at opposite stages of their career Patrick Willis and Chris Borland, a promising 24 year old rookie retired within a week of each other because of concerns about their safety. The news jolted the team, but Boone said teammates accepted it. "It's hard to get out of the league, because it's addicting at times," Boone said. "But if you knew your body couldn't handle it, after working your whole life to get here, it's admirable." An exquisite tackler, Kuechly approached the position of Ray Lewis and Dick Butkus with a modern sensibility, as stout against the pass as he was against the run. He was one of only four defensive players in the 2010s to make the All Pro first team at least five times. "There's only one way to play this game, since I was a little kid, is to play fast and play physical and play strong," Kuechly said in his video, which lasted more than three minutes. "And at this point, I don't know if I'm able to do that anymore. And that's the part that is most difficult. I still want to play, but I don't think it's the right decision." Chris Nowinski, the co founder and chief executive of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, interpreted Kuechly's comments to mean that he was thinking about his brain. He added later, in an email, that he thought concerns about C.T.E., or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head hits, played a role in some of the players' decisions to retire at a relatively early age. C.T.E. was diagnosed in 110 of the 111 brains examined by a neuropathologist, according to a study released in 2017. Researchers at Boston University announced in a 2019 study that tackle football players doubled their risk of developing the worst forms of C.T.E. for each 5.3 years they played.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
The timing of the exchange was conspicuous: It occurred five days after a less than collegial moment between reporters at a presidential news conference. Speaking in Britain last week, Mr. Trump declined to take a question from Jim Acosta of CNN, declaring his employer "fake news" and turning to John Roberts of Fox News, adding, "Let's go to a real network." Mr. Roberts asked his question without acknowledging the presidential slight. (Later, Mr. Roberts issued a statement saying Mr. Trump's CNN comment was "unfair"; he did not mention Mr. Acosta.) That moment has become a topic of heated discussion among White House reporters, who have privately debated how aggressively they should work together to get their questions answered. Teaming up against Ms. Sanders might allow reporters to better parry her efforts to duck questions she dislikes. But a group revolt which many Trump critics have yearned for could also come across to viewers as pompous and self serving. And it would likely further strain relations with a White House that is already stingy about doling out information useful to journalists and their audiences. Still, no previous president publicly declared that the media was "the enemy of the people," which Mr. Trump did as recently as this past weekend. And the president's claim on Tuesday, that he had misspoken in Helsinki about Russia's role in the 2016 presidential election, struck many reporters as implausible. Adding to the tension, Ms. Sanders used the start of Wednesday's briefing to chastise the press corps again, accusing reporters of engaging in a "massive media hysteria" over alleged ties between Russia and the president. She cited an erroneous tweet by a reporter for Mic News which was deleted, but not before it raced around social media as evidence that the press "has gotten totally out of control." "You guys need to take a step back," she said. Then came the tag team effort from NBC News and The Hill.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
'ER' When to watch: Now, on Hulu. Several people have asked me in the past few weeks if now is the worst time to watch "ER," and the answer is no! Now is the best time to watch "ER." It's one of the greats; there are more than 300 episodes; the characters genuinely try to provide good health care; there are multiple models of successful leadership; some people fall in love; and many people learn things. I'm pretty sure fully one third of all living actors appear in the series at some point. "ER," set in a busy emergency room in a Chicago public hospital, premiered in 1994. But other than the absence of cellphones and Google, it feels current modern, even, thanks to its fast pace and aversion to neat endings. A lot of doctor shows follow a case of the week procedural model, but "ER" does not; you might follow a patient's story for only one scene, or you might follow it for most of a season.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
A debate between Zach Grenier, as an entrenched Texas senator, and Eisa Davis, as his upstart opponent, is a highlight of Sarah Burgess's play "Kings" at the Public Theater. For all the post 2016 idealists rushing to run for office on a platform of changing the system, I have two words of caution: Sydney Millsap. Sydney is a political neophyte, hoping to break the stranglehold of entrenched interests that's choking democracy and enabling the kleptocrats. But unlike you, she's fictional, and fabulous: a stunning black tax nerd and Gold Star widow from Texas who's as familiar with the carried interest loophole as with the history of the sizzling fajita at Chili's. Whether or not she is the actual protagonist of Sarah Burgess's "Kings," which opened on Tuesday night at the Public Theater, is the defining problem for both the play and for us. Certainly she has come to Washington after a special election to fill a vacant House seat in her Dallas district with the intention of undoing unfairness and staying honest. When a lobbyist says, "She tells her voters the truth even if it makes her look bad," it is not understood as a compliment. Still, in Eisa Davis's terrific performance, a character who might seem a humorless, civics spouting Ms. Deeds instead comes across as one of those politicians, like Elizabeth Warren, who makes superiority feel almost glamorous. But as Sydney quickly discovers, there are powers even stronger than her moral certainty. These include John McDowell, an entrenched Texas senator and political frenemy. More sinister, and less public, are the lobbyists and semipermanent political staffers who connect candidates to donors for their mutual benefit, if no one else's. The two specimens of this type that Ms. Burgess offers in "Kings" are not designed to elicit your sympathy. Kate (Gillian Jacobs, late of NBC's "Community") not only repackages her clients' grubby schemes as votable policy, but is also rude and double dealing. Lauren (Aya Cash, a star of "You're the Worst" on FXX) is more polished but finds Sydney's ethical intransigence just as mystifying. If the congresswoman would just go along with that carried interest loophole for private equity fund managers, she could reap millions in donations from that sector alone. So what if it's hypocritical? Alas, Sydney is no hypocrite. She is willing to humiliate herself, as the party requires, by dunning donors while on enforced fund raising retreats in Vail, but she won't let anyone buy her. "I will take their money," she tells voters. "I will not do as they say." This paints Sydney, and "Kings," into a self righteous corner. When McDowell (a wily Zach Grenier) threatens to close off the spigots of cash that Sydney needs for re election, she makes the only choice she (or the play) has left: to mount an even unlikelier campaign than the one that got her to Washington in the first place. Whenever it focuses on Sydney's dash through the minefields of democracy, "Kings" is entertaining and informative, if not surprising theatrically. Its high point, two thirds of the way through, is a town hall style debate in which she declaims, in perfectly formed phrases, the kinds of things many of us have been rehearsing for months in front of our televisions and on Twitter feeds. The greed of special interests, the mendacity of politicians, the cockroach endurance of lobbyists: If these are familiar, they are also endlessly compelling. But with no items on the agenda beyond transparency, the bridge between politics and policy is down. Nothing Ms. Burgess gives Sydney to say connects meaningfully to the daily lives of people outside the Beltway. "Kings," you eventually realize, is not really about Sydney, anyway; her story the only one you care about basically dribbles away after the debate. Her entire existence within the play seems designed as a placard to announce one thing: When politics neutralizes the ethically excellent it leaves the field open to everyone else. Surely, then, the title refers to the lobbyists, the only characters as powerful at the end as they were at the beginning. Kate in particular may be Ms. Burgess's intended heroine. She does nothing so dramaturgically crude as have a change of heart, but over time her understanding of the world is complicated by Sydney's. Perhaps she'll have a change of heart later. Unfortunately, Kate, too, is a placard, so thinly drawn and acted that we cannot be bothered with her personal journey. In that sense, "Kings" like Ms. Burgess's previous play, "Dry Powder," seen at the Public in 2016 is a plot in search of an emotion. Kate and Lauren, no less than Sydney and the senator, are improbable exaggerations, caricatures with no human shading. This makes for powerful oppositions and playable scenes but little investment. That fault mattered less in "Dry Powder," about a trio of private equity vultures. We aren't really meant to care who prevails and who is outwitted in their leveraged buyout schemes; the play's purpose is simply to expose the system. That's true of "Kings," too, but there is something much larger at stake in a story about public governance than in one about private greed. It's a telltale problem that the word "Democrat" goes assiduously unmentioned, though all the characters clearly skew blue. Venality in Washington may be bipartisan, but not strictly so; to obfuscate that feels political in the wrong way.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
Moscow's aim, experts say, is to portray American officials as downplaying the health alarms and thus posing serious threats to public safety. "It's all about seeding lack of trust in government institutions," Peter Pomerantsev, author of "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible," a 2014 book on Kremlin disinformation, said in an interview. The Russian president has waged his long campaign by means of open media, secretive trolls and shadowy blogs that regularly cast American health officials as patronizing frauds. Of late, new stealth and sophistication have made his handiwork harder to see, track and fight. Even so, the State Department recently accused Russia of using thousands of social media accounts to spread coronavirus misinformation including a conspiracy theory that the United States engineered the deadly pandemic. Because public interest in wellness and longevity runs high, health disinformation can have a disproportionally large social impact. Experts fear that it will foster public cynicism that erodes Washington's influence as well as the core democratic value of relying on demonstrable facts as a basis for decision making. "The accumulation of these operations over a long period of time will result in a major political impact," Ladislav Bittman, a former Soviet bloc disinformation officer, said in explaining the Kremlin's long game rationale. Sandra C. Quinn, a professor of public health at the University of Maryland who has followed Mr. Putin's vaccine scares for more than a half decade, said the Russian president was drawing on an old playbook. "The difference now is the speed with which it spreads, and the denigration of the institutions that we rely on to understand the truth," she said in an interview. "I think we're in dangerous territory." As a young man, Mr. Putin served in the K.G.B., the Soviet Union's main intelligence agency, from 1975 to 1991. He worked in foreign intelligence, which required its officers to spend a quarter of their time conceiving and implementing plans for sowing disinformation. What Mr. Putin accomplished is unclear. But public accounts show that he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and that his 16 year tenure coincided with a major K.G.B. operation to deflect attention from Moscow's secret arsenal of biological weapons, which it built in contravention of a treaty signed with the United States in 1972. The K.G.B. campaign which cast the deadly virus that causes AIDS as a racial weapon developed by the American military to kill black citizens was wildly successful. By 1987, fake news stories had run in 25 languages and 80 countries, undermining American diplomacy, especially in Africa. After the Cold War, in 1992, the Russians admitted that the alarms were fraudulent. As Russia's president and prime minister, Mr. Putin has embraced and expanded the playbook, linking any natural outbreak to American duplicity. Attacking the American health system, and faith in it, became a hallmark of his rule. That June, Mr. Madsen told RT viewers that the virus makers had worked at a shadowy mix of laboratories, including the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Md. The institute's official job is to help defend the United States against the kinds of pathogens that Mr. Madsen accused it of creating. In a follow up show, Mr. Madsen said the virus had been spliced together from other flu strains, including the virus responsible for the 1918 pandemic, and likened its creators to the mad scientists of "Jurassic Park," the hit movie about resurrected dinosaurs. RT's chyron for the show characterized the result as "Germ Warfare." In 2010, the network founded a new arm, RT America, a few blocks from the White House. Mr. Madsen became a regular on camera guest. In 2012 Mr. Putin added the military to his informational arsenal. His newly appointed head of the Russian Army, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, laid out a new doctrine of war that stressed public messaging as a means of stirring foreign dissent. That same year, a shadowy group of trolls in St. Petersburg began using Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to fire salvos of junk information at millions of Americans. The goals were to boost social polarization and damage the reputation of federal agencies. A rush of tweets turned up the volume. "Panic here in ATL!!" one stated. Another exclaimed, "OMG! Ebola is everywhere!" As the Kremlin grew more confident, it began to simply recycle old narratives rather than wait for new epidemics to emerge. In 2017, Russian trolls used Twitter to give the AIDS falsehood new life. This time the claimed perpetrator was Dr. Robert Gallo, a scientist who in 1984 had actually helped discover the virus that causes AIDS. The tweets quoted him, falsely, as saying he had designed the pathogen to depopulate humanity. The trolls cited a website, World Truth. Its video attacking Dr. Gallo registered nearly four million views. Six researchers centered at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that, over decades, the false narratives around AIDS had fostered a "lack of trust" among African Americans that kept many from seeking medical care. Their 2018 study, of hundreds of black men in Los Angeles who have sex with men, reported that nearly half the interviewees thought the virus responsible for AIDS had been manufactured. And more than one fifth viewed people who take new protective drugs as "human guinea pigs for the government." Within Russia, Mr. Putin has been a staunch proponent of vaccines. "I make sure I get my vaccinations in time, before the flu season starts," he told listeners to a 2016 call in show. At a televised meeting with doctors in St. Petersburg, in 2018, he scolded Russian parents who refuse to vaccinate their kids: "They endanger the lives of their own children." Calling the issue "very important," he warned of possible administrative steps to speed the pace of childhood immunizations. Last fall, Russia's health authorities laid out expanded rules that require strict new adherence to protocols for childhood vaccination. At the same time, Mr. Putin has worked hard to encourage Americans to see vaccinations as dangerous and federal health officials as malevolent. The threat of autism is a regular theme of this anti vaccine campaign. The C.D.C. has repeatedly ruled out the possibility that vaccinations lead to autism, as have many scientists and top journals. Nonetheless the false narrative has proliferated, spread by Russian trolls and media. Moreover, the disinformation has sought to implicate the C.D.C. in a cover up. For years, tweets originating in St. Petersburg have claimed that the health agency muzzled a whistle blower to hide evidence that vaccines cause autism, especially in male African American infants. Medical experts have dismissed the allegation, but it reverberated.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
If the New York metropolitan area reports a critical cape shortage, blame Chris Wells. Mr. Wells is a writer, an actor and a high priest of the monthly artist be in Secret City. Possibly, he has met a mantle or a poncho he didn't long to swirl around his shoulders; it seems unlikely. In "It Will All Work Out," a wobbly, bighearted, cloak and chatter show at Dixon Place, Mr. Wells narrates tales from his life while modeling a series of whirling, spangled outfits. Mr. Wells has a head like a goateed Easter egg and a jolly, florid persona that jazzes up even ordinary stories, as do a groovy live band and lissome backup singers. Striding around in platform boots, he describes falling for theater as a small town teenager, wrecking a car on the freeway, receiving an unorthodox Koreatown massage. None of these yarns are especially outlandish or weighty, but Mr. Wells imbues them with delight and consequence, mostly by announcing his own amazement: "They let me sing the whole song!" "I slowly veered across all four lanes of traffic!" "I love a steam room!" At a preview performance, the prose still seemed in flux, as did the lyrics to the playful songs, written with the bandleader Jeremy Bass. A couple of times, Mr. Wells cracked up as he mangled a line. "We didn't actually drink Santa," he told Mr. Bass. Then he sang that it was "Time to get new school holes."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
"The things that we interact with every day are the things that should get the most thought in terms of design," said Joe Doucet, a New York product designer. Serving utensils, for example: They might not be the center of attention when the big platter of meat and potatoes arrives at the table, but try getting the food onto your plate without them. In the rush to put dinner on the table, serving utensils might be easy to overlook. But Mr. Doucet who has created cake servers and cheese knives, and was responsible for the 3D printed tableware at the "Tablescapes: Designs for Dining" exhibit currently on view at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum advised choosing them with care. If your utensils are beautifully designed, they not only make serving easier, but also bring a sense of occasion to any meal. "They're something you hold in your hands and have a physical experience with," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
THE new Audi A6 has arrived. And from its debut on the luxury stage until the end of its days, this sedan will be the William Mapother of the Audi lineup. Never heard of him? Well, you may know his first cousin and fellow actor, one Thomas Cruise Mapother IV. As with the Mapothers, Audi has a pair of performing cousins in the A7 hatchback and A6 sedan. One is matinee idol handsome. The other may be just as talented, yet seems destined for such cast credits as "Second Banker in Bar" or "Allergic Florist." Reversing the usual timing workaday sedan first, fantasy offshoot second Audi brought out the slinky, coupe roofed A7 first. Now the A6 pulls up to the curb for its premiere and draws little notice; all the paparazzi are crowding around the dashing A7. Fortunately for fans of conventional sedans, there's virtually no discernable gap in luxury, performance or features between these midsize Audis. Choose the A6 and you get a back seat that can handle three passengers in a pinch, but you give up the versatility of the A7's sweetly integrated hatchback. Choose the A7 and you get that spacious cargo hatch, but the back seat can handle only two people, who get 1.2 less inches of headroom. But you will enjoy a pleasurably swelled head from the longing looks that come your way. Style and layout aside, the A6 3.0 quattro and the A7 share their chassis and suspension, their supercharged V 6 and their 8 speed automatic transmission. The cabins are nearly identical. But only the A6 offers a more affordable 2 liter turbo 4 cylinder with 211 horses and a continuously variable transmission, starting at 42,575. Riding on a 2.7 inch longer wheelbase, with a body 0.8 inch wider, the redesigned A6 grows a bit roomier inside. Yet the V 6 model's unloaded weight (4,045 pounds) is down 78 from last year, thanks partly to a body structure that's 20 percent aluminum. Fuel economy has improved a bit, to 19 miles per gallon in the city and 28 on the highway. The 4 cylinder model does better, at a class topping 25/33 m.p.g. And the 4 cylinder A6 Hybrid, which may arrive next year, should easily top 30 m.p.g. in combined city and freeway use. With its big wheels yanked to the corners, the Audi looks tasteful and well proportioned. But for a company whose coupes, crossovers and sports cars are reliably alluring, Audi's sedan bodies have become rather passionless. Its dramatic grille aside, the A6 takes its complacent styling cues from the latest A8 flagship. Together, they're the Dull and Duller of high price German sedans, casting some doubt on Audi's self mythologizing as the edgy, hipper alternative to the luxury establishment. Certainly two other rich competitors, the BMW 5 Series and the Mercedes Benz E Class, remain understated, yet they carry themselves with striking Teutonic authority. And if you're really looking to upset the suburban order, the Jaguar XF is the British glam rocker of this class. In contrast, the Audi is about as edgy as a caramel latte at Starbucks. Fortunately, the A6 is just like the A8 in another regard: once you hop inside and press the start button, the Audi demands high placement on any midluxury shopping list. I drove the Audi from New York to Detroit for a family vacation. And while Interstate 80 is no autobahn, the Audi lapped up 1,300 miles as pleasurably as a run through Europe. And the A6 sipped fuel at a frugal 27 m.p.g. The front seats add a cushion length adjuster, a boon to taller drivers. The Audi was also impeccably quiet on our road trip. Audi says the side mirrors contribute only 3 percent to aerodynamic drag, versus 7 percent for a typical car. The A6's cabin is now a Wi Fi hotspot, at least if you shell out 30 a month for Audi Connect (after getting a free trial for six months). The cellular based system connects up to eight wireless devices. Its navigation unit relies on Google Earth images with a limited local search function that lets you call up photos and information about destinations, along with real time gas prices, traffic reports, news headlines and weather. Audi Connect is part of an optional 6,880 Prestige package that also includes 18 inch wheels, a Bose audio system, four zone climate control and xenon adaptive headlamps. Stroking a fingertip across a drawing pad on the console, drivers can scrawl the first letters of phone contacts or destinations, which are called up while you keep an eye on the road. The on screen graphics of Audi's MMI infotainment system set an industry standard, overlaying traffic data and Google Earth images on top of standard map views. The Google data is impressive in a beta stage way. Yet it must be said: Seeing brown hills from above in Google Earth, or the roofs of surrounding buildings, doesn't help you navigate. In fact, the looming physical features often obscure what you need to see, which are streets and street names. One gain would be street level views of an unfamiliar block; Audi says the system will add those up close views, perhaps in 2012. The Audi needs no gimmicks to perform like a champ. The power of the V 6 has grown to 310 horses, up 10 from last year, and 325 pound feet of torque, a gain of 15. The A6 reaches 60 m.p.h. from a stop in just 5.4 seconds, Car and Driver reports, in a zesty dead heat with the 6 cylinder BMW 535i. All wheel drive is standard, with 60 percent of power directed to the rear wheels under normal conditions, mimicking the feel of a rear drive sport sedan. The new electric steering isn't the most tactile on the road, but it's accurate and confident. Nothing breaks the A6's commanding stride, not bad weather, broken pavement or a sudden maneuver. The standard Drive Select system lets drivers adjust steering, throttle response and transmission, but not the suspension, to settings for comfort or firmer control. The 8 speed transmission is smooth and crisp, though it occasionally lurched or hesitated at slower speeds as it figured out which gear to grab. Compared with BMW's sonorous turbo 6, let alone the 8 cylinder engines available from BMW, Mercedes, Infiniti and Jaguar, the Audi V 6 soundtrack is flat and unremarkable. And for traditionalists, BMW also offers a 6 speed manual transmission. But with or without a stick, the Audi is as formidable as anything in its 6 cylinder class. If that's not enough, a redesigned S6 is arriving as a 2012 model. The S6 will switch from a 10 cylinder engine to a twin turbocharged 420 horsepower V 8. So, will it be the A6 or A7? The window sticker reveals another difference: The price of style, which Audi pegs at an eye opening 9,350. The A6 3.0 starts at 50,775, the A7 at 60,125. (Smartly equipped, my A6 test car reached 60,130). Despite that arguably cynical price spread are the A7's hatchback body, larger standard wheels and fancy headlamps worth nearly 10 grand? Audi's strategy neatly separates and affirms two types of customers. A6 buyers can feel practical and savvy. A7 fans can feel stylish and exclusive, but they'll pay for the privilege. If the A7 cost a mere 3,000 more than the A6, I could imagine the conversations and consternation at Audi dealers: "You mean I can have this boring sedan or that sexy thing in the corner for three grand more? Where do I sign?" Suddenly, Audi wouldn't be able to build enough A7's, and the A6 would gather dust in the showroom.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
