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Opening on the 71st anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the conspiracy thriller "The Gandhi Murder" begins with a claim to be "based on verified facts." Given the overall shoddiness of the production, including distractingly inapt casting and matte work that makes a Ganges River scene look fake, those facts are probably worth reverifying. Directed by Karim Traidia and Pankaj Sehgal, the movie unfolds during the weeks leading up to Gandhi's death, mingling fictional and real life figures. It posits that authorities knew in advance that the murder would happen and could have stopped it but didn't, believing that making Gandhi a martyr would bring unity to feuding Hindus and Muslims in the wake of India's independence. It pins the skulduggery on a fictional intelligence officer, Sunil Raina (Stephen Lang), who carries out his plan with the helpful and conflicted inaction of a policeman, Jimmy (Luke Pasqualino). Raina explains his theory of how Lincoln's death brought the United States together after the Civil War. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Inside the White House's secret, last ditch effort to change the narrative, and the election and the return of the media gatekeepers. By early October, even people inside the White House believed President Trump's re election campaign needed a desperate rescue mission. So three men allied with the president gathered at a house in McLean, Va., to launch one. The host was Arthur Schwartz, a New York public relations man close to President Trump's eldest son, Donald Jr. The guests were a White House lawyer, Eric Herschmann, and a former deputy White House counsel, Stefan Passantino, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Mr. Herschmann knew the subject matter they were there to discuss. He had represented Mr. Trump during the impeachment trial early this year, and he tried to deflect allegations against the president in part by pointing to Hunter Biden's work in Ukraine. More recently, he has been working on the White House payroll with a hazy portfolio, listed as "a senior adviser to the president," and remains close to Jared Kushner. The three had pinned their hopes for re electing the president on a fourth guest, a straight shooting Wall Street Journal White House reporter named Michael Bender. They delivered the goods to him there: a cache of emails detailing Hunter Biden's business activities, and, on speaker phone, a former business partner of Hunter Biden's named Tony Bobulinski. Mr. Bobulinski was willing to go on the record in The Journal with an explosive claim: that Joe Biden, the former vice president, had been aware of, and profited from, his son's activities. The Trump team left believing that The Journal would blow the thing open and their excitement was conveyed to the president. The Journal had seemed to be the perfect outlet for a story the Trump advisers believed could sink Mr. Biden's candidacy. Its small c conservatism in reporting means the work of its news pages carries credibility across the industry. And its readership leans further right than other big news outlets. Its Washington bureau chief, Paul Beckett, recently remarked at a virtual gathering of Journal reporters and editors that while he knows that the paper often delivers unwelcome news to the many Trump supporters who read it, The Journal should protect its unique position of being trusted across the political spectrum, two people familiar with the remarks said. As the Trump team waited with excited anticipation for a Journal expose, the newspaper did its due diligence: Mr. Bender and Mr. Beckett handed the story off to a well regarded China correspondent, James Areddy, and a Capitol Hill reporter who had followed the Hunter Biden story, Andrew Duehren. Mr. Areddy interviewed Mr. Bobulinski. They began drafting an article. Then things got messy. Without warning his notional allies, Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and now a lawyer for President Trump, burst onto the scene with the tabloid version of the McLean crew's carefully laid plot. Mr. Giuliani delivered a cache of documents of questionable provenance but containing some of the same emails to The New York Post, a sister publication to The Journal in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Mr. Giuliani had been working with the former Trump aide Steve Bannon, who also began leaking some of the emails to favored right wing outlets. Mr. Giuliani's complicated claim that the emails came from a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned, and his refusal to let some reporters examine the laptop, cast a pall over the story as did The Post's reporting, which alleged but could not prove that Joe Biden had been involved in his son's activities. While the Trump team was clearly jumpy, editors in The Journal's Washington bureau were wrestling with a central question: Could the documents, or Mr. Bobulinski, prove that Joe Biden was involved in his son's lobbying? Or was this yet another story of the younger Mr. Biden trading on his family's name a perfectly good theme, but not a new one or one that needed urgently to be revealed before the election. Mr. Trump and his allies expected the Journal story to appear Monday, Oct. 19, according to Mr. Bannon. That would be late in the campaign, but not too late and could shape that week's news cycle heading into the crucial final debate last Thursday. An "important piece" in The Journal would be coming soon, Mr. Trump told aides on a conference call that day. His comment was not appreciated inside The Journal. "The editors didn't like Trump's insinuation that we were being teed up to do this hit job," a Journal reporter who wasn't directly involved in the story told me. But the reporters continued to work on the draft as the Thursday debate approached, indifferent to the White House's frantic timeline. "He got spooked about whether they were going to do it or not," Mr. Bannon said. At 7:35 Wednesday evening, Mr. Bobulinski emailed an on the record, 684 word statement making his case to a range of news outlets. Breitbart News published it in full. He appeared the next day in Nashville to attend the debate as Mr. Trump's surprise guest, and less than two hours before the debate was to begin, he read a six minute statement to the press, detailing his allegations that the former vice president had involvement in his son's business dealings. When Mr. Trump stepped on stage, the president acted as though the details of the emails and the allegations were common knowledge. "You're the big man, I think. I don't know, maybe you're not," he told Mr. Biden at some point, a reference to an ambiguous sentence from the documents. As the debate ended, The Wall Street Journal published a brief item, just the stub of Mr. Areddy and Mr. Duehren's reporting. The core of it was that Mr. Bobulinski had failed to prove the central claim. "Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden," The Journal reported. Asked about The Journal's handling of the story, the editor in chief, Matt Murray, said the paper did not discuss its newsgathering. "Our rigorous and trusted journalism speaks for itself," Mr. Murray said in an emailed statement. 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. And if you'd been watching the debate, but hadn't been obsessively watching Fox News or reading Breitbart, you would have had no idea what Mr. Trump was talking about. The story the Trump team hoped would upend the campaign was fading fast. The McLean group's failed attempt to sway the election is partly just another story revealing the chaotic, threadbare quality of the Trump operation a far cry from the coordinated "disinformation" machinery feared by liberals. But it's also about a larger shift in the American media, one in which the gatekeepers appear to have returned after a long absence. It has been a disorienting couple of decades, after all. It all began when The Drudge Report, Gawker and the blogs started telling you what stodgy old newspapers and television networks wouldn't. Then social media brought floods of content pouring over the old barricades. By 2015, the old gatekeepers had entered a kind of crisis of confidence, believing they couldn't control the online news cycle any better than King Canute could control the tides. Television networks all but let Donald Trump take over as executive producer that summer and fall. In October 2016, Julian Assange and James Comey seemed to drive the news cycle more than the major news organizations. Many figures in old media and new bought into the idea that in the new world, readers would find the information they wanted to read and therefore, decisions by editors and producers, about whether to cover something and how much attention to give it, didn't mean much. But the last two weeks have proved the opposite: that the old gatekeepers, like The Journal, can still control the agenda. It turns out there is a big difference between WikiLeaks and establishment media coverage of WikiLeaks, a difference between a Trump tweet and an article about it, even between an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal suggesting Joe Biden had done bad things, and a news article that didn't reach that conclusion. Mr. Bannon had known this, too. He described his strategy as "anchor left, pivot right," and even as he ran Breitbart News, he worked to place attacks on Hillary Clinton in mainstream outlets. The validating power of those outlets was clear when The New York Times and Washington Post were given early access in the spring of 2015 to the book "Clinton Cash," an investigation of the Clinton family's blurring of business, philanthropic and political interests by the writer Peter Schweizer. Mr. Schweizer is still around this cycle. But you won't find his work in mainstream outlets. He's over on Breitbart, with a couple of Hunter Biden stories this month. And the fact that Mr. Bobulinski emerged not in the pages of the widely respected Journal but in a statement to Breitbart was essentially Mr. Bannon's nightmare, and Mr. Benkler's fondest wish. And a broad array of mainstream outlets, unpersuaded that Hunter Biden's doings tie directly to the former vice president, have largely kept the story off their front pages, and confined to skeptical explanations of what Mr. Trump and his allies are claiming about his opponent. "SO USA TODAY DIDN'T WANT TO RUN MY HUNTER BIDEN COLUMN THIS WEEK," the conservative writer Glenn Reynolds complained Oct. 20, posting the article instead to his blog. President Trump himself hit a wall when he tried to push the Hunter Biden narrative onto CBS News. "This is '60 Minutes,' and we can't put on things we can't verify," Lesley Stahl told him. Mr. Trump then did more or less the same thing as Mr. Reynolds, posting a video of his side of the interview to his own blog, Facebook. The media's control over information, of course, is not as total as it used to be. The people who own printing presses and broadcast towers can't actually stop you from reading leaked emails or unproven theories about Joe Biden's knowledge of his son's business. But what Mr. Benkler's research showed was that the elite outlets' ability to set the agenda endured in spite of social media. We should have known it, of course. Many of our readers, screaming about headlines on Twitter, did. And Mr. Trump knew it all along one way to read his endless attacks on the establishment media is as an expression of obsession, a form of love. This week, you can hear howls of betrayal from people who have for years said the legacy media was both utterly biased and totally irrelevant. "For years, we've respected and even revered the sanctified position of the free press," wrote Dana Loesch, a right wing commentator not particularly known for her reverence of legacy media, expressing frustration that the Biden story was not getting attention. "Now that free press points its digital pen at your throat when you question their preferences." On the other side of the gate There's something amusing even a bit flattering in such earnest protestations from a right wing movement rooted in efforts to discredit the independent media. And this reassertion of control over information is what you've seen many journalists call for in recent years. At its best, it can also close the political landscape to a trendy new form of dirty tricks, as in France in 2017, where the media largely ignored a last minute dump of hacked emails from President Emmanuel Macron's campaign just before a legally mandated blackout period. But I admit that I feel deep ambivalence about this revenge of the gatekeepers. I spent my career, before arriving at The Times in March, on the other side of the gate, lobbing information past it to a very online audience who I presumed had already seen the leak or the rumor, and seeing my job as helping to guide that audience through the thicket, not to close their eyes to it. "The media's new and unfamiliar job is to provide a framework for understanding the wild, unvetted, and incredibly intoxicating information that its audience will inevitably see not to ignore it," my colleague John Herrman (also now at The Times) and I wrote in 2013. In 2017, I made the decision to publish the unverified "Steele dossier," in part on the grounds that gatekeepers were looking at it and influenced by it, but keeping it from their audience. This fall, top media and tech executives were bracing to refight the last war a foreign backed hack and leak operation like WikiLeaks seeking to influence the election's outcome. It was that hyper vigilance that led Twitter to block links to The New York Post's article about Hunter Biden a frighteningly disproportionate response to a story that other news organizations were handling with care. The schemes of Mr. Herschmann, Mr. Passantino and Mr. Schwartz weren't exactly WikiLeaks. But the special nervousness that many outlets, including this one, feel about the provenance of the Hunter Biden emails is, in many ways, the legacy of the WikiLeaks experience. I'd prefer to put my faith in Mr. Murray and careful, professional journalists like him than in the social platforms' product managers and executives. And I hope Americans relieved that the gatekeepers are reasserting themselves will also pay attention to who gets that power, and how centralized it is, and root for new voices to correct and challenge them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
TO get her Lloyd Harbor colonial ready to put on the market next week, at 2.495 million, Elena D'Agostino isn't just making sure that the interiors are perfect or that the front yard is manicured and ablaze with planted and potted flowers. With the help of her interior and landscape designers, Ms. D'Agostino, an associate broker with Signature Premier Properties, is also making sure that her two acre backyard sparkles like an oasis a lush, furnished one, complete with palms. Three pairs of French doors across the back of the house open onto a brick patio that serves as an outdoor living room, with cushioned couches and chairs, and a table under a tulle draped tent for dining alfresco. "It's like an extension of your home," Ms. D'Agostino said. Flowers atop a surrounding concrete balustrade add color and glamour. During spring and summer on Long Island, as buyers think about relaxing, entertaining, barbecuing and "staycations," backyard appeal is as important as curb appeal in selling a home. Standards have been pushed higher than ever these days; a dining table with an umbrella on the patio and a few chairs on the lawn no longer make the grade. Farther down Ms. D'Agostino's yard, by the pool, an open air cabana with two ceiling fans has a vaulted mahogany beadboard ceiling and a bluestone floor. Complete with a kitchen and a raised bar counter, it provides a kind of outdoor great room. A sectional sofa in all weather wicker offers a spot to relax and watch the big television, even when it is pouring. "You can park yourself there for the day," she said. "We head out in the morning, have our coffee, breakfast and don't come back to the house until the sun is setting." For cool evenings, a free standing wood burning brick fireplace has been built just beyond the pavilion. "It's like Nantucket," Ms. D'Agostino said. "When I am there, I feel like I am on vacation." Outdoor fireplaces and fire pits, and anything that inspires "socializing," is popular, said Susan Tamberino, the owner of Samhal Interiors in Cold Spring Harbor. "It's all about entertaining," she said. "You want the guys out there watching the game; the kids are in the pool." That translates to "decorating your yard just like I would do your den or family room or kitchen." According to Mark McAteer, an owner of the Laurel Group, a landscape designer in Huntington and Water Mill, "Indoor outdoor living is a phrase we are using a lot." The pool house has morphed from a closed building to "hybridized structures with a little bit of closed space" and an otherwise open air pavilion, a "place for people to gather." "There is an evolution under way just as there is inside the house," as kitchens and entertaining spaces merge, he added. His projects for this summer have included a dozen elaborate outdoor kitchen living spaces, among them a 140,000 job in Brookville with a pizza oven and a free standing fireplace. "You want to be able to sit there, watch TV, be warmed by the fire," even in a wet bathing suit, Mr. McAteer said. Matt Baglietto, the outdoor living department manager for Martin Viette Nurseries, a garden center in East Norwich, said customers were splurging on higher end outdoor furniture "that is just as nice as their indoor furniture." And there is no longer a need to rush outside and pull off the cushions when it starts to drizzle. New weatherproof fabrics ensure cushions "are dry within a half hour of a steady rainfall." Even those with small yards are jumping on the outdoor living room trend, creating relaxing spaces to lounge in, Mr. Baglietto added. Deborah Hauser, an associate broker with Daniel Gale Sotheby's International Realty, said that "every inch of your backyard is now manicured and used." These well appointed "yards on steroids" are a magnet for spring and summertime buyers. "People come in and they go right to the backyard," Ms. Hauser said, citing a listing in Lloyd Neck with multiple levels of patios, and a large pool with a grotto, a swim up bar and a built in barbecue. "They are so excited to have this extra living space. It's the generation that is looking for instant gratification. If two houses are next to each other and one has that extra living space, it adds some sort of inherent value. People like to be outside." In top tier new construction, Ms. Hauser said, outdoor living spaces are "automatically" included, along with home theaters, gyms and playrooms. On the patio, the outdoor fireplace shares a chimney with the indoor fireplace. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
It was a rarity for "Saturday Night Live" this weekend: an opening sketch that had absolutely nothing to do with President Trump or politics. Instead, the show sent up the much talked about sit down between the "CBS This Morning" host Gayle King and the singer R. Kelly, who has been charged with 10 counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse involving four women, three of whom were underage at the time. Leslie Jones played King while Kenan Thompson portrayed Kelly, who repeatedly asked Jones to call him "Victim." She declined. Thompson voiced multiple asides in the style of Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet" series and told Jones that he had "more than millions of dollars: thousands." The sketch also went on to parody the moment when Kelly came unglued and got out of his chair during the CBS interview. But first, the singer seemed confused about whether the interview had even started. He didn't recognize the cameras directly in front of him. "You all just keep your camera out in the open like that?" Thompson asked. "You all are some freaks." Asked directly if he had ever held women against their will, Thompson said: "O.K. guys, think for a minute. Use your brains. Why would I do these things? For 30 years. I gave you all 'Trapped in the Closet.' 'Feelin' on Yo' Booty.' 'Age Ain't Nothing but a Number.' And so many other clues." The standout sketch this week took aim at uproars over Hollywood casting decisions, spurred by social media mobs. The parody came in the form of a game show hosted by Thompson called "Can I Play That?" "actors' least favorite game." The game featured three contestants, played by this week's host, Idris Elba, and by Beck Bennett and Cecily Strong, each of whom portrayed working actors asked to give their best guesses as to who was allowed to play certain roles. Thompson started by asking contestants about a recent real life example: Will Smith's casting as Richard Williams, the father of Venus and Serena Williams. Some have criticized the choice, arguing that Smith is too light skinned to play Richard Williams. Can he play that? Bennett hit the buzzer first: "Yes, of course, he'll do a great job," he said. He was wrong. Strong buzzed in with the right answer: "Absolutely not, he's not black enough." Responding to Elba, who asked if this was real, Thompson said: "It sure is. Because this game is produced by Twitter. Twitter: One mistake, and we'll kill you." The rest of the sketch followed along the same lines. Elba's character was told he was not allowed to play a blind person. "Isn't that what acting is about?" Elba asked. "You know, becoming someone you're not?" "Not anymore, no." Thompson replied. "Now it's about becoming yourself but with a different haircut." By the end of the sketch, it was decided that no one could play Caitlyn Jenner in a biopic and that Rami Malek could play anyone he wanted. In a lightning round, Bennett guessed correctly that a white male like him could play "a white guy, a white guy who gained 50 pounds, slave owner, and that's it." This week, Colin Jost and Michael Che kicked off "Weekend Update" by taking on the sentencing of Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman who was sentenced to less than four years in one of the two cases against him, well below the sentencing guidelines. O.K., here's how bad Trump's presidency is going. His campaign manager this week was sentenced to four years in prison, and for Trump, that's good news. Paul Manafort, who looks like he was born divorced, faced up to 24 years in prison but only got four years, probably in a minimum security white collar facility with a bunch of his friends. The guy stole over 50 million and he basically got sentenced to college. Paul Manafort got 47 months for tax evasion and bank fraud, which, as a black guy, feels very unfair. But for a rich black guy, it's a little encouraging. I mean if I could steal millions of dollars and the United States presidency in exchange for, like, three years of prison in my 70s? I can't promise I won't try. Jost went on to riff about a photo published Friday in the Miami Herald of Trump's Super Bowl party at his country club in West Palm Beach: It was reported that President Trump watched the Super Bowl at Mar a Lago with Li Yang, the woman who founded the chain of Asian day spas where Patriots owner Robert Kraft allegedly solicited a prostitute. First of all, what a time to be alive, huh? Second, you know that Trump spent all their time together trying to convince her to give up North Korea's nuclear weapons. Che then dug into Trump regarding his Friday visit to Alabama in the wake of several deadly tornadoes there, which have killed at least 23 people: President Trump visited tornado victims in Alabama and signed bibles for them. Now, I don't know, man. I'm not a very religious guy, but I feel like when you're getting your bible signed by a dude that raw dogs porn stars, you're probably not a very religious guy either. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
LONDON Leaked documents and interviews with whistle blowing sources will always be a part of investigative journalism. But thanks to the rise of digital technology, and the easy availability of data that has gone with it, reporters have more ways to get stories than ever before. "You can be on your couch in front of your computer and solve a mystery of a missile system downing a plane," said Aliaume Leroy, a journalist who is part of the BBC's Africa Eye team. Internet sleuths who piece together stories from available data, a practice known as open source journalism, have helped identify the white nationalists who assaulted counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Va.; unmask the Russian intelligence officers who the British government said tried to kill a fellow Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury, England; and show that the suspects in the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul included associates of Saudi Arabia's crown prince. With its emphasis on raw facts, open source journalism has an immediacy that is effective at a time when readers all along the ideological spectrum have become skeptical of the news media. "If the BBC tells you they've got a source that proves this, the BBC is the middleman and the source is behind it you can't see it," Mr. Leroy said. "But if you've got the visual evidence, there is no middleman. You connect directly to the evidence." The craft of building a story on publicly available data was part of journalism in the analog era, but it has come of age in recent years, with the ubiquity of smartphones and the expansion of social media. The blogger Eliot Higgins made waves early in the decade by covering the war in Syria from a laptop in his apartment in Leicester, England, while caring for his infant daughter. In 2014, he founded Bellingcat, an open source news outlet that has grown to include roughly a dozen staff members, with an office in The Hague. Mr. Higgins attributed his skill not to any special knowledge of international conflicts or digital data, but to the hours he had spent playing video games, which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked. "It's imagination and perseverance," he said. "You look at a problem and say, 'I know I need to do this thing. I know I have this range of tools I can apply to this.'" Thanks to social media and camera equipped smartphones, a great number of the world's seven billion people cannot help documenting newsworthy events. Open source journalists at Bellingcat and elsewhere try to track down that evidence and place it in context. "It's what humans do," said Nick Waters, a Bellingcat investigator. "They are gregarious. They are addicted to social media, because social media platforms are designed to be addictive. And they like sharing their experiences." The site made a name for itself with its investigation of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in 2014, when the war between Russia backed separatists and the Ukraine government was raging. At the time, Bellingcat was a group of volunteers who collaborated mainly over a Slack channel. Relying on photographs of the crash site and Facebook updates, they identified the launcher used in the attack, reporting that it had been moved from Russia to rebel held territory in Ukraine days before the missile was fired, killing all 298 passengers on board the jet. Bellingcat alumni, as well as formerly amateur open source investigators, have found jobs at established news organizations including The New York Times, whose Visual Investigations unit incorporates open source analysis in its reporting, and the BBC. Open source analysis also has homes at the University of California, Berkeley, Law School; Amnesty International; the University of London's Forensic Architecture; and Storyful, a news agency bought by News Corporation in 2013. Bellingcat journalists have spread the word about their techniques in seminars attended by journalists and law enforcement officials. Along with grants from groups like the Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, the seminars are a significant source of revenue for Bellingcat, a nonprofit organization. The melding of open source journalism with more traditional methods can be glimpsed in the work of BBC Africa Eye. "It was obvious in 2011 and 2012 that Eliot Higgins was by some margin ahead of established media organizations in discerning from a distance what was going on in Syria," said Daniel Adamson, a BBC producer who helped introduce open source reporting to the unit. Africa Eye's 2018 documentary short, "Anatomy of a Killing," a winner of a Peabody Award, shows how the news unit investigated an atrocity. The group started with a viral video of soldiers shooting two women, a young girl and a baby on a dusty rural path. Tipped by an anonymous source a favorite tool of the old school reporter Africa Eye's journalists used photos from the satellite imager DigitalGlobe to connect the silhouette of a distant mountain range seen in the video with a region of Cameroon. From there, they nailed down the coordinates to locate the murder site. They also came up with an estimate of when the crime happened by using Google Earth photographs and treating the soldiers as walking sundials. Further, the soldiers' weaponry indicated that they were part of Cameroon's army, and Africa Eye closed in on the shooters' identities through an overheard nickname and a soldier's Facebook profile. The seven suspects are now awaiting trial. Open source journalism has the same vulnerabilities as traditional journalism. A biased reporter or a reliance on sources with an agenda can lead to skewed stories. Some journalists and activists hostile to what they characterize as Bellingcat's pro Western narratives have criticized some of its coverage of the war in Syria. At issue is an April 7, 2018, attack on Douma, Syria. Bellingcat reported, based on an analysis of six open source videos, that it was "highly likely" that Douma civilians had died because of chemical weapons. In March, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons reported that there were "reasonable grounds" to say that chemical weapons had been used in the attack. Critics of Bellingcat have pointed to an email from an investigator with the organization, saying that it raised questions about the findings. WikiLeaks published the email on Nov. 23. In a response, Bellingcat defended its reporting, saying the final report on Douma from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons reflected the concerns of the investigator whose email was published by WikiLeaks. Open source journalism often takes the form of the authors showing their work, a transparency that tends to make their brand of journalism more believable. The documentary "Anatomy of a Killing," for instance, is as much about how the investigators reported on the roadside shootings as the incident itself. The effect is like a magician walking you through each step of a trick. For champions of open source journalism, narrative transparency is crucial to the form's credibility. It has also proved useful when its practitioners are attacked by the governments they investigate. "I've seen some very sane people tell me there weren't chemical attacks in Syria, in the same way I've seen very sane people tell me the Saudis aren't bombing civilians in Yemen they're just bombing military targets," said Rawan Shaif, who until recently worked on a Bellingcat project tracking Yemen's civil war. "All you need is that doubt in order for people not to believe facts." For her, open source journalism is an antidote to spin. "You can show people how much information you know and how you know it," Ms. Shaif said, "and they can make their own decisions." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Elizabeth Bishop lived in this house in Key West from 1938 to 1946. "You can see the history right away," said Arlo Haskell, executive director of Key West Literary Seminar. "The art of losing isn't hard to master," begins Elizabeth Bishop's poem "One Art," followed by a recounting of her losses, which include "three loved houses." Now Key West Literary Seminar, a literature nonprofit that has championed the writer's work, is paying 1.2 million for the first of those houses, which she lived in for nearly a decade. It plans to use the Key West house as its headquarters. Arlo Haskell, the nonprofit's executive director, called Bishop, who died in 1979, its "guiding spirit." The organization devoted its 1993 seminar entirely to her writing, and more recently it has incorporated her letters, poems and photographs into its programming for young people. Bishop is one of many American writers associated with Key West, Florida's southernmost island. The playwright Tennessee Williams and the novelist Ernest Hemingway, whose former home is now a museum, famously lived there. Ann Beattie, Joy Williams and Judy Blume, who runs a bookstore in the city, live there now. The opportunity to promote Bishop's work, Haskell said, in part feels like a "feminist response to all the Hemingway energy that goes on here." Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Bishop, who was born in Worcester, Mass., in 1911, was deeply influenced by her time in Key West and by the house itself, said Thomas Travisano, whose biography of the poet, "Love Unknown: The Life and Worlds of Elizabeth Bishop," was published by Viking this month. Bishop was raised by different relatives; her father died when she was an infant, and her mother was put in a mental institution when Bishop was only 5. Travisano called her early poems "fables of enclosure," based on her somewhat isolated upbringing. Those poems rarely mentioned the natural world directly, but that changed after she moved to Florida, he said. "You suddenly have the natural world, and birds are clowning around, and you've got the sun and the sea and the sky," Travisano said. "That quality carried over into all of her later work." It was there that Bishop wrote most of her first poetry collection, "North and South," which came out in 1946. Bishop liked living near the ocean, a change of scenery from her upbringing in New England and Nova Scotia, where her mother's family was from. She liked the night life and the pace of the city, Travisano said. He added that it was also significant for Bishop to finally have a house of her own after a childhood of illness and abuse. "This was the first place that she had a home," he said. Bishop later moved to Brazil and then back to Massachusetts, where she lived until her death at 68. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
