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"Training Humans," a photography exhibition unveiled this week at the Fondazione Prada museum in Milan, shows how artificial intelligence systems have been trained to "see" and categorize the world. When Tabong Kima checked his Twitter feed early Wednesday morning, the hashtag of the moment was ImageNetRoulette. Everyone, it seemed, was uploading selfies to a website where some sort of artificial intelligence analyzed each face and described what it saw. The site, ImageNet Roulette , pegged one man as an "orphan." Another was a "nonsmoker." A third, wearing glasses, was a "swot, grind, nerd, wonk, dweeb." Across Mr. Kima's Twitter feed, these labels some accurate, some strange, some wildly off base were played for laughs. So he joined in. But Mr. Kima, a 24 year old African American, did not like what he saw. When he uploaded his own smiling photo, the site tagged him as a "wrongdoer" and an "offender." "I might have a bad sense of humor," he tweeted, "but I don't think this is particularly funny." As it turned out, his response was just what the site was aiming for. ImageNet Roulette is a digital art project intended to shine a light on the quirky, unsound and offensive behavior that can creep into the artificial intelligence technologies that are rapidly changing our everyday lives, including the facial recognition services used by internet companies, police departments and other government agencies. Facial recognition and other A.I. technologies learn their skills by analyzing vast amounts of digital data. Drawn from old websites and academic projects, this data often contains subtle biases and other flaws that have gone unnoticed for years. ImageNet Roulette, designed by the American artist Trevor Paglen and a Microsoft researcher named Kate Crawford , aims to show the depth of this problem. "We want to show how layers of bias and racism and misogyny move from one system to the next," Mr. Paglen said in a phone interview from Paris. "The point is to let people see the work that is being done behind the scenes, to see how we are being processed and categorized all the time." Unveiled this week as part of an exhibition at the Fondazione Prada museum in Milan, the site focuses attention on a massive database of photos called ImageNet. First compiled more than a decade ago by a group of researchers at Stanford University, located in Silicon Valley in California, ImageNet played a vital role in the rise of "deep learning," the mathematical technique that allows machines to recognize images, including faces. Packed with over 14 million photos pulled from all over the internet, ImageNet was a way of training A.I. systems and judging their accuracy. By analyzing various kinds of images such as flowers, dogs and cars these systems learned to identify them. What was rarely discussed among communities knowledgeable about A.I. is that ImageNet also contained photos of thousands of people, each sorted into their own categories. This included straightforward tags like "cheerleaders," "welders" and "Boy Scouts" as well as highly charged labels like "failure, loser, non starter, unsuccessful person" and "slattern, slut, slovenly woman, trollop." By creating a project that applies such labels, whether seemingly innocuous or not, Mr. Paglen and Ms. Crawford are showing how opinion, bias and sometimes offensive points of view can drive the creation of artificial intelligence. The ImageNet labels were applied by thousands of unknown people , most likely in the United States, hired by the team from Stanford. Working through the crowdsourcing service Amazon Mechanical Turk, they earned pennies for each photo they labeled, churning through hundreds of tags an hour. As they did, biases were baked into the database, though it's impossible to know whether these biases were held by those doing the labeling. They defined what a "loser" looked like. And a "slut." And a "wrongdoer." The labels originally came from another sprawling collection of data called WordNet, a kind of conceptual dictionary for machines built by researchers at Princeton University in the 1980s. But with these inflammatory labels included, the Stanford researchers may not have realized what they were doing. Artificial intelligence is often trained on vast data sets that even its creators haven't quite wrapped their heads around. "This is happening all the time at a very large scale and there are consequences," said Liz O'Sullivan , who oversaw data labeling at the artificial intelligence start up Clarifai and is now part of a civil rights and privacy group called the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project that aims to raise awareness of the problems with A.I. systems. Many of the labels used in the ImageNet data set were extreme. But the same problems can creep into labels that might seem inoffensive. After all, what defines a "man" or a "woman" is open to debate. "When labeling photos of women or girls, people may not include nonbinary people or women with short hair," Ms. O'Sullivan said. "Then you end up with an A.I. model that only includes women with long hair." In recent months, researchers have shown that face recognition services from companies like Amazon, Microsoft and IBM can be biased against women and people of color. With this project, Mr. Paglen and Ms. Crawford hoped to bring more attention to the problem and they did. At one point this week, as the project went viral on services like Twitter, ImageNet Roulette was generating more than 100,000 labels an hour. "It was a complete surprise to us that it took off in the way that it did," Ms. Crawford said , while with Mr. Paglen in Paris. "It let us really see what people think of this and really engage with them." For some, it was a joke. But others, like Mr. Kima, got the message. "They do a pretty good job of showing what the problem is not that I wasn't aware of the problem before," he said. Still, Mr. Paglen and Ms. Crawford believe the problem may be even deeper than people realize. ImageNet is just one of the many data sets that has been widely used and reused by tech giants, start ups and academic labs as they trained various forms of artificial intelligence. Any flaws in these data sets have already spread far and wide. Nowadays, many companies and researchers are working to eliminate these flaws. In response to complaints of bias, Microsoft and IBM have updated their face recognition services. In January, around the time that Mr. Paglen and Ms. Crawford first discussed the strange labels used in ImageNet, Stanford researcher s blocked the down load of all faces from the data set. They now say they will delete many of the faces. Their longstanding aim is to "address issues like data set and algorithm fairness, accountability and transparency," the Stanford team said in a statement shared with The New York Times. But for Mr. Paglen, a larger issue looms. The fundamental truth is that A.I. learns from humans and humans are biased creatures. "The way we classify images is a product of our worldview," he said. "Any kind of classification system is always going to reflect the values of the person doing the classifying."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
ALLEGATIONS of financial fraud have, unfortunately, become all too common in this economic downturn. But one of the latest seems worth particular note since it involves a former national chairman of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors, who pushed the group to adopt a policy that requires members to act in the best interests of their clients and to disclose any conflicts of interest. Now, the former chairman, Mark F. Spangler, an investment adviser in Seattle, is being accused by the federal authorities of committing securities fraud when he put his clients' money into investments in private companies without their consent. In an affidavit to support a search warrant of Mr. Spangler's home, a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent claimed that he also created false statements and failed to disclose that he had an interest in two of the companies in which he invested clients' money. One of those companies went out of business this year. Here's a little background: The investments at issue are so called private placements, meant for sophisticated investors who are aware that they could make a lot of money but also that they could lose it all. In this case, the F.B.I. estimated losses of at least 46 million out of the 106 million that Mr. Spangler managed. Ronald J. Friedman, the attorney representing Mr. Spangler, said his client had been cooperating with the federal investigation and had not been charged. He declined to give Mr. Spangler's version of what happened or make him available for comment. A court appointed receiver has been named to try to recover whatever assets remain. "We're at the front end of this," Mr. Friedman said. He added that the allegations had "raised interesting questions about discretionary authority in accounts." All investors should ask how much they should trust their advisers. But for the wealthy, in particular, the case underlines the serious risks of investing in private placement deals. Whether they are set up to invest in real estate, private companies or particular types of securities, private placements are created to finance someone's enterprise. That enterprise is usually undervalued or poised for growth. But it should be a given that it may not play out as planned. Susan John, the current national chairwoman of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors, said she served on the board with Mr. Spangler in the 1990s and had known him for 20 years. The organization says it prides itself on transparency. "He was perhaps one of the strongest believers in standards for Napfa," she said. "So it's very difficult for me to see how he could have evolved into the person that these allegations would lead you to believe he had become." She said Mr. Spangler did a series of presentations showing that returns in private placements were better than in public companies for his clients, many of whom had become wealthy from stock in Microsoft and Starbucks. In the F.B.I. agent's affidavit, several of Mr. Spangler's clients said that he had shown them documents saying they were putting their money in funds that would invest in publicly traded securities, but their money was put into private companies. Because these private placements carry the risk that all the principal will be lost, most advisers recommend them only for their wealthiest clients, whose financial lives will not be affected by the loss. Mr. Spangler's clients said in the affidavit that they told him they did not want to take any big risks with their money. But even when clients agree to the risks, they need to look for red flags that the deal may not work or pay the returns they expect. Perhaps the biggest one here was that Mr. Spangler was associated with the companies in which he invested clients' money. Clients said they were not told that he was on the board of TeraHop Networks, the company that went out of business, and Tamarac Inc., which provides software for financial advisers. With any legitimate private placement, the person offering it will provide a memorandum that discloses how the company is structured and how the promoters of the deal are paid. The memorandum should also lay out how a person's money will be invested, what returns can be expected and what fees will be charged. Getting a lawyer or certified public accountant to read through this is crucial. "You have to remember that the emphasis is on disclosure and disclosure only," said Gerald Townsend, a certified public accountant and president of Townsend Asset Management in Raleigh, N.C. "If they put on Page 1 that 'we're crooks and we're going to steal your money,' they've disclosed. If they have a good securities attorney, they're going to disclose things and hope you don't read them." Other red flags, Mr. Townsend said, are not knowing where the money you are investing is being held, who the auditor is, whether you are personally liable if the investment fails and if the sponsor has a track record. The onus is on investors, though, to understand what they are agreeing to. According to the affidavit, Mr. Spangler had some clients sign agreements that allowed him to change how their money would be invested. In particular, Mr. Spangler added a section in the revised document called "Illiquidity of Investments," which stated that some of these investments might have to be made for a longer period of time to be profitable. "It goes back to understanding what you're signing," said Elaine Scoggins, a director at Merriman, an investment advisory in Seattle. "Ask a lot of questions if you don't understand. There's always the option of getting a second opinion." For people who lose money in private placements, there is little good news. The recovery process will be slow and there is no guarantee on how much an investor will get back. Kent L. Johnson, a venture capitalist who is president of KLJ Consulting, is the court appointed receiver for the Spangler Group. He said nearly all of the assets that had not been lost were invested in various private companies, and it could take up to three years to unwind those investments. He said he hoped to recover about 50 percent of the 68 million that he estimated remained, at least on paper. That would then be distributed to the 80 investors on a pro rata basis. "It's just going to take some time to allow those companies to mature and maximize their value," Mr. Johnson said. "If you try to liquidate them too early it wouldn't be worth as much." As painful as this wait will be for Spangler investors, this is an average length of time and a decent rate of recovery. Robert P. Gray, partner in the forensic litigation group at ParenteBeard, an accounting and advisory firm, said investors with the best chance of recovering money were the ones who had kept detailed records assuming those records were not fabricated.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
HONG KONG Amid ear splitting clashes of cymbals and drums, a team of lion dancers strutted its stuff on the 34th floor of Citibank Tower last month in a traditional ceremony aimed at bringing good fortune to the office that was being inaugurated there that day. The office is special: Located in one of the most prestigious towers of the central business area in Hong Kong, it now houses the global headquarters of Infiniti, the premium brand of the Japanese auto maker Nissan. Nissan's headquarters are in Yokohama. And Infiniti cars are manufactured in Japan and the United States; two more sites are planned for as yet undisclosed locations in Europe and mainland China. But Nissan's management made a deliberate decision to base Infiniti's brain operations like brand strategy, product planning and sales, as well as the chief executive in a city that is not a must be there location for the automotive sector and where office rents are among the highest in the world. "The beauty of Hong Kong is that it is a gateway into China," and China is the brand's most important growth market, said Andy Palmer, who oversees the luxury business unit at Nissan, explaining the decision to base Infiniti in Hong Kong. "This is not a cost reduction or outsourcing exercise," he added. In fact, Nissan's decision highlights a broader trend that is gaining momentum across Asia. For years, U.S., European and Japanese companies have been building up blue collar and back office operations and representative offices in places like mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore. Now top level executives are joining them, increasing the amount of quality time they spend in those areas. Take General Electric, the U.S. corporate powerhouse whose products include medical equipment, turbines and locomotives. Last year, John Rice, vice chairman of G.E. and president and chief executive of global growth and operations for the company, relocated with his wife to Hong Kong. The move was "part substance and part symbolism," Mr. Rice said in an interview at his Hong Kong office. "Being outside the United States makes you smarter about global issues. It lets you see the world through a different lens." Mr. Rice had traveled to Asia many times and visited China for the first time in 1989. "I've come to China close to 100 times," he said, "but I've learned more about China in the last 18 months than I did in the preceding 20 years." Michael Andrew, who took over as global chairman of KPMG International last October, echoed that sentiment. "By being here, you demonstrate that you are not just an Anglo Saxon firm it is a visible demonstration of your commitment to the region," said Mr. Andrew, who chose to base himself in Hong Kong. Given the amount of traveling he does, Mr. Andrew spends only about 25 percent to 30 percent of his time in the city. Still, even that means "you become part of the fabric here," he said. "You have regular access to key business leaders, and you are able to talk to them as one of them, rather than as someone who is just passing through." Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. Another example: Schneider Electric, a French engineering company that derives more than a quarter of its sales from Asia, recently announced that two senior executives would move to Hong Kong. That increases to four the number of managers based in Hong Kong who report directly to the chief executive, Jean Pascal Tricoire. Mr. Tricoire remains based in Paris, though he spends so much time travelling in Asia that his family has moved to Hong Kong to spend more time with him. Surveys conducted by the Economist Corporate Network show just how rapidly the trend toward more Asia based management has accelerated in recent years. In 2008, just 19 percent of non Asian multinational companies surveyed had one or more board members living and working in Asia. By last year, that figure had reached nearly 30 percent. What is more, 45.3 percent of the respondents in the 2011 survey expected to have board members in the region by 2016. Not so long ago, said Ross O'Brien, director of the Economist Corporate Network's Hong Kong office, the trend was about moving manufacturing to where the growth was. Now, "it's about globalizing your brand and your thinking," Mr. O'Brien said. "It's hard to make a decision to invest when you are based in a region where belt tightening is the order of the day," he added, so being in Asia helps focus a company's thinking on the region's potential. Hong Kong is not the only beneficiary of the trend. Singapore, too, has attracted an expanding flock of top level managers and divisional headquarters as companies seek to capitalize on the city state's highly educated work force. And while Hong Kong is seen as the gateway to mainland China, Singapore is an ideal stepping stone for Southeast Asia and India. Abbas Hussain, who oversees emerging markets operations at the British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, is based in the city, as is Deb Henretta, a member of the senior management team at Procter Gamble. The monthlong relocation, Mr. van Paasschen said, was "both more strenuous and more useful than I had imagined." But clearly, the usefulness outweighed the strain, because Starwood is planning to repeat the exercise next year this time in Dubai, another important market for the company.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Many series for fledgling readers feature mischievous girls and their grade school exploits: Ramona Quimby, Junie B. Jones and Clementine, to name a few. Others, like the Magic Treehouse books, send children on fantasy adventures. Abby Hanlon's marvelous Dory Fantasmagory series, featuring the plucky heroine Dory, also known as Rascal, combines the two. As Dory herself puts it: "My two worlds swirl together like a chocolate and vanilla ice cream cone. Real and unreal get mixed up in one crazy flavor." On every page, Hanlon's charming illustrations if you squint, they resemble a child's drawings mix things up as well, interweaving layers of visual and narrative storytelling to invite us in to Dory's active imagination. The fourth and latest book in the series, DORY FANTASMAGORY: Head in the Clouds (Dial, 15.99, ages 5 to 8), will have fans rejoicing that Hanlon's hybrid formula is still going strong. Dory faces obstacles both mundane and enchanted, and surmounts them all. She dumps an objectionable winter coat and devises a pretend game to captivate a weepy friend. After losing her first tooth, she recognizes the Tooth Fairy, shopping incognito, and chases her through a grocery store. And in perhaps her greatest triumph in the series so far, she foils the evil plan of her imaginary nemesis, Mrs. Gobble Gracker, to take over that benevolent spirit's nightly visits. Throughout the series, Dory deals with conventional problems handling scornful older siblings, starting school, making friends, learning to read in unconventional ways. In the first book, she faces her kindergarten fears by inventing Mrs. Gobble Gracker, an even more intimidating foe. With her looming stature and witchy features, she recalls James Marshall's illustrations of Miss Viola Swamp, "the meanest substitute teacher in the whole world," in "Miss Nelson Is Missing," by Harry G. Allard Jr. Dory's everyday world is populated with other magical and comic figures, like Mary, her monster, and Mr. Nuggy, her (male) fairy godmother. And while many stories for children send their protagonists back to the real world for good Wendy grows up and can't return to Neverland; Lucy leaves Narnia; Jackie Paper abandons Puff the Magic Dragon Hanlon does not champion maturity as the answer to adversity. A former first grade teacher, she recognizes the value of coping strategies that are particular to children. Rascal becomes resilient, resourceful and adventurous thanks to the permeable boundary between reality and fantasy, not in spite of it. "Try not to imagine things," Dory's sister, Violet, tells her when she heads off to kindergarten. But it is Rascal's imagination that allows her to adapt to new surroundings, practice new skills and make new friends. In "Head in the Clouds," Hanlon once again shows an unerring sense of what distresses children (that "bunchy" winter coat), what excites them (candy canes discovered in pockets), and what they fear (a tooth fairy delivery gone astray). There is, as always, much to laugh over. We see Luke's and Violet's frustrated memories of life with infant Dory. We learn the contents of the Tooth Fairy's purse (like Beyonce, she carries a certain condiment). And we get Mrs. Gobble Gracker's withering assessment of "Where the Wild Things Are": "I'll show them terrible teeth." When Dory loses her first tooth, her doleful friend Melody sobs, "It means you are growing up!" The admiring reader earnestly hopes not yet.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
And did this seem to you like a big deal, to be given a job at Google, working on YouTube recommendations? Yeah. That was really amazing at first to realize that my work was going to be affecting so many people. So I thought that was going to be a good thing. I thought, OK, we can make artificial intelligence to make the world a better place. And when you got there, I assume there was some algorithm that was selecting videos for people. How did that algorithm work? Yeah. So initially, when YouTube started, what's best was clicks. Like, the more people clicked on videos, the better they thought it was. And then they realized that it led to too many clickbaits. So people would click on the title, then realize that the video was not at all but what was said in the title. And then they would leave the platform immediately. So that would be actually bad for YouTube. So then they switched their measure to total watch time. And how was the goal of this algorithm explained to you? Like, what did you understand about what YouTube's executives wanted? The idea was to maximize watch time at all cost. To just make it grow as big as possible. YouTube now pulls in more than a billion dollars a quarter. It's just an incredible size of audience who are consuming ever more video content. It's not so much if you're watching YouTube, it's how much. How are you feeling about your work at this point? I think we were so excited on working on this project that we didn't really question too much that watch time was a good metric. We were thinking, yeah, I mean, if people are watching longer, they might be happier about what they're watching. So at the time I felt pretty good about this. Yeah. If I had a moment to stick earbuds in my ear To reject how we are human by other Any single moment that I wasn't talking to someone, I was consuming content. Hey, everybody. This episode of the podcast is brought to you by But then I realized there were some issues. People were noticing that you had a problem with maximizing just watch time that it creates this filter bubbles. The way I explained it when I was at YouTube at the time was When you watch a cat video then the recommendation engine can say, oh, you watched a cat video so we're going to give you another cat video, and then another cat video. And then another cat video more of the same, more of the same, more of the same. At the time I was really worried about wasting human potential. If you could on all of YouTube, but then the thing that's going to keep you watching the most is cats, is it the right thing to do to give you, again, cats on cats on cats? You would see a video from the site of the protesters, and then it will recommend another video from the site of protesters. So you would only see the site of protesters. If you start with the side of the police, you would only see the side of the police. Then you had only one side of reality. You couldn't see both sides. So these two different realities were created. Once you recognized that there were these filter bubbles, these sort of algorithmic echo chambers, what did you do about it? So the first thing I didn't want to do is complain about it and try to find, like, the bad example that shows what's wrong with it. Because I didn't want to be the grumpy French guy who complains. So what I did is side projects. I created, with another engineer, who's still at YouTube, we created an algorithm that did the exact opposite. It got out of the filter bubble. And did any of these side projects have any impact at YouTube? Like, did they move into testing, were they implemented, did managers like them? No, there were always just prototype. But then they were never even test on real users. And why do you think that is? I mean, the way they were saying it is that, OK, it's now our objective. And our objective was to increase watch time. So, the problem of political polarization of giving people only one side of a story you're noticing this problem while you're at YouTube, and it sounds like you are trying to address it through these side projects. But you know, your bosses are not saying, Guillaume, that's the best idea we've ever heard, let's put it live on the site right now. Like, how did things unfold for you at YouTube from there? Yeah. So when I proposed the third project to my manager, he told me, "If I were you, I wouldn't work on it too much." And then for a few months I didn't work on it. Then when I started working on it again, then I got fired for a bad performance review. Which is true, because then they spend so much time on this project that I spend less time on my main project. Part of me was pretty proud that, well, I worked on these algorithms, so I helped him watch so much content. I was kind of curious which recommendations were so good that he was so captivated by YouTube? And then I saw that he was watching conspiracy theories about a secret plan to kill two billion people. So naturally I tried to make a joke with him. "Oh, who wants to kill us," to try to initiate conversation. He told me, "Oh, there is this secret plan. Look at it, because medias are not going to tell you about it. But if you look on YouTube, you'll find all the truth." Then we talked about the videos on I could debunk videos one by one. But I couldn't debunk the plot because he told me, like, "There are so many videos like that. It has to be true." So it was pretty intense, because I knew the numbers. So I knew that this was not just one person. This it was millions of people who were in these situations. Hi, everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio. Let's dip into the listener mailbag of questions. Shall why don't we try to see how far we can go back in the search history. Down there. And you have the number news network on cable. Yup, yup, yup. I remember this. OK. Now we're starting. When you look at Hollywood, this is a Jewish cultural system, designed to So of course the deep state Why would I want my nation to be populated by and reflect the culture of people who have come from all other places?	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
ZOEY'S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST 9 p.m. on NBC. While this musical dramedy has a quirky plot Zoey (Jane Levy), a computer programmer in San Francisco, hears others' thoughts in the form of pop songs the last few episodes have revolved around death and grief, hinting that Zoey's ailing father (Peter Gallagher) won't be around much longer. In this season finale, Zoey hears a dark tune in her head, essentially a warning of things to come, and tries to prevent a terrible incident. (It's unclear whether the show will be back for a second run.) The third season finale of GOOD GIRLS follows at 10 p.m. WESTWORLD 9 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO platforms. There was plenty to follow in last week's episode of this sci fi drama, including a reveal, a rebellion and more than one showdown. (Spoilers ahead.) Caleb (Aaron Paul) discovered his memories had been altered. Charlotte (Tessa Thompson) opted out of Dolores's plan, instigating a deadly battle between Musashi (Hiroyuki Sanada) and Hanaryo (Tao Okamoto). And most importantly, we learned that Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) wants Caleb to lead the revolution that she started, though it's unclear whether that was her vision all along. The third season wraps up Sunday, but fans can breathe a sigh of relief the series was recently renewed for a fourth run.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
This hodgepodge reflects the confused state of the Grammys, which still struggles with race and gender: Only one woman won in a major category Sunday night, and the sort of hip hop that's been a fixture at the top of the Billboard charts was essentially absent from both the nominations and the performances. For a spirited recap about the strengths and weaknesses of this year's Grammys, Mr. Caramanica was joined by the whole pop music team of The New York Times: the chief pop music critic Jon Pareles, the pop music editor Caryn Ganz, the pop music reporter Joe Coscarelli and the music business reporter Ben Sisario. Email your questions, thoughts and ideas about what's happening in pop music to popcast nytimes.com.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
From left, the singer Janelle Monae; the president of Planned Parenthood, Cecile Richards; the feminist Gloria Steinem; and the designer Diane von Furstenburg at the CFDA Awards in New York on Monday. "This year, it's been even harder to separate fashion from politics," said the comedian Seth Meyers, modeling an ankle baring Thom Browne tuxedo without socks, as he pointed out, Monday night. Mr. Meyers was not starting his late night monologue, but introducing the annual Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York, and that comment pretty much framed the evening. By the final presentation, honoring the feminist Gloria Steinem, Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood and the singer and actress Janelle Monae for their work in the Women's March on Washington, almost every winner had made a statement of some kind. And not one about dressing Melania Trump. Diane von Furstenberg, chairwoman of the council, asked all of the immigrants in the room to raise their hands (there were a lot). Pat McGrath, winner of the Founder's award, said, "Fashion is an industry where the real insiders are all outsiders." Kenneth Cole, recipient of the new Swarovski Award for Positive Change, said, "Thank you for recognizing a socially conscious business model and platform that I believe is so important in this time in which we are living." And Ms. Monae, whose rousing address pretty much brought down the house, riffed on Hillary Clinton's "women's rights are human rights" speech: "L.G.B.T.Q. rights are human rights; immigrant rights are human rights; minority rights are human rights," she said. Yet the most striking elements of the evening weren't the words, but the winners themselves. Although Steven Kolb, chief executive of the CFDA, urged gala attendees to look around, because "tonight you will find American creativity everywhere," in fact, most of the creativity being honored was not American. I say that not as a pejorative, but as a point. The three major awards of the evening for Designer of the Year in women's wear, in men's wear and in accessories went to foreign designers who had landed atop storied American houses and, through their ability to view the old narrative in new lights, revived them. Raf Simons, the Belgian designer who took the helm at Calvin Klein in August and whose first show took place in February (and was an ode to the melting pot of Stars and Stripes history), won both the men's and women's categories. Stuart Vevers, the British designer who has taken Coach on a trip down Route 66, was named accessory designer of the year. Ms. McGrath, by the way, is also British. Then Franca Sozzani, the legendary editor of Vogue Italia (and, yes, an Italian), who died in December at age 66, was given the Fashion Icon award, a prize previously won by Beyonce, Rihanna and Johnny Depp. And Demna Gvasalia, a Georgian designer based in Switzerland and showing in Paris, won the International award for his work at Vetements and at Balenciaga. Even Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim of Monse, who won the Swarovski Award for Emerging Talent, were born and raised elsewhere before moving to the United States for school and starting their business in the country (as well as becoming the creative directors of Oscar de la Renta). And Rick Owens, who received the Lifetime Achievement Award, is American, but he lives and works in Paris. In other words, if ever anyone wanted to make an argument for the importance of immigration, of cross border fertilization, of the absence of walls and of the renewal and rebirth that comes from an outside perspective, they could do worse than to turn to the 2017 CFDA awards. A lot has been written (and I have complained a lot) about the repetitive nature of these events, which often feature the same names, year after year. Of those in contention for women's wear designer of the year, for example, all except Mr. Simons had won at least once before some of them multiple times. That's a problem unless it is solved by broadening the definition of what constitutes "American," opening the doors and welcoming different players. The wins of Mr. Simons and Mr. Vevers reflected the need for new visions and new ideas in other industries as well as this one. They spoke to the essential impossibility of trying to limit creativity of any kind (intellectual, artistic or practical) by nationality. There is a reason the CFDA has joined with the Mark Zuckerberg backed nonprofit group Fwd.us to support immigration change. The evidence was onstage Monday night. To make local industry globally competitive, it needs global talent.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Buzz Aldrin, a space evangelist, has attached his name, and his myth, to a "Mission to Mars" collection of coats, duffels and backpacks, in collaboration with Sprayground. If anyone can restore proper awe to the notion of space travel, Buzz Aldrin can. At 87, Mr. Aldrin, who made history in 1969 when he set foot on the moon, has hung on to his plain as folk charm and easy, infectious enthusiasm. Those attractions may well factor into pop culture's resurrected romance with the pioneering astronaut, who raised his profile in recent years with guest spots on shows including "The Simpsons" and "Dancing With the Stars," and an appearance at the Summer Olympics in Rio last year. In November Mr. Aldrin led the annual Veterans Day parade in New York City, serving as grand marshal. Unstoppable, it seems, he recently embarked on yet another life chapter: Last winter he strode the runway of the men's wear designer Nick Graham, showing off a silver foil jacket with distinctly aerodynamic loft. So it may have been only a matter of time before Mr. Aldrin made the leap to a mainstream brand. This fall Sprayground, a youth oriented street wear label, enlisted this all American hero to give a shout out to its wares. And, improbable though it may seem, Mr. Aldrin, an outspoken proponent of travel to Mars, attached his name, and his myth, to a "Mission to Mars" fashion capsule collection of coats, duffels, backpacks and the rugged like. "Buzz was the man who gave us a taste of space in the '60s," said David Ben David, Sprayground's founder and chief executive. "We thought it would be cool to see where his head's at now." Mr. Aldrin, a space evangelist preaching the gospel of interplanetary travel through his Space Share Foundation, said he had little practical input into the products' design. Their value, he maintained, is less in pushing the wares than in promoting a vision. "The idea of flying around in space, even though it seems a little far out, certainly catches young peoples' attention," he said in a telephone interview. "Especially when you jazz it up by carrying a briefcase that lights up in your hands." "Everything streams from the zeitgeist," said Daniel H. Wilson, a robotics engineer and the author of science fiction novels including "A Clockwork Dynasty" and "Robogenesis." In the world of sci fi publishing, he said, there has been tendency to forsake gloom and doom scenarios in favor of more exhilaratingly upbeat fare. The objective, it seems, is to revive the optimism of the late 1960s, when the promise of adventure and discovery and the reality of a lunar landing spawned a generalized blue sky optimism. That mood contrasts mightily with the one of the moment. In a currently divisive, often chaotic sociopolitical climate, "space exploration offers a vision of escape that's really appealing," Mr. Wilson said. "If reality is dystopia, why shouldn't our dreams turn utopic?" It's a concept that seems to have wings. And it goes some way toward explaining why a novel like "Artemis," an account of life on a lunar colony by Andy Weir (the author of "The Martian"), quickly entered the New York Times best seller list. Or how "Star Wars: the Last Jedi," which arrives in movie theaters next week, came to be one of this year's most anticipated releases. Interstellar travel has proved at least as intoxicating in the rarefied realms of art and style. Late last year, the sculptor Tom Sachs installed a interplanetary launch station at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, complete with space suited astronauts and a plywood mock spaceship destined for a simulated mission to the moon. Elements of Mr. Sachs's D.I.Y. project were highlighted in an auction of space artifacts last summer at Sotheby's. Somehow their vision persists. This year Alessandro Michele of Gucci introduced fall 2017 advertising images of U.F.O.s, and beam me up Scottie teleportation platforms. Mr. Lagerfeld, in his fall show, offered the spectacle of a simulated rocket launch to highlight a collection of sparkle tights, dresses and cap toe boots, and a silver Mylar space blanket. Last spring, Stuart Vevers of Coach, no laggard in this latest fashion space race, unveiled a retro futuristic capsule collection of NASA themed handbags, light jackets and sweatshirts. "The collection is very nostalgic," Mr. Vevers said at the time. "There's something about the time of the space program that just gives this feeling of possibility." His cosmic references, he said, "are symbolic of a moment of ultimate American optimism and togetherness." A similarly alluring idea of space travel informs "Expedition: Fashion From the Extreme," a Fashion Institute of Technology exhibition of survival and space gear running through January, including an image of the storied 1967 Cardin Cosmocorps collection of vibrantly color bodysuits and shift dresses, ideal for a voyage on the Starship Enterprise. Much the same vision captivated the people at Burton Snowboards, who outfitted the United States Olympics snowboard team in aluminum coated uniforms meant to evoke NASA's glory years. But the appeal of the cosmos isn't all nostalgia. At least if you believe the battery of entrepreneurs intent on boldly going where few have gone before. Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, who aims to ship colonists to Mars in a decade, said he plans to send two tourists on a flight around the moon as early as next year. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has reached deep into his pockets to finance his rocket company, Blue Origin. And Robert D. Richards, the chief executive of Moon Express, has conceived a business plan intended, he said, "to expand Earth's economic sphere to the moon and beyond."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
College football is a mess. It has been a mess for a century, with reams of proposed reform in the wasteland of forgotten file cabinets. I was part of the reform movement for a while, writing that college football should be banned because it has nothing to do with academics. It doesn't. But it is interwoven into the social fabric of colleges and universities. The games are pomp and pageantry and incredible athleticism and tribal fan lunacy. So I eventually gave up on any meaningful change in the sport. Out of catastrophe can come opportunity. With the season fundamentally half canceled by the decision of the major conferences of the Big 10 and the Pac 12 not to play, now is the time to recalibrate the college football industry and confront the issues that players, previously shunted into silence, have brought up because of the repercussions of Covid 19: not just obvious health issues but compensation issues and racial issues and exploitation issues. None of this happens when the status quo of the season ticks on year after year. No one listens. There are those who think the effort to fix college football is malarkey and sanctimony. It's just sport. It's just a game. "Game" implies something fun and benign. College football is a huge industry. The five major conferences bring in at least 4 billion in revenue annually. Yet those who make the game, play the game, are the game, expose themselves to possible brain injury and crippling arthritis and now the pandemic, don't receive a dime of revenue. The big programs make millions off them the top 25 most valuable teams range from roughly 27 million in profit at Clemson University to roughly 94 million at Texas A M University, according to a 2019 study. Head football coaches at Football Bowl Subdivision schools make an average of 2.7 million. Dabo Swinney of Clemson University, 9.3 million, Nick Saban of the University of Alabama, 8.9 million, Jim Harbaugh of the University of Michigan, 7.5 million. Everybody except the players. It is a system of serfdom unlike any not just in sports but in corporate America. The N.C.A.A., perhaps the worst umbrella organization in history and dedicated to protecting the college football industry, keeps using the transparent fallback that players are compensated by the scholarships they receive as well as other ancillaries like trainers and tutoring. So what? The true value of a scholarship varies wildly, and it is no substitute for the money players generate. The National College Players Association and Drexel University's sport management department did a study showing that major college football and basketball players generated as much as 1.5 million each beyond the value of their scholarship. And this is from a few years ago. The problem with this calculation is determining the exact amount, leading to endless disputes over revenue and profit and loss and the wholesale price of a hot dog. A simpler and quicker method would be to tie annual player compensation in the Football Bowl Subdivision schools to the salary of the head coach. As an example, let's use Mr. Swinney's 9.3 million a year at Clemson. Divide that by the number of players on scholarship, limited to 85 by the N.C.A.A., and you come up with an individual share of 109,412. Taking the average F.B.S. salary of 2.7 million, the player share would be 31,765. Since coaches' salaries generally reflect the size of a program, the smaller it is the less a player makes. If a school thinks a player share is too much, lower the salary. There would be no exceptions for programs crying that they lose money. If that is true, drop football. Compensation issues are only part of the college football mess. Because of the George Floyd killing and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, players are now talking about racial inequities. Thirty years ago I wrote the book "Friday Night Lights" about high school football in Odessa, Texas. I saw unflinching racism both shockingly overt and subtler: a double standard of expectation for Black football players versus white football players; the attitude that white players perform well because they work hard and Black players perform well because they are naturally gifted and often don't work hard enough. Have these issues changed? A report commissioned by the University of Iowa in June and released last month found entrenched bullying and racial bias in the football program. Colorado State University stopped its football program this month after allegations of racism and verbal abuse. Then there is the lack of hiring of Black head coaches. Out of 130 Football Bowl Subdivision schools, 14 of the head football coaches are Black. It is a disgrace at universities that are on the defensive because of the issues raised by Black Lives Matter and are preaching diversity and yet have done nothing in this arena despite years of criticism. Just do it. This month 13 players from the Pac 12 came out with a list of demands before the conference season was canceled: player approved measures to address not just Covid 19 but "serious injury, abuse and death"; 50 percent of profit sharing conference revenues for every sport to be evenly distributed among participants; 2 percent of conference revenue to be set aside for financial aid for low income Black students and community initiatives. Their voices are strong and have gotten attention. Another players' group, We Want to Play, has members across all Power 5 conferences and has raised issues similar to those of the Pac 12 group, including the creation of a college football players' association. The Big 10 and the Pac 12 may be out, but the Atlantic Coast Conference and the Southeastern Conference and the Big 12 are still planning to go ahead. It is not surprising, since many of the states advocating to play are the same states that find wearing protective masks optional, college football a sacred American right. Football is not like other sports. It is blood, snot, sweat and spit, bodily meals the virus craves. How can these schools even be contemplating the risk when several medical advisers to the N.C.A.A. said it was ill advised? Some coaches have suggested that football players alone should return to campus, which provides additional evidence that they are viewed more like employees than traditional students and should be compensated. The pandemic has provided a window. The absence of a normal college football season gives players a chance they will never have again. The 13 Pac 12 players said they spoke on behalf of dozens of others who raised similar concerns. They threatened to boycott over the virus, and they should continue to threaten boycott over the other vital issues they raised. You don't need a union for that. You need more voices from every conference and every team to build national unity and fortitude. You can play football without a coach. You can play it without fans or cheerleaders or mascots. But as far as I know, you can't play without players. Buzz Bissinger is the author of "Friday Night Lights." His forthcoming book, "The Mosquito Bowl," will focus on a group of football playing Marines and World War II. 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
Fecal Transplants Can Be Life Saving, but How? A fecal transplant is exactly what it sounds like: To treat certain gut disorders, doctors transfer stool from a healthy donor to a sick patient. Just a few years ago, only a few doctors turned to fecal transplants, typically as a last resort. But in randomized trials, the procedure has proved remarkably effective against potentially fatal infections of bacteria known as Clostridium difficile. The evidence has overwhelmed any squeamishness that physicians might have felt. "We're doing this treatment almost weekly," said Dr. Harry Sokol, a gastroenterologist at Saint Antoine Hospital AP HP in Paris. Now scientists are testing fecal transplants against such diseases as ulcerative colitis, and even obesity and diabetes. A batch of new companies, well funded with venture capital, hope to commercialize the research. Yet for all the excitement, scientists still know surprisingly little about why fecal transplants work. Writing this week in the journal PLoS Biology, Diana P. Bojanova and Seth R. Bordenstein of Vanderbilt University noted that just a gram of stool contains a staggering mix of biological material perhaps 100 billion bacteria, 100 million viruses and a million spores of fungi. That gram also contains 100 million microbes known as archaea, distantly related to bacteria, as well as 10 million cells from the lining of the gut. "There's a lot going on in there it's a whole community," said Frederic D. Bushman, a microbiologist at the University of Pennsylvania. As if that weren't complex enough, someone's stool contains hundreds of species, and the mix varies tremendously from one person to the next. All this variety makes the consistent success of fecal transplants even more impressive. But how do they work? The bacteria in stool seem to be particularly important. Dr. Sahil Khanna of the Mayo Clinic and his colleagues isolated the spores of about 50 different species of bacteria found in stool samples donated by healthy people. They put the spores in pills, which they gave to 30 patients with C. difficile infections. As they reported in the July 15 issue of The Journal of Infectious Diseases, 29 of the patients recovered. Stool bacteria seem to help patients in a few different ways. "We understand, sort of, how they work," said Dr. Vincent B. Young, an infectious diseases physician at the University of Michigan Medical School. In a healthy gut, different species struggle with their rivals for territory. "They have to compete for space, because it's a nice place to be," said Dr. Alexander Khoruts, a gastroenterologist at the University of Minnesota. The bacteria from a donor's healthy gut may be superior at competing for space. They may also be able to gobble up nutrients that competing invaders like C. difficile need to survive. Writing last month in the journal Nature Reviews Gastroenterology Hepatology, Dr. Khoruts and Michael Sadowsky, a University of Minnesota microbiologist, also described another way in which transplanted bacteria may fight C. difficile: chemistry. Our livers produce compounds called bile acids that help break down fat in the food we eat. Many species of bacteria in a healthy gut feed on bile acids, casting off byproducts that, Dr. Khoruts said, appear to slow the growth of C. difficile. But it's also possible that other microbes are involved in ways that doctors just haven't considered. "Bacteria have gotten all the limelight," Dr. Bordenstein complained. Viruses, for example: Dr. Bushman and his colleagues have shown that bacteria infecting viruses can survive the journey from donors to patients in fecal matter. "Maybe they're making the bacterial community more diverse by whacking back anyone that grows out too much," Dr. Bushman said. Dr. Bordenstein said he looked forward to experiments that could tease apart the benefits of each component of stool. In the end, scientists may find that a complicated mix of causes should get the credit. "It's possible there is no one answer," Dr. Sokol said. He and other researchers have been experimenting with fecal transplants for patients who have irritable bowel syndrome with much less success than for C. difficile. It's not clear why the technique helps some patients but not others. One possibility is that the bacteria in a transplant need to send signals to the patient's immune system, getting it to produce less damaging inflammation.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing of a spread eagled male figure, known as the "Vitruvian Man," will soon travel to Paris to star in a blockbuster Leonardo exhibition at the Louvre Museum. It will make the trip as part of an exchange agreement signed Tuesday by the culture ministers of France and Italy, after many months of sometimes bitter negotiations. The drawing a study of the proportions of a human body is one in a series of works that Italian museums are sending to the Louvre for a show to mark the 500th anniversary of the Renaissance master's death. The show is set to open Oct. 24 and run until February. As part of the swap, the Louvre will send Raphael masterpieces, including "Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione" and "Self Portrait with a Friend," to Italy for a 2020 exhibition of his work at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome. The principle of an exchange of works by Leonardo and Raphael was laid down in a Franco Italian summit held in Lyon, France, in 2017. But a diplomatic dispute that broke out between the two countries over the nationalist agenda of Italy's previous government loomed over negotiations. Relations between the two sides soured further late last year, when Lucia Borgonzoni, then Italy's undersecretary for culture and a member of the right wing League party, questioned the logic of lending multiple Leonardos in a major anniversary year. "Leonardo is Italian, and he only died in France," she said. Ms. Borgonzoni later told The New York Times that France was showing "a lack of respect" and treating Italy like a cultural "supermarket."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Alexei Wood, a journalist who was arrested while covering a protest of Donald J. Trump's inauguration, was found not guilty at the Superior Court of the District of Columbia on Thursday of all seven counts against him, including conspiracy to riot and several counts of destruction of property. Mr. Wood had originally faced up to 61 years in prison. His five fellow defendants Michelle Macchio, Jennifer Armento, Christina Simmons, Oliver Harris and Brittne Lawson were also found not guilty of all charges after a nearly four week trial. "Alexei was overwhelmed in court and doubled over crying," Brett E. Cohen, Mr. Wood's lawyer, said in an interview soon after the decision came in. "In these times of press persecution, I feel this is an important victory." Prosecutors said the six defendants were among a group that cut a violent swath through 16 blocks of the city, smashing windows of businesses, tossing newspaper boxes into the street and damaging a car. Authorities tallied the damages at more than 100,000. The lawyers for the defendants had countered that their clients and most others in the group of about 500 were peacefully protesting, with only a handful becoming violent. Mr. Wood, 37, a freelance photographer and videographer based in San Antonio, was one of over 200 people arrested at the protest, which was organized by an activist group called Disrupt J20. Among those arrested were nine journalists. The government has dropped the charges against seven of those people. Mr. Wood and Aaron Cantu, a staff reporter at The Santa Fe Reporter in New Mexico who was working as a freelancer in January, were the only two journalists who faced charges. Mr. Cantu's trial is scheduled for October 2018. Mr. Wood had primarily worked as a commercial photographer but had been trying to build his portfolio as a photojournalist when he went to cover the J20 protest. Leading up to Inauguration Day, Mr. Wood sent emails to editors in San Antonio, including one to an editor at Rivard Report, a local news website. One email read, "Just checking in. Got any assignments you want to throw at me?" In another, Mr. Wood said he was interested in focusing on "street friction, protest and support and police." 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Mr. Wood live streamed the event on Facebook, which ended up being a prime piece of evidence in the case both for the prosecution and his defense. The Facebook video showed Mr. Wood documenting the protest as it turned violent, and into what the government classified as a riot. Mr. Wood can be seen taking photographs and is heard letting out cries of "Whoo!" as he documents protesters vandalizing property. He also identifies himself as a journalist and flashes a press pass. In their closing argument, Jennifer Kerkhoff and Rizwan Qureshi, the assistant United States attorneys, said that by attending the riot and wearing black, Mr. Wood and his fellow defendants were intent on destruction. Mr. Qureshi told the jury that Mr. Wood and the five others who stood trial "agreed to destroy your city, and now they're hiding behind the First Amendment." After the verdict was announced, the U.S. Attorneys Office for the District of Columbia released a statement that said, in part, "We appreciate the jury's close examination of the individual conduct and intent of each defendant during this trial and respect its verdict." During the trial Mr. Cohen asserted that the government did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Wood intended to recruit demonstrators with his live stream. The video, which now has more than 4,300 views on Mr. Wood's Facebook page, did not reach many people when it was live. At points during the broadcast Mr. Wood said that only one or two people were tuned in. "What we found most troubling was that the prosecutors argued the fact that Alexei filming meant he was supporting it and made him more complicit," said Alexandra Ellerbeck, the North America program coordinator for Committee to Protect Journalists. "I think those arguments didn't hold up and the jury very clearly saw through them." Mr. Wood is one of 32 journalists who were arrested in 2017, according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. "We're happy that this ordeal is finally over for Alexei Wood," Ms. Ellerbeck said. "The fact that this went to trial in the first place, where there was clearly nothing there, was already problematic."