The wave of attention that accompanied Taylor Swift's surprise performance at the Los Angeles engagement party of Alexander Goldschmidt and Ross Girard on Feb. 23 was nothing Mr. Goldschmidt didn't see coming. "I knew this was going to be a moment people talked about I just didn't think the news cycle would pick it up this hard because it was Oscars weekend," said Mr. Goldschmidt, who works in social media marketing for TV shows through the company Digital Media Management. But it's possible Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper's swoony Academy Awards duet only fueled interest in love stories: Since Ms. Swift serenaded Mr. Girard with her song "King of My Heart" at the Sycamore Tavern hours after Mr. Goldschmidt proposed, news of the engagement party crasher reached outlets as far as Germany and Australia. The series of events that found Ms. Swift, in a ponytail and a blue floral dress, strapping on her guitar for a flabbergasted party of 65 stretches back to 2014, when Mr. Goldschmidt met Ms. Swift backstage at an Ed Sheeran concert. "I had tweeted and I didn't even tag either of them that I wanted an Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift duets album," Mr. Goldschmidt said. "Out of nowhere, Ed responded to me. We ended up DM ing, and he told me he'd get me backstage at his next concert. When I went backstage he grabbed me a beer and said, 'Have you ever met Taylor?'" The pandemic has been a time of renewal and reinvention for Taylor Swift. After releasing two quarantine albums, the singer is in the process of releasing the rerecordings of her first six albums. None A Fight for Her Masters: Revisit the origin story of Swift's rerecordings: a feud with the powerful manager Scooter Braun. Pandemic Records: In 2020, Ms. Swift released two new albums, "Folklore" and "Evermore." In debuting a new sound, she turned to indie music. Fearless: For the release of "Fearless (Taylor's Version)," the first of the rerecordings, Times critics and reporters dissected its sound and purpose. Reshifting the Power: The new 10 minute version of a bitter breakup song from 2012 can be seen as a woman's attempt to fix an unbalanced relationship by weaponizing memories. Two weeks and many selfies later, Ms. Swift and Mr. Goldschmidt met in Los Angeles on the set of her "Shake It Off" video; Mr. Goldschmidt is among that video's dancers. They kept in touch on social media. In July 2015, when Mr. Goldschmidt was single and miserable, Ms. Swift shared some encouraging words Lady Gaga had sent her via Twitter. "Life is friends, family, and love! We all see that in you, your prince charming will come!" Lady Gaga's post said. Mr. Goldschmidt shared the tweet on Instagram. "I have been given my instructions. I leave my love life in Lady Gaga's magical hands. My Prince Charming will come," he wrote. He started dating Mr. Girard, who is the head of productions at Campfire, a television and film production company, not long after. In 2018, backstage at Ms. Swift's "Reputation" show at the Rose Bowl, he was ready to introduce Mr. Girard to his famous friend. But he didn't have to. "She came up and said 'Hey Ross!'," Mr. Girard said. "She had been reading all of Alex's posts. She didn't even need to ask my name." Mr. Goldschmidt and Mr. Girard don't consider "King of My Heart" their song, the one they fell in love to. Instead, "it was a song that had always resonated with me and my own story, because it's about someone who has become content with being alone and getting to that place of self love, and then suddenly having someone come into their life and rock their world," Mr. Goldschmidt said. He didn't beg, cajole or even ask Ms. Swift to sing it at the surprise engagement party he had been planning for months. Instead, Ms. Swift's publicist, Tree Paine, reached out to him. "I had sent Taylor an email thanking her for all of the years of advice on love and on life and for that song, which had sunk into my heart," Mr. Goldschmidt said. Two weeks later, Ms. Paine called to say Ms. Swift would like to be part of their engagement day. It isn't the first time Ms. Swift has surprised a couple. In June 2016, she crashed the wedding of Max Singer and Kenya Smith, and about 100 guests in Long Beach Island, N.J., before sitting down at a piano and performing her hit song "Blank Space." Other couples have been sent champagne and she's shown up at bridal showers. Mr. Goldschmidt was driving to work in late January when he got the call. "Basically, I lost feeling in my face and I had to pull my car over," he said. "I cried a little bit, I screamed a little bit, then I tried to restore the feeling to my face." He kept the news a secret from almost everyone, including his parents and Mr. Girard's parents, who were flying in from the East Coast for the party. The only person he told was a friend who works as an event planner for the restaurant group that owns the Sycamore Tavern. "I had to tell him so we could figure out the service doors so I'd have a place to hide her," Mr. Goldschmidt said. Challenges to keeping a poker face presented themselves to the last minute: "I was down on one knee on top of a mountain proposing to Ross, and my phone was going off with calls from her security team about sweeps they needed to do of the venue." At the start of the viral video from the party, Mr. Goldschmidt and Mr. Girard stand arm in arm, holding champagne glasses. Mr. Goldschmidt says, "There is one secret I didn't trust any of you with. I would like to welcome my friend Taylor." As Ms. Swift makes her way into the room, gasps erupt. Mr. Girard said he was too preoccupied thinking of how he was going to thank his loved ones for coming to the party for it to register that he was about to be sung to by one of the world's most popular performers. And Mr. Goldschmidt's father thought that his son was introducing a drag queen version of Ms. Swift. "I had to explain to him, I live in Hollywood, not West Hollywood, Dad," he said. Mr. Goldschmidt and Mr. Girard have not yet picked a wedding date. But they know they've set a high bar for reception entertainment. "We're being told it's going to be hard to live up to this," Mr. Goldschmidt said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
A record number of people are expected to fly the nation's airlines this spring between March 1 and April 30, an all time high of about 151 million passengers. That's up four percent from last spring, according to Airlines for America, the trade organization for the major United States airlines. For many of those travelers, "spring break" means only one thing: a beach vacation. And as in years past, travelers looked to classics like Florida, the Caribbean and Mexico for their early spring getaways even as the islands are recovering from hurricanes and the State Department has issued travel warnings about Mexico. In North America, searches for January, February and March showed that Cancun, Guadalajara, and Mexico City were among the top five long haul destinations, along with London and Paris, according to Sojern, the travel research and marketing company. The most popular short haul destinations were Miami, New York City, Orlando, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Other industry groups have reported similar findings. Allianz Global Assistance, a travel insurance provider, said its own analysis of travelers' plans showed Orlando and Cancun to be the most popular domestic and international destinations for spring break (which the company defined as Feb. 23 through April 16). Based on bookings through AAA Travel, the most popular destinations in March for Florida travelers included Orlando and Ft. Lauderdale, Honolulu, Punta Cana and Cancun. In January, the World Tourism Organization reported that tourism to Mexico was robust, and that the Caribbean was "showing clear signs of recovery in the aftermath of Hurricanes Irma and Maria." That same month, the State Department began ranking every country in the world on a scale of 1 to 4 to help travelers make decisions about their safety. Mexico was given a Level 2, which simply calls for increased caution the same ranking as destinations like France, Italy and Britain. Yet certain areas within Mexico Colima, Guerrero, Michoacan, Sinaloa and Tamaulipas states that experience violent crime from gangs and criminal organizations were given the highest ranking, Level 4. Quintana Roo home to tourist areas like Cancun, Cozumel, Tulum, the Riviera Maya and Playa del Carmen was given a Level 2, again the same as France and Italy. But on March 7, the United States Embassy in Mexico City prohibited government employees from traveling to Playa del Carmen, citing a security threat. The alert came after an explosion on a tourist ferry in February at a pier in Playa del Carmen that injured more than two dozen people. On March 9, two days after the alert, the United States government updated it to say that personnel were prohibited from travel only to certain neighborhoods in Playa del Carmen: Centro, Calica, Gonzalo Guerrero, Quintas del Carmen, and Villas del Carmen. The alert advised United States citizens to avoid the neighborhoods as well. The United States Embassy in Mexico City also said that government personnel are prohibited from using ferry services between Playa del Carmen and Cozumel until further notice, and that United States citizens are also advised not to use those ferry services. It remains to be seen if the alerts lead to vacation cancellations in the area, but it's clear that for the first quarter of 2018, Mexico, which has many cities that the State Department has essentially deemed safe to visit, was at the top of traveler's lists. The day after the updated alert, Southwest Airlines began nonstop routes on Saturdays between a couple of cities in California and Cabo San Lucas/Los Cabos; and between Indianapolis and Cancun (seasonally). The airline also began offering nonstop daily flights between San Diego and Puerto Vallarta (seasonally). The United States government recommends that travelers who decide to spend their spring vacation in Mexico buy travel insurance that specifically covers them in Mexico and includes medical evacuation insurance. In previous months, Mexico was for some travelers a substitute for the Caribbean in the wake of hurricanes that devastated several islands. Yet now the rebuilding is underway, and most islands are open for business, creating more options for spring break getaways. Indeed, TripAdvisor announced that travelers won't have trouble finding low hotel prices and airfare to popular islands, and that April is the most affordable month for a Caribbean trip. For instance, the travel planning and booking site found that, based on average accommodation rates and airfare from February to April, travelers departing from the United States could take a weeklong trip for less than 2,000 a person in Curacao, the Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Martinique and Puerto Rico. Hotel rooms were available for less than 250 a night. Expedia's deals page is featuring spots in Punta Cana and San Juan, as well as Cancun, Orlando and Miami. And resorts are also offering deals, like the Seven Stars Resort Spa in Providenciales, Turks and Caicos, where you can save 20 percent off all room types for travel now through April 16, and 30 percent off all room types for travel April 14 through Aug. 10 (if interested, book before March 31). For those looking to visit the United States from other countries, New York City is a top springtime destination, according to Sojern's research. In Europe, search trends for the first three months of this year turned up leading European cities like Paris and London, as well as places in the Middle East and Asia such as Bangkok, Istanbul, Dubai, and Marrakesh. New York City was the only place in the United States to be among the top long haul destinations, according to Sojern. In the Asia Pacific, the top short haul searches between January and March were Bangkok, Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Seoul, while the long haul searches were for London, Honolulu, Paris, Los Angeles and New York City. In Latin America, during the same time period, Sojern found that travelers were gravitating to Mexico and Brazil, and for long haul trips, Madrid, Lisbon, New York City, Miami and Orlando, the East Coast home of Mickey Mouse.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Unfortunately, the federal government is not nearly focused enough on these kinds of measures. From Christopher Rowland of The Washington Post: Hospitals are holding back from ordering more medical ventilators because of the high cost for what may be only a short term spike in demand from the coronavirus epidemic, supply chain experts and health researchers say, intensifying an anticipated shortage of lifesaving equipment for patients who become critically ill. ... Ventilator manufacturers could achieve, within a few months, a significant boost in production from about 50,000 units a year currently, said Julie Letwat, a health care lawyer with McGuireWoods in Chicago who is monitoring the industry. Orders have not flooded in, she said, because most hospitals can't afford to increase inventory of expensive equipment for what could turn out to be a short term event. Hospitals' hesitance to order ventilators is a problem that only the government can solve. It's certainly true that the purchase and production of additional ventilators may turn out to be a money loser for some hospitals and companies. But the country needs additional ventilator capacity now. To Washington, the cost is practically a rounding error, relative to the stimulus sums hundreds of billions of dollars now being discussed. Can you think of a better stimulus idea than erring on the side of buying too many ventilators? None Officials in some other countries seem to be reacting with the right level of aggressiveness. The Trump administration once again is reacting too slowly. "Canada, Germany and other countries are frantically trying to line up new ventilators," my colleague Nicholas Kristof wrote. "A U.S. company that makes ventilators says it could increase production five fold but the U.S. hasn't placed an order." None A New York Times story notes that stepped up production may still not be sufficient to deal with the coming surge in patients, and the story adds: ... some European governments are deploying wartime mobilization tactics to get factories churning out more ventilators and to stop domestic companies from exporting them. The United States, by contrast, has been slow to develop a national strategy for accelerating the production of ventilators. That appears to reflect in part the federal government's sluggish reaction to the coronavirus, with President Trump and others initially playing down the threat. This week, Mr. Trump urged governors to find ways to procure new ventilators. "Try getting it yourselves," he said. None Aaron Carroll of Indiana University notes in The Upshot that the United States now has about 160,000 ventilators available in hospitals. If this pandemic resembles the 1918 Spanish flu in its severity, "we would need more than 740,000," he writes. On the new episode, Michelle Goldberg and I talk with Jeneen Interlandi the Times editorial board's lead health writer about how long the crisis is likely to last, and Michelle and I also discuss the dangerous possibility that this November's election will be disrupted. If you are not a subscriber to this newsletter, you can subscribe here. You can also join me on Twitter ( DLeonhardt) and Facebook. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
The word "me" has suffered mightily since Tom Wolfe's rollicking indictment in the pages of New York magazine over 40 years ago. He deemed the 1970s the Me Decade, and the idea stuck and steeped like an indelible stain well into the 21st century. Once preoccupied by family and community by simple survival Americans, in the full flush of post World War II prosperity, now felt liberated to self actualize through EST (Erhard Seminars Training), HPM (the human potential movement) and other important sounding acronyms. "The old alchemical dream was changing base metals into gold," Mr. Wolfe wrote. "The new alchemical dream is: changing one's personality remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing one's very self ... and observing, studying, and doting on it. (Me!)" In service of this project many spouses were "shucked," as Mr. Wolfe put it, like corn husks "overripe" wives, but fusty husbands too. "It's My Turn," Diana Ross sang in 1980 for a movie of the same title (one of many then about restive adults seeking new lives after the dissolution of a partnership): lifting arms encased in white silky sleeves like an angel poised to take wing. "It's just me myself and I" rapped De La Soul a decade later, and "Me me me me me me I I I," intoned the folk singer Patty Larkin, strumming a guitar as her audience chuckled in rueful recognition. Then the big new canvas of the internet loomed into view. On this vast plain, "me" became just a dot, a data point, a tree top in a forest. You, the plurality, became more important, according to the new Masters and now some Mistresses of the Universe, trying to figure out how to capitalize. You got mail. You were lingering in chat rooms, lurking behind avatars, editing Wikipedia entries. Posting videos on YouTube. You were what Time Magazine anointed, to retrospectively unfair ridicule, Person of the Year in 2006. You were monetizable information that could be sliced and diced, as the Veg O Matics did on the old late night commercials that the new generation would TiVo right past. Products that too flagrantly advertised an actual individual at the expense of this digital collective like Myspace or Mac's MobileMe software, its little favored me.com email address that quickly disappeared behind the Cloud proved a resounding flop. Cultivation of the self was getting upstaged by the proliferation of the selfie. Indeed the selfie was chewing all the scenery, with her sticks and soft focus filters everyone a Norma Desmond. After the profoundly divisive and unsettling presidential election of 2016, the term "self care," wrung from the writings of Roland Barthes and Audre Lorde, began trending on Twitter, now sometimes affixed to Sunday. If Monday was for motivation, Thursday for nostalgia and Saturday for snuggling with cats, a day once devoted to church might now legitimately be spent alone in the bathtub coated in mud, a green smoothie by one's side. A few minutes of cheapie "Calgon, take me away" no longer quite cut it: "Me time," suggesting people so overstretched they have to schedule a slot of relaxation into their Google calendars, has become a phenomenon of such refinement and potential expense that this very news organization now devotes a column to exposing its myths and excesses. But "me" has also acquired a new charge, one unanticipated by Mr. Wolfe, who had begun his essay by describing a female businesswoman who, hemorrhoids notwithstanding, was fully cognizant of her power as italics his "the main sexual presence in the office." During meetings, he wrote, "one of the men would say something and smile and at the same time reach over and touch her... on top of the hand or on the side of the arm ... as if it meant nothing ..." Well, that touch has turned out to mean ... everything! That man is probably having an uncomfortable talk with human resources right now. And that woman has popped on a pink 'pussy hat' and is raising her hand in solidarity with others, an idea pioneered by Tarana Burke and made a yes meme by the actress Alyssa Milano: the consciousness raising (CR) circle revived virtually on social media, but only after a slew of good old fashioned, IRL investigative reporting. "Me" has expanded, inverted, politicized; at this moment in history, it is suddenly, bracingly synonymous with "we."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Sign up for Rory Smith's weekly newsletter on world soccer (and, for the foreseeable future, quite a few other topics) at nytimes.com/rory. At first glance, the problem is clear, and the problem is money. Soccer, at its rarefied heights, is awash with it: broadcasting deals and sponsorship agreements and corporate entertainment, all of it swilling through leagues and clubs, into the hands of players and executives and agents. Particularly in the Premier League, everyone has grown fat on it, and now that the supply has been cut off, nobody wants to go hungry. Weeks after games were canceled and the season was suspended because of the coronavirus pandemic, long after Barcelona's squad agreed to give up 70 percent of its salaries, long after Juventus players delayed their payment for months, players in England had still not agreed to defer or forfeit their salaries. At the same time, just as in the United States and other countries, hundreds of thousands of people in the rest of the British economy were filing for unemployment benefits, just the first wave of the economic shock caused by the coronavirus and the shuttering of towns and cities across the world. At least four Premier League clubs, meanwhile, have moved to place many of their nonplaying staff on furlough: Norwich City, Newcastle United, Bournemouth and Tottenham Hotspur. Others will follow, perhaps including some of the richest in the game, teams that are planning to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in this summer's transfer market now taking advantage of government support programs to pay their employees. From the outside, it is a faintly obscene situation. Soccer, of course, makes a convenient punching bag at times like this, a portrait in the attic for a society unwilling to confront its inequalities. Politicians, never slow to issue moral judgment on footballers, have raged at how out of touch they are, how spoiled, how greedy, how abominably obsessed by money. But the root of the problem is not the surfeit of money; that is merely a function of the real issue, which is the dearth of trust. The players do not trust that the clubs are not trying to make them shoulder the burden. The clubs do not trust that the players' agents and by extension the players will act honorably, in the common good. And, just as important, the clubs do not trust one another: hence the Premier League's edict that, whatever action is taken, it should be across the board. Even in normal times, these institutions eye one another with suspicion. They believe that their rivals will, in some way, attempt to use any situation to gain a competitive edge. They are not well suited to collective action. That lack of trust permeates the game. FIFA, as my colleague Tariq Panja reported this week, has plans to use some of its vast cash reserves as an emergency fund for clubs to dip into in their hour of need. Privately, though, officials worry that much of that money will simply vanish, lost as it percolates through national associations or is siphoned off by agents. The same is true at UEFA. It does not entirely trust the leagues; the leagues do not trust each other; some of them do not trust their clubs. This is the ultimate consequence of the undiluted neoliberal thinking that has permeated soccer: the idea that all are out for themselves. That belief is so ingrained in the sport especially in England, where the Premier League has been built on the purest Thatcherism known to man that it cannot easily be set aside, even now, even at a time like this. (The contrast with Germany, where clubs are held to be community assets, is stark. There, players have sacrificed wages and clubs' money without giving the impression it is having to be clawed from their fingers.) The immediate consequence of that, of course, is that soccer has an image problem. It will be remembered that the national game, in England, did not seem especially willing to do its part to help out the country in its hour of need. There have been gestures, of course, welcome ones, as I noted last week; individual clubs and players have done what they can to use their platforms for good. But from the outside, it looks a lot like as soon as money came into it, that changed. There is, though, a longer term issue. No matter when the pandemic abates, no matter when life returns to something approaching normal, no matter when soccer comes back and no matter which season it is, there will be an economic cost, just as there will be in every other industry. Few clubs, even elite ones, are enormously profitable. (It has been striking how fragile such a lucrative ecosystem can be.) The loss of match day revenue much less having to pay back a portion of television income will be enough to tip quite a few of them into the red. A few steps down from the game's aristocrats, the effects will be much more severe. That means a contraction of the market: not just for transfer fees, but for player salaries and agents' commissions, too. Clubs will be able to spend less, and will be inclined to sell more, driving down prices. Players will not command the sorts of salaries they might have done. At some clubs, it is possible that players will need to take pay cuts, just to help the team absorb the blow. But this is a world, remember, where the players do not trust the clubs, the clubs do not trust the players, and the clubs do not trust one another, where everyone believes everyone else is out for himself, and so they must be, too. Players will be unwilling to suffer if they feel the clubs are passing the buck onto them. Clubs will be tempted to pay beyond their means in order to keep up with their rivals. For soccer, there is a second crisis, waiting just behind this one. The thought has occurred, in recent days, that perhaps March 2020 marked the end of soccer's golden era, the 25 year period when it was the biggest show on earth, a cultural phenomenon of unparalleled scale, an apparently bottomless pit of money and glamour. There was no trust, no unity, no collective spirit in times of plenty. We may be about to find out what happens in times of want. I knew, as I was writing last week's reading suggestions, that I would later be furious at myself for forgetting great swaths of excellent soccer related literature. Fortunately, many of you were on hand to jog my memory. There was a lot of well earned love, in particular, for David Winner's "Brilliant Orange," Sid Lowe's "Fear and Loathing in La Liga" and Joe McGinniss's "Miracle of Castel di Sangro." I'd readily add all of those to the list. I expected a few to mention "Fever Pitch," and was not disappointed, but I was really pleased that someone else out there loves "The Far Corner," Harry Pearson's wonderfully funny assessment of soccer in the North East of England, as much as I do. That would make fine lockdown reading, I think. Others suggested books that I had better add to my birthday list. I've never read Bill Buford's "Among the Thugs," which feels like an oversight, while "Fathers of Football," by Keith Baker, and Paul Watson's "Up Pohnpei!" this is a pun on an English television series of the 1970s, which I watched and loved as a child but I suspect has not aged well sound like the sorts of things I'd very much enjoy. Thanks for the suggestions: I'll do my best to read them, but (for toddler related reasons) my reviews may take awhile. An update on the singular/plural debate from Fred Helms, a retired historian (it never fails to amaze me just how educated our readership is; it's quite intimidating). "I think the American use of the singular is as opposed to the plural are came about as a result of the Civil War," Fred wrote. "Prior to the war Americans talked and wrote about the United States using the plural these United States 'are.' After the war common usage changed to the United States 'is.' Gradually that usage came to be applied to other groups such as sports teams." That leads me on to Thomas Bodenberg, who knows exactly what we need now. "A cultural anthropologist would have a field day dissecting and proffering the why of these differences," he wrote. Any volunteers? And both Richard Murray and Christopher Sousa fell into my trap of asking why Rugby League is so much better than Rugby Union. The former is 13 people running into each other constantly. The latter is 15 people, on each team, watching as one of their number boots the ball forward, and then waiting to find out which arcane rule defines what happens next, all the while being very polite about it. That is as neat a summary as I can offer. That's all for this week. All ideas, suggestions and book recommendations are welcome: askrory nytimes.com. I'm on Twitter, of course, rather more than I should be. This week's Set Piece Menu was recorded before social distancing and involved a coconut cake, from memory. And you can tell everyone you know about how nice it is to get an email every Friday here.