From Tesla, a New Car Smell That Vegans Can Get Behind FOR the eco conscious car buyer, Tesla's luxury electric vehicles, with their neck snapping acceleration, are proof that performance doesn't have to be sacrificed at the altar of saving the environment. But for some discerning consumers, there is a nagging problem. The leather in the seats and steering wheel requires slaughtering animals, and the cloth substitute doesn't quite measure up for a vehicle that can cost more than 100,000. Now, in response, comes the Tesla that even a luxury minded vegan could love. Synthetic leather, in a shade Tesla calls Ultra White, is available as an option for the new Model X sport utility vehicle. Tesla is just the latest automaker to join in what even Euell Gibbons, the naturalist of Grape Nuts fame, would have had a hard time imagining a generation ago: a rush by the car industry long a symbol of environmental wreckage to project a more responsible image. "All the car companies want sustainability cred," said Jack Nerad, executive editorial director at Kelley Blue Book. Perhaps it was inevitable. After all, celebrities like Beyonce and Brad Pitt have given the vegan lifestyle gloss, while its growing number of adherents have pushed restaurants and food companies to create more palatable plant based products that mimic meat and dairy items. If vegans are willing to pay for a premium vehicle, why shouldn't they be able to have fake leather, too? Consider the BMW i3. For 42,400 and up, a buyer gets an interior with open pore eucalyptus wood harvested from a "certified forest." (Translation: a forest that is responsibly managed.) The interior panels are made of a renewable Asian kenaf plant, and it is all assembled in a wind powered factory in Germany. "The aim of developing the BMW i cars is not simply to build emission free cars," the company's website says, "but also to use the maximum possible amount of sustainably produced and recycled materials especially inside." At BMW, it appears, environmental guilt no longer comes standard. In the case of Tesla, whose brand represents a kind of sustainable luxe, many vegans have complained that it makes no sense for an eco friendly car to include animal products, given the significant amount of greenhouse gases the industrial agriculture sector emits. Even Nikola Tesla, the inventor for whom the car is named, they point out, was a vegetarian. Leilani Munter, a professional racecar driver and environmental advocate who is vegan, said she was disappointed when she first tried to buy the Model S and could not get the faster, sportier model without real leather seats. She contacted Elon Musk, Tesla's founder and chief executive, who helped her get the desired model with cloth seats, she said. Not too long after faced with several complaints from similar minded would be customers the company made cloth seats, only in black, an option for all models and trim packages, with a synthetic leather clad steering wheel available on special request. The new seating option for the Model X goes a step further. "Tesla revolutionized the electric car and now it's redefined luxury interiors by using these vegan materials, which are both animal and environmentally friendly," said Anne Brainard, senior corporate liaison and manager of corporate affairs at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. The group urged Tesla to stop using leather at its shareholder meeting last June and had since remained in discussions with the carmaker. Mark and Elizabeth Peters, shareholders and S Model owners who are vegan and have publicly pressed Tesla to abandon animal products, agreed, but said that it was difficult to completely avoid them. "There's ingredients in most everything that we see, wear and experience in our daily lives that somehow have utilized a part of an animal, which is unfortunate," Ms. Peters said. "But if we know, then we can make a choice." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
NEW LONDON, Conn. Keith Wille was metal detecting in the woods of Connecticut a few years ago when he found a triangle of brass about two and a half inches long with a small hole in the middle. He thought little of the find at first, and threw it in his scrap pile. Mr. Wille, 29, is a manager at a survival training company, but spends most of his spare time metal detecting. In September, Mr. Wille drove from his home here to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center with several boxes of objects the highlights of his recent collecting. The museum a vast, glassy structure that looks like an airport terminal, complete with a 185 foot tall traffic control style tower is a testament to the years when the Foxwoods Resort Casino made the Pequots the wealthiest tribe in the nation. Although those fortunes have declined, the Pequots are still financing projects by the archaeologist Kevin McBride, who works full time on what Lori A. Potter, a spokeswoman for the Mashantucket Pequot Nation, called "history that's written by the conquered and not by the conqueror." Inside the museum, Mr. Wille unpacked his boxes, displaying items discovered around the Pequots' homeland: George Washington inaugural buttons, musket and cannon balls, a gold ring, commemorative spoons, a 100 year old military insignia and the triangle of brass. Dr. McBride, the museum's director of research, and David J. Naumec, its senior historian, inspected the lot, but were most curious about the crude brass triangle. They knew it was a kettle point, an arrowhead fashioned from a piece of a brass trade kettle (which resembles a pail) an archaeological signature of the 17th century. Many archaeologists consider metal detectorists looters who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near their labs or dig sites, but Dr. McBride has a different view. "It's a real ongoing debate in the profession," he said. "To what extent do we embrace hobbyists or amateurs? You're not going to stop them so ... join them." At first Dr. McBride and Mr. Naumec tried to do some metal detecting themselves on the battlefield in 2008. "We figured it wasn't rocket science," he said. But they learned that while it's not hard to find a dime lying on the floor, it takes years of practice to recognize the sound of a musket ball eight inches underground and then determine its provenance. The scientists then reached out to local metal detecting clubs and formed an unconventional alliance with several detectorists, deputizing a few citizen scientists who already spend free time looking for what archaeologists want. With so many significant Pequot war era sites still undiscovered, the relationship has begun to produce results. The metal finding enthusiasts tend to be wary of archaeologists and authorities in general, who might restrict their access to a place or take away their finds. Yet when one detectorist, George Pecia, started working with the archaeologists, he realized they could benefit each other. The detectorists get to search areas otherwise off limits and "piece together a mystery, which is what detecting is about," Mr. Pecia said, and the scientists get an efficient way to find anything metal. He and others scanned the dig sites, and Dr. McBride paid them through a grant from the National Park Service's American Battlefield Protection Program that funds his fieldwork. "We call them Jedi masters," Dr. McBride said, pointing out that detectorists had found about 80 percent of the artifacts cataloged in the project. "Even with the most intense digging, we would have found about 5 percent or less of the objects recovered through metal detecting," he said. At the lab, Mr. Wille told the archaeologists about scraps of brass and lead he found close to the kettle point. Nearby, he also struck a layer of shells and two stone arrow heads. "Man, we got to check this spot out!" Mr. Naumec said. "Brass scrap gets us excited. We look for a weird lead the shells!" "That's a huge signature," he explained. "A shell heap or shell midden it's basically their trash." In late November, Mr. Wille led Dr. McBride to where he had found the kettle point, a high, level spot now entirely covered with brambles and small oak trees. Dr. McBride logged the situational details of the find in his iPad. The site got him thinking about the months and years after the English defeated the Pequots. The survivors were handed over to the Mohegans and Narragansetts, the Pequots' traditional enemies who fought with the English. It was "basically cultural genocide," Dr. McBride said. Men were beheaded, women sold to other English colonies. The postwar treaty specified: "You shall no longer be called Pequot." Those given to the Mohegans were resettled, away from their traditional homeland, in five villages. A 1638 letter from Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island, to John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, said that four of the five villages were by the Thames River near present day New London. The precise locations of the villages, which were occupied from 1638 to 1651, were unknown. Crouching over his iPad, the archaeologist looked up at Mr. Wille and said, "I think you've got one." "The adze, the point, brass scrap to me, it's highly suggestive of one of those villages," said Dr. McBride, listing other artifacts Mr. Wille had found in the area, especially an iron adze. A burial from the early 1600s had also been discovered nearby. "It all kind of fits," he said. "We always had a sense they're along the river, but I never, never, thought I'd be standing on one." Mr. Wille may have discovered "the first forced resettlement" of a native people, Dr. McBride said. The site predates Mashantucket, the first Native American reservation that was established in 1666, where the Pequot museum now sits. If this spot had not been found until now, and it took a metal detectorist to find it, Mr. Wille asked: Would it sway the negative opinion that other archaeologists have of metal detectorists? "No," Dr. McBride said, but added: "We've done modeling. You can dig forever and not find the stuff you found in, what, a couple of hours?" "I found the kettle point the first time I was here," Mr. Wille said. "I probably spent two hours." The two men walked downhill to where the adze, a cutting tool with an arched blade, was found. Mr. Wille fetched his detector from the car, wanting to use the remaining daylight to search the area more thoroughly. The difference between archaeology and looting, explained Brian Jones, Connecticut's state archaeologist, is the recording of context. Detectorists tend to be "focused on the things," Dr. Jones said, adding, "Artifacts are important to archaeologists, but really only in the story they tell, and you can't tell the story unless you know where things are found." Many detectorists mean well, but if an object is removed from its surroundings without a detailed survey of the area, the story is lost, Dr. Jones said, "and it's really just looting." He handed it to Dr. McBride, who brushed the dirt off and looked closely. "That's worth an X ray," he said. "It vaguely resembles the shapes we see in other sites." It looked like a tool, possibly traded to the Pequots, or repurposed by them. Dr. McBride said he would like to check it against finds from Jamestown Fort in Virginia or Plymouth, Mass., both contemporaneous sites. "An intriguing shape," he said. Dr. McBride says there is a "better than even" chance that Mr. Wille discovered the site of Tatuppequauog, one of the villages mentioned in the 1638 letter. The letter said it had 20 houses; Dr. McBride estimated that about 200 people might have lived there, a large enough village to account for the distance between where the adze and kettle point were found. If it is Tatuppequauog, Mr. Wille would be listed as the discoverer. While he displayed little emotion that afternoon during the search, afterward he was ecstatic that his pasttime might contribute to history. "You become a part of something bigger than filling your cabinet with musket balls and belt buckles," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" is less a movie about the murderous Manson family than it is a homage to Tinseltown itself, every scene a love letter to the Los Angeles of a half century ago. With the film earning 10 nominations up and down the Oscar ballot, it is fair to ask: Does Hollywood love films about itself? After all, early in the last decade, there were back to back best picture victories for films centered on making movies. "The Artist" (2011) won using precious few words to tell the story of a pair of actors struggling to make the transition from silents to talkies. A year later, "Argo" (2012) took the crown for its based on real life tale of C.I.A. agents working with silver screen producers to camouflage a dangerous mission as an innocent motion picture. And for years, awards season pundits have repeated the old saw that the academy votes for films that remind voters of themselves. Yet, an analysis of all 91 best picture winners reveals only two (as previously noted) with major plot points about filmmaking. If this analysis is expanded to all 563 best picture nominees, only nine fit the bill: "Once Upon a Time," "The Artist" and "Argo," along with the 1937 version of "A Star Is Born," "Sunset Boulevard" (1950), "All That Jazz" (1979), "The Aviator" (2004), "Hugo" (2011) and "La La Land" (2016). (The 2018 rendition of "A Star Is Born" swapped out film stars for pop stars and the other versions weren't nominated for best picture.) Granted, classifying movies this way is an inherently subjective exercise. The data set could be expanded to include stories that use filmmaking as a framing device, like "Titanic" (1997), which opened with the narration of documentary footage. In examples like "Birdman" (2014), as well as this year's nominee "Marriage Story," a significant character was once in Hollywood but is not shown there onscreen. And "The Godfather" (1972) famously featured a plot thread about a producer facing a death threat (conveyed via a horse's head in his bed), but that is surely not the dominant plot of the film. I drew the line at homemade movies, so the video of the floating plastic bag in "American Beauty" (1999) did not make the cut. Even with an expanded definition that includes these borderline cases, there are still only 23 best picture nominees that dealt with film production, or 4.1 percent of all nominees in history. That larger sample had a similar winning rate: 24 percent of those pre 2020 nominees were winners: "The Artist," "Argo," "Titanic," "Birdman" and "The Godfather." But while this data shows Oscar voters aren't obsessed with recognizing their own endeavors, there is some evidence to suggest that the Academy Awards may be trending in that direction. Through 2003, only 2.3 percent of films met the broader criteria; since 2004, 10.2 percent of nominees do. Starting in 2003, there was a three year stretch of nominees that at least mention movies in the plot description. Bill Murray plays a movie star in "Lost in Translation" (2003). Leonardo DiCaprio brings the producer Howard Hughes to life in "The Aviator" (2004). In "Capote" (2005), the title character (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) attends the premiere of "To Kill a Mockingbird," the film version of the novel by his friend Harper Lee (Catherine Keener). Before this awards season, featuring "Once Upon a Time" and "Marriage Story," only one other race ever involved multiple Hollywood based contenders: 2012, when "The Artist" won best picture, "Hugo" was nominated for its tribute to the filmmaking pioneer Georges Melies, and "Midnight in Paris" received a nod for the story of a frustrated screenwriter seeking refuge in the past. Plenty of films more squarely about cinema than "Marriage Story" or "Midnight in Paris" were not even nominated for best picture. "Sullivan's Travels" (1941), "The Bad and the Beautiful" (1952), "The Stunt Man" (1980), "Barton Fink" (1991), "Adaptation" (2002), and many other well regarded films did not make the best picture cut. In more recent years, movies like "Saving Mr. Banks" (2013) and "The Disaster Artist" (2017) were left off the academy list despite the category's size expansion. Most spectacularly of all, "Singin' in the Rain" (1952) was never up for best picture and yet is now considered one of the greatest films of all time, clocking in at No. 5 on the American Film Institute's Top 100 list. What did win best picture instead of "Singin' in the Rain"? "The Greatest Show on Earth," which focused on a different type of entertainment: circus, not cinema. Even this year's list of films provides evidence to suggest that the academy does not automatically nominate plots about its own work. While "Once Upon a Time" did make the cut, others dealing with filmmaking like "Dolemite Is My Name" and "Pain and Glory" did not. Many factors go into the academy's decision on nominating a film for best picture. So while the data does not prove a lack of interest in awarding movies about Hollywood, it certainly is not convincing that such an interest does exist. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
In the third season of Netflix's "The Crown," Queen Elizabeth II (Olivia Colman) meets with the British prime minister, Harold Wilson (Jason Watkins), after a mining disaster in Aberfan, Wales, that killed more than a hundred schoolchildren. Wilson urges her to visit the grieving town. She insists that her presence would create a paralyzing distraction and impede rescue efforts. Besides, she asks, "What precisely would you have me do?" "Put on a show?" It is as if he had asked her to don sequins and ride a unicycle, juggling, down a tightrope. "The Crown doesn't do that." Ah, but the Crown does now, in 1966, or at least it is expected to. And when it refuses, people notice. This should not surprise Elizabeth: "Smoke and Mirrors," a standout episode of Season 1, was about the epochal decision to put her coronation on television, which both magnified the event and made it smaller. And "The Crown" the scintillating Netflix drama, improving with age is not at all shy about putting on a show, doling out all the pageantry and suds necessary. Season 3, arriving Sunday, delivers 10 entertaining episodes of personal history that are equal parts political, poignant and juicy. But the creator and writer Peter Morgan has also set an unusual challenge for a TV series: How do you make compelling drama out of a stolid, purposely restrained protagonist? Is there fascination, power virtue, even in dullness? This is the koan that fuels this season: It is the sound of one hand stoically waving. This season marks a changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, introducing a new cast to bring the royals into midlife. Elizabeth's husband, Prince Philip (Tobias Menzies, taking over from Matt Smith), is shifting from sullen resentment to grumpy middle age. Succeeding Vanessa Kirby, Helena Bonham Carter lustily pops the cork on the tragic, flamboyant Princess Margaret. And then there's Her Majesty. For the first two seasons of "The Crown," Claire Foy played the queen as a reticent new ruler, learning that her job leaves little room for individual humanity. Foy showed us a vibrant young woman being transformed, and flattened, into a national symbol. Colman's Elizabeth opens the season witnessing the result: the unveiling of a new portrait of the monarch as an "old bat." (Her words.) "The Crown" lets us see Elizabeth age as she does one new face at a time, within the four corners of a frame. Colman, who just won an Oscar as the rather more expressive Queen Anne in "The Favourite," is more restrained than Foy, but no less spectacular. She's like a haiku poet, wringing meaning from the least gesture, able to summon heartbreak or dry humor from the same clipped "Thenkyou." Her Elizabeth has conquered her emotions, at great cost and in the name of duty and now here come the expressive '60s and '70s, in which she and her family are suddenly seen as the faces of stuffy hauteur. She took a job she didn't want, killed a part of herself to do it, and now finds that self injury held against her. Morgan is empathetic, but not slavishly so. Colman's queen can be cold, as when her heir, Prince Charles (Josh O'Connor), more in tune with the emotive times, insists that he be allowed to have a public "voice." Her answer falls like the executioner's ax: "No one wants to hear it." Elected leaders, if they're lucky, leave office before they fall out of step with the times. But though the world changes, one remains queen for decades. Only a series on the scale of "The Crown" can show how that feels. "The Crown" does this pointillistically, structuring each episode around an incident in world or Windsor history. (This season spans the longest stretch of time yet, 1964 to 1977.) Though it is arguably the most serial story on TV a single life, evolving over decades it has a strong sense of episodic structure, avoiding the blobby, binge y sprawl of many of Netflix dramas. An early episode dispatches Margaret Elizabeth's antithesister, a jet setter who craves the spotlight on a diplomatic mission to charm the boorish new American president, Lyndon B. Johnson (Clancy Brown, whose impression does not spare the hot sauce). The 1969 moon landing precipitates a midlife crisis for Philip. Philip's reactionary uncle, Lord Mountbatten (Charles Dance), emerges as a schemer to rival Dance's Tywin Lannister from "Game of Thrones." Elizabeth tends to recede in these stories, especially in the back half of the season, in which Charles's growing alienation from his family plays as a long game setup for the Chuck and Di story we're promised in Season 4. (I only wish this season did more with his sister, Erin Doherty's lockjawed, sharp tongued Princess Anne, who's a tonic and a delight.) But each episode returns to the queen thematically, many of them ending with a conversation about the virtue of a dull, inactive monarchy. "Doing nothing," she says with conviction, "is what we do." These scenes can get heavy handed; "The Crown" has a weakness for having its characters spell out its themes, like a proclamation on a gilded scroll. The very broadness and sweep that keep "The Crown" lively can also hold it back. It's a portmanteau of many different kinds of drama: domestic, romantic, military, political, even espionage. It does all of them well, but none surprisingly. Its control precludes the wildness at the heart of many of the greatest series. This show can be, like a distant monarch, easier to revere than to feel passion for. But the series's time lapse version of history a sort of royal "7 Up" remains a refreshing way of approaching a much told story. In a way, the real subject of "The Crown" not so much the monarchy as it is time, as comes clear when Elizabeth matter of factly appraises the woman in the royal portrait, the way you or I might accidentally catch ourselves in the mirror. "Age is rarely kind to anyone," she says. "Nothing one can do about it. One just has to get on with it." One has to respect that attitude. One might even call that respect a kind of love. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Finn Wittrock, who plays Judy Garland's fifth husband, Mickey Deans, in "Judy," relived his drama student days on the Upper West Side. Finn Wittrock stood outside Francesco's, a hole in the wall pizza joint on the corner of Columbus Avenue and West 69th Street, and peered forlornly through the window. A sign addressed to "our most valuable customers" announced that improvements were on the way, but not fast enough for this particular rendezvous. Mr. Wittrock, 34, looked sheepish. As a college student, Francesco's had been his old reliable. "After hitting the dive bar in the middle of the night, we'd come here to sober up," he said, before adding pointedly, "it was always open." He had planned to reacquaint himself with his metaphorical madeleine, the cheese and olive pie, but no dice or slice, even. A passer by intervened to recommend a rival spot around the corner. "The plain is tasty," she said. "And they play Mexican music." So Acts 2 and 3 were set, but what to do for a curtain raiser? Mr. Wittrock deliberated. "That place, Empire Szechuan, was like the Chinese place," he said, and pointed across the road at a maroon awning. His expression did not exude confidence. Pizza less, Mr. Wittrock walked south to take a look at Juilliard. He spoke fondly of his "rat's nest" apartment, where rent included cockroaches. "Three bedrooms in what was the size of a studio apartment," he said, cheerfully. "But I was 21, first time in New York, and I was with my two best friends from school." At Columbus and West 66th Street, Mr. Wittrock pointed to the broad glass expanse of his alma mater. "There it is," he said. "It was this huge monolith back then. It wasn't all glass, it wasn't this fancy." It's not only Juilliard that has gotten fancy since. Mr. Wittrock has, too, with a compact resume of diverse stage and screen roles, most notably as one of Ryan Murphy's eclectic ensemble, playing Fun House psychos and scrummy vampires in the campy fright fest "American Horror Show." Mr. Wittrock's latest role is as Judy Garland's fifth husband, Mickey Deans, in "Judy," the biopic that has been mentioned as an Oscar contender. Turning east toward Central Park, Mr. Wittrock gestured to another shiny building that towered above the intersection. "That was an old deli forever," he said. "I used to get black and white cookies there." Unlike the pizza, the loss of the cookies was less calamitous. "They're not very good, but I thought it was a New York thing," he said. "I also ate a lot of hot dogs, which I've never done since." After graduating he became more deliberate about his diet. To prepare for Angelina Jolie's 2014 movie, "Unbroken," Mr. Wittrock lost 35 pounds by eating whitefish and vegetables in two hour increments and then fasting for 12 hours. "They say it's how cave men would eat," he said. "They would gorge and then not eat for a while." Was there a special diet to play Mickey Deans? Mr. Wittrock, who moved from his home in Los Angeles to London for two months to make the film, shook his head. "Just fish and chips," he said. Entering Central Park, Mr. Wittrock took a path that skirted Strawberry Fields south before looping east across the top of Sheep Meadow. The air was gluey with humidity. Mr. Wittrock, who was dressed in bluejeans and a white henley, pulled a baseball cap from his back pocket and slipped it on. As he walked, memories tumbled out. In 2012, after an audition to play Happy Loman in Mike Nichols's Broadway revival of "Death of a Salesman," he'd found his way to the park "to breathe like a normal person for a second." He landed the role. "I always associate this place with that," he said. Nearing the Mall, Mr. Wittrock looked down the tree lined esplanade to place himself. "There's the Shakespeare statue down there," he said, indicating a spot far south. "I used to sit a lot under this flagpole and write poetry." What happened to the poetry? "It's saved in a folder on my desktop." In his spare time, he now writes film scripts, including "The Submarine Kid," a small 2015 movie that has gained a second life on Amazon. At the Bethesda fountain, he contemplated the skinny skyscrapers that needle the sky. A boat slid by on the lake. "I spent one time getting really high on a boat," Mr. Wittrock said, before changing the conversation. "I have to tell you that I just had a baby," he said. The baby is a 6 month old boy called Jude (he met his wife, Sarah, at Juilliard; they have been married since 2014). "For a baby, every new thing is so mind blowing that it's exhausting," Mr. Wittrock said. "And every day it changes. What was really funny yesterday, he's over it today." What was funny yesterday? "I did an Irish accent he thought was hysterical, and the next time I tried it, he was, like, 'I'm bored, Dad.'" Entering the thicket of the Ramble, the sounds of the city grow distant, almost imperceptible. Mr. Wittrock watched a cardinal hop around in the undergrowth and looked for turtles in the lake, which was turgid and neon green. "I feel they keep it this color so you won't be tempted to swim," he said. After emerging on West 72nd Street, Mr. Wittrock made his way past the gracious apartment blocks the Dakota, the Oliver Cromwell, the Franconia and through the doors of Malachy's. A Beach Boys song was playing. Tennis streamed on the TV screens crowding the walls. After beers were ordered, Mr. Wittrock recalled summers running around the woods in the Berkshires, using sticks for sword fights. "I guess there is some significance to why I come to Central Park all the time," he said. Glancing around, he assessed the state of his old stomping ground. "It actually feels cleaner," he said. "I think they've definitely mopped the floors recently." He looked satisfied. "This is my loop, now complete," he said, and took a long sip of his beer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