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Tituss Burgess had something to confess. "I don't know anything about David Bowie," he said one spring afternoon. "Nothing," he said. "You would think ... but no. I somehow missed him." Despite this gaping cultural blind spot, Mr. Burgess, 39, found himself transfixed at the flashing lights and silver jumpsuit that made up the striking opening tableau of "David Bowie Is," an immersive, audiovisual survey of the iconoclastic musician's life at the Brooklyn Museum. (It closed on July 15.) He turned a corner and gazed up in amazement as costumed Bowie mannequins peered down from a towering platform, like glamorous gargoyles. "Oh my God, this man was everything," Mr. Burgess said, mouth agape. "He was much more than just a recording artist, really. Now I just want to go home and Spotify him." Don't count on Mr. Burgess having much time to explore Bowie's discography any time soon. Part 1 of the final season of "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt," in which he stars as Titus Andromedon, a flamboyant and egomaniacal actor, was recently released on Netflix. "You work for six months and then people can consume it in, like, three hours," said Mr. Burgess, who wore a white button up shirt and brocade pants. "It's so strange." Despite sharing a name with his character, it would be difficult to confuse Mr. Burgess with his histrionic and garrulous onscreen persona. "It's exhausting," he said about his high strung character. "I don't live where Titus Andromedon lives. I'm quite shy." Not that Mr. Burgess is complaining. "This role has been the hugest blessing," he said. "Tina Fey and Robert Carlock" the show's creators "unleashed and unveiled me in the most spectacular way, and I'm deeply indebted to them. But it also came with a certain amount of attention I had never had before and that even to this day is a little difficult to integrate." As if on cue, a young bright faced woman in a printed dress emerged from the crowd in the dimly lit gallery and gasped, "Tituss!" Mr. Burgess parted his lips and revealed a toothy grin, before he leaned his head back and gave a little wave. The fan seemed placated by this gesture, before disappearing back into the throng. "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" is a mad farce centered on the title character (played by Ellie Kemper), a so called Indiana mole woman who was freed from a doomsday bunker after 15 years and is now living in New York. Mr. Burgess plays her absurdist gay roommate and hysterical life coach. Mr. Burgess has emerged as a fan favorite. A clip from the show, of him starring in a make believe music video, "Peeno Noir," went viral, with more than 3 million views on YouTube. (The lyrics are downright kooky: "Peeno Noir, Caviar, Myanmar, midsize car, you don't have to be popular. ...") He is also the show's zany scene stealer (and was just nominated for his fourth Emmy). His manic, scenery chewing soliloquies are executed with a breezy aplomb, though he stresses that they are not as carefree as they appear. "Everything is scripted, everything," Mr. Burgess said. "And you better say it as it's written or we will stop filming until we get everything right. There's no improv. It is so quick. Because it looks so seamless, people think we aren't working. They think we're on the fly. It is a difficult show to do, but very satisfying." His loosey goosey ease is helped by his years of stage work. Raised as an only child in Athens, Ga., he studied music in college before moving to New York and auditioning for Broadway shows. Even back in Georgia, he knew that the performer's life was his destiny. "I had no choice," he said. "That was my earliest memory. This is going to sound so extreme but my best friend the other day said, 'I crave having a child, I want one so badly. My body is aching for one.' And I wondered what must that feel like, the need to produce something? And then I thought, 'Hmm. I think I know.'" Before landing a small cameo on "30 Rock" that first brought him to Ms. Fey's attention, Mr. Burgess made a name for himself in Broadway musicals, with featured roles in "Jersey Boys," "Guys and Dolls" and "The Little Mermaid." Those opportunities allowed him to hone his ability to make a big impression with a small role. Back at the Brooklyn Museum, he turned a corner into a smaller room filled with framed Bowie letters and lyrics scribbled on paper. The gallery was packed. "Oh no, I can't go in there," he said, backing out. He says he is slightly claustrophobic, and after 45 minutes at the bustling exhibit, he needed out. He blames this sensitivity on being a Pisces. "Oh yeah, we feel everything to the nth degree," he said. "That's part of the reason I'm an actor, how I can easily access the soul of another character, but it's something I wish I could turn off." As he headed for the exit, he paused in a gallery where concert footage of Bowie played on one wall, and the costumes Bowie wore were displayed up on the opposite wall. "This isn't a copycat," Mr. Burgess said, savoring the display. "You can feel that this is from the innermost part of this man." "I feel like artists today have gotten lazy," he said. "The absence of social media and the internet mandated, demanded, that we think, we visualize more, we dream. Gesturing at the displays around him, he said, "This is all the result of dreaming."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The Mar Mattai monastery clings to the side of a steep mountain, and on a clear day a visitor can stand against its fortresslike walls and discern far below the winsome farmlands of Upper Mesopotamia. Here, in the cradle of civilization, the building is one of the oldest Christian monasteries in the world. From this peaceful perch, it is difficult to imagine the horror. One hazy morning last spring, Harry Schute, a retired Army colonel in his 50s with a Cheshire grin, walked through the monastery's heavy doors and along its shaded arcades. A boy played with a soccer ball in the courtyard, the boom of each kick cracking off the stone walls. At its peak in the 9th century, the monastery housed as many as 7,000 monks. Today it has five, a bishop, this boy and his family all survivors of the Islamic State. We were on the western fringes of Kurdistan, a Netherlands size, semiautonomous region in the north of Iraq that is home to 5.2 million of the world's estimated 30 million Kurds, a stateless people who populate the border regions between Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria. The fact that the monastery still stood; that this Christian boy and his family were still alive; that a small group of North Americans now felt safe enough to travel here all of it seemed like a miracle. Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, one of the most dangerous cities in the world, sat 20 miles southwest. In June 2014, ISIS overran it and the group's leader, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, stood inside its Great Mosque of al Nuri and named himself caliph of the terrifying regime. By August 2014, ISIS' ominous black flags snapped just three miles from where I now stood. Under the cover of night, the monastery's manager, a priest named Yousif Ibrahim, whose brother had already been murdered by the militants, spirited away scores of ancient documents, the last of the monastery's once magnificent library, and even a discolored hand bone fragment believed to have belonged to St. Matthew the Hermit, who founded the monastery in 363 A.D. He was certain the monastery would be lost. But then the airstrikes began and the Kurdish Peshmerga and Iraqi Army turned the tide on the ground. The caliphate began to crumble. To be sure, Kurdistan is nothing like the Iraq of Mosul but a Middle Eastern Montana with ruins: a cooler, welcoming tableau of crisp mountain streams and scrappy peaks. A traveler can ski at a new resort serviced by gondolas or wander through the sun roasted walls of the deepest canyon in the Middle East. You can drink city water from the taps and stroll around Erbil, the regional capital, concerned with only how to decline, politely, invitations to drink tea. "Hello, my friend, have some bread." For now, the war with ISIS was still winding down. Soon we would watch a 500 pound coalition bomb erupt over the militants' last stronghold in Mosul and send a huge mushroom cloud curling over the city. The concussion, heavy and round, would ring for miles. Here at the monastery, though, on this pleasant spring day, birdsong ricocheted off the cliffs and the only thing to explode were the poppies. As a West Point history major with a soft spot for heavy metal, Mr. Schute had been a state trooper in New Jersey before being called to Iraq in April 2003 to command a United States Army Reserve civil affairs battalion. "Those are the guys who help get people and things out of the way so the Army can come in and break stuff," he said. Soon he became something of a celebrity as the senior American officer in Kurdistan; to this day, the Kurds who view Americans as their liberators for ousting Saddam Hussein recognize him on the street and ask for photographs with him. As his tour drew to a close, Mr. Schute began to feel anxious. In 2003 at a Kurdish investment seminar in Erbil, Mr. Schute met Douglas Layton, an American who came to Kurdistan in 1992. Mr. Layton, whose round spectacles and woolen cap lend him the air of a paperback spy, had survived a 1 million bounty on his head, courtesy of Saddam Hussein. After the dictator's capture and execution, Mr. Layton journeyed to Hussein's palace in Baghdad, where he found his outlandish throne and sat in it. "You're gone," Mr. Layton whispered to Saddam's ghost, "and I'm still here." Mr. Schute and Mr. Layton, who had been working for the Meridian Health Foundation, both knew of Kurdistan's cultural riches and friendly people, so they joined forces to create what eventually became Kurdistan Iraq Tours, the only inbound tourism operator in Kurdistan. The idea seemed absurd. "Everyone said no one will come to Iraq, and I said but they'll come to 'the other Iraq!'" Mr. Layton recalled. "I believed, and I still believe, that tourism is the future." For their main local guide, they hired and trained Balin Zrar, a charismatic, chain smoking Kurd. Mr. Zrar had spent seven years running an Italian restaurant in London after he smuggled himself to Europe an epic tale that involved time in an Iranian prison camp and riding for days curled atop a spare tire under a tractor trailer. After the London bombings, Mr. Zrar returned to Kurdistan to dabble in real estate. For the guide position interview, Mr. Layton asked him if he liked history. "I hate history," replied Mr. Zrar, now in his early 40s, and the candor landed him the job. No one believed he'd be busy. The militants steamrolled down the Tigris and pushed into Kurdistan. They got so close to Erbil's city gates that even Mr. Schute was worried. Tourism companies shut down. Seventy hotels closed. Many flights ceased. "We were the last guys standing," Mr. Layton said. But all through those awful years the men worked behind the scenes, speaking to lawmakers and publishing a gorgeous, comprehensive guidebook to the region. As soon as ISIS was gone they knew travelers would come wandering back. THE RED EYE FROM AMMAN touched down just before dawn in Erbil where Mr. Zrar waited. He had a slim build and black hair flecked with gray. He fidgeted, as most Kurdish men do, with a string of beads called a tasbih. Outside the air was hazy and cool. Our contingent of five North Americans had pretty much spent a lifetime traveling. Even so, only one of us, the head of an adventure travel trade association, had visited Kurdistan before. This time he'd brought along his son, who'd turn 17 on the trip. A Canadian expat living in Hong Kong and a photographer from Los Angeles who had been to North Korea 10 times rounded out our group. The plan was to spend a week traveling in a clockwise loop that started and ended in Erbil, taking in cities like Duhok and Sulaymaniyah along the way. We'd hike in the Zagros Mountains, paddle kayaks on Lake Dukan, and eat kebabs and flatbread. Often we'd pause over sugary tea outside noisy bazaars and linger in museums highlighting Kurdish traditions and history. Mr. Layton, who now lives in Connecticut, could not join us, but Mr. Schute, still in Erbil, would spend time with us. Immediately it became clear that this would be unlike any other trip. Mr. Schute also serves as a senior security adviser to the Kurdish interior ministry and works closely with the Peshmerga, which means "those who face death." More than 100,000 of these Kurdish soldiers our allies against Saddam Hussein and ISIS manned a nearly impenetrable front riddled with tank ditches and checkpoints that has kept Kurdistan an enclave of comparative security while much of the rest of Iraq remains too dangerous for tourists. The Peshmerga, coalition forces and the Iraqis had cornered the last of ISIS's fighters in Mosul's old city along the Tigris. The effort to root them out for good was being coordinated through the Zerevani Peshmerga headquarters outside Erbil. Mr. Schute arranged to take us there. C 17s roared overhead as we arrived. In the distance you could see a dome that the South Koreans had built for a gym and several squat metal buildings. Guards led us into a room with a long table set with bananas and apricots and cold cans of Pepsi. United States Army Lt. Col. Darin E. Huss, the center's director, and Iraqi and Kurdish generals, came in to answer our questions about the fight. "In 10 days it will be finished, inshallah," Staff Major Gen. Saad Khalid Yasin told me. (It would be more like six weeks.) Most eye opening of all, though, was the base's Mad Max junkyard of captured ISIS vehicles. The militants had welded thick armored plates around old Soviet personnel carriers and attached grids of rebar along their sides to disperse incoming rocket blasts. Some rigs had heavy metal prows to better ram a checkpoint. Others had been reduced to mangled heaps of metal. I climbed inside one that had been scorched beyond all recognition. On the floor lay a chalky white bone. Lamb. Someone's lunch had ended poorly. OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS we took in more mainstream sites. We strolled around Erbil's citadel, a fortress on a mound, that dates to 6000 B.C., and mingled with Arab Iraqis from the south who seemed overjoyed to friend an American on Facebook. I stuck my nose in sacks of za'atar and sumac in the city's frenetic bazaar and watched two teen lovebirds she in a hijab, he in jeans kiss behind a tree in a park where no one could see but God. The next morning our driver headed north toward the Mar Mattai monastery. We slipped past wheat fields, gas stations with knockoff names like "Shall" and "Nobil," and a refinery a reminder of Kurdistan's agricultural economy and the fact that Iraq controls some of the richest oil fields in the world, a quarter of which lie in Kurdistan. Kids played on the banks of the Greater Zab River where earthen bunkers once shielded Iraqi tanks during the 2003 invasion. This was the Green Line, the point behind which Saddam withdrew his forces after the creation of a no fly zone over Kurdistan following his defeat in the 1991 Gulf War. The air turned hair dryer hot as we wrapped up our time at the monastery. From there we drove to a field just outside a village called Amian. A lone cow stood in the grass. A kid in a yellow shirt rode by, waving, on a bike. In the distance rose a gumdrop shape dollop of earth. It was a tell, or a man made hill formed when ancient villages are built and rebuilt atop one another over thousands of years until they're abandoned and the grass reclaims them. Kurdistan is littered with these. Very few of them have been excavated, Hashim Hama Abdullah, the director of the Slemani Museum in Sulaymaniyah, would tell me later after I'd spent a morning studying the museum's ancient stelae, tablets and other artifacts. "No excavating happened at all under Saddam," he said. "Now teams are coming in." Kurdistan has no real budget for tourism projects, which means few attractions have basic things like interpretive signs. This field, which also has never been excavated, would be just a field without Mr. Schute to explain it. In 331 B.C. the Persian king Darius III picked this now peaceful place to face Alexander the Great of Macedonia once and for all. The ensuing fight, the Battle of Gaugamela, saw Darius's far greater force suffer such horrific losses that soon the Macedon kingdom would stretch from Greece to Pakistan. The battle counts as one of the most important military victories of all time, Mr. Schute said. "Can you feel it?" he asked, as he imagined the war elephants, the scythed chariots and the tens of thousands of soldiers lining up to hack each other to bits. "I get here and I can feel it." Of all the people that ISIS fought, the militants were particularly vicious toward the Yazidi, one of Iraq's most mysterious religious minorities, who were massacred by the thousands. The Yazidi allow no outsiders to convert to Yazidism and the contents of their holy text, the Meshef Resh or Black Book, are only for other Yazidi. In the most general of terms, they believe in one god and that the angel cast from heaven in Christian faiths is now the reconciled leader of all angels, and takes the form of a peacock. Some Yazidi don't wear blue. The faith holds that every Yazidi should take a pilgrimage to the center of their world, or Lalish, a lovely mountain village about 30 miles southeast of Duhok. The Yazidi believe that Noah's Ark came to rest here after a snake used its body to plug a hole in the boat, thus saving all of creation. Yazidi kids gathered around us as we walked toward temples tucked against scruffy hillsides. The village had stone buildings and narrow streets, and families sat together on carpets inside courtyards and on patios. Everyone, like us, was barefoot. Shoes aren't allowed in Lalish. Another, a teen with immaculate hair, wanted to take a selfie with us. Soon everyone wanted a selfie with us. They followed us toward a shrine with a conical roof. Sheik Adi, a man as holy to the Yazidi as Jesus is to Christians, was buried inside. "Step through the door!" a boy told me, meaning I shouldn't step on the threshold. Angels rest in doorways. "When there is no war in my country, Kurdistan is the best place," he said. He stuffed inflatable kayaks, coolers and tents into his S.U.V. for a long weekend of adventure with his girlfriend. We said goodbye. Then he drove down a road that arced out of sight. If You Go The Kurds voted in September to declare independence from Iraq, a move that triggered Baghdad into placing a punitive ban on international flights into the region. Talks in mid January hinted that the ban might soon be lifted. The Kurdish news agency Rudaw has an English website and has been covering the flight ban regularly. Until it is lifted, travelers have two options for getting into Kurdistan. The first is to go overland through Turkey. To do that you would fly to Sirnak or Diyarbakir, both in southeastern Turkey, then cross into Iraqi Kurdistan via the Habur Ibrahim Khalil border crossing. You'll need a Turkish visa. The second way is to connect on a domestic flight through Baghdad. To do that, you'll need an Iraqi visa. Visa rules for Kurdistan may change as Kurd and Iraqi authorities negotiate the results of the independence vote. For now, passport holders from the United States, Britain, the European Union, Australia, New Zealand and Japan can get a free 30 day Kurdistan visa at the border crossing and, presumably, upon arrival at the Erbil airport in Kurdistan once flights resume. Again, that may all change. Check the Kurdistan Regional Government website for more information. As of press time the K.R.G.'s Department of Foreign Relations website had removed its webpage related to Kurdish visas. For these reasons, it's recommended that would be travelers find a reputable company to organize their trips and to keep them up to date on visa requirements. Kurdistan Iraq Tours (info kurdistaniraqtours) offers custom trips that can range from single day excursions to two week itineraries or more for up to 15 people. Prices are all inclusive (without flights) and vary depending on the group size, hotels and the exact itinerary. Expect to pay from 2,000 to 9,000. (Note: Kurdistan is a cash economy. You can use a credit card at major hotels but Kurdistan Iraq Tours can only take cash.) Kurdistan Iraq Tours works with outfitters based in Britain and the United States, such as Steppes Travel, Native Eye Travel, Undiscovered Destinations, Young Pioneer Tours and Spiekermann Travel. Mountain Travel Sobek plans to offer a Kurdistan trip in 2019. Wild Frontiers Travel may add it again in the future. The State Department strongly advises against traveling to Iraq and it didn't support the Kurdish referendum. Travel insurance is a must. Companies like World Nomads and First Allied offer coverage in Iraq. It's also a good idea for United States citizens to register with the State Department through its Smart Traveler Enrollment Program before going. Kurdistan Iraq Tour's high level contacts within the Kurdish government allow for a more nuanced and real time understanding of what's safe and what isn't. Situations can change, of course, but I, and other members in my group, never once felt unsafe.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Did the people who brought you baby powder and baby shampoo also bring you the opioid crisis? That will be the question before an Oklahoma judge starting Tuesday, as the first civil trial takes off on the long, nationwide runway of trials against prescription opioid manufacturers, distributors and sellers. Oklahoma is squaring off against Johnson Johnson, the New Jersey based, family friendly giant, which produces a fentanyl patch. On Sunday, another defendant in the case, Teva Pharmaceuticals Ltd., the Israel based producer of generic medicines, including opioids, settled with Oklahoma for 85 million. Details of how the state will allocate the money have not yet been finalized. In a statement, the company said, "The settlement does not establish any wrongdoing on the part of the company; Teva has not contributed to the abuse of opioids in Oklahoma in any way." There is great interest in the case, which originally included Purdue Pharma, and not only from lawyers in nearly 1,900 federal and state lawsuits who want to see how the evidence and legal strategies resonate. "So much of the litigation has remained under seal or redacted that this will be the public's first glimpse into Pandora's box," said Elizabeth C. Burch, a law professor at the University of Georgia who writes about mass torts. "Not only will a trial occur, but it will be televised." While the state has not said how much it is seeking, the Oklahoma attorney general, Mike Hunter, has said that companies have caused opioid related damages worth billions of dollars. But Purdue Pharma already settled with the state in March for 270 million. With the company that has become embedded in the public's mind as an arch villain gone from the proceedings and Teva also out of the case, will Mr. Hunter be able to stick J J with the rest of the bill? Oklahoma, a largely rural state whose medical, social welfare and criminal justice systems have been ravaged by opioid addictions and deaths, has "home court advantage," Ms. Burch said. But the case is hardly a slam dunk. The challenge in all opioid cases is how to closely tie each defendant to the carnage. In its attempt to frame that narrative, Oklahoma is relying on just one legal theory, which itself has an uneven record. The theory that J J violated public nuisance law is also being raised in the first federal cases to go to trial in Cleveland, Ohio, currently set for Oct. 21. All eyes will look to the Oklahoma trial as an out of town rehearsal for that big show. How will witnesses perform? Which arguments will resonate? "If J J prevails in Oklahoma, they may feel they are gaining leverage" in the federal negotiations, said Alexandra D. Lahav, a professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law who is an expert on bellwether trials. Through its pharmaceutical division, Janssen, J J manufactured Nucynta, an opioid tablet, which it divested in 2015. It still makes Duragesic, a fentanyl patch. Teva produces Actiq and Fentora, for breakthrough cancer pain. Through a company spokesman, J J said that since 2008, its opioid medications have amounted annually to less than 1 percent of the opioid prescriptions written nationally. A Teva spokeswoman said its medications were administered infrequently in Oklahoma: Between 2007 and 2017, she said, the state reimbursed just 245 Actiq and Fentora prescriptions. J J also has reason to be wary of the spotlight: It wants to protect its family friendly branding. In redacted court documents, Oklahoma has accused J J of targeting patient groups for opioid sales, including veterans, older adults and children. In a statement, John Sparks, a lawyer for J J and Janssen, said, "Janssen did not market opioids to children, and the State's suggestion to the contrary is false and reckless." Instead, he continued, Janssen had designed a drug abuse prevention program with a school nurse association. J J, with 2018 sales of 81.6 billion, is already waging a public relations campaign as it continues to fight lawsuits alleging that its talc based baby powder caused cancer in some consumers. If Oklahoma is not ground zero for the emergency, it's "certainly close," Mr. Hunter said recently during a panel on opioids at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. Between 2015 and 2018, he said, there were 18 million opioid prescriptions written in a state with a population of 3.9 million. In a 15 year period, overdose deaths increased 91 percent. In briefs, lawyers for Mr. Hunter who, like many government officials bringing such cases, is using outside counsel, have called J J the "kingpin behind the public health emergency." One of Mr. Hunter's lead lawyers lost a niece to opioids; another, a son. Oklahoma's case against J J largely falls into three areas. The first is the company's marketing and sales practices, including targeting populations like veterans and children, and using patient front groups and high profile doctors who oversold the benefits and downplayed the risks of the drugs. By doing so, the state says, the company helped normalize opioids from what had originally been a very conservative approach to them. The second is J J's former ownership of two companies that produced and refined Tasmanian poppies into narcotics material for other drug manufacturers, including Purdue. Finally, the state points to the company's development and sales of its own opioids. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. J J says the company manufactured drugs that played only a minor role in the market, even as it was conducting business that was heavily regulated and approved by government agencies. The company stopped marketing Duragesic by 2008, court papers said, and divested Nucynta in 2015, the year the company ceased marketing opioid medication altogether. J J's Mr. Sparks said that Oklahoma "attempts to group all manufacturers together with general and broad allegations." In 2017, Oklahoma became one of the first states to file a prescription opioid lawsuit. In the ensuing months, the case has morphed considerably. Oklahoma recently jettisoned most of its claims to concentrate on just one that the companies violated the state's public nuisance law, creating a substantial health harm. Unlike a conventional lawsuit that seeks compensation for damages already incurred, the state is asking J J to pay to "abate" the nuisance it is accused of creating, going forward. Public nuisance laws, which are centuries old, were invoked when something interfered with a right common to the general public, traditionally roads, waterways or public spaces. Recently, their use has been expanding, with mixed results: success for the Big Tobacco settlement and some pollution cases; failure in gun litigation and most lead paint cases. Ms. Burch said some courts have found that those manufacturers didn't have a specific duty to the public. The companies had prevailed by arguing that once the product left their facilities, they were not the direct cause of the ensuing harm or in a position to remedy it. Similarly, she said, opioid defendants contend that the connection between manufacturers and overdose deaths is too attenuated. Earlier this month, a North Dakota judge dismissed that state's case against Purdue, including its public nuisance claim. While the ruling affects only that state, lawyers have said the decision creates an appellate template for defendants. Public nuisance laws, the judge wrote, were not intended where "one party has sold to another a product that later is alleged to constitute a nuisance." Mr. Hunter says that Oklahoma's own law is "powerful and expansive." The state had been eager for a jury trial. But recently, lawyers reversed course and requested a bench trial, despite the perception that a jury could be readily convinced to seek revenge for the opioid devastation. That perception is not necessarily true. "Juries are increasingly pro defendant," said Ms. Lahav. "And the state may feel that Oklahomans are business friendly and individualistic." Jurors might have responded well to the company's argument that manufacturers were producing medicines that were government approved, she added, and that people had a choice about whether or not to take them. It was J J who wound up requesting a jury trial. That was likely because, said Adam Zimmerman, who teaches complex litigation at Loyola Law School Los Angeles, Judge Balkman has made rulings against the defense and has steadily marched the parties toward a trial date. "J J would probably rather try their luck with 12 people as opposed to this one person," he said. In a statement about the Teva settlement, Mr. Hunter said: "Nearly all Oklahomans have been negatively impacted by this deadly crisis and we look forward to Tuesday, where we will prove our case against Johnson Johnson and its subsidiaries."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Last month, driving along Route 62 through Montagu, in South Africa's Western Cape province, my friend Sabiha and I spied a sign announcing a "car boot sale" a sort of roadside flea market. We didn't pause to confer: They had us at "sale." In an open lot lined with bakkies South African for "pickup trucks" locals hawked bric a brac from the backs of their cars. Old Trivial Pursuit editions, vintage candelabra, hardly worn shoes it was all for the taking. We carted home picture frames for 10 to 50 rands apiece (85 cents to 4.25 at 11.75 rands to the dollar) and candleholders for 10 rands. "When you drive through the tunnel, you drive into the 1970s," said Kenny Keet, an anesthesiologist I chatted with by the coffee stand. Mr. Keet, from Somerset West near Cape Town, was referring to the Cogmanskloof Pass, carved through a mountain as you approach Montagu from the west. "Small country towns like this are ready to burst into the future," he added. Route 62 is lined with plenty of these towns, ones with laid back, eccentric states of mind and very reasonable prices. The route is popular with locals but virtually unknown to foreign visitors, who prefer to explore the Winelands or drive the better known coastal Garden Route. Even in those pricier areas, these days, South Africa is a steal for American travelers: the rapidly depreciating currency is approaching 12 rands to the dollar (it was around 8 when I first visited in 2012). Fine dining, fancy hotels and those expensive places you usually scroll past when scanning TripAdvisor reviews they're not necessarily out of your budget here. Affordability aside, this country boasts some of the most postcard worthy road trips I've ever embarked on, and savvy local tourism boards have made navigating easy with helpful maps and rosters of otherwise obscure local businesses. I consulted a glossy Route 62 brochure, acquired from a tourism information booth, and plotted out a route to test how far a rand could really go. Two hours east of Cape Town, Robertson is the gateway to Route 62, and our starting point. The enchanting Mo Rose guesthouse has cactus studded gardens and six stylishly appointed suites with animal hide rugs and cushions with African motifs. Owned by a German Italian couple, Mo Rose is a roughly seven acre idyll set on a former cactus nursery, which explains its forest of succulents. The damage for a night in this chic retreat: 800 rands per night per person (prices start at 650 rands), including a sumptuous breakfast. Robertson is celebrated for its food and wine, and both are showcased at Reuben's restaurant (named after its celebrity chef, Reuben Riffel), at the Robertson Small Hotel, one of the best fine dining finds around: a hearty dinner of beef fillet, tomato basil pasta, and mozzarella fior de latte with poached tomatoes came to 475 rands. To call the nearby village McGregor sleepy would be something of a euphemism almost comatose might be more accurate. But artsy types would appreciate the Edna Fourie gallery and the ceramics specialist Millstone Pottery. A few blocks away, at the Frangipani cafe, a cascade of flowers floated down from the trees as we tucked in to hot scones with jam and cheese, a toasted chicken mayo sandwich, and iced coffee in the garden. Everything was delicious and the total came to 94 rands. In Montagu, aside from pillaging car boot sales I dropped 220 rands on three carved wooden owls at Hicks Art Gallery, a 106 year old private residence where the owner lets visitors roam freely through rooms full of canvases. Next came Barrydale, home to Ronnies Sex Shop, which, despite the name, is a somewhat grimy roadside diner with a cult following (though it does feature unmentionables suspended above the bar, donated by enthusiastic patrons). It's not the only expression of creativity in Barrydale. Inkaroo carries jewelry hewed from driftwood, freshwater pearls and acacia thorns, generally ranging from 125 to 800 rands. At Barrydale Hand Weavers, you can watch workers at their looms spinning bathmats (250 rands), scarves (150 rands) and table runners (95 rands). But it's Magpie, an art collective specializing in recycled chic chandeliers and furniture, that's caught the attention of the world's most powerful couple: Their colorful, cheeky crafts were a hit with the Obamas' decorator, who hung two chandeliers in the White House. While most of the fixtures are on the pricey side, Magpie's "ampoule couture," tiny beaded sheaths to dress up naked light bulbs, makes for unique souvenirs at 220 rands apiece. Sabiha and I checked into the Karoo Moon Motel, a new three room bed and breakfast run by the owners of Diesel Creme, the popular retro Americana diner next door. (The row of vintage gas pumps out front will clue you in to your arrival.) The aesthetic is kitschy fun: old cigarette ads, biblical paintings, pressed tin headboards and fraying chintz armchairs. We spent the night in a double for 600 rands. At the biker magnet Diesel Creme I binged on a burger and fries (65 rands) and a decadent red velvet shake (35 rands) amid a vast collection of vintage Pepsi and Coke signs ("The typical American girl finds a drink of Coca Cola delicious and refreshing as you will," reads the one in the women's room). Farther along Route 62 lies Calitzdorp, known for its port wine and not much else but a scenic loop off the town's main road, known as Arts Route 62, is a must. The gravel road is a spine rattling change from a two lane country highway, but the meander itself is sublime in its beauty and variety. Amid vineyards, valleys blanketed in flowers, and aloes standing guard along the foothills, we saw artists' studios, cattle crossing signs and people water skiing near a dam. Back on the main road, it was a race to get to Oudtshoorn before sunset. The "ostrich capital of the world," Oudtshoorn owes much of its existence to an early 20th century ostrich boom, when the town was teeming with feather palaces dedicated to keeping British society mavens decked out in the latest fashion. These days, it's home to a few ostrich farms that let visitors feed or even ride the birds, and shops like Queen Zebra, where you can buy an ostrich leather bag (890 rands), springbok cushions (450 rands) or rosewood and bone salad tongs (89 rands). But Oudtshoorn's main attraction is the Cango Caves, a millenniums old complex of caverns. The adventure tour (100 rands) has you climbing, crawling, sliding and shimmying your way through a spectrum of narrow spaces not for the faint of heart or wide of girth, but plenty fun. We drove up a steep hill to Le Petit Karoo Ranch, a collection of four rooms and four tents owned by Pascal Chanel, a French Swiss former horse jockey. The tents are simple but comfortable affairs, with impossibly soft bedding, outdoor bathtubs and decks with the best sunset viewing vantage point around. And they're far more luxurious than they need to be, at 700 rands a night for a double. Oudtshoorn is part of a semi arid region called the Klein (Little) Karoo, and from there we veered off Route 62 toward the Groot (Great) Karoo. To do that, you first cross the Swartberg Pass, a breathtaking and heart stopping mountain road that squiggles its way up toward a 5,000 foot summit in a series of dizzying switchbacks. It eventually deposited us in Prince Albert, a beguiling village popular with gallerists setting up shop in quaint whitewashed cottages. And then, at last, I found the terrain I'd been waiting for ever since I began conjuring images of the Karoo: wide open roads unfurling toward the horizon without another car in sight. Dried up riverbeds and ocher earth flecked with green shrubs. It's stark, and it's stunning. The Great Karoo lives up to its name. The landscape gradually becomes both mountainous and more verdant as you approach the town of Graaff Reinet, the gem of the Karoo. It looks majestic hemmed in by mountains, and as the fourth oldest European settlement in South Africa, it's crowded with historic buildings like the striking Dutch Reformed Church, erected in 1887. The Drostdy Hotel was originally built around 1806 and reopened in December as a luxurious new boutique hotel with 48 rooms made over in a contemporary palette of soft blues, greens, taupes and grays. The public areas are more of an Old World throwback: dark colors, overstuffed leather couches, framed newspaper clippings on the walls and animal skulls and horns galore. And through February, the opening rate is 1,125 rands for a double (it goes up to 2,000 in March). Just outside town, in the fun to say out loud Camdeboo National Park, the Valley of Desolation forms yet another dramatic panorama: a series of staggeringly sheer volcanic rock obelisks presiding over the Karoo. The view is hauntingly surreal, the kind that one might be tempted to call priceless but lucky for you, it's not. For the admission fee of just 80 rands it's all yours.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Kathy Halbreich's name has often surfaced over the years as a possible successor to the director of the Museum of Modern Art, Glenn D. Lowry. But Ms. Halbreich points out that she is, in fact, older than Mr. Lowry, that MoMA has a mandatory retirement age and that she has long considered her current job at MoMA associate director the best in the business. Instead, she has decided to leave the museum to head the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Manhattan as its new executive director, the organization plans to announce on Thursday. In addition to promoting the works of Robert Rauschenberg, who died in 2008, the foundation supports artists in the many fields in which he worked painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking and performance. (It also runs a residency program in Rauschenberg's former home on Captiva Island, Fla., but because the house was damaged by Hurricane Irma, the program was postponed this year.) "It's a foundation focused on doing the best for artists," Ms. Halbreich said in a telephone interview. "The more I learned, the more perfect the match felt as my next chapter." She previously served for 16 years as director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where her exhibitions focused on artists like Joseph Beuys, Helio Oiticica and Kara Walker.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
THE blistering pace of advances in automotive technology may be confusing to consumers, but it seems to be creating a strong employment outlook for those who fix cars. According to a forecast by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from 2010 to 2020 the work force will add positions for 124,800 service technicians and mechanics, 32,700 automotive body and glass repairers and 13,800 painting and coating workers. While that growth rate is not explosive, the Labor Department foresees steady employment for those with training and certification. But the rapid fire technology developments are also widening the skills gap. Basic mechanical know how is no longer enough; new materials, assembly processes and electronic controls make repair work more challenging. As a result, training has become more demanding, even as schools face tighter budgets and shorter classroom hours. How will they train new technicians under such pressures? Video game technology may provide part of the answer. "Time is not our friend," said Ron Ussher, a collision repair instructor at the Thomas A. Edison Career and Technical Academy at Elizabeth High School in Elizabeth, N.J., noting the pressure to teach more in fewer hours. "But with the simulator, time isn't an issue." Last year, Mr. Ussher saw a demonstration of a new virtual reality teaching tool called SimSpray, made by VRSim, a technology start up in East Hartford, Conn., which helps students learn the basics of automotive painting. There was soon one in his school's paint shop. To use the simulator, a student works a realistic spray gun while a 3 D view of a spray booth is projected in the hood covering the student's face. The simulator is what virtual reality engineers call immersive, rendering a lifelike setting of a paint booth, providing cues to help students develop the muscle memory needed for a smooth paint job. In the real world, painting requires costly materials and hours of preparation, but simulators put learning on a faster track, teachers say. "You can make a mistake, redo it, then hit it again," Mr. Ussher said. "We can do five paint jobs in 10 minutes." Speed is not the only advantage. According to a 2010 study conducted at Iowa State University, students training on a virtual welding machine were 30 to 40 percent more likely to gain professional certifications than those who trained exclusively in normal classroom and shop conditions. "These simulators give enough fidelity that people can experiment," explained Richard Stone, a 33 year old professor of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering at Iowa State, and the study's lead researcher. VRSim developed the welding simulator in 2003 under a Defense Department grant; the units are now sold by Lincoln Electric, a Cleveland based maker of welding machines, for 46,500. Customers include training schools, local trade unions, manufacturers and prisons. SimSpray, introduced last year following the success of the welding unit, starts at 25,000. Mastering the fine points of welding and painting is not easy. Last summer, I tried out the paint simulator. I had more confidence in this skill I partly paid my college tuition sprucing up houses and apartments but quickly learned that I was in need of a refresher. The trick to spray painting is keeping the spray gun head perpendicular to the working surface while maintaining a rhythm of smooth, consistent strokes. As I painted a car's fender in the virtual world, drips oozed down the surface where I applied too thick a coat, and patches of primer poked through thin spots. Such teaching tools appeal to people who grew up playing video games, experts say. "You've got an aging work force, and they are still painting like they were painting in the '60s and '70s," said Matthew Wallace, chief executive and president of VRSim. "This speaks in the language of the video game generation." Simulators at job fairs are helping to inspire youths' interest in the skilled trades, he said. Schools using the training simulators are also saving money on materials and energy. "We saved about 4,000 on fluid this semester that we were purchasing to teach these students gun technique," said Dan Moore, who heads the collision repair department at Randolph Community College in Asheboro, N.C. "It saved us a lot of money, and they get the gun technique down. We don't let them in the paint booth until they can score 55 percent."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
THOR: RAGNAROK (2017) on iTunes, Amazon and FandangoNow. Marvel's latest in the Thor series finds the god of thunder (Chris Hemsworth) held captive on the planet Sakaar without his trusty hammer. Across the universe, his sister, Thela (Cate Blanchett), has descended on Asgard while the threat of Ragnarok the end of Asgardian civilization looms. But before he can save his home planet, Thor must win a gladiatorial battle against his old pal the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo). While "the Thor movies have been largely forgettable," Manohla Dargis wrote in The New York Times, "'Ragnarok' tries hard to change that profile, and mostly succeeds by knocking its big, blond beauty consistently down to size." THE FRANKENSTEIN CHRONICLES on Netflix. Sean Bean ("Game of Thrones") plays a river policeman hunting the killer behind a composite corpse of children's body parts in this retelling of Mary Shelley's classic novel. Both seasons of this British cult drama series are on Netflix.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Skiers at Serre Chevalier, in the southern French Alps near the town of Briancon. On a clear winter morning in the French Alps just over a year ago, Sascha, my 9 year old son, and I stood at the top of our first run at the Serre Chevalier ski area. I stamped to knock the snow from my skis, then pushed off, carving easy turns in the groomed track that spilled through groves of larch trees, Sascha following behind. "Help, Daddy!" he cried. I jammed to a stop, looked back and saw a tangle of limbs, skis and poles. "I'm stuck!" Sascha had taken a fall and lost his poles, but his skis had stayed on his feet, which were pinned underneath him. "It hurts. Help!" he said, the panic rising in his voice. "I want to go home." Ugh. Our first father son trip wasn't supposed to start like this. I sidestepped to him, released his skis and gently untwisted his legs. After a few comforting words and a suggestion that we take it easy, we set off side by side. "Sascha wants to spend more time with you," my wife, Lori, had said to me late one night that fall. "He and I were talking on the way home, and he said, 'I really want to do something with Daddy.'" Ouch. Since we'd moved to Paris from New York three years earlier, I had been working Sundays and evenings. I knew abstractly that Sascha and his younger sister were feeling my absence. We had dropped them into the neighborhood school, and within months they were fluent in French and had made new friends. Everything was fine, or so I thought. Our interactions were limited to frantic mornings hustling them off to school and fleeting good night kisses when I returned from work. Before I knew it, three years had passed and how well, really, did I know them? Something told me that an afternoon at the playground wasn't going to cut it. Sascha was old enough to travel with me by himself, I decided. I had a few days of vacation, and winter was coming up: ski trip. But the thought of driving seven hours to the Alps, skiing for two days, then driving back seemed grim and expensive. I wondered: Could we go by train? It would add an element of adventure and be considerably cheaper. A little research revealed that one of the few remaining night train routes would take us from Paris to the Southern Alps town of Briancon, the gateway to the sprawling ski station of Serre Chevalier, which bills itself as the largest resort in the southern French Alps. Rolling the dice, I booked tickets on the train, found a promising family style pension, the Hotel de l'Europe, in the nearby town of Le Monetier les Bains and immediately started worrying about the lack of snow, anxiously watching as webcams revealed a brownish, parched landscape. The week before we were due to leave, it started to snow, dumping a glorious 20 inches in a few days. We packed carefully, one duffel for me and a small wheelie for Sascha. I noticed, happily, that along with comic books and adventure stories he had packed Joe, the love worn bear he has kept close since he was a baby. Our train clattered into the Gare d'Austerlitz, looking dowdy compared with the sleek high speed trains that are replacing the night routes across Europe. We wedged ourselves into our compartment, in the lowest of the three bunks on either side. Sascha was happy in his nest with a reading light, a thin sleeping sack and a water bottle, and plunked himself on his stomach so he could look out the window. Slowly, our train chugged out of the station, swaying as the lights of Paris gave way to the suburbs and finally the darkened fields and woods. "Tuck me in, Daddy," he asked after a while, gripping Joe tightly. Awaking at the station in Briancon, we hopped on a shuttle bus that would take us to Le Monetier les Bains. Just past the first signs for Le Monetier we got our first glimpse of the high mountains. We clambered off at the edge of town and walked a few hundred meters up the rustic Rue St. Eldrade. At the Hotel de L'Europe, a cheerful woman with a British accent took one look at our bedraggled state and asked, "You'll be wanting breakfast, then?" After a restorative meal of yogurt, granola, still warm pastries and coffee (for me) and a hot cocoa (for Sascha), we checked out our room, which turned out to be a bright, newly renovated suite with one bedroom for each of us and two bathrooms. Before fatigue took hold we changed into our gear and walked to a nearby ski shop to get some intelligence about Serre Chevalier. "Keep to the middle of the mountain," we were told up high it would be windy and foggy later in the day, possibly stormy, and down below the snow cover was a little thin. Booted and suited, we caught a free shuttle bus to the new base lodge a few minutes away. It was surreal to be riding a chairlift in the bracing air a little more than 12 hours after leaving Paris. On the advice of the ski shop, we started with an intermediate run, Rochamout, where Sascha fell. By the bottom, helped by creamy, forgiving snow, we had our ski legs again. After lunch in the base lodge we headed back up as flurries began. Around 2 p.m. we decided to take the long chairlift from the middle of the mountain to a natural, treeless pass with the jolly name of Cucumelle. A few minutes after boarding, we were in a full fledged blizzard, pelted with stinging hail and buffeted by 60 mile an hour wind. I tucked Sascha's neck warmer into the base of his goggles, took his poles and told him to keep his head in his lap. "We won't be able to get down," he said in a panicky voice. Clearly, this was test No. 2. I pushed him off the lift, pointed him downhill and told him to grab one of my poles. We inched into the teeth of this unexpected storm and after a few agonizing minutes, found ourselves back among the calm of the trees. Feeling that was enough adventure for one day, we went back to the hotel, and to a dinner of pasta carbonara speckled with rich lardons, prepared by the hotel's proprietor and chef, Pascal Finat. (Sarah Finat, his wife, had greeted us in the morning.) Eleven hours of sleep later, we awoke to a blindingly sunny, crisp day, and cut first tracks on freshly groomed cruising runs through the larches and a few fir stands. Traditional chairlifts predominate in Serre Chevalier, so we had plenty of time to talk on the way up. I started out with softball questions: school (he didn't much like math); friends (all boys, he said, but with a little prodding admitted to liking two girls); favorite sports (soccer, of course). He was 9, after all; introspection could wait. I focused on observing his actions and moods, how school and sports like skiing came easily to him, how he stubbornly refused to ask for help until it was the only course of action left, how he was extremely sensitive to physical pain and discomfort. One of the joys of skiing in Europe is lunch, and I'd been told that the elusive restaurant L'Echaillon was the place to go. After a bit of up and down, we found a side trail that seemed to lead only to the restaurant. After another decadent soak in the thermal baths, we grabbed dinner at the excellent Pizza Nono, then took the shuttle back to the Briancon train station. There were no complaints from Sascha, no dawdling. He was becoming a travel partner, and I was already looking forward to our next trip. As we left the Paris station the next morning, our trip already seemed like a memory, a flash of sun and snow in a gray and drizzly Parisian winter. I sensed that Sascha was feeling some of the same melancholy. I stopped in the middle of the street and said "hug" our code for comforting him when he was younger. He squeezed me with strength that felt more like an adult's than a boy's.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
IN a world of infinite resources, one without responsibilities or consequences, I would drive nothing but V 8 Ford Mustangs. Each morning I'd get out of bed, fire up one of my perfectly toned muscle machines and spin its rear tires until great clouds of burned rubber billowed skyward. I'd spend the day racing all challengers, quitting only when it was time to head home for some sleep and to dream of doing it all again the next day. In the real world, my life does not live up to these Mustang fantasies, but that's not because of any shortcoming of the car. On the contrary: the 2011 Mustangs were impressive from the moment they went on sale in April 2010 with fresh engines and transmissions. The V 6 Mustang, reviewed on these pages last year, proved to be a well balanced package, with a 3.7 liter engine that delivered 305 horsepower and 31 m.p.g., by the E.P.A.'s rating, on the highway. While that V 6 is a popular and in most ways entirely fulfilling choice among buyers, historical precedent demands that a selection of V 8 engines is available. Brute power remains a prime attraction of the Mustang and its colleagues, a market segment that today has shrunk to include only the Chevrolet Camaro and Dodge Challenger as its other surviving members; as a class, it accounts for far fewer sales than when it was given the label of pony cars in the 1960s. Ford has stepped up with a pair of new V 8s: a 412 horsepower 5 liter engine for the Mustang GT and a supercharged 5.4 liter of 550 horsepower for the Shelby GT500, both available in summer ready convertible form. The V 8s elevate the Mustang's performance so that the GT now closely matches the 426 horsepower Chevrolet Camaro SS, and the GT500 closely parallels the supercharged Camaro ZL1, due next year. From outside, it's the 5.0 emblems on the 2011 Mustang GT's fenders that distinguish the car, giving it a direct, nostalgic appeal to the generations of homegrown mechanics who grew up hot rodding the 5 liter Mustangs built from 1979 to 1993. But those cars ran an all iron V 8, an engine whose family tree had roots reaching back to 1962. That engine used pushrods to operate two valves for each cylinder, and its performance in factory installed form peaked with a 240 horsepower version used in the 1994 95 Mustang Cobra. Squeezing 72 percent more power out of virtually the same displacement required updated technology. Nicknamed Coyote by Ford engineers during its development, the new 5.0 is an all aluminum, twin cam, 32 valve design with variable valve timing on both the intake and exhaust cams. Capped by a composite plastic intake manifold, this 5.0 is far more than a warmed over version of the underwhelming 4.6 liter "modular" V 8s used in the Mustang GT since 1996. But it is related. What it has in common with the 315 horsepower engine of the 2010 Mustang GT is a basic geometry that allows it to be machined and assembled on the existing production lines in Windsor, Ontario. Though the latest 5.0 lacks up to the minute features like direct fuel injection, it absolutely rips to its 7,000 r.p.m. limit. It's giddy, glorious, romping fun, exhaling magnificent sounds through its stainless steel exhaust headers. And the GT is quick. In tests done by Insideline.com, part of the Edmunds car buying Web site, a GT coupe equipped with the sublime Getrag 6 speed manual transmission thumped to 60 m.p.h. in 4.8 seconds and ran through the quarter mile in 13.3 seconds at 107.3 m.p.h. (The coupe is 115 pounds lighter than the 3,720 pound convertible, according to Ford.) Despite its capacity for furious acceleration, the Mustang GT's electronic throttle is sweetly progressive, enabling the engine to trawl through traffic with dignity. The E.P.A. rates the manual shift 2011 GT at a respectable 17 m.p.g. in the city and 26 m.p.g. on the highway. But it's not uncompromised. Compared with the Mustang coupe, the convertible's structure feels a bit soggy, as if there's a hairline fracture running diagonally across its floor. It's more noticeable with the soft top up than down. Otherwise, the GT convertible drives the same as the GT coupe. It's light on its feet, responds quickly to steering inputs and approaches its limits predictably and gently, even with the traction control system switched off. But as lovable and huggable as the Mustang GT is, it feels as if time is passing it by. The Mustang is a more practical car than the Camaro and easier to live with than the overgrown Dodge Challenger. But its trunk is dinky, the rear seat is all but useless and the wide doors swing open into neighboring cars in parking lots. More problematic is the convertible version of the Mustang GT's force fed sibling, the license shredding Shelby GT500. The acceleration of the GT500 borders on hallucinogenic; Insideline.com measured a GT500 coupe hitting 60 m.p.h. in 4.1 seconds and running through the quarter mile in 12.4. It slams forward so ferociously that the hemispheres of your brain feel as if they're sloshing apart in your skull. Simply blip the throttle and the torque 510 pound feet at peak seems to fold the GT500's structure over on itself. What's soggy in the GT's structure becomes limp linguini under the GT500's supercharged onslaught. This is way more engine than car. But it is the most powerful engine ever installed on a Ford assembly line discounting the wartime production of B 24 Liberator bombers with 550 horsepower available at 6,200 r.p.m. While the aluminum engine takes weight off the car's front end, and some suspension retuning makes the 2011 GT500 more civilized than the 2010 edition, this isn't a car for beginners. Turn off the electronic traction control and even a part throttle stab will overwhelm the Goodyear Eagle F1 285/35ZR19 rear tires. Hit a divot under hard acceleration even with the traction control on and the rear end will slam sideways into the next lane. Of course, in the hands of skilled driver a very skilled driver the GT500 is scaldingly fast. Yet it would be even quicker with a suspension that put more of the power on the pavement. What's light and delightful in the Mustang GT is brutish in the GT500. It takes a concentrated effort to haul the GT500's Tremec 6 speed manual transmission into gear. The steering has to wrestle with wide 255/40ZR19 front tires. The throttle reacts more suddenly. It's no longer entertaining; it's a spectacle. And after a while that's just exhausting. Beyond that, the throwback plastic interior pieces, indifferently tailored upholstery, often indecipherable instruments and cheap controls that are all tolerable in the 38,695 Mustang GT ( 42,530 as tested) are flat inexcusable in the 54,495 GT500 ( 60,330 as tested). No paddle shifted, computer controlled, automated transmission can match the elemental experience of shifting a fine manual gearbox behind a great V 8 engine. The Mustang GT is one of an ever shrinking number of new cars at any price to offer this pleasure. Anyone buying a car based primarily for its amusement value has to consider the GT. The GT500, on the other hand, is built for people who need the living daylights scared out of them at regular intervals. It's unsubtle and can reveal a mean streak. It's not as much fun as the GT, and fun is virtually all that matters with any Mustang. INSIDE TRACK: Another reminder that absolute power has its pitfalls.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