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
For many years Larry Kramer and I were good friends. And then we weren't that was Larry's decision. It was also Larry's decision that the time had come to reconcile, a few years after a rift that was and remains heartbreaking for me. I hadn't spoken to Larry in five years; I was standing in the Greenwich Village bookstore Three Lives, reading something, when I heard a soft, sad whispered "Anthony," and I turned to see him, looking older and frailer than he had the last time we were together, staring up at me through thick lenses. He said, "I miss you." I said, "I miss you too, Larry." I really had missed him, a lot. Larry was great fun to be with, to dish dirt with over the phone or at lunch. When he was in a good mood, as he often was, he was just a grand old New York queen. He seemed to have known practically everyone, and knew or claimed to know many of their spiciest, darkest secrets. Larry also knew what made the wheels of the worlds of art and politics turn, who had called whom to make stuff happen. And he knew who failed to make the wheels turn, who failed tests of chutzpah or moral courage, by which Larry meant voluble outrage. He adored the just and brave and talented, and he adored denouncing those who had failed to act, those who had let us down. By "us," Larry meant the L.G.B.T. community. He was an unapologetic tribalist. I often told him that I felt this amounted to a willed limitation of empathy, fatal to the necessity of building solidarity with other communities fighting for justice, enfranchisement, emancipation. He told me that I was too easily distracted and insufficiently loyal to "our people." As Shaw, Brecht and others have observed, saints are, for the most part, unbearable company, exhausting, unnerving scourges. Larry wasn't a saint, and he would have killed anyone who called him one. But I suspect that many official saints were as thorny as he was. His focus was so exclusive that it could sometimes feel exclusionary, but the specificity of his vision gave it an astonishing, unsettling, disruptive force. Through his singular devotion to L.G.B.T. liberation, he attained the expression of something like a visionary politics of universal value. With the force of prophetic revelation, the AIDS epidemic laid bare for Larry a terrible, galvanizing truth: Liberation from oppression is, in the most concrete sense, a matter of life and death. Therefore, oppression is as impermissible and intolerable as murder. Oppression is, in fact, murder. To him, any attempt to dodge this truth, or to hide from its imperative for immediate action, was incomprehensible and unforgivable. Comfort with oppression wasn't bad because it might lead to a holocaust; oppression was the holocaust, and comfort was complicity. Larry had much in common with Susan Sontag, who, in "Illness as Metaphor" and later in "AIDS and Its Metaphors," admonished us to strip disease of all meaning beyond its biology. To assign moral or literary rather than scientific meaning to illness, she argued, is to use the suffering of others, often for the purpose of stigmatizing them, making it easier to withhold aid, to selectively withdraw decency and humanity. Sontag's essays helped lay the groundwork for a new rights based politics of health care in which Larry played a vital role. They admired each other, despite reservations. They shared a furious insistence on seeing, clearly and courageously, and then on speaking out, telling others what they'd seen. Both used language as a means of pushing consciousness past every trick of language that disguises reality. I wasn't fully out of the closet in 1983 when I read the New York Native essay "1,112 and Counting," Larry's primal scream/howitzer blast of a wake up call to gay men who were struggling with the unassimilable scientific reality of a new, fatal, sexually transmitted disease. I hated the essay and I hated him for writing it; it felt abusive and violent. I wasn't alone in feeling this. Many of us couldn't absorb what Larry was telling us; we relegated him to the cave of our demons, the bullies and abusers with which we'd all had to contend. But for some of us certainly for me Larry's scorched earth harangue provoked painful introspection. It's unpleasant and scary to be yelled at, but you ignore the meaning of what's being yelled at your own peril. Larry was howling demands at us, but the shattering words of his essay articulated a stark truth. He was demanding not that we submit but that we rise up and begin to take ourselves, our lives, our health and each other as seriously as he did. And then came "The Normal Heart," an excoriation of a play, unlike anything we'd seen before. A theatrical polemic that described the present moment with harrowing exactitude; an incredibly crafted, gorgeous, funny, devastating masterpiece of theatrical realism; and also and this is very rare a work of art that provably moved its audiences to political action. It's a play about an insufferable person rising to a historical moment; it shows us horrible suffering in order to goad us to become insufferable ourselves, in the name of refusing suffering. My deep indebtedness to Larry as a writer was the basis of our friendship. I was indebted to him as a gay man and as a citizen. As a person who tries to stay politically engaged, I was in awe of him. But I loved his words, and he loved that. Larry was an artist. Sometimes he'd say that nothing mattered more to him than being respected as an artist. I believe that he was an extraordinary writer, and I also believe that he sacrificed for the sake of his unceasing activism some of what he might have accomplished artistically. I think he knew that, though he never complained about it and Larry liked to complain. He wrote "Faggots," "1,112 and Counting," "The Normal Heart" and its sequel, "The Destiny of Me." In terms of political engagement, few serious American artists have achieved more. Larry was sometimes joyful but rarely happy, at least not so he'd let anyone know about it. He was constitutionally incapable of satisfaction; for him, satisfaction death. He wanted to be included, he wanted his community to be let in on the franchise, to have a place amid structures that permit order, stability and prosperity. He was willing to raze those structures if we were denied access, but the access, not the razing, was the point. He was relentless but not revolutionary. And yet, announcing failure and defeat and impending apocalypse, he fed a rage that formed the words that helped fuel a revolution. He was sometimes a misery and often an unmatchable mensch. He was a blisteringly magnificent solar flare of a human being. And I'll miss him forever.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
WASHINGTON Facebook on Wednesday said that the data of up to 87 million users may have been improperly shared with a political consulting firm connected to President Trump during the 2016 election a figure far higher than the estimate of 50 million that had been widely cited since the leak was reported last month. Mark Zuckerberg, the company's chief executive, also announced that Facebook would offer all of its users the same tools and controls required under European privacy rules. The European rules, which go into effect next month, give people more control over how companies use their digital data. Facebook had not previously disclosed how many accounts had been harvested by Cambridge Analytica, the firm connected to the Trump campaign. It has also been reluctant to disclose how it was used by Russian backed actors to influence the 2016 presidential election. Among Facebook's acknowledgments on Wednesday was the disclosure of a vulnerability in its search and account recovery functions that it said could have exposed "most" of its 2 billion users to having their public profile information harvested. The new effort to appear more transparent about the data leaks including a rare question and answer session with Mr. Zuckerberg and reporters came just before Mr. Zuckerberg's expected testimony next week on Capitol Hill, where he will most likely face criticism over how the company collects and shares the personal data of its users. Sheryl Sandberg, Mr. Zuckerberg's top deputy, has several national television interviews scheduled for later this week. The company said that on Monday it would start telling users whether their information may have been shared with Cambridge Analytica. Andy Stone, a spokesman for Facebook in Washington, said the 87 million figure was an estimate of the total number of users whose data could have been acquired by Cambridge Analytica. He said that the estimate was calculated by adding up all the friends of the people who had logged into the Facebook app from which Cambridge Analytica collected profile data. "We wanted to put out the maximum number of people who could have been affected," Mr. Zuckerberg told reporters. Facebook also released a lengthy document describing how it would protect personal data in the future. In that document, Facebook said its search and account recovery systems had been open to abuse by anyone who already had some information about an individual, such as a phone number or email address. The vulnerability extended to much of the platform's user base before it was closed on Wednesday, Facebook said. The company also said it would limit the types of data that can be harvested by software used by outside businesses. The changes mean that users will have to give permission before an app can collect information beyond their names and addresses. The company also said it would no longer allow outsiders to use apps to gather information about the religious or political views of its users. And it will stop using third party data from companies such as Experian and Acxiom to help supplement its own data for ad targeting. "It's clear now that we didn't focus enough on preventing abuse," Mr. Zuckerberg said. "We didn't take a broad enough view of what our responsibility is. That was a huge mistake, and it was my mistake." The Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Facebook violated a 2011 agreement meant to protect users' privacy. User data is crucial to the company's business, because it is used to deliver advertising to users. Mr. Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify about the company's handling of sensitive user data before the Senate's Commerce and Judiciary committees on Tuesday and the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday. "This hearing will be an important opportunity to shed light on critical consumer data privacy issues," said Representatives Greg Walden, Republican of Oregon, and Frank Pallone, Democrat of New Jersey, of the House committee. Senator Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said, "With all of the data exchanged over Facebook and other platforms, users deserve to know how their information is shared and secured." Facebook's problems stretch back before the reports about Cambridge Analytica, to earlier investigations into how Russian actors infiltrated the platform by placing ads and posts to influence the 2016 election. Mr. Zuckerberg initially dismissed the idea of foreign interference on Facebook as a "crazy idea." Since then, the company has been the focus of investigations by law enforcement and congressional committees that are delving into the Russian influence campaign. Facebook now acknowledges that its platform was used to sway voters. All those troubles have prompted investors to flee the company, and its stock has fallen sharply in recent weeks. In response, the company has put its executives front and center. Mr. Zuckerberg typically talks to groups of reporters only after the company releases its quarterly financial reports. But after not responding in public for several days following the Cambridge Analytica disclosure, he has given a series of interviews.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
Credit...Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times He doesn't have a booming, fanboy in chief personality. His modest home office, at least as it appears on Zoom, is light on the usual cape and cowl collectibles. Hollywood was not even his first calling: He set out to be a mechanical engineer. As the president of DC Films, however, Mr. Hamada, 52, manages the movie careers of Wonder Woman, Batman, Cyborg, the Flash, Superman and every other DC Comics superhero. And the new course he has charted for them is dizzying. The most expensive DC movies (up to four a year, starting in 2022) are designed for release in theaters, Mr. Hamada said. Additional superhero films (two annually is the goal, perhaps focused on riskier characters like Batgirl and Static Shock) will arrive exclusively on HBO Max, the fledgling streaming service owned by WarnerMedia. In addition, DC Films, which is part of Warner Bros., will work with filmmakers to develop movie offshoots TV series that will run on HBO Max and interconnect with their big screen endeavors. "With every movie that we're looking at now, we are thinking, 'What's the potential Max spinoff?'" Mr. Hamada said. If you thought there was a glut of superheroes before, just wait. To make all the story lines work, DC Films will introduce movie audiences to a comics concept known as the multiverse: parallel worlds where different versions of the same character exist simultaneously. Coming up, for instance, Warner Bros. will have two different film sagas involving Batman played by two different actors running at the same time. The complicated plan involves a sharp increase in production. Last year, Warner Bros. made two live action superhero movies, "Joker" and "Shazam!" In 2018, there was only "Aquaman." All three were smash hits, underscoring the financial opportunity of making more. For various reasons, including creative misfires and management turnover at DC Films (Mr. Hamada took over in 2018), Warner Bros. has badly trailed Disney owned Marvel at the box office. Over the last decade, Warner Bros. has generated 8 billion in worldwide superhero ticket sales, including 36 million from "Wonder Woman 1984" over the weekend; Marvel has taken in 20.6 billion. Disney has succeeded in part because its divisions collaborate in a way that siloed Warner Bros. never has. But that is changing. AT T mandated greater cross company synergy when it took over WarnerMedia in 2018. "In the past, we were so secretive," Mr. Hamada said. "It was shocking to me, for example, how few people at the company were actually allowed to read scripts for the movies we are making." More than ever, studios are leaning on pre established characters and brands especially if their corporate parents are building streaming services. HBO Max has 12.6 million subscriber activations. Netflix has 195 million. How do you delight Wall Street and quickly close the gap? You start by putting your superheroes to work. This month, Disney announced 100 new movies and shows for the next few years, most of them headed directly to its Disney streaming service, which has 87 million subscribers. Marvel is chipping in 11 films and 11 television shows, including "WandaVision," which arrives on Jan. 15 and finds Elizabeth Olsen reprising her Scarlet Witch role from the "Avengers" franchise. Warner Bros. has at least as many comics based movies in various stages of gestation, including a "Suicide Squad" sequel; "The Batman," in which Robert Pattinson ("Twilight") plays the Caped Crusader; and "Black Adam," starring Dwayne Johnson as the villainous title character. Television spinoffs from "The Batman" and "The Suicide Squad" are headed to HBO Max. WarnerMedia's traditional television division has roughly 25 additional live action and animated superhero shows, including "Superman Lois," which arrives on the CW network in February. WarnerMedia provided only vague information about the sequel's performance on HBO Max, saying in a news release that "millions" of subscribers watched it on Friday. Andy Forssell, WarnerMedia's direct to consumer general manager, said the movie "exceeded our expectations across all of our key viewing and subscriber metrics." So far, "Wonder Woman 1984" has collected 85 million worldwide, with 68.3 million coming from cinemas overseas, where HBO Max does not yet exist. The film, starring Gal Gadot and directed by Patty Jenkins, cost at least 200 million to make and an estimated 100 million to market worldwide. It received much weaker reviews than its series predecessor. Toby Emmerich, president of the Warner Bros. Pictures Group, said on Sunday that he had "fast tracked" a third Wonder Woman movie. "Our real life Wonder Women Gal and Patty will return to conclude the long planned theatrical trilogy," Mr. Emmerich said. Mr. Hamada rose to power through New Line, a Warner Bros. division that mostly makes midbudget horror films and comedies. Among other achievements, he worked with the filmmaker James Wan and others to build "The Conjuring" (2013) into a six film "world" with 1.8 billion in global ticket sales. ("The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It" arrives in June.) "A lot of times in studio meetings, executives just repeat buzzwords, and it becomes a joke," Mr. Wan said. "Walt always brings something constructive, useful and important to the table. He talks to me in a language that I understand." Mr. Hamada and Mr. Emmerich had two options: Figure out how to make the various story lines and character incarnations coexist or start over. The answer is the multiverse. Boiled down, it means that some characters (Wonder Woman as portrayed by Ms. Gadot, for instance) will continue their adventures on Earth 1, while new incarnations (Mr. Pattinson as "The Batman") will populate Earth 2. "The Flash," a film set for release in theaters in 2022, will link the two universes and feature two Batmans, with Mr. Affleck returning as one and Michael Keaton returning as the other. Mr. Keaton played Batman in 1989 and 1992. To complicate matters further, HBO Max gave Mr. Snyder more than 70 million to recut his "Justice League" and expand it with new footage. Mr. Snyder and Warner Bros. had clashed over his original vision, which the studio deemed overly grim, resulting in reshoots handled by a different director, Joss Whedon. (That didn't go well, either.) "Zack Snyder's Justice League," now four hours long, will arrive in segments on HBO Max in March. At least for now, Mr. Snyder is not part of the new DC Films blueprint, with studio executives describing his HBO Max project as a storytelling cul de sac a street that leads nowhere. The multiverse concept has worked on television, but it is a risky strategy for big screens. These movies need to attract the widest audience possible to justify their cost, and too much of a comic nerd sensibility can be a turnoff. New actors can take over a character; James Bond is the best example. But multiple Gothams spinning in theaters? "I don't think anyone else has ever attempted this," Mr. Hamada said. "But audiences are sophisticated enough to understand it. If we make good movies, they will go with it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Beach Is in This California Town's Name, but It Offers Much More The word "discover" is always a misnomer when used by travelers: when a place is new to you, that doesn't mean it's new to everyone else. This was reinforced recently in the midst of my excitement exploring a dynamic midsize city close to where I live in Los Angeles, one with roughly the population of Miami or Kansas City. No, I'm not referring to San Diego nor Palm Springs. I'm talking about Long Beach, Calif., a port city less than 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. It's got a cute and compact downtown, good food, ethnic and cultural diversity, a thriving L.G.B.T. community, and some unparalleled wildlife viewing opportunities. It is, in short, a city entirely worthy of anyone's time and I have no one to blame but myself for not realizing it sooner. I spent a few days last month exploring Long Beach by foot, car and bike, and left feeling like I had plenty more to explore. Even better, I was able to have a great time without spending much cash. Long Beach certainly thrives on ocean culture but, contrary to what its name might imply, the draw isn't necessarily surf and sand there are better beaches nearby. Instead, expect to enjoy the shoreline in other ways: waterside eating and drinking establishments, boat trips and bike rides along the ocean. I picked up a Groupon for Harbor Breeze Cruises, spending just 36.80 for two tickets (down from a walk up price of 90) for a 150 minute ocean cruise and whale watching tour. My girlfriend and I boarded the big catamaran hoping for the best. It didn't look good initially. Undulating gently in the Pacific Ocean with a couple dozen other locals and tourists, we were treated to little more than a pleasure cruise during the first two thirds of the trip. But then those of us on deck heard it the distinctive sound of air and water blasting through a whale's blowhole, like a short burst of television static. From our location about halfway between the shore and Santa Catalina Island, we spotted two long, slender, grayish bodies of fin whales, the second largest mammals on earth, bobbing gently like apples in a barrel at 2 o'clock off the starboard bow. Each emitted a powerful blast or two from their blowhole s before disappearing under the water with little warning our guide on board explained that fin whales don't make a big show of their tails before taking a deep dive. We spotted a few groups of two to three whales, then cruised for another few minutes to a different spot, where we saw at least a half dozen more. The massive and enchanting creatures lolled gently before snorting indignantly a few times and submerging; they seemed entirely unconcerned with us humans. As a bonus sighting, a pod of dolphins joined alongside our boat on the way back to shore. Long Beach's outdoor delights can be enjoyed by boat, but perhaps a more terrestrial approach is your