SYDNEY, Australia Just after dawn one recent morning, Lou Rosicky was walking, slightly stooped, through a covered catwalk tucked just below the tip of one of the famous, towering concrete sails of the Sydney Opera House. Around him was an almost impenetrable mechanical thicket pipes, wires, machinery and conduit, all servicing amplifiers, control boards, lights, sprinkler systems, winches and cooling ducts. The feel? The gullet of a cyborg, circa 1964. "The weight of history is everywhere in this building," Mr. Rosicky said. He is the opera house complex's point man in a vast renovation project aimed at bringing all those innards up to date. The endeavor, budgeted at close to 300 million Australian dollars (nearly 200 million U.S.), culminated with the closure of the complex's concert hall for the first time in its history. The hall has in the past been open 363 days a year, a point of pride, but it was shuttered in February for the start of a two year upgrade. As the building approaches its 50th birthday, in 2023, the interventions are necessary. While its architect, Jorn Utzon, is now widely recognized as a visionary and his creation is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the hall's construction was troubled, and certain problems have never been solved. Years of testing have produced a new plan for the concert hall's acoustics as well as for more basic matters. "The air conditioning system is hopeless," said Rory Jeffes, the leader of Opera Australia, who for many years was managing director of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, which plays in the opera house. "It blows out of cannon ports up above, and then falls onto the stage, and very often turns the pages of the musicians as they play." The complex has been in constant use since it opened. It hosts nearly 2,000 events a year, attended by about 1.4 million people, in five theaters and two outdoor spaces. A total of nearly 11 million visitors per year tramp around the public spaces, inside and out. Louise Herron, the opera house's chief executive, arrived eight years ago for what she saw as an opportunity to finally accomplish the rehabilitation the institution had been eyeing for decades. "I said, 'I would like to renew the opera house for future generations,'" she recalled. Ms. Herron put together the hundreds of millions in funding, mostly from government sources. She said she quickly saw that while the acoustics and electrical wiring needed attention, so did the customers. "Early on I went to see Reynold Levy," then the president of Lincoln Center, she recalled in a recent interview in her office. "I said, 'What do you worry about?' He said, 'I worry about train timetables, and I worry about the car park.' That gave me the license to worry about those things." When it came to the customer experience, however, the opera house had to contend with the Scylla and Charybdis of modern renovation: accessibility and historical heritage. "Everything, absolutely everything, is heritage," Mr. Rosicky said, meaning that alterations were limited or prohibited because the building is a historical landmark. "All the bathrooms, they are all heritage; the toilets, the taps, the clothes hangers, everything." In the 1960s, accessibility issues were an afterthought, and to this day getting to a bathroom at the Sydney Opera House is not easy. At a recent Sydney Symphony performance, a visitor set out from a box seat above the orchestra to find a restroom, and found himself traversing some 110 steps, up and down each way. As a consequence, some visitors have never seen the opera house's spectacular common area, the elevated North Foyer, where before show talks are given and concertgoers can sip wine during intermission while gazing out at Sydney's sparkling bridge and harbor. Installing elevators would not be as easy as it sounds. Utzon's sails are shells; inside, exquisitely nested, are smaller shells containing the performance halls, which themselves are ringed by the walkways and stairs the audiences use. The structures don't have sides or a back where new elements like elevators could be easily introduced. The renovation architects, ARM Architecture, settled on sluicing in small footprint glass elevators on outside corners of each of the complex's halls. That created a new problem: how to achieve pedestrian access to those corners. The concert hall is embraced by two giant parentheses of stairs, which rise to the North Foyer and the elevated back of the hall. With no other place to go, the architects are puncturing the grandest of these stairs to construct a tunnel that will take visitors with mobility issues to the new elevators. "It's really important that the opera house belongs to everyone," Ms. Herron said. The creation of the Sydney Opera House was an arduous process, marked by setbacks and compromise. Its genesis was in 1947, when the Sydney Symphony hired a British conductor, Eugene Goossens, to help give the orchestra and the city cultural prestige. The vibrant Goossens adopted Sydney as his own, discovering the young soprano Joan Sutherland, who went on to become an opera superstar. He found support for a new opera house from the premier, or governor, of the state of New South Wales, Joe Cahill, a stout union man who bought into the idea that Sydney needed big ideas for a big future. The year was 1956; a worldwide call for designs was put out. The state began to prepare the site, and established a lottery to pay for it. The unexpected winner of the design competition was the brilliant and iconoclastic Utzon. The wild surmise of his design sketches beguiled virtually all who saw them. Privately, Utzon hoped he could figure out how to build it. He and Cahill assured Australians that construction would take four years. But Utzon and hundreds of engineers toiled, fought and sometimes despaired as they tried to figure out how to create giant arcing slices of concrete that could stand up without the use of columns. A 1960s era documentary on the delays called the project an "Antipodean Tower of Babel." Utzon's lack of progress eventually brought him to a confrontation with the state government, and he was forced off the project, the cost of which eventually spiraled to more than 10 times the original estimate. After resigning, Utzon left the country and never returned to see the completed building. The work was finished by the young Australian architect Peter Hall, who solved many lingering issues and designed the luscious interiors. Queen Elizabeth II attended the opening ceremony on Oct. 20, 1973 16 years after Utzon's design was revealed. Some sniffed at the new building. "This circus tent is not architecture," said Frank Lloyd Wright. But it swiftly became widely beloved, contributing far more than it cost to Australia's tourism industry. "We are the only country in the world recognized globally by an arts center," said Mr. Jeffes, the Opera Australia executive. One problem that was never adequately addressed was how to make the concert hall work for a symphonic performance. "The main criticism is the variability of it all," Andrew Hayne, a principal of ARM, the architecture firm, said during a recent walk through. He pointed to the great length of the hall: "The energy finds it very hard to get all the way to the back." He then looked up to Hall's kaleidoscopic ceiling: "And the crown, while spectacular, is very tall above the stage." Players have long complained that their music wafts upward and that they can't hear themselves. Years ago, the hall installed clear plastic doughnuts above the stage to push the sound outward, but the highly reflective stylings of the interior and the large size of the hall still make for a sonic mess. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Travel warnings about the Zika virus, especially for pregnant women, are very much in the news now, but the germ was discovered more than a half century ago, and you may have already visited places where it flourishes. As of December 2015, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta reported evidence of transmission of the virus in at least 45 countries in Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Pacific islands. There were cases reported in Mexico and El Salvador in November 2015, and one in Puerto Rico in December. Travelers should be concerned, but there is no need for panic. "There are two things that make people pay attention," said one expert, Dr. Kamran Khan, an infectious disease doctor and scientist at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto. "It showed up where it has never been before, and it is rapidly spreading. That's because Aedes mosquitoes are widespread throughout most of Latin America and parts of the U.S." Mosquitoes of the Aedes species (the name derives from a Greek word for "unpleasant") seem to be the main vector. These mosquitoes also spread dengue and chikungunya, two other, more severe, viral infections. The virus was isolated in 1947 in the Zika Forest in Uganda. Researchers were studying the transmission of yellow fever, when they found the new virus in a rhesus monkey. Its first appearance in humans was in 1952 in Uganda and Tanzania, and the first large outbreak of disease was in 2007 on Yap Island in Micronesia. There was an even larger outbreak in French Polynesia in October 2013, when about 10,000 cases were reported. In 2014, there were cases in New Caledonia and the Cook Islands in the South Pacific. For most people, the Zika infection is not particularly serious. According to the C.D.C., only about 20 percent of infected people have any symptoms at all, and the few who become sick usually have a mild fever, sometimes diarrhea or a rash, headache or muscle pain. The illness goes away within a week, and rarely requires hospitalization. Rest, pain medication and hydration are the only treatments, and there is no cure or vaccine. There has never been a death attributed to the Zika virus, according to the C.D.C. Still, there are significant dangers for pregnant women because the virus has been linked to congenital microcephaly, a serious and often fatal birth defect in which the fetal brain fails to develop properly. The large outbreak in Brazil, which began in May 2015, is particularly worrisome because the number of cases of congenital microcephaly in newborns and stillborns has abruptly increased. It is possible that there is some other reason for this, but there is general agreement that until another association is found, the Zika virus should be assumed to be the cause. No one knows how many people in Brazil are infected, but C.D.C. estimates range from 500,000 to 1.5 million. There have been about 3,500 cases of congenital microcephaly, according to Brazilian health authorities. On Jan. 15, the Hawaii State Health Department reported that a microcephalic baby infected with the virus had been born in Oahu, the first such case in the United States. The mother had lived in Brazil during part of her pregnancy. Knowledge is evolving, but the C.D.C . has issued Alert Level 2 Warnings ("Increased risk in defined settings or associated with specific risk factors") for Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Martinique, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Suriname, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Puerto Rico. The agency did not mention Africa or Asia in connection with the Zika virus, but warnings about the dangers of other mosquito borne illnesses are already in effect in those regions. It is difficult to determine the exact places where Zika transmission is happening, and these recommendations will be updated as more information becomes available. For the moment, travelers to any area where the virus has been reported should cover exposed skin with long sleeved shirts and long pants, use insect repellent like DEET and use permethrin treated clothing and equipment. "There are Aedes in parts of southern Europe Portugal, France, Spain, Italy," Dr. Khan said, "so when we look ahead to the summer, the epidemic may look very different and it's possible that people could introduce it into parts of Europe. But that's looking a couple of steps ahead." Pregnant women, in no matter which trimester, should talk to their doctors if they must travel to countries where Zika infections have been found, and if the trip is not essential, they should consider postponing it. Women who are trying to become pregnant are also at risk, and should discuss their travel plans and the risks of the Zika infection with their health care providers. All travelers should strictly follow the routines that will prevent mosquito bites. Aedes mosquitoes flourish seasonally in large areas in the United States, and year round in most of Florida and parts of Texas and California, so travelers who are infected abroad and return to these areas could spread the illness. Sexual transmission of the virus may also be possible. In 2011, researchers found that a scientist who had contracted the Zika virus while working in Senegal transmitted it to his wife after his return home to Colorado, almost certainly through sexual intercourse. And in 2015 the virus was found in the sperm of a 44 year old man in Tahiti. There is also at least a theoretical risk of transmission through blood transfusions. Most infected people will not know they are infected, but Dr. Khan said that those who return with symptoms of Zika within two weeks of leaving a place where the virus is active should take precautions. They should let their health care provider know so that doctors and the public health system can respond properly, and, if they are returning to areas where Aedes mosquitoes are present, they should assiduously avoid being bitten by covering their skin and using insect repellent. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, which has a lively show called "Found: Queer Archaeology; Queer Abstraction" on through the fall, is itself an archaeological project of many layers. The museum reopened last spring after renovations, but has existed in New York, in one form or another, for nearly 50 years. It originated in a SoHo loft shared by two men, Charles W. Leslie and Fritz Lohman (1922 2010), life partners and collectors of homoerotic painting, drawing and photography. In the summer of 1969, they opened their home as a weekend art salon and were astonished when hundreds of people showed up. It turned out that the type of art they loved, "unambiguously gay" and shunned by conventional museums, had a zealous following. Soon afterward, the couple opened a commercial gallery in SoHo. But in the 1980s, their focus turned from promotion to preservation. AIDS was devastating the gay art community. Entire careers were disappearing as artists lost homes or died and had work trashed. In response, in 1987, the two men formed the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation, a nonprofit collecting and exhibiting institution, which eventually acquired a new gallery at 26 Wooster Street in SoHo. The foundation was awarded official museum status in 2011, becoming the first accredited gay art museum anywhere. After closing for renovations, it reopened its Wooster Street gallery at double the size in March. Over the decades, the institution had pretty closely adhered to its founding criterion for what made art gay: basically, the presence of the nude, usually white, male body. But gay culture itself changed. Women, often shunted aside in the early movement, had become a powerful aesthetic and political force. Trans people, once silent, were speaking out. Ethnic and racial diversity increased. Queerness, a concept of difference that floated free from binary notions of sexuality and gender, had evolved. And this more complicated sense of identity, incorporating lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer consciousness, had gone global. In the new century, under the leadership of Hunter O'Hanian, the museum, which absorbed the foundation, acknowledged these changes. And now, directed by Gonzalo Casals, it fully incorporates them, as is evident in "Found: Queer Archaeology; Queer Abstraction." The male figure is still here, and sometimes nude. But in large scale watercolors by Geoffrey Chadsey it's a racial and sexual hybrid. In collages by Troy Michie it's physically fractured, its erotic charge interrupted, confused, even canceled out. And in a photomural by the Los Angeles artist Ken Gonzalez Day, the body is conspicuous through its absence. The mural is based on one of many photographs the artist has tracked down of lynchings of Latinos, Native Americans and Chinese immigrant men in California in the early 20th century. In the nocturnal picture used here, men milling around a tree look upward, but the object of their attention is missing. The artist has erased the form of the hanged victim, leaving dark, empty space. Angela Dufresne recalibrates the gender balances of Gustave Courbet's famous 1855 depiction of his Paris studio in a picture of comparably heroic scale. In a deft, shrewd act of painterly transvestism or transsexualism Karen Heagle merges her own portrait with that of the renegade Viennese artist Egon Schiele (1890 1918). And Eve Fowler inscribes the revolutionary, logic skewering language of the lesbian modernist Gertrude Stein on a large wood panel, a format that brings protest posters to mind. In mentioning these artists, I'm talking about some of the most stimulating American figures around, who are joined on this show by others from Argentina, Brazil, Hong Kong, Israel and Lebanon. Taken as a whole, their work would do any museum proud, as would a suite of eight magical little paintings by Sam Gordon. Several feature what look like astrological signs; all incorporate scraps harvested from Mr. Gordon's New York studio floor. Almost everything in "Found," which has been organized by the artist Avram Finkelstein, a founding member of the Silence Death collective, is on loan for the occasion. But a second exhibition, "Expanded Visions: Fifty Years of Collecting," a reduced version of a show that opened in the museum in March, is gleaned entirely from the permanent holdings. Assembled by Rob Rosen, the museum's director of exhibitions, and Branden Wallace, its registrar, it includes many recent acquisitions and gives a good then and now sense of the institution's thinking. Eve Fowler inscribes the revolutionary language of Gertrude Stein on a large wood panel in this 2012 work. At any point over the past several decades, for example, you might have found, hanging on Leslie Lohman walls, a circa 1900 photograph of Sicilian youths by Wilhelm von Gloeden, or George Bellows's 1923 print of a men's bathhouse, or one of John Burton Harter's academic 1980s nudes. You would have been far less likely to find the equivalent of Zanele Muholi's portraits of the black South African lesbians, or Chitra Ganesh's feminist mash ups of South Asian comic strips, or anything at all resembling the doll like hand stitched sculptures of the transgender artist Greer Lankton all of which have recently arrived in the collection and look completely at home in the show. The museum has a history it can be proud of, a radical one. From the start, it championed an outcast art and stood boldly, unfashionably, by it. Now it is complicating its earlier aesthetic direction without compromising its social mission, which is a tough act to pull off. Whether the museum is, or will continue to be, as advertised, the only art institution of its kind doesn't matter. It's a museum that both stretches "gay" and resists "normal," and for that it's invaluable. "Make being different your strength" could be its motto. Wasn't that the lesson the 1960s were teaching when Mr. Leslie and Mr. Lohman first opened their home and their art to the public that summer the summer of Stonewall, as it happened all those years ago? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
SEATTLE Last fall, the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery began to display, among its recent acquisitions, a photograph of the composer George Walker. It shows him close up, his right index finger and thumb bearing down on a pencil with the precision of a surgeon, at work on the manuscript score of his Sinfonia No. 5. The image of Dr. Walker, who died last summer at the age of 96, was captured by the photographer and filmmaker Frank Schramm, a close friend. They had known each other since Mr. Schramm heard a broadcast of Dr. Walker's Sinfonia No. 3 in 2004 and, he said, "immediately gravitated to his work." Living within a couple of miles of Dr. Walker in New Jersey, Mr. Schramm would pay regular visits to his house in Montclair helping out with errands and at the same time using his camera to document his life and work, right up to the end. "George was 81 when I met him, so there was already a sense of time running out," Mr. Schramm said. "But he was so focused. We would listen to and discuss music. It became like an unsolicited master class for me." The piece, which was completed in 2016, in part conveys Mr. Walker's response to the 2015 shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. "He looked back and saw the other work he had done and thought this could be the last one," said Gregory Walker, the older of Dr. Walker's two sons. "And he felt an urgency about getting it out there." "Visions" crowns a long career in which Dr. Walker produced more than 90 compositions, including intimate pieces for solo piano (his primary instrument), and large scale orchestral and choral works. It was the last score he completed; at the time of his death, he had embarked on a piece commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Amid impassioned debates about the canon and its exclusion of historically marginalized voices, his remarkably individual and intricately crafted musical voice is long overdue for discovery. "George was very proficient," Mr. Schramm said. "His house became his think tank, with his work at the center. He knew what he had." But it was frustrating, he added, for Dr. Walker to repeatedly face difficulty in getting orchestras to program his work. A longtime passionate advocate has been Peter Kermani, a former chairman of what is now the League of American Orchestras and the founder of Albany Records. In the mid 1980s, when he first encountered Dr. Walker's music, he was attracted to "the lack of sweetness and treacle that a lot of American works had." "Right from the beginning, that was a distinguishing feature of George's music," Mr. Kermani added. "I think he was breaking new ground. I felt he should be given every opportunity on the planet to get his music performed and heard." During the past two decades, Mr. Kermani has released a multivolume series of Dr. Walker's orchestral works on the Albany label, along with albums documenting the composer's earlier career as a concert pianist. He introduced Dr. Walker to the English born conductor and pianist Ian Hobson, a specialist in mid 20th century American orchestral music who had made numerous recordings with the Sinfonia Varsovia of Poland. Mr. Hobson described Dr. Walker as "a composer of great integrity: uncompromising in the best sense of the word, who doesn't pander to anything." While still trying to place "Visions" with an orchestra, Dr. Walker arranged to have it recorded by Mr. Hobson and the Varsovia Symphony the final installment of Mr. Hobson's cycle of his Sinfonias, each of which is a compact, single movement composition. ("Visions," with a duration of about 18 minutes, is the longest of them.) "Visions" Mr. Hobson said, is "complex and built of small cells of harmonic patterns and melodic groupings," adding that "sometimes the detail is knotty and gnarly and deliberately so and sometimes unexpected beauties emerge from his extremely sensitive ear for color." Dr. Walker's son Gregory a teacher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a former concertmaster of the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra said that the piece, which includes spoken text, is striking for the new ground it breaks in orchestral writing. George Walker was born in 1922, into an arts loving family in Washington. His father, an immigrant from Jamaica, ran a medical practice from their home and organized his own research groups with colleagues. (At the time, the American Medical Association didn't grant membership to black doctors.) His mother, a singer, encouraged his precocious talent for music with piano lessons and did the same for his younger sister, Frances Walker Slocum, who became the first black woman granted tenure at Oberlin College. Dr. Walker started attending Oberlin at 14, focusing on piano and organ before beginning graduate studies at the Curtis Institute of Music. He envisioned a career as a concert pianist and made his debut in 1945 at Town Hall in New York, as the first black instrumental soloist there. A few weeks later, he achieved the same milestone with the Philadelphia Orchestra as the soloist in Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto. Despite critical acclaim, Dr. Walker was able to secure only a fraction of the number of engagements that came readily to his white peers. He turned instead to an academic career, while at the same time channeling his creative drive into composition. To improve his keyboard skills at Curtis, he undertook composition studies. (The title of his memoir, "Reminiscences of an American Composer and Pianist," reflects how fundamental both identities remained for him.) Dr. Walker studied with the storied mentor Rosario Scalero, who also taught Samuel Barber, and spent a period in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. She encouraged him, and with a new focus on composition, he cultivated a distinctively laconic style purged of excess and meticulously designed from meaningful gestures. In 1996, Dr. Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for "Lilacs," a commission from the Boston Symphony Orchestra that set portions of Walt Whitman's Lincoln elegy "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." But the recognition that came with that and other honors did not erase his experience of struggling to get his music heard by the public. Responding to The New York Times about the Pulitzer news, Dr. Walker revealed the boldly self reliant attitude he had used to cope with the constant institutional roadblock of racism: "I strongly felt if I continued to press for what I hoped to achieve, I would achieve it." Being the first black composer to win the music Pulitzer became something of a double edged sword. Invariably, like a Homeric epithet, it has become the phrase regularly used to introduce him as a composer. "He has been advertised as this African American statesman who is supposed to be representing all the potential that has been neglected in the black community," Gregory Walker said, "yet doesn't follow the trends or fit cleanly into any category of contemporary music." George Walker's guiding philosophy, his son added, was that everyone is an individual, and his music was "proof of how individual things can be." "He saw himself as an extension of great artists of the past, using their compositional techniques, idioms, instruments and aesthetics and his love of Beethoven and Romantic era composers," Gregory Walker said. "He transformed all of that into something that was himself." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The ancestors of modern humans interbred with Neanderthals and another extinct line of humans known as the Denisovans at least four times in the course of prehistory, according to an analysis of global genomes published Thursday in the journal Science. The interbreeding may have given modern humans genes that bolstered immunity to pathogens, the authors concluded. "This is yet another genetic nail in the coffin of our oversimplistic models of human evolution," said Carles Lalueza Fox, a research scientist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain, who was not involved in the study. The new study expands on a series of findings in recent years showing that the ancestors of modern humans once shared the planet with a surprising number of near relatives lineages like the Neanderthals and Denisovans that became extinct tens of thousands of years ago. Before disappearing, however, they interbred with our forebears on at least several occasions. Today, we carry DNA from these encounters. The first clues to ancient interbreeding surfaced in 2010, when scientists discovered that some modern humans mostly Europeans carried DNA that matched material recovered from Neanderthal fossils. Later studies showed that the forebears of modern humans first encountered Neanderthals after expanding out of Africa more than 50,000 years ago. But the Neanderthals were not the only extinct humans that our own ancestors found. A finger bone discovered in a Siberian cave, called Denisova, yielded DNA from yet another group of humans. Research later indicated that all three groups modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans shared a common ancestor who lived roughly 600,000 years ago. And, perhaps no surprise, some ancestors of modern humans also interbred with Denisovans. Some of their DNA has survived in people in Melanesia, a region of the Pacific that includes New Guinea and the islands around it. Those initial discoveries left major questions unanswered, such as how often our ancestors interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans. Scientists have developed new ways to study the DNA of living people to tackle these mysteries. Joshua M. Akey, a geneticist at the University of Washington, and his colleagues analyzed a database of 1,488 genomes from people around the world. The scientists added 35 genomes from people in New Britain and other Melanesian islands in an effort to learn more about Denisovans in particular. The researchers found that all of the non Africans in their study had Neanderthal DNA, while the Africans had very little or none. That finding supported previous studies. But when Dr. Akey and his colleagues compared DNA from modern Europeans, East Asians and Melanesians, they found that each population carried its own distinctive mix of Neanderthal genes. The best explanation for these patterns, the scientists concluded, was that the ancestors of modern humans acquired Neanderthal DNA on three occasions. The first encounter happened when the common ancestor of all non Africans interbred with Neanderthals. The second occurred among the ancestors of East Asians and Europeans, after the ancestors of Melanesians split off. Later, the ancestors of East Asians but not Europeans interbred a third time with Neanderthals. Earlier studies had hinted at the possibility that the forebears of modern humans had multiple encounters with Neanderthals, but hard data had been lacking. "A lot of people have been arguing for that, but now they're really providing the evidence for it," said Rasmus Nielsen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new study. The Melanesians took a different course. After a single interbreeding with Neanderthals, Dr. Akey found, their ancestors went on to interbreed just once with Denisovans as well. Where that encounter could have taken place remains an enigma. The only place Denisovan remains have been found is Siberia, a long way from New Guinea. It is possible that Denisovans ranged down to Southeast Asia, Dr. Akey said, crossing paths with modern humans who later settled in Melanesia. Dr. Akey and his colleagues also identified some regions of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA that became more common in modern humans as generations passed, suggesting that they provided some kind of a survival advantage. Many of the regions contain immune system genes, Dr. Akey noted. "As modern humans are spreading out across the world, they're encountering pathogens they haven't experienced before," he said. Neanderthals and Denisovans may have had genes that were adapted to fight those enemies. "Maybe they really helped us survive and thrive in these new environments," he said. Dr. Akey and his colleagues found that Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA was glaringly absent from four regions of the modern human genome. That absence may signal that these stretches of the genome are instrumental in making modern humans unique. Intriguingly, one of those regions includes a gene called FOXP2, which is involved in speech. Scientists suspect that Neanderthals and Denisovans were not the only extinct races our ancestors interbred with. PingHsun Hsieh, a biologist at the University of Arizona, and his colleagues reported last month that the genomes of African pygmies contained pieces of DNA that came from an unknown source within the last 30,000 years. Dr. Akey and his colleagues are now following up with an analysis of African populations. "This potentially allows us to find new twigs on the human family tree," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