'ARMENIA!' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Jan. 13). The first major museum exhibition ever devoted to the art of Armenia officially its "medieval" era, but in fact spanning nearly 1,500 years bulges with weighty stone crosses, intricate altar frontals and flamboyantly illuminated Bibles and Gospel books unlike any manuscripts you've seen from that time. Armenia, in the Caucasus Mountains, was the first country to convert to Christianity, in the fourth century, and the richly painted religious texts here, lettered in the unique Armenian alphabet, are a testament to the centrality of the church in a nation that would soon be plunged into the world of Islam. By the end of the Middle Ages, Armenian artists were working as far afield as Rome, where an Armenian bishop painted this show's most astounding manuscript: a tale of Alexander the Great that features the Macedonian king's ship swallowed by an enormous brown crab, hooking the sails with its pincers as its mouth gapes. (Jason Farago) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI SCULPTURE: THE FILMS' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Feb. 18). This show is built around works by the Romanian modernist (1876 1957) that have been longtime highlights of the museum's own collection. But in 2018, can Brancusi still release our inner poet? The answer may lie in paying less attention to the sculptures themselves and more to Brancusi's little known and quite amazing films, projected at the entrance to the gallery throughout the duration of the exhibition. MoMA borrowed the series of video clips from the Pompidou Center in Paris. They give the feeling that Brancusi was less interested in making fancy museum objects than in putting new kinds of almost living things into the world and convey the vital energy his sculptures were meant to capture. (Blake Gopnik) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'CHAGALL, LISSITZKY, MALEVICH: THE RUSSIAN AVANT GARDE IN VITEBSK, 1918 1922' at the Jewish Museum (through Jan. 6). This crisp and enlightening exhibition, slimmed but not diminished from its initial outing at Paris's Centre Pompidou, restages the instruction, debates and utopian dreaming at the most progressive art school in revolutionary Russia. Marc Chagall encouraged stylistic diversity at the short lived People's Art School in his native Vitebsk (today in the republic of Belarus), and while his dreamlike paintings of smiling workers and flying goats had their defenders, the students came to favor the abstract dynamism of two other professors: Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky, whose black and red squares offered a radical new vision for a new society. Both the romantics and the iconoclasts would eventually fall out of favor in the Soviet Union, and the People's Art School would close in just a few years but this exhibition captures the glorious conviction, too rare today, that art must serve the people. (Farago) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org 'MARY CORSE' at Dia:Beacon in Beacon, N.Y., and 'MARY CORSE: A SURVEY IN LIGHT' at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through Nov. 25). Light, and specifically the radiant light of Los Angeles, shaped Corse's career. She became interested not just in representing light, but also in making objects that emitted or reflected it. This duo of shows features her light boxes or "light paintings" made with argon gas and Tesla coils, as well as her paintings on canvas that include glass microspheres, like those used in the lines that divide highway lanes. Both shows are overdue representations for Corse, who was an early member of the loosely defined Light and Space movement of the 1960s and '70s in California. (Martha Schwendener) 212 570 3600, whitney.org diaart.org 'CROWNS OF THE VAJRA MASTERS: RITUAL ART OF NEPAL' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Dec. 16). Up a narrow staircase, above the Met's galleries of South and Southeast Asian art, are three small rooms of art from the Himalayas. The space, a bit like a treehouse, is a capsule of spiritual energy, which is especially potent these days thanks to this exhibition. The crowns of the title look like antique versions of astronaut headgear: gilded copper helmets, studded with gems, encrusted with repousse plaques and topped by five pronged antennas the vajra, or thunderbolt of wisdom. Such crowns were believed to turn their wearers into perfected beings who are willing and able to bestow blessings on the world. This show is the first to focus on these crowns, and it does so with a wealth of compressed historical information, as well as several resplendent related sculptures and paintings from Nepal and Tibet. But it's the crowns themselves, the real ones, the wisdom generators, set in mandala formation in the center of the gallery, that are the fascinators. (Holland Cotter) 212 535 7710, metmuseum.org 'DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS: COMMUNITY AND PLACE IN URBAN PHOTOGRAPHY' at El Museo del Barrio (through Jan. 6). This show's title comes from the 1967 autobiography of the New York writer Piri Thomas, a community organizer of Puerto Rican and Cuban descent who grew up in what was then called Spanish Harlem. Five of the show's photographers Frank Espada (1930 2014), Perla de Leon, Hiram Maristany, Winston Vargas and Camilo Jose Vergara took as their beat that neighborhood, or Latino sections of Washington Heights, the South Bronx and Brownsville, Brooklyn. Others were working in Los Angeles. The pictures are a blend of documentary and portraiture. They see what's wrong in the world they record the poverty, the crowding but also the creativity encouraged by having to make do, and the warmth generated by bodies living in affectionate proximity. (Cotter) 212 831 7272, elmuseo.org 'EMPRESSES OF CHINA'S FORBIDDEN CITY' at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass. (through Feb. 10). Every emperor of the Qing dynasty had dozens of wives, concubines and serving girls, but only one of them could hold the title of empress. The lives of women at the late imperial court is the subject of this lavish and learned exhibition, which plots the fortunes of these consorts through their bogglingly intricate silk gowns, hairpins detailed with peacock feathers, and killer platform boots. (The Qing elite were Manchus; women did not bind their feet.) Many empresses' lives are lost to history; some, like the Dowager Empress Cixi, became icons in their own right. Most of the 200 odd dresses, jewels, religious artifacts and scroll paintings here are on rare loan from the Palace Museum in Beijing you will not have a chance to see these again without a trip to the People's Republic. (Farago) 978 745 9500, pem.org 'THE FUTURE' at the Rubin Museum of Art (through Jan. 7). It flies and flows and creeps. You measure it, spend it, waste it. It's on your side, or it's not. We're talking about time, and so is the Rubin. It is devoting its entire 2018 season and all its spaces to time as a theme, with an accent on the future. There's a fine historical show devoted to the Second Buddha, Padmasambhava ("lotus born"), subtitled "Master of Time." And the Brooklyn based artist Chitra Ganesh contributes a suite of bold large scale drawings that weave references to South Asian religions, Indian pop comics and 21st century feminism into a genre sometimes called Indo Futurism. (Cotter) 212 620 5000, rubinmuseum.org 'THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION' at the Museum of the Moving Image. The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America's great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program "Sam and Friends" before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother's old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through "Sesame Street" and "The Muppet Show," though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace and love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Farago) 718 784 0077, movingimage.us 'BODYS ISEK KINGELEZ: CITY DREAMS' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Jan. 1). The first comprehensive survey of the Congolese artist is a euphoric exhibition as utopian wonderland, featuring his fantasy architectural models and cities works strong in color, eccentric in shape, loaded with enthralling details and futuristic aura. Kingelez (1948 2015) was convinced that the world had never seen a vision like his, and this beautifully designed show bears him out. (Roberta Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'THE LONG RUN' at the Museum of Modern Art. The museum upends its cherished Modern narrative of ceaseless progress by mostly young (white) men. Instead we see works by artists 45 and older who have just kept on keeping on, regardless of attention or reward, sometimes saving the best for last. Art here is an older person's game, a pursuit of a deepening personal vision over innovation. Winding through 17 galleries, the installation is alternatively visually or thematically acute and altogether inspiring. (Smith) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'SARAH LUCAS: AU NATUREL' at the New Museum (through Jan. 20). Lucas emerged in the 1990s with the YBAs (Young British Artists), a group that included Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin and that didn't focus on a particular medium or style. They were postpunk which is to say, more focused on attitude than aptitude with a Generation X nihilism and malaise, as well as the clear message that anything, artistically, could be borrowed, stolen or sampled. Self portraits are among Lucas's weapons. Instead of sexualized, made up or fantastic portraits, hers are plain, androgynous and deadpan. And this exhibition, with its 150 objects many of them sculptures created in plaster or from women's stockings and tights stuffed with fluff is populated with penises and with cigarettes penetrating buttocks, rather than the breasts and vulvas modern artists have used to demonstrate their edginess. At just the right moment the MeToo moment Lucas shows us what it's like to be a strong, self determined woman; to shape and construct your own world; to live beyond other people's constricting terms; to challenge oppression, sexual dominance and abuse. (Schwendener) 212 219 1222, newmuseum.org 'FRANZ MARC AND AUGUST MACKE: 1909 1914' at Neue Galerie (through Jan. 21). Marc and Macke worked at the forefront of German art in the early 1900s, experimenting with audacious simplifications of forms, infusing colors with spiritual meanings and, in Marc's case, specializing in dreamy portraits of otherworldly animals. With the Russian born Wassily Kandinsky, the two friends also helped found a hugely influential circle of Munich painters known as the Blue Rider. But this dizzying, overstuffed exhibit at the Neue Galerie ends abruptly: Both men were killed in combat in World War I, Marc at 36 and Macke at only 27. (Will Heinrich) 212 628 6200, neuegalerie.org 'THE PROGRESSIVE REVOLUTION: MODERN ART FOR A NEW INDIA' at Asia Society (through Jan. 20). The first show in the United States in decades devoted to postwar Indian painting continues a welcome, belated effort in Western museums to globalize art history after 1945. The Progressive Artists' Group, founded in Bombay (now Mumbai) in the afterglow of independence, sought a new painterly language for a new India, making use of hot color and melding folk traditions with high art. These painters were Hindus, Muslims and Catholics, and they drew freely from Picasso and Klee, Rajasthani architecture and Zen ink painting, in their efforts to forge art for a secular, pluralist republic. Looking at them 70 years on, as India joins so many other countries taking a nativist turn, they offer a lovely, regret tinged view of a lost horizon. (Farago) 212 288 6400, asiasociety.org/new york 'SCENES FROM THE COLLECTION' at the Jewish Museum. After a surgical renovation to its grand pile on Fifth Avenue, the Jewish Museum has reopened its third floor galleries with a rethought, refreshed display of its permanent collection, which intermingles 4,000 years of Judaica with modern and contemporary art by Jews and gentiles alike Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and the excellent young Nigerian draftswoman Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. The works are shown in a nimble, nonchronological suite of galleries, and some of its century spanning juxtapositions are bracing; others feel reductive, even dilettantish. But always, the Jewish Museum conceives of art and religion as interlocking elements of a story of civilization, commendably open to new influences and new interpretations. (Farago) 212 423 3200, thejewishmuseum.org 'SOUL OF A NATION: ART IN THE AGE OF BLACK POWER' at the Brooklyn Museum (through Feb. 3). It will be a happy day when racial harmony rules in the land. But that day's not arriving any time soon. Who could have guessed in the 1960s when civil rights became law that a new century would bring white supremacy tiki torching out of the closet and turn the idea that black lives matter, so beyond obvious, into a battle cry? Actually, African Americans were able to see such things coming. No citizens know the national narrative, and its implacable racism, better. And no artists have responded to that history that won't go away more powerfully than black artists have. More than 60 of them appear in this big, beautiful, passionate show of art that functioned as seismic detector, political persuader and defensive weapon. (Cotter) 718 638 8000, brooklynmuseum.org 'THROUGH A DIFFERENT LENS: STANLEY KUBRICK PHOTOGRAPHS' at the Museum of the City of New York (through Jan. 6). This exhibition of the great director's photography is essentially Kubrick before he became Kubrick. Starting in 1945, when he was 17 and living in the Bronx, he worked as a photographer for Look magazine, and the topics he explored are chestnuts so old that they smell a little moldy: lovers embracing on a park bench as their neighbors gaze ostentatiously elsewhere, patients anxiously awaiting their doctor's appointments, boxing hopefuls in the ring, celebrities at home, pampered dogs in the city. It probably helped that Kubrick was just a kid, so instead of inducing yawns, these magazine perennials struck him as novelties, and he in turn brought something fresh to them. Photographs that emphasize the mise en scene could be movie stills: a shouting circus executive who takes up the right side of the foreground while aerialists rehearse in the middle distance, a boy climbing to a roof with the city tenements surrounding him, a subway car filled with sleeping passengers. Looking at these pictures, you want to know what comes next. (Arthur Lubow) 212 534 1672, mcny.org 'TOWARD A CONCRETE UTOPIA: ARCHITECTURE IN YUGOSLAVIA, 1948 1980' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Jan. 13). This nimble, continuously surprising show tells one of the most underappreciated stories of postwar architecture: the rise of avant garde government buildings, pie in the sky apartment blocks, mod beachfront resorts and even whole new cities in the southeast corner of Europe. Tito's Yugoslavia rejected both Stalinism and liberal democracy, and its neither nor political position was reflected in architecture of stunning individuality, even as it embodied collective ambitions that Yugoslavs called the "social standard." From Slovenia, where elegant office buildings drew on the tradition of Viennese modernism, to Kosovo, whose dome topped national library appears as a Buckminster Fuller fever dream, these impassioned buildings defy all our Cold War vintage stereotypes of Eastern Europe. Sure, in places the show dips too far into Socialist chic. But this is exactly how MoMA should be thinking as it rethinks its old narratives for its new home next year. (Farago) 212 708 9400, moma.org 'CHARLES WHITE: A RETROSPECTIVE,' at the Museum of Modern Art (through Jan. 13) and 'TRUTH AND BEAUTY: CHARLES WHITE AND HIS CIRCLE,' at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery (through Nov. 10). What a beautiful artist White was. Hand of an angel, eye of a sage. Although White, who died in 1979, is often mentioned today as a teacher and mentor of luminaries like David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall, his is no case of reflected glory. In this career survey, he shines, from a 1939 mural called "Five Great American Negroes" to his astonishing late masterpiece "Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man)." As a valuable addendum to the MoMA retrospective, a group show at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in Chelsea includes, along with fine pieces by White himself, an array of work by artists, old and young, whom he worked with or influenced. (Cotter) 212 708 9400, moma.org 212 247 0082, michaelrosenfeldart.com	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
What's the Just for Laughs festival like? As a comedy nerd, the idea that there's a place you can go where there's an enormous amount of your favorite comedians all performing and you can jump around to different shows is just crazy. As a fan, I ran around and caught Andy Dick, the "Oh, Hello" show, Maria Bamford. I brought my daughter who was about to run off to college and we had the best time. How are the audiences, compared with other places? I thought they were so warm and excited about comedy that it felt like the perfect place to tape a special. I like getting out of major cities like New York and talking about my life, show business and politics in a place where people are watching it from a distance. People who come are so receptive to comedy. That made it fun and allows you to experiment more. How do you characterize Montreal's sense of humor? I don't know if cities are funny, but you definitely feel the vibe of certain cities or people who go to comedy shows. When you play San Francisco it's different than Philadelphia. It's a little more raucous in Philadelphia. There's a fun, aggressive energy in the crowd in Philly and very attentive energy in San Francisco. Montreal feels like a very smart, warm, enthusiastic crowd. There seems to be some sense of the absurd. I also think because Hollywood is so far away that they seem pretty amused by any story I told about the ridiculous things that happened there. How does Cirque du Soleil fit into the comedy scene in Montreal? I'm such a fan of Cirque du Soleil. My daughters are 19 and 14 and we've probably seen 80 percent of all the shows they've ever put on. When we travel around the world promoting things, we try to see the Cirque du Soleil show in that city. It's scary and funny and beautiful and experimental. A city that creates and embraces, that is the best kind of city.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
The fact that the third night of the Democratic National Convention, when Kamala Harris officially accepted her party's nomination for vice president, followed the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment and women's right to vote (or rather, some women's right to vote) was both fitting and significant, given that it was an evening filled with strong female voices, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Representative Gabby Giffords and Senator Elizabeth Warren. They were in the majority, aside from former President Barack Obama, whose stirring, urgent ode to the Constitution delivered from the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia and the constant work and faith demanded to make a "better union," was driven by his warning that such faith was now under almost existential threat from President Trump. And the women spoke both personally and powerfully: of the choice facing the nation, of the critical need to vote, of how the Democratic presidential candidate Joseph R. Biden Jr. will address the issues of gun control, child care of their own lived experience. Mrs. Clinton, in her living room, addressed the election of 2016; Ms. Pelosi spoke of the change for which women are fighting in the House of Representatives; Ms. Warren, of the plan for an infrastructure for families. They acknowledged the work of those who came before. As part of that, Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Pelosi and Ms. Giffords all wore white, the color that, since Mrs. Clinton's nomination for president in 2016 when she wore a white suit for her acceptance speech, has become a tacit nod to the suffragists in the public political discourse. It was the color worn by the historic numbers of women in Congress at the State of the Union in 2019; the color worn by Ms. Pelosi when she announced that the House would begin drafting articles of impeachment against the president later that year. Ms. Warren wore a red jacket; Mr. Obama, a blue shirt, tie and suit. But for much of the night, it was the white, with all its implicit associations, that echoed. Until Ms. Harris, that is. The nominee took to the stage alone in a cavernous room in Wilmington, Del., filled with flags but no visible people. And she wore burgundy. To be specific, she wore a double breasted, broad shouldered jacket with slightly flared trousers as she talked about the women who paved her way and inspired her, from her mother to Representative Shirley Chisholm. As she shared her own journey, and decried the current crises of Covid 19 and structural racism, and the way they are being handled. As she accepted her historic nomination, and moved her party, and possibly the country, forward. The white suits have served as potent iconography: a symbol of women's voices, and unity, and struggle. But they have also represented frustration and women's role as the opposition. Ms. Harris's decision to do something different was a reminder that we are on the verge of a new era. (You can bet the issue of "to wear white or not to wear white" was raised at some point in the planning of her appearance, given its butterfly effect since this event four years ago; these choices are highly considered.) Much has been made of the fact that Ms. Harris is being anointed as her party's future, a woman at the forefront of a new generation of Democratic leaders. The election looms. There is a chance, once again, to change history. In etching that idea across the retinas of the voting public, every detail, even the color of a suit, matters.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The Black Sea isn't black, and it's not usually turquoise either. But a huge bloom of phytoplankton has illuminated it and the connected Bosporus and the Golden Horn of Istanbul with beautiful swirls of milky blue green. This aquatic artwork appears every summer, but this year's bloom is one of the brightest since 2012, according to Norman Kuring, a NASA scientist. It's so bright, it can be seen from space. NASA created this composite image of the bloom with data and satellite images on May 29. It has gotten brighter since and appears to be nearing its expected peak, around the summer solstice. After a particularly luminous weekend, thousands of people began talking about the opaque, jewel toned water on social media. The marine artists responsible are most likely phytoplankton, teeny organisms that live off energy derived from a combination of dissolved nutrients and their ability, like plants, to break down sunlight. In the Black Sea, and the eastern European rivers Danube and Dnieper that feed it, live a common group of phytoplankton called coccolithophores.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
To the director Michael Fimognari's credit, "P.S. I Still Love You" doesn't condescend to Lara Jean's dilemma even as her choices deserve popcorn pelted at the screen. Yet, he's content with a product that seems beamed in from a staticky old channel. Despite Condor's determination to make Lara Jean feel like a real girl albeit with distracting false eyelashes she's stuck being a clone, opening the film crooning "And Then He Kissed Me" to her bedroom mirror just as Elisabeth Shue did in "Adventures in Babysitting." Later, when Lara Jean's loyalty is divided by the reappearance of her sixth grade crush (Jordan Fisher), an emotionally attuned dork who, like her, prefers to spend his Saturdays playing bingo, the soundtrack broods with a moody cover of "Girls Just Want to Have Fun." How canny to capitalize on a youthful ache to rewind to an era when Molly Ringwald wasn't forced to worry about school shootings and climate change. (The year Nixon resigned, 1974, TV viewers made a hit out of "Happy Days.") Fimognari, promoted from the job of cinematographer on the first installment, occasionally cribs a shot from a more ambitious movie: a floating kiss; a pair of snow angels; an argument on a class trip to the aquarium filmed before a tank of bioluminescent jellyfish, recalling a James Bond brawl in "Skyfall." Mostly, however, the visuals are childish, with saturated tinting that has to be squinted through, as though a lollipop melted on the lens. Ironically, the film's best sequences are wish fulfillment for geriatrics. Lara Jean's retro fixation reaches its peak when she volunteers at Belleview, a retirement home with fortune tellers, posh soirees and a former Pan Am flight attendant named Stormy (Holland Taylor) lording over the palm frond fantasia like a screwball grande dame. The rooms are art deco, the wardrobes are doo wop, and the residents groove to the Bee Gees. Pass the prune daiquiris yes, there are prune daiquiris and get drunk on nostalgia. To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
In 2015, the beauty retailer Sephora made its brand tagline "Let's Beauty Together," switching away from a prior mantra, "The Beauty Authority." Its senior vice president for marketing and brand, Deborah Yeh, explained the tagline several years later: "Beauty is diverse and has many voices and faces," she said. "We believe it's for our clients to define and for us to celebrate." In late April, the R B star SZA, who is black (and has said she worked at Sephora before she made it as a musician), reported that a Sephora employee in Calabasas, Calif., had "called security to make sure I wasn't stealing." The news threatened to upset that carefully honed, diversity focused image, which has resonated with the brand's young American customers. On Wednesday, Sephora will close all of its stores in order to host a "one hour inclusivity workshop" for employees at retail locations, distribution centers and corporate offices in the United States. The brand announced these plans in the caption of a Facebook video several weeks ago. Separately, the brand apologized to SZA, and said it was "working with our teams to address the situation immediately." The training comes in tandem with the release of a Sephora "manifesto," entitled "We Belong to Something Beautiful," that is meant to outline the brand's commitment to championing diversity and self expression. "While it is true that SZA's experience occurred prior to the launch of the 'We Belong to Something Beautiful' campaign, the campaign was not the result of this Tweet," said a statement released by Sephora. "However, it does reinforce why belonging is now more important than ever." The company had been planning the one hour workshop for its 16,000 employees for more than six months, the statement explained.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
A scene from "Sun in the Last Days of Shogunate," one of 38 movies in the retrospective. What is shitamachi, besides the title of a major series of Japanese movies starting Friday at Film Forum? Easier to say what it's not. It's not tea ceremonies in the imperial gardens. It's not high fashion in Harajuku or the neon frenzy of Shibuya. It's definitely not Bill Murray lounging, lost in translation, in the minimalist splendor of the Shinjuku Park Hyatt. The full name of the 38 film series, "Shitamachi: Tales of Downtown Tokyo," offers a partial explanation. But having begun as a designation for the eastern, low lying, more working class areas of the Japanese capital when it was still called Edo, shitamachi has lost some of its geographic specificity through centuries marked by earthquakes, fires, bombing s and chaotic growth. (Ginza may now be Tokyo's high end shopping district, but when Mikio Naruse made "Ginza Cosmetics" in 1951, it was still shitamachi .) Through time the word has come to refer to quadrants of the mind as much as the map, denoting a rambunctious spirit, an earthy frankness, a mercantile impulse and a healthy grudge against the upper classes who oppress and marginalize. It also implies nostalgia, for better times that might have come before the shogunate, or before World War II, or before the great recession of the early 1990s. And you will end up, in nearly every movie, alongside or above a river, usually the Sumida, which passes through shitamachi identified wards like Adachi, Arakawa, Sumida, Koto and Taito. Barges, warehouses and scrubby, empty patches of riverbank are constant motifs. The water separates the fictional red light district Suzaki Paradise from the more respectable but grindingly poor and boring environs on the other side. The singing and dancing anti imperial protesters of Shohei Imamura's " Eijanaika " (1981) run into violent reality when they try to cross the river into the tonier precincts of Nihonbashi. Much of the action of "Where Chimneys Are Seen" takes place in the shadow of a towering levee that doesn't keep the river from flooding the neighborhood when the rains are heavy. Building around the flexible concept of shitamachi has allowed the guest programmer of the Film Forum series, Aiko Masubuchi , to put together something quite different than the usual Japanese film roundup. Rather than two weeks of the Yasujiro Ozu or Akira Kurosawa canon or a collection of samurai or yakuza favorites, the series is a cross section of the country's cinema, roaming periods (from Ozu's 1933 "Woman of Tokyo" to Nami Iguchi 's 2004 "The Cat Leaves Home") and genres. Pure genre films are the exception, but they're present Seijun Suzuki' s "Kanto Wanderer" (1963) is a B movie yakuza entertainment, but the small time scrambling of the gangsters, the nostalgia for a more prosperous and chivalrous era and the harborside Shinagawa setting are all shitamachi signifiers. The majority of the series, however, represents what is known as shomin geki , or realist, slice of life movies usually about working class characters. It's a style heavily associated with Ozu and Naruse, who between them are represented by seven films. Of more interest, though, are less familiar examples like "Humanity and Paper Balloons," which Masubuchi who grew up on the east side of Tokyo in shitamachi areas called the classic shitamachi film, one that lays the groundwork for the genre. The film opens as the residents of a claustrophobic alley react to the suicide of a neighbor, with curiosity but also with irritation when the investigation keeps them from getting to work. It all turns out well, though, when the barber Shinza ( Kan'emon Nakamura ) baits their landlord into supplying sake for a wake that turns into a raucous block party. Yamanaka, in his last film, neatly balances the comedy of the small community's scrappy recalcitrance with the story's darker strains. Unno ( Chojuro Kawarasaki ), a down on his luck samurai, stoically endures a string of humiliations as he tries to collect on a debt owed to his dead father. The rebellious Shinza, meanwhile, who won't accept that a man of his station can't do whatever he wants, is regularly beaten and harassed. Standing up for yourself in shitamachi is a difficult and dangerous business. Perhaps the best discovery of the series is "Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate," a finely honed comedy that placed 40th in a list that Akira Kurosawa's daughter compiled of 100 of her father's favorite movies. Like "Paper Balloons" it's set within a self contained community, taking place mostly inside a brothel that serves as a crossroads for its Shinagawa neighborhood. Samurai, monks, con men, noodle sellers and peddlers of books and kimonos pass through, on easy terms with the squabbling prostitutes and a browbeaten crew of serving boys. In true shitamachi fashion, fellowship does not prevent anyone on the premises from sponging or grifting. The monks don't tip, the samurai don't pay and a carpenter whose tools are held against his debt gets them back by selling his daughter to the house. The hero of the piece, the "wastrel" Saheiji ( Frankie Sakai ), puts off paying his bill by simply refusing to leave. Shitamachi may be "a region that is both physical and imagined, with very blurry borders," as Masubuchi says, but when you're there you know exactly where you are. "Shitamachi: Tales of Downtown Tokyo" runs through Nov. 7 at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, Manhattan, filmforum.org.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Taylor Swift, Beyonce and Dua Lipa lead the nominees for the 63rd annual Grammy Awards, which will be held in January. Beyonce, Taylor Swift and Dua Lipa dominate the nominations for the 63rd annual Grammy Awards, leading a diverse if somewhat scattershot collection of artists for January's edition of music's top awards show. Beyonce, with the most nods overall, received nine nominations in eight categories, including both record and song of the year for "Black Parade," a track released during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests this summer with lyrics like "Put your fists up in the air, show Black love." In the best record category, Beyonce will compete against herself as the featured guest on Megan Thee Stallion's hit "Savage." Swift, whose last two LPs received minimal attention from the Grammys and did not win any prizes got six nominations, including five for "Folklore," the blockbuster album she recorded during the coronavirus pandemic. "Folklore" is up for album of the year and best pop vocal album, and her song "Cardigan" got two nods, including song of the year. She even got a nomination for "Beautiful Ghosts," a song she wrote with Andrew Lloyd Webber for the much maligned film version of "Cats." Other top nominees for next year's show, which is scheduled for Jan. 31, include the rapper Roddy Ricch, with six in four categories, and Brittany Howard, the frontwoman and guitarist of the band Alabama Shakes, with five for her solo debut. Billie Eilish, the 18 year old auteur who swept the most recent awards, and the rappers Megan Thee Stallion and DaBaby each got four. But while the Grammys in recent years have made significant progress in reflecting the tides of current pop music, the latest crop of nominations includes some puzzling choices and snubs. The Weeknd, the Canadian pop star whose "After Hours" is one of the biggest albums of the year and who will perform at the Super Bowl halftime show in February was spurned entirely, as was Luke Combs, perhaps the most successful young hitmaker in Nashville. The Weeknd spoke out with a cryptic post across his social media channels on Tuesday night. "The Grammys remain corrupt," he wrote. "You owe me, my fans and the industry transparency ..." In response, Harvey Mason Jr. of the Recording Academy said in a statement that he "was surprised and can empathize with what he's feeling." He also denied that the Weeknd's lack of nominations was a retaliation against the singer for performing at the Super Bowl, as floated in some theories online. BTS, the K pop phenomenon, received its first nomination down the ballot in the best pop duo/group category, a placement sure to be noticed by the group's huge and protective fan base. A posthumous album by the rap star Pop Smoke that has been one of the year's biggest chart hits also received just one notice: best rap performance for his song "Dior." 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. The major categories are dotted with artists who are far from household names. Black Pumas, a rock band with a retro soul sound but little public profile is up for record of the year ("Colors") and best album, for a deluxe version of its self titled debut LP. (The original version, released in June 2019, fell outside the awards' eligibility window, which covers music that came out from September 2019 to August 2020.) The makeup of live awards shows has been changing throughout the pandemic, with little apparent consensus among producers about how to put an event together. The Billboard Music Awards in October, for example, had no live audience, but the American Music Awards this week had a limited crowd (as well as cardboard cutouts of Beyonce and Jay Z). How the Grammys, music's biggest awards show, will handle its broadcast is unclear. In an interview, Mason, a producer and songwriter who is the chairman and interim chief executive of the Recording Academy, the nonprofit behind the Grammys, said the organization intended to hold a live event in Los Angeles with a small audience, and that artists would be present to perform and accept awards. Many details are still being worked out; Trevor Noah, from "The Daily Show," will be the host. There has also been tumult behind the scenes at the academy, which has come under fire for its poor record in recognizing Black artists and women in the major awards. The academy also had an explosive conflict with its former chief executive, Deborah Dugan, who accused the organization of tolerating sexual harassment and of violating the integrity of its nominations process. The academy has denied those accusations, and has made a number of efforts over the last year to diversify its ranks, including inviting more than 2,300 new members; 74 percent accepted the invitation to join. Mason said an expanded membership is key to making the awards reflect the true state of music. "This is a peer to peer award," he said. "Whoever gets the votes wins. So we have to make sure that the people who are voting are knowledgeable and representative of the music, and are voting with the intent of recognizing and honoring quality music." Last January, five months after she took over with a mandate to change the academy's status quo and just 10 days before the Grammys event, Dugan was removed from her post, and later terminated. The academy said she had mistreated an underling. In a legal complaint, Dugan denied that accusation and said that her dismissal was retaliation for documenting a range of misconduct and other problems at the organization, including excessive legal fees and conflicts of interest by board members. For the latest Grammy Awards, the crop of nominees includes many women and artists of color. But that has also been the case for several years now, and the true test of change at the Grammys may be who ultimately wins. Reaction to the news was mixed. BTS fans celebrated the group's first nomination but griped that the boy band was shut out of the major categories. And in an Instagram post, Justin Bieber, who received four nods, including best pop vocal album for "Changes," complained that he was not nominated in an R B category. "I am very meticulous intentional about my music," Bieber wrote. "With that being said I set out to make an R B album. Changes is an R B album. It is not being acknowledged as an R B album which is very strange to me." (He added, "Please don't mistake this as me being ungrateful.") In addition to Swift, Lipa and Black Pumas, the nominations for album of the year include Post Malone's "Hollywood's Bleeding," a major streaming hit; Haim's "Women in Music Pt. III"; "Chilombo" by Jhene Aiko; Coldplay's "Everyday Life"; and "Djesse Vol. 3," a project by the British multi instrumentalist Jacob Collier. Also up for record of the year are DaBaby's breakthrough hit "Rockstar," featuring Ricch, which gained extra currency with a Black Lives Matter themed remix; "Say So" by the rapper, singer and internet firebrand Doja Cat; Eilish's "Everything I Wanted"; and Post Malone's "Circles." In the song of the year category, "Black Parade," "Cardigan" and "Don't Stop Now" will go up against "Circles," "Everything I Wanted," Ricch's hit "The Box," H.E.R.'s "I Can't Breathe" and "If the World Was Ending," by JP Saxe with Julia Michaels, whose popularity on TikTok helped it become a streaming hit. The world music category was named best global music album to avoid what the academy considered "connotations of colonialism, folk and 'non American.'" Nominees include Bebel Gilberto, Anoushka Shankar, Antibalas, Burna Boy and Tinariwen. Over the summer, as the music industry wrestled with issues of race, the academy announced that it had renamed urban contemporary as progressive R B. That change predated the industry's most recent discussions, but the connotations of "urban" have long been debated, including at the Grammys. Nominees for best progressive R B album which, according to the academy's peculiar musicology, "may include samples and elements of hip hop, rap, dance and electronic music" as well as "production elements found in pop, euro pop, country, rock, folk and alternative" are Aiko, Chloe x Halle, Free Nationals, Robert Glasper and Thundercat. The nominations for this year's 83 categories were winnowed down from more than 23,000 submissions an uptick from the 21,000 that were submitted for the 62nd annual ceremony, suggesting that musicians have focused on recording work in the absence of live opportunities during quarantine. One category was affected by the pandemic, however. The nominations for best immersive audio album formerly known as best surround sound album were delayed because, according to a Recording Academy spokeswoman, the panel of specialists who review those recordings considered virtual meetings but decided that "there was not a way to judge all the entries in a thorough manner that does justice to the entries and was safe for the committee members." The entries for that category will be taken up again next year, but judged separately from the 64th annual submissions.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Music
Stephen Gan, center, in the front row at the Hugo Boss men's spring 2018 show in New York. In mid June, Stephen Gan, the founder and editor in chief of V magazine and the creative director of Elle, was eviscerated on Diet Prada, the Instagram feed popular in the fashion industry. Many of his former staffers told the editors of the feed that he was racist, homophobic and sexist. One recalled Mr. Gan known for his close associations with big industry names like Karl Lagerfeld and Hedi Slimane ordering an intern to be fired because Mr. Gan didn't like the way he walked. It was too effeminate. Another remembered Mr. Gan saying that Alicia Keys, on the cover of V with an Afro, "looked primal." A third claimed that he paid a Black female employee a settlement after she began tape recording meetings with him in the office. In a statement Mr. Gan gave to Diet Prada, he said it was "ludicrous" that he, a gay Asian man, would be singled out for homophobia. He followed it up with a post on V's Instagram account saying that he was committed to "acknowledging my shortcomings," though he declined a request to be interviewed for this article, calling the claims "rumors." The fashion industry, which has long considered elitism and exclusion to be core values, is going through a painful transition. Bad behavior there tended to be not just forgiven, but also romanticized in the name of creative genius. Anna Wintour, fashion's most famous power broker, inspired "The Devil Wears Prada," a best selling book that depicts a queen bee fashion editor as the personification of evil. So she showed up to the premiere of the blockbuster movie version in Prada, the perception of nastiness only adding to her mystique. Recently, after the publication of an unstinting memoir by Ms. Wintour's longtime colleague Andre Leon Talley, who is Black, she apologized for "publishing images and stories that were hurtful and intolerant" in Vogue. But internally Ms. Bailey was known for burning through staff members, dozens of whom complained in recent years to the human resources department of Hearst (its parent company) about what they regarded to be verbally abusive behavior, according to six former employees at the magazine and two Hearst executives. Efforts by management consultants who were brought in by Hearst to work with Ms. Bailey on her behavior never got more than temporary results, the executives said. Late last year, Ms. Bailey's employers came to the belief that the MeToo movement was going to give way to a broader reckoning about bad boss behavior and reached the conclusion that after almost 19 years, Ms. Bailey's role needed to change, according to two people with knowledge of the situation who were not authorized to speak publicly by Hearst. (Ms. Bailey did not respond to a request for comment for this article.) Soon after, Hearst announced that Ms. Bailey was "stepping down" and being made a "global consultant" for Harper's Bazaar's 29 editions worldwide. Four months later, the U.S. edition of Harper's Bazaar hired Samira Nasr, its first Black editor in chief in its history. In part because V, unlike Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, is an independent fashion magazine known for its campy, risk taking ethos, some were surprised Mr. Gan himself would come under fire. In response to questions for this article, Mr. Gan, through a representative, sent a lengthy email to The New York Times. His statement did not respond directly to any of the claims made by his former staff members, but said that V's mandate was to celebrate "uniqueness and champion individuality." Musical artists of color like Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys and Missy Elliott, who sold millions of albums but never got American Vogue covers, got covers of V, which was also the first major fashion magazine to feature Beyonce in that spot, in 2004. Mr. Gan also said he could not have "published a scantily clad Ashley Graham or put Hunter Schafer or Lizzo on the covers of V and produce these shoots with an editorial team that thought I'd be judgmental on how they themselves looked." The magazine has had few Black employees in significant creative positions over the years. More than half a dozen people who worked at V over the last decade said that Mr. Gan seemed to favor his male employees and marginalize women, although nearly everyone was subjected to lacerating comments. "He had little to no regard for the people who worked for him," said Ricky Michiels, a former photo editor at V who started in June 2017 and quit four months later with no job lined up. "We were all disposable." Natasha Stagg, who worked at the magazine from 2012 to 2016, by which point she was its editor, said: "We connected over our love for tragic figures and pop culture and impossible personalities and fantasy fashion, but I always felt sort of analytical when I was talking about those things, and I think Stephen was totally just in it." "There was a kind of performative quality to his behavior," she said, adding, "It was like a cartoon in my mind it was even a little comical, except that it shouldn't really be funny." Carolyne Loree Teston came to the magazine as Mr. Gan's assistant in 2015 after three years at Baron Baron, one of the industry's most well known ad agencies. She cried last week as she talked about her concerns over discussing her former boss publicly. "I don't want to hurt him, I don't want to dance on his grave," she said. But having quit her job there in 2016 after just eight weeks, she believed a reckoning was nevertheless in order. "It was like 'The Devil Wears Prada,'" she said "Everyone was afraid of Stephen." In 1999, Mr. Gan and his partners started V, a consumer fashion magazine that looked like the love child of Interview and W and became a showcase for photographers such as Inez van Lamsweerde, Steven Klein and Mario Testino. Two years later, Ms. Bailey, who'd achieved great success editing Marie Claire, took over Harper's Bazaar and hired Mr. Gan as her creative director. It was a choice that "brought her immediate credibility on the runway," as David Carr wrote in The Times. As part of his deal with Hearst, Mr. Gan, who is now 54, was allowed to continue running V. He became close friends with Hedi Slimane, art directed ad campaigns for Chanel and hosted parties with Chanel's designer, Karl Lagerfeld, and his young godson, Hudson Kroenig. Over the years, Mr. Gan also became more and more interested in mainstream pop culture, while Ms. Dean and Mr. Kaliardos veered further into the art world. In 2014, Mr. Kaliardos and Ms. Dean split from Mr. Gan. They took Visionaire; he kept V (along with the SoHo offices). "It was like parents getting divorced," Ms. Stagg said. Hannah Huffman, who worked as an office manager and photo director at the magazine from 2015 to 2018, believed the sole reason she was hired at the magazine was her appearance. "I literally walked into the office, Stephen came into the conference room, looked me up and down, said, 'OK,' and then walked out," she said. "It didn't matter what else was going on or if I was a qualified human." Mr. Gan "wasn't a screamer," said Sara Zaidane, a market editor at the magazine from 2016 to March 2020. But that didn't stop him from engaging in what she regarded to be abusive behavior, dressing her down and humiliating her in front of their colleagues. "He liked to have an audience." "I was in charge of the credit lists," Ms. Zaidane said. "And in the spring of 2019, I put Saint Laurent on a list when we had another shoot entirely of Saint Laurent. In my mind, it made sense to have another look. We gave highest priority to brands that spent the most money on ad pages, and they were one of our biggest vendors, but he decided to take 15 minutes in a staff meeting to tell me I was disorganized and that Karl Lagerfeld's godson could do my job better than me. So that was what he felt: I was less qualified to do my job than an 11 year old." Another time, Mr. Gan walked into the fashion closet and noticed that the clock wasn't working. "He just went off, saying I had no attention to detail, that my apartment is probably a mess because I can't even see things when they're right in front of my face," Ms. Zaidane said. "He said my time at the magazine that the clock was ticking. And he said this with a whole group of people standing around." (Both anecdotes were confirmed by another staff member who worked contemporaneously with her.) Mr. Michiels was one of several former employees who came to believe that Mr. Gan favored male staff members. "It was so ironic," Mr. Michiels said. "Here's a guy who idolizes women's beauty and bodies, but the women in his office he couldn't even bother saying good morning or thank you to. With me and Hannah, If we ever had a problem maybe I sent a call sheet too late she would take the brunt of it, even though I was the senior person and was at fault. No matter what, it was Hannah's fault." In the summer of 2016, Mr. Michiels and Ms. Huffman hired an intern who wasn't thin. "Steven said, 'Who hired her?'" Mr. Michiels recalled. "He said she didn't fit V. He was appalled that we would hire someone who was not stick thin. It had nothing to do with her work ethic or anything, it was strictly based on looks. He never even talked to her." Mr. Gan suggested firing her, they said. Ms. Huffman and Mr. Michiels refused "She wasn't even being paid!" Mr. Michiels said and soon left their positions. In 2017, Bianca Collado finished her sophomore year at Hunter College and took an internship at V. Five weeks in, she wore what she described as a "halter top with high waisted jeans and a little jacket over it" and no bra underneath. That day, a catered lunch was being served in the office, she said, and Mr. Gan walked up to her. "He'd never even spoken to me before and the first words out of his mouth were: 'What makes you think you can wear that here?'" Ms. Collado said. "He was looking at my chest as he said this, and I didn't even know what to say. I think I replied, 'I didn't realize it was a problem,' and he said, 'I don't ever want to see you wearing anything like this ever again.'" Ms. Collado thought it was ridiculous. "The boys wore booty shorts and cut up crop tops to the office," she said. She quit that afternoon. By then, the industry was facing pressure to diversify after several years in which designers like Dolce Gabbana and Celine had staged fashion shows all but devoid of Black models. None of this prevented Mr. Gan's career from progressing at Hearst, where he moved from Harper's Bazaar to Elle, which is edited by Nina Garcia, in 2018. There are conflicting reports about Mr. Gan's future at Elle. On June 15, WWD reported that his contract, expiring soon, would not be renewed. Two days later, Mr. Gan said he was still employed. And the allegations against him don't pertain to his behavior at Hearst. Some of Mr. Gan's colleagues, particularly those who are a little older, say informal and cutting humor on the basis of appearance, race and sexual orientation is endemic to the fashion business, and that if Mr. Gan is being held to account for his comments, then few working in fashion are safe. But Mr. Gan's younger employees argue that it is possible to be openly gay and homophobic; to be both a champion of women and Black celebrities, and an abuser of women and Black people whose demeanor and appearance does not comport to rigid standards.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
MOSCOW A Moscow movie theater that bucked an official ban on showing "The Death of Stalin," a British black comedy about the Soviet dictator's death, has halted screenings after a police raid on Friday. In a Facebook post, Pioner Cinema wrote that the 2017 film, by the director Armando Iannucci, which had been playing to sold out crowds, had been pulled as of Saturday "due to circumstances beyond our control" and directed further queries to Russia's Ministry of Culture, which had quashed it. The post was accompanied by an image of graffiti reading "Free Speech Conditions Apply" by a well known street artist. Alexander Mamut, a billionaire known for cutting edge cultural projects, owns the art house cinema as well as two major Russian movie theater chains, leading to speculation that "The Death of Stalin" standoff indicates conflict among Russia's elites. Ola Cichowlas, an AFP journalist, tweeted photographs of the raid. As of Saturday, it was not clear which law enforcement agency was behind it. An official of the Moscow branch of the Investigative Committee, Russia's equivalent of the F.B.I., told the Tass news agency, that it had nothing to do with the raid.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