thing. I used the Social Bicycles app (now owned by Uber, if that matters to you) to buy some time on the Long Beach bikeshare network, which is fairly extensive, with hubs throughout the city. The per hour rental cost is 7, and I took advantage of an offer that gives a free hour with the purchase of three. The interface was temperamental, but I eventually was able to rent a bike and enjoy a ride along Junipero Beach. Salty sea air and ocean views aside, it was also a good vantage point for one of Long Beach's offshore historical oddities: the THUMS oil islands. In the 1960s, following a lift on a drilling ban, American energy companies spent 22 million on a series of artificial islands to extract oil from beneath the harbor. You wouldn't know it by looking at them: the islands look like shopping malls from shore, with extraction facilities masked by phony building facades. You can't visit them, but they're an odd and interesting footnote in the area's long history with the oil industry. Getting back to things you can visit: The Earl Burns Miller Japanese Garden, on the Cal State University Long Beach campus, is a respite of tranquillity, with koi, ducks and beautiful landscaping. Admission is 5, but I was allowed in for free since I arrived close to the garden's closing time. Alamitos Park, at the end of the Alamitos Peninsula, isn't a huge green space, but has a calming energy and is a nice place to walk or bike to. Much of Long Beach is quite walkable, and one of the most fun areas to explore, on East 4th Street near Cherry Avenue, happens to have a number of excellent vintage and thrift shops packed into just a couple of blocks. The nonprofit AIDS Assistance Thrift Store is a good place to start, with a mountain of secondhand merch for treasure seekers, ranging from old paintings to furniture. Assistance League of Long Beach Thrift and Vintage Shop is another good one, selling 4 shirts and 12 suits; I picked up a pair of shoes for 8. A few other stores fall more into the vintage (not thrift) category: curated collections that are slightly pricier. Past and Present is an eclectic shop definitely worth popping into, with everything from old Disney merchandise to glassware and board games. Most of it isn't cheap, but there is a shelf with 10 shirts and 5 art prints. Meow is another good vintage store, specializing in accessories and apparel never previously sold or used. And La Bomba may have been my favorite, if only for the cute little dog there that snoozes among the piles of old clothes and shoes. Over at The Hangout, another place on East 4th , I struck up a conversation with Marissa Baklayan, a stylist and photographer who was working at the shop. We chatted for a bit about The Hangout's decidedly singular concept succulents and ice cream and I asked her how she liked Long Beach. "Everyone here knows each other, especially in this neighborhood," she said. Across the street at the fast casual restaurant The HipPea, where I picked up a good falafel sandwich ( 7.99), one of the employees, a nice guy named Brian, echoed a similar sentiment, but added that a lack of rent control has become problematic. Rents have indeed risen sharply in Long Beach in recent years as people have realized it's a progressive and diverse community that's cheaper than many neighboring coastal cities. The resulting gentrification threatens the livelihoods of some renters, including many of the city's nonwhite and L.G.B.T. residents. For years, Long Beach has had a reputation as one of the nation's most gay friendly cities. The Alamitos Beach neighborhood has pride flags flying outside numerous bars and restaurants, and rainbow crosswalks are painted in intersections along East Broadway. I spent a very enjoyable karaoke night at Executive Suite, an L.G.B.T. friendly nightclub in the Zaferia neighborhood northeast of downtown. The club takes a creative approach to incentiviz e patrons to perform, awarding 2 tokens, redeemable at the bar, per song sung for up to three songs. One of the owners, Lenny Sinatra, deftly ran the show. Also in Zaferia is Joe Jost's, a 1920s era tavern that looks like it hasn't changed much since it opened which is just how the regulars like it. I struck up a conversation with Doug Pricer, a local writer and historian who explained to me the interesting history of Zaferia, which was once its own town, and its relationship to Long Beach, which was a dry city even before Prohibition. "Zaferia used to be wet when Long Beach was dry," he said. When I visited, Cathleen Buck, the wife of Ken Buck, the owner (and Joe Jost's grandson ), was busy in the large back room. I ordered a Coors Light ( 2.60) and a Joe's Special, a nicely spiced Polish sausage with Swiss cheese and a pickle on rye bread ( 3.45) and a mountain of pretzels and spicy yellow chilies. Ms. Buck and I chatted while I noshed on a pickled egg ( 1.35), another of Joe Jost's signature snacks. If you're looking for more of a meal, I'd recommend heading to Cambodia Town, centered around a roughly mile long stretch of East Anaheim Street and home to one of the largest Cambodian populations outside of Asia. At Riverside Supermarket, just west of Cherry Avenue, you can pick up hot food as well as groceries. I bought a container of mixed seafood sour soup for 4.99 that was sharp and tangy. You can pick up plants outside the market as well I bought a jasmine bush for 10 and a rice paddy herb plant, called ma om in Khmer, for just 3. Another day, I picked up an order of pad kee mao ( 8.25) from Tasty Food to Go, a small restaurant specializing in Thai and Lao cuisine.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
In time, Wenner, who founded the Rock Hall with the record executive Ahmet Ertegun, became more associated with the institution than any other figure becoming its top negotiator in the industry, as well as the person blamed, fairly or unfairly, for its shortcomings. That role will soon come to an end. Wenner, 73, will step down as chairman of the Rock Roll Hall of Fame Foundation on Jan. 1, the organization announced Wednesday. He will be replaced by John Sykes, the president of entertainment enterprises for the radio giant iHeartMedia, who was among the first executives at MTV. "I just felt I had done what I set out to do," Wenner said in response to questions about why he decided to leave his post. "That it had been built, stabilized and become well financed and managed and, after 30 plus years of running it, time for new energy, new ideas, a new generation." Wenner's retirement is the biggest change to the management of the institution in its history, and it raises questions about how the Rock Hall will evolve under Sykes. Many critics have contended in sometimes detailed reports that the Hall has admitted too few women and people of color. In an interview, Wenner denied that, pointing to the Hall's history of inducting black pioneers of rock and R B music, and saying that the induction process should not be influenced by such considerations. "I don't think that's a real issue," Wenner said. "People are inducted for their achievements. Musical achievements have got to be race neutral and gender neutral in terms of judging them." According to Jon Landau, Bruce Springsteen's longtime manager and the chairman of the hall's nominating committee, Wenner's decision was driven in part by the need for a succession plan. Wenner, he said, nominated Sykes as his successor. "It was a collegial and thoughtful process," Landau said in an interview, "and was handled in a very fraternal way." But things have never been entirely collegial at the Rock Hall, which was founded by Ertegun, of Atlantic Records, along with a team of music and media executives, including Wenner, Landau and Seymour Stein of Sire Records. Wenner became chairman after Ertegun's death in 2006. Since its earliest days, the Rock Hall has been pilloried as unnecessary or even contrary to the spirit of rock 'n' roll an elite museum for a youthful and rebellious art form and attacked for which artists its voters decide to include or exclude. Even those who get in have balked, as Steve Miller did in 2016, complaining about issues like inductees' licensing agreements. "They need to respect the artists they say they're honoring, which they don't," he said. The Rock Roll Hall of Fame began in 1983 as less of an institution than a concept for honoring rock's roots and elevating its heroes. It held its first induction ceremony in 1986 at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York, but did not open the doors of its museum in Cleveland until 1995. "A long time ago, when no one was thinking about our music and its posterity," Mick Jagger said in a statement, "Jann saw that we needed a place to celebrate popular music and recognize the people who had made the music grow. It was a visionary idea and he stuck with it." In time, the Rock Hall came to embrace other kinds of music, like hip hop starting with Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, in 2007 and chart topping pop singers like Madonna and Janet Jackson. For Wenner, who will remain on the Rock Hall's board, relinquishing control over that institution may be his final step in letting go of an extraordinary level of power and influence over pop culture. In 2017, Wenner sold the celebrity magazine Us Weekly to American Media Inc., the publisher of The National Enquirer. Later that year, he sold a majority stake in Rolling Stone the magazine he founded in 1967 with the music critic Ralph J. Gleason to Penske Media Corporation, which has since redesigned the magazine and pursued new features like a Rolling Stone branded chart to challenge Billboard. Wenner retains the title of editorial director at the magazine. Reflecting on the twilight of his career, Wenner said he is working on a book, although he declined to offer details. He said seeing Rolling Stone and the Rock Hall passed to another generation brought him "enormous satisfaction," and added, "That's better satisfaction that to hold on to some bitter end."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Wallace's giant bee, shown here with a honeybee for scale, has a wingspan of more than 2.5 inches and a body the size of a thumb. It's been 38 years since scientists last spotted the insect known as Wallace's Giant Bee, a rare species found only in a group of Indonesian islands called the North Moluccas. With a wingspan of 2.5 inches and a body the size of a human thumb, it's considered the world's largest bee, and was feared extinct. Those fears can now be somewhat laid to rest. In January, an international team of conservationists found a Megachile pluto, as the species is called, in the wild. The team captured the first ever photos and videos of a live specimen, renewing hope for survival of the species, which is threatened by deforestation. "It's just ridiculously large and so exciting," said Simon Robson, a biologist at the University of Sydney in Australia and a member of the expedition. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. The discovery did not come easily. Despite the bee's size, its rarity, remote location and nesting habits make it difficult to find. "I personally know of at least five attempts to find the bee," said Clay Bolt, a photographer who was part of the latest expedition. The bees make their homes by digging holes in the nests of tree dwelling termites, where they spend much of their time hiding. "It was a lot of walking around the forest in 90 degree heat and the highest possible humidity looking at termite nests and chasing after bees," said Dr. Robson. In all, it took five days of hunting for the team to find their "holy grail." Though Wallace didn't seem particularly interested in the bee he devoted only a single line to it in his journal it became something of an obsession among biologists. The next sighting didn't come until 1981, when Adam Messer, an entomologist, observed several in the wild and returned home with a handful of specimens that are now held in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Natural History Museum in London and other institutions. Dr. Messer observed that the bees use their unusually large mandibles to scrape together balls of tree resin and wood to fortify their nests, and that they are relatively solitary animals. Dr. Robson believes they are capable of stinging, though he wasn't in a position to provide evidence. "We were all keen to get stung to see how bad it was," he said, "but because we only found the one, we treated it very carefully." The expedition was partly funded by Global Wildlife Conservation, a Texas nonprofit that in 2017 started a global search for 25 "lost" species animals that are not necessarily extinct but haven't been spotted in at least a decade. In addition to Wallace's Giant Bee, the list includes the Pink Headed Duck, the Fernandina Galapagos Tortoise and the Namdapha Flying Squirrel. Conservationists are concerned that deforestation threatens the survival of the bee giants. The region of Indonesia where the bees are found lost seven percent of its tree cover between 2001 and 2017, according to Global Forest Watch. Excited as they were to find the bee, Dr. Robson and his team worry that the sighting may be a mixed blessing. Last year, an anonymous seller sold a previously unaccounted for specimen to an unknown bidder on eBay for 9,100. "If you can get that much money for an insect, that encourages people to go and find them," said Dr. Robson. To help protect the bees, the team has agreed not to disclose the exact island where they made their discovery.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
When the playwright Steven Levenson, then a "bored high school junior," found himself outside the Supreme Court on a December evening in 2000, it was not because of a passionate interest in the case of Bush v. Gore then being decided or a fondness for demonstrations. "The truth is I had never been to a protest," he wrote last year in an essay about political engagement. "And it sounded like a good story to tell at school on Monday." In some ways, Mr. Levenson's disappointing play "Days of Rage," which opened on Tuesday at Second Stage Theater, is that good story, except turned inside out. In this version, callowness has curdled into cynicism, and it isn't naivete being mocked. Instead, young radicals who believe themselves to be fighting injustice are shown to be fools and worse. A peaceful march is not what the play's characters, affiliated with Students for a Democratic Society, are after. Disappointed by years of unsuccessful agitation against the war in Vietnam, the three remaining members of a ragtag collective in an upstate New York town a lot like Ithaca are ready for revolution. After weeks of leafleting they have five people signed up. Including themselves. Their failure as organizers puts a strain on the household, which is run with strict collectivist principles. All decisions are made by majority vote. All behavior is subject to quasi sadistic group criticism sessions. All money is shared. Bodies are shared too, supposedly to prevent individual attachments from undermining the mission. What's new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter Cutting against this discipline is the chaos of 20 somethings living in a hovel. (Louisa Thompson's set, a cross section of a house barely managing to stand, is completely convincing on that score.) Quinn, the truest believer, accuses Jenny of not cleaning the pantry. Spence, who fancies himself the theorist, has doubts about Jenny's doctrinal (or, at any rate, sexual) devotion. And with little more than 50 among them, paying the rent may be a more pressing issue than supporting the Vietcong. So far so good; the ineptitude and jumbled motives of agitators ego, angst and anomie come into it are reasonably ripe for satire. And though the failures of radicalism are a common enough theme of fiction ("American Pastoral"), film ("Running on Empty") and earlier plays ("Other Desert Cities"), "Days of Rage" renews the genre merely by asking how far we would go to stand up to a government we consider bereft of values. On Saturday night, just a few hours after the murder of 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, the gasp of the audience when a character brought out a gun seemed more than just a response to a plot turn. But with the introduction of two outsiders, the play starts tugging in incompatible directions. Peggy (Tavi Gevinson) is a rich runaway whose willingness to join the collective and cover its bills comes with a big problem attached. She's a troublemaker, pushing the others into paranoiac corners and the play into overdrive. Whenever she's in a scene, it becomes more about individual psychopathology than group dynamics, and not very credible in either case. Hal (J. Alphonse Nicholson) pushes the other way. He is black, has a brother in Vietnam and has already experienced the injustices the others blather about. Their condescension to him and his bemused response are the most interesting things in the play; when Jenny confesses she is a racist, "like everyone in the country," what can Hal answer but "great"? Mr. Levenson excels at overall dramatic architecture; as in "If I Forget" and his book for "Dear Evan Hansen," the timing and payoff of plot points here is unimpeachable. But the clash between heavy handed satire and naturalistic conflict leaves "Days of Rage" in a tonal muddle he can't resolve. The sexual turn that provides closure to many of the scenes quickly begins to seem like a tic, and when that pales, the only option left is a generalized hysteria. At least the hysteria is effectively staged. The director Trip Cullman gets all the tempos right, forcing the audience into an uncomfortable alliance with the characters as they hole up in their hovel, certain they are about to be attacked. And the cast especially Ms. Patten, lately seen in "Jagged Little Pill," and Mr. Nicholson, riveting in "Paradise Blue" does a good job filling their shells of characters with genuine personality. Ms. Gevinson's breathy, bug eyed weirdness, so distracting in other roles, is surprisingly effective here. If only she weren't playing such a worm and a dilettante. To the extent "Days of Rage" focuses on Peggy she sets the plot in motion it seems to suggest that the entire antiwar movement, or at least its radical fringe, was an adolescent tantrum, with no intellectual heft however much Hegel was read. (Peggy at first thinks Lenin is a Beatle.) Certainly many did things during that period they needed to regret; some have spent the last five decades explaining and paying for their behavior. In "Days of Rage," a somewhat lame "what happened to them" coda tots up the costs and the accommodations of the characters' bad choices. But in the bigger scheme of things, the radicals were not the problem. They were the ones who were willing to reopen the question of how America should function to say, as Jenny does in one of the play's best moments, "Once you know what's happening in the world, in your name, all over the world, then the only extreme thing really is to do nothing." Foolish they may have been: paranoid, grandiose and rigid in their thinking. But who does that sound like today?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
WASHINGTON Eighteen months after the recession officially ended, the government's latest measures to bolster the economy have led many forecasters and policy makers to express new optimism that the recovery will gain substantial momentum in 2011. Economists in universities and on Wall Street have raised their growth projections for next year. Retail sales, industrial production and factory orders are on the upswing, and new claims for unemployment benefits are trending downward. Despite persistently high unemployment, consumer confidence is improving. Large corporations are reporting healthy profits, and the Dow Jones industrial average reached a two year high this week. The Federal Reserve, which has kept short term interest rates near zero since the end of 2008, has made clear it is sticking by its controversial decision to try to hold down mortgage and other long term interest rates by buying government securities. President Obama's 858 billion tax cut compromise with Congressional Republicans is putting more cash in the hands of consumers through a temporary payroll tax cut and an extension of unemployment insurance for the long term unemployed. It is also trying to address one of the biggest impediments to the recovery the reluctance of companies to invest their piles of cash in new plants and equipment by granting tax incentives for business investment. The measured optimism is reminiscent of the mood a year ago, when the economy seemed to be reviving, only to stall again in the spring amid widespread fears caused by the debt crisis in Greece and other European countries. Even so, economists are increasingly upbeat about the outlook, saying that while the economy in 2011 will not be strong enough to drive unemployment down significantly, it should put the United States on its soundest footing since the financial crisis started an economic tailspin three years ago. Phillip L. Swagel, who was the Treasury Department's chief economist during the administration of George W. Bush and teaches at the University of Maryland, said, "The recovery in 2011 will be strong enough for us to see sustained job creation that will finally give Americans a tangible sense of an improving economy." A prominent forecaster, Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com, predicted that the economy would be "off and running" next year. "The policy response, in its totality, has been very aggressive," he said, "and I think ensures that the recovery will evolve into a self sustaining expansion early in 2011." The recession officially ended in June 2009, when the economy started to grow again. Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of the country's output, grew at an annualized rate of 3.7 percent in the first quarter of this year. But then it stalled, with the rate falling to a mere 1.7 percent in the second quarter and 2.6 percent in the third quarter. Jan Hatzius, the chief United States economist at Goldman Sachs, said the economy was likely to grow at an annualized rate of around 3 percent this quarter. Goldman projected last week that the growth rate would be 4 percent for most of 2011. Morgan Stanley, which raised its growth forecast for 2011 to 4 percent, is even more optimistic, forecasting a rate of 4.5 percent this quarter. Administration officials, who have been burned by premature optimism in the past, were reluctant to make predictions for next year. But Austan D. Goolsbee, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers since September, said that a shift in sentiment quickly followed the news of the tax deal "There aren't many policies which, on the day Washington announces them, lead most private sector forecasters to publicly and significantly revise their forecasts upward," he said. "This one did." There are significant caveats to the more positive outlook. The housing market remains weak, and another sustained drop in prices could badly undercut the economy. Financial markets and the banking system remain vulnerable to a new round of jitters in Europe over the debt burdens of countries like Ireland and Spain. There is mounting concern about the tattered balance sheets of state and local governments. While fiscal and monetary policy seems to be helping the economy in the short turn, the tax cut compromise essentially deferred looming battles over how to cut federal spending and address the government's huge debt burden. The Fed's bond buying efforts have not prevented long term interest rates from rising a phenomenon that is interpreted by optimists as a reaction to higher growth and by pessimists as a demonstration of the ineffectiveness of the central bank's efforts and the potential for inflation. And for most of the roughly eight million Americans who have lost their jobs since the recession began in December 2007, it hardly feels like a recovery. The unemployment rate remains at its highest level since the early 1980s; it rose to 9.8 percent this month and is likely to remain above 9 percent through all of next year, confirming the view that the United States is in another jobless recovery like the ones that followed the last two recessions, in 1990 91 and in 2001. "Historically, unemployment rates come down slowly, so even with 4 percent growth, you would expect to see the unemployment rate come down maybe a percentage point a year, probably less," said Alan B. Krueger, who was the Treasury Department's top economist until last month when he returned to Princeton. "Given how high the unemployment rate is, that's going to seem very slow." Robert J. Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University and a member of the committee that sets the start and end dates of business cycles, cautioned against excessive optimism, noting the huge burdens on state and local governments, rising costs of health care and other long run fiscal challenges. "The rise of the stock market is mainly because there are no other good investments in sight, not because the stock market has some unique talent in predicting what's wrong with the economy." N. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard economist who was chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under Mr. Bush, said that "anything that spooks consumers and businesses from spending" could threaten the recovery, including "a worsening of the fiscal crisis in Europe or the increased fear that a similar crisis will soon infect U.S. cities and states." The Fed is likely to end its 600 billion bond buying program in mid 2011, meaning monetary policy might be providing less of a kick to the economy by the end of the year. Officials in the Obama administration also seem to agree that after the 787 billion stimulus last year and the 858 billion tax cut compromise just approved by Congress, the government's arsenal of fiscal tools has just about been used up.