HONG KONG As China's leaders have been preoccupied with a political struggle leading up to a once in a decade leadership change this autumn, there are increasing signs that the Chinese economy may be running into trouble. China announced Thursday that growth in imports had unexpectedly come to a screeching halt in April rising just 0.3 percent from the same period a year earlier, compared with expectations for an 11 percent increase. Businesses across the country appeared to lose much of their appetite for products as varied as iron ore and computer chips. China has been the largest single contributor to global economic growth in recent years, and a sustained slowdown in its economy could pose problems for many other countries. Particularly exposed are countries that export commodities like iron ore and oil and rely on demand from China's steel mills and ever growing ranks of car owners. Exports, a cornerstone of China's economic growth over the last three decades, grew 4.9 percent last month half as much as economists had expected. And a slump in new orders over the last month at the Canton Fair, China's main marketplace for exporters and foreign buyers, suggests that overseas shipments by the world's second biggest economy, after that of the United States, may not recover quickly. Growth in other sectors appears to be slowing, too, particularly in real estate. Soufun Holdings, a Chinese real estate data provider, released figures Monday showing that residential land sales in the country's 20 largest cities had fallen 92 percent last week from the week before, as declining prices for apartments have left developers short of cash and reluctant to start further projects. In a series of interviews over the last week, bankers and senior executives from provinces all over China, in a range of light and heavy industries, cited a broad deterioration in business conditions. Two of them said that some tax agencies in smaller cities had been telling companies to inflate their sales and profits to make local economic growth look less weak than it really was, while reassuring the companies that their actual tax bills would be left unchanged. There are early signs of a credit squeeze, at least among private sector companies. Many seem to be asking their suppliers for more time to pay debts and complaining of cash flow problems. Zhang Jinmei, the sales manager at the Qitele Group, a company that makes playground equipment in the coastal city of Wenzhou, said that local investment and lending pools there were starting to charge higher interest rates for loans, a sign of worries about creditworthiness. "The business environment is getting tougher and tougher," said Tom Zhang, the sales manager at the Hebei Haihao High Pressure Flange and Pipe Fitting Group. "Competition is very intense to get more business our domestic sales are down from last year, though our export sales are more or less stable." Some sectors are faring better. Car sales rose 12.5 percent in April from a year earlier, the Chinese Association of Automobile Manufacturers announced on Wednesday. The National Bureau of Statistics announced on Friday morning in Beijing that inflation in consumer prices slowed to 3.4 percent in April from 3.6 percent in March, while producer prices, measured at the factory gate, actually fell 0.7 percent in April from a year earlier. The fading of inflation pressures makes it easier for the government to stimulate the economy without pushing up prices. A clearer signal of China's economic health may emerge later Friday when the National Bureau of Statistics announces April figures for industrial production, retail sales and fixed asset investment. Today in On Tech: Imagine not living in Big Tech's world. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. Bank regulators released a 'road map' for crypto regulation that is short on details. China has noticeably not loosened monetary policy in recent months to mitigate the economic slowdown. The government had been moving toward easing through the winter, lowering cash reserve requirements for banks in November and most recently in February, so that the banks could lend more. But the government has left the reserve ratio unchanged since then. It has also left regulated interest rates unchanged at the fairly high levels set last July, when the economy was much stronger. Changes in the reserve ratio or interest rates are ultimately decided not by the central bank in China but by the country's political leadership. The government's inactivity has coincided with the biggest political drama in China in more than a decade: the ouster of Bo Xilai, a leading advocate of renewed government control over the economy and public life. The Communist Party removed him March 15 as the party secretary in Chongqing and on April 10 suspended his membership in the Politburo and the larger Central Committee. On March 12, three days before Mr. Bo lost his job in Chongqing, the governor of the Chinese central bank, Zhou Xiaochuan, strongly hinted that the government was prepared to lower the reserve requirement further, but it has done nothing since to follow up. "We have a lot of room to adjust the reserve ratio," Mr. Zhou said at the time. "On the other hand, it is necessary to see whether there is a necessity to adjust." Stock market investors appeared to be betting Thursday that Chinese leaders would be forced to ease policy in response to the latest trade figures. After early gains, the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets dropped sharply in late morning when the export and import statistics were released. But both markets later rebounded, and they closed the day little changed. GaveKal Dragonomics, a research firm specializing in the Chinese economy, said in a report Thursday that it was "still true the Chinese leadership's obsession with growth and stability is heightened during transition years. This makes it implausible that the leadership would allow the economy to collapse while they fight over who gets what job." The sectors doing best in China these days seem to be connected to state owned enterprises and local governments, which continue to enjoy preferential access to loans from the state controlled banking system. Projects like rail construction and low income housing continue to move ahead. But Chinese officials have long tracked prices of industrial commodities and activities like electricity consumption for signs of the economy's health, said Andy Xie, an independent economist based in Shanghai. Growth in electricity consumption has been slowing. And while commodity prices have begun to weaken worldwide because of worries about European debt, they have particularly slumped in China in the last few weeks, according to corporate buyers and specialty data tracking services. One result is a lot of unhappy business executives. "Our industry sector is facing tough times, and some companies in our sector are struggling," said Amanda Wang, the sales manager at Steady Shower Technology, a manufacturer of bathroom fixtures in Ningbo. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
A new peripheral character in the Trump universe stepped into the spotlight this week: the entertainment publicist and former tabloid reporter Rob Goldstone. This is the man who facilitated a meeting last year between Donald Trump Jr. and Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer and Moscow insider, with the promise of information that "would incriminate Hillary Clinton and her dealings with Russia." Mr. Goldstone, who runs the public relations company Oui 2 Entertainment, contacted Donald Trump Jr. by email on behalf of his client, Emin Agalarov, a Russian pop star whose father, Aras, is a real estate tycoon. Aras Agalarov worked with President Trump and Mr. Goldstone to take the Miss Universe contest to Moscow in 2013. On Tuesday, Donald Trump Jr. posted images of his email exchanges with Mr. Goldstone on his Twitter account after learning that The New York Times planned to publish them. The meeting, details of which were first reported by The Times, took place on June 9, 2016, on the 25th floor of Trump Tower and was attended by Donald Trump Jr.; his brother in law, Jared Kushner; Paul Manafort, President Trump's campaign manager at the time; and Mr. Goldstone. When asked for comment this week by The Times, Mr. Goldstone said he thought Ms. Veselnitskaya was a "private citizen." In an email to Donald Trump Jr. last summer, however, he called her a "Russian government attorney." He also said he did not know that Aras Agalarov, who has ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, had any involvement in setting up the meeting. His emails showed a different story. Mr. Goldstone is not exactly a savvy political operative. He was born in Manchester, England, and lives in New York. He is currently on what he has termed a "gap year," during which he is traveling around the world. So far, according to his Facebook page, Mr. Goldstone has made stops in Venice; Dubrovnik, Croatia; and Montenegro, among other places, and posted images of himself with young men "muppets," as he calls them in each one. The last item he posted on Facebook was a photo of a sign for the Bathhouse of the Winds in Athens on Sunday. Earlier Facebook check ins and posts have helped form a timeline of Mr. Goldstone's relationship with the Trumps. In June 2013, he mentioned a "fun meeting" with Donald J. Trump. A photograph posted days later shows Mr. Goldstone and the man who would be president having dinner together in Las Vegas, along with Emin Agalarov, who goes by the name Emin. That encounter was followed by an event at the Moscow branch of Nobu in November of that year to welcome the future president to that city for the Miss Universe contest. (Mr. Goldstone's company was involved in the event.) In February 2014, Mr. Goldstone posted a photo of Ivanka Trump with Emin in Moscow. About a month later, another photograph on Mr. Goldstone's Facebook page shows Ms. Trump, her father and Emin in warm weather clothes. Beyond these experiences with members of the Trump family, the Facebook feed reveals Mr. Goldstone's affinity for eccentric headwear, including an elaborate crown, a pirate hat, a headpiece loaded with fruit worthy of Carmen Miranda and a cap with the words "Out Off Office" printed above the bill. On the day of his meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016, he let the world know he was there by checking in on Facebook. Social media also paints a picture of Mr. Goldstone as something of a Russophile. Russian friends regularly show up in his Facebook feed, and according to The Guardian, Mr. Goldstone traveled to Moscow so frequently that he referred to it as his "second home" on Instagram. After President Trump won the election, Mr. Goldstone posted a photograph of himself wearing a shirt with the word Russia printed across the front. The caption: "Hedging bets." (Mr. Goldstone's Instagram account is now locked, and The Guardian reported that he took down the photo after a reporter tweeted about it.) At Oui 2 Entertainment, according to the About section on its website, Mr. Goldstone's "clients have included Michael Jackson, B. B. King, Richard Branson, EMI Music Publishing, TLC, The Hard Rock Cafe, Steinway Sons and Best Buy." Before founding the firm, according to the site, Mr. Goldstone was the head of the international marketing division at HMV Group, and represented artists on tour in Australia like Mr. King, Cyndi Lauper, Julio Iglesias and U2. In an interview with The Jewish Telegraph, a British newspaper, Mr. Goldstone spoke of his earlier career in journalism, saying he wrote for The Birmingham Post and Mail, The Sun and The Sunday Mirror, among others. Mr. Goldstone took his byline out for another spin in 2010, when he wrote an essay headlined "The Tricks and Trials of Traveling While Fat" for The Times. "At 285 pounds and 5 feet 7 inches, I may not be the tallest, but I am almost always one of the biggest passengers on a plane," he wrote. "That's 'one of': As anyone with even the most tangential relationship with news headlines over the last several years knows, Americans are getting fatter and fatter. And as the well proportioned gird themselves for the hassles of holiday travel, plus size travelers like me prepare for a plus sized ordeal." Seven years later, it appears that Mr. Goldstone has a fresh "plus sized ordeal" to contend with. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
SEATTLE When malicious software first became a serious problem on the internet about 15 years ago, most people agreed that the biggest villain, after the authors of the damaging code, was Microsoft. As a new cyberattack continues to sweep across the globe, the company is once again at the center of the debate over who is to blame for a vicious strain of malware demanding ransom from victims in exchange for the unlocking of their digital files. This time, though, Microsoft believes others should share responsibility for the attack, an assault that targeted flaws in the Windows operating system. On Sunday, Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and chief legal officer, wrote a blog post describing the company's efforts to stop the ransomware's spread, including an unusual step it took to release a security update for versions of Windows that Microsoft no longer supports. Mr. Smith wrote, "As a technology company, we at Microsoft have the first responsibility to address these issues." He went on, though, to emphasize that the attack had demonstrated the "degree to which cybersecurity has become a shared responsibility between tech companies and customers," the latter of whom must update their systems if they want to be protected. He also pointed his finger at intelligence services, since the latest vulnerability appeared to have been leaked from the National Security Agency. On Monday, a Microsoft spokesman declined to comment beyond Mr. Smith's post. To prepare for fallout with customers, Judson Althoff, a Microsoft executive vice president, sent an email to the company's field sales team on Sunday encouraging them to be supportive of businesses targeted by the attack, or even those who were simply aware of it. "Our key direction to you is to remember that we are in this with our customers we are trusted advisers, counselors, and suppliers to them," he wrote. "More than technical guidance, I want you to make sure you are spending the time needed to understand the concerns they have and that they know we are here to help." While Microsoft's reputation has suffered in the past because of security problems, the company's stock is barely down from the close of trading on Thursday, just before reports of the ransomware. "People have extremely short memories when it comes to this," said Jan Dawson, an analyst with Jackdaw Research. "I think, realistically, people will move on pretty quickly." Microsoft has recognized the risk that cybersecurity poses to it since about 2002, when Bill Gates, the former chief executive, issued a call to arms inside the company after a wave of malicious software began infecting Windows PCs connected to the internet. "As software has become ever more complex, interdependent and interconnected, our reputation as a company has in turn become more vulnerable," Mr. Gates wrote in an email to employees identifying trustworthy computing as Microsoft's top priority. "Flaws in a single Microsoft product, service or policy not only affect the quality of our platform and services overall, but also our customers' view of us as a company." Since then, the company has poured billions of dollars into security initiatives, employing more than 3,500 engineers dedicated to security. In March, it released a software patch that addressed the vulnerability exploited by the ransomware, known as WannaCry, protecting systems such as Windows 10, its latest operating system. Yet security flaws in older editions of Windows persist. The company no longer provides regular software updates to Windows XP, a version first released in 2001, unless customers pay for "custom support," a practice some observers believe has put users at risk. Late Friday, Microsoft took the unusual step of making patches that protect older systems against WannaCry, including Windows XP, free. "Companies like Microsoft should discard the idea that they can abandon people using older software," Zeynep Tufekci, an associate professor at the school of information and library science at the University of North Carolina, wrote in a New York Times opinion piece over the weekend. "The money they made from these customers hasn't expired; neither has their responsibility to fix defects." But security experts challenged that argument, saying that Microsoft could not be expected to keep updating old software products indefinitely. Providing updates to older systems could make computers more insecure by removing an incentive for users to modernize, Mikko Hypponen, the chief research officer of F Secure, a security firm. "I can understand why they issued an emergency patch for XP after WannaCry was found, but in general, we should just let XP die, " Mr. Hypponen said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
U MINH, Vietnam Luc Van Ho slips through a tangled thicket of jungle, graceful as a dancer. A blanket of dried bamboo and melaleuca leaves on the forest floor barely crackles beneath his bare feet. Only the smell of cigarette smoke betrays his presence. A hunter, Mr. Luc, 45, set out at dawn from his family's bamboo thatched home in Vietnam's U Minh forest to check a half dozen homemade traps rigged along animal trails in the underbrush and on canal banks frequented by snakes and turtles. He stops at a snare trap made of wood and bicycle brake wire, nearly invisible beneath leaves. The trap is empty, not unusual. "Before, this forest was very different," Mr. Luc said. "Now, the animals are so few that most hunters are changing their jobs." Still, in the previous two weeks, Mr. Luc had caught nine Southeast Asian box turtles and Malayan snail eating turtles, five elephant trunk snakes, a handful of water birds and two rare Himalayan griffon vultures. For safekeeping, Mr. Luc stashed the vultures in his brother's house, leaving them tethered in the bedroom until he can figure out what to do with them. In the past, Mr. Luc's hunting trips often yielded wildlife bonanzas, including prized pangolins. Also known as scaly anteaters, they are among the most trafficked mammals in the world. Mr. Luc works with traders willing to buy live pangolins for 60 a pound. Although he caught just two pangolins last year, that price makes it well worth the effort to keep seeking them out. He knows, however, that this lucrative resource is finite. Illegal wildlife is one of the world's largest contraband trades, netting an estimated 19 billion a year, not including illegal fisheries and timber. While all Southeast Asian countries and many others outside of the region are involved, Vietnam plays a paramount role. The country is a major thoroughfare for wildlife goods bound for China, which arrive overland from Cambodia, Thailand and Laos; by ship from Malaysia and Indonesia; or by air from Africa. "After China, Vietnam is the next port of call in terms of where to look to figure out what's going on with wildlife trade," said Dan Challender, a co chairman of the pangolin specialist group at the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Vietnam is also a significant consumer of wildlife, especially those yielding the ingredients for traditional medicine, such as rhino horn, which is used to treat everything from cancer to hangovers. The exotic meats of rare animals are seen as luxuries by a rising middle class eager to advertise its prosperity. "Pangolin is frequently the most expensive item on the menu, so ordering it is an obvious way to show off to friends and colleagues," Dr. Challender said. "The fact that it's illegal isn't played down and is even attractive, because it adds this element that you live beyond the law." International concern about the trade has never been greater, but conferences, new enforcement strategies and ivory crushes have yet to make a dent. In February, the Obama administration issued a plan to curb illegal wildlife trade by strengthening enforcement, reducing demand and sending a handful of agents abroad. The United States is the second largest market for illegal wildlife products, but only an estimated 10 percent of traffickers are caught because of inadequate resources supporting enforcement, as well as legal loopholes pertaining to certain products, such as ivory. In January of this year, officials intercepted more than 7,500 protected pig nosed turtles in Indonesia, a frozen tiger in Vietnam and 190 endangered black pond turtles in Singapore. As wildlife disappears in Southeast Asia, poachers increasingly turn to Africa. More than 1,500 pounds of ivory and two tons of pangolin skins were intercepted in Uganda in January. Last year in South Africa alone, a record 1,215 rhinos were killed for their horns. The illegal wildlife products that officials manage to interdict account for an estimated 10 to 20 percent of the total trafficked. "We may be disrupting criminal networks, but we're certainly not dismantling any of them," said Scott Roberton, Vietnam country representative and regional coordinator for wildlife trafficking programs for the Wildlife Conservation Society. "The situation is going to get worse before it gets better." While China recently increased its arrests and prosecutions for wildlife crimes, those caught trafficking wildlife in Vietnam or other transit countries almost always escape punishment. Dealing in protected species is a criminal offense under Vietnamese law, as is selling wild caught animals of any kind. But even when trafficking kingpins are taken into custody, prosecution often depends on finding unrelated charges that are taken more seriously than wildlife crime, such as car smuggling. Poachers like Mr. Luc who says he has never run into legal trouble are rarely reprimanded, and punishment, if any, usually entails a small fine. Thien Vuong Tuu ("The Alcohol of the Gods"), a fancy restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City, advertises pangolin, bear, porcupine, bat and more on its illustrated menu. Customers interested in pangolin sold for 150 a pound must order it two to three hours in advance and place a deposit based on its weight. When the customer returns for dinner, the manager presents the live pangolin to the table, then slices its throat on the spot to prove that the meat is fresh and has not been substituted. "Pangolin is very popular with customers, because it treats a lot of sicknesses," said Quoc Trung, the restaurant manager. His staff will also dry and package pangolin scales left over from dinner a popular ingredient in traditional medicines that are still covered by Vietnamese health insurance. On a Sunday night, families with young children and groups of middle aged men fill the restaurant. At one table, two French speaking men order a cobra to the delight of their female companions. Two young servers bring out a large, writhing snake, its mouth bound tightly shut with plastic twine. As the customers film with their smartphones, one server holds the snake taut. The other carefully feels along the animal's abdomen until he locates the heart, then opens it up with a pair of scissors and removes the beating organ with his bare fingers. As the servers wring out the animal, the blood drips into a ceramic bowl to be mixed later with alcohol and drunk. "The government doesn't allow exotic meat, but we have our sources and good connections with the police," Mr. Quoc said after the show concluded. "The demand is so high for these things, so we have to supply them." Given the widespread lack of enforcement, grass roots conservation organizations in Vietnam increasingly find themselves on the front lines. Education for Nature Vietnam recently conducted a survey of restaurants, hotels and shops in 12 districts in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, recording each violation of wildlife laws and insisting that authorities follow up. In Vietnam, much of the wildlife intercepted from illegal traders is sold by officials back into the black market. Nguyen Van Thain, Save Vietnam's Wildlife's founder, often must race to the sites of recent confiscations to try to recover animals before that can happen. "Corrupt rangers still want to sell animals back to the trade," Mr. Nguyen said. Even if the animals are not sold, very few return to the wild, because of a lack of rehabilitation facilities. Animals not sent to a specialized rescue center often "just sit around until they die," Dr. Shepherd said. Over the last three months, Mr. Nguyen has helped rescue 20 pangolins, but the maximum capacity at his center one of only two in Vietnam that can care for pangolins is less than 50. With a budget of just 90,000 a year, he has few resources with which to expand the center and hire additional staff. Mr. Nguyen says he is not confident that attitudes will change in time to spare his country's wildlife. "The problem in Vietnam is that conservation is a new way of thinking," he said. "Vietnamese people need to learn to take seriously what we have now. We need to take care of our own environment and wildlife if we want it to be around in the future." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
On Saturday night, when Kamala Harris stepped onto the stage and into history at the Chase Center in Wilmington, Del., as Vice President elect of the United States, she did so in full recognition of the weight of the moment, and in full acknowledgment of all who came before. Of the fact she is so many firsts: first woman to be vice president, first woman of color to be vice president, first woman of South Asian descent, first daughter of immigrants. She is the representation of so many promises finally fulfilled, so many hopes and dreams. How do you begin to express that understanding; embody the city shining on a hill? For the next four years, that will be part of the job. She said it "while I may be the first woman in this office, I will not be the last" and she signaled it, wearing something she had not worn in any of her moments of firsts since she joined Mr. Biden as his No. 2 (or, indeed, in the months before when she was running for the Democratic nomination herself): a white pantsuit with a white silk pussy bow blouse. Two garments that have been alternately fraught and celebrated symbols of women's rights for decades, but which over the last four years have taken on even more potency and power. The pussy bow blouse: the quintessential working woman's uniform in the years when they began to flood into the professional sphere; the female version of the tie; the power accessory of Margaret Thatcher, the first female British prime minister. And then, suddenly, a potentially subversive double entendre in the hands of Melania Trump, who wore a pussy bow blouse after her husband's "grab 'em by the pussy" scandal. The point was not who made the clothes; it wasn't about marketing a brand (though, on the subject of "building back better," the suit was by Carolina Herrera, an American business). The point was that to wear those clothes to make those choices on a night when the world was watching, in a moment that would be frozen for all time, was not fashion. It was politics. It was for posterity. And it was the beginning of what will be four years in which everything Ms. Harris does matters. Obviously, what she wears is only a small part of it. But in her first ness, in her ascent to the highest realms on power, she will become a model for what that means. How, as a woman, as a Black woman, you claim your seat at the highest table. Clothes are a part of that story. In some ways, they are how those at faraway tables connect to it. Yes, what Mr. Biden wears matters, too. His aviators have become practically his doppelganger; the blue tie he wore on Saturday night, representative both of his party and the blue skies to (they hope) come. Presidents have always used clothing as part of their political toolbox. John Kennedy distinguished himself from the generation that came before by opting for single breasted suits instead of the more formal double breasted styles favored by Roosevelt and Truman. Barack Obama did the same by often abandoning the tie. George W. Bush wore his cowboy boots as a badge of origin and attitude. Donald Trump used his overly long, five alarm red ties to signal masculinity and send everyone down a master of the universe wormhole. But what Ms. Harris wears, and will wear, could matter more. Why should we pretend otherwise? As Dominique and Francois Gaulme wrote in the 2012 book "Power Style: A World History of Politics and Style," clothing, from its earliest origins, was developed "to communicate, even more clearly than in writing, the social organizations and distribution of political power." And when the person possessed of that power is a pioneer, when she is defining a new kind of leadership, understanding those lines of communications and how to employ them is key. Not because she is a woman, but because she will be the first woman vice president. Hillary Clinton came to understand this, over a career in which at first she seemed to dismiss fashion and then, as first lady, to resent it, before finally embracing it as a useful tool. It began when she joined Twitter in 2013 with a biographical note that included the descriptors "pantsuit aficionado" and "hair icon," along with "FLOTUS," and "SecState." When she started her Instagram account in 2015, her first post was a photo of a clothing rail with an assortment of red, white and blue jackets and the caption, "Hard choices." During an Al Smith dinner before the 2016 election, she joked that she liked to refer to tuxedos as "formal pantsuits." She weaponized her clothing as necessary. This is an option of which Ms. Harris herself is well aware. She has embraced the political pantsuit tradition presaged in 1874 at the first National Convention of the Dress Reform League, when, as reported in The New York Times, one attendee declared: "This reform means trousers. They are freedom to us, and they afford us protection! Trousers are coming." But she did not partake in the Crayola colored pantsuit tradition of the generation before: Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel. Perhaps, rather, it is a signal of what to expect. That she will go on as she has, with practical, elegant suits that don't get in the way of her day or require much response from the peanut gallery. (We, in turn, can get back to Kimye.) That the details the pearls, the pumps, the sneakers will matter. And that then, every once in a while and when the situation and theater calls for it, she will deploy a sartorial surgical strike that hits everyone where it counts. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Food safety inspectors furloughed during the federal government shutdown will be returning to work beginning Tuesday but still without pay so that the Food and Drug Administration can begin to resume inspections of some high risk foods at manufacturing and other processing plants, the agency's commissioner said on Monday. Food inspections about 160 of which are conducted a week have been halted since the federal government shut down and about 40 percent of the F.D.A.'s work force was furloughed. But Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the agency's commissioner, said that he was asking employees to return from furlough to conduct some of the inspections and other agency functions involving surveillance of certain drugs, devices and potential outbreaks of food borne illnesses. About one third of all food safety inspections are for high risk foods, he said. It was unclear when more routine inspections would resume. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