And so the worst kept secret in fashion has been confirmed: Hedi Slimane, the creative and image director of Yves Saint Laurent, has left the brand. Given the strength of the rumors of his departure that have been circulating since January, this may go down as the most anticlimactic fashion announcement ever made. But despite the fact that it happened on April Fools' Day (a coincidence that probably escaped no one), the news has serious implications. Mr. Slimane is the fourth designer at a major fashion house to recently leave his post after less than five years. Last July, Alexander Wang left Balenciaga after three years; in October, Raf Simons left Christian Dior after the same amount of time; and in February, Stefano Pilati left Zegna. Mr. Slimane has been at the helm of YSL since 2012. Mr. Slimane accomplished a lot in that time, transforming the brand's reputation as well as its financial fortunes. Saint Laurent is now the fastest growing line in the luxury portfolio of its parent company, Kering, reporting slightly less than 1 billion euros, or about 1.14 billion, in revenue for 2015, up 38 percent from 2014. Saint Laurent now accounts for 12 percent of sales by Kering's luxury brands and 8 percent of the group's total sales. To do so, Mr. Slimane also created a model of an all powerful aesthetic mastermind that has since been adopted by Alessandro Michele at Gucci and has become the dream of many designers. But the idea that the brand's transformation is complete, as the news release suggests (to be specific, the statement characterized Mr. Slimane's stay as "a four year mission, which has led to the complete repositioning of the brand"), and can simply be handed over to another designer, is a troubling one. Yet this seems to have become the conventional wisdom of the industry. Gildo Zegna, chief executive of the Italian men's wear label Ermenegildo Zegna, said something very similar when Mr. Pilati left: "We wanted to develop a strong point of view in fashion, and for Zegna to be a show not to be missed in Milan. We have reached this objective faster than expected." On to the next! At a lunch to start Milan Fashion Week in February, I sat next to Francois Henri Pinault, chief executive of Kering, and asked him about such abbreviated relationships, as one does when faced with that kind of opportunity. He shrugged and said, "That is the normal life cycle of modern luxury." Fashion has been infected by the contemporary disease of short termism. And this means "fashion" writ large: not only executives on the corporate side, who in public companies necessarily have to think in reporting quarters, but also the members of the design side, which is not exempt here. There is a tendency to blame corporate "moneymen" for the evils of a system that is crushing the poor creative flower of a designer, wringing all the invention out of him or her, but it is increasingly clear that that is an antiquated idea. Mr. Simons left; he was not forced out. Mr. Slimane, with his insistence on total control and refusal to live in Paris, instead remaining in Los Angeles and making the brand come to him, is no one's idea of a pushover. The talk surrounding his contract negotiations centered on speculation about what he wanted (supposedly more money), not what he was being required to do. The relationship horizon line on both sides seems to be shrinking. Indeed, in multiple conversations with fashion chief executives since all this began, the answer that keeps coming up when they are asked why they don't give designers longer contracts five years, seven years (the average length of a creative director contract currently is three) is that the designers won't sign them; that the designers want the freedom to renegotiate (or leave). You can understand it, to a certain extent: If designers' work increases sales at a global mega brand to a meaningful level, they want their salaries to reflect the success. One executive told me designers he spoke to would be happy to sign one year contracts if they could. Compare this to the length of time founders such as Yves Saint Laurent himself was at his house (40 years), or Valentino Garavani (48 years), or Hubert de Givenchy (43 years). One of the reasons those brands had worth even after their founders retired the reasons they were valuable enough to be bought by conglomerates and private equity firms such as their current owners, Kering, the Qatari investment firm Mayhoola, and Moet Hennessey Louis Vuitton respectively was that their good will and aesthetic equity had been defined and built over decades. That is what was purchased, as much as the names themselves. Because that is what attracts not just one generation of shoppers, but the next and the next. Creating an image for a brand and truly embedding it in the life of a consumer takes investment not just in renovation but in the relationship between brand and individual, and designer and brand. After all, the products themselves require investment. They are not cheap. Consumers have to believe they will hold their meaning over time. And the meaning is created by the designer. Modern luxury theory has it that the brand has to be greater than any individual, but we should not forget that brands are given their personality and their depth by the people who make them. They aren't caretakers; they are content creators (and not in the social media meaning of the word). Comme des Garcons is Comme des Garcons because of its founder and designer, Rei Kawakubo; Ralph Lauren because of Ralph Lauren; Giorgio Armani because of Giorgio Armani; Chanel because of Coco Chanel and now the designer Karl Lagerfeld. Indeed, though the latter did not create the style of the maison he took on in 1983, he has worked within its vernacular for over 30 years. As a result, it is still clear what the brand stands for, and you can buy into that value system or use it to telegraph your own. Similarly, Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli, creative directors of Valentino since 2008, have succeeded in establishing a modern character for the company that speaks to the legacy of its founder, rooted as it is in beauty and decoration, while also giving it a resonance in contemporary culture by combining a certain rigor of line with elaborate craftsmanship. But it has evolved over seasons their first few shows looked very different and if they had departed after Year 3, their contribution would have had very little impact. It would have been a blip, rather than an identity. If the value system a brand represents changes, and changes very dramatically, as it did at YSL under Mr. Slimane, who crushed its botoxed Le Smokings under a highly merchandised California youthquake truck, it: a) takes a while for the world to adjust (remember the initial shock! horror! at his grunge grrls on the runway in Season 2); and b) can give consumers whiplash if it then segues into something else entirely. As to what might lie ahead, at least for YSL, rumors are centered on Anthony Vaccarello, a young Belgian Italian designer whose last show was very 1980s rocker in part because it doesn't seem a huge departure from the Slimane aesthetic, though it is more aggressively sexy and less holistic. Kering said it would make an announcement "in due course." Mr. Slimane has been, characteristically, silent about his plans. There was talk he might go to Dior, which is still searching for a designer, but it is even more likely he will segue into the art world. His creative universe has always seemed more like performance art than simply clothing. This week, two new ad campaigns, shot by Mr. Slimane, were previewed by YSL: one featuring Jane Birkin in a Smoking suit, and one featuring Cara Delevingne in looks from Mr. Slimane's last show. There will be a bridge period where, at least from the outside, everything will look very much the same. And it's hard to imagine that given the cost of Mr. Slimane's reinvention, which extended beyond the runway to stores, furniture for the stores and a new hotel particulier in Paris, Kering would be prepared to do the same for whoever comes next. Ideally, that person would stay longer than three years. But a certain precedent has been set. The unsettling prospect of a fashion world of free agents, more than any single look, may be the legacy of Mr. Slimane. And it's unclear where in that scenario any long term profits lie.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Cardboard cutouts of fans and fake crowd noise have accompanied German soccer league games since its return last month. We Hope Your Cheers for This Article Are for Real Andy Phillips, a soccer fan from Kent, England, has a modest expectation for the games he watches on television: that what he is seeing and hearing is real and actually happening. The coronavirus pandemic has made this complicated. Watching a German soccer game at home on a recent weekend afternoon, Phillips, 53, was "aghast" to find that the TV network had layered artificial crowd noise over the live broadcast from the stadium, which had been closed to spectators because of the pandemic and was therefore mostly silent. He listened, "psychologically annoyed," as the fake crowd cheered for goals, booed for rough fouls and hummed with anticipation when the ball drifted close to the penalty area. "It was horrendous, to be honest," he said. "Not because I don't enjoy the sound of crowd noise, but the fact it was fake." As professional sports have tiptoed back to the playing field, league officials and television executives around the world seem to have come to a consensus: that sporting events without the accompaniment of crowd noise are simply too jarring, too unfamiliar and too boring for the typical fan to endure. And so prerecorded crowd audio tracks have quickly become the go to solution for live showings of such disparate sports as Hungarian soccer, South Korean baseball and Australian rugby. For every fan like Phillips, who finds the embrace of aural artifice bizarre and existentially troubling "Who needs people in the ground, when you create your own atmosphere?" he said there are also those for whom the simulated noise provides feelings of comfort and normalcy. "Anything is better than hearing the echoes around a quiet stadium," said Hunter Fauci, 24, of Highlands, N.Y., a member of the American fan club of the German team Borussia Monchengladbach who appreciated the artificial noise. "Silence would make a lot of fans depressed." These sonic sleights of hand, then, can be polarizing. But they are about to become even more prominent in the coming weeks as other major leagues inch back to competition. For instance, Joe Buck, the Fox Sports play by play announcer, said last month on SiriusXM Radio that it was "pretty much a done deal" that the N.F.L. would use artificial fan noise for its live game broadcasts this year if games were played in empty stadiums. 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. When it returns this week, England's Premier League will offer viewers simulated crowd noise with help from the Electronic Arts's "FIFA" soccer video game series. (While audiences in the Premier League and Bundesliga's home countries have the option to switch between audio feeds on parallel channels, television viewers in the United States watching on NBC and Fox networks will get the augmented audio as the default for these leagues.) Spain's La Liga returned last week, also with virtual stadium sounds borrowed from "FIFA." Similarly, The Athletic reported earlier this month that the N.B.A. had discussed the possibility of using audio from the "N.B.A. 2K" video games to enliven its own broadcasts. Reactions to having the quietude of real life smothered by manufactured noise have ranged from dystopian anxiety to resignation to relief. Twenty years ago, CBS drew criticism when the network used taped nature sounds to brighten up a broadcast of the PGA Championships; avian experts noticed some non indigenous bird calls chirping out of their speakers. But today's circumstances seem to have created a more welcoming environment for experimentation. "We're kind of in a try anything mode," said Bob Costas, the longtime sports announcer. "You just don't want it to sound like the laugh track on a bad '60s sitcom." But old school canned laughter may be the most fitting reference point for what is happening now. Alessandro Reitano, vice president of sports production at Sky Germany, said the goal of the Bundesliga's "enhanced audio" initiative was to "forget a little bit that you're seeing an empty stadium" an effort that has also involved the increased use of up close camera angles and to elevate the atmosphere beyond the feeling of "kids playing in the park." Still, Bundesliga officials were hesitant about the project. Fans in Germany take particular pride in the organic and democratic quality of sports in the country, and in recent years anything that has appeared to de emphasize the importance of live audiences, especially in the service of television, has drawn an intense backlash. But because of the unprecedented circumstances, the league went ahead crafting a proprietary system in which a soundboard with more than a dozen carefully selected audio samples as specific as a nervous crescendo of applause while a team chases an equalizing goal or lusty jeers for a call overturned by video review sits at the disposal of an operator watching from a studio in Munich. "They have this imagined sense of what the spectacle should be and how the consumer should experience it, and they manipulate the representations of it to produce that for the consumer, and it's just taken to the nth degree," David Andrews, a professor of sports culture at the University of Maryland, said of these leagues and television networks. "Baudrillard would have gone mad with this." Jean Baudrillard, the French theoretician, postulated that simulated experiences were replacing real life in postindustrial society. He described a media saturated culture moving toward the realm of what he and other critics called hyper reality, a state where the simulated can be more prominent than the authentic and where images and copies can be considered realer than real life. "We can look at sports and see how close we are moving toward that model," said Richard Giulianotti, a sports sociologist at Loughborough University in England. Once, long ago, watching a game on TV felt akin to eavesdropping on a party happening at some faraway place. Now games are specifically tailored as made for TV spectacles, and the screen in your living room, on your phone is where the action is. Examples of sports' long journey toward hyper reality abound: electronic screens that instruct fans to cheer; luxury boxes that recreate the plush feeling of a living room inside a stadium; instant replay and video assisted referee systems; digital strike zones and glowing first down markers; e sports.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Tesla is issuing a recall action concerning about 29,000 charging adapters for its 2013 Model S electric cars because of a potential fire hazard, the automaker has informed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in a letter sent to the agency over the weekend. Tesla said in the letter, which was dated Jan. 12, that the NEMA 14 50 adapters used for 240 volt recharging of the Model S may overheat, which "could cause problems including melted adapters and, in a worst case scenario, fire." The adapter makes it possible to connect the car's charging plug to a 240 volt household receptacle. Tesla said that since late 2012 about 2.7 percent of the adapters were being returned because they stopped charging. At the time, Tesla did not consider these failures to be a safety problem because the damage was contained within the adapter. The damage caused by the overheating condition stopped the flow of electricity. But late in 2013 Tesla told the safety agency it had learned of several cases in which there was damage outside the adapter, including a "highly publicized" garage fire in Irvine, Calif.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
It's not that Nissan can't build a decent C.V.T.; I found the transmissions mostly unobtrusive in the Juke and the Rogue. But time and again the Versa's engine would over rev without any corresponding input from my right foot, at 40 m.p.h. on a flat road or accelerating from a rolling stop. Remember that terrible driver's ed feeling of shifting into second when you meant to shift to fourth? The Versa's C.V.T. makes those mistakes for you. Perhaps this is fitting, because the Versa is every bit an entry level vehicle. The 4 cylinder engine musters a mere 109 horsepower, which is low enough that I can actually picture the horses; after a strenuous uphill climb I was tempted to thank each of them by name. The car is tuned for beginners, with firm braking and steering that's not too sensitive. You can point it dead ahead on straightaways and take your hands off the wheel, freeing them to wave other cars past. There's nothing wrong with entry level if it's done right. And the Versa does have its selling points. It's fairly roomy, especially the back seat. Trunk space is more than adequate. And appearance wise it's perhaps no worse than your typical stubby subcompact sedan. Its mileage claims were right on the money: I averaged a little over 33 m.p.g. over a weekend of combined city highway driving in the 2012 SL. The 2013 model gets low rolling resistance tires and a few design tweaks that lift the combined fuel economy estimate to 35; a conventional 4 speed automatic is now offered as well, but only on the bare bones S. Indeed, part of the SL's problem may be that it's not entry level enough. Its nicer touches seemed out of place mixed in with the cloth seats and plasticky controls were chrome door handles, brushed steel steering wheel trim and a tech package with satellite radio and the aforementioned navigation system. The premium touches can push the SL above 18,000. For that money you might as well buy something like a Ford Fiesta, which offers finer interior appointments, a sportier profile and a powertrain that, while modest, is at least predictable. Still, Nissan must be doing something right. Last year, the Versa family (including the hatchback, which is being reintroduced for 2014 as the Versa Note) was the sales leader among subcompacts by a substantial margin. And who knows if I were the father of a teenage driver I might consider buying him a Versa sedan. But if so, I'd call Nissan's bluff and buy the base car with the 5 speed manual. It can't be any worse than the C.V.T., and besides, I think there's still real value in forcing a young driver to grapple with a stick shift. Give him a feel for the car before he learns to ignore it in favor of the latest app. Make him understand that driving is not a thing that happens on a computer screen that every merge into traffic is a make or break moment.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
After weeks of backing a European rescue for the financially troubled Greece, Germany shifted course on Thursday, signaling that help should come from the International Monetary Fund rather than Greece's neighbors. Turning to the I.M.F. would represent a new and potentially humiliating twist in Greece's financial drama, which was set off by doubts about Athens's ability to borrow 53 billion euros this year to finance a yawning budget deficit and refinance waves of debt coming due. Worries that investors would shun Greek bonds and force a default shook markets worldwide last month but eased recently after Germany and other members of the European Union signaled they would come to Greece's aid if necessary. The Greek government, in turn, unveiled a long awaited package of budget cuts. But prospects for both European aid and domestic spending cuts seemed to fade Thursday with Berlin's about face, as well as a warning from Greece's prime minister that the promised budget cuts might not be enacted unless the country could borrow at lower interest rates. "We will make it, provided that our country can borrow on reasonable terms," Prime Minister George A. Papandreou said in a cabinet meeting that was broadcast in Greece. "Based on those conditions, our country is not seeking and will not seek financial aid, either from our European partners or from the I.M.F., which would be our last resort." Despite Mr. Papandreou's brave talk, it is likely that some form of aid will be needed to help Greece raise the 53 billion euros, which includes 20 billion euros that is needed in April and May alone. And for Greece, as well as the European Union, the maneuvers Thursday amount to fiscal brinksmanship. Greece would prefer that any financial help come from Europe, to avoid the embarrassment of turning to the I.M.F. But with voters in Germany and elsewhere strongly opposed to a bailout for what they see as a profligate government, European leaders want to see proof the Greek government is serious about cutting spending after years of living beyond its means. Citing legal hurdles, a government official in Berlin said on Thursday that Germany believed that any external financial support to Athens would best be provided by the I.M.F. "In the case that the Greeks get into really serious problems, we would support an I.M.F. solution," said the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. Beside unsettling the markets, Greece's troubles have undermined the euro, the common currency it and 15 and other European nations share. Prime Minister George Papandreou of Greece on Thursday in Brussels. He said he wanted to "borrow on reasonable terms." Amid the uncertainty, the euro slipped against the dollar and was quoted at 1.3621 in afternoon trading in New York on Thursday, down from 1.3741 early in the session. European stocks also wilted, with the Athens Stock Exchange General Index ending 3.4 percent lower. Since the euro's inception in 1999, no member has sought support from the I.M.F., which typically comes to the rescue of emerging market economies rather than developed countries. The earlier offer of support for Greece did calm markets and take the spotlight off Greece, but European leaders have been vague about how any aid package would actually be structured. The Greek government, however, has been pushing for more clarity on what its neighbors will do in the hope of bringing down its borrowing costs, which have risen as Greece's debt troubles have become more acute. The yield on Greece's benchmark 10 year bonds rose Thursday to 6.265 percent a spread, or differential, of 3.14 percentage points over comparable German bonds, the European benchmark for safety. Germany says it believes that Athens can live with that premium, but the Greek government thinks it should not have to pay that much to borrow now that it has agreed to measures meant to cut its budget deficit to 8.7 percent of gross domestic product. Greece's budget deficit hit 12.7 percent of G.D.P. last year, making it the worst gap in Europe. If Athens relies on financing from the markets at high interest rates, "that undermines the actual measures that you are taking," Mr. Papandreou said. "That money then goes to the interest of those who are loaning to you rather than the implementation of a program." The prime minister said that he still hoped for a positive response from Greece's neighbors at a meeting of European Union leaders next week in Brussels. "We have kept all options open," he said. Germany's new stance could worsen divisions in Europe, since President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Jean Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, both favor a European rescue effort rather than an I.M.F. orchestrated one. Already, the varying announcements from Berlin have left some politicians in Europe cold. "I find what has happened, or rather what has not happened over the past few days and weeks, incomprehensible," said Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister and the current president of the Liberal Democratic bloc in the European Parliament. "It is incomprehensible because it is precisely a European response that is the quickest and least costly solution." In Washington, Caroline Atkinson, the I.M.F.'s director of external relations, said on Thursday that the fund had not yet been approached by Athens. "We expect the euro zone countries to want to and to plan to resolve this question by themselves," Ms. Atkinson said. She added that the I.M.F. was ready to respond to a request from Greece for a loan.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Global Business
Spanish flamenco dancing is part of this summer's lineup of festivities in celebration of the city's 300th birthday. San Antonio is famous for its Mexican heritage including its Tex Mex cuisine and the 1836 Battle of the Alamo. But the city's connection to Spain doesn't get the same recognition even though this metropolis of about 1.5 million residents and one of Texas' oldest cities, was founded by Spaniards in 1718 on the banks of the San Antonio River. In fact, Texas was a part of Spain from 1690 to 1821. This summer, to coincide with the tricentennial of the city, San Antonio's Spanish heritage is set to come to the forefront. Two initiatives, each four months long, are paying homage to Spain including a milestone exhibition of paintings by Spanish artists at the SAMA and an Ole, San Antonio celebration in the P earl District, a riverfront neighborhood that is home to many restaurants, independent stores, a boutique hotel and a Culinary Institute of America campus. Many of Ole's events are affordable and even free. Spain's early explorations of Texas began in 1521, according to Sherry Kafka Wagner, a historian and urban designer. "Parts of Spain are semiarid like San Antonio, and the Spanish were able to settle here because t hey were adept at water engineering and established an irrigation system along the river," she said. The city began with three parts, Ms. Kafka Wagner said. In 1718, there was the Mission San Antonio de Valero, now known as the Alamo, where Spanish priests presided over Native American inhabitants, and the San Antonio de Bexar Presidio, a military fort established by San Pedro Creek, on the edge of downtown San Antonio . Then in 1731, 16 families from the Canary Islands settled in the main plaza of the city and founded the civil government. That same year, these families also founded the San Fernando Cathedral, which is one of the oldest active cathedrals in the United States today. "Spain is such a fundamental part of what San Antonio is, and that is being recognized and celebrated this summer," Ms. Kafka Wagner said. The noted Spanish graphic designer Ana Juan, who is based in Madrid, is among the artists whose works are on display at an exhibition of contemporary Spanish graphic art in a pop up gallery space. Ms. Juan created a poster for the 300th anniversary after visiting San Antonio earlier this year. "I wasn't aware until I came to the city that San Antonio and Spain were so linked, but I have learned a lot about our common roots," she said. Her poster is her interpretation of the San Antonio River. She chose to focus on the river because without it, she said, "San Antonio would not exist." Exhibitions in the gallery by Spanish artists will continue all summer, and several of these names will be artists in residence in the Pearl neighborhood and meet visitors. The Spanish photographer Beatrix Molnar, whose images capture the contemporary world of Spanish flamenco, is one example. Spain's gastronomy, too, is a big part of Ole , San Antonio. All of Pearl's restaurants will have a tapas menu on Tuesdays throughout Ole until September, but some spots are offering tapas daily including the 100 seat bar at Supper, an American eatery at Hotel Emma. John Brand, the executive chef, spent a week this January on a culinary tasting tour through Spain to get inspiration for his 11 bites such as salt cod croquettes and lamb meatballs with romesco sauce. "Tapas are so important to Spanish culture, and I want to get people in San Antonio excited about enjoying them, too," Mr. Brand said. On the final day, Sept. 16, Ole, San Antonio will have a performance one of more than two dozen concerts of the Madrid based guitarist Luis Gallo performing with mariachi musicians from the city. About a 10 minute scenic riverfront walk from the Pearl neighborhood, the SAMA is commemorating Spain with an exhibition, until Sept. 16, of 42 artworks from Spanish masters including Picasso, El Greco and Goya. Called "Spain: 500 years of Spanish Painting from the Museums of Madrid," the exhibition shows works from eight museums in Madrid, including the Prado, Reina Sofia and the Sorolla. In their first official visit to San Antonio, King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia of Spain inaugurated the exhibition in June. Dr. Luber, the show's co organizer, said that the collection she put together, along with chief curator Dr. William Keyse Rudolph, is rooted in Gothic Spain and has devotional works that reflect the dominance of the Catholic Church at the end of the Middle Ages. The exhibition then follows Spanish style through the court of Philip II to the Golden Age and ends at the dawn of the 20th century. Many of the works are on view in the United States for the first time. Dr. Luber said a handful of the pieces in the show come from museums in the United States such as Lola by Picasso, a portrait of the artist's sister that he painted in 1900 in Spain. It is on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Planning the show took six years, Dr. Luber said. "The San Antonio Museum of Art is not particularly Eurocentric, so when we first came up with the idea for the exhibition, it was somewhat audacious," she said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
MIAMI Jamar Roberts has been around the world as a leading dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. But a week after Hurricane Irma swept through Miami, he was back where he started, at Dance Empire, a studio in a suburban strip of warehouses here. Life was mostly back to normal in Miami, with the towering piles of debris lining the streets the chief remaining sign of the storm. Inside the studio, attention was focused on Mr. Roberts, who was rehearsing a group of young dancers in a piece that hinted at his difficult past. He demonstrated a sequence that veered between wild, flinging movement and tense, pulsing quiet. "There's this feeling of loss," he said, his torso buckling. "You're losing ground." From a corner Angel Fraser Logan, Empire's owner and artistic director, looked on approvingly. "My favorite place is watching him create on my dancers," she said. Ms. Fraser Logan, 42, has been watching Mr. Roberts, 35, for two decades. As a teacher and a mentor, she helped him surmount a troubled home life and grow from an introverted boy who barely spoke to a world class dancer. "She made me feel safe to express the things I wanted to express," Mr. Roberts said, "without feeling like they were wrong, that I was wrong for wanting to dance or choreograph." In return, he became part of her family, godfather to her children, and an inspiration to students at Empire, where he has returned regularly to teach and choreograph since he left Miami for Ailey, in New York, in 2001. Mr. Roberts, at 6 foot 4 inches, towers over Ms. Fraser Logan ("I'm five foot nothing"). And his reserved demeanor contrasts with her animated one. But they remain tightly bound, and are now collaborating on an ambitious project highlighting Mr. Roberts's roots here, a program of his choreography called "The House of the Most Loved," slated for the Olympia Theater in downtown Miami in January. Mr. Roberts spent a week in mid September rehearsing with Empire students, and will add other young dancers from the area later. He'll travel from New York to work on the show, even as he prepares his first piece for the Ailey troupe, "Members Don't Get Weary," set to premiere on Dec. 8 during the company's season at New York City Center. After the Empire rehearsal, Mr. Roberts joined Ms. Fraser Logan and her daughter Brooke, 23, at their house, where he stays when in Miami. They sat in the kitchen, eating leftovers, telling stories about his teenage appetite, his wariness of her dogs ("where I came from dogs bite you," he said), how he dressed up as a cartoon character for Carter, Ms. Logan's 7 year old son; and how he coaxed Brooke through adolescence. (She will be his choreographic assistant for the Ailey piece in New York.) Close as they are now, Mr. Roberts and Ms. Fraser Logan come from different backgrounds. Mr. Roberts and his two brothers grew up in Goulds, a poor neighborhood he described as regularly torn by gunfire and drug busts. His family moved often, living with relatives when they couldn't afford their own home. After Hurricane Andrew destroyed their house in 1992, he said his parents' drug use made his family's already chaotic home life untenable. "We just got poorer and poorer," Mr. Roberts said. "Nights were really dark and heavy." He found an escape in sixth grade, when he was transfixed by a dance performance at his school holiday show: girls in sparkly purple dresses whirling to a syrupy Disney tune. "My whole world changed," he said, laughing. "They were spinning and twirling and I was like, 'I have to do that.' I was just drawn to the beauty of it." His life stabilized when he and his brothers moved in with his grandmother. He transferred to an arts magnet middle school with a strong dance program. He borrowed classical music tapes so he could make up dances at home, and drew ballerinas to give to the program's director. But he said he remained so withdrawn that he rarely talked. Ms. Fraser Logan, by contrast, grew up in a middle class family in Palmetto Bay. She trained at the New World School of the Arts, the Miami conservatory whose graduates include Robert Battle, the artistic director of the Ailey company. Instead of a career as a dancer, Ms. Fraser Logan, who married at 20 and had children, turned to teaching. She was struck by Mr. Roberts, a towering ninth grader when she spotted him in the back of a modern dance class she taught at a local arts high school. "He had a chipped front tooth and jumped so high he almost hit the ceiling," she said. Impressed, and thinking he might be an ideal scholarship student at her new studio, she offered to buy him a bus pass. For his part, Mr. Roberts said he was mesmerized by the barefoot, uninhibited Ms. Fraser Logan: "I had never seen a teacher like that, so expressive and open." So he showed up at her studio. "He couldn't control how he was spinning, couldn't stop," she said. "But it was more graceful, with more ability than I'd ever seen." But it was Ms. Fraser Logan, Mr. Roberts said, who "taught me how to be an artist the importance of dance being a form of expression and not just a physical act you do when music is on." Now it's his turn to mentor the next generation. The group that Mr. Roberts rehearsed at Empire included the daughter of his middle school dance director and a girl he is coaching who won a scholarship to the Ailey school last summer. "That freedom and openness and expression I was taught by Angel," Mr. Roberts said. "Once you tap into yourself that way, nothing else does it for you."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead. NEW YORK JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL at Film at Lincoln Center (through Jan. 28). The tension between modernity and tradition is always on display at this annual series, whose lineup blends the new and the old. Old in this case stretches back to "Broken Barriers" (on Sunday), a silent feature from 1919 based on the writing of Sholem Aleichem; it's showing in a new restoration with live accompaniment. The festival will also host 50th anniversary screenings of "The Garden of the Finzi Continis" (on Jan. 26 and 27), Vittorio De Sica's portrait of a Jewish Italian family facing the tightening grip of Fascism. The closing night feature, "Crescendo," stars Peter Simonischek ("Toni Erdmann") as a conductor who tries to convene a youth orchestra that combines Israeli and Palestinian musicians. 212 875 5601, filmlinc.org ORIGIN STORIES: BERTRAND BONELLO'S FOOTNOTES TO 'ZOMBI CHILD' at the Quad Cinema (Jan. 17 23). "Zombi Child," an odd, elusive new movie from the French director Bonello ("Nocturama"), centers on a group of upper class schoolgirls, one of whom makes the mistake of exploiting the ostensible magical traditions of a new Haitian classmate. Among other influences, Bonello drew on Jacques Tourneur's atmospheric B movie "I Walked With a Zombie" (on Monday and Wednesday) and Peter Weir's Australian classic "Picnic at Hanging Rock" (on Saturday and Tuesday), in which schoolgirls go on an outing and disappear. 212 255 2243, quadcinema.com	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
AMSTERDAM Michaela DePrince was appearing here in the third act of Balanchine's "Jewels" with the Dutch National Ballet on a recent evening. There were about a dozen ballerinas in bejeweled white tutus arrayed across the stage, and there she was all the way stage right in the front line. This 20 year old American ballerina, who joined the Dutch National Ballet's main company in August, is in some respects the equivalent of a chorus girl in a Broadway musical. But night after night, people show up just to see her dance. Ms. DePrince, who was an orphan in war torn Sierra Leone and became a professional ballerina against staggering odds, has become a celebrity here since the publication late last year of her best selling young adult memoir, published in the United States as "Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina" and internationally as "Hope in a Ballet Shoe." For the past several months, "there's been a barrage of requests for personal appearances, interviews and talk shows," said the company's artistic director, Ted Brandsen, who instituted a media moratorium for a while, to let her focus on dancing. She has also been asked to be a model for fashion brands, a spokeswoman for international charitable organizations including War Child and the International Red Cross, and even a cultural ambassador for the Sierra Leone embassy in the Netherlands all of which she has turned down. No one has been as surprised by her sudden celebrity as Ms. DePrince. "When I first started to do all this, I was like, 'Why are you interested?' " she said in the cafeteria of the ballet and opera house, where she was preparing for five hours of rehearsals before a performance of "Jewels" that night. "But then I started to get it. I'd get messages from young girls and moms, and people in Africa, and so on." This is a very different kind of life than anyone might have imagined for Ms. DePrince, born Mabinty Bangura in 1995, during an 11 year civil war that killed 50,000 people. Her father was the victim of a rebel led massacre of workers in the diamond mines, killed when she was 3. She and her mother moved into the home of an uncle, who gave them so little food that her mother died of starvation. That same uncle then deposited the child in an orphanage. Mabinty, too, was twice cursed by her complexion: Her chocolate brown skin has white patches around her neck and chest caused by vitiligo, a skin disease. In the orphanage she was nicknamed "devil's child" and told that she was "too ugly" to be adopted. But one day, the West African trade winds blew a magazine through the orphanage gates. On its cover was a ballerina in a pink tutu, her leg bent in an elegant passe. Four year old Mabinty was immediately captivated, and vowed that she would one day become just like that girl. At the time, she didn't even know what ballet was. She told her own story in a TEDx Amsterdam talk in November that has been viewed about 25,000 times. Consequently, she has become a celebrity in the Netherlands, where she has been profiled in newspaper articles and appeared on television talk shows, and has become an inspiration to girls worldwide. Michaela DePrince is also impressing her audiences onstage. Within weeks of joining the main company here last year, she had an opportunity to perform a soloist role in "Swan Lake." By a fluke, all five of the dancers in line ahead of her to dance a pas de trois were sick or injured. Her performance "made it immediately clear to everyone that this girl was doing what she should be doing," Mr. Brandsen said. "She has an amazing jump and great technical faculties, but mostly she had a radiance onstage." Mr. Brandsen hired Ms. DePrince to the junior company a year and a half ago after an open audition, and she quickly moved up the ranks. She is confirmed for two soloist roles in a program of four contemporary ballets, "Back to Bach," in May, and she is cast for a soloist role in "Cool Britannia," featuring work by three British choreographers, in June. "I've always wanted to prove people wrong, and that's what drives me," Ms. DePrince said. "I've been like that since Sierra Leone, when everyone said, 'Nobody is ever going to want you; no one is ever going to adopt you.' I've just kept trying to prove them wrong." Ms. DePrince says she has landed at the right place with the Dutch National Ballet, where 30 nationalities are represented onstage and she is the only dancer of African origin. "Companies in Europe are going out of their way to do amazing contemporary pieces, and people take chances," she said. Now she has to balance her celebrity with a rigorous schedule of rehearsals and performances. Her mother receives about 40 interview requests for her every day, Ms. DePrince said, and the ballet's media office gets many more. "What is hardest to monitor is that nobody feels that she gets the breaks she gets because she's a well known figure," Mr. Brandsen said. "You have to make clear to people that she gets the roles because of her talent and not because of her story." Ms. DePrince said that she rarely spoke about her childhood with anyone other than family members, and that she was surprised there was so much interest. "I don't like doing it," she said, "but it's my way of reaching out to people; it's my way of inspiring people." She added: "I just started to realize that talking about it can be therapeutic." For now, Ms. DePrince is focused on dancing, but she said she would like to open a school for the arts in Sierra Leone after her dance career ends, "when I'm 40." Before that, she wants to become a principal dancer in the Dutch National Ballet, an ambition that Mr. Brandsen believes she is capable of achieving. "She has the potential to really go further and do more soloists and principal roles, but she's not there yet," he said. "It's about making sure she takes those opportunities."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
AUGUSTA, Ga. By the time he reached Augusta National Golf Club's 17th tee during Monday's practice round, Cameron Champ had talked with his stand in coach and tour guide about his upcoming wedding and how to navigate the course's greens. Now Phil Mickelson, 50 years old and a three time Masters winner, had more advice for the man half his age who was making his first Masters appearance. "If you're going to miss this fairway," Mickelson counseled, "miss it right, because you have an angle into the green." More than two dozen players made their Masters debuts this year under extraordinary circumstances because of the coronavirus pandemic mandatory testing, a course largely emptied of spectators, the ritual springtime tournament being played in November. But the informal tradition of Augusta tutelage did not ebb. And at least some of the advice, conspicuous to any passer by thanks to the absence of crowd noise, may have helped: On Saturday, 14 first timers made the rain delayed cut, a Masters record. At day's end, the top of the leaderboard was crowded with players in their inaugural appearances. The first timers Abraham Ancer and Sungjae Im were tied with Cameron Smith for second at 12 under par, four strokes behind Dustin Johnson. Sebastian Munoz finished Saturday tied for seventh at nine under par. Champ, who shot a 68 on Saturday, will be at six under and tied for 15th as he starts the tournament's final day, less than a week after his crash course with one of the most celebrated golfers of the era. "I wanted to play with him and pick his brain and ask him questions," Champ said after his practice with Mickelson. "He's fun to be around, super talkative, and obviously, he's a Masters champ." Augusta National has not crowned a Masters champion in his debut since 1979, when Fuzzy Zoeller won the green jacket. The course is among the most challenging in golf for a rookie to unlock, in part because access to it is so rare outside the tournament. Ancer played it for the first time just last week. Im went through all 18 holes alone on Monday, his first day on the course. Still, advice is often welcomed. Im said he had spoken with K.J. Choi, who finished in the top 10 at the Masters on three occasions, about how to approach the course and had ended the conversation feeling encouraged. On the fairways and the greens this past week, other veterans proved eager to offer counsel about Augusta National, but still stopped far short of spilling every secret of the par 72 course. "Ray Floyd, Crenshaw, Nicklaus, Palmer they would all talk about putts, shots, things to watch out for," Mickelson said, naming winners of a combined 13 Masters tournaments. But for all the wisdom available to early career players, there is only so much that can prepare a Masters rookie for the rigors of a course that is far more challenging, Ancer said Friday, than it appears in televised splendor. Besides, there was no guarantee that the tricks devised from successes and regrettable plays in Aprils past would hold up in November. Tiger Woods, the defending champion, recalled that he had received advice from figures like Jack Nicklaus and Seve Ballesteros. But he said that they and, later, he had not shared all. Instead, Woods, a five time Masters winner who is tied for 20th at five under, suggested there was no substitute for raw experience at Augusta. "That's just something also that you have to go through," he said. Woods's approach may still represent something of an advancement for rookie veteran relations. Bob Goalby, the 1968 champion, recalled on Wednesday that players like Doug Ford and Sam Snead, both of them Masters winners, had offered him advice. Those exchanges, though, were often based in friendships, not necessarily pay it forward sensibilities, he said. "Most people are more helpful today than they used to be they used to try to trick you," Goalby, 91, said, laughing. "We didn't play for a lot of money, and you had to get the best little edge you could get, no matter how it was. You'd try to beat that guy by a stroke. Playing for the kind of money they play for today, they can gamble, and the next week they're playing for 9 million instead of playing for 15,000, total." These days, some of the advice that the old lions dispensed is obsolete because Augusta National has evolved. "I remember Palmer saying on seven that if he was playing well enough to win, he was playing well enough to hit a driver in that fairway and then he'd have a little sand wedge in," Mickelson said. "But that has gone from a birdie hole to one of the hardest pars, so little things like that don't really fly anymore." Munoz figured that out when he practiced alongside the past champions Vijay Singh and Jose Maria Olazabal. He summed up their assessment as, "Man, it's completely different from what we're used to." "I think that kind of helped me because I didn't try to play it the way it usually plays and just the way I perceive it right now," Munoz said. Indeed, a barrage of advice carries its own perils. Adam Scott, the 2013 winner, recalled practicing alongside Greg Norman in 2002, his first Masters entry, and Norman advising him simply to play the game. Scott finished ninth that year. "In the years after that, I started asking people more and more things, and I found out where all the trouble was and never played good for about eight years here," Scott said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Earlier this month, the Science staff published a series of short articles called "Misconceptions." The idea: to debunk some common misconceptions about health and science that many people accept as truth in their everyday lives. Most of the stories got a lot of reaction from readers but the one I wrote, headlined "Exercise Is Not The Path to Strong Bones" caused a small uproar in our inboxes. I wanted to try to clear up some misconceptions about this 'Misconception.' As a distance runner who has run five marathons and someone who tries to work out almost every day I would never want to leave the impression that people shouldn't exercise. But I also want to be honest about what can really be accomplished. As my article said, exercise certainly has some established benefits but strengthening adult bones enough to prevent fractures is not one of them. I wish I had made it clearer that my focus was on weight bearing exercise for adults only. The many readers who wrote in are correct that exercise can help build strong bones in children and adolescents whose bones are still growing and developing, although there is some uncertainty over how much and what sort of exercise is best.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
Elizabeth Murray was a great painter who didn't have a great late phase. One certainly seemed possible after her 2005 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, but, sadly, she died of cancer in 2007 at the age of 66. So it's not surprising that the excellent if slightly random survey of Murray's drawings at the gallery Canada, on the Lower East Side, has a bittersweet, if only undercurrent. It confirms the love of drawing and all its sundry instruments from traditional pastel to ballpoint pen at the heart of Murray's art. "Everything comes from drawing out my ideas," she once said. The high quality, diversity and incessant energy of these works also suggest how much more Murray might have accomplished. This show has been orchestrated although not exactly selected by the writer, publisher and independent curator Dan Nadel (whose areas of expertise include the comics and the Chicago Imagists inspired by them) and the artist Carroll Dunham, a painter whose work, like Murray's, deliberately treads the border between abstraction and representation and is indebted to cartoons. Mr. Nadel and Mr. Dunham went to Pace Gallery, which represents Murray's estate, and were shown about 50 drawings to select from. They took the whole batch. It is remarkably effective and includes everything from quick doodles to finished studies in pastel and, later, colored pencil. It even includes one painting the relatively small, odd "Dust Tracks" to show where the drawings were headed: toward works full of formal and physical eccentricities, psychological tensions as well as legible images, including in this case a keyhole peeking through what seems to be a jagged break in some ice. Murray was a hybrid artist, which makes her work seem very pertinent in a moment when younger painters have little interest in purity and a lot in the formal or abstract possibilities of representation. She was a semiabstract painter whose works told domestic, often relationship centered tales once you realized that her goofy bulbous, splayed or stretchy shapes also doubled as cartoonish figures, furniture, rooms and occasional speech balloons. Such recognition was often aided by titles like "More Than You Know" and "Don't Go." This hybridity lay along a Chicago New York vector, with a stop on the West Coast. Born and raised in the Windy City, Murray had drawn cartoons since grade school and was steeped in the attitudes namely an equal interest in high and low of the artists who would soon to be known as the Chicago Imagists. At the School of the Art Institute of Chicago she admired Cezanne's work and de Kooning's paint handling. Attending Mills College outside San Francisco for graduate school, she admired the bold figurative work of Joan Brown and became cognizant of the curvaceous shapes of Arshile Gorky, precedents for her own. But her goal was always New York, whose modernist tradition included not only Surrealism (a big presence in Chicago) but also Post Impressionism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop. Through her career, Murray borrowed from all these tendencies, but pursued a style of one, repeatedly taking painting apart and rebuilding it different ways. Her canvases evolved from rectilinear to shaped; broke into fragments and reunited, but gained various protrusions. When flatness returned it again fractured into the elaborate rectangular archipelagoes or clusters of small shaped canvasses. This time, each had its own motif or symbol but also functioned as part of a larger image. They are Murray's last works. The Canada show begins with an exciting vitrine of 14 sketches on modest lined notebook and tablet paper. They confirm how Murray's often complex paintings could begin in quick, almost automatist scribbles and sketches. Drawings wrap around three walls, unfurling Murray's astounding vocabulary of lines, marks and surfaces, her love of color and her finesse with grays and blacks. She musters dense ink cross hatchings for "Things Fall Apart," three drawings from 1995, which show her signature form, a coffee cup shattering into pieces. She has a nice dry scribble in the colored pencil drawing for "Bop" and a more refined one for "Brick With Heart," both studies for archipelago paintings. The sense of domesticity and its discontent is often present, with a brass bedstead making recurring appearances. Sometimes it holds a loving couple ("Little Kiss," 1996); other times, a convalescing single, shadowed in a rich darkness of ink, gouache, colored pencil and whatnot ("Bed" and "Note Bed," both 1994). In "Look Back," one of the strongest drawings here, a pencil wielded different ways vividly depicts a bed and two figures leaving separately. The bed's crumpled blanket takes the deeply serrated form of a cartoon explosion, signaling an unresolved argument. You almost see dust fly. Some drawings indicate paths not taken. A single sheet from 1995 shows four irregular canvases; two feature assertive stick figures whose rigidity and angularity are a far cry from the usual stretchy, pliant limbs. And a second vitrine introduces an entirely new subject the landscape! in colorful topological studies commissioned by Travel Leisure, which invited several artists to depict one of the 50 states. Murray's bright, cartoony renderings of mesas, desert, canyons and plant life in Utah are undeniably tantalizing. Murray was always hard working and prolific, charging ahead nearly to the end of her life. In the archipelago works unveiled in her last two shows at Pace, in 2003 and 2006, her palette lightens and brightens considerably even as her illness becomes a recurring theme. White, so scarce since her earliest abstractions, returns, either as paint or the actual wall behind the paintings. The sheer exuberance and freedom of these works is stunning, as is the way they depart from and circle back to much that came before. They more than suffice as Murray's great late works, but I still wish she'd had more time. I also wish some museum would pull up its socks and give her drawings the full retrospective they deserve.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Who was the Joker of 1915? Could it be the supervillain of the Italian silent feature "Filibus," a prankish, technology savvy jewel thief who repeatedly confounds a famous detective and, also a master of disguise, is in fact a woman? "Filibus: The Mysterious Air Pirate" opens Thursday, Oct. 24 for a week at Anthology Film Archives in Milestone's new 2K digital restoration. More than a century old, it may be the spryest comic book movie of the season and perhaps the most progressive. Produced by a small studio in Turin and shot largely on the Italian Riviera, "Filibus" is a lighthearted analogue to "Fantomas" and "Les Vampires," the pulpy serial melodramas produced in France by Louis Feuillade. The advertising campaign was similar, with enigmatic posters asking, "Who is Filibus???" Who indeed? Amused by Kutt Hendy's boast that he will collect the reward offered for capturing Filibus, the baroness informs the police that the detective himself is Filibus and proceeds to frame him for her crimes. Gadgets abound but her main secret weapon is the dirigible that, perpetually hovering in the clouds, can be used for surveillance and the application of knockout drugs, as well as facilitating various abductions, thefts and escapes. The airship gondola further serves as the baroness's dressing room. Repeatedly hoisted up in a bucket like contraption by her impassive crew, she smoothly changes get up and gender. Working clothes include a mask and newsboy cap outfit for burglary and a svelte tuxedo for passing herself off as the dapper Count de la Brive, a guise in which she courts Kutt Hendy's unwitting sister. Deceptions ensue many revolving around a precious Egyptian antiquity and, while the count (or rather the baroness) may not ultimately get the girl, a letter drops from the sky as the movie ends to suggest that Filibus's contest with Kutt Hendy will continue. Unfortunately it did not. Like much of Italy's lively film industry, the studio that produced "Filibus" appears to have been a casualty of World War I. "Filibus" was directed by Mario Roncoroni, later involved in a film version of the poet and proto fascist Gabriele d'Annunzio's patriotic tragedy "La Nave," and written by Giovanni Bertinetti, known for his science fiction novels, several of which concern fantastic flying machines. Given his interests, Bertinetti is thought to have been influenced by Italy's Futurist avant garde, an affinity further suggested by a bombastic manifesto, "The Cinema: School of the Will and of Energy," that he published in 1918, calling the medium "the exponent of an entirely new way of considering life and the universe." Anticipating the kind of anxieties that were recently raised by "Joker," Bertinetti argued that seemingly "frivolous" movies were a form of "light hypnosis" useful in stimulating passive spectators to action and thus raising the possibility that "Filibus" was intended to inspire a nation of independent women if not cross dressing burglars. Through Oct. 30 at Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, Manhattan; 212 505 5181, anthologyfilmarchives.org. Rewind is an occasional column covering revived, restored and rediscovered movies playing in New York's repertory theaters.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
President Trump said that the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick should get a shot at another job in the N.F.L. if he was qualified, his latest attempt to meddle in the business of the country's biggest sports league. "I would love to see him get another shot, but obviously he has to be able to play well," Trump said Wednesday in an interview with the Sinclair Broadcast Group. "If he can't play well, I think it would be very unfair." Trump spoke again about Kaepernick during an interview on Wednesday night with Sean Hannity of Fox News, reiterating that he believed Kaepernick, 32, deserved another shot in the N.F.L. "if he has the ability." The president has repeatedly criticized Kaepernick and other players who knelt during the national anthem to protest police brutality against African American people and other forms of social injustice. In 2017, Trump urged N.F.L. owners to fire any players who protested during the national anthem.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Lots of singular sensations: A scene from the very faithful staging of "A Chorus Line" at City Center, with the original costume designs by Theoni V. Aldredge. When "A Chorus Line" opened on Broadway in 1975 having step ball changed its way uptown from the New York Shakespeare Festival it was the livingest thing in a dead zone. Over its 15 year run, its youthful vigor helped resuscitate the moribund theater district, and musical theater in general. Now "A Chorus Line" is 43, well past the age at which the anonymous ensemble dancers it honors would have retired, their bodies or bank accounts unable to hack it anymore. Still, if the show's 11 o'clock anthem is correct, they are looking back on what they did for love all those years spent on the line without regret. No regrets here, either. I'm always excited to see "A Chorus Line." (Well, maybe not the movie.) In any reasonably faithful production, like the one that opened on Wednesday night as part of City Center's 75th anniversary gala, what's thrilling about the show invariably remains so. But I wonder if the rest is beginning to get creaky. And make no mistake, this "Chorus Line," which runs through Sunday evening, is religiously faithful. Like the 2006 Broadway revival, which Ben Brantley called an "anatomically correct reproduction" in his Times review, this one is directed by Bob Avian and choreographed by Baayork Lee to simulate the original. (Mr. Avian choreographed that production with Michael Bennett; Ms. Lee played Connie in it.) The now classic designs (sets by Robin Wagner, costumes by Theoni V. Aldredge, lighting by Tharon Musser) appear to have been retrieved from storage; you can almost smell the naphthalene wafting from the ultra '70s woolens. The advantages of this fidelity go beyond historical interest. It's an immense pleasure but also a profound education to see how Bennett and Mr. Avian working with the composer Marvin Hamlisch, the lyricist Edward Kleban and the book writers James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante put the puzzle together. Has one number ever so efficiently established, as "I Hope I Get It" does, what a show is about, setting up its theme (the desperate need to perform), suggesting its conflicts, introducing its many characters and establishing its style? The perfectly organic sequence you can't tell where the collaborators' individual contributions begin and end demonstrates everything that's best about "A Chorus Line." It's not the steps themselves; it's the architecture. Assembling bodies into masses of light and dark, wiping the stage picture, irising in on an individual or panning the entire ensemble, Bennett creates a rhythm of revelation more akin to film than theater. At the same time, his visual minimalism, his use of blackness to set off its opposite, allows for effects that are distinctly theatrical, as when the dancers periodically return to their original positions to recreate the line, or when the line becomes a gaptoothed smile after someone gets injured. What's new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter In these large scale elements, "A Chorus Line" remains unimpeachable, even in a production that is necessarily a bit shaggy. (The City Center cast had only three weeks of rehearsal.) But just as the individual steps have always felt less important than the big picture, the individual stories of the dancers are beginning to feel less important than their group characteristics. That's an irony, of course, for a musical whose foundational purpose was to reward the contributions and sacrifices of ensemble dancers by making them the stars. Those dancers, after all, are auditioning for a show whose actual star we never meet. As Zach, the director choreographer pulls them one by one from the line to learn more about them, we are meant to engage in the specifics of their stories. How did they start dancing? Who got in their way? Why did they keep going? But these stories are sounding a little trite in 2018. Even when sharply performed I especially enjoyed Jay Armstrong Johnson's catty Bobby, Melanie Moore's oddball Judy and Anthony Wayne's overenthusiastic Richie their tales of woe are both long winded and unsurprising. The underlying commonalities among them (everyone's sensitivity was mercilessly trampled in youth) are no less repetitive for being believable and touching. Even when treated more lightly, as in "Sing!" and "Dance: Ten; Looks: Three," the punch lines seem pro forma, as if Bennett and his collaborators were looking to fill out a program with the requisite number of comedy bits. Only the first such number "I Can Do That," performed with immense charm here by Tommy Bracco as Mike seems to hold its own. In compensation for the attention splitting that the original concept necessitated, "A Chorus Line" gradually reveals its focus on a central dancer, Cassie. Having made it off the line into featured roles, Cassie found her further rise blocked by a case of self diagnosed bad acting. Now she wants to return to the ensemble, a fate that Zach her former lover, it turns out resists on her behalf as if it were death. It's here, in the story of the relationship between Zach (Tony Yazbeck) and Cassie (Robyn Hurder), that "A Chorus Line" most shows its age and its underlying confusions. It's not just that the dialogue now sounds like soap opera psychobabble. But Zach's argument not helped by his spending most of the show as a disembodied voice booming orders over the so called "god mic" seems to undermine the idea that the rest of the show is promoting: That the true stars are the non stars. "A Chorus Line" has never really been able to solve the Zach problem, perhaps because he is so clearly based on Bennett himself. It helps that Mr. Yazbeck, even playing a brute, has tremendous stage warmth. But the only time this story really makes sense is when Cassie dances it not so much in her big solo, "The Music and the Mirror," as in her audition sequences. Her desperation to stop being exceptional so she can get the job (watch Ms. Hurder struggle to tone down her extensions) is heartbreaking. That's the "Chorus Line" compromise. It will never say in words what it demonstrates so eloquently in movement. Even in the best productions, and this one's good enough, it will always be a Cassie.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