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Deriding what they called "mob mentality," Chris Pratt and his "Guardians of the Galaxy" castmates released a letter of support on Monday for the director James Gunn, who was fired from the "Guardians" franchise on July 20 after offensive jokes he wrote on Twitter were resurfaced by online vigilantes. Mr. Gunn's tweets mostly written between 2009 and 2012 contained jokes about pedophilia, AIDS, rape and the Sept. 11 attacks. Two far right provocateurs, Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, threw a spotlight on the tweets two weeks ago after Mr. Gunn harshly criticized President Trump on Twitter, prompting calls for Mr. Gunn's ouster. The Walt Disney Company, which controls the "Guardians" series through its Marvel Studios unit, swiftly fired Mr. Gunn, calling the old tweets "indefensible and inconsistent with our studio's values." Mr. Gunn also apologized. But Disney was quickly condemned in some quarters for reacting to a social media shaming that appeared to have been undertaken as political payback. Mr. Gunn's firing has also stirred debate about how Hollywood should handle transgressions made during a more anything goes era. As the movie industry seeks to clean up its culture, how retroactively should new standards be applied? "There is little due process in the court of public opinion," Mr. Pratt and eight of his co stars, including Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel, wrote in the open letter. "James is likely not the last good person to be put on trial." The actors continued, "We hope Americans from across the political spectrum can ease up on the character assassinations and stop weaponizing mob mentality." Noting that Mr. Gunn had repeatedly apologized, the cast members also said: "In casting each of us to help him tell the story of misfits who find redemption, he changed our lives forever. We believe the theme of redemption has never been more relevant than now." Mr. Gunn, 51, has long been an online instigator. Glaad condemned him in 2012 for making anti gay and sexist comments on a blog. He apologized at the time for what he called a poor attempt at humor. Despite that history, Disney hired him to write and direct the first "Guardians of the Galaxy" movie, which was marketed as family entertainment and took in 773 million worldwide in 2014. A sequel, also written and directed by Mr. Gunn, collected about 864 million last year. Mr. Gunn has lately been consulting on a "Guardians" themed addition to Epcot at Walt Disney World. Since his firing, "Guardians" fans have circulated petitions online calling for Disney to reinstate him. By Monday evening, one such petition on Change.org had more than 345,000 signatures. 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 letter released by Mr. Pratt and his co stars did not join the fan petitions in demanding that Mr. Gunn be rehired as director of "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3," which is set to begin shooting in the coming months. None of the actors threatened to quit. (The other signees were Dave Bautista, Michael Rooker, Pom Klementieff, Karen Gillan and Sean Gunn, who is Mr. Gunn's brother.) But the actors did say in the letter that Mr. Gunn had their "full support" and that they were "shocked" by his abrupt ouster by Disney, especially since the offending tweets were written "many years ago." "Each of us looks forward to working with James in the future," the letter said. "His story isn't over not by a long shot." Disney is unlikely to reverse its decision to fire Mr. Gunn. Doing so would force the company to explain why Mr. Gunn's tweets written years ago, yes, although the director was also in his 40s at the time were less offensive than the racist tweet that prompted Disney to fire Roseanne Barr from "Roseanne" in May. (Ms. Barr wrote on Twitter on July 24, "I'm disgusted to read all of the support for James Gunn's pedophile jokes.") Working for Disney, which primarily focuses on family entertainment, is also not the same as working for another Hollywood studio. Still, the movie industry has long tolerated vulgar comments and behavior particularly from its creative ranks. As the MeToo and Time's Up movements have taken hold over the past year, and as studios have moved to an aggressive zero tolerance behavioral policy as a result, some people are starting to contemplate what constitutes a proper response. Over the weekend, for instance, Terry Press, the president of CBS Films, ruminated on the topic on her Facebook page after The New Yorker published an article in which several women accused Leslie Moonves, CBS's chief executive, of sexual misconduct in decades past.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Although Burna Boy's "African Giant" is nominated for best world music album, he's not staying in any niche. His understated, insinuating rhythms mixing percussion and electronics connect to Jamaica, Puerto Rico and American R B and trap as well as to the Nigerian Afrobeat of Fela Kuti (Burna Boy is from Lagos, Nigeria). Since his debut album in 2013, Burna Boy has recorded alongside Drake, Ed Sheeran, Lily Allen, Stormzy and others. His lyrics, like Fela's, juggle English and Nigerian languages and patois, as he offers African pride and straightforward history lessons along with tales of night life and romance. JON PARELES The Icelandic composer Hildur Gudnadottir, nominated for best score soundtrack for visual media for the HBO mini series "Chernobyl," came to music as a cellist before studying composition and collaborating as cellist or composer with musicians on the borders of Minimalism, classical music, electronic music, indie rock and film music, among them Mum, Animal Collective, the Knife, Pan Sonic, Nico Muhly, Johann Johannsson and the chamber ensemble she co founded, Nordic Affect. Her cello, sustained and somberly emotive, has been at the center of much of her music, like her Golden Globe winning score for "Joker." But her grim, harrowing score for "Chernobyl" blurs boundaries between orchestral and synthetic; it deploys eerie, implacable sustained tones that shade into electronic noise. PARELES When Christone Ingram known widely as Kingfish plays the guitar, the sound is rollicking, throaty, sinewy, stinky. Born and raised in Clarksdale, Miss., Kingfish took to the blues early, and became something of a teen guitar prodigy. Last year, he released his debut album, "Kingfish," which is both deeply reverent of tradition and yet not stodgy in any way; it's nominated for best traditional blues album. The vitality in Kingfish's music has put him in high demand he's performed alongside Vampire Weekend, Rakim and, naturally, Buddy Guy. But he's no sideman. JON CARAMANICA In 2015, Koryn Hawthorne, then a teenager, placed fourth on "The Voice." Now she's one of the most jolting new talents in gospel music, with a wonderfully husky voice and an emerging appetite for risk. She's nominated in best gospel performance/song for "Speak the Name," a startling duet with Natalie Grant. The song is a howling success, a praise annihilation. But Hawthorne has other modes, too. The title track of her 2018 debut album, "Unstoppable," is pointedly effective, jaunty and feisty R B there's a version with the long running gospel rapper Lecrae, but also one with the secular Dallas rapper Yella Beezy. CARAMANICA A big band can seem an old, clunky thing, but at its best, the 18 piece jazz orchestra can still synthesize a hectic swarm of ideas, linking the old with the new. For five years the Terraza Big Band has enjoyed a residency at Terraza 7, a Latin jazz club attuned to the diversity of its neighborhood (Jackson Heights, Queens). And on its debut, "One Day Wonder" nominated for best large jazz ensemble album the group corrals a plurality of Pan American influences into an organic identity. Its nine tracks bear the stamp of the current jazz generation, but their clipped and dilating rhythms give a hint of the vast cultural inheritance that flows through the band when it's at home in Queens. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
CORVALLIS, Oregon As the anthropology instructor engaged her class, a fault line quickly developed. American students answered and asked questions, even offered opinions, but the foreigners half the class, most from China sat in silence. It became clear that some had understood little of the lecture here at Oregon State University and were not ready to be enrolled. In fact, they are not, at least not yet. Instead, those students fit into a fast growing and lucrative niche in higher education, of efforts to increase enrollment of foreigners with transitional programs to bridge the cultural divide often a chasm between what it means to be a college student in their own countries and in the United States. Oregon State's program, a joint venture with a private company, Into University Partnerships, prepares students to move into the university's mainstream after a year, as Oregon State sophomores. Colleges want, and increasingly need, more foreign students, not only for high minded reasons, but also because foreigners generally pay full price. Recruitment from overseas is a rare and increasingly important financial bright spot at a time when state support for higher education has dropped to historic lows, research grants are declining, consumers are objecting to tuition increases, and the supply of college age Americans is stagnant. "It is a wonderful source of revenue," said Sabah U. Randhawa, Oregon State's provost. "It helps us afford to admit more resident students, offer them more aid, expand the faculty and infrastructure." The university's joint venture, called Into Oregon State, has about 1,400 students, most from China and most studying engineering. Dr. Randhawa wants to expand it significantly, in part, he said, "because we want more academic and national diversity, and because engineering is an expensive discipline." English is just one of numerous challenges for the foreigners that must be addressed in the transition year. Many say they are used to classes in which only the teachers speak, they do not call on students, students have few choices about what work they will do, and grades are based entirely on a few written exams. "This tradition of class discussion and activities is very strange to us," said Yuqi Zhang, a student from China. A recently arrived South Korean student, Min Jae Lee, said, "In American university, student is free, study attitude is free." Into Oregon State has a 12 person student care team that offers workshops and personal counseling on cultural issues that go far beyond the academic: dating etiquette, notions of personal space and privacy, driving and drinking laws, attitudes toward mental health, body language, and standards of interaction with peers, faculty members or even, if needed, the police. The most prestigious American schools have no shortage of foreign applicants and have their pick of the best. But most colleges and universities are relatively unknown worldwide and lack the resources to do overseas recruiting. And while the supply of students abroad who want an American education is immense, the number who are actually prepared for it is much more limited. A number of for profit companies have stepped into that breach, offering recruitment services or college preparatory boot camps, but a handful offer something more ambitious, working with American colleges to create bridge programs for foreigners, a more common practice in Britain and Australia. Six years ago, there were no programs of that kind in the United States, but now at least 15 American universities have them, working with companies like Into and Study Group, both based in Britain; Navitas, an Australian company; and Kaplan Inc., with more scheduled to come on line. The trend of colleges' hiring private companies for new functions has been underway for decades. Few colleges, for example, run their own dining halls anymore, and many campus bookstores have become outposts of national chains. "But this is an additional leap because it's much closer to our core mission," said Peter N. Stearns, provost of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., which recently announced an agreement with Into. He and other administrators say universities have moved cautiously with this particular strain of outsourcing, worried about ceding control of curriculum or admissions, or watering down either academics or the caliber of the student body. "Into approached us five years ago, but we decided to build our own program, which in retrospect was probably a mistake," Dr. Stearns said. "We're pleased with what we've got, but it's small, 125 students. We want to do it on a much bigger scale, and we've come to the conclusion that we can't." The private companies have recruitment operations around the world, so they can find students, screen them for quality, direct them to Western schools they might not have heard of, and provide support services on campus. The programs vary in structure, duration and revenue sharing arrangements. In Into's program, the universities control the academic side, providing the curriculum and employing the professors, and the students attend for at least a full academic year before enrolling in the university. At Into Oregon State, some students are just studying English, while others are heading to graduate school, but most intend to enroll as undergraduates. The university decides whether they have performed well enough to make that transition. Most do. The foreign students take courses that a domestic freshman might take, but with a twist. Irene Rolston, for example, teaches several sections of Comparative Cultures, some with only Oregon State students, and some where about half the students are in the Into program. In the mixed classes, she is helped by language instructors who also work with the foreign students outside class on their English skills. Students in the Into program pay slightly more than the usual price charged to non Oregonians, which is roughly 34,000 this year for tuition, fees, room and board. Once they enroll in the university at large, they pay the standard out of state charges. Before the program began, Oregon State had about 900 international students, fewer than half of them undergraduates, out of more than 20,000. That figure has more than doubled and continues to rise. The next goal is a big increase in the number of Oregon State students who study abroad, said Dr. Randhawa, the provost. "I think it's absolutely critical for folks to know different cultures and understand the world," he said. "To me, this is more important in the long haul than any discipline they learn."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Education
For some time now, there have been two versions of Brian Williams. One is an Emmy winning, sober, talented anchor on the "NBC Nightly News" and the other is a funny, urbane celebrity who hosts "Saturday Night Live," slow jams the news with Jimmy Fallon and crushes it in every speech and public appearance he makes. Each of those personas benefited the other, and his fame and appeal grew accordingly, past the anchor chair he occupied every weeknight and into a realm of celebrity that reaches all demographics and platforms. Even young people who wouldn't be caught dead watching the evening news know who Mr. Williams is. Which is good until it isn't. It was Mr. Williams himself who brought those two worlds together at the end of his newscast over a week ago when he broadcast a segment in which he was shown at a Rangers game in a tribute to a retiring command sergeant major, who, Mr. Williams suggested, had evacuated him from a dangerous situation in Iraq. "The story actually started with a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an R.P.G.," Mr. Williams said, introducing the segment, referring to a rocket propelled grenade. "Our traveling NBC News team was rescued, surrounded and kept alive by an armor mechanized platoon from the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry." But Stars and Stripes, the military publication, was tipped off that a thread popped up on NBC's Facebook page about the segment from soldiers who were there that day in 2003, saying Mr. Williams was describing something that happened to another helicopter, not his, and that he arrived later. Confronted with this, Mr. Williams acknowledged his mistake on his newscast last Wednesday, and offered up a muddled apology, saying he had conflated events in his memory. And then in a statement over the weekend, he said, "In the midst of a career spent covering and consuming news, it has become painfully apparent to me that I am presently too much a part of the news, due to my actions." He added: "As managing editor of 'NBC Nightly News,' I have decided to take myself off of my daily broadcast for the next several days." The perceptions of the weak, confused apology, and suspending himself for as long as he chooses, are not good for Mr. Williams or his employer. A full throated, unmodulated apology is the only thing that will satisfy a public who placed their trust in him. And his voluntary step back, however well intended, suggests he is answerable only to himself. Indeed, the investigation at NBC will be led internally, by the head of investigations, who depends on Mr. Williams to make room for his work on the newscast. Deborah Turness, the embattled head of the news division, needed to demonstrate that someone was in charge of Mr. Williams and his fate. The American public won't abide someone putting himself into the naughty corner and setting the conditions for staying there. Beyond those strategic failures, if you are going to tell a war story that sprints past the truth, it best not be about war. Those of us who worked the Hurricane Katrina coverage rolled our eyes at some of the stories Mr. Williams told of the mayhem there, but it was a dark, confusing place and a lot of bad stuff happened, so who were we to judge? But armed service and its perils are seen as sacred and must not be trifled with. The soldiers who ended up in harm's way and survived that day are calling him out because their moral code requires it. "Everyone tells lies," he wrote. "Every single one of us. The issue isn't whether or not you lie. It is how you deal with it once you are caught. I thank you for stepping down for a few nights, Mr. Williams. Now can you admit that you didn't 'misremember' and perform a real apology? I might even buy you a beer." Mr. Summerlin is right. I wrote a book some years back about the nature of memory and the stories we tell ourselves and others. Stories tend to grow over time and, if they are told often enough, they harden into a kind of new truth for the teller. Mr. Williams has been on almost every talk show you can think of and that requires not only a different skill set he is a gifted and funny performer but stories in abundance. Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. It's useful to note that Mr. Williams initially reported the story fundamentally as it had happened although the soldiers on hand say he exaggerated the danger to himself even then and over time, as he retold it, he moved into the middle of it, so that the story became something that happened to him. All those 1 percent enhancements along the way add up and can leave the teller a long way from the truth. The evolution of his account was evident in a 2013 appearance on the "Late Show With David Letterman." "We were in some helicopters. What we didn't know is we were north of the invasion," he said. "Two of our four helicopters were hit by ground fire, including the one I was in, R.P.G. and AK 47." I haven't reported from a war zone, but I know the fog of war requires an excess of caution. You can't toe touch and tell tall tales later. His NBC colleague David Bloom died of a pulmonary embolism while covering the war in 2003. In 2006 in Iraq, Bob Woodruff of ABC suffered a traumatic brain injury. Many, many journalists have been maimed or died in pursuit of the truth, and those who survive don't generally speak about it much. As the evening news anchor, Mr. Williams possesses a rare combination of fame and trust, with each feeding off the other. But fame is slippery, morphing into infamy very quickly, as Mr. Williams discovered in four days of sustained pounding. Everyone loves a story about seeing the mighty fall, even if they are as fundamentally likeable as Mr. Williams. (NBC confirmed that Mr. Williams would not be making a scheduled appearance on Mr. Letterman's show this week.) As it turns out, his non apology was not a safe haven, but a trap door, and his self banishment was not a consequence, but a mistake. I don't know if Mr. Williams will lose his job. I don't think he should his transgressions were not a fundamental part of his primary responsibilities. But if the executives who run NBC come to believe that he can't credibly cover combat or hurricanes, or call a politician on a lie, they will dismiss him even though there is no plan in place for succession. I watched him read the news on Friday night. Even playing hurt, he is very good at it. And I thought about how weird it would be to see him doing the job in a hair shirt for months or years to come. It's an image that clanks. We want our anchors to be both good at reading the news and also pretending to be in the middle of it. That's why, when the forces of man or Mother Nature whip up chaos, both broadcast and cable news outlets are compelled to ship the whole heaving apparatus to far flung parts of the globe, with an anchor as the flag bearer. We want our anchors to be everywhere, to be impossibly famous, globe trotting, hilarious, down to earth, and above all, trustworthy. It's a job description that no one can match.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Move Over, Rat Pack and Brat Pack: Here Comes the Snap Pack On a warm for March night, a foursome led by a 23 year old fledgling fashion designer named Andrew Warren shimmied themselves into an Uber S.U.V. They were heading from a pajama themed party at the Dolce Gabbana store on Fifth Avenue to dinner at a new restaurant, Vandal, on the Bowery. Dressed in a black corseted two piece lent to her by Dolce Gabbana, Kyra Kennedy, 20, handed her phone to the driver so he could plug it in for her. Ms. Kennedy is a daughter of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Her porcelain skin face was framed by a jeweled headpiece, which at the party had prompted Peter Brant Jr., a model, to remark: "Kiki! You look a bit like Josephine Baker." Reya Benitez listened and laughed. Turning 24 at midnight, she wore a white slip dress designed by Mr. Warren, and bopped in her seat to the beat of Justin Bieber's "Sorry," asking the driver to turn the volume up, way up. "It's my jam," said Ms. Benitez, the daughter of Jellybean Benitez, a D.J. and music producer. Sparkling in a see through gold dress also on loan from Dolce Gabbana was Gaia Matisse, the great great granddaughter of the painter Henri Matisse. "Andrew, do you have any pics?" she asked, turning to Mr. Warren. "I need to look on my phone," he said, the soft light of the screen bathing his face. Las Vegas in the 1950s and '60s had the Rat Pack. In Los Angeles in the '80s there was the Brat Pack. Now, New York has become home base to a young, wealthy and itinerant group that one may think of as the Snap Pack. For them, taking photos and videos for Instagram and Snapchat is not a way to memorialize a night out. It's the night's main event. In the S.U.V., the four passed their phones to one another, assessing the goods, texting pictures that they favored. "Obviously I'm going to put a different filter on it," said Ms. Matisse, 22 and raised in Paris and New York, as she considered whether to post a picture of herself and her friends. Ms. Kennedy, a statuesque beauty, gazed at another photograph. "Oh my God, I look like a whale!" she said. She and Mr. Warren met about a year and a half ago. "He scooped me up in Aspen," she said. Often traveling together, the group members chronicle their lives tirelessly from beach to mountaintop to Mr. Warren's parents' apartment on Central Park West (to which he returned after graduating from Syracuse University in 2015) for their combined Instagram following of more than 100,000. They have given one another goofy nicknames. Ms. Benitez is "the Chica," the exact spelling of which is a point of contention among the friends. Ms. Matisse is "Koala," Ms. Kennedy is "Hester." And Mr. Warren? "Have you seen 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory'?" Ms. Kennedy asked. "He's Veruca. 