After Gov. Tom Wolf ordered all "non life sustaining" businesses in several counties in Pennsylvania to shutter last week as one of a growing number of governors to issue "stay at home" or "shelter in place" orders to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus only the most Dickensian remained in operation. It was not possible, on Monday, to send a child to school in Pennsylvania or for the Department of Transportation to perform any but the most urgent bridge repairs. But bookkeepers, slaughterhouses, steel mills and QVC stayed open. Indeed, by grace of the commonwealth's declaration that "electronic shopping and mail order houses" should be permitted to continue physical operations, viewers in every state and territory of the American republic retained the right to purchase, say, a reversible sequin shamrock T shirt in six installments of 6.41, as advertised by a QVC host broadcasting live from the home shopping company's TV studio in West Chester, a suburb of Philadelphia. In some respects, no network is better suited to see viewers through the unraveling global catastrophe. Even under normal conditions, the shopping channel's hypnotic, sales pitch style programming soothes like a balm. In the mouths of its vivacious hosts, continuously babbling like brooks of clear, cool water, every detail is delightful (ruched jacket sleeves) or, at worst, astonishing (the amount of filling stuffed into savory frozen ravioli). The company's founder Joseph Segel, once summarized its appeal with the observation, "There's no bad news on QVC." This week, bad news was periodically acknowledged to exist. Some QVC viewers, perhaps, took comfort in the fact that Quacker Factory, the purveyor of shamrock shirts, had not been requisitioned to manufacture the N95 masks and ventilator machines in critically short supply at American hospitals. But they could not ignore the fact that all the guests dialed in remotely, via phone call or Skype a circumstance that meant the on screen hosts, in addition to temporarily styling their own hair and makeup to reduce the number of staff present, needed to perform herculean feats to fill the airtime. Parents wishing to sharpen children's extemporaneous speaking skills during their prolonged absence from class would do well to present them with the challenge faced by host Kerstin Lindquist at the one o'clock hour on Monday: endeavoring, for sixty minutes, to sell sunglasses to a population heavily discouraged in some localities, legally prohibited from amusing itself outdoors. "You need them for skiing," Ms. Lindquist said of the sunglasses. "For being at the beach. For looking at the pool. For driving." Although QVC hosts excel at presenting the aspirational as inevitable, in the context of a global pandemic, the list of reasons one might need stylish shades designed by the actor Jamie Foxx veered into the preposterous. So Ms. Lindquist recalibrated. "Despite the fact that a lot of us are at home right now, you can still walk outside," she offered. "There's still going to be a lot more sunshine to come," she said, expressing, too, her hope that viewers are "getting that vitamin D when you can." "Your backyard, your front yard, next to a really, really nice window whatever works, because we need that vitamin D," she added. This was the unnerving forecast of our immediate future: Sitting indoors in a pair of brand new sunglasses in the hopes of synthesizing vitamin D (a process, sadly, impeded by the glass of most windows.) And yet, through the sheer force of Ms. Lindquist's enthusiasm, multiple styles of frames sold out. As stores across America have shut down amid a global economic crisis caused by the new coronavirus, the retail industry is predicting millions of job losses. It is also seeking guidelines on what retailers can be deemed "essential" and allowed to stay open. For now, the rules vary by locality, and there are plenty of gray areas, including pet stores, auto repair shops and "electronic" stores that offer zero physical contact with customers. QVC does not run traditional commercials. Since last Friday, however, public service announcements about the coronavirus aired during some segment breaks. Between P.S.A.s, customers' increasing hermetism can help or hinder a pitch. "If you're watching 'Invisible Man' on your couch wearing the jumpsuit, you'll still look cute," said one host about a jumpsuit she was modeling. She had just given a glowing review to the new horror film, released by Universal several months early on streaming platforms because of the pandemic, in which a woman is physically and psychologically abused by an invisible man. A robotic vacuum, marketed to people who have no time to clean, was a tougher sell to an audience banned from engaging in most social activities. "When we get back to normal life," said the disembodied voice of a vendor calling in by phone, "we're busy. We don't spend our time vacuuming." A two hour presentation of gourmet food items stood out in that two hosts were on the set simultaneously to sell them. At times, Mary Beth Roe and Stacey Stauffer appeared on opposite sides of a kitchen island laden with holiday food, apparently in accordance with the six feet of personal distance recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In other moments, they tested even the bounds of the laxer one meter advisory issued by the World Health Organization. "I know a lot of you have emailed and such and said, 'Are you guys doing this and that?'" Ms. Roe said early in the segment, referring to viewers' questions about whether QVC is operating in accordance with health advisories. "We absolutely are, which is why we are not eating any of this food." Both women, she explained, had sampled the items they were pitching "months and weeks ago." Besides negotiating the inherent stop and start awkwardness of conference calls with unseen guests, the hosts of clothing segments visibly battled their urges to casually re drape and arrange items worn by a reduced number of models on set. The sets themselves, each designed to look like a brightly lit version of a neutral upscale kitchen, or sitting alcove, or living room with two other living rooms inside it, felt unusually cavernous. A representative for QVC declined to say how many employees were present. Hosts spoke of keeping as many people out of the studio "as possible." But they also emphasized that QVC's service would continue unimpeded. As ever, items would arrive "directly to your doorstep no interaction with a human being," said Kerstin Lindquist. While the majority of employees at the corporate office in West Chester have shifted to remote work, QVC fulfillment centers in Pennsylvania, Virginia, California, and North and South Carolina have not reduced staffing. (The company said it has made health and safety modifications at all sites to support social distancing and enhanced sanitation practices, and those whose jobs are conducive to working remotely are doing so.) "We're one of the only things that is still live, other than news," said Ms. Lindquist while demonstrating application of an anti aging product. "And we're going to try and stay live as long as we possibly can with the appropriate precautions always being taken. As you can see, I'm alone here, which is great." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
It's 8:30 p.m. and Sherry Bensimon, a funeral director at Riverside Memorial Chapels of New Jersey, in Hackensack, is still at work. A colleague who just returned from Hackensack University Medical Center tells her that the hospital's refrigerated trailers, one of which arrived that day, were already at capacity. Each holds about 50 bodies and that's in addition to the hospital's two morgues. "They're full already?" Ms. Bensimon's voice cracks. "Oh God." We talk a lot about the emergency medical workers and doctors and nurses whom we clap for every evening. But funeral directors are the last responders on the front lines the people who come after someone has died. While they help families say their final goodbyes, funeral directors and their teams operate largely in the background. "We're not a profession where we feel you need to recognize some of us," said Vanessa Granby, 29, a director at Granby's Funeral Service in the Bronx. They're vital to public health, but they're also at high risk of exposure to the coronavirus. This week, BuzzFeed News reported that scientists in Thailand documented what they believe is the first instance of the virus's transmission from the dead to the living, amplifying the conversation about the need to support those in the "death care" sector. Along with health care workers, they're running short on personal protective equipment. "We've become order takers, basically," said Elysia Smith, 38, a funeral director at International Funeral Service of New York. "We're trying to fill the order as fast as possible. It feels really impersonal." Funeral directors are people who feel compelled to serve. From the moment a family calls, directors guide them through the lengthy process of taking care of someone who has passed removing the body, arranging memorials, organizing the cremation or burial, navigating the paperwork and consoling the families through their sorrow. It's a job built on trust and compassion in moments of immeasurable grief: Can I trust that you will take care of my loved one with dignity and reverence? Can I trust that you will honor the value and spirit my loved one brought to this world? Can I trust that you will help my family celebrate the meaning and love this person brought to our lives and to so many others? "I feel really responsible when a family calls me," Ms. Smith tells me. "I feel like I'm their voice." Now there are too many calls. There are too many deaths. There are too many families. And because space is limited, funeral homes are doing the unimaginable: turning families away. "It's the total opposite of what we do," Ms. Smith said. Part of the job involves removing the deceased, which means going into people's homes, nursing facilities, hospital morgues and, in some places, refrigerated units holding the bodies. While they'd once wear work attire and gloves to do a removal, death care employees are now suiting up with N 95 masks and Tyvek suits or plastic gowns, maybe even double layering their gloves. They're disinfecting body bags with a germicidal spray before bringing them into the funeral home. Not all calls come in as confirmed Covid 19 cases, but funeral directors are practicing universal precautions, treating each case as if it might be infectious. "It's almost like we're playing Russian roulette," said Stephanie Simon, 56, an industry veteran with nearly 30 years of experience. Ms. Simon works as an embalmer and director at Charbonnet Labat Funeral Home in New Orleans. She has started wearing a hazmat suit and a respirator when preparing a body. (Other embalmers are now working in similar gear.) With a confirmed Covid 19 case, among the riskiest things embalmers may do is remove the intubation tube, which can produce large but visible droplets that contain the virus. For Ms. Simon, the pandemic reminds her of Hurricane Katrina. "That was a devastating time for us and changed the way we did our daily routine," she said. Rather than spending time with families face to face, getting to know them and their loved ones, directors are largely making arrangements by phone, Zoom or FaceTime. Paperwork is done electronically. Most are organizing direct burials or cremations, with families postponing memorial services until stay at home orders are lifted. Some funeral homes still offer limited viewings for immediate family members only one hour maximum, no more than 10 people, chairs staggered six or more feet apart. Live streamed funerals are becoming more common. Eric Friszell, 22, is a resident funeral director at the Nolan Funeral Home in Northport, N.Y., a position he has held since August. "It's two major adjustments: It's me coming out of school and into the field, and it's adjusting to this whole new way of directing," Mr. Friszell said. "I didn't expect to be learning the ropes during a pandemic." Ayris Granby, Vanessa Granby's aunt and the Granby's home's business manager, has been a funeral director for three decades. Many of those she serves are foreign born New Yorkers who want to send their loved ones back home to countries like Jamaica, Guyana or Trinidad and Tobago. But that's not a service she can provide right now: The logistics, from travel restrictions to the paperwork, make the request nearly impossible. What pains Ms. Granby the most is not being able to do her job the way she knows best: through touch, which can't be digitized. "When you see someone hurting and you can't reach out to comfort them," she said. "I feel the loss more, because I can't give more." In this time of social distancing, there's something especially unnatural about not being able to embrace someone who's suffering, her niece, Vanessa Granby, said. "Now it's just words." Rituals are disappearing, too. Services at most churches, temples, synagogues and mosques have been suspended, and graveside farewells are increasingly restrictive. Helon Rahman, 46, is the director and owner of the Rahman Funeral Home in Detroit. In a recent week, she conducted 15 services double the normal. More than half were Covid 19 cases. While Ms. Rahman specializes in Muslim burials, she has also started serving other faiths. Non Muslim funeral homes are unable to handle the flood of deaths, she said. Islamic tradition calls for bodies to be washed before being shrouded and buried. But because of uncertainty around the virus, Ms. Rahman is instead performing the tayammum purifying the bodies with something other than water. She puts dirt over the areas that are normally washed feet, hands, face and head all while the body is in a bag. "I can count on my hand how many times I've done that in 10 years," Ms. Rahman said. She performed it only in cases where a body was badly decomposed. "Now we are doing this several times a day," she said. The funeral prayer, the Janazah, is a shadow of the communal action that it's supposed to be. Ms. Rahman recently oversaw a funeral where the Janazah was performed by a handful of people praying around a hearse pointed toward Mecca. The coffin remained in the vehicle. "We can't make the family happy," she said. "We can't allow them to be part of the rituals that they would normally be part of." For Ms. Bensimon, the director in New Jersey, her heart aches for all those she brings into her care whom she knows died alone. It's not just the constant calls that keep her up at night. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Q. I have two Twitter accounts a personal one and a more professional one I just created for my job. Can I use them both on the same phone? A. The Twitter apps for Android and iOS allow you to be logged into multiple accounts on the same device. If you are using the Twitter app with your original account, you need to add the second account in the app's settings in order to switch back and forth. Open the Twitter app and tap your profile icon or the three lined menu icon on the screen; you may see one or the other depending on the version of the app you are using. When your profile panel opens, tap the downward pointing arrow (or, on the iOS version, the More icon with the three dots) to open a menu with links to create a new Twitter account or to add an existing one. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, followed by Pete Buttigieg and a surprise third place finisher, Amy Klobuchar. Joe Biden placed fifth, leaving the state before polls even closed, while Andrew Yang, Michael Bennet and Deval Patrick all dropped out of the race. "The New Hampshire primary was last night and according to cable news, here's what happened: Bernie Sanders won, but not by a lot, so it's really like third, and Pete Buttigieg was second, but who saw that coming? So it's more like first. And Amy Klobuchar was third, which is really surprising so it's also like first, and Joe Biden came in fifth, but was expected to do better, so it's more like eighth. So I guess the real winner is Andrew Yang, because he dropped out and doesn't have to deal with this anymore. So, congratulations, Andrew Yang, on winning New Hampshire." SETH MEYERS "Bernie Sanders finished first, Pete Buttigieg finished second and Joe Biden is finished." JIMMY FALLON "Joe Biden left New Hampshire before the polls were even closed? I mean, I've heard of fans leaving the game early, but you know it's bad when the team leaves early to beat the traffic." TREVOR NOAH "Biden's lackluster performances have been a huge surprise, and now, even Biden's own people are having a little trouble hiding their anxiety. One unnamed adviser told reporters, 'I know we're supposed to say we're going to win, but I just don't know. This is horrendous. We're all scared.' It's not great when your campaign sounds like a Civil War letter home: 'My dearest Jill, we fled New Hampshire after a miserable defeat and have retreated to make our last stand in South Carolina. I thought we could win, but I guess I'm just a lying, dog faced pony soldier.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "Meanwhile, Andrew Yang officially dropped out of the race. Yang supported giving Americans 1,000 a month, reducing student loans and legalizing weed. Americans heard that and were like, 'Wait, he did? We messed up come back, hey! We like you!'" JIMMY FALLON "Which means Yang's now out of a job. You know what he could use? A thousand dollars a month." STEPHEN COLBERT "Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado announced that he is ending his campaign. He's planning to go back to his previous job of looking like the assistant principal on a Disney Channel show." JIMMY KIMMEL "He had less than 1 percent and he's dropping out. Michael Bennet saying he's dropped out of the race is like me saying I've decided not to run the Kentucky Derby this year." JIMMY KIMMEL "This is interesting: Amy Klobuchar's rise in the polls is being called 'klomentum.' That's right. Yeah, and Joe Biden's campaign is called 'pretty much klover.'" CONAN O'BRIEN "You know, a month ago, if somebody had told me Amy Klobuchar was going to do better in New Hampshire than Joe Biden, that person would have been Amy Klobuchar it wouldn't have been anybody else." JIMMY KIMMEL "Look, I'm excited to vote for whoever ends up being the nominee, even if they are the future subject of a biopic called 'The Devil Wears Kohl's.'" SAMANTHA BEE "And the timing couldn't be better for Klobuchar, because in many ways, you see, the presidential campaigns are like getting drunk at a party, all right? You want to peak at the right time. See, the other candidates, they had their surge last year, which is too early. That's like getting wasted at 6 p.m. Yeah, because by the time the party is really going, you are puking in the bushes, like, 'Oh, I'm so sorry I didn't pace myself. I promise I'll do better in South Carolina!'" TREVOR NOAH In honor of Valentine's Day, "Jimmy Kimmel Live" asked men about their partners' birthdays, eye color, parents' names and other basic information they should have had no trouble coming up with. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
STEVEN UNIVERSE: THE MOVIE (2019) 6 p.m. on Cartoon Network. Rebecca Sugar became the first solo female show creator at Cartoon Network when she created "Steven Universe." Since its 2013 debut, the show has won a Peabody Award, been nominated for five Emmy Awards and gained applause for being a standard bearer in L.G.B.T.Q. representation in animation. The series gets the movie musical treatment here, with a story that involves Steven (voiced by Zach Callison) saving the world after the arrival of an alien threatens the continued existence of life on earth. Chance the Rapper, Gallant and Aimee Mann are among the musicians who collaborated on the movie's original music; Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole are among the vocal talent involved. "With the show, we like to take things that feel familiar and dig into them," Sugar said in a recent interview with The New York Times. "So, I wanted to approach a 'Steven Universe' musical that way: These are things you recognize from other musicals, but with these characters." UNTOUCHABLE (2019) Stream on Hulu. It has been nearly two years since investigations by The Times and The New Yorker revealed allegations that Harvey Weinstein sexually harassed or abused numerous women over several decades allegations, of course, that are credited with sparking the MeToo Movement. This documentary, directed by Ursula Macfarlane, uses interviews with some of his accusers, alongside journalists and former Weinstein employees, to tell a larger story of how Weinstein went from a childhood in Queens to the position he's in now: set to go to trial in January on charges of rape and other sex crimes. UNSANE (2018) Stream on Amazon; Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. Claire Foy plays a woman who is forced into a psychiatric hospital in this mysterious thriller, which was directed by Steven Soderbergh. Shot on an iPhone, the film introduces Sawyer (Foy), who has recently moved from her hometown and arrived in a new city, where she works an unfulfilling job in a dull cubicle under a creepy boss. We learn that Sawyer left home to escape a stalker. When she goes to seek psychological counseling at a hospital, she gets duped into signing on to stay there for 24 hours. It ends up being a considerably longer visit. In her review for The Times, Manohla Dargis called the film "an effectively nasty, sometimes funny, sometimes grindingly unpleasant thriller." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
When Greg Glassman resigned earlier this month as chief executive of CrossFit, Inc., excoriated for comments about George Floyd's death on Twitter and in a Zoom meeting, people who have worked there were surprised that his downfall was tied to accusations of racism. They had assumed that the reason would be routine and rampant sexual harassment. Interviews with eight former employees, and four CrossFit athletes with strong ties to the company, reveal a management culture rife with overt and vulgar talk about women: their bodies, how much male employees, primarily Mr. Glassman, would like to have sex with them and how lucky the women should feel to have his rabid interest. According to the dozen interviewed, Mr. Glassman, 63, has verbally demeaned women, pulled at their clothes to try to peek at their cleavage and aimed his phone's camera to snap photos of their breasts while they traveled with him for work (sometimes pressuring them to consider sharing hotel rooms or borrowed houses with him). Through a company spokesman and spokeswoman, Mr. Glassman denied such conduct. The spokeswoman said Mr. Glassman has treated her only respectfully. She suggested that people speaking out against Mr. Glassman are doing so to lessen the worth of his company and then buy it from him. "There is a collective effort to devalue the company and buy it for scraps," she said. The former employees say reporting the harassment was not an option. Mr. Glassman is the sole owner of CrossFit, Inc. Perhaps the most powerful female executive there, Kathy Glassman, the affiliate director, is Mr. Glassman's sister, and they were reluctant to complain to her. There was no human resources manager until 2013. That manager left the company in January and has not been replaced. Now headquartered in Scotts Valley, Calif., CrossFit was created in 2000. It is privately held and currently employs 72 people full time, down from 137 two years ago. A shift in the company's focus from competitive games to health initiatives, and the pandemic, have resulted in layoffs. Most departing workers receive severance only if they signed nondisclosure agreements. Dave Castro, a longtime deputy of Mr. Glassman's who has taken over as the company's chief executive, declined to speak for this article. The spokespeople noted that the CrossFit Games, a professional competition introduced by the company in 2007, rewards men and women with equal prize money, and that the method encourages women to celebrate strength and fitness regardless of body type or weight. Even those critical of CrossFit's culture praised its rigorous exercise method, which is taught in thousands of mom and pop gyms around the country that have licensed the CrossFit trademark. For some of its devotees, CrossFit is a near religion. "There is so much positive in the CrossFit community," said one female former employee who, like many others interviewed for this article, was granted anonymity because she fears legal retribution from Mr. Glassman. "Do you want to be the person who ruins people's hopes and dreams and even their businesses? CrossFit is not just about fitness. It becomes your friends, your family, your community. People create their entire lives around it." Away from the local gyms where he is venerated, though, the picture of Mr. Glassman clouds quickly. "There was a constant narrative about women," the former corporate employee said. She described his using vulgarities frequently to refer to women, enumerating which he wanted to have sex with and which he wouldn't. He "was always descriptive in nature about it," she said, "bragging about sexual escapades." This attitude was so entwined with operations that the Wi Fi password at a company office in San Diego used to be a sexist obscenity, according to three former employees. Male employees would rank female professional CrossFit athletes according to how much the men wanted to have sex with them, according to an email from a current CrossFit employee to a former one that was reviewed by The New York Times. (Mr. Glassman denies this, his spokeswoman said.) One former male employee, who requested anonymity because he didn't have permission from his current employer to speak to the media, defended Mr. Glassman. "I'm not into painting someone into an evil person just because he might have been misogynistic," he said. In 2012, Mr. Glassman agreed to pay a financial settlement to Julie Kelly, a former employee whose lawyers threatened to file a sexual harassment lawsuit, according to three people in the CrossFit community with direct knowledge of the situation. Among other incidents, they related, during a company get together at a bar, Mr. Glassman stood next to Ms. Kelly and made a vulgar and obscene comment about her to another man. (Mr. Glassman denies this, the spokeswoman said, and would not comment on the settlement.) Also that year, Mr. Glassman was being driven to the airport by Andy Stumpf, a former Navy Seal with five Bronze Star medals and a Purple Heart who oversaw CrossFit, Inc.'s partnership with Reebok and also worked as Mr. Glassman's pilot. "We were in the car and he was chuckling," said Mr. Stumpf, in an interview. "I asked why he was in such a good mood and he said, 'I finally finished up with the bullshit with Julie; I had to pay that whore.'" In an interview, Lauren Jenai, Mr. Glassman's ex wife who founded CrossFit with him, said that the employees and athletes were accurately describing the corporate atmosphere she witnessed before divorcing Mr. Glassman in 2013. She also confirmed that Mr. Glassman entered into a financial settlement with Ms. Kelly to avoid a sexual harassment lawsuit. (Ms. Jenai received 20 million from Mr. Glassman as part of their divorce settlement, in exchange for her ownership of the company.) "He's the father of my kids. I care about Greg and about CrossFit," Ms. Jenai said, "but this should be addressed." Of the constant sexualized assessment of women, she said, "100 percent. That happens every day, all day." Ms. Jenai said the vulgar Wi Fi password was also used in the home she shared with Mr. Glassman, and was in keeping with the office patois. "They are nasty about women and they talk freely in front of them and it does make my skin crawl," she said, but not always. "I think it does need to be said that both Greg and I, and our friends, have raw senses of humor. There is a lot of that banter that I don't find offensive but the difference was, I was in a position of leadership so my job didn't depend on how I responded to those remarks." Ms. Jenai said people were punished for challenging the culture. "If you didn't agree with Greg, you would be ostracized, especially if you were a female," she said. "For me, the bigger problem than the language is the culture behind it. If you speak out, you're out. I've seen it firsthand, over and over and over." The CrossFit spokeswoman said that Ms. Jenai was motivated to lessen the company's value so she could buy it. The spokesman forwarded an email sent by Ms. Jenai to Matt Holdsworth, CrossFit, Inc.'s chief financial officer, on June 15, less than a week after Mr. Glassman had resigned. "My interest and intentions are solely based on wanting to help with current issues CrossFit is facing. I do not want to see the company or brand suffer," Ms. Jenai wrote. "I'm looking at 50M as an offer or thereabouts. Is this something CrossFit Inc would consider?" On Saturday morning, Ms. Jenai confirmed this. "I was approached by an investment company who wants to back me in buying CrossFit," she said. "In people's minds, including mine, it would be a very elegant solution. I don't want to see this thing go down the drain. I've talked to reporters because if I say nothing I'm complicit. If I talk to people and don't tell the truth, I'm a liar." CrossFit's first workouts were held in a garage in Santa Cruz, Calif. The county sheriff's department was among Mr. Glassman's earliest clients. The method has been popular among the police and the military, including those assigned to elite teams like Green Berets and Navy Seals, enhancing the fitness program's credibility. At the beginning of 2020, there were more than 14,000 affiliate gyms, according to Justin LoFranco, founder of Morning Chalk Up, a newsletter that covers the CrossFit community. Affiliated gyms pay CrossFit, Inc. an annual fee of 3,000 or less. The company also draws revenue from CrossFit Games and sponsorships, like one from Reebok, which was valued at about 100 million over the last 10 years. By the time the deal with Reebok was struck in 2010, CrossFit, Inc. already had a reputation. Lindsey Johnson, a CrossFit athlete hired by Reebok to train its executives, turned down an opportunity to do additional work for CrossFit, Inc. "I had heard too many stories about too many things I didn't want to be a part of," Ms. Johnson said, including "straight up bullying and sexual harassment of women. We've heard this story before, this isn't a brand new situation, someone at the top with a God complex." After Mr. Glassman's inflammatory tweet and comments about Mr. Floyd, Reebok announced that it would not renew the CrossFit deal. Morning Chalk Up reported that more than 1,200 affiliates had plans to disassociate themselves from the CrossFit brand. ("Greg thought Reebok was a terrible partner. He has been dying to get out of" the contract, the spokeswoman said. The spokesman added that only 450 affiliates have officially deactivated, some because of the pandemic.) Last week, scrutiny of the company intensified after Mr. Stumpf, a speaker on leadership, devoted an entire episode of his podcast, "Cleared Hot," to what he saw while working for CrossFit, Inc. from 2010 to 2014. "I cannot count the number of times that derogatory and specifically sexual comments were made about female staff members directly in my presence," Mr. Stumpf said, urging Mr. Glassman and the company to release former employees from nondisclosure agreements. That summer, the company hosted a CrossFit Health Conference in Madison, Wis. A blown up poster on social media and near the entrance of the conference featured an illustration of a doctor with money coming out of his white doctor's coat, surrounded by scantily dressed, buxom women, including one with dollar bills coming out of her short shorts as she grasps the doctor's crotch. Ms. Jenai, who now runs Manifest, which provides testing kits and personal coaching to help people deal with chronic health issues, said that Mr. Glassman's putting Mr. Castro in charge will not solve CrossFit, Inc.'s problems, since Mr. Glassman retains ownership. "He is a yes man," she said of Mr. Castro. "I believe Dave being put in this position, there is no change. It is the status quo." The CrossFit spokesman said it was untrue that Mr. Glassman would still be calling the shots. "He wants to retire and home school his kids," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