CELLPHONES have been blamed for all sorts of transgressions: the disappearance of phone booths, the decline of civility in restaurants and movie theaters, even for being potential carcinogens. But there is at least one point in their favor: they have helped increase the supply of real estate in New York City. As the communications world has gone wireless, Verizon has been selling some of its monolithic "central offices," once needed to house copper wire for land line calls but now mostly obsolete. Among the new uses have been business offices, medical research labs and even high school sports complexes. One of those Verizon buildings, a 1929 tan brick Art Deco high rise at 212 West 18th Street in Chelsea, is being converted into luxury condominiums. The 53 unit project is called Walker Tower for its architect, Ralph Walker, who also designed several other phone company buildings. The 200 million project is a venture of JDS Development and the Property Markets Group. The developers say they are sparing no expense in the furnishings and finishes. The 12 to 15 foot high ceilings will be coffered. Radiant heat will course through French oak herringbone floors. Washing machines and dryers won't be stacked, as in many buildings, but will sit side by side, in individual laundry rooms.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
IN July the prim neo Georgian Harvard Club of 1894, on 44th Street between Fifth and the Avenue of the Americas, lifted its veil of construction netting. Newly spruced up, it's the oldest club on what was once a block of such institutions, including New York Yacht and Yale. Most of the clubs are gone, but Harvard expanded twice, and in 2003 built a controversial third addition that has only recently lost its novelty. The first inkling of a Midtown club district came in 1887, when the Century Association and other clubs began talking about moving to West 43rd Street, off Fifth Avenue, then a home for stables and secondary structures. In the 1890s clubs and professional organizations swept over West 43rd and 44th Streets, and one of the new brooms was Harvard, which began work in 1893 on its clubhouse at 27 West 44th. The architect was Charles McKim, who had studied at Harvard in the 1860s but had not graduated. He produced one of New York's most Bostonian buildings, a chubby three story box of limestone and red brick with Federal style lintels and the Harvard emblem on the top story. There wasn't much to a club in those days; in Harvard's case just a board room, a grill room, a billiard room and two bathrooms not even a library. At least there was enough room in 1899 for the club to give a party for Harvard and Yale graduates, who were "choked with food, drink and songs and gave each other countless long cheers," according to a Yale Club account.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
On Saturday, the New Museum will host IdeasCity festival, a free public event devoted to cities and culture, in Concrete Plant Park in the Bronx. This iteration of the festival, themed "New Ecologies 3755," focuses on the effects of climate change in the borough. It will feature workshops, talks, performances, activities, food and even boat tours on the Bronx River, led by the organization Rocking the Boat. IdeasCity was founded in 2011 and has organized gatherings all over the world. This one coincides with the United Nations Youth Climate Summit and a weekend of events leading up to the United Nations Secretary General's Climate Action Summit on Monday . V. Mitch McEwen, the curator for this year's IdeasCity events, said she likes to think of this festival as a "happening." "I'm borrowing that term from artist led events in the mid 60s that combined art and activism," she said. She said the wide umbrella of programming is tied together by climate change, and its connections to broader issues in society, culture, and the Bronx in particular. The program includes music and storytelling performances, some organized in partnership with DreamYard, a local organization that works with youth, families, and schools; workshops on topics including land development and agriculture; and keynote conversations featuring Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman who have an architectural practice in San Diego that explores borders, infrastructure and public culture and Jon Gray, of the Bronx based culinary collective Ghetto Gastro.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Walter Price's "A breeze filled with determination wafted towards us" (2018) at Greene Naftali Gallery. "This may be the most exciting painting show in Chelsea right now," our critic says. After several months of forced inactivity because of the pandemic, New York's art galleries are back, with a vengeance. Since Labor Day, they have collectively mustered one of the better fall seasons of the last several years, with more to come in the weeks ahead. Yes, there have been changes. Unfortunately, some galleries have closed, while others are being worryingly slow to reopen. Yet fewer have gone missing than seemed likely in March or April. Others have sought new leases on life by relocating from Chelsea to TriBeCa, or from SoHo to the Upper East Side, and so forth. In the face of the economic unknowns, the collective message from galleries sounds something like: we're not taking this lying down. The sense of resurgence is especially tangible in Chelsea, where my running list of shows to see has reached 74. A good number form a fractious conversation about painting. The differing viewpoints about the medium can be dizzying, ricocheting off each other. They range from Pieter Schoolwerth's demonically choreographed "Shifted Sims" series at Petzel Gallery where figures and interiors from the Sims video games, printed on canvas, intersect with mannered applications of paint, forming a disturbing netherworld of social and art making rituals to Julian Schnabel's latest forays into Romantic abstraction at Pace. In them, great flourishes of white and blue unfurl across slightly shaped stretchers with a dusty pink tarp serving as canvas. And they are bookended by shows of crisp new Minimalist paintings from Robert Mangold, and Yoshitomo Nara's unendingly cute, wide eyed innocents, brought forth with consummate ease in paint and colored pencil. Mr. Schoolwerth's fastidious craft finds some echo in Kyle Dunn's work at P.P.O.W., where the paintings build on the homoerotic realism of Paul Cadmus and the stylized figuration of Tamara de Lempicka once overlooked talents of the 1930s. His beautifully carved wood frames ripple around and sometimes interrupt the images. At Berry Campbell you can see the all but forgotten fusion of Minimalist boldness and Color Field staining that Edward Avedisian achieved in the mid 1960s. And Michael Rosenfeld Gallery has brought together a large, stunning group of Benny Andrews's portraits primarily from the 1970s and '80s which have not been seen together before. The psychological realness of Mr. Andrews's Black subjects contrasts strikingly with the more polemical go for the jugular approach of a younger generation exemplified by the strong new paintings in Titus Kaphar's first show at Gagosian, two blocks away. Taken together these eight shows, and the four reviewed below with four more very honorable mentions demonstrate how completely open painting is right now, how distant are the illusions of dominant styles that once squeezed out all but major players. This may be the most exciting painting show in Chelsea right now. Although Mr. Price has had several promising solos in New York, including at MoMA P.S. 1, and appeared in the last Whitney Biennial, it has a breakout feeling. His scale has expanded, his integration of cartoon based imagery and painterly improvisation has gained confidence and his ideas are laid out in an abundance of often excellent drawings that fill two small spaces of their own. Mr. Price, who was born in 1989 in Macon, Ga., and lives in Brooklyn, has a great way with materials, from the crayons and transparent yellow tape that appear in his drawings, to oil paint, which he approaches with a keen sense of color and manages almost always to infuse with fire or light. He has one eye on art history and another on the richness and the stresses of Black life. Even the small paintings are like big stages where human and painterly dramas intersect. Sometimes this turns slightly mythic, as in the painting "A breeze filled with determination wafted towards us," which presents a red Colossus out of Goya striding across a light blue river beneath an orange sky while also fading into the surface. In contrast, a work titled "It has to rain before you can see where all the leaks are at," suggests a contemporary street scene involving several figures, three umbrellas and two cars while around them a series of greens evoke stormy weather and a verdant park, while some kind of unexpected chemical interaction of paint creates patterns implying plant growth. Further down West 26th Street, at Galerie Lelong, is the magical first show of Ficre Ghebreyesus, an Eritrean born painter, who is sadly no longer with us. Ms. Beavers's works bulge out from the wall in enlarged, often repeating forms that she covers with coarse but skillful brushwork, like van Gogh on steroids. Subjects include bright pink lips attended by tubes of lipstick; torsos flaunting bikini underwear styled with motifs from Picasso and Mondrian; and a hand with fake nails in the shape of Maurizio Cattelan's taped banana. In "Smoky Eye Every Step," a repeating eye is progressively made up. The same happens to the half of the artist's face, which is "made up" with a relief by Lee Bontecou. "People I admire: Mike Kelly, Ru Paul, Obama, Elaine de Kooning, Madonna," offers a large single image of the artist's face with five additional pairs of famous eyes. These works conflate all kinds of self improvement and adornment projects: makeup, tattoos, cosmetic surgery and nail art as well as fandom and celebrity worship. Their blaring billboard power from afar is countered by a squirm worthy intimacy up close. In its own beauty obsessed way, this is a beautiful show. Two painting shows not to miss lie within a few steps of Ms. Beavers'. Just doors to the east, at Lehmann Maupin, the Brazilian twins Osgemeos continue to convert their popular graffiti style centered on tall, yellow, thin limbed figures with platter like heads who are often seen against patterns of gemlike color into portable works more suitable for private collectors. Close by on the west, Amy Sillman's debut show at Gladstone continues her quest, in paintings, large drawings and smaller images of flowers, for an individual abstract style with some of the best paintings of her career. Abstract paintings of a more historical vintage feature in Virginia Jaramillo's exhibition at Hales. The artist, 81, is currently having her first museum exhibition of her geometric curvilinear paintings of 1969 1974 at the Menil Collection in Houston. The Hales exhibition picks up in 1975, when Ms. Jaramillo detoured into a delicate, almost disembodied form of stain painting. Layering together thin washes of color, she created subtle shifts in tonalities, and shapes within shapes that, while barely there, verge on visionary. Pure color alternates with suggestions of skies and landscapes, as in "Thira," in which veils of pale brown insinuate a mirage of graceful rock formations hovering in mist. (Also on West 20th Street, the latest abstractions of Odili Donald Odita at Jack Shainman offer a geometric retort to Ms. Jaramillo's fluidity, and show this artist, whose bracingly optical patterns are influenced by African textiles, expanding his vocabulary.) Through Oct. 17 at David Zwirner, 525 and 533 West 19th Street; 212 727 2070, davidzwirner.com.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Climate change has narrowed the range where bumblebees are found in North America and Europe in recent decades, according to a study published Thursday. The paper, published in the journal Science, suggests that warming temperatures have caused bumblebee populations to retreat from the southern limits of their travels by as much as 190 miles since the 1970s. Logic would suggest that the northern reaches of their home turf would shift to higher latitudes by a corresponding distance. But that has not happened, leading researchers to think that the more northern habitats may be less hospitable to them. "Bumblebee species across Europe and North America are declining at continental scales," Jeremy T. Kerr a conservation biologist at the University of Ottawa in Canada who was the lead author of the report, said at a news conference. "And our data suggest that climate change plays a leading, or perhaps the leading, role in this trend." Not all entomologists agree with the findings, saying that the paper offers evidence of a correlation between climate change and waning bumblebee population ranges, but does not make the case that warming temperatures are the main cause. Instead, they say that a multitude of factors contribute to the bumblebees' shrinking borders, and that a changing climate may be just one factor. For the study, the researchers constructed a database that contained more than 420,000 observations of 67 different European and North American bumblebee species, including when and where they were found. The museum records stretch back more than 110 years. The researchers analyzed the observations along with climate information from every year from 1900 to 2010 in the regions and drew conclusions about how the northern and southern limits of different bumblebee species shifted over the past century. They compared population changes from 1974 to 2010, when temperatures began to warm, with changes from 1901 to 1974, when human caused climate change was less of a factor. They found that the southernmost range of bumblebees retreated north at a rate of about 3 miles per year (the precise latitude was different for the many species of bees they studied). For example, Bombus affinis once buzzed as far south as Georgia, but now is only rarely seen in states like Illinois, Maine and Wisconsin, while Bombus terricola, which thrived in North Carolina and the Mid Atlantic, is now mostly seen in parts of Maine, New Hampshire, Ontario and Quebec, according to Leif Richardson, an ecologist from the University of Vermont and a co author of the paper. "One of the most striking results was that trends were often indistinguishable between Europe and North America," said Paul Galpern, a landscape ecologist from the University of Calgary and a co author of the paper. "Bumblebee species are responding quite similarly across continents since climate change began to really accelerate from 1975." The findings did not entirely surprise Dave Goulson, a bee biologist at the University of Sussex in Britain who was not part of the study. He said in an email that he expected bees, which thrive in cooler climates, to be adversely affected by climate change, particularly in the southern tips of their range. "What is more surprising," he said, "is that they do not seem to be expanding northwards. Perhaps because suitable habitat is not available to the north of their existing ranges." He called the study the first clear evidence that many species were shrinking across huge geographic scales. Sydney Cameron, an entomology professor at the University of Illinois who specializes in bumblebee conservation, called the study "noteworthy" for its vast data set and expansive range, but disputed its findings. Climate change, she said, might be a factor in the potential shrinking of bumblebee ranges, but it is too early to say for certain. "It's correlative, not causal; they cannot say that a two degree climate change caused these patterns," she added, referring to an approximate Celsius reading for changes across the regions. Dr. Cameron also took issue with the paper's suggestion that bumblebee population loss could be mitigated through interventions such as "assisted migration," in which the populations are physically moved farther north. She called that an "impractical solution" because of the risk of species spreading pathogens. The researchers also analyzed long term data on habitat loss and pesticide use, including neonicotinoids that have been criticized by bee conservationists for flustering bees and causing them to forget how to buzz their way home. "The question is, have neonicotinoids or habitat losses caused the huge range losses we observed in this study?" said Alana Pindar, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph and an author of the paper. "The answer for now is clearly 'No.'" She added that although these factors were known to harm bee populations, the study showed that climate change was the main reason behind the severe population shrinkage. James Strange, an entomologist with the Department of Agriculture, did not agree with that assertion. "What they've shown is that climate change has at least some effects on the population changes of some bumblebee species," Dr. Strange said. "But I did not come away convinced that climate change is causing these movements." He said he was worried this paper might cause people to blame climate change entirely for bee population destruction and ignore potential factors such as parasites, pesticides and habitat destruction. "There's a bit of me that's nervous someone will pick this up and say 'They figured it out: It's climate change,' " Dr. Strange said. "But really, we haven't figured it out yet."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Dr. Samantha Meltzer Brody, director of the University of North Carolina's perinatal psychiatry program and leader of a project that will use a new iPhone app to recruit women who have had postpartum depression for a study of the disorder's genetic underpinnings. With mothers and medical providers clamoring for answers about postpartum depression, scientists are beginning a major effort to understand the genetic underpinnings of mood disorders that afflict millions of women during and after pregnancy. Researchers led by a University of North Carolina team will use a new iPhone app to recruit women who have had postpartum depression. The goal is to collect about 100,000 DNA samples and compare them with DNA from women who have never experienced depression in hopes of discovering genetic factors that could lead to better prediction, diagnosis and treatment for maternal mental illness. Attempts to find clear genetic clues to depression in the general population have yielded few results so far, and some experts questioned whether the new effort, announced Monday, would be any more promising. But the team's theory is that postpartum depression may be distinct, involving genes with more identifiable effects because they act during or soon after pregnancy. The free app, PPD ACT, will be offered in the United States, Australia and Britain, and is likely to be extended to other countries, said Dr. Samantha Meltzer Brody, director of the University of North Carolina's perinatal psychiatry program and the project's leader. "To make sure this is not just a study of iPhone using people," Dr. Meltzer Brody said, iPad versions of the app will be available in some urban and rural clinics, and patients who want to provide their DNA will "right then and there be offered a spit kit." The app, to be promoted by Apple as an expansion of its ResearchKit software for medical data collection, poses questions about sadness, anxiety or panic after childbirth in an effort to assess whether women have experienced serious postpartum depression. Women with high scores are asked if they want to submit DNA; if so, they will be mailed a kit to donate their saliva. Names and email addresses will be required, Dr. Meltzer Brody said, but the project will encrypt personal data. Once enough samples are collected, "each will be individually genotyped for something like 600,000 genetic markers scattered throughout the genome," Dr. Sullivan said. The comparison group will be demographically similar women who have been pregnant at least twice but never experienced depression. "Are there regions of the genome where women with postpartum depression differ systematically from women without?" Dr. Sullivan asked. Anjene Addington, chief of the genomics research branch at the National Institute of Mental Health, which is providing the kits to collect saliva, said the project aimed to collect thousands of DNA samples from a diverse group of women. "As we learn more about genetic research on psychiatric disorders, we know that we need huge, huge numbers of participants," she said. Compared with many physical illnesses, the genetics of psychiatric disorders have so far proved complex and elusive to understand. Even one of the most heritable disorders, schizophrenia, appears linked to small variations in more than a hundred genetic regions. Recently, though, a genetic variant has been identified that seems to ignite excessive pruning of synapses in a key brain area in people with schizophrenia. Depression has been one of the toughest to figure out, partly because it affects different people in different ways. "You might have an 18 year old woman who is doing self cutting and she's got depression," Dr. Sullivan said, "and a 64 year old woman with hypertension and Type 2 diabetes and she's got depression." Because postpartum depression afflicts a narrower group of women who have recently given birth, it may be easier to study, Dr. Sullivan said. He said he and some colleagues had recently conducted a study that suggested postpartum depression was more heritable than general depression. Dr. Addington said there might be genes that specifically influence a woman's sensitivity to hormonal fluctuations in pregnancy. But David Goldstein, director of Columbia University's Institute for Genomic Medicine, who is not involved in the project, said another possibility was that postpartum depression's links to hormonal fluctuations, in addition to emotional and other stresses that can accompany having children, might indicate it was "less likely to be genetic." He said he had no objection to the project's goal, but "it's possible that you can collect information from tens of thousands of individuals and not find anything." Dr. Kenneth S. Kendler, director of psychiatric genetics research at Virginia Commonwealth University, who is not involved in the project, said some evidence suggested that genes involved in postpartum depression differed somewhat from those in general depression. Ideally, the project will find "fewer gene variants involved and they are bigger in effect size," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
A slew of high end, high profile rental buildings are poised to open across Manhattan and Brooklyn this year, adding more than 8,000 units at a pace not seen in years, and in the process, redefining what rental housing in the city can be. Many of these new rental buildings are large, tall and unusually shaped. Some are in untested residential areas, which might explain their devotion to lavishly entertaining their occupants by piling on the amenities both indoors and out. Soon to be completed examples include Via 57West, on an industrial edge of Manhattan's West Side; 461 Dean Street, by the Barclays Center at the Vanderbilt Yards in Brooklyn; and 365 Bond Street, on the banks of the Gowanus Canal. Prices, too, are lofty, with studios in some of the buildings renting for about 5,000 a month. While any softness in the rental market new leasing activity has slowed in recent months, and vacancies are up could spell challenges going forward, most developers say they are undeterred. "New York is safer and cleaner than it's been in decades, and we fully expect people to keep moving here," said Adam R. Rose, a president of Rose Associates, which is converting 70 Pine Street, an Art Deco office building in the financial district, into a 776 unit rental. "And the fact is, we need virtually unlimited housing at all levels," he added. Once, a driveway and porte cochere might have been enough to provide a building with an air of prestige, but rentals today seem to be springing for brash top to bottom designs. Like their condo kin, rentals are increasingly opting for architects with boldface names. Via 57West, a 709 unit rental at 625 West 57th Street, for example, was designed by the Bjarke Ingels Group. Mr. Ingels is the Danish designer whose resume also includes Two World Trade Center. Because the metal paneled rental is near the West Side Highway, a gateway to Manhattan, the city's Planning Commission didn't want some humdrum rectangle, according to Durst officials. But Mr. Ingels' great pyramid also allowed Durst to preserve Hudson River views from the windows of the Helena, a rental that the company owns next door, according to a Durst spokesman. The offbeat style produced unusual layouts. A 685 square foot one bedroom with tall windows that was a stop on a recent tour had an angled exterior wall, which might not be ideal for straight backed furniture. "We have apartments with a lot of character to them," said Jonathan Drescher, a Durst senior vice president. And those apartments seem tailored to younger, unattached renters, as 85 percent are studios, starting at 2,770 a month, or one bedrooms, starting at 3,880. In contrast, the median price of a studio in Manhattan in December was 2,562 a month, while that of a one bedroom was 3,375, according to a market report from Douglas Elliman Real Estate. Via and other buildings are adding rental units to the market in a banner development year. About 4,900 apartments in large and mostly market rate buildings are expected to open their doors in Manhattan in 2016, according to data prepared for The New York Times by Cliff Finn, an executive vice president of Douglas Elliman Development Marketing, and George Wlodarczyk, a research director there. This is a significant increase, as the number has hovered below 3,000 a year since at least 2010. Eight of the 15 major buildings to open this year, according to Elliman, offer 300 apartments or more. Similarly, Brooklyn will add about 3,300 apartments in major projects in 2016, Elliman said, the most since 2014, when about 3,000 units entered the market. But in previous years, going back to 2007, the number of new apartments that opened in the borough was much lower. In addition, the city has more empty apartments than usual. Traditionally, in New York, the dividing line between a robust and not so great market is a 2 percent vacancy rate. Since June of last year, the rate has been higher, with November's at 2.87 percent, the highest in nine years, Mr. Miller said. In December, the rate was 2.74 percent. With empty apartments and dipping rents, the market is not ideally suited for thousands of new units, which could depress prices further. For renters, that could be a good thing. Mr. Miller said concessions are already part of the picture. Both Via 57West and 70 Pine are offering two free months on a 14 month lease, which is more than the one month traditionally offered under similar conditions, Mr. Miller said. "I think there is great confusion about demand for this product," Mr. Miller added. "It's not correct to say that demand is not there for this new product. It is more accurate to say that in many, if not most, cases, demand is not there at prices set a few years ago." Of course, developers won't really know where things stand until their rental offices actually open. But so far, many of the rentals scheduled to hit the market in the next few months come with high monthly price tags. The new 11 story, 106 unit rental from the Related Companies at 456 Washington Street in TriBeCa, for instance, will have studios starting at 4,995 a month, while one bedrooms will start at 5,295, though a Related spokeswoman pointed out that the building, which is to open in May, is in a prime location, and that its apartments are larger than most of the firm's other properties. Studios are around 600 square feet, she said, while one bedrooms range from 700 to 750 square feet. Also in May, Related will unveil the Easton, a 230 unit rental on East 92nd Street, where one bedrooms will start at 4,295 a month. If rents seem steep, they need to be considered along with the costs of building apartment houses, which can be astronomical, according to Jed Walentas, a principal of Two Trees Management Company, which is developing 300 Ashland Place, a 379 unit tower across from the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, to open at summer's end. The building, clad in aluminum composite panels, was designed by TEN Arquitectos, Enrique Norten's firm. From above, the building resembles a flattened football with its pointed ends trimmed, creating slightly curving walls. It was built under the 421 a program, which gives developers breaks on their property taxes if they construct and maintain affordable housing in a so called 80 20 building 80 percent market rate rents and 20 percent below market or affordable rents. Developers say that in a city where land is so pricey, it can be almost impossible to build without the program, especially rentals, for which revenue trickles in over time. The controversial benefit, which critics say enriches developers at the expense of the public and has outlived its usefulness, expired in January, and its impending end helped fuel the current rental building boom, some developers say. At 300 Ashland Place, 421 a has made a big difference. The 170 million project will realize savings of up to 2 million a year in property taxes for 25 years, or about 50 million, according to Two Trees officials, in exchange for the building's 76 below market rate apartments. As Mr. Walentas scanned the horizon from his rising tower, which provides views of low slung sections of Brooklyn that were mostly unattainable before the rental boom, he said he wasn't worried about competition. "The more people build, the better it's going to be for everybody," he said, adding that the rising buildings help strengthen neighborhoods. One new rental in the current crop, 461 Dean Street in Brooklyn, will be split almost evenly between apartments with below market rents and market rate apartments. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. The 363 unit project from Forest City Ratner Companies, which is made of prefabricated modules, will have 181 apartments with lower rents. About 40 percent of the affordable units, or 72, will be for people making 100 percent to 160 percent of the area's median income, or up to 138,080 for a family of four. That family could end up paying 2,800 a month for a two bedroom, said Susi Yu, an executive vice president of Forest City. "This is actually a segment of the market that really has been overlooked," Ms. Yu said, referring to the income bracket of that same family of four. When the lottery is announced, which is expected "imminently," according to a project spokeswoman, applicants will have 60 days to register at the New York City Housing Connect web page, or by paper application. To get the word out about the application process, Forest City will contact labor unions, community boards and churches. Each applicant will receive a number. If that number is drawn, he or she must submit tax returns, landlord references and bank statements to verify eligibility. Priority will be given to people with visual impairments and other disabilities, and secondarily, to those who live within the boundaries of Brooklyn Community Boards 2, 3, 6 and 8. Municipal workers also will have an advantage. As has been the case for several years, buildings in less residential neighborhoods are packed with extras designed to give their occupants something to do in otherwise quiet areas. But the amount of space dedicated to these amenities has mushroomed. At Via by the West Side Highway, for instance, the 30,000 square feet of indoor amenity space will include a 75 foot swimming pool, a half basketball court and a leather walled room designated for poker. A terraced courtyard planted with pitch pines, river birches and honey locusts will offer another 22,000 square feet of communal space. Four retail spaces will line the building's base. But in a shift, even developers in more central areas are acknowledging a new cultural reality: that young renters, who may work and live under the same roof, and have all their groceries delivered, might not set foot outside that much. At amenity loaded 70 Pine, "the whole idea is that you don't ever have to leave the building," Mr. Rose said. Rents for studios on the lower floors of the 1932 building, which are now being marketed, start at 3,100 a month, and 21 leases were signed between December and the end of January. The next batch of studios, on higher floors, will inch up to 3,200 a month, Mr. Rose said. The building has about 19,000 square feet of amenities, spread across two below grade levels, including a two lane bowling alley and a 20 seat screening room in an old bank vault, whose door will be welded into the open position. Seventy Pine's fitness center will be run by La Palestra, a company whose services extend to arranging out of building exercise at places like Mount Kilimanjaro. There will be about 31,500 square feet of retail space, including a branch of the upscale grocer Urban Market. And the top four levels of the building, which has a window lined observation deck, will house a yet to be named restaurant from the team behind the Spotted Pig in the West Village. The list of amenities dazzles even Mr. Rose. "I've been in this business for 30 years, and we've never done this much in one place before," he said.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
TWISTER (1996) 7:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. on Syfy. A decade before storm chasing became the subject of an ill fated Discovery Channel reality series, Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt played tornado hunters who are also a couple on the brink of divorce in this loud thriller. Jan de Bont, fresh off directing "Speed," kept his foot on the gas as he brought to life the quick moving, Oklahoma set screenplay, written by Michael Crichton and Anne Marie Martin, which follows Paxton and Hunt's characters as they deal with maelstroms of both environmental and emotional varieties. In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin called the result "a gale force movie with the energy to blow audiences right out of the theater," writing that Crichton "delivers his familiar mix of hurtling pace, by the numbers character development and exotic science." Tornado chasing "suddenly takes on a sex appeal not usually associated with horrendous storms," she noted. BATTLE OF THE 80S SUPERCARS WITH DAVID HASSELHOFF 8 p.m. on History. For a more nostalgic view of the '80s than "Snowfall" will give you, hop over to History and watch David Hasselhoff ogle a bunch of cool cars. The climax of the special is a race in which Hasselhoff goes head to head with Erik Estrada and Dirk Benedict.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Credit...Ossip van Duivenbode/MVRDV This article is part of our latest Design special report, which is about getting personal with customization. In architecture, the tension between freedom and restrictions animates the best work. We wonder how a building by, say, Frank Gehry can stand up, given the striking twists and turns of its form. No matter how visually striking, structures have to follow local building codes, not to mention the laws of gravity. In the Netherlands, a 10,625 acre community called Almere Oosterwold is demonstrating a democratic version of this balancing act, experimenting on the frontiers of house customization in a country known for heavy regulation. Owners have the freedom to design what they want with or without an architect, or with software specially designed for the project, as long as it meets codes. One house in Oosterwold is powered by a bike and built on a rail so that it can turn and follow the sun during the day. There are prefab houses, tiny houses and a "garage house" that holds RVs owned by its older, part time residents, who travel a lot. Ironically enough, it took a lot of government planning to open the floodgates of self expression. Almere Oosterwold may be the most planned unplanned place around. Conceived more than a decade ago, the development now has some 1,000 completed houses, with thousands more in the offing. It is the first of four planned "garden cities" within Almere, which will all have a different concept and character. The architect Winy Maas, a co founder of the Rotterdam firm MVRDV, created the Oosterwold masterplan and has been involved in all aspects of the project; his firm has also consulted on some of the house designs and created the DIY software, HomeMaker. "We developed a strategy that could attract people by giving them complete freedom in shape, in density," Mr. Maas said. "People can do what they want, but they cannot harm their neighbor at all." Demand is quite high, Mr. Maas said, because the idea "has touched something in the younger generation." Almere and the Dutch government's real estate development agency commissioned the plan from Mr. Maas, a passionate urbanist and designer of what he called "dense environments." He worked with the former Almere alderman Adri Duivesteijn to get the project through bureaucratic hoops. The bootstrap aspect of Oosterwold goes way beyond aesthetics: Energy, sewage and roads must also be figured out by residents, leading at least one person over the years to ask Mr. Maas, "Are you crazy?" The HomeMaker software is intended to allay concerns. "We made it to calculate the ground price, the amount of water, the amount of solar cells needed," Mr. Maas said. "It also figures out how to make a road not only for the homeowner but for those who come after them." For the Dutch, the concept requires a new way of thinking. "We have such a tradition of planning in the Netherlands," said Michelle Provoost, an architectural historian and executive director of the International New Town Institute in Rotterdam. "New towns are always planned top down, with no space for doing it yourself. So in that sense it's groundbreaking." She acknowledged, "In some countries it wouldn't be that experimental." What's unusual, however, is the scale and density. When it's completed, the plan is to have 15,000 homes and some 40,000 residents. The Netherlands is the 32nd most densely populated country in the world, famous for harnessing nature with canals and windmills. Oosterwold's master plan is driven by ecological concerns. New structures are only allowed to occupy up to a fourth of the land, and about half is devoted to agriculture, to bolster a sustainable ecosystem. At the home of Barry and Shirley van Oostrom, the approach is not only green, but also dusky purple, at least when their Cabernet Cortis vines ripen. The couple, who had lived in Almere for 20 years before moving to Oosterwold, grow three varieties of wine grapes next to their new home, and they operate three bed and breakfast lodges, which they built in 2017. They are always booked, because "people like sleeping by a vineyard only 25 minutes from Amsterdam," Ms. van Oostrom said. "A farm was our dream, maybe in Spain," she added. "But when this came up, we decided not to leave the Netherlands." The decision was easy, but the design and construction, less so. "It's a different way of living, and it attracts certain types of people," Ms. van Oostrom said. "It's a lot of hard work. You have to do everything yourself." The couple consulted an architect on their design, particularly for the engineering, but they sketched out ideas and took the lead on creating their office area. Over all they wanted a U shaped plan and sliding doors "like on a barn," she said. They got it. The spare, wood and concrete house that resulted gave them the modern farmhouse vibe they wanted. The autonomy was the selling point. "As long as it's safe and you can live in it, you can build what you want," Ms. van Ooostrom said. "The rest is up to you." But "the rest" can involve a lot of unusual tasks, as Anke de Boer, another Oosterwold denizen, is discovering. "We started this three and a half years ago," said Ms. de Boer, a translator who works at home, as does her biologist husband, Ricky. "The engineering stuff has yet to be done. We hope to be in come spring." "Finalizing the design wasn't the problem," she said of the wood frame home, to be painted an "ocean blue green." The couple established their priorities with a pen and paper, chief among them a bedroom orientation that would allow them to wake with the sun. They consulted an architect whom they met through their construction company. But to get to the house, you need a road, and there was not one. "We had to sit down with neighbors to figure out the whole road process," Ms. de Boer said. "It's one of the biggest issues here in Oosterwold. If there's one thing that deteriorates relationships with neighbors, that's it. You have to figure out how to divide the cost." After coordinating with 11 neighbors, she and her husband latched onto an association that had built a dirt road. Asphalt will be the final material. Mr. Maas sees nothing but virtue in the process. "They have to do it together," he said. "It moves from egoism to we goism." Of course, freedom entails the liberty to design something not to everyone's liking. Mr. Maas lamented some of the house designs by a developer that he called "Belgian Disney." "It depends on your definition of bad taste," he added. Ms. Provoost noted a trajectory toward less inventive design. "The houses have become more the same, and that's disappointing," she said. She still finds Oosterwold "special" for its lack of pre existing infrastructure and government allocated open space. The closest comparison she could muster is the Ghanaian city of Tema, a planned port city developed in the 1950s and 1960s She doesn't think Oosterwold "will be repeated anytime soon."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Laurie Ruckel, deputy chairwoman of the Trust and Estates Department at Loeb Loeb, a law firm, discussed estate planning. Louise Phillips Forbes, a senior associate real estate broker at Halstead Property, stressed the importance of understanding the value of your real estate. "Real estate holdings can be an important part of your estate planning and are often one of the largest assets within the estate," Ms. Forbes said. "Careful consideration should be given to how you title real property owned with your spouse or partner as the title can control the disposition of the property." Women tend to live longer than men and must plan accordingly. In the United States, the average life expectancy is 81.2 years for women and 76.5 for men. This means women will most likely have to deal with money matters at some point, whether they like it or not. "Women often survive their spouses, and they have not been well versed in the financial fluency of their family," Ms. Ruckel said. "Or they have a sick spouse or a spouse who suffers from mental infirmities, and they don't know what to do. Often, I see cases of a second marriage and there's a natural tension between the women and the stepchildren. Even if everything went along swimmingly during the marriage, there can be all this tension when the glue is gone." That is what happened to Diane Steiner, a divorce lawyer in New York. After her second husband, to whom she was married for 25 years, was diagnosed with dementia, his children questioned the will and sued to be his guardian and for power of attorney. She thought she had a good relationship with them. But, she said, "I could not prevent my stepchildren from suing. They thought if they got control they could siphon off funds for their own benefit." Her husband died two weeks before the case was scheduled to go to trial, and the will and power of attorney over his finances remained as her husband wished. Still, "It cost me an enormous amount of money in legal fees," she said. "Women should insist on knowing what assets and liabilities they have," said Ms. Steiner, who declined to give her age. "Probably half of the women I see say, 'I was such a fool.' You have to have money in your own name, as well as joint bank accounts. You have to have retirement assets. You have to pay attention to the financial statements that come into the house. Make copies of statements that look important. Never sign a tax return unless you understand it. Ask questions. Take it to a lawyer."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
Long Wharf Theater in New Haven on Thursday announced a new artistic director to succeed a leader it had fired over sexual misconduct allegations. Jacob G. Padron, the 38 year old founder of the Sol Project, an organization that champions Latino playwrights, will assume the top artistic post at Long Wharf in February. He will succeed Gordon Edelstein, who was fired last January, one day after The New York Times reported that multiple women were accusing him of inappropriate physical and verbal behavior in the workplace. Mr. Padron said he saw his task as focusing on the company's future, but acknowledged that there may still be some healing to take place as well. "There's always room to create a culture of reflection," he said. He added that he saw the theater as thriving, but "there is always work to do in terms of thinking about operations and thinking about resources." He said he would continue to help lead the Sol Project, and would talk with Long Wharf about possible relationships between the project and the theater. He also said that part of his focus would be continuing to try to create "a more inclusive American theater."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Theater
It was the kind of full throated critique of President Trump familiar to MSNBC viewers, yet transplanted to the heart of Fox News: Tucker Carlson, the network's conservative 8 p.m. host, upbraiding the White House for its attempts to justify the killing of a top military commander in Iran. "It's hard to remember now, but as recently as last week, most people didn't consider Iran an imminent threat," Mr. Carlson said at the start of his Monday show, going on to mock Mr. Trump's secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, for saying intelligence agencies had identified an undefined Iranian threat. "Seems like about 20 minutes ago, we were denouncing these people as the 'deep state' and pledging never to trust them again without verification," Mr. Carlson told viewers, eyebrow arched. "Now, for some reason, we do trust them implicitly and completely." At 9 p.m., Fox News made way for the pro Trump commentary of Sean Hannity, who declared "the world is safer" after the death of the commander, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani. But Mr. Carlson's dissent showed how a right wing media world that typically moves in lock step with the president has struggled to reconcile Mr. Trump's surprise escalation with his prior denunciations of open ended conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. In an interview, Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump's former chief strategist, said that he and other supporters of the president were still hunting for an effective defense. "This is a very complicated issue, and the people who support President Trump, from Tucker Carlson all the way to Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, are really trying to work through this," Mr. Bannon said on Monday. "What you're seeing now live on television, live on radio is people working through what this means." Just as the political world was caught off guard by the killing of General Suleimani, so was the conservative media complex. As reports of the missile strike in Baghdad that killed the general emerged on Thursday, Mr. Hannity phoned into his Fox News show from vacation to offer vociferous praise. That same night, Mr. Carlson warned his viewers that "America appears to be lumbering toward a new Middle East war." On "Fox Friends" the next morning, the co host Brian Kilmeade said he was "elated" by the news, only to be scolded by Geraldo Rivera, who pointed to false intelligence peddled by the George W. Bush administration to justify the Iraq war. "Don't for a minute start cheering this on," Mr. Rivera, a Fox News correspondent, told the hosts. Mr. Bannon, the former chief of Breitbart News, now runs a pro Trump podcast, "War Room: Impeachment." In the interview, he said he was concerned that a burgeoning conflict in Iran could threaten Mr. Trump's support among "working class, middle class people, particularly people whose sons and daughters actually fight in these wars," a group that believed the president opposed significant foreign intervention. "Why was it necessary to kill this guy and to kill him now and to exacerbate the military issues, given the fact that President Trump looks to us as someone who's not trigger happy?" Mr. Bannon said, paraphrasing a question he said he was hearing from independent voters. "That still has to be explained," Mr. Bannon continued. "I don't know if it's the president addressing the nation. I don't know if it's the president getting on 'Fox Friends.' But clearly, at some point in time, the president's got to walk through not just what his logic was, but also where he wants to take this." 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. Indeed, part of the problem for conservative media commentators was the lack of guidance from the White House, which has been slow to settle on a public narrative around General Suleimani's death. In 2003, as the Bush administration prepared for a conflict in Iraq, White House officials took pains to build support among allies and media commentators for an invasion. In 2020, the Trump administration seems to be attempting the reverse: retroactively arguing its case even as the world grapples with the consequences of a provocative military strike. Without providing specifics, Trump aides have referred to evidence from intelligence agencies about an imminent threat from Iran the same intelligence agencies that Mr. Trump and his media surrogates have attacked for three years as biased and prone to fabricating evidence. The White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, is virtually unknown to the public, because she has not held a briefing in her six months on the job and rarely agrees to interviews outside of Fox News. An attempt on Twitter by Vice President Mike Pence to connect General Suleimani to the 9/11 attacks was quickly proved wrong. Mr. Pompeo, dispatched to the major political talk shows on Sunday, argued that "appeasement" of Iran would increase the risk of a terror attack, even as General Suleimani's death set off enormous anti American protests in Tehran. That prompted an on air rebuke from Mr. Carlson, who showed a clip of Mr. Pompeo on his Monday Fox News show. "The risk of terror is also increased by bombing other people's countries," Mr. Carlson said. Mr. Carlson, a longtime opponent of American involvement in the Middle East, has been more willing than Mr. Hannity to criticize Mr. Trump, though he has not called out the president by name in his recent commentary on Iran. After his Monday segment on General Suleimani, he introduced a five part series, "American Dystopia," chronicling urban decay in San Francisco. (The president later retweeted a Twitter post by Mr. Carlson promoting the series.) Mr. Trump, for his part, has done relatively little so far to persuade the public. Aside from a brief and hastily convened TV statement from his Palm Beach resort, he has kept to Twitter, initially posting a caption less picture of an American flag on the day of the Baghdad strike. On Tuesday afternoon, the president spoke informally to reporters at the White House about the strike. On Monday, he granted his first interview on the matter to the radio show of the conservative host Rush Limbaugh, a Trump safe space with a direct line to the president's political base. "I hope this is the greatest year of your life, sir," Mr. Limbaugh cooed to Mr. Trump at one point, while also venturing that the Suleimani killing had many Americans on edge. "People are being scared to death, their kids are being scared to death, out of their minds, that somehow this is going to start World War III," he said. Mr. Trump responded haltingly, as if testing out ideas for his message. "This should have been done for the last 15 to 20 years," the president said, calling General Suleimani "a terrorist" and declaring that "our country is a lot safer." Soon, he had veered into complaints about House Democrats and their views on Israel. Charlie Sykes, a longtime right wing talk radio host and a critic of Mr. Trump, said in an interview that the president could still draw on a reservoir of support among his conservative supporters. "Killing terrorists has always been a great talking point for Republican presidents," Mr. Sykes said. Mr. Trump's campaign trail opposition to the Iraq war, though, complicates matters. "Trumpism is both isolationist and highly militaristic at the same time," said Mr. Sykes, who is also a MSNBC contributor. "It's not dovish it's highly militaristic, but it's selectively militaristic. Being strong is not inconsistent with appeasing the North Koreans or Vladimir Putin." He paused to laugh. "My head is hurting just thinking about this." On Monday night, Mr. Hannity previewed a potential new talking point for the president. "We can't and won't be going with boots on the ground in Iran," he told viewers. "That's not going to happen, and frankly, it's not necessary." Still, the situation in Iran remains fluid. On Monday, Mr. Bannon used his podcast to point out the contradictions of the president's approach, noting, "One of the central building blocks of why he was elected president was to get out of these foreign wars." A co host, the former Trump campaign aide Jason Miller, leaped to the president's defense, but Mr. Bannon interrupted. "You're thinking like Republicans," he said. "Where's the populist nationalist movement in this? This is supposed to be a new day."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
Oh, charcoal. Are you dirty? Clean? Both? Neither? Whatever the case, a new class of grooming products includes charcoal as a key ingredient. Last year, Clinique added Charcoal Face Wash to its men's line, while Dermalogica debuted a detoxifying Charcoal Rescue Masque over the summer. In terms of services, the New York salon Mario Badescu will throw in a charcoal mask as an add on to facials, while Ling Skin Care offers a "charcoal facial detox." Pressed Juicery has taken an inside out approach, with an "activated charcoal lemonade" on its menu. "Activated charcoal has been around in the medical profession for hundreds and hundreds of years," said Diana Howard, vice president for research and development at Dermalogica. "They use it when someone ingests poison. Most ambulances carry it."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