'I want it! I want it! I want it!'" Mr. Warren's ambitions are at least in part driving all this social media activity: He is trying to promote his new fashion line, Just Drew, so named after the breakup of a collaboration with a friend on a line of T shirts. He has since stepped up to more complicated garments. At a recent trunk show at the Shephard building in Greenwich Village, arranged with the help of a best friend who is a luxury real estate scion, he displayed navy blue palazzo pants ( 295), silk wool blazers in both black and white with mesh netted panels in the back ( 750) and signature handkerchief silk charmeuse slip dresses ( 595), all made in the United States. "I want my clothes to be realistic," he said. "Sometimes people just do designs for attention, like they come out in a garbage bag." In a way, Mr. Warren, an only child, is just building on the family business. His paternal grandfather, David Warren, was a successful clothing manufacturer (his name is inscribed on the "Garment Worker" statue on Seventh Avenue, a man working at a sewing machine); he founded the Warren Group, which the family sold in 1998. Andrew Warren's parents, Marcy and Michael Warren, worked in the company David founded, and are doing a lot of Andrew's back office work, as well as advising him. (They hired a seasoned designer to help execute their son's vision.) "We have a top that is in orange, and Andrew can't stand it," said Michael Warren, who is 60. "But I tell him, in Atlanta and Dallas they are going to love it, and you need to care about what they'll love outside of New York." What Andrew Warren lacks in nuts and bolts retail expertise, though, he makes up for with youth and app savvy. "The stores want him," said Ms. Warren, 54. "They don't want old moo out to pasture me. They want the jack rabbit, they want the young blood. They want him and they want his friends." These include Tiffany Trump, Donald Trump's 22 year old daughter with Marla Maples. With Ms. Kennedy, Ms. Benitez and Ms. Matisse, she modeled for Just Drew's first New York Fashion Week show at Gotham Hall in February. Among his older supporters is Jason Binn, 48, the magazine impresario who was a founder of Gotham, Hamptons and Ocean Drive, the latter started in part with money invested by Michael and Marcy Warren. Last summer, DuJour, another of Mr. Binn's magazines, featured Mr. Warren and his set in a sprawling article called, "The (Real) Rich Kids of Instagram," a reference to a website that mockingly aggregates lavish photos posted by the young jet set. "Everything!" Mr. Binn said. "He hustled and hustled, and he became friends with everyone and then best friends with everyone. He built a great Rolodex, and the next thing you know, he's got them to work for him!" Mr. Warren's Rolodex is burnished, of course, by his agile Snapchat, which Mr. Binn called "more colorful than a Puff Daddy video." These seconds long snippets take viewers to loud, throbbing nightclubs, show the gang smoking on balconies and posing near private jets. A recent scene focused on Lita, the Warren family's live in nanny and housekeeper, as she tried to step over doorway gates in place to limit the wandering of the family's dogs as she carried a stack of empty pizza boxes. "We're at the Hampton Classic, get over that one!" Mr. Warren can be heard saying as he trained his camera on her. Despite such displays, the "Rich Kids of Instagram" moniker rankles Mr. Warren and his clique. "I party and I have fun, but I'm doing something serious," he said. "Like Rihanna, because she sings, and rappers no one is judging them for going out. But when I go out it's like a judge." Even as they grasp that their postings can draw scorn, the Snap Pack seems unable to relinquish the habit of social media, and the illusion of image control it affords. "I look good in pictures I take of myself," Ms. Matisse said as the group settled in for dinner at Vandal. Ms. Matisse, who said she is a method actor "it's my passion" graduated in 2015 from New York University, where she studied "the self and other identities," she said, "the Eastern psychology of ourselves and Buddhism and how the East is so much different from the West and it's all very interconnected." She admitted some ambivalence about her activities on Instagram. "It's so consuming, it takes so much time," she said. "I hate the process of the Instagram, the contrast, the saturation, the filter," she said of editing the pictures. "Then I send it out into the world and may not even ever see it again." Friends joined the table, seating arrangements were shuffled, and a bottle of eye drops was passed around, enhancing more sultry selfies. Barron Hilton, 26, brother of Paris, was among the stragglers from the Dolce Gabbana party. He was wearing a bathrobe and chatting excitedly about his Instagram food blog, Barron's Bites. The waitress carded the diners as they ordered cocktails. Mr. Warren got an extra glass, and several of the friends poured in their drinks: straight vodka, margaritas, something and tonic. A week later, the Snap Packers gathered early on a Tuesday morning in the green room of "Good Day New York," the local Fox morning news and talk show, for a segment focusing on Just Drew. Mr. Warren's mother is a friend of one of the hosts, Rosanna Scotto. Mr. Warren would be interviewed as Ms. Kennedy, Ms. Matisse and Ms. Benitez modeled. Also serving as a model was Alexa Greenfield, 23, another friend of Mr. Warren's and an entrepreneur whose ventures include jewelry for men's ties. "I'm friends with Andrew, but I'm tamer," Ms. Greenfield said. "I'm hidden, I don't let him put me on Instagram." She chatted with Blake Frank, a Just Drew employee, and Chris Bolos, who does production, sourcing and other tasks for the family. Ms. Matisse was not there yet. She had slept at the Warrens' apartment and was apparently concerned about leaving her teacup longhaired Chihuahua there. "Marcy has three dogs," Mr. Bolos said, "and Gaia has a little rat." Dressed in Just Drew pants and a crop top, Ms. Benitez sat with her phone looking at photos of herself in Miami, then sat on the arm of Mr. Warren's chair and began snapping the two of them. He nudged her away. "He doesn't love me anymore," she said, fake pouting. "I like to take photos," he said, "but I'm not a bad person. I've had a cancer patient D.M. me on Instagram and say, 'Your Instagram snaps give me hope.' She said I inspire her and I make her want to keep going every day so she can have a fun life." But then it was time for him to do a quick primp. Mr. Warren wears his hair in a comb forward, and it requires certain maintenance. "I want to do it right before we go on because it falls immediately," he said. The time arrived, the swoop was swooped, and the group got ready to head to the set. But first, they posed for a group selfie.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Croatia is a popular vacation destination this year for travelers from the United States. Expedia has seen air ticket demand to the country double this summer, compared with last summer, and on the travel search engine Kayak, searches to Croatia between Jan. 1 and May 25 this year for travel from May 26 to Sept. 5 were up 25 percent, compared with the same periods last year. A holiday to Croatia, even during the peak season in August and September, doesn't have to be expensive, according to Wanda S. Radetti, the owner of Tasteful Croatian Journeys, a company specializing in custom private trips to Croatia. "Despite the high demand for Croatia, you can find reasonably priced, nice accommodations and affordable group tours in beautiful, historic locales," she said. Attractive airfare prices may be another incentive to consider Croatia: Data from Expedia indicate that airfare from the United States to both Dubrovnik and Split this summer is 30 percent lower than it was last summer. Options for Croatia trips in August and September include a seven night getaway on the island of Vis, offered by WearActive, a company specializing in active trips. Guests stay in a seaside stone cottage, and activities include yoga, snorkeling, biking, hiking and kayaking. Prices from 990 euros (about 1,130), including accommodations and most activities and meals.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
As a teenager, discovered Hanif Kureishi's novel "The Buddha of Suburbia" and felt her world crack open. Kureishi, who is British Pakistani, made his narrator and protagonist, Karim, mixed race as well. Smith, the child of a black Jamaica born mother and a white British father, wasn't used to seeing biracial characters in fiction. "Practically the only star I had to steer by was that old, worn out, paper thin character the 'tragic mulatto,'" she writes in her latest collection of essays, "Feel Free," "whom I found in bad novels and worse movies." But Karim wasn't tragic, nor was he an idealized, anodyne role model. He was, in Smith's words, "pushy, wild, charismatic, street smart, impudent, often hilarious." Kureishi isn't interested in pieties, and neither, refreshingly, is Smith, as anyone who has read her essays in Harper's, The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books knows. Smith argues that it is Kureishi's willingness to be impious, perverse and rude that gives the novel its singular power: "All the great energy of 'Buddha' comes from watching the liberty of creative freedom being taken, over and over again as if it were a right." Which, of course, it is. But that's not always obvious to young artists, particularly those who don't see themselves represented in the status quo. Reading the novel, Smith "felt something impossible loosen within me," she writes in "The I Who Is Not Me," the inaugural Philip Roth Lecture, which she delivered at the Newark Public Library in 2016. "It was a gift of freedom." A few years after this formative moment, in 2000, she published "White Teeth," her celebrated debut novel. Smith has written four novels since then, and in the past decade, she has also produced a significant body of smart, incisive nonfiction, much of it occasioned by encounters with books and film and visual art, from Kureishi's novel to Balthasar Denner's 18th century painting "Alte Frau" to Jordan Peele's film "Get Out." Although her essays range over many topics Brexit, Facebook, climate change, cultural appropriation, pleasure versus joy she is interested in the making and meaning of cultural artifacts, and in the exchange of feeling that takes place between art and its audience, between text and reader: what she calls "the essential, living communication between art work and viewer." As the title of her new collection suggests, here Smith explores variations on a theme: freedom of language and thought; freedom from received narratives that tend to be foolishly consistent, if not downright constricting; freedom from the "impossible identities" society so facilely places on people, or from those we too readily adopt ourselves. Most of all, though, she's concerned with artistic and aesthetic freedom, with the boldness and daring that compel an artist to create even when conditions seem hostile. In 1969, she notes, it was a radical act for a Jewish author to write a foul mouthed, sex obsessed, masturbating character like Alexander Portnoy. But in "taking this freedom for himself," Smith writes, Roth, "intentionally or not, passed that freedom down" to readers and writers like Smith, who came after him. Freedom is a conceit well suited to a collection of essays. Aldous Huxley called the essay "a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything" and this is Smith's approach. She writes about her lower middle class upbringing by way of the second bathroom in her childhood home: "The spare room, the extra toilet these represented, for my parents, a very British form of achievement." She mourns her father while celebrating the exhilarating democracy of Italian public parks, and she explores Justin Bieber as love object through the philosophy of Martin Buber. The essay form's freewheeling nature arguably accounts for its current popularity. Readers, hip to the conventions of storytelling we fill our commutes with podcasts and fetishize long form narratives are drawn to the essay, which lends itself to the unexpected and original. Behind the best contemporary essays you can sense the writer's beating heart. Smith's style is casual, discursive, but not collagelike in the current fashion, intimate without being overly personal. Taking her children to "The Polar Express 4 D Experience" on the same day she sees Charlie Kaufman's puppet film, "Anomalisa" while carrying a pocket book of Schopenhauer around yields "Windows on the Will: 'Anomalisa,'" an essay that examines Kaufman's film through its Schopenhauerian fixation on human suffering (the easier to dramatize with puppets): "the inevitability of it, and the possibility of momentary, illusory relief from it." Similarly, in "Man Versus Corpse," the discovery of a "forlorn little hardbacked book" about Italian masterpieces on a table in her lobby leads to a close reading of Luca Signorelli's painting "Nude Man From the Back Carrying a Corpse on His Shoulders," which in turn opens up into a rambling discussion of existence, inequality ("the unequal distribution of corpses"), Rothko, Warhol ("an enthusiastic proponent of corpse art"), iPhones and her own inability to imagine herself as a corpse, before ending at a dinner party with talk of Knausgaard and his multivolume "cathedral of boredom." It is exquisitely pleasurable to observe Smith thinking on the page, not least because we have no idea where she's headed. "Notes on Attunement," her well known essay on Joni Mitchell, recounts the sudden epiphany that took her from "Joni Mitchell hating pilgrim" to a fan who weeps with joy at her music, touching on Wordsworth, connoisseurship, Seneca, Kierkegaard and the inconsistency of the self along the way. At times she reminds me of a musician jamming, or one of those enviable cooks who can take five random ingredients lying around the kitchen and whip up a meal. Her loose, roving essays cohere because they are rooted in her sensibility, in what Elizabeth Hardwick called "the soloist's personal signature flowing through the text." How to characterize Smith's sensibility? Above all, she's allergic to dishonesty, hypocrisy, sanctimony, cant. "For many people in London right now," she writes in "Fences: A Brexit Diary," "the supposedly multicultural and cross class aspects of their lives are actually represented by their staff nannies, cleaners by the people who pour their coffees and drive their cabs, or else the handful of Nigerian princes you meet in private schools." She takes a wide lens, Olympian view, often empathizing with both sides of an issue her arguments can thus be difficult to pinpoint but she is ultimately pragmatic. "One useful consequence of Brexit," she writes, "is to finally and openly reveal a deep fracture in British society that has been 30 years in the making." At root she believes that art is a realm where knotty issues can be safely explored, and that we should not draw neat boundaries around its subjects. Such is the argument of her much discussed essay on "Get Out," which first appeared in Harper's: It's a fantasy that "we can get out of each other's way, mark a clean cut between black and white," she concludes in that essay, which also examines the controversy over the white artist Dana Schutz's painting of Emmett Till. In an open letter, the artist Hannah Black had asked the Whitney Biennial to remove and destroy the painting, on the grounds that Schutz had no right to depict black suffering; the request, Smith writes, was "the province of Nazis and censorious evangelicals." The problem with such racial essentialism, she suggests elsewhere in this collection, is that it can run both ways. See the narrow, patronizing tendency to "ascribe to black artists some generalized aim," like "inserting the black figure into the white canon." This trivializes the formal and technical concerns of the artist, Smith writes, "the unique problem each art work poses." Smith is an appreciator of art, a connoisseur, rather than a stern critic. It's rare that she writes about anything she dislikes. Indeed, if the book has a subtheme, it is joy, a feeling not often discussed outside of New Age circles. It's an emotion brought about by giving birth, falling in love, taking drugs those almost unbearably exquisite experiences that the final essay, "Joy," recounts but also by art: Joni Mitchell's music, Fred Astaire's dancing, the defiantly campy street strut of the man in Marc Bradford's video "Niagara." Of course, as Smith notes in her foreword, the idea of freedom has taken on new resonance in the past year, and I have often heard it asked whether art that is not expressly political is still necessary or worthwhile. But as Smith writes: "You can't fight for a freedom you've forgotten how to identify." Art making it, contemplating it reminds us what it's like to feel free.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
Humpback whales are creatures of habit. They spend the summer in cold, high latitude feeding areas. In the winter, when it's time to mate, they return to the exact tropical spot where they were born. And when they get there, the males sing a tune common to that breeding ground, almost like it's a local jingle or a college fight song. But according to a study published last week in Royal Society Open Science, there's at least one place where whales mix it up: Raoul Island, nearly 700 miles off the northeast coast of New Zealand. Humpback whales from the South Pacific tend to stop there for a few days on their way from various breeding grounds in places like Tonga and New Caledonia to their feeding ground in the ocean near Antarctica. While they're hanging out near Raoul Island, they do something researchers hadn't seen before: Whales from each breeding ground share their own songs, and learn one another's. In other words, it's a humpback karaoke spot. The music made by male humpback whales is instantly recognizable. Rich and haunting, it mixes disparate pitches and textures in a way most human musicians wouldn't dare . These sounds are an object of fascination for experts and laypeople alike, and they have been the subject of at least one best selling album. Researchers aren't entirely sure why whales sing, although most agree that it has something to do with courtship. (Female humpbacks, which make interesting sounds of their own, seem to take the songs into account when choosing mates.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Ms. Krishna is a journalist and the author of the cookbook "Indian ish." Credit...Whitten Sabbatini for The New York Times When the pandemic hit America's restaurants, it was as if an anvil dropped on a bubble. To run a restaurant, any kind of restaurant, is a constant struggle to keep that bubble aloft. Every day is a negotiation: of labor costs, food costs, rent, insurance, health inspections, and the art and craft of creating an experience special enough to keep people coming through the doors. When the pandemic lockdown forced hundreds of thousands of establishments to close, there was no backup plan. No one was prepared for the extent of the fallout. The restaurant and fast food industry, the second largest private employer in the United States, collapsed overnight. At least 5.5 million jobs evaporated by the end of April, and the number of people employed in food services is still 2.5 million fewer than in February. Technomic, a consulting firm for the food service industry, estimates that 20 percent to 25 percent of independently owned restaurants will never reopen. And those restaurants uphold an ecosystem that extends to farms, fishmongers, florists, ceramists, wineries and more. The damage has been so severe that the James Beard Foundation announced in August that it would cancel its restaurant awards this year because of the pandemic and a need to re examine structural bias. The most deeply affected were restaurant workers, who were either laid off so that they could file for unemployment or were asked to keep working and risk their health. These are people who often do not have access to health insurance, earn less than a living wage and disproportionately include undocumented workers, immigrants, and Black and brown people the most marginalized people in this country. They are restaurants like the Four Way, a 74 year old soul food institution in Memphis. At the beginning of March, it was racking up record sales of its fried catfish and peach cobbler. Once the pandemic hit, Patrice Bates Thompson, the owner, had to make changes fast. Like many other restaurateurs, she shifted to mostly takeout and delivery, has been buying her employees groceries when purchasing food for the restaurant and is helping a few of them cover their utility bills. Nearly every restaurant that survived the pandemic so far has had to adjust its operations to survive. The shift to takeout is perhaps the most visible and lasting change for restaurants. Takeout and delivery services have allowed thousands of restaurants all over the country to survive, and the experience is evolving as restaurants apply their creativity to this now ubiquitous form. Seven Reasons, a fine dining restaurant in Washington, bundles orders with cocktails in Mason jars and sends customers links to Spotify playlists to listen to while they're eating a lockdown appropriate approximation of dining out. Junzi Kitchen, a mini chain of Chinese restaurants in New York and Connecticut, was inspired by restaurants in China to design an interactive, rotating takeout menu, with an accompanying Instagram Live by the chef, Lucas Sin, explaining the story behind each dish and how to plate it. Other restaurants have turned into grocery stores, offering their premium ingredients to home cooks. The New York restaurateur Gabriel Stulman started selling meal kits out of his West Village spot, Jeffrey's Grocery, so that customers can replicate popular dishes at home. She has made some concrete changes. She eliminated tipping and plans to offer everyone on her staff health care and retirement benefits. She has reduced the size of her staff so that she can pay them more between 25 and 30 an hour and spend more time on training them and teaching them about the business. "I have worked in this industry a long time," Ms. Miranda told me. "I never had a 401(k) or benefits or anyone looking out for my financial future." Musang, she hopes, will be different. The old school model of restaurants is exclusively about revenue. "We didn't build this restaurant for that," she said. "We built this restaurant with the intent to make change." She wants it to be the last place her employees work before they open up their own restaurant. Francesca Hong, the chef and a co owner of Morris Ramen in Madison, Wis., also started a community kitchen, which she and another restaurant group, Rule No. One, have expanded into an initiative called Cook It Forward Madison. The project works with nonprofits to provide meals to people in need. In turn, the nonprofits provide the restaurant with financial and technical assistance, like accounting and legal aid. The biggest argument against worker centric systems is an economic one: Who is going to want, much less be able, to pay more for meals in the middle of a recession? And reduced capacity in restaurants will also mean reduced labor. Not every restaurant will be able to make big changes; many have always been in survival mode and lack the resources to alter how they do business. When Jacklyn Pham's father opened Saigon Pagolac, a Vietnamese restaurant in Houston's Chinatown, in 1989, he didn't have a mission, she said. Cooking was simply what he knew how to do. He still does inventory with pen and paper. At the beginning of 2020, sales plummeted because anti Chinese sentiment from the coronavirus slowed traffic to Chinatown. The restaurant did takeout through March and April, and reopened for dine in service in May, as soon as Texas allowed it. There was no other way, Ms. Pham said. There were bills to pay. At Monkey 68 in Roswell, Ga., which reopened to the public at 50 percent capacity in mid May, Tay Wunn, the general manager, is focused on how to follow safety guidelines while still making money with fewer customers. Mr. Wunn doesn't feel ready to ponder structural changes when the restaurant is making half what it did before the pandemic. He reopened because "we needed the revenue," he said, and because so many of the employees did not receive unemployment benefits and wanted to get back to work. Building a labor centered model for restaurants may feel quixotic, an idea that won't work at scale. But because most restaurants are small scale operations, the solutions don't need to be all encompassing. There are many ways, big and small, that a restaurant can value labor. They can do it by eliminating tipping or switching to a cooperative model, but a new model can also mean cutting down on food waste and adding the savings to employees' paychecks or lobbying for government policies that support workers' and immigrants' rights. For Ms. Thompson, of the Four Way in Memphis, it means helping her employees pay their bills while she researches health benefits packages for them. Every restaurant should be able to find a model narrowly tailored to its workers and community, so long as there is also a broader public safety net. For an industrywide shift to take place, some government assistance will be essential. In the United States, federal assistance came via the Paycheck Protection Program, part of the emergency Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act passed in late March. But the first round of the P.P.P. allocated only 9 percent of its loans to the hospitality sector, and most of it went to chains with far greater resources than independent restaurants. With no federal reopening regulations and no official customer guidance, restaurants, workers and diners are left to make ethical calculations of their own. Close forever or reopen under unsafe conditions? Take a job in harm's way or forfeit a paycheck? Support a local restaurant or risk a server's health for a plate of enchiladas? These questions all come down to labor, and the willingness of government, restaurant owners and customers to value it. More important than any specific policy is an acknowledgment that the restaurant system that we have all bought into for so long is broken. A system built to serve the privileged by hurting the most vulnerable is not a system worth having. Not in a pandemic, and not ever. Priya Krishna ( priyakrishna) is a journalist and the author of the cookbook "Indian ish." 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