On the Saturday of Paris Men's Fashion Week last month, all 42 seats in a tiny restaurant just north of the Marais district were full, even those in the annex bar, where a couple in black Adidases and silver Louboutins were sharing guacamole with Kobe beef bacon. In the main dining room, lit by votive candles, a group of 15 were celebrating the birthday of YSL's studio director, while waiters in tan hide aprons circulated with wine bottles and glasses. Every few minutes, someone got up for a cigarette, but not before a petite Spanish woman wearing a leopard print blouse and chunky earrings and drinking white wine with ice stopped them for a double kiss and a "bonsoir, ca va?" At Anahi, everyone knows the lady of the house, Carmina Lebrero. The reopening in May of this 375 square foot Argentine restaurant, a few blocks from Place de la Republique at 49 rue Volta, has the couture world a flutter. Back in the 1990s, it served as an unofficial canteen of the louche fashion set, with its beloved owners, Ms. Lebrero and her sister, Pilar, serving as the mesdames of ceremonies. This is where Jean Paul Gaultier and Paloma Picasso canoodled shoulder pad to shoulder pad with Naomi Campbell, Thierry Mugler and other regulars. "It was a fashion hub," the designer Pierre Hardy said. "All the models, all the photographers; everybody was there. It was very social but also very private. It had the shine of Indochine but the comfort of Florent." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Despite the four dark years of the Trump administration, I see light at the end of the tunnel. And that light is generated by the strong reaction to incompetent and cruel government, evidenced by an increasing public outcry and record breaking early voter turnout. This autocratic, insensitive administration, supported by accomplices in the Senate, has provoked a strong interest and participation in the democratic process by individuals who previously felt powerless to change anything. As a reaction to the Trumpian tragedy, young people, minorities, women and the disenfranchised are increasingly dedicated to efforts to clear our government of corruption and to elect a new generation of individuals who are dedicated to improving life, liberty and justice for all. How must it feel to be Joe Biden today knowing that the future of our democracy rests in his hands? In the day before what could be the end of the world as we know it, all I want to do is watch reruns of classic New York Yankee games. Anything but face the suffocating thought that Donald Trump could be unleashed upon this nation in his full fury for four more years (or beyond). Joe Biden has lived through hard times that none should have to endure. He is remarkably resilient. But today the weight of the world rests on his shoulders, and even he must be staggering. Hillary Clinton's loss sent us into the streets in protest. A Democratic defeat in 2020 would send us into hell. Joe, no pressure, buddy. It's just like any other day, but our heads will explode if you fail in this mission. Donald Trump isn't the one driving this country apart. It's the establishment and the elite who are driving us apart by not accepting the views of others. My last vote was for Hillary Clinton; this one is for Mr. Trump! He cares for the little people, and I'm one of them (a teacher in the public schools). I am a Christian believer, and I do not approve of all of Mr. Trump's abrasiveness. However, I am not voting for pastor of my church, I am voting for leader of this country, warts and all. As a 19 year old farmer, I worry about my future in American agriculture an industry vulnerable to trade shifts, climate volatility, work force disruptions and politicians out of touch with farmers' interests. Hostility added to the mix alarms me. Just weeks ago a Massachusetts farmer's pro Biden display was burned, yet the description of the burning of the farm equipment of a Trump supporter, Jonathan Rempel, that some believe may have been politically motivated seems even more destructive by shredding community fabric. I pray that Henderson, Neb., can recover its kinship, a characteristic of rural communities that farmers count on as we look toward our future. But I do not trust the resilience of kinship based in unilateral support for one effective marketer a pied piper. I proudly cast my vote for Joe Biden because his plan for rural prosperity invites me and Mr. Rempel to partner as patriots in the work of feeding and fueling our country while stewarding our natural resources. While I disagree with President Trump on everything, I suspect that I share many values with Mr. Rempel. I imagine a future in which Mr. Rempel and I can capitalize on our shared values in a resilient kinship, with no place for arson. Just as farmers trust each other for information, we need to be able to trust each other as neighbors. I am writing this letter in nervous anticipation of the election results. The last four years have been so upsetting and, at the same time, so revealing. They have exposed the greed, hypocrisy, ignorance and partisan political thinking that regrettably have always been part of the human condition. But now the wild assertions on social media, raging propaganda on cable news, the widening gap between the haves and have nots, and the president's promotion of chaos and division have stretched our perceptions of truth and fairness and have damaged our political system. I believe that if President Trump wins there is little hope for our democracy. If Joe Biden wins and the Democrats win a majority in the Senate, we should have a good chance at recovery. But that in itself will not fix things. In this scenario, alt right groups and QAnon will temporarily go underground. But let's be clear: These destructive forces will not go away. For those who support Biden Harris and the future health of our democracy the work to establish equity in our political system will have just begun, and there will be no place for complacency. Stores and businesses being boarded up in preparation for postelection violence? Caravans of flag waving trucks intimidating and snarling highway traffic? I so hope Joe Biden wins and can make America America again. Some questions for the Trump supporters who feel entitled to act like anarchists by disrupting and stopping traffic: What gives you the right to break the law? What gives you the right to potentially delay firefighters, E.M.T.s and law enforcement doing their jobs? Do you really think rudeness and recklessness are the best ways to try to show your support for your favored candidate? Do you see any irony in breaking the law to show your support for the self proclaimed law and order candidate? How many of you would be outraged if antifa did exactly what you all did? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Want more basketball in your inbox? Sign up for Marc Stein's weekly N.B.A. newsletter here. The N.B.A. finals that will conclude the longest, strangest and most complicated season in league history begin Wednesday night. For the first time in six years, the game's grandest stage will not feature the Golden State Warriors. The closest that the Warriors' trusty trio of Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green will get to the finals is watching their former teammate Andre Iguodala, now with the Miami Heat, match up against a rival familiar to them all: LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers. "As a competitor, you always want to be there," Green said, "but when people ask me if I miss basketball right now, I tell them in a heartbeat, 'No, I don't.' We've done it at the highest level that you can possibly do it for five straight years. "What I do miss," Green continued, "is competing at the absolute highest level. I will miss playing in the finals and knowing that every basketball player in the world is watching me play performing on that stage." With the Warriors excluded from the N.B.A. bubble because of their lowly 15 50 record, Green still managed to find a new performance platform with no shortage of exposure. He made multiple appearances on TNT's "Inside The N.B.A." in recent weeks and was widely praised for the depth of analysis he brought to the sport's most celebrated studio show. Green described the relief defenders feel when Philadelphia's Joel Embiid shoots from long range. He went into deep detail about how the Portland Trail Blazers could set screens closer to midcourt to help free up Damian Lillard against the Los Angeles Clippers. He provided damning video evidence to support criticism of Nikola Jokic's defensive effort for the Denver Nuggets. Green also offered many more playoff insights on Twitter on nights he wasn't working in TNT's studio. "I love to try to educate through the TV position," Green said, citing Tony Romo, the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback, as an analyst he takes cues from. "The offense is lined up and the defense is lined up and he's telling us exactly what the offense is about to do because of what he sees," Green said. "Similar to Tony Romo, I want to give the world insight on what is actually going on out there on the court, as opposed to people thinking they know what's going on." As occasionally happens for him with the Warriors, Green encountered some turbulence in the studio, too, incurring a 50,000 tampering fine from the league office for saying that Devin Booker staying with the Phoenix Suns was "not good for his career." Mostly, though, Green won plaudits for his candor and the ability to take viewers deeper than usual into modern strategy. He likewise showed that he could work well alongside the TNT star Charles Barkley after years of public feuding. "Chuck has been in the TV business for 20 years," Green said. "Any time someone is in one particular business for that long, they're usually pretty good and Chuck is really good. I think when we're out there, there's usually several differences of opinion, and that's fine. Our opinions don't always have to align. He's an amazing person and he's an amazing talent when it comes to TV. I respect him." Ernie Johnson, Turner's Emmy Award winning host of "Inside," praised Green as the most "naturally good" analyst he has worked with since Johnson's longtime colleague Kenny Smith joined the show in 1998. Said Johnson: "I told Draymond one night after a show, as everyone was putting masks on and walking to their corners: 'Hey, life's good for you right now. I don't know how much longer you're going to play, but you know right now that the day you hang them up, everybody's going to want you to work for them if this is what you want to do.' " Green was scheduled to work most of the Western Conference finals for TNT but returned to California after Game 1 for the birth of his third child. He has filled the past six months with off court pursuits after the Warriors played almost the entire season without Curry and Thompson, as the sharpshooting guards recovered from injuries. Green has taken an active role in James's More Than a Vote campaign aimed at combating voter suppression in Black communities. In June, Green co wrote an editorial for ESPN with Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, urging the N.C.A.A. to pay college athletes. And his TV work has included several appearances on Turner's "The Arena" series, which covered a number of social issues, and on CNN as a contributor to discuss the ongoing efforts of players to speak out against systemic racism and police brutality. "I wouldn't necessarily say it's activism," Green said. "I just kind of believe what I believe in. I believe that there's a right and a wrong in things, so if I see something that I think is wrong, I'm not afraid to speak up on that." Back in analyst mode, Green is picking the Lakers to beat Iguodala's Heat in six games. "As much as I love what Miami has done in the bubble," he said, "LeBron and Anthony Davis are too much to handle." The three time N.B.A. All Star and former N.B.A. defensive player of the year has already decided that studio work "will definitely make up a part of what I'm doing after I'm done playing the game of basketball." The Warriors had the league's worst record, and it remains unclear how well Andrew Wiggins fits with them or how significantly Golden State can upgrade its roster with the No. 2 over all pick in the N.B.A. draft on Nov. 18. The games Green has been dissecting on TNT have nonetheless emboldened Green to believe that the Warriors can hush the naysayers and make a swift return to title contention, even though Curry, 32, and Thompson, 30, will have both missed more than a calendar year by the time the 2020 21 season starts. Green's confidence is hardly unreasonable. No one will call the Lakers a historically dominant team, even if the devastating duo of James and Davis handles Miami comfortably in the finals. The Heat, for that matter, were the East's No. 5 seed and thus are likely to continue to face skepticism that they can remain at their current level without the benefit of the randomness of bubble conditions. The Bucks and the Clippers, presumed powerhouses all season, are in varying states of disarray after their second round exits. The Celtics, Raptors and Rockets also have major questions to answer after their playoff disappointments. For all the Warriors must reassemble, there is comfort in knowing that no rival is rampaging in their absence. You ask; I answer. Every week in this space, I'll field three questions posed via email at marcstein newsletter nytimes.com. Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you're writing from, and make sure "Corner Three" is in the subject line. Q: Professor Stein! Has Jamal Murray worked with Rod Strickland? I noticed they both tend to drive all the way to the basket and release the ball at the last possible instant, which makes blocking their shots extremely difficult. Barron Hall Stein: The answer is no, but drawing parallels between the way Murray finishes at the rim and how distinctively Strickland did so throughout an 18 season N.B.A. career is high praise for Denver's Murray. Strickland took it as a compliment, too. I checked in with him after receiving your question just to make sure there was no hidden connection. He has been working as the program manager for the N.B.A. G League's professional pathway team, where highly rated prospects can spend a year awaiting eligibility for the N.B.A. draft in a pro environment rather than in the college game. Strickland said he doesn't know Murray personally. Yet as a fan, Strickland said he has indeed thought to himself that the Canadian's finishing on layups "looks familiar." "I left Kentucky before he got there and, honestly, I don't think that's teachable," Strickland said. "That's creative instincts, body control and imagination." Strickland was on John Calipari's staff with the Wildcats from 2009 14. Murray spent one season there, in 2015 16. Q: Bam Adebayo has played great basketball, but we shouldn't overreact to his performance against a really weak Celtics interior defense. 10goV23 from Twitter Stein: I can't totally dismiss what you're saying, because Boston certainly had the least imposing front line of the N.B.A.'s final four teams. The praise for Adebayo, though, certainly did not start with my story last week. Nor does it only stem from his effectiveness in the Eastern Conference finals, which Adebayo capped with a monster performance (32 points, 14 rebounds, 5 assists) in Miami's clinching Game 6 victory. Playing at that level in the N.B.A. finals against Anthony Davis will be a much tougher assignment, but let's face it: Adebayo has filled the description of breakout player all season. Next to Jimmy Butler's arrival on South Beach, Adebayo's emergence is as responsible as anything for launching the Heat on an N.B.A. finals run that no one I know predicted. Adebayo can guard the Lakers' Anthony Davis better than anyone Denver has, but Davis's own defensive capabilities are equally fearsome. The Lakers, remember, just emerged from a Western Conference finals in which Nikola Jokic averaged 21.8 points, 7.2 rebounds and 5.0 assists per game short of the levels Jokic hit in the Nuggets' second round upset of the Los Angeles Clippers. Dwight Howard's physicality and Jokic's bouts with foul trouble do not fully account for the statistical dip. Jokic, from what I know, has never relished playing against Davis, who has the mobility and wingspan to take space away as well as any big man in the league. How Adebayo copes will be a fascinating subplot. The Heat are bound to counter with various zone defense looks to try to exploit the Lakers' iffy perimeter shooting. Miami also has a number of defenders (Butler, Jae Crowder and, of course, Andre Iguodala) who can make LeBron James work hard and drain his battery. Those realities figure to add to Davis's burden. Q: Does the N.B.A. have any plans to add some gravitas to the finals in the bubble? It would be weird to see a championship series played with coaches in polo shirts and the goofy virtual fans on the screens. Mike Chamernik (Chicago, Ill.) Stein: Based on the latest information I've received from the league, coaches will not be switching back to suits in the N.B.A. finals and virtual fans (up to 320 of them) will continue to be beamed into the arena. I personally miss wearing suits and blazers to games and was roasted by peers in the bubble when I decided to sport more standard gear one night, but I think I am in the minority. How much of a gravitas boost would we really see by making coaches revert to more formal wear at this juncture? I welcome more meaningful suggestions on how to spruce things up, but the bubble, at this point, is the bubble. Although some cosmetic changes have been made to the actual hardwood, we won't see a dramatic shift in atmosphere at floor level like we typically do in the finals because the league remains determined, for safety reasons, to limit the number of people who can get close to the court. Eight of the 20 teams that have returned home from the N.B.A. bubble have made a coaching or front office change since their seasons ended. The Los Angeles Clippers were the latest Monday when they parted ways with Coach Doc Rivers. In the West, three teams are still looking for new coaches after departures in Houston (Mike D'Antoni), Oklahoma City (Billy Donovan) and New Orleans (Alvin Gentry). In the East, two ousters left coaching vacancies in Indiana (Nate McMillan) and Philadelphia (Brett Brown). The Nets replaced Jacque Vaughn as coach with Steve Nash, and the Sacramento Kings hired Monte McNair to replace Vlade Divac as general manager. If the Los Angeles Lakers beat Miami in the finals, LeBron James and Danny Green can join John Salley and Robert Horry on the short list of players to win championships with three different franchises. I completely botched my attempt to make the following point on Twitter on Saturday night, but James is also bidding to become the first player to win the N.B.A. finals Most Valuable Player Award with three different teams. In the first 36 seasons that the N.B.A. employed a 16 team playoff format, home teams posted a record of 1,817 968, good for a winning percentage of .652. In 2020's N.B.A. bubble, where all games are played at a neutral site, "home" teams are just 37 40 by far the worst success rate (.481) for home teams in any modern postseason. Last Friday marked the 20 year anniversary of two major events involving N.B.A. stars of their era. On Sept. 25, 2000, Vince Carter unleashed his famous "Le Dunk de la Mort" over France's Frederic Weis in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. On the same day, Boston's Paul Pierce was stabbed 11 times in a nightclub but survived the attack to make a full recovery and play 82 games in the ensuing 2000 01 season. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
American tax policy must stand as one of the great mysteries of the global political economy. In 1969 Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, Jimi Hendrix played "The Star Spangled Banner" at Woodstock, and federal, state and local governments in the United States raised about the same in taxes, as a share of the economy, as the government of the average industrialized country: 26.6 percent of gross domestic product, against 27 percent among the nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Nearly 50 years later, the tax picture has changed little in the United States. By 2015, the last year for which the O.E.C.D. has comparable data, the figure was 26.4 percent of G.D.P. But across the market democracies of the O.E.C.D., the share had climbed by an average of more than seven percentage points. Citizens of many countries that were poorer and little taxed in the 1960s, like Spain and Japan, today pay a much larger share of their incomes in taxes than their American counterparts. In some rich countries like Denmark, where taxes were already high in the 1960s, taxpayers now contribute almost 20 percentage points of G.D.P. more to the public purse than Americans do. Wagner's Law, named for the 19th century German economist Adolph Wagner, states that government spending as a share of the economy will increase as nations get richer and their citizens demand more and better public services. This may approximate public policy in other industrialized nations. In the United States, it fails. Americans are paying dearly as a result, as their comparatively small government has proved incapable of providing an adequate safety net to protect those most vulnerable to globalization and technological change. It is hard to understand the deep reasons behind the American aversion to taxes and government. Is it the vestigial expression of a rugged individualism born on the American frontier? Is it racial hostility an unwillingness by whites to fund social programs that some believe unduly benefit minorities? And whatever apologists for small government might argue, there is no credible evidence that countries with higher tax rates necessarily grow less. Over the last couple of weeks, Republicans have offered legislation to cut taxes by 1.5 trillion over the next decade more than half a percentage point of G.D.P. They assert a dire need to stimulate growth by encouraging corporations to invest in the United States. But Lawrence H. Summers, a former economic adviser to President Barack Obama, has asserted that the plan may instead "retard growth" and burden the middle class. Bruce Bartlett, who helped conceive the 1986 tax overhaul under President Ronald Reagan but has become a critic of Republicans, characterized claims that corporate tax cuts would increase the income of the middle class as "complete nonsense." 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Beyond this criticism, though, the debate offers an opportunity to look closely at the mechanics and consider the motivations behind the nation's great divergence with the other market democracies of the West. Austria, Belgium, Greece, Hungary, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Norway approved or carried out comprehensive tax reforms last year, according to the O.E.C.D. Other countries also enacted more piecemeal changes. With the exception of Greece, which is under German pressure to cut its budget deficit, they have all aimed at stimulating growth. Many of these efforts are likely to reduce income tax revenue, as the Republicans' plans would. But the larger goals are radically different; they are also meant to enhance equity. Of 15 O.E.C.D. countries that changed their top income tax rates for 2016 and later years, nine increased them and only six reduced them, the O.E.C.D. found. Most of the tax cuts were aimed at those below the top tier of earners: over all, 19 countries cut marginal income tax rates for those not in the highest bracket, aiming to increase the take home pay of average workers. At the bottom of the income distribution, Belgium, Britain, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands all increased the ranks of those owing no tax. Austria also expanded its tax credits, while Finland and the Netherlands increased the top payout of the earned income tax credit, and Ireland introduced such a credit for the low income self employed. To be sure, many tax changes in other rich countries benefit the rich. Inheritance taxes have declined in several other O.E.C.D. nations. The Republican proposition to cut corporate tax rates is hardly out of line: Most other advanced nations are doing the same thing. Still, reforms around the O.E.C.D. do not look quite like the American giveaways. For instance, countries that have cut corporate tax rates have also raised taxes on dividends shifting the tax burden from corporations to their shareholders, and collecting the tax revenue somewhere. I have written about this country's uniquely stingy tax policy before. Small government, I believe, has proved to be no match for its social ills, too puny to offer much resistance to rampant inequality, stubborn infant mortality or off the charts opioid addiction. American voters' uniquely intense hostility toward trade can, in the same way, be traced back to the government's ineffectiveness in mitigating trade's disruptions. Republicans seem to believe that the best prescription to address the nation's ills is to slash some 50,000 from the taxes of people earning a million or more. As Isabel V. Sawhill and Eleanor Krause of the Brookings Institution note, the estate tax could generate 1 trillion over a decade just by raising the rate and cutting the exemptions to where they were in the 1970s. Raising the exemption on the estate tax to 11 million, as Republicans propose, will help only a narrow sliver of ultrarich Americans. It is hard to conclude that the Republican proposal is about anything but that narrow sliver. If it succeeds, it will transform the United States from a low tax country to a lower tax one. And the mystery will persist: In cutting taxes as babies die and adults waste away in addiction, what do Americans mean by nation? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The career of the 88 year old American photographer Jay Maisel has been blessed both by his individual talent, which is vast, and by some very good fortune. That latter component manifested itself most generously in the early 1960s, when Maisel bought a six story, 36,000 square foot former bank building in Manhattan's SoHo, on the corner of Bowery and Spring. As he recalls in "Jay Myself," an energetic documentary directed by Stephen Wilkes (his former intern), he could not afford the building at the time. The 25,000 down payment was forbidding. But a magazine assignment fee turned out to be a per page deal, not a flat rate, and the pages were many. Voila, a down payment. The space enabled Maisel to become a hoarder, albeit a hoarder of genius. Several overhead shots in the movie show a floor covered by transparencies of his work; the views are reminiscent of the final shots of "Citizen Kane" or "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Maisel also invented gizmos, collected objects of various attractive colors (there's concern expressed in the movie over the ultimate fate of a group of blue bottles), and more. The structure was also where he lived, had a small family, and relaxed. One floor housed a basketball half court. At its far end was a gallery of Maisel's work, which covers as much under the sun as a single photographer can capture in a lifetime. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The applicant's nom de plume was not exactly subtle, if you know Polish. The middle initial and surname of the author, Anna O. Szust, mean "fraudster." Her publications were fake and her degrees were fake. The book chapters she listed among her publications could not be found, but perhaps that should not have been a surprise because the book publishers were fake, too. Yet, when Dr. Fraud applied to 360 randomly selected open access academic journals asking to be an editor, 48 accepted her and four made her editor in chief. She got two offers to start a new journal and be its editor. One journal sent her an email saying, "It's our pleasure to add your name as our editor in chief for the journal with no responsibilities." Little did they know that they had fallen for a sting, plotted and carried out by a group of researchers who wanted to draw attention to and systematically document the seamy side of open access publishing. While those types of journals began with earnest aspirations to make scientific papers available to everyone, their proliferation has had unintended consequences. Traditional journals typically are supported by subscribers who pay a fee while authors pay nothing to be published. Nonsubscribers can only read papers if they pay the journal for each one they want to see. Open access journals reverse that model. The authors pay and the published papers are free to anyone who cares to read them. Publishing in an open access journal can be expensive the highly regarded Public Library of Science (PLOS) journals charge from 1,495 to 2,900 to publish a paper, with the fee dependent on which of its journals accepts the paper. Not everyone anticipated what would happen next, or to what extent it would happen. The open access business model spawned a shadowy world of what have been called predatory journals. They may have similar names to legitimate journals, but exist by publishing just about anything sent to them for a fee that can range from under 100 to thousands of dollars. The fee often is between 100 and 400, said Jeffrey Beall, scholarly communications librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, as the journals compete for paying customers. Of course, it is easier for predatory journals to have low fees because their expenses are minimal. The researchers decided not to list any of the fake journals that they uncovered in the sting, saying that some have names so close to those of legitimate journals that it would be confusing. There are now thousands of fake open access journals, about as many as legitimate ones, according to one of the creators of Dr. Fraud, Katarzyna Pisanski, a researcher in the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex in England, and her colleagues. It was that alternate world that Dr. Fraud tapped into. The legitimate journals rejected her application out of hand, but many fake ones did not hesitate to take her on. The investigators, writing about their sting operation in Nature, said they had seen young colleagues fall for the blandishments of predatory journals, not realizing that the emails they received were from publications that only wanted their money. Dr. Pisanski and her colleagues wanted to help researchers understand how fake journals operated. "The emails can be very flattering," Dr. Pisanski said, telling the recipients they are "eminent researchers" and "inviting" them to contribute. When researchers respond and send in papers, "they are published at lightning speed, often without peer review," she said. But not everyone who publishes in these journals is an innocent dupe. Mr. Beall, who until recently published a list of predatory journals, said he believes many researchers know exactly what they are doing when they publish there. "I believe there are countless researchers and academics, currently employed, who have secured jobs, promotions, and tenure using publications in pay to publish journals as part of their credentials and experience for the jobs and promotions they got," Mr. Beall said. And it can require real diligence on the part of employers to ferret out those questionable publications, Mr. Beall said. "Examining someone's publications now requires close scrutiny," Mr. Beall said. "Merely eyeballing a C.V. is insufficient now." David Knutson, the manager of communications at PLOS, said that young researchers may feel relentless pressure to publish, at all costs. "These authors are shopping around their papers," he said. "There is so much pressure to publish." As for Dr. Fraud, she got some lucrative offers. One journal suggested she organize a conference, whose papers would then be published; she would get 40 percent of the proceeds. Another invited her to start a new journal and offered her 30 percent of the profits. Dr. Pisanski and her colleagues told the journals that accepted Dr. Fraud that she wanted to withdraw her application to be an editor. But it was not easy to withdraw. Dr. Fraud remains listed as a member of the editorial boards of at least 11 of those journals. She is also listed as a member of conference organizing committees. At least one journal she did not apply to also listed her as an editor. And, Dr. Pisanski and her colleagues wrote, Dr. Fraud is even listed as an advisory board member of the Journals Open Access Indexing Committee. Its mission? To "increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scholarly journals." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Deep into 's epic, multigenerational novel, "America Was Hard to Find," a young man tells the story of how he landed on the cover of Life magazine. In the picture, he's a 12 year old boy dropping chrysanthemums down the barrels of rifles carried by National Guard troops at a Vietnam War protest. But the image conceals a more complicated truth: When the picture was taken, this child was high on mushrooms, provided to him by a friend of his mother's. This gulf between the iconic photograph and the actual human experience, between the public's imagination of history and the way it feels to the person living through it is the focus of this sprawling but absorbing novel. The story follows the lives of three vastly different people: the boy in the picture, his mother and his father. It opens in 1957 in the Mojave Desert, where we meet Vincent, the man who will become the boy's father. He's a married Air Force pilot who will soon begin training to be an astronaut. Enter Fay, a 21 year old bartender who has recently rejected the conservatism (and the wealth) of her parents. Fay is smart, independent, adrift. Vincent is stoic to the point of near total silence. Their affair is brief, and Fay never reveals the resulting pregnancy to Vincent. Yet by the circuitous routes of history, both will also one day appear on covers of Life magazine. Vincent will become the first person to walk on the moon (though a feeling of emptiness instead of glory will trail him afterward). Fay will join a Weather Underground like group, eventually enacting the kind of horrifying protest that seems designed with the iconic photograph of it blazing in the mind. (Her Life cover.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