A pair of blowouts on Thanksgiving served as a fairly entertaining start to a week that includes must watch matchups like the Kansas City Chiefs facing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Tennessee Titans playing the Indianapolis Colts. Meanwhile, the league is still struggling mightily with the coronavirus. Baltimore's game against Pittsburgh has been delayed until at least Tuesday, and Denver will not have an active quarterback on their roster for a game against New Orleans. Here's a look at N.F.L. Week 12 with all picks made against the spread. Tom Brady can clearly still do many things effectively. He already has more touchdown passes, 25, for the Buccaneers (7 4) than he had all of last season for the Patriots, and Tampa Bay is averaging 29.1 points a game. There is no reason to believe Brady won't be able to lead the team to its first playoff appearance since 2007. Though Brady still has clear value, it is worth noting that he has already thrown more interceptions than he did last year, and is throwing them at his highest rate since 2009. More troubling given his team's star studded collection of pass catchers is his complete inability to stretch the field. According to the N.F.L.'s Next Gen Stats, Brady's last 22 pass attempts of 20 or more yards have fallen incomplete the longest such stretch for any quarterback since 2017. Despite an ugly start last weekend, the Colts (7 3) showed how great their defense can be in a thrilling win over Green Bay. After falling behind, 28 14, at halftime, Indianapolis limited the Packers to a field goal on five second half possessions and forced a fumble in overtime to set up a game winning field goal. The Colts, who will be without star defensive tackle DeForest Buckner who is on the Covid 19 reserve list, face another stiff test this week from the Titans (7 3), who shook off a bit of a cold streak by beating Baltimore in overtime. To add some spice, this game could go a long way to determining which of these teams win the A.F.C. South. The Colts are a much more balanced team. They're playing at home, and it is easy to imagine their offense putting up a huge number of points against Tennessee's banged up defense. Ultimately, the Colts have a few too many advantages in this matchup to doubt them. Pick: Colts 3.5 There is a difference between a bad team and one that is simply overcome by injuries, and San Francisco (4 6) has been more of the latter in its letdown season. The Upshot still gives the 49ers an 11 percent chance of qualifying for the postseason, but the team is more suited to a different role: spoiler. There is no such thing as a moral victory, but the Raiders (6 4) should be holding their heads high after very nearly beating the Chiefs in a game that came down to which team had the ball last. Had Las Vegas gotten one more possession, the score easily could have gone the other way. After hanging with the Chiefs, the Raiders shouldn't find the Falcons (3 7) to be much of a problem. Atlanta is 1 4 in Mercedes Benz Stadium, and the team's porous secondary will be in trouble trying to slow down Raiders quarterback Derek Carr. The unclear status of Falcons wide receiver Julio Jones's injured hamstring makes Atlanta's efficacy just as questionable. Pick: Raiders 3 Aaron Rodgers is coming off a disappointing loss, is going up against a division rival that might be starting a third string quarterback and is playing in prime time. You might expect fireworks in such a situation, but enthusiasm should be tempered considering Chicago's defense commands respect regardless of the team's four game losing streak. With respect for the fact that Green Bay (7 3) can score 25 or more points against just about any team, the question is how many points Chicago can score against the Packers' inconsistent defense. Chicago might get running back David Montgomery back this week, but the choice for the Bears (5 5) at quarterback will come down to the health of Nick Foles and Mitchell Trubisky. If neither can go, Tyler Bray will presumably start. All three, at this point in their careers, are bad. The scoring should be fairly low, but it could still result in a lopsided win for Green Bay. Pick: Packers 8.5 Quarterback Teddy Bridgewater and running back Christian McCaffrey both practiced on Wednesday, but it's possible that Carolina (4 7) will hold either or both out of the game since the Panthers' Week 13 bye would give both a chance to get closer to 100 percent. Should Bridgewater be active, however, he could do quite a bit of damage against the Vikings (4 6), even without McCaffrey, as the Panthers have a fairly underrated collection of receivers. If Bridgewater is out, the math changes. Pick: Panthers 4 Footballers 41, Cowboys 16 While Dallas played well last week, we predicted that Washington, as the most complete team in the pitiful N.F.C. East, would come away with a win on the road. Our pick of Washington 3 proved wise when running back Antonio Gibson ran all over the Dallas defense (136 yards from scrimmage, three touchdowns) and Andy Dalton and the Cowboys weren't able to keep pace. In one of the stranger plays you'll see (above), the Cowboys, trailing by just 20 16 in the fourth quarter, tried a fake punt at their own 24 yard line. Wide receiver Cedrick Wilson was stopped for a 1 yard loss on the trick play and Washington's Gibson scored one play later. The Footballers added two more touchdowns in the final quarter in what ended up being a blowout. Texans 41, Lions 25 With J.J. Watt seeming fully healthy for the first time in ages, and Deshaun Watson at the top of his game, we predicted Houston would have no problem beating the Lions in Detroit. Not only did Texans 3 pay off, but the win was powered by Watt, who had the second pick 6 interception of his career, and Watson, who passed for 318 yards and four touchdowns. Houston drew 10 penalties in the game, but the Texans' defense balanced that out with three turnovers. That was a huge problem on a day when Detroit's secondary had absolutely no answer for Houston wide receiver Will Fuller V, who had six catches for 171 yards and two touchdowns. The loss dropped Detroit to 4 7. As a result, it wasn't a surprise when the team fired Coach Matt Patricia and General Manager Bob Quinn on Saturday. A quick primer for those who are not familiar with betting lines: Favorites are listed next to a negative number that represents how many points they must win by to cover the spread. Chiefs 3.5, for example, means that Kansas City must beat Tampa Bay by at least 4 points for its backers to win their bet. Gamblers can also bet on the total score, or whether the teams' combined score in the game is over or under a preselected number of points.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Robert W. Finertie, 82, of Walnut Creek, Calif., is writing a memoir about his struggles with melanoma. He said that writing his life story "has been a healing journey that has helped me reach so many things in my past." Like many retirees, 82 year old Robert W. Finertie wanted to create a well crafted account of his life. The raw material was certainly there. He had been a Presbyterian minister who became unemployable after a divorce, ultimately turning to a career in life insurance. And there was his struggle with melanoma in the 1970s. After he was told the cancer was gone, tests showed that it had spread to his groin, and he underwent a lengthy series of chemotherapy sessions to save his life. Looking back, he wanted to share what he had learned from the experience and how he survived. Mr. Finertie, of Walnut Creek, Calif., said it "has been a healing journey that has helped me reach so many things in my past. My wife says I have never been happier." To come up with a draft, which is now 100 pages, Mr. Finertie enrolled in online courses with the writing coach Brooke Warner. She, along with Linda Joy Myers, a Berkeley, Calif., psychologist, teaches "Write Your Memoirs in Six Months." Mr. Finertie said the classes helped him focus on the purpose of his memoir and connected him to other aspiring memoirists for inspiration and feedback. Others looking to highlight meaningful slices of their life stories whether just to share with their families and friends or to publish for a wider audience are signing up at writing centers, adult education programs and independent bookstores to learn techniques to retrieve and describe compelling moments. No one keeps an official tally of enrollees, but teachers like Wendy Salinger, who conducts a summer memoir writing course at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, said retirees made up a substantial portion of these classes. "We help them understand that a memoir covers an aspect of their life," said Ms. Salinger, who has written her own. "A memoir is not an autobiography that tells a life from beginning to end. A memoir has to tap into a universal truth." There have long been memoirs, often written by celebrities and politicians. But recent bare all personal tales like "Wild," in which Cheryl Strayed unsparingly examines her life during a grueling hike on a Pacific Northwest trail, are inspiring more people to be increasingly candid about experiences that were once carefully hidden. "There are a lot of scenes my students write that knock my socks off," Ms. Salinger said, "because people have to look inward to be honest, and that can be very difficult." The confessional writing that results from such self examination grates on some who find it self indulgent or even cynical, and the genre got publicly sullied in 2006 when writer James Frey was caught mixing fiction with truth in his popular memoir "A Million Little Pieces." But the genre has endured and even thrived. "It's the age of memoirs," Ms. Salinger said, as self publishing has made it easier and more accessible to plumb an individual's past and share it widely. And many do so because they believe memoir writing is therapeutic and revelatory. Students like Mr. Finertie, who said he was inspired by Ms. Strayed's memoir, can pursue online courses that use top sellers like Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes" and Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love" to help teach writing and narrative techniques. Most who enroll in such memoir writing seminars are in their 50s and 60s, said Ms. Myers, who also started the National Association of Memoir Writers six years ago, and teaches the memoir course with Ms. Warner. Some people can churn out a 60,000 word memoir in six months, but coming up with an insightful piece of writing often involves long term effort. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' It took Annette Berkovits of Manhattan six years to research and write a memoir about her father, Nachman Libeskind, after she discovered tapes he had recorded about his World War II era experiences. She enrolled in the Gotham Writers' Workshop and wrote "revision after revision and revision," she said, while taking several memoir writing courses, including a master class in the genre at the writers' workshop, as well as some poetry classes. Eventually she wrote "In the Unlikeliest of Places," which tells the tale of her father from prewar Poland, the Nazi invasion, imprisonment in a gulag in the former Soviet Union and then to his life in the United States where, in his 80s, he became a modernist painter. She visited Poland several times while conducting research. "One of the biggest challenges is not to have a straight narrative," she said, "so I traveled back and forth to Poland several times to really understand my father's experiences." Ms. Berkovits, who spent her career at the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, began the memoir in 2007, when she was 63. It was published in September by the Wilfrid Laurier University Press. For every memoir writer who aspires to commercial acclaim, there are others like Dr. Paul T. Wilson, a retired Bethesda, Md., psychiatrist, who want to leave a personal legacy for family. He and his wife, Barbara, took a brief course in writing memoirs offered by a local adult education program, Live and Learn Bethesda. "I wanted my story to be entertainingly written," he said. In the process of coming up with his 30 page memoir, he began recalling his earliest years as the child of a missionary couple in China. "It stirred up stuff that was quite different from lying on the couch and babbling at the ceiling while I was being analyzed" as part of his psychiatric training, he said. Dr. Wilson was content with printing his memoirs and distributing them to his children, and he did not seek commercial publication, where the competition with celebrity tales is stiff. Still, "there's a healthy market for a tell all memoir," said Trish Todd, executive editor of Simon Schuster, which has published memoirs from people as diverse as former Vice President Dick Cheney and the actor Rob Lowe, and two years ago started a self publishing option, called Archway Publishing, for authors to publish their works for a price. Ms. Todd only accepts memoir submissions from book agents for Simon Schuster's list. But in a nod to the power of memoirs, the publisher will release an e book or printed book after helping select the winner of a nationwide memoir contest. Begun by AARP, the national organization for seniors, and HuffPost 50, the Huffington Post's website for older adults, the contest solicited entries from those age 50 and above. The entrants, each of whom had to submit a 5,000 word memoir synopsis, offered stories that ran the gamut, from spouses who came out of the closet to domestic violence to struggles to lead independent lives.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
OAKLAND, Calif. Hundreds of Facebook employees, in rare public criticism on Monday of their own company, protested executives' decision not to do anything about inflammatory posts that President Trump had placed on the giant social media platform over the past week. Many of the employees, who said they refused to work in order to show their support for demonstrators across the country, added an automated message to their digital profiles and email responses saying that they were out of the office in a show of protest. The protest group conducting a virtual "walkout" of sorts since most Facebook employees are working from home because of the coronavirus pandemic was one of a number of clusters of employees pressing Facebook executives to take a tougher stand on Mr. Trump's posts. Inside the company, staff members have circulated petitions and threatened to resign, and a number of employees wrote publicly about their unhappiness on Twitter and elsewhere. More than a dozen current and former employees have described the unrest as the most serious challenge to the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive, since the company was founded 15 years ago. "The hateful rhetoric advocating violence against black demonstrators by the US President does not warrant defense under the guise of freedom of expression," one Facebook employee wrote in an internal message board, according to a copy of the text viewed by The New York Times. The employee added: "Along with Black employees in the company, and all persons with a moral conscience, I am calling for Mark to immediately take down the President's post advocating violence, murder and imminent threat against Black people." The Times agreed to withhold the employee's name. Mr. Zuckerberg has argued on a number of occasions that Facebook should take a hands off approach to what people post, including lies from elected officials and others in power. He has repeatedly said the public should be allowed to decide what to believe. That stand was tested last week when Twitter added fact check and warning labels to two tweets from the president that broke Twitter's rules around voter suppression and glorification of violence. But as Twitter acted on Mr. Trump's tweets, Facebook left his posts on its platform alone. Mr. Zuckerberg said Mr. Trump's posts did not violate the social network's rules. "Personally, I have a visceral negative reaction to this kind of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric," Mr. Zuckerberg said in a post to his Facebook page on Friday. "But I'm responsible for reacting not just in my personal capacity but as the leader of an institution committed to free expression." Mr. Zuckerberg spoke briefly with Mr. Trump in a telephone call on Friday, according to two people familiar with the matter. The call, which was previously reported by Axios, was described as "productive," though it was not clear what was said. Mr. Zuckerberg explained his position to employees in a live streamed question and answer session later that day. In a video of the session that was reviewed by The Times, hundreds of employees voiced opposition by posting comments alongside the session, and some questioned whether any black people had been involved in making the decision. "The lack of backbone, and this weak leadership, will be judged by history. Hate speech should never be compared to free speech," one employee wrote. "The president (sic) is literally threatening for the National Guard to shoot citizens. Maybe when we're in the middle of a race war the policy will change." Mr. Zuckerberg said the posts were different from those that threaten violence because they were about the use of "state force," which is currently allowed. While there was some support for the chief executive during the livestream, the results of an internal poll taken during the session and posted by a staff member showed that more than 1,000 Facebook employees voted against Mr. Zuckerberg's choice. Nineteen of the respondents said they agreed with the decision. In response to the walkout on Monday, Mr. Zuckerberg has moved his weekly meeting with employees to Tuesday from Thursday. The meeting will be a chance for employees to question Mr. Zuckerberg directly. A Facebook spokeswoman said Monday morning that executives welcomed feedback from employees. "We recognize the pain many of our people are feeling right now, especially our Black community," said Liz Bourgeois, the spokeswoman. "We encourage employees to speak openly when they disagree with leadership." Mr. Zuckerberg's post last week explaining his decision on Mr. Trump's posts frustrated many inside the company. More than a dozen Facebook employees tweeted that they disagreed with Mr. Zuckerberg's decision, including the head of design of Facebook's portal product, Andrew Crow. An engineer for the platform, Lauren Tan, posted about the situation on Friday. "Facebook's inaction in taking down Trump's post inciting violence makes me ashamed to work here," Ms. Tan wrote in a tweet. "Silence is complicity." Two senior Facebook employees told The New York Times that they had informed their managers that they would resign if Mr. Zuckerberg did not reverse his decision. Another person, who was supposed to start work at the company next month, told Facebook they were no longer willing to accept a position at the company because of Mr. Zuckerberg's decision. Over the weekend, several petitions circulated among Facebook employees calling for the company to make personnel changes and for more diversity of voices among Mr. Zuckerberg's top lieutenants. Roger McNamee, a venture capitalist who was an early investor in Facebook but in recent years has turned into an aggressive critic of the company, said Facebook's decision to leave Mr. Trump's posts alone was typical of a longtime pattern of behavior among big social media companies. "Internet platforms that are pervasive as Facebook and Google are globally must always align with power, including authoritarians. It is a matter of self preservation," Mr. McNamee said. "Facebook has been a key tool for authoritarians in Brazil, the Philippines, Cambodia and Myanmar. In the U.S., Facebook has consistently ignored or altered its terms of service to the benefit of Trump. Until last week, Twitter did the same thing." Mr. Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer, planned to host a call on Monday evening with civil rights leaders who have lashed out publicly against Facebook's protection of Mr. Trump's posts. The call was expected to include Vanita Gupta of the National Leadership Conference, Rashad Robinson of Color of Change and Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The civil rights leaders said they would push back on Mr. Zuckerberg's position on Mr. Trump's posts, which they see as violations of Facebook's community standards that do not permit voter suppression or the incitement of violence, even by political figures. "It's really important for Mark Zuckerberg to contend with the fact that he is prioritizing free expression while our democracy is literally burning," said Ms. Gupta, who organized the call with the executives. On Sunday, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote that he would be donating 10 million to groups working on racial justice. The move, coupled with his earlier post expressing solidarity with the demonstrators, did little to quell the internal protest.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Technology
This article contains spoilers for "The Queen's Gambit." In the Netflix series "The Queen's Gambit," the character Benny Watts walks up to Beth Harmon, the show's heroine, at the start of the 1967 United States Chess Championship. The location is a small auditorium on the campus of Ohio University. Uttering an expletive, Benny gestures around the hall and complains about the conditions, noting that the best players in the country are competing, and yet the venue is second rate, the chess boards and pieces are cheap plastic, and the few spectators seem bored at best. As a chess master who grew up in the era just after the one in which the series takes place, and who wrote the chess column for The New York Times for eight years, I can attest to the scene's almost painful authenticity. Many tournaments of that era were played in odd and sometimes dingy locations. Even the U.S. championship was not immune; the 1964 65 competition was not even held. The show's creators have also done a particularly good job at capturing and dramatizing the high tension of chess tournaments and the sometimes total obsessiveness that the game can inspire. Although it is played for comic effect, there is more than a grain of truth to the scene in which Harry Beltik (Harry Melling) hauls a big box of chess books out of his car and starts passing them to Beth in her living room, only to discover that she has already read most of them. And most skilled chess players have probably played at least a few games entirely in their heads by calling out the moves while speeding down a highway, as Beth and Benny do. Over the decades, it has become almost a running gag among chess fans to point out mistakes in onscreen portrayals of the game. Dan Lucas, one of the senior officials at the United States Chess Federation, has kept an unofficial list for years. Among the most common transgressions: boards that are oriented incorrectly (there should always be a white square in the right corner), incorrect arrangements of pieces (such as reversing the kings and queens on their starting squares) and characters who don't know how to move and handle the pieces. Working with two consultants, Garry Kasparov, the former world champion, and Bruce Pandolfini, a well known New York City chess coach, the creators of "The Queen's Gambit" have avoided those errors. (Pandolfini even has a cameo role as a Kentucky tournament director.) The actors were trained on how to play and to move pieces like experts, which is usually done with swift, almost machine gun like movements. Taylor Joy actually developed her own, more fluid style, as she explained in an interview with Chess Life magazine, which was based on her training as a dancer. In the series, she scoops the pieces up and then softly flips them over. The games portrayed in the series are not just realistic, they are real, based on actual competitions. For example, the match in which Beth defeats Harry for the Kentucky state title was from a game in Riga, Latvia, in 1955; the last speed chess game in which she beats Benny was played at the Paris Opera in 1858; and the game in which she faces the Russian champion Vasily Borgov (Marcin Dorocinski) in the series finale was played in Biel, Switzerland, in 1993. Despite the efforts to make the chess scenes believable, there are still areas in which the series comes up short. The most apparent is in how fast the players move during the tournaments. As one tournament director tells Beth before a competition in Cincinnati, each player has two hours to make 40 moves, which was, and still is, a standard time control for such games. But in every match, Beth and her opponents make each of their moves after taking only a few seconds to think about them. At such a tempo, they would finish their games in minutes, not hours. The speed is understandable for filmmaking because watching players sit at a board for hours, barely moving, is not riveting. But it is also not accurate. Nor is having competitors talk during some of the games. Other than offering a draw essentially agreeing that the match ends in a tie players do not speak to each other during matches. It is not only considered bad sportsmanship, it is also against the rules. But several times, as in Beth's game against Harry in Episode 2, in which she gloats near the end, and in her game against a young Russian prodigy in Mexico City in Episode 4, Beth and her opponents engage in verbal exchanges. The dialogue makes the games more understandable and spices up the drama, but once again, it is not true to life. Though "The Queen's Gambit" is a work of fiction and the characters that appear in it never existed, there are passing references to players who did, among them the world champions Jose Raul Capablanca, Alexander Alekhine, Mikhail Botvinnik and Boris Spassky. There is also a curious moment when Harry compares Beth to Paul Morphy, an American, who played that famous game at the Paris Opera in 1858 and who is widely considered the greatest player of the 19th century. The comparison seems like a misdirection. Despite her self destructive tendencies, Beth does not resemble Morphy. She is closer to a female version of another champion: Bobby Fischer. That may not be accidental. Walter Tevis, who wrote the 1983 novel on which the series is based, was a passionate and knowledgeable amateur player. In making the protagonist a woman playing a game that had long been dominated by men and which continues to be today, though no one knows the reason Tevis may have been expressing a hope that one day there might be true equality of the sexes over the board. "The Queen's Gambit" covers a period from 1958 to 1968. That coincides with the peak of Fischer's career, which ran from 1957, when he won the U.S. championship at 14, to 1972, when he won the world championship at 29 and quit competing. Beth wins the 1967 U.S. championship. That was the year Fischer won his eighth and final American title. After her adoptive mother dies in Mexico City, Beth, who is in her late teens, finds herself living alone. Soon after Fischer's older sister, Joan, married and moved out, his mother, Regina, did, too, to pursue a medical degree. That left Fischer, at 16, living on his own. Fischer was somewhat antisocial and one dimensional there was little that he liked to talk about outside of chess. Beth is more likable, a necessity for a leading character in a show, but she has some similar traits. She learns Russian in order to be prepared to face the Soviet players; Fischer taught himself Russian so that he could read Russian chess journals, which were the best sources of information. Unlike the other top players in the show, Beth is able to make a living at chess. Even Benny, a past U.S. champion, lives in a dingy basement. Fischer was a pioneer as a full time professional player in the United States. Kasparov has often said that it was Fischer's demands for better playing conditions and larger prizes that professionalized the game. When Beth needs money to go to Russia, she asks the government to pay for the trip. Fischer's mother once picketed the White House to try to raise money for the United States chess team. One of the reasons Beth does not have enough money for the trip is because she has bought too many dresses. Fischer, even though he was often scratching for money, had his suits and shoes custom made. Finally, Beth and Fischer have similar, aggressive playing styles. And when playing white and facing the Sicilian Defense, they both play the same system: the Fischer Sozin Attack.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
Jenny Schlenzka, a curator at MoMA PS1, is about to move from one old school building to another. In February, she will become the artistic director of Performance Space 122 known as PS122 in a nod toward the building's former use as a public school. Ms. Schlenzka, 38, succeeds Vallejo Gantner, who announced in May that as soon as his replacement was found, he would step down from the organization, a downtown hub of innovative performance and the host of the annual Coil festival, which begins on Tuesday. At PS1 which is also in a former school building, this one in Long Island City, Queens Ms. Schlenzka created the program Sunday Sessions, which featured performers like Ann Liv Young and Justin Vivian Bond. Before that, she was an assistant curator at PS1's affiliate, the Museum of Modern Art, where she worked with artists including the cerebral choreographers Jerome Bel and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. She will be the third artistic director in the history of PS122, which was founded in 1980, and is its first female leader. In an interview, Ms. Schlenzka said that it was time for more women to lead arts institutions, generally.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
Forget free wine hours and on demand workout videos. An increasing number of hotels around the world are now providing guests the option to book rooms with filtration and purification systems that minimize threats of air pollution and offer cleaner air. "Interior air quality can be abysmal," said Beth McGroarty, research director for The Global Wellness Institute, a nonprofit organization for the wellness industry. "Hotels are combating this by installing high tech systems in some of their rooms that improve the air their guests are breathing." The quest for clean air is part of the growing interest in wellness travel, Ms. McGroarty said . Outside conditions could certainly be a larger factor. According to data released last year by the World Health Organization, nine of 10 people globally breathe polluted air. Many top urban destinations, particularly in developing nations, have been recognized for unhealthy smog conditions. Wildfires are becoming more frequent, affecting the air quality of hundreds of miles. And travelers with respiratory conditions or allergies may especially benefit from breathing cleaner air. Most hotel properties generally charge a higher nightly rate for their clean air rooms, compared with their standard rooms, and while the amount varies depending on the hotel, a stay can be 5 percent to 7 percent more expensive.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
AMSTERDAM When a ballet offers you video on stage, a stark set and imaginative lighting, you probably have the strong impression that you are seeing an innovative work. When that work is new, and boasts a collaboration with a famous artist, and is promoted by attractive posters showing a naked body, you are likely to be even more certain. But as the Dutch National Ballet's "Tempest," choreographed by Krzysztof Pastor, with video design by Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari, unfolded on Wednesday night at Het Muziektheater here, severe doubts crossed my mind. What exactly was new about the dull choreography that moved dancers in blocky groupings around the stage, or set endless pas de deux full of across the shoulder lifts and we're having sex now couplings? Why is the story ballet an irresistible lure to choreographers? Why pick this story, which is all about the potency of language, with a central character, Prospero, whose identity is defined by thoughts and memories that dance can only broadly suggest? One reason is that it's the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, a good occasion for ballet companies all over the world to commission new work based on his plays. Last year, Alexei Ratmansky created a new "Tempest" for American Ballet Theater; in April, the Royal Ballet performed Christopher Wheeldon's new "Winter's Tale." Now comes Mr. Pastor's "Tempest," which, like those ballets, is a large scale and ambitious production. There are Ms. Neshat and Mr. Azari's rather beautiful gray toned seascapes and waving sea grasses on sand dunes. There is an attractively minimal set (by Jean Kalman) consisting of a large tree that is slowly lowered and a glowing red circle in which the magical events of the story take place. There are imaginative, nicely simple costumes long, pleated trouser skirts and loose shirts for the principal men, a beautiful green bronze dress for Miranda by Tatyana van Walsum. There is a score of mostly 16th and 17th century English music (a hefty dose of Purcell, but also Robert Johnson, Matthew Locke and Thomas Tallis) with some unremarkable new sections from Michel van der Aa, and a virtuoso display on the daf, an Iranian frame drum, from Abbas Bakhtiari, who plays the elderly Prospero. It is Mr. Bakhtiari who provides the link between the four scenes that structure the piece. Shaking and beating upon his tambourine like instrument to create an astonishingly reverberating sound, he opens each of the four sections that constitute the piece, and remains a shadowy presence through most of the action, watching the character of his younger self (Jozef Varga) and the others. The Tempest Rink Sliphorst and Jurgita Dronina of Dutch National Ballet in this production at the Het Muziektheater in Amsterdam. Given how hard it is to reproduce Shakespeare's complicated plotlines in dance, Mr. Pastor's approach initially seems promising. Instead of following a linear narrative, he structures the ballet by beginning each section with a storm created by an elderly Prospero. In each, bodies emerge from the water; first the young Prospero and his daughter Miranda (Jurgita Dronina), exiled from their country and shipwrecked on the island, later Ferdinand (Remi Wortmeyer) along with Stephano (Serguei Endinian) and Trinculo (Roman Artyushkin). In each section, we see these characters encounter Ariel (Koen Havenith) and Caliban (Rink Sliphorst), and one another. The central narrative thrust of the play Prospero's desire for revenge upon his brother, who supplanted him as Duke of Milan and exiled him to the island is ignored, as are most of the characters in the play and the numerous subplots. Perhaps those are wise decisions. But in paring down the tale to focus on a Ferdinand Miranda love story, and some sort of inchoate brooding from the elderly Prospero, Mr. Pastor also loses any narrative urgency or interest. Instead we get a repetitive structure in which each section is introduced by Mr. Bakhtiari conjuring up a wild percussive storm as Ms. Neshat's film of the sea (oddly untempest like most of the time) and shadowy figures standing on a beach, plays. Then Purcell begins and a sixteen member corps de ballet, all wearing long skirts (in, variously, blue, red, black and white) rush in and dance, before giving way to the solo protagonists. Unfortunately, it's tragically dull. It's surprising that an experienced dance maker like Mr. Pastor, who is a resident choreographer at Dutch National and the director of the Polish National Ballet, could produce such uninteresting movement, but most of the corps work looks like large scale classroom exercises. He occasionally inserts a bent legged shuffle or a contraction of the torso, but mostly it's conventionally academic ballet, without the counterpoint, dynamics or spatial organization that might engage the eye and mind and make it modern. The pas de deux and solo work is little better, although the beautifully articulated dancing of Mr. Wortmeyer and Ms. Dronina goes a considerable way in alleviating tedium. If nothing else, Ms. Dronina would deserve a prize for stamina; apart from the third section she is almost never offstage, and seems always engaged in an impassioned pas de deux with her father, Caliban or Ferdinand. Mr. Pastor makes the interesting choice not to bestialize Caliban; Mr. Sliphorst is clad only in black trousers and dances with a classical refinement that is not differentiated from the others. Only in part three and the encounters between Caliban and the play's comic characters Stephano and Trinculo, does Mr. Pastor attempt some buffoonery and a more earthy style, but this does no more to bring Caliban alive as a character for us than his earlier appearances. The elements of this "Tempest" never cohere. The video design is beautiful but never feels integral and is sometimes cliched. (There are a lot of brooding images of Mr. Bakhtiari's face watching the others.) The music is beautifully played by the Holland Symfonia (and the counter tenor Purcell solos sung by Dave ten Kate), but is perhaps Mr. Pastor's Achilles' heel in its slow paced formal gravity. Most important, the choreography makes no case for ballet as a contemporary art. Here, regardless of the packaging, the content looks old. The Tempest. Choreographed by Krzysztof Pastor. Dutch National Ballet at Het Muziektheater. Through Sunday.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
In her new staging of T.S. Eliot's poems "Four Quartets," the choreographer Pam Tanowitz has created dance theater of the highest caliber. This had its world premiere on Friday at Bard College's Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. After one viewing, on Saturday night, I'm inclined to call this the most sublime new dance since Merce Cunningham's "Biped" (1999). Few poems are as suffused in ideas of dance as these Eliot "Quartets," written between 1936 and 1942. Eliot piercingly grasped the principle obtained surely from Hindu religion that, in dance, motion contains stillness and stillness motion. ("At the still point, there the dance is,/ But neither arrest nor movement.") And these references to dance illustrate Eliot's larger philosophical points about time, memory, culture, history, life and death, recurrently expressed in terms of paradox ("In my beginning is my end"). In Ms. Tanowitz's production, which ran through Sunday, the dance itself gives us multiple aspects of philosophy. The movement here does not illustrate the words in literal terms. It's more the other way round: The stage world gives us the amazing impression that Eliot's words arise out of Ms. Tanowitz's dance imagery. In ensembles that combine pattern and asymmetry, in duets and solos of thrilling contrasts and insistence, the choreography becomes the poems' outer framework (dance often proceeds at length between stanzas) and their spiritual accompaniment. The actor Kathleen Chalfant, seated between stage and musicians, reads all four poems with a quietly sonorous range of expression. She makes them sound contemporary and newly contemplative; she understates the dimensions that can seem religiose or portentous; she shows both wry humor and deep poignancy. In the first quartet, she attends so much to sense that she seems to underplay Eliot's rhythm. But by the fourth, speaking in darker tones, she reveals a pulse within the verse with telling drama. A superb new score by the illustrious Kaija Saariaho is also played, sometimes between stanzas, sometimes underneath the words, by the four musicians of The Knights (violin, viola, cello, harp). Varied effects of vibrato, portamento and pizzicato bring different shades of intensity, atmosphere, eloquence: Even a single austere cello line down a few tones can become fraught with significance. But the choreography is vividly independent from the music. Especially in solos, the 10 dancers (including Ms. Tanowitz herself, making a brief but telling appearance) illustrate Eliot's haunting line "You are the music While the music lasts." They are, that is, their own music and their phraseology embodies many of music's dimensions. Here is dance with its own evocative panoply of melodies, rhythms, harmonies, dynamics, constructions. The scenic designs by Clifton Taylor uses four paintings by the artist Brice Marden, employing both bright and soft colors, in some of the finest stage imagery of our time. The way one follows another helps to make this "Four Quartets" a spiritual journey. We're taken, poetically, through planes of existence. Some of the decors include doorways and screens without being intrusive. And the lighting, also by Mr. Taylor, makes the space and performers even more thrilling, sometimes with effects of shadow and silhouette. Ms. Tanowitz's use of stage space is superbly varied. Her performers often move like characters aware they're in a landscape. They move multi directionally. When dancers occupy only rear corners of the stage as happens in a long, remarkable duet (that often consists of overlapping or alternating solos) for Jason Collins and Victor Lozano at the start of the second quartet, "East Coker" they remain the protagonists of their own stories, intensely occupied in their own activities. Yet peripheral space also comes imaginatively into play at many moments: In brief arcs from one wing to the next, people make fleeting entrances and exits, as if anonymous, conveying that this one domain is part of others. In the words of the Bible, how beautiful are the feet! Ms. Tanowitz has long been one of the finest inventors of footwork but here, in ways no living choreographer has matched, she makes her dancers' feet look marvelous and delectable: strong, pliant, nuanced. They arch, perch, tap, bounce, run, skip. If you could watch this work only from the calf down, you would have rich fare. Yet the dances makes spines and legs look just as lavishly resourceful. Although the "Four Quartets" style throughout feels homogeneous, the dancers alternate, in a rare way, between firm technical rigor and a looser kind of softness. Watching, we feel the different legacies of two master choreographers who both died this century Cunningham (the rigor) and Trisha Brown (the softness). The dancers move between glorious shapes of sculptural line and gentler touches. There are many jumps: some brisk and flickering, some heroic and coursing, but others, in a later section, have a curiously lazy quality, as if in slow motion. This is also choreography in which the eyes play an important part. Often the dancers are just addressing the space, quietly focused. But in solos, the turn of a head, the direction of the gaze becomes crucial. And there are duets in which the meetings of eyes, without any overstatement, develops a powerful charge. (Eliot's poems now and then address "You" as if in intense conversation.) But the duets are wonders of two way accompaniment (mutual independence too), enlarging our understanding of how two people can coexist. A wide array of dance motifs returns throughout the work: A tilting stance with hands meeting overhead becomes a classically statuesque image of withdrawn meditation. Lindsey Jones has an insistent string of rapid steps (emboites), with legs turned out, scarcely advancing, like a witty drill; Mr. Collins bobs backward in shimmering jumps that trace diagonals across the stage; Mr. Lozano, in profile to us, does an accelerating run on the spot of gathering force.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Dance
"Ghost Stories" is a new Netflix anthology of four horror films made by some of Bollywood's leading filmmakers. To those unaware that Indian cinema has long surpassed the cliches of MGM style musicals and Technicolor kitsch, this movie introduces the talents and the shortcomings of the current tastemakers of Hindi film. Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee and Karan Johar direct vastly different shorts about contemporary Indian characters pushed to various stages of madness. There are terrifying in laws, unexplained sounds in the hallway, violent miscarriages, gruesome revelations and one particularly frightening mob of village cannibals. Bollywood's usual focus on romance and family melodrama hasn't allowed for a thriving horror genre, but with this anthology, each of these filmmakers tries their hand at local screams and moody creeps. The films are at their most unsettling when they draw their supernatural fears from India's lived reality mob violence, intergenerational conflicts and women's suffering. In promotional interviews for "Ghost Stories," all four directors have discussed the artistic freedom of creating content for the global streaming giant, freed from the country's cutthroat theatrical business model and the censors at the Central Board of Film Certification. For audiences, however, the results are a mixed bag. Kashyap transforms the trauma of a miscarriage into a stylized psychological thriller in which a jealous nephew uses his malicious supernatural powers to inflict pain on his pregnant aunt. Akhtar, whose masterful film "Gully Boy" was India's official Oscar submission for international feature this season, tells the story of a young nurse caring for a senile woman who may not be as ill as she seems. With exquisite production values dramatic apartments and severe color palettes these two segments showcase the technical prowess of contemporary Indian cinema and the acting talents of a new wave of performers.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
Christian Liaigre, a French interior and furniture designer whose muscular and elegant objects in wood, bronze and leather were emblematic of 1990s minimalism, and whose clients included Karl Lagerfeld, Calvin Klein, Rupert Murdoch and the Mercer hotel in SoHo, died on Sept. 2 in Paris. He was 77. His design firm, Liaigre, announced his death on Instagram without specifying the cause. Mr. Liaigre (pronounced lee AY gruh) had been an art student and a drawing teacher and had worked with show horses before he began making furniture in the early 1980s. By the turn of the next decade, a chunky, cracked wooden stool inspired by Brancusi's sculpture "Endless Column" had become his calling card, its gutsy and elemental shape a corrective to the fussy opulence the swags of chintz and Louis chairs that had defined the excesses of the '80s. The Mercer, which Andre Balazs opened in 1997, introduced Mr. Liaigre to the United States. The hotel's new old Modernism and loftlike rooms attracted movie stars (including Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe, who felt so at home there that he once hurled a phone at a desk clerk) and designers like Mr. Klein, who lived there before its official opening and liked his rooms so much that he hired Mr. Liaigre to design his own apartment at the Police Building, a few blocks south. "It was a complete aesthetic, and I don't think anyone did it better," Mr. Klein said in a phone interview. Other high profile clients followed, including Mr. Murdoch and his wife at the time, Wendi Murdoch, for whom Mr. Liagre designed a triplex in SoHo and a 184 foot sailing yacht named Rosehearty. His dark, low slung wenge wood furniture, and his clean lined linen sofas in white and pale lavender, were soon copied ad infinitum; for decades they would influence trendy hotel interiors, pricey condo developments and furniture emporiums like West Elm and Restoration Hardware. (By the late 1990s, wenge wood, his signature material, had been knocked off so often that it became a design world punch line.) Along with the austere architecture of John Pawson and the unadorned clothing of Mr. Klein and Helmut Lang, Mr. Liaigre's works sculptural tables, seats and lamps constructed of bronze, stone and ebonized woods were touchstones for a generation that expressed its wealth in earth tones and a monkish lack of ornament. His work resonated with craftsmen and architects, too, because the joinery was often the ornament. Ian Schrager, the hotelier and developer, hired both Mr. Pawson and Mr. Liaigre to design his penthouse at 40 Bond Street in the NoHo section of Manhattan, a Herzog de Meuron showplace, as well as his house in Southampton, N.Y. Mr. Schrager recalled that the contractors kept turning over Mr. Liaigre's furniture to see how the pieces were put together. "His furniture was so refined, so beautiful and so well made," Mr. Schrager said. Mr. Pawson remembered meeting Mr. Liaigre just once in a chance encounter at the Mercer. Both men were up early for breakfast. "We were the only ones in the room," Mr. Pawson said by email from his home on the island of Majorca in Spain. "We had a nice chat over a very minimal white egg, tea and toast." Before working on the Mercer, Mr. Liaigre had designed the interiors of the Hotel Montalembert in Paris, a boutique hotel built in the 1920s and redone in 1990. At that time, boutique hotels, as pioneered by Mr. Schrager, were over the top theaters, designed most notably by Philippe Starck and Andree Putman. "They were extremely sexy, but they were not an intimate, personal style," David Netto, an American designer, said in a phone interview. "The Hotel Montalembert was like a revelation. You walked in and saw the possibility of how to decorate that hadn't been around since the 1930s. African sculptures next to Louis XV furniture, the neutrality of the architecture." He added, "People were beguiled by that hotel." Christian Liaigre was born on Aug. 10, 1943, in La Rochelle, France. His father was a veterinarian, and his grandfather bred horses. Christian worked for his grandfather for a decade after attending the Ecole des Beaux Arts and the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. He is survived by his wife, Deborah Comte Liaigre; their son, Leonard; and a granddaughter. His daughter, Virginie, died last year. Mr. Liaigre's design roots were French Modernism, Asian furniture, African art and riding hardware bridles, saddles and stirrups. Many compared him to Jean Michel Frank, the early French minimalist, but "with less ennui," as Mitchell Owens, the decorative arts editor at Architectural Digest, said in an interview. "Liaigre's work had a butchness to it," he added. "It was very male and very architectural." Decades earlier, Mr. Owens had interviewed Mr. Liaigre about how his upbringing had influenced his work. He recapped the interview on Instagram: "We talked of his childhood near La Rochelle, his potent memories of his veterinary surgeon father's tools and of accompanying him from farm to farm throughout the Vendee, his respect for woodworkers and love of chestnut and oak trees, and his belief in furniture that, no matter how reductivist, held the whiff of the terroir in its design." Former employees described Mr. Liaigre as a quiet, meticulous teacher whose drawings were always perfectly to scale. "He felt that to get the proportions right, the only way to do it was by hand," said Kirstin Bailey, a designer in Mr. Liaigre's studio in the 1990s. Mr. Liaigre sold his company to a group of investors in 2016. "To say that he was detail oriented would be a gross understatement," Mr. Balazs of the Mercer wrote in an Instagram post. "'Obsession' would be far more apt."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Art & Design
The United States may be headed into a bad flu season, according to figures recently released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As of the last week of December, "widespread" flu activity was reported by health departments in 46 states. More ominously, a second measure the percentage of patients with flu symptoms visiting medical clinics shot up almost to the peak reached at the height of the 2017 18 flu season, which was the most severe in a decade. About 61,000 Americans died of flu that season, the C.D.C. said. (The original estimate of 79,000 was revised downward last year; the agency said the number changed as more death certificate information became available.) This year's flu vaccine may not be particularly effective against the strain of the virus now widespread in the United States, experts said. But even so, it's worth getting the shot: people who are vaccinated fare better if struck by the flu than those who are not. It is still too early to know how severe this season will be, said Lynnette Brammer, leader of the agency's domestic influenza surveillance team. Although many people are coming down with flu, the two chief indicators of severity hospitalizations and deaths are not yet elevated, she noted. Deaths from pneumonia and flu are actually lower than normal at this time. But reports of hospitalization and death normally lag other indicators by at least two weeks. The current season did begin unusually early. By late November, the flu had hit hard in the Deep South, from Texas to Georgia. The virus then broke out in California and the Rocky Mountain states, but was not widespread in the Northeast until recently. That pattern echoes what happened in Australia, where winter runs from June through August. Flu came unusually early to the Southern Hemisphere in 2019. In seasons when Australia has a bad flu season, the Northern Hemisphere sometimes does, too. In another important way, however, the United States is not following Australia's lead. The A(H3N2) strain of influenza was dominant there last year, while most American cases this season have been caused by a very different strain, called B Victoria. (B strains are named for the cities where they were first isolated.) B strain flus do not normally arrive until late in the season. But when they do, "they often impact children more than adults and older adults," Ms. Brammer said. What parents need to know about this flu season The C.D.C. tracks the deaths of children individually, rather than making estimates, as is done for adults. Those over 65 are usually the group hardest hit by flu. Thus far this season, 27 children have died of flu in 2017 18, 187 died but pediatric deaths don't normally start peaking until mid January. On the rise now is the A(H1N1)pdm09 strain, which is a descendant of the pandemic "swine flu" that first appeared in 2009 and then morphed into a seasonal flu. H1N1 strains are usually the first to appear. They usually cause fewer hospitalizations and deaths per capita than B strains or A(H3N2). Thus far, based on limited testing data, this season's flu shot does not look like a good match for the B Victoria flu and may not be very effective, the C.D.C. said. But the shot does still appear to be well matched for the A(H1N1)pdm09 strain. C.D.C. flu data relies on reports from doctors' offices, clinics and hospital emergency rooms about how many patients come in with flu symptoms. An even faster measurement of flu's spread comes from Kinsa Health, which collects daily readings of fevers from up to two million users around the country who own its thermometers. The devices connect to smartphones and instantly upload readings to the company's app. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Kinsa readings indicate that flulike activity peaked on Dec. 24 at a level just below the 2017 18 level confirming what the C.D.C. found and has since dropped by almost a third, said Nita Nehru, a company spokeswoman. But even this week's lower figure "is much higher than is typical of this time of year," she added. It may bounce up again soon, now that students have returned to school from holiday vacations. The company assumes that fevers lasting three or more days indicate flu rather than a common cold, said Inder Singh, the company's founder. The C.D.C. has not endorsed Kinsa's methods, but the data does show flu patterns at least a week or two ahead of reports from medical clinics. Thus far, almost none of the hundreds of samples tested by the C.D.C. have been resistant to Tamiflu or any other common antiflu drug. Those medications do not cure the flu; they only reduce the severity of an infection, and only if they are taken early.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
A CNN story on Tuesday about an anonymous Reddit user who created a widely circulated video of President Trump wrestling the network's logo to the ground has inspired multiple backlashes. Some criticized it as a form of blackmail. Others raised issues of journalism ethics over the network granting conditional anonymity to the user. The 28 second video and its source have been the subject of questions since Sunday morning, when the president tweeted it as he continued his attacks on the news media. The tweet, which was retweeted by the official presidential account, has become Mr. Trump's most shared post on Twitter, The Associated Press reported. CNN said on Tuesday that it had found and spoken to the Reddit user, who had apologized for creating the video and other posts that were racist and anti Semitic, including one that added Jewish stars to photos of CNN personalities. A CNN reporter, Andrew Kaczynski, said he had confirmed the user's identity and had spoken to him by phone. But the article by Mr. Kaczynski did not identify the user as anything more than a "private citizen." Mr. Kaczynski later said on Twitter that the Reddit user was a "middle aged man." CNN wrote in the article that it was not publishing the user's name "because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same." It continued: "CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change." The last line struck critics as sinister or as a veiled threat, a characterization Mr. Kaczynski strongly denied on Twitter. A hashtag, CNNBlackmail, lit up among people, especially on the right, claiming CNN was pressuring the Reddit user not to mock the network again. Some critics, including Donald Trump Jr., referred to the Reddit user as a 15 year old, but it was not clear what that conclusion was based on. Mr. Kaczynski flatly denied the claim, saying that the user was an adult and that Mr. Trump and others were intentionally "spreading misinformation." The network has been a frequent target of attacks from the right as it covers the Trump administration. Ted Cruz, the Republican senator, said CNN's story was "troubling" and suggested it could be seen as extortion. Stocks rise after President Biden says Jerome Powell will stay atop the Fed. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. In a statement, Matt Dornic, a spokesman for the network, said that "CNN decided not to publish the name of the Reddit user out of concern for his safety," and that "any assertion that the network blackmailed or coerced him is false." The user apologized and deleted his Reddit account before speaking with Mr. Kaczynski, the statement said. "CNN never made any deal, of any kind, with the user," Mr. Dornic said. "In fact, CNN included its decision to withhold the user's identity in an effort to be completely transparent that there was no deal." Andrew Seaman, the ethics chair of the Society for Professional Journalists, said in a blog post that tying the source's anonymity to future behavior was odd, but not unethical. "Journalists should support the open and civil exchange of views, but their role is debatable when they try to police good conduct on other platforms," he wrote. "Additionally, where would these types of agreements with sources end? Would journalists agree not to identify a thief because he or she promised never to steal again?" Readers often greet anonymous sources with suspicion, and journalism ethicists often scrutinize the practice, but newsrooms still rely on them when significant stories would otherwise go untold. In most cases, as when someone is in a war zone or is discussing sensitive political matters, anonymity is granted because the sources fear retribution that would compromise their physical safety or have professional consequences. Indira Lakshmanan, the Newmark chair in journalism ethics at the nonprofit Poynter Institute, said the CNN story was newsworthy and that there were legitimate reasons to shield the Reddit user's identity, since journalists have a responsibility to minimize harm to private citizens.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