Uber, Lyft and other gig economy companies congratulated themselves this week for winning a costly fight to overturn legislation in California that would have caused them to treat their contract workers as employees with guaranteed wages and benefits like an unemployment lifeline. The companies called Prop 22's passage a win for workers, but it should be viewed as a cynical circumvention of the legislative process and a 200 million warning to those who would oppose them. Almost immediately, the gig companies promised to begin replicating the law in other states. Though California lawmakers in 2019 passed legislation that reclassified gig workers as employees, the companies including also Instacart, Postmates and DoorDash ignored the law. Displeased with the statute that could upend their business model, the gig companies banded together to write a ballot proposal that hewed to their business interests and undermined due democratic process, particularly through a provision requiring amendments to pass with a supermajority of seven eighths of the Legislature. Legislatures and voters should beware. Prop 22 codified a system that denies workers full benefits, true minimum wage guarantees and stability guarantees that are especially crucial during the coronavirus pandemic. In California, gig companies overwhelmed voters and drivers with relentless and often disingenuous ads, text messages, push notifications, emails and even fliers along with their food deliveries touting the benefits of the measure, while outspending their opponents more than 10 to one.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
A 10 to 15 year lease is available for a 17,245 square foot triplex penthouse office space on the 27th, 28th and 29th floors of this 1928 building in Murray Hill. The building, designated a landmark by the city, was designed by Ely Jacques Kahn, in collaboration with Leon Victor Solon, a ceramist. The upper floors of the facade are distinguished by vibrant strips and blocks of magenta, ocher, black and azure terra cotta. The triplex, which formerly housed mechanicals as well as office space, was recently repurposed and now has a 3,210 square foot wraparound terrace, a two story atrium and a sculpture garden. The building offers on site parking. Owner: PPF Off Two Park Avenue Owner, an entity owned by Prime Property Fund managed by Morgan Stanley	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
SAN FRANCISCO Pinterest set a price range for its initial public offering that will value the company below its last private market peg of 12 billion, raising questions about investor demand for prominent but unprofitable technology companies that are stampeding toward the stock market. In an updated prospectus on Monday, Pinterest said it planned to price its offering at 15 to 17 a share. At the high end of that range, the digital pin board company would be valued at about 11.3 billion, accounting for stock options and restricted stock. The business was first valued at 12 billion in 2015, and again in 2017, by venture capitalists and other private investors. Pinterest's price range dampens some of the fervor over a wave of tech offerings this year, which had promised to generate piles of new wealth in Silicon Valley. It follows last month's I.P.O. of Lyft, the ride hailing company, which is deeply unprofitable. While the offering created a great deal of hype and Lyft's shares rose on their first day of trading, the stock fell below its offering price on its second day of trading, as it faced questions about its business. "People are looking at Lyft and realizing that even if the road show goes extremely well and there is a lot of demand, you can't overprice the offering," said Elliot Lutzker, corporate and securities partner at Davidoff Hutcher Citron.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
The Trump administration is challenging Chinese access to Taiwan's high tech supply chain and, by extension, Beijing's influence over the island it claims as its territory. U.S. Is Using Taiwan as a Pressure Point in Tech Fight With China The Trump administration has for years sparred with China over tariff threats, technology and the terms of their trade deal. But in a pair of actions last week, the administration escalated those economic tensions in a way that comes close to touching a red line for Beijing: its contentious relationship with Taiwan. One of the world's leading computer chip makers, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or T.S.M.C., said Thursday that it would build a factory in Arizona, a move heralded by American officials as a first step toward relocating a vital supply chain to the United States. The next day, the Department of Commerce announced a rule change that could stymie the business the Chinese tech giant Huawei does with T.S.M.C. and other global chip manufacturers. The administration has been working on multiple fronts to isolate Huawei, a major global smartphone brand and the planet's largest producer of the equipment that powers mobile networks. But simultaneously undermining Huawei and bringing T.S.M.C. closer into the American orbit is a one two punch of industrial policy that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago, one that raises the prospect of a more serious conflict between China and the United States. Never before has the Trump administration so forcefully challenged Chinese companies' access to Taiwan's high tech supply chain and, by extension, Beijing's influence over the self governing island democracy, which it claims as part of its territory. China considers its claim to Taiwan nonnegotiable, and it has lashed out at companies and politicians for failing to acknowledge it, even inadvertently. The administration seems intent on "hitting at targets that are both economically and politically sensitive for Beijing," said Eswar Prasad, a professor at Cornell University. China's Ministry of Commerce condemned Washington's latest move against Huawei, saying it would do what was necessary to protect the interests of Chinese businesses. The rule change bars companies around the world from using American technology to produce or design chips that are sent, either directly or through an intermediary, to Huawei itself. But it does not appear to prevent them from producing chips that would be sent to Huawei's customers or partners, such as contract manufacturers that assemble phones and other devices on Huawei's behalf. The rule could still disrupt Huawei's business, however, forcing the company or its suppliers to reorganize their operations. And the Commerce Department could revise its rule in the coming months to narrow any loopholes. As of Tuesday, some administration officials were already discussing ways to strengthen the rule, two people familiar with the deliberations said. "The future of at least a major portion of Huawei's business is now firmly in the hands of the Commerce Department," said Paul Triolo, a technology policy analyst at Eurasia Group. In an emailed comment, Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, said his department was charged with catching and punishing intermediaries and front companies that circumvent its regulations, and that it does so regularly. "Any collusion with Huawei or its affiliates to willfully violate this rule is prohibited, and any party found to be in violation will be barred from further access to U.S. equipment or software," Mr. Ross said. Huawei this week declined to answer reporters' questions about the amended rule, although it acknowledged that its business would "inevitably" be affected. The United States has also grown more active in jockeying against China to build up and control access to the technological components that power everything from smartphones to missiles. Last May, the Commerce Department added Huawei to its "entity list," requiring American companies to obtain a license before they can sell to the Chinese firm. The administration has since issued a series of other restrictions on collaborating and trading with Chinese technology companies. The Commerce Department said the latest rule change was meant to thwart Huawei's efforts to get around past restrictions. To lessen its reliance on American suppliers, Huawei has sought to meet more of its semiconductor needs in house. But to mass produce those chips to its specifications, Huawei still needs T.S.M.C. and other foundry firms, which rely extensively on software and equipment made by American providers. By taking aim at Huawei's access to a company that sits in Taiwan, the Trump administration added a dash of geopolitical insult to the injury. Taiwan has long been of keen political significance for both Beijing and Washington. It is currently governed by a party that is suspicious of China's ruling Communist Party and favors closer ties to the United States. In recent years, Taiwan's status as a global capital of semiconductors has added to its strategic importance. T.S.M.C. makes microchips for big global names across the tech world, including Apple, Qualcomm and Huawei's chip subsidiary, HiSilicon. "You have the best semiconductor manufacturer in the world, and China thinks it owns the land it sits on," said Stacy Rasgon, a semiconductor analyst with the research firm Sanford C. Bernstein. "It shows just how dependent everyone is on T.S.M.C." The real purpose of the Arizona deal may have been "to allow T.S.M.C. to eventually become a trusted member of the U.S. military's supply chain," Mr. Triolo said. The geopolitical dimensions of the technology tussle are not lost on Huawei executives. At an event at Huawei's headquarters in Shenzhen on Monday, one of the company's deputy chairmen, Guo Ping, made pointed remarks about Washington's motivations for continuing its crusade against Huawei, even amid the global coronavirus crisis. "The United States believes that technological leadership is the foundation of its supremacy," Mr. Guo said. "Technological leadership from any other countries or companies could put American supremacy at risk."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Economy
Covid 19 Tests Are in Short Supply. Should You Still Get One? None A family at a testing site in Miami Springs, Fla. Getting a coronavirus test, like wearing a mask, shows "a desire to be a part of the solution," an epidemiologist said. Saul Martinez for The New York Times	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
What does parenting burnout look like during a pandemic? After a column by Farhad Manjoo on the subject, thousands of readers told us about their "new normal." For many, excessive screen time was the least of their worries. "Our goal is to survive: no divorce, no getting fired and no children running away from home. If we can do that, I'll consider us a success story," wrote Marie LaRiviere, a reader in Fremont, Calif. "We have lowered our expectations in every way possible." A selection of their stories, edited for length and clarity, is below, accompanied by images from Alice Proujansky's series of photographs, "Six Feet Apart," which focuses on her experience sheltering in place with her children, January and William, in New York. There's Nothing Normal About the New Normal 'From the time I wake up until the time I go to sleep, that child is with me' I don't even feel like I'm parenting at the moment. We're all just alive and in the same room. I had twin boys in December and I thought that this would be a great extended maternity leave. But with their need for constant attention, I have just broken down and let my 3 year old do whatever she wants. My husband and I were splitting shifts to take care of the twins and now my daughter has moved into his side of the bed so I have a near constant shadow. From the time I wake up until the time I go to sleep, that child is with me. I cannot get away and yet I allow it, because it's easier than fighting. Elizabeth Kelley, Columbus, Ohio 'I blink and it's time to feed these rascals again' My wife and I love each other, but this is just a lot. Frankly, we are kind of spiraling. Our house is a disaster and it is driving us all crazy but I can't get it together enough to pick up. I blink and it's time to feed these rascals again. Our older children (10 and 12) are OK, they can entertain themselves with books, music and chatting with friends on devices. But our 6 year old is struggling. We finally broke down and allowed him to watch educational television (fishing shows or Nova) or play Prodigy (a math game) on the computer. No tablet, no YouTube (those things makes him insane). At night we build fires in the fire pit and let the kids feed twigs into it one by one. It's cathartic and feels ancient in a weird way. Justin Taylor, Schaumburg, Ill. 'I've cried more in front of my boys than my father ever did in front of me' We've had to make decisions we never dreamed we would have to make. I missed our daughter's birth so as not to not risk exposure and to keep something constant in my sons' lives. We missed Passover with my mother in law, who flew in to help with the birth and still has not held her granddaughter. We named our daughter on a Zoom chat with family and friends, rather than in a synagogue with a celebration. My wife and I have lost our tempers more in the last month than in our entire seven years of marriage. I've cried more in front of my boys than my father ever did in front of me, and that's OK because the boys have tremendous amounts of empathy and they give out hugs as much as we give out treats. We have learned amazing things as a family about each other and our faith. Aharon Hyman, Jerusalem 'I was fighting with everyone to be quiet' My day starts at 4 a.m. and ends at 9 p.m. I work as a chart analyst for the Hospital for Special Surgery and have to go into the office at least a few days a week. My husband is also an essential worker, a night shift cleaning supervisor in the food industry. He sleeps during the day so my Mom, who lives with us, takes care of our son, who is 6. But my son waits for me to get home before starting his school work. At first I was fighting with everyone to be quiet so that we could concentrate. He'd run around the house crying and whining that he didn't want to do it. There were a lot of assignments I counted 14 one day and I had to speak to the teacher. I tell everyone I have two jobs and the second one, of course, is teaching. Beatriz Ramirez, Queens, N.Y. 'I am scrambling to try and save my job' We are failing miserably with our 3 year old and 8 month old, cooped up in a New York City apartment. My billable hours at work have suffered to a point where I am scrambling to try and save my job (compared to last year when I got a big promotion). I'm not sure when things are going to explode, but the end is nigh. The threat of the virus seems minuscule compared to our mental and physical exhaustion. My husband has resorted to increased alcohol consumption to cope (I can't drink because I am breastfeeding). I haven't washed my hair in over a week. At the start of the lockdown I told my husband that we will come out of this either planning a second honeymoon or putting a divorce lawyer on speed dial. Avy Pitamber, Manhattan I'm a single Mom and a teacher. I started this with the expectation that I would personally teach my oldest child (in kindergarten), keep in contact with my students and keep up with housework. I also have a 1 year old who gets therapy for his developmental delays. As time has gone on, I find that I'm frustrated, depressed and can't finish anything I start. We haven't touched school work in days. The kids are stressed and it's undone all their sleep training. I feel overwhelmed and ashamed that as a professional I can't do this. My house is in shambles. When I have to do work meetings I point the camera to the highest point possible to hide the chaos on the floor. Sarah Nicklas, Harrisonburg, Va. 'The Mom guilt is out of control' I'm not expected to put in a full eight hours a day when my children are with me, but I have split custody so I put a lot of pressure on myself to overachieve or work overtime the days I don't have them. When I do have them, the Mom guilt is out of control as my boys (2 and 5) begin their fourth or fifth hour of television. My 5 year old has been potty trained for more than two years but has started to regress. My soon to be ex and I signed divorce papers the weekend before everything started to shut down in Utah. Is it terrible to say that I'm so thankful I have somewhere to send my children so I don't have to be with them 24/7? Michelle Sayers, Salt Lake City 'I've been outspoken at my company from day one about this new reality' This has been one of the hardest things we have done as working parents. I'm a high achiever type personality, and not only am I not doing well, I'm barely keeping things afloat some days. I've been outspoken at my company from day one about this new reality and how those of us with young children in particular are bearing a burden that makes work impossible to sustain at normal capacity. The constant feeling of never crossing items off a to do list is incredibly tough for my mental well being. Thankfully, my employer has been supportive. But this marathon with no finish line has shifted our standards. Katherine Lehmann, Roswell, Ga. The first two weeks that we stuck to the school provided schedule were miserable. The kids (3 and 6) missed their friends, going to playgrounds, and my husband and I were high strung, trying to do exemplary work to avoid being laid off in addition to full time home schooling. We realized that level of unhappiness was unsustainable. Our new normal involves going for long walks, watching lots of movies, making Lego creations, gardening and reorganizing Pokemon cards a thousand times over, in between fits of hyper focus on work. Homeschool is relegated to no more than an hour a day, if that. Our pediatrician told us that boredom is good for kids and to stop worrying about entertaining them all the time. Eleanor T. Chung, Baltimore County, Md. As a deputy general counsel of a large company and a single Mom who is home schooling a kindergartner in a language I don't speak (he attends a French bilingual school), the whole thing has been frustrating and tear inducing. But now in week six, I've reached a plateau and gotten comfortable with being a mediocre parent and subpar employee. Sleep is super important, as is riding bikes or hiking in a large park every day. Co parenting seems like a dream. Someone else to take the kid for an hour so I could go for a run or hit the store? Not happening. Laura Altieri, Berkeley, Calif. How We Get By I thank God I'm co parenting with someone who isn't a panicker' I work at a Trader Joe's, so I'm on the proverbial front lines. My ex wife is working from home with the children, and I still get them on my days off. In both households, they do very little of the school work assigned. It's too much of a battle. And we've largely stopped fighting it. When I'm with the kids, we try to do a lot of creative play both sports in the driveway and elaborate family rituals with dolls. It's exhausting but it keeps them amused and then I feel less guilty about giving them screen time. I thank God I'm co parenting with someone who isn't a panicker and is fairly relaxed about letting the children go out to the taco truck or ride their bikes around the neighborhood. I know other divorced couples at each other's throats because they have different danger thresholds. Hugo Schwyzer, Hawthorne, Calif. I was home schooled in a fundamental evangelical household so I knew how much work this would be from the beginning. It's all my worst nightmares at once. I've decided to tune out all the advice from my elders about how they kept their toddlers busy when were their toddlers at home during a global pandemic? I'm just doing what makes sense to me right now. So I bought the kids a trampoline. We also created a code word: "Space Attack!" Whenever one of us says it, we all have to scatter so we don't lose our tempers at each other. Liz Ivkovich, Salt Lake City The first two weeks seemed easy, then everyone's emotions became bigger, more sporadic, harder to manage. So we created space to just be with the feelings; more hugs, more new strategies, more self care, more gratitude. We use prayers to motivate our kids (6 and 8) to reflect and be thankful. And a daily nap for both kids and grown ups was a game changer! Think like a team. Help each other up like a team would. I've never been more thankful for my husband and our differences than right now. Alison Elliott, Ontario, Canada	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
An experimental dengue vaccine worked almost perfectly in a small trial in which volunteers were deliberately given a mild form of the disease, scientists said last week. The results in 41 volunteers were so encouraging that they justified starting a larger trial, now underway in Brazil. The vaccine was jointly developed by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the Food and Drug Administration. In the study, published in Science Translational Medicine, 41 volunteers were given the vaccine, now named TV003, or a placebo. No replicating virus was found in the blood of any of the 21 volunteers who received the vaccine. Dengue was found in the blood of all 20 who had the placebo, and many developed signs of infection, such as rashes and low levels of white blood cells. Deliberate "challenges" are rare in testing vaccines for diseases that have no cure. Scientists must be certain that the infecting microbe is so weak that it cannot make volunteers dangerously ill. There are four dengue viruses, or serotypes, all spread by Aedes aegypti, the mosquito that spreads the Zika virus. Every year, nearly 400 million people around the world get dengue, more than are infected with any other mosquito borne disease. Most recover and become immune to the first serotype they had. But about two million who later become infected with a different serotype develop dangerous hemorrhagic fevers, and about 25,000 die from them each year. One of several dengue vaccines in development, Dengvaxia, has recently been licensed in Mexico. But it offers relatively little protection against some serotypes and may make some young children who receive it more likely to be hospitalized years later. "Dengue is unique, and if you don't do it right, you can do more harm than good," said Dr. Anna P. Durbin, a researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who led the testing of TV003. Because dengue is from the same family as the Zika virus, the techniques used to make TV003 might be applicable to a Zika vaccine, she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