In the fractured world of modern boxing, Anthony Joshua has become something of a rare bird: a heavyweight champion who holds three of the four major belts. In Britain, his native country, he is a sporting hero. At 22 0 with 21 knockouts, including a marquee win over the longtime heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko in 2017, Joshua seems poised to break through to stardom on a more international level. He will fight professionally for the first time overseas on June 1 at Madison Square Garden, against Jarrell Miller, a brash Brooklyn native and a 5 1 underdog. "People call me the underdog, but that's all right," Miller, 30, said Tuesday. "I want to be the underdog. I wasn't born with a silver spoon." The only major belt Joshua doesn't hold is the World Boxing Council's, which remains the property of the unbeaten American Deontay Wilder. They each point fingers at the other to explain why a unification bout has not taken place, and Wilder has been distracted by the possibility of a rematch with Tyson Fury, whom he fought to a draw in December. A Joshua Wilder bout, should it happen, could set off a full revival of the heavyweight division. Joshua, 29, talked with reporters and editors of The New York Times on Tuesday. Their conversation has been edited and condensed. Your opponent. Jarrell Miller. He is a big guy. But he's like 300 plus pounds. (Joshua is generally around 250.) Is there a strategy you need to use for someone that large? Just beat him up. There's no real complicated stuff when it come to boxing. Just. Beat. Him. Up. You hit them hard, and you earn their respect. What happens is, their spirit is like 100 percent, then you've got to take them down to 80, to 60, to 40, to 20, until they got nothing left. And then if he stays in there it's how much heart he has. Yeah, he's a big guy. It's a bigger target. He's obviously going to be firing back, so I have to be on my A game. The other thing about Miller is that he's got a mouth on him. Yeah, but that's just verbal. I do physical. Does it bother you when he pops off? June 2 he'll be irrelevant. So he's relevant for the next 14 weeks. And then when it's all done, I'll move on to looking at Wilder, Fury or Luis Ortiz. Did you watch the Wilder Fury fight? They were on too late. In the U.K., it's like 5 in the morning. I'm focused on my training, and staying up that late is not good. Wilder Joshua is on the top of the list for a lot of fight fans. You think we'll see it soon? Yeah. I don't see why we don't see it now. The ball is in his court. When he's done freezing me out, he knows where to find me. I've knocked a few guys out with the uppercut. Dillian Whyte was a good one. Dominic Breazeale, in the second round I hit him with a good uppercut; I could have finished him off, but we took it easy. Klitschko, that was the end of the beginning for him. What's been your hardest fight so far? In the fifth round, you put him down, he rallied ... Remember, I was knocking everyone out in like three or four rounds. I thought Klitschko was going to be knocked down as well, no doubt. So when I dropped him in the fifth, I assumed he was just like the rest of them. I learned that Klitschko is a little bit different. He's battle hardened. He comes from the Soviet Union. Who you are is what comes out in the ring. Klitschko comes from having one bottle of water in the shop, one pen, one chocolate, one loaf of bread. So he's quite a hard person. Does fighting away from home for the first time affect you? It does. There's major historic fighters who fought away from home and took their first losses. I have to be aware of that. That's why we're doing five weeks, rather than a two or three week training camp here. Your website lists your favorite boxers. Are there things you pick and choose from each of those? Evander Holyfield was good; he bobs to the right. He kind of sets up the right hand. Sugar Ray Robinson, man, the footwork, the class. Jack Johnson, just dominance. Mike Tyson, just a machine. He wasn't supposed to be a boxer. He went from jail to the Catskills, and they trained him to be the best fighter in the world. What do you want your legacy to be? To have no hatred in my heart for up and coming heavyweights. Watch them and not be bitter. I love the sport. I want that person to beat my record. I want them to do better than I did. What's your preference: To be in a war or to just dismantle somebody? You don't see the best of me until you put me in a sick situation. I'll just take it easy. Just cruise control. If I box from a distance, less punishment for me, cool. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The scale of the coronavirus pandemic and the economic shutdowns it caused set in motion a series of debates and questions about what the world may look like once its stranglehold on society loosens: Will we travel less? Will we work at home more? Will norms in schools and at large scale public events be changed for years? Less noticed, but just as important, is the potential that the coronavirus could be a catalyst to overhaul the global economic order. A debate on the failures of the global economy had already started before the pandemic, born of a sense that capitalism and corporations had become parasites on the planet. In the aftermath of the pandemic, the world's rich countries should do more than just wait for corporations to change. They have to overhaul their monetary policies, the forms of private investment they incentivize and the attitudes of their antitrust enforcement. Until now, monetary policy has rewarded holders of financial assets over those who have stock in real assets like land, factories and labor. That's because the world's most powerful central banks have prioritized controlling inflation over expanding industrial capacity and employment in what's called the "real economy." This status quo in central banking, which has been dominant for four decades, has encouraged corporations, especially the largest publicly traded companies, to focus on short term financial gains and share prices at the expense of pursuing longer term investments that would reap more broadly shared rewards. Compounding the gains of those who already own plenty of capital has resulted in the entrenched income inequality and stagnant wages that citizens in dozens of countries bemoan. In the United States, the Federal Reserve is expected to operate under its dual mandate to promote "maximum employment" and stabilize prices (by limiting inflation). However, while central banks like the Fed have explicit inflation targets typically aiming to keep the rate at 2 percent they do not have explicit unemployment targets. The Fed, could instead put new policies in place that make a very low unemployment rate or more aggressively, underemployment rate the new trigger for whether it decides to stimulate or hit the financial breaks on the economy. This shift would avert the risk of depressing wages and be helpful to groups in the work force who are discriminated against and often "first fired, last hired." And crucially, it would reward companies for longer term investments that promote real economic growth. How else can the financial markets be encouraged to prioritize real, productive investment? Governments can begin to issue higher taxes on dividend payments to large shareholders of big, publicly traded companies and pair that with tax reductions on long term investments. It's not surprising that investors who for years looked at a landscape of sluggish to moderate global growth have been looking for quick financial returns rather than productive, but sometimes risky, long term investments. Guided by shareholder demands, for the past decade businesses have focused on delivering returns quickly and predictably to investors instead of investing in longer horizon infrastructures like research, plants and machinery that would ultimately lead to innovation and drive economic growth. According to a 2019 report, "American Investment in the 21st Century," led by Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, net private domestic investment in fixed assets like equipment, machinery and property has shrunk in half since the mid 1980s. Higher taxes on large dividend payments and federal subsidies for long term investments could help America reverse course. We also need to address concentration of corporate power. To overhaul the prevailing global economic architecture, the globe's leading governments will need to address the fact that many sectors airlines, banking, technology have become oligopolies dominated by just a few multinational corporations. These Gilded Age style markets reduce competition and concentrate the pricing power of large, well connected corporations. There have been calls to break up technology companies or to limit their scale and monopolistic tendencies. However, dozens of national regulators are pitted against global corporations that can use their multiple bases to evade rules inconvenient to them. So international regulatory cooperation will be needed to rein in the increasingly unfettered power of these multinational behemoths. At a time when many governments seem steered by nationalism, effective cross border cooperation is hard to imagine. However, feats of global cooperation from the past like the post World War II establishment of the Bretton Woods system's new world order offer examples of leaders eventually meeting the moment even amid formidable challenges. The pandemic is not just giving us a chance to rethink how to best live and work. It is also providing an opportunity to reconsider the way that the very structures of our world economy operate. Dr. Moyo is an economist and the author of "How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly and the Stark Choices that Lie Ahead." 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. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
To hear Beyonce speak is such a rare occurrence that any new instance of it, no matter how fleeting, feels special, like catching a glimpse of a shooting star. So naturally, her involvement with Disney's remake of "The Lion King" she voices the adult Nala and created a companion album featuring new music inspired by the movie has dominated the film's promotional tour, complete with a meeting between Queen Bey and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, at the British premiere. But how much (non singing) Queen Bey should audiences expect to hear in this re envisioning of Pride Rock, due in theaters Friday? Though the new film is 30 minutes longer than its predecessor (118 minutes in 2019 vs. 88 minutes in 1994) and features additional scenes for the adult Nala, Beyonce's screen time is fairly comparable to Moira Kelly's in the original. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
MALIBU, Calif. When Denise Richards first met with the producers of "The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills," she wore a Guns N' Roses T shirt and ripped denim. "They said I was the first one ever to come in not all dolled up," Ms. Richards, 48, said as she melted into a plush gray chair at her husband's office in Malibu, Calif., where he practices "frequency medicine" (alternative treatments that involve light and sound). The endless blue of the Pacific Ocean spread out through the window behind the actress, who was dressed again in casual cool fashion: a Fleetwood Mac tee and jeans. Now Ms. Richards has seen the inner workings of the show and is happy to share some trade secrets. "Producers aren't coming up to us saying, 'O.K., why don't you guys start talking about this and fighting about this,'" she said. "That doesn't happen." And anyway, the conflicts make up a small part of the relationships between the Housewives, she said. Otherwise, "Why would we hang out with each other?" For the most part, Ms. Richards has avoided the drama on which the show is built. With the help of Lisa Rinna, a longtime friend and castmate, she has eased her way into the show's social circle and avoided the season's central conflic t: the never ending story line surrounding Dorit Kemsley giving away the dog she adopted from Lisa Vanderpump's rescue center. And while some on the show shrink at the mention of their love lives, Ms. Richards has spoken frankly about her husband, Aaron Phypers, and their sex life. In one memorable episode, she said that she has sex with her husband every morning (which, good for them) and spoke glowingly about his physical endowment. After several rounds of drinks, Ms. Richards couldn't stop talking about it to Ms. Vanderpump and Kyle Richards while Mr. Phypers was sitting adjacent. Counting how many times Ms. Richards mentioned his body part in the conversation would have made a great "Watch What Happens Live" drinking game. When Mr. Phypers pops into his office during the interview for this article, his jawline that of a Lifetime movie villain , the scene comes immediately to mind. "I think he was so shocked I said it in front of him," Ms. Richards said of the onscreen discussion of his endowment. "It's not such a bad thing." Mr. Phypers chimed in, adding that after the episode aired, his 80 something office assistant, Peggy, said, "All right, drop 'em, let's see this." That conversation did not touch on the fact that, in the United States, many such massage parlors are part of a multibillion dollar sex trafficking trade that relies on immigrant labor. That conversation was left off the show or didn't happen at all. (In a follow up interview, Ms. Richards said, "It was a lighthearted conversation, and nothing inappropriate happened at a massage parlor.") Ms. Richards and Mr. Phypers further captivated the attention of "Beverly Hills" viewers when the couple planned a quickie wedding, sent invites by text message and got married in the space of two days. They had wanted to wed earlier, Ms. Richards said, but "circumstances just weren't permitting." "Housewives" isn't Ms. Richards's first reality rodeo. In 2008, "Denise Richards: It's Complicated" premiered on E!, chronicling her life as a single mother juggling her acting career in the wake of her tumultuous divorce from Charlie Sheen. On "Housewives," their co parenting relationship has appeared candid and quite strong; Ms. Richards has been very determined to keep things positive for her children. But she admits it come in waves. "I just have to keep things very positive and very harmonious for the kids, and not let them be privy to any kind of discord between us," she said. She always includes Mr. Sheen when things have to do with their children. For instance, he was invited to Ms. Richards's wedding in November 2018, and when Mr. Sheen arrived to Thanksgiving dinner a few years back with a prostitute in his car, Ms. Richards set a plate for her, telling her children she was a friend's assistant. "It was definitely not your traditional Thanksgiving situation," Ms. Richards said. Looking back on their relationship, she said she couldn't have imagined the direction their lives would take: "When I married Charlie, he had been sober for four years, he was in a very different place in his life." But she'd rather not dwell on the subject. While Ms. Richards has been working for nearly 30 years, and has appeared in films like "Starship Troopers," "Wild Things" and "The World Is Not Enough," she hasn't appeared in many big budget movies. Asked whether she thought there was a reason for that, personal or otherwise, she said: "I think there's different choices," and that there's "nothing I would want to talk about publicly." "Choices were made, and that's something that I would not want to bring up years later," she added. And anyway, she is just grateful to still be working. She recently starred in the soap opera "The Bold and the Beautiful" and has other shows and a feature film coming down the pipeline. "Of course, would I love to do a big blockbuster movie or do movies that you get recognized for doing?" she said. "I would've loved to do some of those roles too. But, I feel very grateful and blessed that I'm able to continue working. I'm not 25, so to be able to still maintain and make a living my whole career, is something that I'm very grateful for." Ms. Richards recently shot the highly anticipated "Housewives" reunion, which began airing earlier this month. She was excited for her first reunion, which shocked the other Housewives. "I love seeing everyone, and I love our crew," she said. "I've missed filming with the crew." In some ways, the end of season rite asked more of the women than the show itself: Ms. Richards said she was picked up at 6 a.m. to go to the set and didn't leave until 9 p.m. She said she had to sit in heels and a gown all day with breaks only for the bathroom. The producers told her it was "the longest taping ever." So ... will she be coming back for Season 10? "I would definitely go back if they officially tell us that we can," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Just in time for International Women's Day last Sunday, Agent Provocateur, the British lingerie company founded as a kind of hipper, kinkier Victoria's Secret, released a new ad campaign. It features four high achieving sportswomen, many of whom are also Olympians: the Canadian pole vaulter Alysha Newman, the American climber Sasha DiGiulian, the British gymnast Georgia Mae Fenton and the American hurdler and sprinter Queen Harrison Claye. And it features them in action on the track, mid rock face, on the uneven bars in underwear, though not perhaps the underwear you might expect. Instead of sports bras and leggings or briefs, they are wearing mostly push up bras, lace and garter belts. Plus one filmy little robe, an elaborate gold chain and ... it's not exactly clear what. Looks kind of like a halter. According to Sarah Shotton, the creative director of Agent Provocateur, the goal of the campaign was "to hero" a different kind of body. The sportswomen featured were given the choice of what they wanted to wear. And by wearing it in the context of their discipline, as opposed to the context of a runway show designed by men and largely attended by men, by doing it for a company run by women, in clothing designed by women, they are changing both the narrative and its authors. This is pretty much the same argument used by Rihanna in her Savage x Fenty line, and expressed in her Amazon streamed lingerie spectacular last September, which featured dancers, models and celebrities of all sizes and skin tones gyrating in a variety of ever tinier underthings and high heels by their own choice. And it is the position of the Agent Provocateur athletes. "A lot of times, as an elite athlete I feel we are told we are powerful but not feminine," Ms. Harrison Claye, the hurdler, said. "So to have a brand celebrate a physique like mine spoke volumes to me. Because to me, my strength is my femininity. They don't exist on either side of a divide." Yet it is impossible to view the images and not wonder if it is really women taking charge of their own sexuality that people will see or, rather, very strong women being reduced to their sexuality. (Victoria's Secret also tried to suggest that the women in its shows felt empowered, only for some of them to announce later that they didn't actually feel that way at all). Or not to wonder: Am I really meant to take this and by association, her seriously? "Because I am training and in the public eye, I do take into consideration how things I put out into the world can be perceived," said Ms. DiGiulian, the climber. "But I do not let it control my decision making. I felt very strongly about bringing to life my own power through these images." "We are all navigating what femininity means in a post MeToo world," Ms. Shotton said. "To define what it means to be a woman in the 2020s. It's challenging for all of us." That question may be most obvious when it comes to underwear at least the kind that is less about practicality than what lies beneath but it was also the single biggest thread running though the recent ready to wear season. (At least as far as clothing went; as for conversation, it was the coronavirus.) So there was Sarah Burton before her Alexander McQueen show, demonstrating how a single fabric had been woven so that it segued from matte to sheer to reflect the multiple qualities and identities encompassed by the idea of the "feminine," because, she said, "strength and fragility can coexist in one woman, one person." There was Silvia Fendi, backstage before her Fendi show, talking about balancing the tropes of girlishness and executive power and revealing that "as a kid, I never had anything pink." "I was raised convinced I had to put those symbols aside to find my space in society. But there is something very subversive about a strong woman dressing like a femme fatale." And there was Virginie Viard name checking the film "Les Biches" by Chabrol in her show notes "for his Parisiennes who are as feminine as they are amazones" as an inspiration for her Chanel collection. Femininity in all its multiple meanings also came up at Alberta Ferretti, Prada, Lanvin, Paco Rabanne, Miu Miu, Chloe and Dries Van Noten (to name a few). Not to mention Dior, where Maria Grazia Chiuri, the artistic director of women's wear, highlighted the work of a second wave feminist, the Italian art critic Carla Lonzi, and then pulled quotes from her work for T shirts ("I say I") and the neon signs that were her set decoration ("Consent," "Women's Love Is Unpaid Labor"). To a certain extent, this would be expected. After all, these were (mostly) women's wear collections. Femininity is presumably a defining issue when it comes to this particular sector. It should be a given that clothes would wrestle with its meaning, just as designing women's wear (and women's lingerie, for that matter) should be, by definition, a feminist act one targeted at making women's lives better, addressing their evolving sense of identity, and expressing it to the world. Yet it's hard to remember any season in which the term itself was so overtly questioned or underscored. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
When not wanting to dri ve them selves to a given destination, some passengers be they faithful to Uber or Lyft feel the need fo r spee d. But I feel the need for Ameed. Ameed Musleh is an independent driver for hire. Although he either owns or has access to newer Lincoln Town Cars, his primary vehicle is a 1998 edition with nearly 400,000 miles on the odometer. Its back seat and trunk are extraordinarily spacious, and it floats along the road as though you're on a lake with no chop. Its black exterior is exquisitely maintained; its tan interior is cracking a bit and smells of cigarettes, but is still plenty comfy. If you want to ride in silence, M r. Musleh , 50, will grant you that serenity without you having to specify as much on an app. If you like your conversation a bit bawdy, Mr. Musleh can work blue. Standup comics read a room; Mr. Musleh reads his back seat. Occasionally, Mr. Musleh is available on extremely short notice. But more often than not, you have to book him a few hours in advance, pre negotiating a rate that almost always beats those of the ride share services. On the back end of a big night on Seattle's bustling Ballard Avenue, while scores of tipplers wage war with their smartphones in hopes of landing a limited supply of Ubers or Lyfts in the immediate area, Mr. Musleh's Town Car pulls smoothly up to where you're standing on the side of the road. It looks particularly regal in the rain, and it only has eyes for you. Even with the predominance of Uber and Lyft, plenty of Americans still ask to be driven someplace by a "town car." But with every passing year, the odds become slimmer that they'll be ferried to their destination by an actual Town Car, a model Lincoln ceased manufacturing in 2011, and which is now too old to qualify for Uber and Lyft's luxury offerings or, in some major cities, their standard level of service. And because of the deteriorating interiors, many private livery companies are slowly phasing out even newer Town Cars, replacing them with supersize S.U.V.s, Mercedes sedans, Chrysler 300s or Lincoln Continentals, a model that Lincoln rebooted in 2016 after a 14 year absence from new car lots, presumably because Matthew McConaughey wanted to make weird commercials about them. "A lot of people will, de facto, be like, 'I need a Town Car,'" said Colin Perceful, a former doorman at the Muse Hotel in New York and the Four Seasons in Seattle, who now operates his own tour company, Totally Seattle Tours. "We'll say, 'O.K., how about a luxury sedan?' And they're like, 'Yeah, same thing.' It's like when someone asks for a Kleenex instead of a tissue. The Town Car sort of embedded itself into the lexicon of transportation." A native of Palestine, Mr. Musleh moved from a refugee camp in Jordan to the United States three decades ago on a student visa. He had a friend who drove a taxi, so he tried that for about 10 years. But he felt as if he was being charged too much to lease his vehicle from a cab company, so as soon as he had enough regular customers, he plunked down 5,000 for that '98 Town Car and struck out on his own after briefly considering driving 18 wheelers for a living. Business boomed for the first five years, he said, before Uber really asserted itself and cost Mr. Musleh about 75 percent of his regular business. Hence, he is considering adding a newe r Chrysler 300 to his fleet so he can augment his income by driving for Lyft. "Fifty percent of my customers left because they got older and don't go out as much, 25 percent went to Uber and Lyft, and 25 percent remained," Mr. Musleh said. "Young customers feel like they're bothering me." Curiously enough, when Uber got its start in 2009 as UberCab, it was primarily a black car service that relied heavily on Lincoln Town Cars. But with the dawn of UberX, the cheaper service, the company's hybrid heavy fleet effectively ate its dad. In a way, this is just history repeating itself. Around the time Geoff Puett got into the chauffeured car business in the mid '90s, industry preferences were shifting from stretch limousines to Lincoln Town Cars, which, as he said, adopted a "smaller, rounder body style" in 1998. Mr. Puett, the general manager of Bayview Limousine in suburban Seattle, still has five 2011 Town Cars in his fleet because, as he put it, he "has passengers who refuse to ride in anything else." By contrast, Bayview has 17 Continentals, a number that may increase once the company sells off it s Town Car s. He likes the new Continentals but conceded that the trunk isn't nearly as deep as the Town Car's, joking that "you could get five bodies" in that storage space. When Mr. Puett has had to sell stretch limos to private buyers, he has been struck by the number of families who have snapped them up. Turns out that the window between the front and back seat is not only useful for concealing morally questionable behavior among adults, but it's also great for deadening the din of screaming 6 year olds. While Mr. Puett pointed out that later model Town Cars were virtually "all fleet sales," there are some passionate individual enthusiasts. "They were and are bullet cars that can go 300,000 miles easily," said David Gustafson, the 80 year old communications chairman of the National Lincoln and Continental Owners Club. A resident of Burnsville, Minn., Mr. Gustafson added that "you just can't kill" Town Cars, which he affectionately referred to as "BarcaLoungers on wheels." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Some of Joe Judge's intensity and preparedness is owed to his mentor, Bill Belichick, but his style is his own. "He's energetic on the field," said Giants quarterback Daniel Jones. "Guys respond to that." The Giants and the Jets have struggled with the injuries, internal dissent and, to put it plainly, winning in recent seasons. As the Giants, who were 4 12 last year, face their first true post Eli Manning season, the team's identity under General Manager Dave Gettleman will be clear. For the Jets, a nine year postseason drought and off season shots at Coach Adam Gase's leadership obscure the competence the team showed while going 6 2 in the second half of a 7 9 season. The teams were the first in the N.F.L. to declare they would play without fans at home games this season. And with a heightened cry against social injustice sounded across the country, members of the Jets and Giants organizations have contemplated their part in the movement. The Jets were one of the teams that canceled practice after the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis., in solidarity with the walkout across North American sports leagues last month; the Giants also delayed practice. Leaguewide statements and individual displays are planned, and players from the two New York metropolitan area teams said they hoped to use their platform to bolster awareness. Players have not ruled out sitting out games in protest, but they think discussions over the next week will solidify what actions will be most impactful. "How far can we take it, what's another level we can take it to?" Giants running back Saquon Barkley said in a news media call recently. Without a preseason game pulse check, both teams will rapidly show whether their new courses will hold in a season unlike any other in their players' lifetimes. Though Gettleman is the architect of the Giants' current team, he promised on a call with reporters recently that they would be the Fighting Joe Judges this year. 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. He is hoping the team adopts the spirit of its first time head coach, Joe Judge, who was an assistant in New England since 2012 and a staff member at Alabama before his hire in January. In his few weeks of training camp, Judge's energetic team building has made people take note. "He definitely used a couple of profanities every other sentence," said the Giants' new defensive back, Logan Ryan, who helped the Patriots win two Super Bowls, adding that the coach was a significant reason for him signing. "He's energetic on the field," Daniel Jones, the team's starting quarterback, said. "Guys respond to that." It's a far cry from the team's temperature in two seasons under Pat Shurmur, who was 9 23, and a positive sign for a guy who was the team's second choice for head coach after Matt Rhule took the Carolina Panthers job. Judge compensated for his inexperience by adding the former Dallas Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett as offensive coordinator. The 2016 Coach of the Year Award winner, Garrett should help Jones, who is in his second season, own the position now that Manning's 16 year tenure and two Super Bowl wins are officially in the past. The Giants open their season at MetLife Stadium on Monday night against the Pittsburgh Steelers. "I'm looking forward to getting into any stadium we can where there's people cheering, booing whatever they're doing," Judge said. "It brings a lot of energy and excitement to what we do on Sunday." The Jets' Adam Gase is looking for consistency. Where Judge's job is to provide a revitalization, Gase has taken shot after shot for a weak 2019 season from fans and players alike, with the departed safety Jamal Adams questioning whether he was the leader the team needed. The question was a residual one. After Gase took over the team to start the 2019 season, the Jets had their worst start in 12 years, going 1 7. As Gase has said, his lesson from last year has been that no one can control injures. This year begins on the same note: Two receivers who were expected to start in 2020 Denzel Mims and Breshad Perriman were among those who spent much of training camp in recovery. "Couple more roster gymnastics, I would say," Joe Douglas, the team's general manager, said on Monday. Injury and sickness are not new to the Jets. Last year, the team's starting quarterback, Sam Darnold, came down with mononucleosis, which kept him out of three games. Over the remote off season and the in person training camp that followed, Gase focused on team meetings, watching tape and, in some cases, shortening practices to prepare for their Week 1 game on Sunday against the Buffalo Bills. "We just haven't been able to really get to do it on the field because we haven't been healthy yet," Gase said. In his second season, Gase has emphasized consistency and routine in the Jets' dormitory style training camp, where he said he tried to get players into a rhythm of virus test, practice, repeat. That, and a mostly stable offensive lineup, should be the greatest gift Gase can provide Darnold (despite cutting center Jonotthan Harrison last weekend), who aims to boost his completion percentage from 61.9 percent last year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Air pollution, even of short duration, increases the number of lower respiratory infections, a new study reports, and the effects may be particularly serious in young children. Acute respiratory infection of the lungs and airways, usually caused by viruses, are a leading cause of illness and death in young children. The study, in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, tracked 146,397 people, 77 percent of them children younger than 2, who had infections treated in hospitals and clinics in Utah. Researchers gathered data on levels of small particulate matter, or PM2.5, from sensors at three monitoring stations in the state's Wasatch Front region. The area has substantial variations in PM2.5. Beginning in the second week after an increase in pollution levels, the researchers found a corresponding increase in respiratory infections, peaking in the third week after the PM2.5 increase. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