To answer these questions, Dr. Montenegro and his colleagues ran numerous voyage simulations and concluded that the Long Pause that delayed humans from reaching Hawaii, Tahiti and New Zealand occurred because the early explorers were unable to sail through the strong winds that surround Tonga and Samoa. They reported their results last week in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Our paper supports the idea that what people needed was boating technology or navigation technology that would allow them to move efficiently against the wind," Dr. Montenegro said. The researchers studied climate data from the area to better understand the environmental conditions the explorers would have faced on their journeys. They also examined data on El Nino and La Nina conditions as well as wind and current directions and intensities. Their computer simulations showed that the wind was an essential part of the early human expansion to these islands. While they sailed east from the Solomon Islands to Tonga and Samoa, the wind was at their backs, providing a smooth trip forward that let them populate islands like Fiji and Vanuatu. But after reaching this part of the Pacific, Samoa in particular, the environmental conditions changed significantly. At that point, instead of traveling with the wind they needed to travel against it to progress across the long distances.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge learned this week that a rib stress fracture was causing the pain he had felt for a while. TAMPA, Fla. The good news: The source of the mysterious pain in Aaron Judge's shoulder and chest has finally been identified. He has a stress fracture in his uppermost right rib. The bad news: He has a stress fracture in his uppermost right rib that will keep him out of the Yankees lineup on opening day, and surgery hasn't been ruled out yet. After nearly a dozen tests of several parts of Judge's body, a CT scan this week finally pinpointed the culprit. But the diagnosis raised more questions about the Yankees' handling of injuries, particularly because Judge's dates to last season. In right field on Sept. 18, Judge made a diving attempt on a fly ball. He grimaced when he got up, and the team later said that Judge had jammed his shoulder. He kept playing through the American League Championship Series. But on Friday, Judge, 27, revealed that he had felt a "crack" and a "pop" on that play. With adrenaline flowing and the postseason coming up, Judge said he did not think much of the injury. He passed a few tests (including a magnetic resonance imaging examination), received "a couple shots" in the troubled area and kept playing. "Most of the pain and problem was coming from the shoulder and neck and the surrounding area, so the pain was radiating in other places," Judge said. "So you give them the symptoms and tell them what's wrong, and they work off of what you say." None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. As Judge began working out in November, he felt soreness in his shoulder area but brushed it off as a normal side effect of resting the previous month. As the winter progressed, he said, the pain got worse and he was confused by its source. "I was like, 'Oh, this is something I can kind of warm up and work through and be fine by the time spring training starts,'" he said. "If I would've known it was a rib, I maybe would've done things a little bit differently." After arriving in Tampa early for spring training, Judge continued to feel something wrong with his shoulder. He underwent an M.R.I., and the Yankees said then that nothing abnormal was found beyond shoulder soreness. After Judge rested and then intensified his hitting and throwing last week, the pain persisted and oscillated between his chest and his shoulder. "My understanding is that it's a hard thing to find because you're not going to find it in M.R.I.s or different scans," Yankees Manager Aaron Boone said. "He had M.R.I. of the shoulder and chest, bone scans, CT scans, X rays all these things. And it was this particular CT scan that found it." Asked if it would take three to six months for the rib to heal, Judge said doctors told him that it appeared he was about halfway through that process. He will be re evaluated in two weeks with another CT scan to see how much the rib has improved. Boone said a decision on whether to surgically remove the rib, a small bone under the collarbone, would be made then. Although Judge will miss opening day on March 26, he said he believed he would avoid surgery. In the meantime, Judge won't be lifting weights, hitting or throwing, in order to avoid further aggravating the injury, as he did over the winter. "If someone breaks their leg, they're in a cast and immobilized for a couple weeks or months," he said. "That gives the bone a chance to heal." But because he was angry about how the Yankees' season ended, two victories short of reaching the World Series, Judge wanted to get started immediately on improvements for the 2020 season. "We've all been through pains, bumps and bruises, and usually in my head I feel it's something I can fight through," he said. "I think that kind of cost me a little bit there." The Yankees faced criticism for how they handled injuries last season, when they set a major league record with 30 different players landing on the injured list. As a result, the Yankees restructured their player health and performance staff. Questions have continued into this season as three players pitchers James Paxton and Luis Severino, and Judge are still dealing with injuries from late last season. Paxton and Severino, in particular, underwent multiple tests throughout the off season before the root causes were found, and they had surgery last month.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Fifteen minutes west of Medellin, we flew into a dense bank of clouds. When the clouds broke briefly, the deep green jungle appeared, extending miles in all directions, laced with brown rivers and the occasional riverside village. This is the wild, wet and mostly roadless Choco region of northwest Colombia. Not a high rise or highway in sight. Before long, the 17 seat plane descended, and the small town of Nuqui came into view, sitting at the tip of a long beach on the Pacific coast. Though it attracts far fewer tourists than the country's Caribbean coast, this remote area is well known to vacationing Colombians, who visit on summer weekends to watch humpback whales breaching near shore. Ecologists come to study the unparalleled biodiversity. And the coast is starting to attract American tourists looking for exotic wildlife, uncrowded waves and a quiet patch of sand. Nuqui is a friendly but impoverished community of about 3,000 people, mostly Afro Colombians, living in houses clustered tightly along dirt roads next to a tidal river. There's no bank or post office in Nuqui, which is accessible only by plane or boat. The transportation fleet includes three moto taxis, a handful of motorcycles and plenty of bikes. Mostly, locals walk. Or they travel in dugout canoes, always standing paddling when going to sea to fish, or poling when going upriver toward the villages of the indigenous Embera people. Children walking home from school in the town of Nuqui. Juan Cristobal Cobo Sanz for The New York Times From Nuqui, we took a motor launch down the coast, past brown sand beaches and hills to El Cantil, which sits in a loose cluster of eco lodges and hostels. El Cantil has seven rooms in a string of cabanas facing the sea, and an open air pavilion that serves as the dining room. It's a family operation run by Guillermo Gomez, known as Memo, whose father designed and built the lodge. Mr. Gomez has an infectious enthusiasm for local wildlife, a passion for surfing and a commitment to low impact tourism. (Guests are encouraged to pack out any packaging they bring, the cabins have kerosene lamps, and a small hydro plant provides power for a couple of hours in the evening, just enough to charge batteries.) You won't see any infinity pools along this coast, but on our first morning there we found something better. We walked south to the miles long Playa Termales. The beach is named for the small town of Termales, and the town is named for its thermal spring. By the time our small group three young German travelers, my wife and I and a guide from El Cantil reached Termales, the sun had broken through the overcast that typically moderates the heat here, and the day had turned sultry. But we were ready for the hot spring after rinsing off in the cool water of the adjacent river. It turns out the spring is not boiling hot, just a perfect bathing temperature. The sulfurous water seeps up through the sandy bottom of a tree shaded concrete pool. The effect is magical, utterly relaxing. We floated around until our skin was like prunes. Then, after stopping in town for a snack fresh coconut water, chugged from the shell we ambled back along the beach. Along the way, we noticed that the waves, choppy and disorganized when we arrived, were improving. The meals at El Cantil are built around fresh local fish, plantains, rice and fruit, and provide a chance to catch up with the other guests. That night, over dinner, a guest from California told us he had taken a 40 minute boat trip to surf a rocky point break and had found great waves. It sounded like challenging surfing, but, after a few beers, we agreed to join him the next morning. The coast looked surreal in the mist as we motored south with three boards stacked in the bow of the launch. We passed little coastal towns strung out along the beaches clusters of low houses with thatched palm roofs and a few canoes pulled up on the sand. Then a more austere coastline of wave lashed rocks. Finally, we came to a wave that we didn't have to look for. It stood up tall, proud and cobalt blue and broke cleanly over a rock shelf perched beneath the verdant hills. It looked a bit ominous as we strapped on our leashes and hopped from the boat, the swirls of barely submerged rocks clearly visible in the break zone. But the Californian was soon charging the steep heart of the wave, while my wife and I cheated out onto the shoulder and caught some of the more forgiving waves sweet lefts that rolled consistently along the edge of a channel. Bobbing on the boards between sets, pelicans passed silently, very near, just skimming the water. Occasionally, we heard the cries of birds hidden in the trees, barely audible over the roar of the surf. Looking at that steep, wild hillside rising from the rocky shore, the entire scene felt otherworldly, primeval. Nuqui was more than 20 miles to the north, Buenaventura over 100 miles to the south, and the undeveloped rain forest extended dozens of miles to the east. I realized that in a lifetime afield I'd never been farther from a road. After we left the break under cloudy skies, the sea was still glassy calm in early afternoon. Unlike the storm battered Caribbean, there's not much wind here. This is just a few degrees north of the Equator, squarely in the doldrums. Sea stacks that would be wind scoured crags in the Caribbean are Seussian humps here, covered in mats of vegetation, sprouting trees at odd angles, with frigate birds preening in the branches and blue footed boobies hunkered on the ledges. Our last day brought rain, no surprise. The Choco is among the wettest places on earth, with some areas seeing more than 400 inches of rain annually. Still, it was a fine day for frogs. So I hiked into the jungle with an eagle eyed local guide and a French tourist. Toucans called in the distance as we climbed the steep path among tropical hardwoods, walking palms, giant ferns and lianas. Soon, an eerier sound cave dwelling toads singing nearby. Then the raucous shrieks of parrots high in the treetops and, far away, the low moans of howler monkeys. We soon glimpsed a spectacular orange and black frog clinging to a mossy tree trunk: a poison dart frog. Before long, we found another, this one fingernail size, black with yellow stripes, idling in a pool in the leaves of a bromeliad. Then, hopping in the leaf litter, still another species of poison dart frog, this one with green stripes and blue speckled legs. The Embera smear their blowgun darts with the toxic secretions of the frogs, giving the frogs their name. The frogs are among the many species uniquely adapted to this rugged place ranging from enormous leatherback turtles to tiny hummingbirds and endemic orchids. Although still mostly wild, the Choco's environment is threatened, especially in inland areas, by logging and mining, much of it illegal, and the steady incursion of roads. Hiking out, we glimpsed a red headed songbird perched on a branch, waiting out the drizzle. This is the red capped manakin, famous on YouTube as the "Michael Jackson bird," for its moonwalking courtship dance. Finally, near the beach, we came across another creature famous for its video appearances a basilisk lizard, also known as the "Jesus lizard" for its ability to run on water. At the airport, we saw a twin engine plane moldering by the runway, ditched there years ago by drug traffickers, one vestige of the region's troubled past. In 2008, FARC guerrillas kidnapped six tourists about 10 miles north of Nuqui, and released them months later. But in this moment of relative political stability, Colombian tourism is thriving, especially in Bogota, Cartagena and Medellin. And Nuqui, like the Bahia Solano region just to the north, is also counting on tourism being a big part of its future it even boasts an eco tourism themed school. Taking off in the plane, we caught a last view of the little town and, way off in the distance, still another surf break a long, empty wave, peeling perfectly onto a jungle cloaked sandy shore split by a brown river. Then the clouds swallowed it all up. IF YOU GO HOW TO GET THERE Satena Airlines flies to Nuqui five days a week from Medellin's Enrique Oyala Herrera Airport (the older airport downtown, not the new international airport) for about 400,000 pesos, roughly 135, round trip. Pack light, there's a 15 kilogram weight limit for luggage; satena.com. El Cantil is an eco lodge on the coast south of Nuqui, popular with international tourists. Rates are about 354,000 pesos per person, including three meals. The lodge can arrange jungle hikes, surf trips and whale watching; elcantil.com/en/lodging hotel nuqui. Pijiba Lodge, one of the oldest hotels in the area, is just down the beach from El Cantil, a 40 minute boat ride south of Nuqui. Rates are about 256,000 pesos a night, meals included; pijibalodge.com. Nuquimar Hotel is a 15 minute walk from the airport in Nuqui. Clean, spartan rooms with private baths, near the beach, cost about 180,000 pesos a night, including breakfast; nuquimarhotel.com. WHAT TO SEE In addition to the many beaches, and the hot springs at Termales, some tourists visit Utria National Park, just north of Nuqui. parquesnacionales.gov.co/portal/es/ecoturismo/region pacifico/parque nacional natural utria. Mano Cambiada, a community group in Nuqui, can organize tours of the park; facebook.com/ManoCambiada. The region's biggest draw, by far, are the humpback whales that visit between June and October. Though the whales are often visible from shore, all of the hotels can arrange whale watching tours.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
THE LAST GIRL My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State By with Jenna Krajeski Illustrated. 306 pp. Tim Duggan Books. 27. How to approach a memoir of a war still being waged? "The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State" contains open wounds and painful lessons, as the Yazidi activist learns how her own story can become a weapon against her co opted for any number of political agendas. In August 2014 Islamic State militants besieged her village of Kocho in northern Iraq. They executed nearly all the men and older women including Murad's mother and six brothers and buried them in mass graves. The younger women, Murad among them, were kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery. Raped, tortured and exchanged among militants, 21 year old Murad finds an escape route when she is sold to a jihadist in Mosul who leaves a front door unlocked. She flees into Kurdistan by posing as the wife of a Sunni man, Nasser, who risks everything to escort her to safety. Just when Murad, and the reader, expect a flood of relief, there is another sinister turn: Murad and Nasser are detained by Kurdish officials who force them to testify about their escape with cameras rolling. The officials are eager to hear how peshmerga fighters from a rival Kurdish faction the two groups fought a civil war in the 1990s had abandoned the Yazidi communities they were supposed to protect. The officials swear no one will ever see the tape, but it appears on the news that same night, putting Nasser and his family in grave danger. "I was quickly learning that my story, which I still thought of as a personal tragedy, could be someone else's political tool," Murad writes.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
More than 30 years after the widespread use of mammograms set off a surge in the detection of tiny lesions in milk ducts, there is still debate about how or even whether to treat them. In an era when there has been so much study of how to treat more advanced cancer, it might seem odd that there is so much uncertainty about these minute sprinklings of abnormal cells, often called Stage 0 cancer, which some say are not cancers at all. The latest round of controversy was set off by a paper published Thursday in JAMA Oncology that analyzed 20 years of data on 100,000 women who had the condition, which is also known as ductal carcinoma in situ, or D.C.I.S. The majority had lumpectomies (with or without radiation) and most of the others had mastectomies. The death rate from breast cancer of these patients, regardless of their choice of treatment, over the next 20 years was about the same as the lifetime risk in the general population of women, 3.3 percent. The study's authors and other leading researchers in the field said the data indicates that treatment has not made much of a difference, if any, for the tens of thousands women a year who are told they have this condition. (Last year about 60,000 in the United States got a D.C.I.S. diagnosis.) One piece of evidence is that the women who had mastectomies had their entire breast cut off and so if D.C.I.S. was, as many had thought, a precursor to cancer or an early cancer, their death rate should have been lower than it was for women who had lumpectomies that could have left D.C.I.S. cells behind. Another major clue is that though tens of thousands of cases of D.C.I.S. were being diagnosed and aggressively treated each year, there seemed to be no substantial impact on the incidence of invasive breast cancers found annually in the general population. About 240,000 were diagnosed with it last year. If treating D.C.I.S. was supposed to fend off invasive breast cancer, the incidence of invasive breast cancer should have plummeted once D.C.I.S. was being found and treated, the experts said. That has intensified questions about what D.C.I.S. really is cancer, precancer, a risk factor for cancer? Before mammography, only a few hundred women a year were diagnosed with D.C.I.S. It was a condition almost always noticed only on autopsies. Once radiologists began finding D.C.I.S., though, doctors were faced with a dilemma. At first glance, it seemed wonderful to find the lesions. The cells looked like cancer although they had not broken through the wall of the milk duct into the surrounding breast tissue. Their discovery, it seemed, offered a chance to cut out cancers long before they could be felt as lumps. But there was a problem, noted Dr. Barnett Kramer, director of the division of cancer prevention at the National Cancer Institute. With D.C.I.S. the abnormal cells were not just a well defined clump. Instead abnormal cells often were sprinkled along the length of the milk duct. What to do? The obvious answer seemed to be to cut off the entire breast. Doctors had the example of abnormalities detected by the Pap test: Cutting out early lesions on the cervix prevented deaths from invasive cervical cancer. It made sense to do something similar to prevent breast cancer deaths, said Dr. Barron Lerner, a historian of medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center. Yet this was happening at a time, in the 1980s and early 1990s, when women with invasive cancers were told they could have a lumpectomy instead of a mastectomy. "It's very weird thinking back now. We treated the more aggressive disease less aggressively than we treated the less aggressive disease," said Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society. Unlike the situation with invasive breast cancer, no one did clinical trials in D.C.I.S. comparing, say, lumpectomies plus radiation to mastectomies, or watchful waiting, and assessing whether there was a difference in the risk of cancer reappearing in the breasts. But as doctors became comfortable treating invasive cancers with lumpectomies, they began treating D.C.I.S. that way, too. Over the years, investigators have come to conclude that the old model of cancer that a few aberrant cells will grow, spread and inevitably become a deadly cancer if not destroyed is wrong. Small clumps of abnormal cells may just stop growing, scientists now know. Even invasive cancers do not always grow. Some regress or disappear. That is especially true in prostate cancer, where as many as half of all cancers found with screening will not progress if they are simply left alone. But it also seems true in breast cancer, researchers say. Doctors used to think that cancers that recur at the original site in the breast after treatment are likely to spread outside the breast and kill. That, too, has turned out not to be true. Some cancers metastasize and others remain in the breast and never leave it, Dr. Kramer said. The two types of cancers have different properties. That is why radiation after a lumpectomy does not reduce the death rate from breast cancer although it reduces the recurrence of invasive cancer in the breast. "Treatment that reduces recurrence in the breast is not a good surrogate for reducing the risk of death from breast cancer," Dr. Kramer said. "This gets to the issue of how counterintuitive cancer is." With D.C.I.S., women have a worse prognosis if they are black, under 40, or have tumors with molecular markers like those found in more aggressive invasive cancers. They may benefit from treatment, but so far no one has done a large clinical trial asking if these treatments prevent breast cancer deaths for the rest of the women with D.C.I.S. Are the surgical treatments better than watchful waiting and perhaps drugs to reduce overall breast cancer risk? Medical experts say it is highly unlikely such a clinical trial will ever be done. Because the risk of dying of breast cancer is so low for women treated for D.C.I.S., the study would take 10 to 20 years and involve tens of thousands of women, assuming it would even be possible to recruit so many who would agree to have their treatment decided at random. And assuming somehow there were funds to pay for it. And when it was done, doctors might well argue that the study used old style medicine, that things had progressed since then and so the results were no longer valid.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Health
The Miami Heat are on their way to the N.B.A. finals, continuing one of the more improbable postseason runs in recent years. They beat the Boston Celtics on Sunday, 125 113, to win the Eastern Conference finals in six games. In the deciding game, the Heat were led by Bam Adebayo, who scored 32 points, snatched 14 rebounds and dished five assists. Jimmy Butler added 22 points and eight assists, and Andre Iguodala provided a spark off the bench, scoring 15 points on 5 of 5 from the field. Miami, the fifth seed in the East, will now get the chance to try to become one of the lowest seeded teams in N.B.A. history to win the championship. In 1981, the Houston Rockets entered the playoffs with a 40 42 record, which made them the sixth seed, back when only six teams from each conference made the playoffs. They made the finals and lost to the Celtics in six games. More than a decade later, in 1995, the Rockets won the championship after entering the playoffs with a 47 35 record, again making them the sixth seed. Four years later, the Knicks made the finals in a strike shortened season as the eighth seed. The 1995 Rockets are the only team lower than the No. 4 seed to win a championship.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Sports
Marino Franchitti, Scott Pruett and Memo Rojas combined to win the 12 Hours of Sebring endurance race on Saturday at Sebring International Raceway in Florida, giving Chip Ganassi, the car's owner, something of a milestone victory. Ganassi's racecars have now won not only Sebring and a number of other significant races, but also the prestigious Indianapolis 500, the Daytona 500 and the 24 Hours of Daytona. The Sebring 12 hour event featured 30 lead changes among 11 different cars, with Franchitti taking the lead for the final time as Ryan Dalziel made a pit stop with about 40 minutes remaining. After completing his stop, Dalziel tried to run Franchitti down, and a caution period helped bunch the field for a 20 minute sprint to the finish, but Dalziel came up 4.7 seconds short. Carl Edwards took the checkered flag on Sunday in a confusing finish at the rain delayed Nascar Sprint Cup race at Bristol Motor Speedway in Tennessee. Edwards had pulled out to a commanding lead ahead of Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Aric Almirola in the final laps, but the yellow caution lights came on with two laps to go. No one seemed to know why the lights came on, but the field dutifully slowed behind Edwards just as a cloudburst hit the speedway. After a few laps, the checkered flag was displayed and the victory was awarded to Edwards. Robin Pemberton, vice president for competition at Nascar, said later that an override switch in the stand adjacent to the start finish line had been flipped inadvertently, causing the track's caution lights to illuminate. The race had been interrupted twice previously for rain delays totaling more than five hours. Doug Kalitta took the victory Sunday in the National Hot Rod Association Top Fuel category at the Gatornationals drag races in Gainesville, Fla. Kalitta solidified his lead in the series point standings with his first victory of the season; he had scored well in previous races this season, but had yet to win in a final round.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
You've also got the ones in front of the camera, like James Corden or John Oliver, and Britishness is part of their brand. CBS reportedly tried to manage that a bit with Corden, approving of him using words like "squiffy" (to mean tipsy) or "shag" the kinds of words that sound a bit Austin Powers, but not ones that they said might confuse. What are the hot Britishisms of the moment on these shores? I see "dodgy" quite a bit where you might once have seen "fishy" or "sketchy." Another one is "gutted," to mean emotionally devastated. This week, people have tweeted photos of "lift" for elevator on signs directing you to American ones. What's funny about that one to me is that "elevator" is an Americanism that some Brits feared was taking over in the 1960s. But no, "lift" is still around, and it's trying to make American hotels and shopping centers sound cool or cosmopolitan now. New York definitely has it bad, but there's a fair amount of it in Washington and Boston too. One of the "lift" elevators was in North Carolina. Historically, New England and the genteel South had a lot of interest in emulating England, which ties into the class system in those parts of the country the rich would send their children "back" to England for education. As you go more westward, there's more distance from Britain and fewer cultural ties to it, except in Utah, where the odd Britishism crops up because of British Mormons migrating there in the late 19th century. So, like the British, a Utahan might say "if needs be" instead of "if need be." What about the flip side? Are the British howling about "Americreep"? They sometimes talk about "creep," but they're more likely to talk about a "flood." British people generally don't go out of their way to adopt Americanisms; they tend to feel that Americanisms are thrust upon them. You have to remember, Brits watch a lot more American television and hear more American music than vice versa, so they hear a lot more American English than vice versa. The top annoyances seem to be "can I get," as in "can I get a cappuccino?" and anything that can be classed as American management speak. People are starting to complain about "reach out" meaning "to contact," and I can't blame them on that one. Of course, in the 1930s, they were complaining about the Americanism "to contact," and now no one notices it's an import.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
The San Diego Archaeology Center holds a pair of extraordinary skeletons. Dating back about 9,500 years, they are among the oldest human remains ever found in the Americas. A number of scientists would love to study the bones, using powerful new techniques to extract any surviving DNA. "These skeletons of such antiquity are so important for helping us understand what happened in the past in North America," said Brian Kemp, a molecular anthropologist at Washington State University. But for years, the remains have been out of reach, the subject of a legal struggle that pitted three University of California scientists against their own administration and the Kumeyaay, a group of Native American tribes. The skeletons were found in San Diego's La Jolla community in 1976 by an archaeology class digging on land owned by the University of California, San Diego. In 2006, a group of tribes laid claim to the skeletons, and the university later agreed to transfer custody. To block the transfer, the scientists went to court. After losing in lower courts, the scientists in November asked the United States Supreme Court to become involved. This week, the court declined. That decision swept away the last obstacle to the transfer. "It's hard to describe how bad I feel," said Robert L. Bettinger, one of the plaintiffs in the case and a professor at the University of California, Davis. "To have them slip through our fingers this way is a tremendous loss for science." Steven Banegas, spokesman for the Kumeyaay Cultural Repatriation Committee, which claimed the skeletons, said the tribes would meet to decide what to do with the remains. He did not rule out that scientists could study them. "These things we need to discuss," he said. "We want to be the ones who tell our own story." At the time the skeletons were found, archaeologists were relatively free to do with Native American remains as they saw fit. That changed with the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. The law was a response to some ugly chapters in the history of research on Native Americans. Grave robbers had plundered skeletons and sacred objects, some of which were stockpiled in museums. The act established a legal procedure by which Native Americans could claim cultural objects and human remains kept in museums or found on public land. More than 1.4 million objects and remains of 50,000 people have been transferred under the act, but some cases have sparked conflicts. In 1996, for example, hikers stumbled across an 8,500 year old skeleton in Kennewick, Wash. Native American tribes claimed the skeleton, intending to rebury it. But scientists challenged their claim, and after eight years of legal battling, they won the opportunity to study the remains. Most recently, geneticists retrieved enough DNA from the Kennewick Man's bones to reconstruct his entire genome. Last year, the scientists reported that he was closely related to living Native Americans. That finding strongly weighed against earlier claims that Kennewick Man might be related to Polynesians or even Europeans. Ancient skeletons like Kennewick Man and the La Jolla remains can offer clues to how humans spread across the Americas. Researchers generally agree that people moved from Asia over the Bering Land Bridge roughly 15,000 years ago. How they spread from there is still the subject of fierce debate. Did they move down through the center of North America? Did their route hug the coast? The La Jolla remains, excavated from a cliff overlooking the Pacific, could offer some clarity. The Kumeyaay Cultural Repatriation Committee, representing 12 bands of Native Americans in Southern California, filed a claim for the La Jolla remains in 2006. To determine what connection the remains might have to its people, the committee asked Arion Mayes, a San Diego State anthropologist who had worked on Kumeyaay skeletons, to conduct an examination, on the condition that she not destroy any of the material. "It was a great honor," Dr. Mayes said. Dr. Mayes found clues about what the two people had been like in life. One was a man who died in his mid to late 20s. He had a strong right arm that he may have built up through the use of a spear thrower. The other, a woman in her late 30s or early 40s, had teeth that showed signs of having been worn down by stripping fibers for making baskets. "She used her teeth as tools," Dr. Mayes said. The University of California, for its part, appointed a committee of professors to evaluate the tribes' claim. In 2008, they concluded that the skeletons were "culturally unidentifiable." The grave contained no objects that might have established a cultural link, and the committee found no compelling evidence that these were ancient relatives of the Kumeyaay people. Even so, Dr. Bettinger, a member of the committee, said in an interview that he grew concerned that the university would rush a transfer of the skeletons, and that the Kumeyaay would deny access. So in 2010, he asked the university for permission to study the remains. So did Margaret J. Schoeninger, an anthropologist at the University of California, San Diego, and Tim D. White of the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Schoeninger was denied, and Dr. Bettinger and Dr. White say they never received a response. Instead, the University of California announced that in 2011, the skeletons would be given to the La Posta Band, one of the Kumeyaay bands. Dr. Bettinger, Dr. Schoeninger and Dr. White sued to stop the transfer, arguing that the university had not made an adequate finding about the skeletons. Dr. Kemp of Washington State, who filed an amicus brief on behalf of the scientists, said the university had failed to meet the requirements of the repatriation act. "The law hasn't been followed," he said. But the court arguments didn't directly address the university's actions or the scientific importance of the skeletons. The University of California argued that the Kumeyaay bands had to be joined in the suit. Because the bands had tribal immunity, the university argued, the scientists couldn't sue them. A district court agreed and dismissed the suit. In 2014, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit also ruled against the scientists. In November, the scientists petitioned the Supreme Court to send the case back to the circuit court to consider whether tribal immunity can be invoked in claims arising under the repatriation act. The court rejected the petition with no explanation. "It's a tragedy and a disgrace a tragedy for science, and a disgrace for the court," said James McManis, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. Mr. McManis said the decision could leave researchers at a disadvantage because tribes will be able to claim immunity in disputes over remains. The Supreme Court's denial marks the end of the road for the scientists. The task now, said Dorothy Alther, the lawyer for the Kumeyaay, is "to contact the university and see what the next steps are for repatriation." Kate Moser, a spokeswoman for the University of California, said by email, "We believe the university process has achieved a decision that is in accordance with both the law and our commitment to the respectful handling of human remains and associated artifacts." Dr. Mayes said she hoped that scientists and Native Americans would find more constructive ways to resolve such conflicts. "When you end up in the courts, things get volatile and the conversation gets lost," she said. "Only by having mutual respect will we have a positive situation in the future." While some tribes have rejected ancient DNA studies, others have decided to go forward with them. Mr. Banegas wouldn't rule out that possibility for the La Jolla remains once they come into Kumeyaay custody. "That's not off the table," he said. "I wouldn't want anyone to think we're closed off."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
Randi Zuckerberg, a Silicon Valley executive, said Wednesday evening that a male passenger on her Alaska Airlines flight had repeatedly sexually harassed her and that flight attendants had dismissed her complaints. Ms. Zuckerberg said the harassment began as soon as she boarded the flight on Wednesday, traveling from Los Angeles to Mazatlan, Mexico. Before the plane even departed the gate, a man seated next to her in first class asked her if she fantasized about a female colleague who was traveling with her, and then he provided vulgar commentary about the women who walked by him as they boarded, she said in a Facebook post. "Feeling furious, disgusted and degraded after an Alaska Airlines flight during which the passenger next to me made repeated lewd, inappropriate, and offensive sexual remarks to me," said Ms. Zuckerberg, the founder and chief executive of Zuckerberg Media, a marketing and production company. She was formerly an executive at Facebook, which her brother, Mark Zuckerberg, co founded. Ms. Zuckerberg said that she and her colleague both reported the man's behavior to the flight attendants, who, she added, shrugged off their complaints, saying that he was a frequent flier who was known to act that way.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
I was deep into a mother of the bride role, marching with military determination to Kleinfeld Bridal on 20th Street and Avenue of the Americas in New York. I was joining forces with my two daughters, Alessandra Plump, the bride to be, and my younger daughter, Gabriela Plump. Our goal was to find the perfect wedding dress for Alessandra that day. Then, along the way on West 22nd Street, I happened on a store called NY Cake. "We do customized dummy cakes," read a sign in the window. I knew this was a day for action, not distraction, but I couldn't resist. I stepped inside to find a baker's paradise: cookie cutters; candy molds; icing tools; edible glitter; pastry fillings; cake stencils; sprinkles; ribbons; blocks of fondant icing; and sugar paste sculptures of garlands, cherubs, fruits and flowers. "Can anyone make a fake cake?" I asked Richard Mansour, one of the managers, whose 48 year old sister, Lisa Mansour, founded and owns the business. "How much does it cost to make one?" I asked. "You can make one for a couple of hundred dollars," he said. said. That would cover the materials; a lesson, which is required if you make the cake onsite, would be more. (Groups classes start at 100 for the basics up to 400 for advanced decorating; private lessons are 300 an hour.) It was a sign. I have never loved traditional, tiered wedding cakes. The portions can be skimpy, the slices slapped carelessly onto plates. By the time cake is served, many wedding guests have long finished eating and are deep into dancing. Even worse, wedding cake often tastes stale. That's because a lot of bakers make and freeze them, ice them frozen, then let them sit and harden for a couple of days so that they won't fall under the weight of the layers or crack during transport. Even dowel rods installed inside the cake are no guarantee. And boy, are wedding cakes expensive: anywhere from 6 to 15 a slice depending on the number of tiers, types of filling and frosting, and custom decorations in a city like Washington, where Alessandra's wedding was taking place. That meant 1,000 to 2,400 worth of cake for a party of 160 or so, even though the menu at the wedding location we had chosen came with dessert. By the time I got to Kleinfeld Bridal, I had a plan. I told Gabriela that she and I could have a mother daughter bonding day decorating a dummy cake that we'd then take to the wedding in Washington. "Mom, we're here to buy a wedding dress, not to discuss cakes," Gabriela said dryly. Alessandra is an efficient shopper and we bought her dress that day. Soon afterward, Gabriela and I were scheduled for a daylong cake decorating session with Lisa. We turned up one Saturday morning and Lisa escorted us into a glassed in kitchen with stainless steel tables at the back of the store. Since our cake was not edible, I thought we were going to decorate it with pearls and rhinestones stuck on with Super Glue. After all, I had seen that in 2017, an eight tiered cake decorated with more than 4,000 diamonds by a bakery in Chester, England, had been valued at 52 million. No way, said Lisa. "It's dangerous to decorate with rhinestones and pearls," she said. "People will try to eat them." She showed us decorated models, including a silver gray and white marbleized fondant covered cake with silver sparkles; and a sleek geometric Art Deco confection in shimmering gold. We decided on a round, four layer cake using pearlized fondant and rose gold paint. "Are you ready to get dirty?" Lisa asked. We put on white pastry chef jackets, and said we were. To start, each layer needed to be covered with edible glue so that the fondant icing would stick to the Styrofoam. Lisa told us to slather the layers with the "glue" a.k.a. Crisco. Then she opened a five pound sealed block of white fondant, essentially an edible sugar paste with the consistency of Play Doh. She lightly dusted an aluminum counter with cornstarch and sliced the fondant into smaller pieces with a serrated edged knife. She showed us how to knead the fondant with our hands and roll it out with stainless steel rolling pins. Gabriela passed the fondant slab several times through an electrical rolling machine to flatten it to a thickness of one quarter inch. Lisa helped her center the fondant over a round Styrofoam form and over its sides, taking care to prevent folds by lifting the fondant away from the cake and easing it down with one hand. She used a pizza cutter to trim off excess fondant at its bottom. "You have to gently feel where the bottom of the cake is, like a caress," Lisa said. After we prepared four layers in different sizes, we stacked them into tiers. Gabriela sprayed the layers with an edible pearlized paint that gave it a silver glow. We chose rose gold paint powder, mixed it with lemon extract, picked up paintbrushes and went to work. There was not enough time to learn how to make flowers out of sugar paste (that would have to come on Day 2), so we used two bunches of white roses made in advance. We painted parts of the flowers in rose gold, leaving the leaves green. We pinned the flowers on the cake, and edged the bottom of each layer with satin ribbon. For the final touch, we sprinkled our masterpiece with ultrafine edible glitter. Over the years, NY Cake has become a cake decorating mecca. On the day I was there, decorators from Argentina, Jamaica, Virginia and Texas came into the shop. Every year, Lisa Mansour organizes a NY Cake Show in which thousands of people from all over the world come and decorate cakes. In early June, NY Cake moved out of its space at 56 West 22nd. It will reopen in a 7,000 square foot space in early September a block away at 118 West 22nd. The new space will have a cafe with custom decorated cakes and cupcakes, a wider range of products, a kitchen with ovens, refrigerators, freezers to make real cakes and a formal Cake Academy that will teach a range of baking skills, including how to make croissants. Lisa's younger sister, Jenny Kashanian, who runs the wholesale, mail order and website services, will move to the new site from the Yonkers warehouse. "We'll be altogether again," Lisa said. "Just like when we were kids." Gabriela and I put the cake we had decorated into a secure box; a cousin drove it to Washington. It was on display throughout the wedding, and people who weren't in the know had no idea it was not real. When it came time for the cake cutting, Alessandra and her husband, Mathew Brailsford, held a knife over the top of the faux cake and then cut into designer cupcakes frosted in white. And we did have a real cake. My close friend Carol Giacomo contributed two carrot sheet cakes made from scratch. They weighed more than 20 pounds, but she hand carried them safely from New York to Washington on the Acela. She iced and layered them with thick butter cream frosting on site. Everyone said her cake was delicious. As for the fake cake, it now sits in the living room of the newlyweds' one bedroom apartment.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
MILAN It's evening in Milan or at least on the runways it is. Forget athleisure, wellness and wheat grass (though green juice is having a moment in the land of espresso); there are other things in life to dress for. Like dark, louche nights of the soul, a cabaret in Weimar Berlin or sunset dreams of swooning and spooning in a misty cityscape to name a few of the scenarios that showed up in early shows. We can't all be jogging all the time. Unless, of course, you are Fausto Puglisi. Though he name checked liturgical vests, mosaics and Sicilian churches, the usual mix of unapologetic mythological bling was notably toned down this season in favor of ... bomber jackets paired with "extreme couture" stiff A line skirts, color blocked knits and coats (burgundy, aquamarine, pink and purple) and stretched out sweatshirt dresses. Still, no one was thinking about Fitbits at Roberto Cavalli; not in those snakeskin platforms, anyway. Instead, in his second season, and in an abrupt (but improved) about face from the acid washed jeans of the first season, the creative director Peter Dundas took the brand back to its after hours glam rock heyday, and to his own history with the house. (He was chief designer under Mr. Cavalli from 2002 to 2005.) In an elaborate palazzo, past flickering candles reflecting off crystal chandeliers, Mr. Dundas sent out velvet and damask and brocade, dangling skinny scarves and tiger prints. There were purple velvet flared trouser suits and gold lace gypsy dresses; maxi furs and distressed denim; all tracing a sweeping line down the frame. This kind of costume decadence teeters on Studio 54 kitsch, but after seasons of enforced sportiness, there's something enticing about the idea of clothes meant for no organized aerobic activity whatsoever, save writhing in the strobe lights after dark. Or, in the case of MaxMara, having a Lotte Lenya moment in the weaving workshops of the Bauhaus. Imagine that song and dance (not so easy, to be fair), or just consider sequined hot pant romper suits in gold and black paired with fishnet tights contrasted with more familiar longline washed alpaca coats or striped knit vests. Sleeveless dresses were patchworked together from sparkling tank tops and neutral men's wear style skirts with big black and white striped pockets; and leaf green shine was twinned with shell pink cashmere (and more of those stripes, because, you know: modernity). Midcalf silk dresses came with ruffled bibs and hems; minidresses skimmed thigh high ruffle topped spats; and baby blue shearling was cut by teal waves. It was fluid and kind of fancy, especially when it came to velvet baby doll dresses embroidered with flowers taken from 18th century Japanese wallpaper, and Margot Tenenbaum minks inset with bouquets of the same, the sense of history echoing through puffed sleeves, smocked at the elbows. From black holes to midnight blue trapeze coats covered in circular frills, it's apparently not that much of a leap. At least in the logic of fashion. "It was just an idea," the designer shrugged backstage before the show, before adding a dig at another Milanese brand that shall remain nameless. "I'm very much against over intellectualizing fashion." Better to sleep on it, perchance to dream. At least such was the proposition at Alberta Ferretti, where a host of Morpheus's handmaidens in lacy lingerie emerged against a video backdrop of an atmospheric, seemingly abandoned, Central Park. (Why we were in New York was unclear; something to do with women who take their future into their own hands, it seemed.) Nighties dominated in chartreuse silk charmeuse, lace and garland embroidered tulle, often partly or almost entirely sheer (what is it with the almost nakedness this season? It showed up at Cavalli, too, and seems particularly pointless) covered with enveloping bathrobe coats in fur or backed by climbing flowers and trees, birds perched in their branches. The designer said she wanted to liberate the body, but while it worked in silk pajamas and jumpsuits, a look that has been making the rounds for a while, the dresses were lightweight, in every sense of the word. There were some nods to real clothes in the form of tweed boucle suits and sheaths appliqued with blooms, devore velvets and fur stoles, but daywear was in the minority.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Fashion & Style
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, one of the most recognizable faces of the Trump administration, is writing a book that is expected to be published next fall, St. Martin's Press said Thursday. In a news release, George Witte, the editor in chief of St. Martin's Press, said the book would cover the former White House press secretary's years working for President Trump and offer "a unique perspective on the most important issues, events and both public and behind the scenes conversations inside the White House." The publisher declined to comment further. The White House didn't respond to a request for comment. Ms. Sanders worked on Mr. Trump's presidential campaign and joined the administration when he was elected. She served as his press secretary from July 2017 until she left the White House in June. Mr. Trump praised her loyalty, calling her "a warrior," and encouraged her to run for governor of Arkansas, a position once held by her father, Mike Huckabee. She also became known for her confrontations with reporters, and for doing away with the decades old tradition of formal daily press briefings, arranging instead for the president to speak and answer questions for himself. "I'm excited to tell my story about the challenges of being a working mom at the highest level of American politics and my role in the historic fight raging between the Trump administration and its critics for the future of our country," Ms. Sanders said in the release.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
In Ushuaia, Argentina, the capital of the province of Tierra del Fuego, where I began a three night cruise through southern Patagonia, the daily newspaper is called El Diario del Fin del Mundo The Journal of the End of the World. It's a startling name for a newspaper but an apt description of the cruise, during which it is easy to believe that you have, indeed, sailed to the very end of the earth. Ushuaia, which claims that it is the southernmost city in the world, makes a good jumping off point for exploring southern Patagonia. Last March, my wife, Carole, and I flew there from Buenos Aires, a three hour flight. In Buenos Aires we wore T shirts and shorts and drank a lot of cold water; in Ushuaia, even at the end of the region's summer season, we shivered in polar fleece and gloves and couldn't get enough cafe con leche good preparation for the cruise itself. Ushuaia has the feel of both a ski resort and an active seaport. Its main street, San Martin, is lined with chalet style buildings, many of them housing upscale outdoor clothing shops. We stayed at the modern Lennox Hotel, right in the center of town and a short walk to the dock. Our room overlooked the town and the snow peaked Andes Mountains in the distance; other rooms, and the beautiful breakfast room on the top floor, offer spectacular views of the harbor, where our ship was already docked and awaiting boarding the next evening. Our room was compact but comfortable, with a double bed, small closet and a full bath with shower. The star feature of the room was the view through a window that covered most of the outer wall: mountains, islands, glaciers. It was never less than breathtaking. A welcoming cocktail party in the Darwin Lounge on the top deck included a short speech by the captain, in English. Non English speakers (about half the passengers) gathered in the deck below for a welcome in Spanish. Waiters passed trays of pisco sours a too easy to drink concoction of the regional brandy, lime juice, egg whites and bitters. Among the captain's announcements: There would be no Internet access or cellphone service for the duration of the cruise. This was met with expressions of relief and some murmurs of anxiety. Seventy two hours with absolutely no news or contact from the outside world added to the voyage's end of the world feeling. And so our ship threaded the narrow waterways of southern Patagonia, along the Beagle Channel, named for Charles Darwin's ship, and the Straits of Magellan. Darwin's reputation looms large in this region; although the naturalist is most closely associated with the Galapagos Islands, he spent more time in southern Patagonia, where he studied not turtles but the native Fuegian people. While large cruise ships do operate in the area, many of the waterways we explored are too narrow or shallow for today's floating behemoths. During our time at sea we did not see another vessel of significant size. The starkly pristine landscape called out for closer inspection, a need that was satisfied by a full roster of excursions. The first one, a hike on Cape Horn, was scheduled for 7 o'clock in the morning on our first full day aboard. Carole and I set the alarms on our cellphones (at least they were useful for something), but we needn't have bothered. At 6:30 precisely we were awakened by a blaring announcement from the ship's public address system. "Attention, dear passengers!" came the way too chipper voice, first in English, then Spanish, through a speaker a foot or so from my pillow. "Our excursion to Cape Horn leaves at 7! Coffee is served in the Sky Deck!" Thirty minutes later the English speakers were gathered in the Darwin Lounge, wearing bright orange life jackets over an impressive array of haute foul weather gear. Spanish speakers assembled one deck below. We were given a brief introduction to the excursion, with a focus on how to board the sturdy, 15 passenger, inflatable Zodiacs that would ferry us ashore: Grab the arm of a crew member, step on the side of the boat, sit and shimmy. This was a mantra repeated before each embarkation grab, step, sit, shimmy and it always went smoothly. The ride to Cape Horn took about 10 bumpy, windy minutes. By executing the mantra more or less in reverse, we managed to step onto the beach with dry feet. We climbed a set of stairs to a long boardwalk over a grassy field that connects a monument at the very tip of Cape Horn and a working lighthouse. We'd been warned about the wind, but nothing prepared us for the gale force onslaught we faced. At times the only way to move forward was to crawl. Communicating meant shouting. During occasional lulls I stood up, only to be thrown off the boardwalk by a sudden gust. Reaching the monument at last, and clutching it for support, it was easy to understand why the waters off Cape Horn, the southernmost headland of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, were a notorious graveyard for ships before the Panama Canal made the southern route avoidable. At least our Zodiacs were able to land on shore; the cruise company warns that weather conditions sometimes make this and other shore excursions impossible. On another excursion we hiked along a beach to visit Aguila Glacier, chunks of which were floating in the sea below. The almost surreal blue tint of the glacier, our guide informed us, results when the ice becomes extremely dense and absorbs colors at the red end of the spectrum, thus reflecting primarily blue. Darwin, on seeing his first glacier in the area, in 1833, perfectly described it in his journal: "It is scarcely possible to imagine anything more beautiful than the beryl like blue of these glaciers, and especially as contrasted with the dead white of the upper expanse of snow." Our last excursion was to Magdalena Island, inhabited by more than 100,000 Magellanic penguins surprisingly charismatic creatures, many of them peeking out at us, in monogamous pairs, from nesting holes dug in the tundra. The excursions weren't overly rigorous the longest hike was less than three miles and the wind and cold were never as bad as at Cape Horn. Also helping to mitigate the elements was the whiskey fortified hot chocolate we were served after two of the hikes, just before boarding the Zodiacs to return to the ship. On board, we happily passed the time in quiet contemplation of the slowly unfolding panorama of snow capped mountains towering over the white capped sea. Who knew there could be so many variations of white? That it was still possible, in 2014, to travel for days without a single glimpse of human habitation? That simply observing nature from a comfortable chair, cellphone tucked away in a suitcase, pisco sour in hand, could be the ultimate form of relaxation? No wonder disembarking at the small city of Punta Arenas, after our days at sea, was so disorienting. Vans lined the dock, taxis jostled for fares, cellphones chirped to life. We were all too clearly back, and much too soon, from the end of the world.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
Chuck Rhoades Jr. and Charles Rhoades Sr. are at war. They have been since the last season of "Billions," when son betrayed father as part of a plot by Chuck to ruin his nemesis, Bobby Axelrod. But the most powerful weapon wielded in the conflict so far hasn't been a legal threat or a stock swindle. It's the kiss that Charles plants square on Chuck's mouth, hands locked on his son's head to prevent him from pulling away. That kiss is the climax of "Hell of a Ride," this week's aptly titled episode from the writer Randall Green and the director John Dahl. In a series that has made a study of the physicality of the rich and powerful, the scene is a graduate level course. On one level, and like so many of these characters' other words and actions, it is very likely a reference to a work of macho pop culture: the kiss of betrayal that Michael Corleone plants on his disloyal brother Fredo in "The Godfather Part II." (Bobby quoted the first "Godfather" film earlier in the episode when he instructed his philanthropy guru, Sean Ayles (Jack Gilpin), to "use all your powers and all your skills" in support of his latest stealthy venture.) But like the best such moments on "Billions," the context transforms the reference into something new and unique, and in this case uniquely disturbing. The father son dynamic creates a power imbalance absent in the brother to brother version, adding an overtone of Oedipal anxiety and parental abuse. That ugliness is compounded in turn by the creepy sexualization of the two men's relationship in this episode, from Charles's bawdy stories of his collegiate sexual exploits to the revelation that Chuck lost his virginity at age fourteen to a prostitute hand selected by his father based on firsthand knowledge of her skills. Charles's presence also looms large over Chuck and Wendy's heart to heart regarding her one night stand with the space entrepreneur Craig Heidecker during their separation an act of infidelity Charles had taken it upon himself to uncover and parade before his son. And the kiss itself is just the latest aftershock from Chuck's deliberate demolition of his father's investment in the Ice Juice public offering last season. Indeed, it is a direct reaction to Chuck's having used the political clout of his eminence grise Black Jack Foley to threaten Charles's lucrative land holdings surrounding an upstate casino project and thereby force his father to keep quiet about Chuck's role in sabotaging the stock, now the subject of investigation by the upstanding attorney Bryan Connerty. "We both love this man," Connerty tells Charles at one point, "you as his father, me as a sort of son." It's Oedipus all the way down, folks. The fantastically fraught kiss wouldn't be half as effective without the skillful acting of Paul Giamatti and Jeffrey DeMunn. DeMunn has never had a better showcase on "Billions" than he has in this episode, from the nude scene in which he drops trou to intimidate Connerty during a locker room conversation (eat your heart out, Sophocles) to his complex performance of pride, gratitude, love and secret rage bubbling as Chuck makes a surprise appearance to present him with an award at his 50th reunion at Yale. Giamatti, meanwhile, brings out Chuck's core of kindness and decency they're in there somewhere! when he helps Wendy through the shock of both losing her lover to a deadly rocket crash and discovering that Chuck has known about Heidecker all along. It is during that conversation that Chuck reveals the true story of his first time and not just his first time having sex. "It was the first time my father ever said he was proud of me," Chuck says. Charles repeats this rare word of praise just before the kiss; when he pulls away, the trauma radiates from Giamatti's eyes so strongly you can almost hear it hum. While I could easily spend an entire review unpacking this one scene, that would do a disservice to the rest of the episode, which moves from strength to strength. Aside from the power struggle between the Rhoadeses, there's a crisis of conscience for Taylor Mason. As Axe Capital's chief investment officer, Taylor bets against Heidecker's space venture despite deeply admiring the guy and supporting his long term goal of space colonization. Taylor's move winds up making Axe Cap a fortune when his rocket explodes, killing both him and his company's stock value. "You lost a hero and were rewarded for it," Wendy says during Taylor's therapy session after the disaster, paraphrasing Taylor's characteristically wordy and precise description of the issue with her own trademark blunt incisiveness. How should Taylor resolve this inner conflict? According to Wendy, it's quite simple, and she sums it up in a sentence that could well be this show's mantra: "Mind the truth that makes you money." Taylor, who as a gender nonbinary person surely has no shortage of experience in resolving conflict to get to the truth beneath, goes out and buys the same obscenely expensive Patek Philippe watch that Heidecker wore a memento mori in gold, its purchase made affordable by the money the man's death generated. Bobby and Wags, meanwhile, are also wrestling with matters of life and death, albeit in very different ways. Bobby spends the episode fighting his ouster from the board of a charity with the beautifully vapid moniker World Aid, concerned with his potential loss of prestige. But, being Bobby Axelrod, he figures out a way to weaponize his own status as persona non grata and convert his reputational loss into financial gain. Bobby senses the potential in the plans of Oscar Langstraat (the laconic comedian Mike Birbiglia), a "venture philanthropist" (shudder) who wants World Aid to buy the solar energy company behind the air conditioning tents the charity is providing to climate ravaged regions of Africa. The charity's good name will drive the stock through the roof, which will enrich the charity in turn. After ordering Taylor to surreptitiously snap up stock for Axe Cap, Bobby spends his final board meeting ranting and raving about how stupid the idea is, knowing that the board hates him so much they'll approve the deal just to spite him. Once again, human misery is converted to currency by players canny and amoral enough to see the play and make it. Wags's story line provides a comedic counterpoint to those of Taylor and Bobby. He's on a mission to buy the last burial plot on the entire island of Manhattan yours for the low, low price of 350,000! which requires outmaneuvering a wealthy and profane personal injury attorney played by Michael Kostroff, best known as the similarly sleazy lawyer Maurice Levy on "The Wire," whose delight in playing these kinds of creeps is evident in every single line reading. A little blackmail, a well placed item about the lawyer's mistress on Page Six, and boom, Wags's eternal resting place is secured. He and Bobby meet in the graveyard and have a killer exchange about the different ways death is spoken of depending on the age of the deceased. Dying in your thirties or forties? "Tragic." Fifties? "Such a shame." Sixties? "Too soon." Seventies? "A good run." Eighties? "A life well lived." Nineties? "Hell of a ride." Wags repeats those last words to himself as he lies down on the grave site, gazing up at the sky, not a care in the world. We should all be so lucky. Or is that so wealthy? On a show like "Billions," where wealth is wielded like a magic charm, perhaps that's a distinction without a difference.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The French filmmaker Robert Bresson once said: "Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden." In "I Was at Home, but...," the German director Angela Schanelec seems to have taken her ideas and stashed them deep in a private vault. Every so often, though, she cracks open this movie with a line, an image, a snatch of a song offering you fugitive glimpses of an intensely personal world. (It won her the best director award at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival.) "I Was at Home, but ..." begins with a hare being chased by a dog across a rugged, bleached out rural landscape. It's a tense race for life the hare is fast, the dog too and invokes countless scenes of endangered bunnies, including in Renoir's "Rules of the Game." (Schanelec's title, in turn, seems to nod at Ozu's "I Was Born, but...") The chase appears to end with the hare resting among an outcropping of rocks. This is followed by a brief, enigmatic interlude of a charming donkey wandering in a derelict house where the dog tears at a small, dead animal, presumably our hapless hare. After this mysterious opener, we cut to a girl in a red coat sitting alone on a curb in deep twilight, framed by a stand of trees in the background, a backpack next to her. The combination of the color of the coat, the isolation of the girl and the crepuscular woods brings to mind Little Red Riding Hood, an association that settles in your mind like an unformed thought. A boy later revealed to be the son of the protagonist walks by wordlessly. A few beats later there's a shot of him in front of a brick building, where the buzzing of exterior lights mixes with bird calls and insects whirs. Not long after, the movie shifts to a classroom where a girl recites a line from "Hamlet": "Nor earth to me give food, nor heaven light!" In the original, these words are spoken by the Player Queen in the play within the play, when she insists she would never remarry, an allusion that like the Red Riding Hood imagery settles in your head as a possible clue. As you cast about for meaning, you may remember Hamlet's mother, the real queen, who in this same section says, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." This isn't something one could say of Schanelec, whose narrative approach is austere and elliptical, and whose intentions can be so inscrutable that "I Was at Home, but ..." can feel like a private reverie rather than one meant for sharing.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