In Vermont, the Lure of Skiing in the Mad River Valley A few years ago, I was skiing high above the Sugarbush resort in Vermont with John Egan, a legend of extreme skiing 20 years before the genre had even been identified. Mr. Egan has starred in audacious ski movies from Argentina to Siberia and everywhere in between. He could live almost anywhere, his teaching skills and reputation making him welcome at dozens of skiing resorts. But he has instead called Mad River Valley in central Vermont home for decades. That day, skiing on a trail named Panorama, we stopped at a clearing near a 4,000 foot peak and I asked him: "Why live here? Why the Mad River Valley?" He replied with two questions of his own: "What do you see? And what don't you see?" The view was quintessential Vermont: a majestic mountain range rising above a tranquil valley dotted with red barns and traced by serpentine country roads that led to largely undisturbed hamlets. Nowhere in my view was there a major slopeside condo development, a fast food restaurant, a national chain hotel or an interstate highway. Despite the absence of even a single traffic light in the Mad River Valley, there was no backup of cars or trucks in any direction. Mr. Egan, Sugarbush's chief recreation officer, had made his point without another word. The Mad River Valley is home to two of the most venerable, prized ski areas in the Eastern United States: Sugarbush and Mad River Glen, which attract nearly a half million snow sport enthusiasts annually. The valley has a multitude of restaurants, pubs, inns, art galleries and charming covered bridges. The Mad River Valley, it could be said, is centrally isolated. Just north of Vermont's midpoint, it is far from sequestered yet it seems detached from the bustle surrounding the state's other draws. That is probably because it is just a little bit hard to get to, and always has been. The railroad went around the valley in the mid 1800s and the national highway system did the same a century later. The mantra of a trip to the Mad River Valley (and the tribe drawn to it) could be "one hour more," because the drive by car is roughly 60 minutes longer on a meandering rural road than the trek to Vermont's best known ski areas: Killington and Okemo if coming from the south and Stowe if arriving from the north. But as the poet Robert Frost, a longtime New Englander, wrote: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. The extra time it takes to descend into the Mad River Valley has forged the culture of the community. It has shaped the experience of those who live there and those who come to ski, snowboard, hike or fish. A place that is a little remote is not only less appealing to the homogeneity of mass market commercial entities, but by its nature it also draws only those who truly want to be there. It is why, even in the middle of a busy winter holiday weekend, the Mad River Valley remains one of my favorite destinations. You're not skiing at a tourist attraction, you are just visiting the locals. "We know there are some people who just come to ski and that's it," said Hadley Gaylord, a fourth generation farmer in the Mad River Valley who also operates a year round farmstand on scenic Route 100. "But if they're looking for people to get to know and experience what we might be able to give to them there's plenty of us willing to do that, too." Mr. Gaylord, 60, has seen his corner of the world, defined by the 26 mile strip of the Mad River, evolve, especially as a winter resort. A couple of years after Sugarbush opened in 1958, the mountain's marvelous terrain became a playground of Manhattan glitterati, earning it a place in Vogue, which called the scene "Mascara Mountain" because it was a favorite of models, fashion designers and the Kennedy clan. Sugarbush expanded and became the more commercial of the two valley resorts the stridently independent Mad River Glen is a member owned cooperative open to the public, meaning anyone can join. In 1995, Sugarbush was bought by a ski industry conglomerate, whose holdings stretched from nearby Killington, known as the Beast of the East, to Utah. That purchase worried many in the community. "We sat there asking, 'How do we keep out McDonald's and ugly traffic lights?'" he said. "The townspeople rallied together to make it happen." In 2001, a group led by Winthrop H. Smith Jr., the former chairman of Merrill Lynch International, bought Sugarbush and worked hard to restore the trust between the resort and the community on a variety of issues, including the environment. When Sugarbush work crews were clearing land for new and sorely needed base area facilities, they used an old fashioned team of horses to clear timber for the construction site, allowing the resort to avoid building new roads that could have worsened erosion. Mr. Smith, who has been skiing in the area since the 1970s, decried the trend of making ski areas into what he called, "minicities on mountains." He wanted more of a niche market and insisted the resort could survive with 350,000 winter visitors a year, about half the number his biggest competitors in the state regularly attract. "The product is a fabulous mountain," Mr. Smith said, "and a Mad River Valley environment that lowered my blood pressure by 20 points every time I drove into it." Sugarbush has exceeded its goal of 350,000 annual ski visits for many years, Mr. Smith said. A new base lodge and hotel opened a decade ago, replacing the squat, fusty buildings that used to house essential guest services. There has been some on mountain real estate development, but it has been moderate, fewer than 100 units in 10 years. This month, a new quad lift opened, which helps spread the flow of skiers and snowboarders around to Sugarbush's varied, distinctive trail network not that it ever seems all that overcrowded on the resort's four peaks. Sugarbush, with a powerful snow making operation, has a host of cruising trails, glade skiing of all ability levels, and if you choose to raise your blood pressure 20 points, take the Castlerock chair lift and pick any path down. Just a few miles away is Mad River Glen, the ski area known for a motto plastered on bumper stickers seen around the country: "Mad River Glen, Ski It If You Can." At the iconoclastic Mad River Glen, snowboarders are banned, snow making is limited to 10 percent of the mountain and only half the trails are ever groomed. There is novice and intermediate terrain, despite the bumper sticker's apparent warning. But what sets Mad River Glen apart is how little some things have changed since it opened in 1948. The parking lot is dirt and there is a lift that is a one person single chair, the ultimate winter activity statement in a famously individualistic state. At the same time, Mad River Glen is akin to a populist movement. Skier owned, the cooperative's 1,800 members pay a one time fee of about 2,000 to join and then must spend at least 200 annually on services or goods at the mountain. It takes natural snow for Mad River Glen to be at its best, but when the weather cooperates, members and visitors flock to a genuine old New England skiing experience. Mad River Glen draws roughly 85,000 skier visits a year, so it's still likely you will be alone with your thoughts as you stare down twisting, narrow trails largely unaltered since they were cut in the woods 70 years ago. Like most in the community, Mad River Glen locals are also committed to the valley experience. There is no on mountain lodging. Eric Friedman, Mad River Glen's director of marketing, said that when he gets inquiries about staying at the ski area, he instead says: "Wouldn't it be cool to come to Vermont and stay in a classic ski lodge? You know, a place with a moose head over the fireplace and the owner sitting around telling stories? Well, we have a few of those right down the road. "A lot of people respond to that. They come here, and I think they feel like they've settled into another country." There are a handful of villages and towns in the Mad River Valley. Waitsfield and Warren, which are closest to the ski areas, have roughly equal populations (about 1,700) according to the 2010 census, but Waitsfield has the larger central business district. In Waitsfield, there are friendly local bars, like the appropriately named Localfolk Smokehouse, which serves inexpensive barbecue, and the tavern at the Hyde Away Inn, where you can play pool, sit by the fire or grab a filling meal. Strolling or driving through Waitsfield, you can find everything from a pet spa to a glass gallery to a yarn shop and a bookstore. In historic Waitsfield village, near a covered bridge that dates to 1833, there are boutiques, a museum, a pottery store, an artisans' gallery and a vegetarian restaurant. Warren is dominated by the Warren Store, a former 19th century stagecoach stop where you can stock up on essential provisions of all kinds: baked goods, beer, wine, gifts as well as local gossip. The community is also infused with the energy and eminence of the Green Mountain Valley School, an elite ski academy that has produced nearly 30 Olympians, including a world champion, Daron Rahlves . Mr. Schenk's restaurant is a good example. Raised in Connecticut, he came to the Mad River Valley in 1979 as a ski bum. After working in local restaurants, he started making wood fired, clay oven flatbreads and by 1990 opened his restaurant along Route 100. The fare offered, which featured natural local ingredients, was so well received that a wait of two hours to eat at American Flatbread became common, and still is. Mr. Schenk's humble creation has since branched out across New England and beyond. "It was a product of a valley with a strong sense of place," said Mr. Schenk, who pointedly mentioned summer 2011 as an example. That is when Hurricane Irene flooded Vermont, killing six people and decimating hundreds of homes and businesses, including American Flatbread. "We got over 400 people who came to us in a week to help dig out, clean up and rebuild," Mr. Schenk said. "Their efforts saved the business. That kind of thing was repeated all over the valley." Mr. Egan once again offered his particular brand of metaphysical counsel: It is all about what you can see (a stunning view) and what you cannot see (meaning that I should ignore the trail's hazards). I don't know if that was the moment when I became in tune with the Mad River Valley, but since I got down in one piece, it has always felt that way. IF YOU GO Clay Brook, 102 Forest Drive, Warren; 802 537 8427; sugarbush.com. Ski in/ski out lodging with 61 units, from hotel rooms to five bedroom suites; from 337 to 2,206 a night. Pitcher Inn, 275 Main Street, Warren; 802 496 6350; pitcherinn.com. Eleven rooms, which start at 350 a night (midweek), including breakfast, for two.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
This article is part of David Leonhardt's newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday. In 2017 and 2018, Democratic voter turnout surged in one election after another. Those displays of enthusiasm were a leading indicator of the 2018 midterm results, in which Democrats won a resounding victory in House elections. After the first few contests of the 2020 primary elections, the turnout picture wasn't so clear, and political commentators wondered whether that was a bad sign for Democrats. But in the last several primaries the picture has become much clearer. The news for Democrats is excellent: Turnout is up, way up. About 1.7 million Michigan residents cast ballots in the Democratic primary yesterday, up roughly 40 percent from 2016. Turnout has also been up substantially in California, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and elsewhere. The surge doesn't seem to be a result of enthusiasm for any one Democratic candidate. Many Democratic voters, after all, spent months undecided about and uninspired by the current field. Instead, turnout appears to have surged because Democrats have rallied around Joe Biden as the candidate most likely to defeat President Trump and because they remain very energized about beating Trump. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." "From the moment he was sworn in back in January, 2017, Donald Trump has been the Democratic Party's single greatest get out the vote tool," Joe Walsh, a Republican former congressman who ran a brief primary campaign against the president, wrote last night. "Joe Biden is not my candidate. But people saying he isn't electable are lying to themselves," the author Molly Knight wrote. It is "becoming obvious Biden is way more popular than Hillary. Trump lost to her by 3 million votes and needed an inside straight in the electoral college to beat her." Biden has performed well among both the white and black working class, Richard Yeselson of Dissent magazine noted. That pattern suggests that the left's theory of winning elections is wrong, Yeselson added. (I agree.) And the turnout surge isn't limited to loyal Democrats. In Michigan's Livingston County, a conservative part of the Detroit suburbs, turnout in the Democratic primary soared yesterday. "That surge in turnout, virtually all of it for Biden, includes Republicans and independents voting for him in the Democratic primary and presumably ready to vote for him in the general" election, said William Kristol, the conservative writer. There are still two main reasons for caution: One, Biden is not the preferred candidate of younger voters. In Michigan, Bernie Sanders won voters under 45 by the whopping margin of 64 percent to 32 percent, according to exit polls. In Washington state (where Elizabeth Warren won some early votes), Biden won only 16 percent of that age group. It's possible that some of those younger voters who turned out to vote for Sanders will stay home in November. Ezra Levin, a co founder of Indivisible, a progressive group, argued that Biden now had the responsibility of winning over these voters: "Sanders has built the largest grassroots fundraising engine in American history. He's had the largest rallies. He has the most enthusiastic supporters. He has a lock on young voters. The question now is whether Biden tries to court this grassroots giant." The second reason for caution is that there is still a very long time between now and Election Day. Two weeks ago, the economy was roaring along, and Democrats seemed on the verge of nominating a self identified democratic socialist who had taken multiple unpopular positions. Given how much has changed in the last two weeks, imagine how much can change in the next eight months. If you are not a subscriber to this newsletter, you can subscribe here. You can also join me on Twitter ( DLeonhardt) and Facebook. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter ( NYTopinion) and Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Opinion
Superlatives are everywhere in Shanghai. I forked over my 50 yuan (about 7.90) and boarded the maglev train departing from Pudong International Airport. My understanding was that this was a high speed train, like the one I'd recently taken from Chengdu to Xian. I didn't realize that, operating by a giant set of magnets that caused it to levitate over the track (hence the name, maglev), it was the fastest commercially operating train in the world. After leaving precisely on time, our speed began to build. And build. Soon, we were screaming through a blur of new housing developments and farmland at 268 miles per hour as we made our way from the Pacific coast to the heart of Shanghai. The ride, while not exactly smooth you feel the speed was exhilarating. I stepped off 19 miles and a few minutes later at Longyang Road, slightly dazed. Despite this high tech arrival system, Shanghai is, in a way, a late bloomer. Cities like Beijing and Xian have been political and commercial powerhouses for centuries. Heading into the 19th century, Shanghai was a modest trading port that exploded after being "opened" to the world by Western imperialism. What became known as the Paris of the East laid the groundwork for what Shanghai is today: an unparalleled economic powerhouse and megacity of 24 million people. Packed with luxury brands and overrun with shiny Bentleys and Audis, it's also impossibly expensive kryptonite for a penny pincher like me. Luckily, I was able to spend a four day weekend there denting, but not breaking, the bank. You can start saving money by staying on the fringes of the city center, where rooms at the Peninsula can run 900 per night. I settled on the Jinjiang Metropolo Hotel Classiq Shanghai, just north of the Huangpu River in Hongkou, and paid 576 yuan per night, about 90, for a perfectly comfortable "Extreme Sassy" double room. (The hotel has since been rebranded as the Golden Tulip Bund New Asia. Things move fast in Shanghai.) After the rush of the maglev train, getting there on the subway felt like a mere crawl. Still, it was relatively efficient and definitely cheap expect to pay between 3 and 5 yuan for a one way journey. And the location near Tiantong Road was ideal I could either hop directly on the subway or take a short walk over the Suzhou River into the Huangpu District, giving me easy access to the Number 2 subway line, one of the two main underground east west thoroughfares in the city. It's also just a few minutes' walk to the Bund, the famous waterfront area where old European banking and trading houses gaze over the river at the new, towering financial centers of Pudong. China is platitudinously described as a compelling mix of ancient and modern but in Shanghai, there's ample reason. Walking in Shanghai, though, can be an adventure. As you might expect from a city of more than 20 million people, it's constant and not always controlled chaos. Still, between the nonstop dodging of cars and motorbikes, it's fairly doable and a great way to work up an appetite. And while Shanghai itself is high priced (a cold brew and pizza slice at the world's largest Starbucks will set you back 20), true Shanghainese cuisine happens to favor the frugal, in the form of one of my favorite types of food: dumplings. The first dumpling to get to know is the xiao long bao, or soup dumpling, a regional specialty that's long been popular in the States. The steamed dumplings, usually filled with pork or crab meat, have delicate, nearly translucent skins but not too thin that they might break, losing the valuable liquid inside. My first of many great xiao long bao came from Papa Chan's Shanghai Dumplings, a fairly sizable restaurant on Sichuan Middle Road. Around late morning, I noticed a mob of people forming in the lobby and decided to join them. I was glad I did while I ended up mistakenly getting four orders of dumplings (10 yuan each) instead of one order of four dumplings (my Chinese is a little rusty), they were perfectly petite and bite size, and exploding with porky soup flavor. I'd snarfed down a dozen before I'd even gotten wind of the sizzling jian bao a thicker, doughier fried dumpling down the street. At Lao Sheng Xing, another quick casual midday hot spot, a man wielding two pairs of industrial pliers poured a steady stream of grease out of a wide, shallow pan. The two dozen or so golden brown dumplings, stuffed with beef and chopped vegetables, bubbled and sputtered. I ordered three big fried dumplings, each about the size of a baseball, for a total of 9 yuan. The drill at most of these places is the same: Order at the counter and hand your receipt to a server or, in this case, the guy making the dumplings. Grab your food, an available seat and enjoy. Other quality dumpling houses abound, and special mention should go to Ling Long Fang for its casual, appealingly dingy atmosphere and excellent xiao long bao (16 yuan a dozen) which you can see being made while you wait. The real M.V.P. of Shanghai dumplings, though, is the sheng jian bao. At the intersection of steamed bun, fried pot sticker and soup dumpling, you'll find the sheng jian bao (not to be confused with the regular jian bao mentioned above). They are fried in a shallow pan, then steamed, and finished off with a smattering of scallions and sesame seeds. They also drench the palate with hot juice upon the initial bite. You can get your fix at Da Hu Chun, a warm and homey storefront with shared tables and four pork filled dumplings for 7 yuan. Of nearly as good quality are the ones at Yang's Dumplings, a popular chain get the sheng jian bao stuffed with shrimp (four for 18 yuan). The best I had, though, were during a two hour morning food tour I purchased through Lost Plate, a food tour outfitter (300 yuan, includes food). Our guide, Nick, started us off at Xiahai Miao (Under the Sea), a Buddhist temple with an adjacent vegetarian restaurant (the Eight Treasure Noodles were quite good), then walked us through the former Jewish Ghetto, where 20,000 refugees lived during World War II. Winding our way through the nongtang (old fashioned alleyways) passing humble apartment blocks with European style balconies, we ended up near the intersection of Dongyuhang and Anguo Roads, where I found the sheng jian bao of my dreams in a small storefront. They were fluffy on top, crunchy on the bottom and filled with savory, fatty juice. They were included in the price of the tour, but would have cost just 6 yuan for an order of four. While I was beguiled by the food of Shanghai (as you might be able to tell), I was equally smitten with the numerous historical, artistic and musical options the city has to offer. After the tour ended, I went to the nearby Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum (20 yuan), which elucidates the history of Jewish refugees in Shanghai, highlighting in particular the lives of Jakob Rosenfeld, an Austrian doctor who fought with the People's Liberation Army, and Ho Feng Shan, a diplomat sometimes called the Chinese Schindler for issuing visas against orders. Elsewhere, the M50 Art Industry Park is a huge arts community set in a prewar textile manufacturing complex. Most of the dozens upon dozens of galleries are free to browse including the Chenglin Art Gallery, home to the playful and colorful paintings of Chenglin Huang though a handful charge admission. I also stopped in at the gallery of Bu Bai Liao, who happily showed me several of his rock 'n' roll inspired portraits. Mr. Bu said he enjoyed M50, but added that communal gallery life has a downside: "I think artists need the freedom to communicate with other people." The M97 Gallery on Changping Road is smaller, more intimate and free and is easy to miss if you're not looking for it. I was interested by a macabre, slightly disturbing multimedia installation called "The Theater of Apparitions," by Roger Ballen, as well as work that involved the beautiful layering of Chinese calligraphy and traditional darkroom techniques by Sun Yanchu. Another worthwhile art destination in the southeast corner of the city center and marginally harder to get to is the state run Power Station of Art, formerly the Nanshi Power Plant. Admission is free, but I paid an additional 50 yuan to see the special exhibition dedicated to the Italian design collective Superstudio (through March 11). The concept of a government supervised contemporary art museum is intriguing, to say the least, and it's interesting to see how Chinese artists navigate the boundaries of harsh censorship. The music in Shanghai is as compelling as its art, and I saw a number of live music shows over the course of my stay. Jazz is one popular import, and I headed out one night to watch the smoking hot Ulysses Owens Jr. Quartet at Jazz at Lincoln Center Shanghai yes, that Lincoln Center. The club was swank and intimate, and the music as good as any you'll see in New York City. A highlight was the vocalist Alicia Olatuja joining for a sultry rendition of Michael Jackson's "Human Nature." Tickets (180 yuan) were reasonable, though the servers didn't care much for the fact that I passed on ordering dinner and had only a Qingdao beer (55 yuan). On a different end of the spectrum was a Leonard Bernstein retrospective I attended at the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, founded in 1879 as the Shanghai Public Band and billed as Asia's oldest orchestra. The conductor, Zhang Jiemin, exhibited masterful control, and she led the orchestra through a program that included the overture to "Candide" (one of my favorites), as well as Bernstein's " Jeremiah " symphony. The 80 yuan tickets were sold out when I went to the box office, so I took the next best at 180 yuan. (Upon arriving at the symphony hall, for what it's worth, I noticed plenty of scalpers looking to unload tickets.)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
If the most familiar story in the newspaper industry is the demise of newspapers, the second is that of the passionate, wealthy entrepreneur wielding a potential solution. John A. Catsimatidis, the billionaire owner of the Gristedes supermarket chain, is considering making a bid for The Daily News in New York. There have been rumors that James L. Dolan, the billionaire owner of the New York Knicks, may also be interested. They might look across the country for a cautionary tale. In 2012, Aaron Kushner paid about 50 million, plus the assumption of 110 million in pension obligations, for The Orange County Register, a venerable publication that was once among the most read newspapers in California. Mr. Kushner, 41, a Stanford economics and organizational analysis graduate who sold a web company during the dot com boom and later ran a greeting card business, planned to start a revolution and reverse the tide in the industry, with ambitious plans to expand, add talent and greatly increase revenues. But on Tuesday, Mr. Kushner resigned from all executive duties at The Register and its parent company, Freedom Communications. His co owner Eric Spitz, 45, stepped back to become chairman of Freedom. Richard Mirman, a former casino executive who has served as a publisher for the company, was elevated to president and chief executive. Mr. Mirman, said Teri Sforza, a columnist and reporter at The Register, is known for his financial acumen. "He's saying, 'Look we've gotten into a lot of trouble, and here's how I am trying to fix things,' " she said in a phone interview. It signaled, perhaps, the beginning of the end of an experiment that many hoped would result in the promised land for modern newspapers: a business that thrives despite the expensive, unpredictable and arcane business of journalism. When Mr. Kushner bought the paper, said Gary Warner, a former travel editor who was laid off in 2014 after more than 20 years at the paper, "he got up there and said a lot of things that people were just ecstatic about. We were going to go out and get some real stars and make this a destination newspaper again, like it was in the '80s." At first Mr. Kushner aggressively expanded. He hired 440 employee as part of a local print strategy, created two dozen new sections and began publishing a new daily, The Long Beach Register. In November 2013, he bought The Press Enterprise of Riverside for about 27 million. In 2014, he started The Los Angeles Register. He shuttered it just five months later after rounds of layoffs and facing multiple lawsuits. "I don't feel that Aaron really knew much about the editorial side at all," Mr. Warner said. "He had a business side vision, which was that print could still generate a lot of revenue handled the right way, and if he made it a must read, the readers would follow." In the end, Mr. Warner said, it never quite became a must read. Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. A spokesman for Freedom declined to make Mr. Kushner and Mr. Spitz available for an interview. For the year ended in March 2014, The Register had a circulation of 302,802 on Sundays and 182,669 on weekdays, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. Those figures had risen from 290,631 on Sundays and 178,247 on weekdays for the year ended March 2012, around the time Mr. Kushner took over. "It has been an incredible period of ups and downs," Ms. Sforza said. "In our business, is there going to be anything else for the next 10 or 15 years?" In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Mirman said, "Eric and Aaron had a vision, and they were entrepreneurs and they went for it, so to speak. I think in a lot of cases, the revenue didn't materialize." The business is not profitable but Mr. Mirman thinks it could be within months, not years, he said. Though he has decided to take a more conservative approach, he said, further layoffs are not in his immediate plans. Despite their stepping back, Mr. Kushner and Mr. Spitz do not seem likely to sell anytime soon, Mr. Mirman said. "They're very passionate, entrepreneurial folks," he said. "They're still invested in the company, and they both want to make sure that the paper supports the community, supports readers." Whether their plan succeeded or failed, he said, "it almost doesn't matter. It made people think differently." At a meeting this week to announce the executive changes, Mr. Spitz struck a note that some employees said they found incongruous. He praised Mr. Kushner's vision, according to people briefed on the meeting, and suggested that the staff might write him a thank you note.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media

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