The comedians doing the most assured work online didn't need to adjust for the coronavirus shutdown. As I wrote recently, the standouts were already on the web, particularly in the growing genre of "front facing camera comedy." Here are seven worth watching: Stalter has become essential escapist entertainment, performing nearly nightly hours on IG Live, including comic versions of a cooking show, a magic show, a motivational seminar and a master class on the art of seduction. Find her here on Instagram and here on Twitter. With more than 300,000 followers on Twitter, she's arguably the biggest star of this form, a magnetic performer whose motormouth characters evoke the comic anxiety of Roz Chast cartoons. Find her here on Twitter and here on Instagram. Gifted at accents and impressions, she has been hilarious recently as herself, capturing the hostility of a couple cooped up in at home and the difficulty of conversation over FaceTime, a crossover collaboration with Eva Victor that went viral. Find her here on Instagram. A rising star with a knack for finding the right detail, particularly in beta male character types: the needy boyfriend, the younger sibling in a fight. Find him here on Instagram and here on Twitter. A standout in New York's weird comedy scene, he posted two very funny videos this month, satirizing Vice News and the life of a comic in quarantine. Find him here on Instagram and here on Twitter. His cliche movie types (every expert hacker, the brutally meta character inserted into every horror film for a decade after "Scream") are hilarious sketches that double as sharp movie criticism. Find him here on Instagram and here on Twitter. Leaning less on quick cuts than taut, maniacal monologues, she has a gift for hilarious snapshots of the unhinged, the deluded and the startlingly vengeful. Find her here on Twitter and to a lesser extent, here on Instagram.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Television
The messages began pinging around Instagram around noon on Monday. Nashom Wooden, an omnipresence on New York's gay bar and club scene, was dead at 50 after a short illness that he had suspected but not confirmed was Covid 19. It came as a shock, first because Mr. Wooden looked barely different than he had at 35, but also because among people in nightlife, there was about him a survivalist quality rivaled only by Susanne Bartsch, the drag queen empress whose parties he sometimes appeared at, and Lady Bunny, his drag queen comrade and former roommate. Over the years, Mr. Wooden performed in heels as Mona Foot; appeared with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robert DeNiro in the 1999 movie "Flawless"; co wrote and performed a song that became a top 10 hit all around Europe; bartended at the Cock, a longtime gay dive in Manhattan's East Village neighborhood; and showed up at countless movie premieres and fashion shows, usually in his fitted Maison Margiela leather jacket, dark jeans and Rick Owens boots. Mr. Wooden grew up in Brooklyn but came of age at Boy Bar, the not quite bar not quite nightclub where many an early '90s drag queen was hatched. The original idea (it's not exactly clear whose) was to turn him into what Lady Bunny described as a "a sassy mammy character," with Aretha Franklin wigs and floral print '50s dresses. But Mona had glamour running through her veins, down past her bulging calves. So off went that look and on came the glittery, Barbarella and Wonder Woman inspired duds. At night, Mr. Wooden hosted Mona Foot's "Star Search," a weekly competition at Barracuda that preceded RuPaul's "Drag Race" by more than 15 years and probably served as one of its inspirations. During the day, Mr. Wooden ran the men's department at the Patricia Field boutique, working alongside Candis Cayne, another of the scene's best known personalities. In heels onstage, he was a terrifying presence. "He could really cut a bitch," Ms. Cayne said. Out of heels, he was a mensch. By the end of the '90s, Mr. Wooden had been cast as one of a gaggle of drag queens in "Flawless," where he serves as one of Mr. Hoffman's sidekicks and performs Cher's "Half Breed" in a drag club. He and his sisters of the cloth, JoJo Americo and Paul Alexander (performing as the trio The Ones), recorded a song with the movie's title. It went to No. 4 on the Billboard Club Play chart, No. 7 in the United Kingdom and No. 2 in Belgium. George Michael added a few lyrics and rerecorded it a few years later as "Flawless (Go to the City)." It became his last big hit. From there, The Ones recorded a few albums and performed at festivals around the world. But Mr. Wooden was less known for having a career than for being a presence. "He was at every gym, he was at every club, he was equally beautiful in and out of drag," said Christopher Peregrin, the global director of partnerships at Magnum, a leading photography agency. "Sometimes, these queens wash their faces, take off the make up and the attractiveness disappears. But he was as compelling out of drag as he was in it." Three weeks ago, Mr. Wooden was in peak physical shape, working out with friends in Chelsea. A week and a half ago, he was holed up at home in the East Village with what seemed to be a strange flu.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Eliot is the master of the unsaid. Irons's sensitivity to Prufrock's hesitation on the brink of utterance allows the poetry to bring out a prophetic impulse without sounding entirely absurd: "Do I dare / Disturb the universe?" Like other great readers of Eliot (among them John Gielgud and Alec Guinness), Irons combines the velvet with emotionally alert variations in pace. With the line "It is impossible to say just what I mean!," he speeds up the frustration seething beneath Prufrock's genteel front, complete with formal necktie. Irons makes a bold decision to let loose the speaker's longing, to the point of a sigh, and he is wonderfully suggestive in the variations on "Shantih shantih shantih" echoing on at the end of "The Waste Land." I used to wonder if "the peace which passeth understanding," Eliot's note to this word, was building or fading. The poet's own deadpan reading did not provide an answer, but Irons comes down on uncertainty with three different intonations. His final, stretched out "Shantih" injects a strange intimacy following a thunderous "DA," announcing rain water as a sign of the spiritual fertility that Eliot longed for all his life. Irons voices an Eliot who craves, desires and suffers more openly than in the sober accents of Gielgud and Guinness. Their recordings, completed during the poet's lifetime, perhaps felt the impress of Eliot's neutrality. Yet for them, and for Irons too, the poet appears one of us, which is to say that in all these recordings Eliot becomes more English than I think he really was. Irons glides smoothly over a barrage of judgments in "Marina," "Death" being embodied in "Those who sit in the sty of contentment" and in "Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals." Here is an annihilation of the flesh worthy of his Puritan forebear Andrew Eliott of Salem, a juror in the witchcraft trials. Instead, Irons lends himself to what coexists with the voice of judgment: what is hesitant, what feels unattainable and the struggles of a flawed being in "Four Quartets." A high point is when Eileen Atkins joins Irons in the best "Waste Land" reading ever in terms of interpretation and play of voices. Listen especially to the repartee of a man and a woman caged together in a hellish union. Their emotional duo and the naturalness that Irons brings to Eliot make this set of CDs a special gift.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Books
A roundup of motoring news from the web: Only about 300 people around the world will be able to buy the track oriented Bentley Continental GT3 R, and 99 of those buyers will be in the United States. Bentley said that pricing for the 572 horsepower 4 liter twin turbo V8 equipped sports car would start at 337,000. It will be capable of going from zero to 60 miles per hour in 3.6 seconds. The introduction of the GT3 R in the United States will be this weekend at the Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, in California. (Autoblog) The stock of Truecar, the automotive sales website, hit a high on Tuesday, rising 14.7 percent to 15.87 a share. Truecar, which had its initial public offering of 7.8 million shares in May, reported second quarter earnings of 50.5 million, more than 60 percent higher than its second quarter revenue in 2013. The stock closed at about 15 a share on Wednesday. (Investors.com) Lexus is using a new global marketing strategy in which 25 marketing experts from around the world meet to discuss and exchange ideas ahead of a coming product's introduction. The first vehicles on which Lexus is using the strategy are the NX crossover, which was recently unveiled in Japan, and the sporty RC coupe, which is scheduled to be released in the United States this year. (Ad Age) BMW announced this week that Stefan Sengewald, who just completed a rotation as the chief financial officer for BMW of North America, will take over as senior vice president of organizational development and process management for the BMW Group. Mr. Sengewald has been with BMW since 1987 and has served in financial roles throughout the company, including in Spain, France and Mexico. BMW said he played a significant role in choosing San Luis Potosi, Mexico, as the site for the company's new plant in North America. (BMW of North America)	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Automobiles
"New York is a lonely, lonely, lonely city," Yossy Morales said one recent Saturday, a morning so frigid that a bicycle deliveryman outside Burger Heaven on Lexington Avenue at 62nd Street was forced to pour scalding water over his Kryptonite lock to key it open. For the past decade Ms. Morales, 42 and a native of Honduras, has been on an informal mission to thaw the chill of daily life in a city of eight and a half million. During that time, she has waited tables and served at the counter of Burger Heaven, a family owned East Side institution, slinging breakfast specials and dispensing human warmth along with a steady stream of endearments to a loyal clientele. "Everybody has problems, and it's fun to talk to them about their life," Ms. Morales said. "It's not just customer and waitress. It's friend and friend." It was an ordinary exchange on an average February day, and yet it was one tinged with melancholy because, after 77 years in continuous operation, the last of what had once been eight separate Burger Heaven outposts in Manhattan announced that it would close on Feb. 28. (The day after this article's publication, Burger Heaven's demand outpaced its inventory; the restaurant closed for good on Feb. 26, at 4 p.m.) The reasons are mostly unsurprising, and yet, unlike at many other small businesses in the city, landlord greed is not one. The family that runs Burger Heaven also owns its building, as it had those in several other now shuttered locations. Years ago, Evans Cyprus, the chain's farseeing 94 year old patriarch and founder, bought a variety of lunch counter outposts, where he installed the vinyl upholstered booths, chrome edged Formica counters, swivel stools and clustered ranks of condiments that amount to an archetypal diner style. Mr. Cyprus did his best to adapt with the times, adding healthier options to the Burger Heaven menus, turning a location near Saks Fifth Avenue into a diner cum bar. What he could not have anticipated who could? were the cultural shifts that would eventually supplant diners with food trucks or delivery services. "Young people want grab and go," said Dimitri Dellis, 61, and one of three family members responsible for a business that encompasses four generations. They no longer require a third place, that fixed geographical point in the triangle of daily destinations, after home and one's job. For a generation raised on smartphones and laptops, the third place is anywhere you plop down. Thus it has become an alien concept, the lunch counter as a regular social destination, a place where, as Astrid Dadourian, an editor and writer, said one recent morning at Burger Heaven, "you set your day, do some people watching, have some camaraderie, notice the guy who always sits at the counter and wears a hat." A scene like that, with its Edward Hopper associations, has come to seem as anachronistic as folding a print newspaper, something you saw once in a diorama or in a YouTube video. Never mind that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis regularly dined at the counter of Burger Heaven on East 53rd Street with her son, John F. Kennedy Jr., who played soldiers with the ranks of ketchup bottles, saltshakers and sugar canisters. Forget about socialites eating cheek by jowl with secretaries, bank heads alongside barbers. This is where Barbara Walters consumed her regular rare burger, no bun, with a knife and fork. It is also where Holly Golightly regularly met Mr. O'Shaughnessy, the mobster Sally Tomato's lawyer and bagman for her payoffs in "Breakfast at Tiffany's." What is the consequence of losing access to such places in a city where retail establishments are closing all the time and where many can cite lineages of beloved coffee shops long gone? "New York can be cold, and a place like this makes you feel like you live in a village," Kari Lichtenstein, a family lawyer, said last week, as she sat with her mother, Emilie Palef, a Toronto native first drawn here by the quirky stores and homey restaurants. "We were on our way to another spot, and I said to my daughter, 'I need tomato soup,'" Ms. Palef said, of how they had ended up at Burger Heaven that day. With it she also got one of the hugs Ms. Morales serves up liberally to her customers, whose faces and orders and, frequently, troubles she seems to know by heart. "A coffee shop is that place where they know what you like and if you don't show up, they're worried," said Sarah Schulman, a New York bred novelist raised above Romanoff, a venerable joint near Washington Square, educated in the ways of greasy spoons as a waitress at Leroy's in TriBeCa and so strong a believer in link between these humble establishments and the engines of urbanism that coffee shops feature in two of her novels. "When you homogenize a city, you destroy its feeling of urbanity," Ms. Schulman said, referring to the banks and drugstores and chains retailers steadily wallpapering over the city's indispensable quiddities. "When we lose businesses that are not chains, we lose specificity and difference." And heterogeneity is all but on the menu at Burger Heaven, where both the customers and the staff mirror the city's diversity of race, ethnicity and class. "We have people working here who are from Mexico, Honduras, Venezuela, Panama, Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Ecuador, Bolivia and Poland, but they're all Americans," said the diner's longtime manager, Sammy Hamido, who is of Egyptian origin. More than the famous tuna salad sandwiches, made with pricey high grade canned fish and none of the extenders a lot of places use to improve the bottom line, or the A grade beef ground fresh on site or the Idaho potatoes peeled and cut fresh daily for Burger Heaven's classic French fries, it is the democracy of the lunch counter that will be missed. New York, as E.B. White wrote in his most celebrated essay, does bestow upon its citizens the "gift of loneliness," if you can call it that. But it also offsets the fearful isolation of big cities with a measure of companionable privacy in public spaces, and a sense when you sit at Burger Heaven's counter that your existence does not go unremarked. In exchange for the noise and expense, the smells and the nuisance, the rats and the rest, we obtain this small pleasure: being both anonymous and known. In all the years I've gone there I never learned Ms. Morales's last name until being told Burger Heaven was closing. Nor did she know mine. To me, she was Yossy with the thousand watt smile. To her, I was: "Hello, my love, what are you having? The usual?"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Style
Some 16,000 years ago, prehistoric humans ventured deep into the La Garma cave in Spain to perform sacred rituals. Guided by lanterns made of animal fat, they navigated hundreds of feet through dark caverns and around thick stalagmites until they reached one of their circular stone huts, each of which had a horse skull at its center. Though archaeologists don't know what religious ceremonies took place inside the huts, they think they now understand a piece of the decor: a cave lion pelt, perhaps used as either a rug or a roof. Edgard Camaros, an archaeologist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Spain, and his colleagues discovered nine fossilized claw bones belonging to the extinct Eurasian cave lion, a beast larger than an African lion but without the mane, while exploring the ritual site. They reported their findings Wednesday in the journal PLOS One. In the many years that he, his wife, Marian Cueto, and their colleagues have spent exploring the vast caverns, they had uncovered more than 30,000 bones, most of which belonged to horses and goats. Mixed among all those bones were the cave lion claws, the only remnants from the beast. "It was very strange to find only the claws," said Dr. Camaros. "Everything you have inside this cave was a thing humans introduced to it." La Garma is like a time capsule into the lives of the people from the Upper Paleolithic era, according to Dr. Camaros. For thousands of years it had remained untouched, so everything inside looked exactly like it had when the ancient people performed their rituals. Since the only cave lion remains that the team found inside the cave were claws, Dr. Camaros said, that most likely meant that the prehistoric people brought only the lion's claws into the cave. For his team the question became, 'Why would Paleolithic people only bring lion claws into the cave?' "Our interpretation is that the claws were attached to the skin of the lion," Dr. Camaros said. "You know those horrible carpets which people have in their house, the bear carpets with the claws and head? This would be very similar but without the head, just the claws and the pelt." He thinks that the prehistoric people may have skinned cave lions with their claws intact, and either placed the pelts over huts to make a tent or laid them on the floor. Then, after thousands of years the skin and fur disintegrated, leaving behind only the fossilized claw bones. To support their hypothesis the team points to markings they found on the claws. Each claw has a similar pattern of scrapes and scratches that seemed to have been made by human tools. The patterns led the team to believe that the early humans were well acquainted with the lion's anatomy and knew exactly where to cut to sever the skin from the tendons and ligaments. Though the researchers are not sure how this cave lion died, Dr. Camaros thinks it was hunted by early humans. He said that the findings strengthen the idea that humans hunted cave lions, and he speculated that humans should potentially be considered as a possible factor in the species' extinction, around 14,000 years ago.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Science
For the first few months after Jon Helmuth retired three years ago, he slept late, acquired a tan and showered at odd times. Actually, some days he didn't bother to shower at all. After that pleasantly aimless interval, Mr. Helmuth, a divorced father of four who is now 45, began organizing his five bedroom house in the woods of Vandalia, Mich., a village near the Indiana border. But once he alphabetized the spice rack and finished making an easy chair out of castoff designer jeans, "I started running out of things to do," he said. Those who recall their own freshman year of retirement will, perhaps, nod knowingly and sympathetically. Been there, done that. But the situation is different when you retire very early too early even to get your first membership solicitation from AARP. While early retirement and a life of leisure may sound like the stuff of daydreams, the reality can be jarring for people who are used to being busy and important. There can be boredom, a sense of isolation and a lot of awkward social questions. Mr. Helmuth, for instance, was only 42 when he sold his stake in Genesis Products, an Elkhart, Ind. based manufacturer of wood and laminate doors, furniture and other components that he helped found in 2002. "I used to be kind of a big deal, and now I'm not," Mr. Helmuth said, adding that he left with around 5 million. "I don't need to work again as long as I'm not incredibly stupid," he said. Then again, the people who might either want to help him spend his money or resent his good fortune tend to be busy with jobs. "I feel like all my buddies are at school and I'm at home with mono," he said. "And there are no retirement homes for 45 year olds." Early retirees are an anomaly, said Sara E. Rix, a former senior strategic adviser for AARP who is now a consultant to nonprofits. "The trend is in the other direction," she added. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the work force participation rate for people in the 65 to 69 age range increased to 32.1 percent in 2015, from 18.4 percent in 1985. Those who choose to clock out a good 10, 20 or 25 years ahead of schedule rarely have financial worries otherwise, presumably, they would still be on the payroll. They have lived within their means and saved enough to carry them through, or, like Mr. Helmuth, they have cashed out of a business. Maybe they have come into an inheritance or have a spouse who is still bringing home a paycheck. But they do have other concerns: What's the best response to strangers at parties who ask, "So what do you do?" How do they handle peers' curiosity (can you really afford to do this at your age?) and envy (so you really CAN afford to do this!)? What kind of message are they sending their children? For Donna Buxton, who had a very demanding job in computer operations in the health care industry until her retirement at 46, the big issue was guilt. Never mind that her husband, Michael, who at the time was the president of a forging company, was doing well enough on his own to support the family the couple has one daughter and was encouraging her to walk away. "I had a very strong work ethic, and I felt I should be contributing to the household in a financial way," said Ms. Buxton, now 55, who lives in Villa Park, Calif. "But my husband kept repeating to me that he didn't want me to work for the sake of working he wanted me to work only if I were passionate about it." Her passion had been dampened by the round the clock nature of her job. "The stress level was so high, and it was taking such a huge toll on the family, that we decided it wasn't worth it anymore," Ms. Buxton said. Since retiring, she has become involved in civic affairs and joined a golf group and a health club. She has had some job offers, "but," she said, "I was so burned out I turned them down." Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' Stress reduction was also what Al Villeta was after when he retired last year, at 52, from his job as a UPS driver and porter in Forest Hills, Queens. The most he ever made in a year, Mr. Villeta said, was 80,000; on average it was 60,000 to 65,000. But his family lived frugally, and he and his wife (who is still working as a department head at a long term health care facility) had invested in real estate, which provides a steady and predictable income stream. "Sometimes I feel awkward saying 'I'm retired' because people will say, 'You look so young to be retired,'" said Mr. Villeta, who has two adult children. "Or they're thinking, 'How much could a UPS driver make that he could have enough to retire?'" With his contemporaries still in the work force, Mr. Villeta now pals around with men 30 years his senior. "I've petitioned my wife to give up her job, but she feels very connected to the people she works with," he said. "Sometimes I feel lonely during the day, so I got a dog, which was very helpful. He keeps me company and gets me out of the house a little bit." For some young retirees, family issues drive the decision to exit the work force. When Mr. Helmuth's marriage broke up in 2012, "I felt I needed some resetting," he recalled. "I wasn't feeling great about my work life balance," he added. "My business partner wanted to double down and do a lot of additional expansion, and I was like, 'Hey, go for it.' We separated on good terms." Matters can be particularly fraught for those young retirees who worked in a highly successful family business that was sold in advance of the founder's death. "I have 35 and 40 year old clients who are inheriting great sums of money, and they're not going to be sending out their resumes again," said Ricardo J. Armijo, a senior vice president and portfolio manager in the Birmingham, Mich., office of UBS. "A lot of them take up biking or playing golf and tennis because their contemporaries are working during the day." This type of schedule, Mr. Armijo said, can lead them to "questions like, 'How do I set a good example for my children?' and 'Am I being a productive?' because they come from families of go getters." According to Mr. Armijo, these young retirees tend to take extra care with their investments. "They don't make decisions on the spot, as perhaps they did before," when they still were working and had income from their jobs, he said. If they had a bad streak in the market, they could recoup. "But now their attitude is, 'This money is it,'" Mr. Armijo continued. "They don't want to be known to future generations as the ancestor who lost the family fortune." There is an adjustment period to this new reality. "But after a few years," Mr. Armijo said, "they get used to their new situation in life, and the following years are very fulfilling." That's a common theme. "I never wanted to go back to work," said Sue Tafler, 69, of Lexington, Mass., who was 51 when she retired from Prentice Hall as a textbook editor and began volunteering at her synagogue instead. But not everyone is so emphatic, she acknowledged: "I have friends who've retired and take part time jobs they can't let go." Retiring happily is one thing, of course, and announcing it loudly and proudly is quite another. "It took four or five years before I could say I was retired," Ms. Buxton said. "I would just say, 'I'm not working right now.'"	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Your Money
PHILADELPHIA A block from Drexel University, a glassy new rental building offers residents a roof deck with a heated saltwater pool, a fire pit and outdoor televisions amenities that would make for a raucous college party, if college students could live there. But the 28 story tower at 3601 Market Street was not built to house any of Drexel's 16,900 undergraduates. Nor is it intended for the 10,400 undergraduates studying at nearby University of Pennsylvania. Instead, it aims to attract young professionals junior faculty, office workers and young doctors to live in University City, a West Philadelphia neighborhood that is also home to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the Penn Presbyterian Medical Center. The Market Street apartments are among roughly 2,000 residential units that are planned or have recently opened in University City and are aimed at young professionals and graduate students. A local developer has also acquired eight rental buildings in the neighborhood since the summer, with plans to renovate those 600 units to attract more young professionals. About half of University City's 50,600 residents are between the ages of 20 and 34, and of the 75,000 jobs in the area, three quarters of them are in health care and education, according to a report by the University City District. The jobs tend to command high salaries. From 2008 to 2013, the number of mid to high wage jobs increased by 80 percent, according to the report. So for employers looking to recruit young workers, an influx of luxury housing built a few steps from the office could win over a prospective employee who might have balked at a long commute. Near college campuses around the country, developers have begun building luxury housing for the staff, not the students. Tapping into a desire among some younger workers to live in walkable, urban communities, these developers have discovered that a college neighborhood can fit that bill, as students are no longer the only ones who want to live near campus. "In a way, it's almost a continuation of the college experience," said Bruce J. Katz, the centennial scholar at the Brookings Institution, where he focuses on global urbanization. "Particularly for people who are involved in the entrepreneurial economy and who are looking to spend the bulk of their time outside their apartment." Among the new developments around the country are Century Square, a 60 acre mixed use project rising near Texas A M University in College Station with 250 luxury rentals; a mixed use complex with 453 luxury rentals opposite Arizona State University in Tempe that will break ground this spring; and a 15 story tower with 180 residential units that opened in December in Hyde Park, a few blocks from the University of Chicago. College campuses, particularly research universities, have all the ingredients necessary to become a trendy live work enclave. The area around a college campus "is already lively. There are already bars and restaurants. There are already residential services," said Dustin Downey, the senior vice president for multifamily development at Southern Land Company, which developed 3601 Market in Philadelphia with Redwood Capital Investments and the University City Science Center. Southern Land also built similar projects in Nashville near Vanderbilt University and in Raleigh near North Carolina State University. "With those conveniences comes a really high quality of living." For the universities, shiny new towers with playful amenities like shuffleboard, game rooms and dog runs make it easier to recruit young faculty members at no cost to the school, particularly in places like West Philadelphia, which lacks quality housing and has been plagued by poverty and crime for decades. In March, Radnor Property Group will break ground on 3201 Race Street Apartments, a 16 story, mixed use tower to be built on land owned by Drexel University. The property will include 164 market rate apartments, townhomes and a child care center. "It makes the neighborhood safer," said Nancy Trainer, the associate vice president for planning and design at Drexel University. "It makes a better environment for all of us." These apartments do not come cheap. At 3601 Market, a third of the units have rented since leasing began in August. Of the remaining listings, a 427 square foot studio is 1,525 a month; a 698 square foot one bedroom with a balcony is 2,025 a month; and two bedrooms start at 2,749 a month. By comparison, the median rent in University City is 1,450 a month, according to the University City District's report. Developers use various strategies to keep undergraduates away from these new projects, including high rents that most students can't afford. They time leasing to miss the start of the academic year, reject applicants who will rely on a guarantor to pay the rent and design spaces that are not ideal for young students. "The undergraduates get the message," Mr. Downey said. Otherwise, potential residents get skittish if they think that the halls might eventually get overrun with college students. "We're not going to have bicycles hanging off of the balconies and we're not going to have music blaring and kegs rolling down the hall," said Lawrence Pobuda, a senior vice president at Opus Group, which plans to build luxury housing next to Arizona State University. Not every community wants a glassy high rise with hundreds of new tenants who could strain public transit and increase traffic congestion. "There has been tension for many decades," said Carolyn T. Adams, a professor at Temple University who studies urban development. "And so every time those institutions have needed to do some kind of construction or building they have had to work very hard to manage their relationship with the neighbors." For the residents of Powelton Village, which abuts Drexel University, new market rate housing means a reprieve from undergraduate housing, which to them translates to empty beer cans littering the sidewalks of the tree lined streets. Powelton Village is a neighborhood of mostly Victorian homes, yet the homeownership rate was only 13 percent in 2010, according to a neighborhood report co written by Drexel University. Many of the homes are divided into apartments for students. "We just need a balance in the neighborhood to keep it a community," said John J.H. Phillips, an artist and the president of the Powelton Village Civic Association, which supported Drexel's plan to redevelop 3201 Race Street. "The students don't take part in things that communities do, whereas young professionals and young families would have a more active role in the community." The new development is having a ripple effect on the neighborhood. Last summer, Post Brothers Apartments, a local developer, began buying aging rental buildings with plans to renovate them. The centerpiece of the 95 million portfolio is Garden Court Plaza, a 146 unit Art Deco building at 4701 Pine Street. Apartments have parquet floors and crown molding, but kitchens and bathrooms need updating. As part of the renovations, the developers plan to upgrade an expansive green roof deck, adding croquet courts and outdoor grills. The developers also plan to restore the historic lobby and renovate apartments as leases turn over, raising rent to 1,900 a month for a one bedroom, from about 1,200 a month. "For a very long time no developer was focused on serving this massive market of young professionals that are working here," said Matthew Pestronk, the president of Post Brothers Apartments. Until recently, "There has not been a white collar, entry level housing option available at all."	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Real Estate
Whedon scripted 80 additional pages for the endeavor, but his quippy tone and more colorful aesthetic proved to be at odds with Snyder's grim, chiaroscuro take on the crime fighters, and the reshoots presented a significant scheduling problem: Cavill had already moved on to "Mission: Impossible Fallout," and the mustache he grew for that film had to be inelegantly erased from his new Superman scenes. Whedon's patched together "Justice League" was released in November 2017 to scathing notices, earning significantly less than Gadot's solo film, "Wonder Woman," which had debuted just a few months earlier. Though that seemed to spell the end of "Justice League" as a franchise, Snyder's fans continued to clamor for his director's cut, and last November, Affleck and Gadot added their online voices to the ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement. Warner Bros. Pictures chairman Toby Emmerich then contacted Snyder to gauge his interest in remaking the film for the soon to launch streaming service HBO Max, and the director assented. Since the Snyder cut of "Justice League" was never completed, the studio will probably pour 20 million to 30 million into an extensive, effects heavy postproduction process to bring it up to snuff. It may also prove to be significantly longer than Whedon's two hour version: In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Snyder said that he was mulling a four hour director's cut of "Justice League," or even a six part episodic series that could restore several trimmed subplots, including separate story lines for the Flash (Ezra Miller) and Cyborg (Ray Fisher). Though this is an unprecedented about face for Warner Bros., the move makes sense as studios reel from a pandemic forced shutdown: Snyder's "Justice League" guarantees HBO Max a high profile project that can be fashioned out of already shot footage, and it provides a visibility bump for its stand alone superheroes. Gadot's sequel "Wonder Woman 1984" was moved to a late summer berth after movie theaters closed for the season, while new films starring Jason Momoa's Aquaman and Miller's Flash may not be able to go into production for a long time.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Movies
James Corden, a onetime comic performer on the London stage who found his niche on American late night television as the host of "The Late Late Show" on CBS, will continue to hold down the network's 12:30 a.m. slot for the next few years. CBS announced on Monday that it had extended Mr. Corden's contract through 2022. He hit the airwaves in 2015, a time when the late night landscape was in the midst of a substantial reordering. David Letterman and Jon Stewart both left their late night shows in 2015, and Jay Leno had stepped down from "The Tonight Show" in 2014. Mr. Corden replaced Craig Ferguson, who left as host of "The Late Late Show" in 2014. Five years later, there is stability in late night, and the successors of the departed hosts seem to be in it for the long haul. Jimmy Fallon, who replaced Mr. Leno as the host of NBC's "The Tonight Show," is signed through 2021. Trevor Noah, Mr. Stewart's replacement at "The Daily Show," is signed through 2022. At ABC, the host of "Jimmy Kimmel Live," the longest serving broadcast late night show, also recently signed a three year extension. Stephen Colbert, Mr. Letterman's replacement on CBS, hosts the most watched show in all of late night.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Media
The bad news : If you're still planning your summer vacation travel, it may already be too late to lock in the most affordable rates if you're staying within the United States. According to the travel website Hipmunk, April would have been the cheapest month to buy a round trip domestic flight , based on its data analysis comparing booking from last year to this year. The good news: You could still score a huge discount this summer by looking abroad. "We've been seeing lower prices to international cities where new flight routes have opened, or low cost carriers have expanded, and competition has increased," said Adam Goldstein, Hipmunk's chief executive. To identify which international cities are trending cheaper, Hipmunk analyzed booking data from flights departing the United States and purchased between Jan. 1 and April 14 with a departure and arrival date in June, July or August and compared them to the same booking window from last year. Overall , average round trip international airfare rates are slightly higher compared to last year up one percent but Hipmunk found several international cities where there are bargains to be had. "Singapore is especially having a moment this summer, with demand up and prices down 30 percent year over year," said Kelly Soderlund, Hipmunk's content manager.	N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification	Travel
My family has been running from danger for nearly 100 years. The Nazarios are refugees; their remnants have scattered around the world to survive. My Jewish mother fled Poland in 1933. My Christian father fled Syria two years earlier. They met and married in Argentina, whose right wing dictatorship imprisoned and almost killed my sister. By giving us a home, the United States saved our lives. Would it do the same today? The Trump administration has barred those seeking refuge from our borders and turned our immigration courts into a joke. This is a betrayal of America's decades long role as a world leader in refugee protection. It also breaks our own laws and treaty commitments, which say we will take people in, give them a fair court hearing and not return them to harm. But it is not a total historical anomaly. America has gone through spasms of nativism before. In 1939, Congress shelved a bill to take in 20,000 Jewish children, and the ocean liner St. Louis, which carried 937 Jewish refugees, was turned away from the docks; hundreds aboard were murdered in the Holocaust. Then, as now, many on both the right and the left have argued that the choice Americans face on immigration and asylum is between zero tolerance and opening the floodgates. But this is a false choice. We can have an immigration policy that is sane and humane. One of the few survivors, Toby Levy, who is now 86 and lives in Brooklyn, told me that she saw a German soldier shoot a young girl. He picked the child up with one hand, she was so small; "I will never forget that," Ms. Levy said. And with the other hand "click" he shot her in the head. In a nearby town where many of my family members lived, children were buried alive. My mother's aunt stayed on the family vineyard. She, her husband and their five children disappeared off the face of the earth. Her youngest, Asher Lemel Apsel, was just a few years old. My father's name was Mahafud, which means protected by God. He was born on a wheat and sheep farm in a Christian enclave of Syria called Mhardeh. Christians were slaughtered in Syria throughout the 20th century. My family feared for their lives whenever they traveled outside of Mhardeh, and they finally decided to leave the country when my father was a newborn. He and his parents settled in Santiago del Estero, in northern Argentina, which was hot and dry and reminded them of home. They took the name Nazario, thanks to an Argentine migration agent who told my great uncle Asad Eben Naser Loush that no one would be able to pronounce his name. The agent wrote down "Nazario" instead a common surname in Italy, where many Argentines were from. When my father was a young man studying biochemistry, he met my mother on a bus in Buenos Aires. It was 1951, and he recited Pablo Neruda to her: "I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees." When he stopped riding that route, my mom systematically scouted out every biochemistry lab on the bus line, asking, "Does Mahafud work here?" until she found him and asked him out. When they married, my Jewish grandfather was furious. He said my mother was dead to him for marrying an Arab he even sat shiva for her until they gave birth to something he could no longer resist: his first grandsons, twins, no less. In 1955, a military coup one of many shut down the university where my father worked. In 1959, he received a grant to continue his research at the University of Wisconsin. Soon after we arrived in the United States, I was born the first in my family to be born here. Tall and dark skinned, my father longed for Argentina. He invited Latino friends to sit in a circle in front of our home and pass around a gourd filled with mate, an Argentine tea communally sipped from a silver straw. Argentines are obsessed with grilling meat, and true to form, my father barbecued whole goats in our backyard. On weekends, he took me along to the lab, where I watched him switch out test tubes in the centrifugal machines. He was trying to map the genes of microorganisms, work that he would eventually pursue as a professor at the University of Kansas Medical Center. I understand Americans' desire to say, "Take care of our own first!" In Los Angeles, where I live now, we have our own tent cities blocks upon blocks of homeless encampments. One in seven children in the United States is hungry. Empathy has been stretched to its limits. People aren't racist for fretting that Americans without high school diplomas may have to compete with immigrants for jobs in industries like construction. I understand those who fear rapid cultural change. We have to play straight with people: In the 2019 federal fiscal year, nearly a million migrants were apprehended at our southern border, a 12 year high. That's not nothing. A third of all Hondurans are planning to migrate, a recent survey showed. Wouldn't you? A new study by Doctors Without Borders found that more than two thirds of migrants fleeing Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala had a family member murdered, kidnapped or disappeared. Despite their discomfort with the stream of asylum seekers, Americans took to the streets in 2018 when they saw our government tearing babies out of the arms of Central American mothers. We don't do that, Americans said. That's not the kind of country we are. And yet these same Americans have been largely silent as our government tramples a half century of refugee and asylum law. The Trump administration has barred asylum seekers from entering the United States to make their claim, as our law says they are entitled to do, instead forcing them to line up for months and await their turn at an official port of entry on the Mexican side of the border. Even when they get to the head of the line, they can be turned back: Since January 2019 we have sent more than 57,000 asylum applicants, including at least 16,000 children, back into Mexico's borderlands to wait until their court date. It's dead winter, and their only shelter is often a few taped together trash bags. They are at the mercy of cartels and kidnappers, who see them as easy prey. A lawyer in Laredo, Texas, I recently spoke to astounded me by disclosing that more than half of the migrants she has interviewed have had someone in their family kidnapped, extorted or assaulted by narco cartels while waiting just across the border in Nuevo Laredo, a place so dangerous the U.S. State Department compares it to Syria, North Korea or Yemen. One asylum officer who resigned in protest told The Los Angeles Times that we are "literally sending people back to be raped and killed." When my father was 42, he died of a heart attack. Like many migrants, my mother longed for home, so in 1974, when I was 14 years old, she uprooted her four children and left Kansas for Argentina. My mother had terrible timing: The military was just about to take power and kill or disappear an estimated 30,000 people. I would tremble whenever I saw a Ford Falcon cruise down the street; it was the vehicle of choice for undercover military officers. They would pluck people up professors, teachers, journalists, students anyone advocating a more just society. They beat you, administered electric shock to your genitals. They put your head in a bucket of urine and feces until you were drowning. They drugged people with the anesthetic Ketalar and every Wednesday shoved them off airplanes into the ocean. They kept hundreds of pregnant women long enough for them to give birth, handed the babies to childless couples in the military, then killed the mothers. Owning certain books "Alice in Wonderland," Freud could get you in trouble. I helped my mother put all of the family's books into a big pile in the backyard. We set it on fire. One day my mother and I were walking down the street when I saw a pool of blood on the ground. "Two journalists were murdered here," my mother told me. I decided, staring at that pool of blood, to become a journalist. Among the American values I am most proud of are freedom, the rule of law and the right to dissent. Right now, the rule of law is being quietly massacred in the name of keeping asylum seekers out a policy most Americans don't even agree with. (A Gallup poll last year showed that 57 percent of Americans support taking in Central American refugees, and 76 percent, the highest since Gallup first asked in 2001, see immigration as good for the United States.) President Trump said he wanted a rigged asylum system, and that's what he's given us. In June he tweeted, "When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came." He proclaimed from the Oval Office, "To be honest with you, you have to get rid of judges." The Trump administration is expanding a program in El Paso (where the denial rate is already 97 percent) in which migrants' cases are decided within 10 days. Ten days to find a lawyer, request documents from officials in another country and line up expert witnesses. It's a sham. After a year and a half of life under Argentina's generals, my mother decided to get us out. We went back to the United States just a few months before the military officially took control of the government on March 24, 1976. But my sister was a senior in high school; she stayed behind to finish the year. One night in May the phone at our house in Kansas rang with a call from one of my aunts. Soldiers had broken down the door to our Buenos Aires condo and trashed the place. My sister was missing she had been disappeared. My sister, who now practices medicine in the Midwest, was hesitant to be identified in this article. She was afraid that her friends, colleagues and patients here in the United States would judge her for what she went through that they wouldn't be able to comprehend that in Argentina at that time, you could be imprisoned and killed despite being entirely innocent. The aunt in Buenos Aires was too afraid to go to the police for fear they might snatch her, too. She called my father's sister Sofia in northern Argentina, who called a cousin whose son worked in Argentina's secret services. "What can you do?" she begged. She learned that my sister was alive and being held at the central police station. Sofia had the family gather any disposable cash and all of their gold bracelets, in case they were needed for bribes, and she flew to Buenos Aires. She waited several tense hours in the station before someone acknowledged that my sister was there. But she was transferred, and then transferred again. A few weeks later, my sister's boyfriend, Javier Gustavo Grebel, was picked up while leafleting against the military outside a school. Those with clearly Jewish names, like his, fared worse than other prisoners. A now declassified telegram from the United States Embassy titled "Violence Against Argentine Jews" says anti Semitic military commanders called people "Jew dog" during torture sessions. Some believed that simply being Jewish was enough to get you arrested. We later heard from another prisoner that Javier's torturers broke all the bones in his face. Did he end up in the military's "chupaderos," its concentration camps? To this day, his family has no idea what happened to him. While all this was going on, I was acutely aware that I was the only natural born American citizen in my family. So at 14 I lobbied my congressional leaders in Kansas to save my sister. This led to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger sending a telegram to Argentina's dictator, Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla, asking why my sister was being held without charge. (Mr. Kissinger is, of course, the same diplomat who appeared to give the new regime a green light for human rights abuses when he told Argentina's foreign minister in June 1976, "We understand you must establish authority," and, "If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.") On the night of Sept. 21, 1976, my sister was released. She had been imprisoned for five months. What was done to her in that time? It was so painful for her to relive the experience that, although we're very close, we didn't speak of it for decades. Now I know: My sister was raped, forced to stand in stress positions, blindfolded, and held in a damp, cold cell. She went days without food or sleep. The night she was released, there was a thick frost in the air. Often, prisoners were shot moments after being let go. Walking away from the prison, she told me, she expected to feel a bullet at any minute. The American government generally does not allow innocent people to be imprisoned, raped and shot in the back. These are the kinds of experiences refugees who come here seeking safety are fleeing. We can have a pragmatic, compassionate refugee policy. We don't have to choose between letting everyone in and no one in. Conservatives may not like this, but we have to let through people who say they are afraid. Allow applicants into the United States and monitor them until their court hearings (which nine in 10 do show up for). Don't lock them up, as we are doing with some 60,000 immigrants a night, in places where they get inadequate medical care. At least seven migrant children have died in immigration custody since 2018. This simply didn't happen before. Our government is killing children through neglect. Make the court process fair; make it fitting of our country. Take our increasingly politicized immigration courts out of the Department of Justice and make them independent. Make sure that immigrant children have a government funded lawyer, since most cannot afford representation, which basically guarantees they will lose. From October 2017 to June 2018, 70 babies went to court alone. Liberals might not like this, but we also have to deport migrants who lose their cases. President Trump refers to asylum as a "loophole" in our system. That's bogus. Yet there is another loophole that must be addressed: A vast majority of those who lose their asylum cases don't leave the country. They stay and blend into the woodwork. This rightfully riles Americans who believe these unsuccessful asylum seekers are thumbing their noses at our legal process. Require Immigration and Customs Enforcement to focus on deporting people who have just lost their asylum cases, not the parent who has been here 30 years. Democrats need to get woke and realize that any immigration reform plan has to show they believe in the rule of law. I've lived in a country with no laws. Democrats don't want that. We cannot take in everyone, so we need to prioritize those fleeing harm. Stop talking about idiotic things like open borders. Or liberals will keep losing on this issue. There's something ready made for Americans who care about this travesty to lobby for: the Refugee Protection Act, introduced in Congress in November. It would require the United States to take in far more refugees, including at least 100,000 a year from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras alone. It would prevent the government from forcing people to apply for asylum in other countries they passed through on the way here, and prohibit ports of entry from pleading overcrowding as an excuse to turn people away. It would exempt migrants from criminal prosecution for crossing without documents, and allow asylum seekers to be released temporarily in the United States if they pose no risk to public safety. It would reverse a Trump administration decision that bars people fleeing domestic or gang violence from obtaining asylum. And it would require our government to appoint lawyers for migrant children. Americans need to stop whining and ride Congress to pass this bill. Every one of my fellow Jews in this country should have their hair on fire over this especially folks like Jared Kushner, whose Polish family, like mine, found safety here. I often get asked: What part of "illegal" don't you understand? Well, our laws say we have to help people who are running for their lives. Take it from a Nazario: President Trump is the one who has broken the law. 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

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