WASHINGTON Four minutes into a video that was posted on Instagram last month, Justin Bieber leaned into the camera and adjusted the front of his black knit beanie. For some of his 130 million followers, it was a signal. In the video, someone had posted a comment asking Mr. Bieber to touch his hat if he had been a victim of a child trafficking ring known as PizzaGate. Thousands of comments were flooding in, and there was no evidence that Mr. Bieber had seen that message. But the pop star's innocuous gesture set off a flurry of online activity, which highlighted the resurgence of one of social media's early conspiracy theories. Viewers quickly uploaded hundreds of videos online analyzing Mr. Bieber's action. The videos were translated into Spanish, Portuguese and other languages, amassing millions of views. Fans then left thousands of comments on Mr. Bieber's social media posts asking him if he was safe. Within days, searches for "Justin and PizzaGate" soared on Google, and the hashtag savebieber started trending. Four years ago, ahead of the 2016 presidential election, the baseless notion that Hillary Clinton and Democratic elites were running a child sex trafficking ring out of a Washington pizzeria spread across the internet, illustrating how a crackpot idea with no truth to it could blossom on social media and how dangerous it could be. In December 2016, a vigilante gunman showed up at the restaurant with an assault rifle and opened fire into a closet. This time, PizzaGate is being fueled by a younger generation that is active on TikTok, which was in its infancy four years ago, as well as on other social media platforms. The conspiracy group QAnon is also promoting PizzaGate in private Facebook groups and creating easy to share memes on it. Driven by these new elements, the theory has morphed. PizzaGate no longer focuses on Mrs. Clinton and has taken on less of a political bent. Its new targets and victims are a broader assortment of powerful businesspeople, politicians and celebrities, including Mr. Bieber, Bill Gates, Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah Winfrey and Chrissy Teigen, who are lumped together as part of the global elite. For groups like QAnon, PizzaGate has become a convenient way to foment discontent. The theory has also gone global. While it previously found traction mainly in the United States, videos and posts about it have racked up millions of views in Italy, Brazil and Turkey. "PizzaGate never went away because it encompasses very potent forces," including children's safety and the power of elites, said Alice Marwick, a disinformation expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "But now there is so much scaffolding from people who have researched it, it wasn't hard for others to pick up from there." PizzaGate is reaching a level that nearly exceeds its 2016 fever pitch, according to an analysis by The New York Times. TikTok posts with the PizzaGate hashtag have been viewed more than 82 million times in recent months. Google searches for PizzaGate have skyrocketed. In the first week of June, comments, likes and shares of PizzaGate also spiked to more than 800,000 on Facebook and nearly 600,000 on Instagram, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook owned tool for analyzing social interactions. That compares with 512,000 interactions on Facebook and 93,000 on Instagram during the first week of December 2016. From the start of 2017 through January this year, the average number of weekly PizzaGate mentions, likes and shares on Facebook and Instagram was under 20,000, according to The Times's analysis. The conspiracy has regained momentum even as its original targets Mrs. Clinton, her top aides and a Washington pizzeria, Comet Ping Pong are still dealing with the fallout. Hateful comments have recently surged on the Facebook page and Yelp and Google review pages for Comet Ping Pong, where the child trafficking supposedly happened. The pizzeria's owner, James Alefantis, said he had received fresh death threats that caused the Federal Bureau of Investigation to open a new investigation two months ago. The F.B.I. said Friday that it could not confirm the existence of an investigation. "There are no real options for someone like me. I don't have the names or numbers for people to call at Google or TikTok," Mr. Alefantis said. "But I don't want to be that person who lives their life in fear." Representatives for Mr. Bieber didn't respond to requests for comment. PizzaGate was born in 2016 in online forums like 4chan and Reddit, where right wing users and supporters of Donald J. Trump pored over hacked emails from John D. Podesta, Mrs. Clinton's senior campaign adviser, looking for evidence of wrongdoing. Some emails referring to Mr. Podesta's dinner plans mentioned pizza. A 4chan participant then connected the phrase "cheese pizza" to pedophiles, who on chat boards use the initials "c.p." to denote child pornography. Mr. Alefantis, who is friends with Mr. Podesta's brother, Tony, was mentioned in several of the emails. That led internet users to connect his pizza parlor to their conspiracy. The theory soon appeared in bogus publications like The Vigilant Citizen and The New Nationalist on Facebook and Instagram. On Twitter and YouTube, other users amplified the content. Fact checkers debunked the idea. But weeks after the November 2016 election, Edgar M. Welch, 32, a North Carolina resident, drove six hours to Comet Ping Pong to free what he believed were enslaved children. He shot several rounds from a military style assault rifle into a locked closet door of the pizzeria and eventually surrendered to the police. In 2017, he was sentenced to four years in prison. But starting in April, a confluence of factors renewed interest. A documentary promoting PizzaGate, "Out of Shadows," made by a former Hollywood stuntman, was released on YouTube that month and passed around the QAnon community. In May, the idea that Mr. Bieber was connected to the conspiracy surfaced. Teenagers on TikTok began promoting both, as reported earlier by The Daily Beast. A week ago, Rachel McNear, 20, watched "Out of Shadows," which has garnered 15 million views on YouTube. She then turned to Twitter, where she came across Mr. Bieber's supposed association with PizzaGate. After reading more on Instagram, YouTube and Facebook, she created a one minute description of her research on the topic and posted it to TikTok on Monday. "The mainstream media uses words like conspiracy theory and how it is debunked but I'm seeing the research," Ms. McNear, of Timonium, Md., said in an interview. Her video was taken down on Wednesday when TikTok removed the PizzaGate hashtag and all content searchable with the term. A TikTok spokeswoman said such content violated its guidelines. That same day, Facebook also expunged PizzaGate related comments under Comet Ping Pong's page after a call from The Times. YouTube said it had long demoted PizzaGate related videos and removes them from its recommendation engine, including "Out of Shadows." Twitter said it constantly eliminates PizzaGate posts and had updated its child sexual exploitation policy to prevent harm from the conspiracy. Facebook said it had created new policies, teams and tools to prevent falsehoods like PizzaGate from spreading. Teenagers and young adults, many of whom are just forming political beliefs, are particularly susceptible to PizzaGate, said Travis View, a researcher and host of the "QAnon Anonymous" podcast, which examines conspiracy theories. They are drawn to celebrity photos on tabloid sites and Hollywood blogs to uncover PizzaGate's supposed secret symbols and clues, he said. Even a triangle which can signify a slice of pizza can be taken as proof that a celebrity is part of a secret elite cabal. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Are you better off now than you were in July? On the face of it, that shouldn't even be a question. After all, stocks are up; the economy added more than a million jobs in "August" (I'll explain the scare quotes in a minute); preliminary estimates suggest that G.D.P. is growing rapidly in the third quarter, which ends this month. But the stock market isn't the economy: more than half of all stocks are owned by only 1 percent of Americans, while the bottom half of the population owns only 0.7 percent of the market. Jobs and G.D.P., by contrast, sort of are the economy. But they aren't the economy's point. What some economists and many politicians often forget is that economics isn't fundamentally about data, it's about people. I like data as much as, or probably more than, the next guy. But an economy's success should be judged not by impersonal statistics, but by whether people's lives are getting better. And the simple fact is that over the past few weeks the lives of many Americans have gotten much worse. Obviously this is true for the roughly 30,000 Americans who died of Covid 19 in August for comparison, only 4,000 people died in the European Union, which has a larger population plus the unknown but large number of our citizens who suffered long term health damage. And don't look now, but the number of new coronavirus cases, which had been declining, seems to have plateaued; between Labor Day and school re openings, there's a pretty good chance that the virus situation is about to take another turn for the worse. But things have already gotten worse for millions of families that lost most of their normal income as a result of the pandemic and still haven't gotten it back. For the first few months of the pandemic depression many of these Americans were getting by thanks to emergency federal aid. But much of that aid was cut off at the end of July, and despite job gains we're in the midst of a huge increase in national misery. So let's talk about that employment report. One important thing to bear in mind about official monthly job statistics is that they're based on surveys conducted during the second week of the month. That's why I used scare quotes around "August": What Friday's report actually gave us was a snapshot of the state of the labor market around Aug. 12. This may be important. Private data suggest a slowdown in job growth since late July. So the next employment report, which will be based on data collected this week and will also be the last report before the election will probably (not certainly) be weaker than the last. In any case, that August report wasn't great considering the context. In normal times a gain of 1.4 million jobs would be impressive, even if some of those jobs were a temporary blip associated with the census. But we're still more than 11 million jobs down from where we were in February. And the situation remains dire for the hardest hit workers. The pandemic slump disproportionately hit workers in the leisure and hospitality sector think restaurants and employment in that sector is still down around 25 percent, while the unemployment rate for workers in the industry is still over 20 percent, more than four times what it was a year ago. In part because of where the slump was concentrated, the unemployed tend to be Americans who were earning low wages even before the slump. And one disturbing fact about the August report was that average wages rose. No, that's not a misprint: If the low wage workers hit worst by the slump were being rehired, we'd expect average wages to fall, as they did during the snapback of May and June. Rising average wages at this point are a sign that those who really need jobs aren't getting them. So the economy is still bypassing those who need a recovery most. Yet most of the safety net that temporarily sustained the economic victims of the coronavirus has been torn down. The CARES Act, enacted in March, gave the unemployed an extra 600 a week in benefits. This supplement played a crucial role in limiting extreme hardship; poverty may even have gone down. But the supplement ended on July 31, and all indications are that Republicans in the Senate will do nothing to restore aid before the election. President Trump's attempt to implement a 300 per week supplement by executive action will fail to reach many and prove inadequate even for those who get it. Families may have scraped by for a few weeks on saved money, but things are about to get very hard for millions. The bottom line here is that before you cite economic statistics, you want to think about what they mean for people and their lives. The data aren't meaningless: A million jobs gained is better than a million jobs lost, and growing G.D.P. is better than shrinking G.D.P. But there is often a disconnect between the headline numbers and the reality of American life, and that is especially true right now. The fact is that this economy just isn't working for many Americans, who are facing hard times that thanks to political decisions by Trump and his allies are just getting harder. 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. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
One hundred years ago this October, the Dutch dancer, courtesan and German paid secret agent known by her stage name, Mata Hari, was executed by a French firing squad. Many fictional adaptations have capitalized on both the prurient and the tragic aspects of her life, most recently Paulo Coelho's 2016 novel, "The Spy," which offers a hagiographic portrait of a heroine whose "only crime was to be an independent woman." On Thursday at Here, the Prototype festival presented the premiere of "Mata Hari," an opera by the composer Matt Marks, with a libretto by Paul Peers, who also directed the show. Their tone is bracingly unsentimental, as is clear from the first swear words uttered by the chain smoking nun who patrols the women's prison where Mata Hari awaits her verdict. Gone, too, are the exotic costumes, jewel encrusted headpieces and striptease routines quoting Indonesian dance gestures that made Mata Hari famous. Instead, Mr. Peers's smart libretto adopts a process that peels away his title character's contradictions, unreliable memories, half lies and compromising admissions in a way that subtly notches up the pathos. To a certain degree, the score succeeds in reflecting those tensions. Mr. Marks's most striking innovation is a bold mix of vocal styles. Mata Hari is a speaking role, here inhabited by Tina Mitchell, who plays it with coiled tension and brittle haughtiness. The part of her Russian paramour, Vadime, is given over to Tomas Cruz, a pop and jazz singer. The male chorus, made up of other former lovers and current accusers, as well as the role of Sister Leonide (Mary Mackenzie), uses classically trained singers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
PARIS The list of important 20th century female ballet choreographers isn't long, but Birgit Cullberg, often forgotten today, is certainly on it. Cullberg, for whom the Swedish government formed the eponymous Cullberg Ballet in 1967, was regarded as a major choreographer well into the 1980s. Today, however, her work is almost unknown outside her native country. (Her son, Mats Ek, has achieved far greater renown). But in an ingenious bit of programing, the Paris Opera Ballet has put together a double bill of two important midcentury female choreographers, pairing Agnes de Mille's 1948 "Fall River Legend," and Cullberg's 1950 "Miss Julie." The double bill runs through March 13 at the Palais Garnier. Both pieces reflect a preoccupation with social and psychological realism shared by a number of other choreographers of the era, like Antony Tudor. Both, in their explicit treatment of ungovernable emotions, repressed (and, in "Miss Julie," expressed) sexuality and violence must have been shocking to their audiences at the time. Both provide big dramatic roles for a central female dancer. In neither case do things go well. These pieces are also their creators' best known works. It's a sad truth that the reputations of de Mille, who died in 1993, and Cullberg, who died in 1999, rest on a handful of pieces. Of de Mille's work, only "Fall River Legend," "Rodeo" and "Three Virgins and a Devil" continue to be performed. In Cullberg's case, only "Miss Julie" is internationally known, partly because American Ballet Theater performed it frequently between 1958 and the early 1980s. Today, both look dated. "Fall River Legend," to music by Morton Gould, is a far stronger work in its tightness of construction and stylistic rigor, but with a few exceptions, it's not terribly interesting in terms of dance invention. The ballet is based on the true story of Lizzie Borden, who in August 1892 may or may not have murdered her father and stepmother with an axe in the small town of Fall River, Mass. Although a jury found Borden innocent, de Mille sets up her central character as unambiguously guilty, and the ballet is a progressive lesson in why this is so. "Fall River Legend" is a feminist tale of sorts, and the central interest of the work is in how the ballerina can make her character psychologically comprehensible to us, since the rest the flashbacks to the younger self watching her happy parents, the mother's death, the stepmother's cruel manipulation is all skillful plot explication. On Saturday afternoon, Laetitia Pujol portrayed the Lizzie character known as The Accused as a tightly wound, damaged creature, barely able to believe or take pleasure in the attentions of the Pastor (Pierre Arthur Raveau), laughing with crazed delight at the fright of her parents when she first picks up the axe. Ms. Pujol achieved a gripping, staring eyed intensity at the end, but her rather one note interpretation was less effective than that of Alice Renavand's more nuanced approach at the evening performance. Ms. Renavand, the Opera's newest etoile, has previously demonstrated remarkable dramatic presence in Pina Bausch's "Orphee" and "Rite of Spring," and she brought a touching fragility to her portrayal, suggesting a connection to the younger self that de Mille shows us in the early part of the ballet, and a capacity for happiness that gave the ending a tragic it could have been otherwise note. Ms. Renavand's truthful performance was a breath of air amidst rather generically stylized performances from the Opera dancers, who dutifully performed de Mille's old fashioned church processions and folk inspired dances for the townspeople. The difference between the folksy, bent kneed, wide legged frolicking of the servants, and the elegant lines of Julie and her fiancee, is just one of the ways in which Cullberg's "Miss Julie" is sadly simplistic. The title and story is taken from August Strindberg's 1888 play, a landmark work for its concentrated unity of action and time, its relentless exposure of female desire, and its evocation of the irreconcilable differences between the needs of the spirit and the needs of the flesh. The story itself is straightforward: The aristocratic Julie pursues and seduces her father's valet, Jean. Unable to live with what she has done, she commits suicide. And that's all we get in the ballet, which doesn't manage to convey the larger themes that have kept the play pertinent even though the breaching of class barriers and explicit sexuality no longer have much power to shock. The best that can be said of the ballet, set to a mournfully melodic score by Ture Rangstrom and with brightly hued naive Cubist decor by the painter Sven X:Et Erixson, is that it offers great dramatic opportunities to its protagonists. Eleonora Abbagnato, blonde, long limbed and beautiful, was a febrile, vulnerable Julie to Stephane Bullion's rather pallid Jean on Saturday afternoon. In the evening, Aurelie Dupont and Nicolas Le Riche offered far more assured performances, suggesting the fluctuating power play, the sadism and masochism, and the dreadful, endless need felt by both Julie and Jean. Mr. Le Riche in particular manages to make something of consequence happen here, and the dancing of the minor characters is impeccable throughout. It's fascinating to see this moment of dance history, juxtaposed against another piece that also gives a central role to a complex, often unlikable female character. It's a pity that with its simple peasant folk endlessly sticking their legs out to the side and flexing their feet, and its heroine posturing on the kitchen table like Roland Petit's Carmen, there is way too much that is annoyingly silly for this "Miss Julie" to feel convincing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
HONG KONG Even as the United States, the European Union and Japan jointly filed a trade case Tuesday against China over its export restrictions on strategic rare earth metals, many specialists could not help wondering whether it was too little and too late for Western and Japanese manufacturers. President Obama heralded the case as a landmark when he announced it at the White House on Tuesday morning, signaling that the United States and its allies would require China to play by international trade rules. "Our competitors should be on notice: You will not get away with skirting the rules," he said. But international trade officials, industry leaders and specialists in China and the West noted that Beijing would have a strong hand of cards as it seeks to defend its export policies on rare earths. The metals are needed for making an array of sophisticated products, from smartphones to smart bombs, as well as wind turbines and other green technologies. China is the source of more than 90 percent of the world's processed rare earth metals. Even if the West and Japan overcome the stiff challenges of winning their case at the World Trade Organization, it could still take several years before Beijing changes its policies by which time companies in the West and Japan could have moved even more of their factories that use rare earth metals to China. "The filing was too late," said Karl A. Gschneidner Jr., a rare earths specialist at the Energy Department's Ames Laboratory in Iowa. China was "cutting off supplies and controlling things in the past couple years," he said. He noted that this year the reopening of a long idle American mine at Mountain Pass, Calif., and the opening of another mine in Australia would start putting more rare earths into the global supply chain potentially enough to meet more than half of the demand outside of China. But many rare earth metal users, including computer hardware manufacturers and producers of energy efficient lighting, have already shifted operations to China and are unlikely to move soon. But some specialists say that the West has benefited indirectly from China's quotas, because they drove rare earth prices up by as much as 30 times. That caused a boom in mining investment that is now opening alternatives to China. "I don't think it's too little, too late," said Yaron Vorona, executive director of the Technology and Rare Earth Metals Center at the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, a nonprofit organization in suburban Washington focusing on energy security. Whatever the eventual implications for world supplies of rare earths, in some ways a recent Western victory on a somewhat related trade case may have strengthened China's hand. Dollar Tree will raise prices to 1.25 by the end of April. The World Trade Organization ordered China last July to dismantle export duties and quotas on nine other industrial raw materials, including bauxite. An appeals tribunal upheld the ruling and added details in late January. China has been able to study those orders as it has redesigned its export restrictions on rare earths. The new quotas are as stringent as the old ones, making it harder for Western manufacturers to obtain rare earths in the quantities and with the timeliness their factories require. But the revamped quota rules could be easier for China to defend in front of a W.T.O. tribunal, than its earlier policies would have been. China, for example, has begun requiring its rare earth exporters to obtain a certificate of environmental compliance before they are allowed to make any overseas shipments. That could strengthen China's claim that export quotas on rare earths are environmentally necessary. Without dispute, the mining and processing of rare earths have many toxic and even radioactive byproducts which is one reason the West and Japan for decades were reluctant to produce them. China denies claims by Western trade officials that Beijing has waved the environmental flag to disguise its true motive: to force Western and Japanese factories to move to China to gain access to an uninterrupted supply of low cost rare earths. The Chinese government has also lent large sums to four state owned mining companies that are buying many of their smaller, private domestic rivals in rare earths. That raises the prospect that China could assemble a state owned rare earth oligopoly one that could effectively limit exports without government policies that mandate the restrictions. W.T.O. rules mostly cover government regulations, not the behavior of oligopolies. "It will be much more difficult for us to win the rare earth case than it was for us to win the previous case," said a Western trade official, referring to the W.T.O. rulings on industrial raw materials. The official, who insisted on anonymity because the case was diplomatically and legally delicate, added that the rare earth case could still be won because of voluminous files that point to abusive Chinese trade practices. A diplomatic confrontation between China and Japan over disputed islands in September 2010, for example, turned into a Chinese show of force on rare earths. Chinese regulators abruptly summoned the presidents of China's rare earth mining companies to a secret meeting in Beijing, said a person with a detailed knowledge of the meeting, who insisted on anonymity to avoid angering Chinese officials. The mining executives were told that the Chinese government was about to halt all shipments of rare earths to Japan, where the electronics industry, camera industry and others depended heavily on the materials. The executives were told that if any of their companies stepped up shipments to another country instead, allowing reshipment of rare earths from that country to Japan, then the company would lose its export license. The assembled executives were also warned against speaking to the news media about the coming embargo, this person said. Chinese trade statistics showed that exports of rare earths to Japan dropped to almost zero during the embargo, which continued for two months. Legal shipments to other markets increased little in that period, although smuggling to Vietnam and then to Japan increased. On Tuesday, besides trying to free the global flow of rare earth metals, the United States and its allies demanded that China dismantle export restrictions on two other strategic minerals mined mainly in China: tungsten and molybdenum, which are used to strengthen steel. Mr. Obama also signed a law meant to make it easier for companies and unions to file antisubsidy cases against imports from China and other countries designated by the United States as having nonmarket economies. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Artfully awkward sincerity defined the Canadian singer and songwriter Alessia Cara on her 2015 debut album, "Know It All." In one of its hits, "Here," she sang about feeling antisocial and alienated at a loud party. And in a song that became an anthem, "Scars to Your Beautiful," she decried superficial ideas of beauty, vowing, "To all the girls that's hurting, let me be your mirror." She went on to collaborate with the rapper Logic on the anti suicide song "1 800 273 8255," and sang an uplifting Lin Manuel Miranda song, "How Far I'll Go," for the Disney movie "Moana." She was named best new artist a few years late at the 2018 Grammy Awards. Cara's second album, "The Pains of Growing," doubles down on both the sincerity she wrote all the lyrics and the awkwardness. "There's truth in every word I write," the 22 year old insists in "Growing Pains," which opens the album. If so, she is a singer with an agile voice but a young woman still figuring herself out. In her new songs, she struggles with a breakup, with loneliness, with worry and depression and with a general sense of futility. In one song, "Wherever I Live," she can't even charge her phone because the outlet in her hotel room is broken. Her consolation is that "At least I say what I mean," as she sings on "Girl Next Door," which is the album's mission statement: shrugging off glamour to be a "plain Jane," proclaiming modesty and insecurity yet insisting that she'll "do what I dream." And she's eager to offer empathy and encouragement. In "Easier Said," she pushes back at thoughtless admonitions to simply "shake off the cloud that follows you around," instead counseling, "Just take your time to recover." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
There are two basic tactics we've seen from science and health professionals in talking to the public about the coronavirus and now the first approved vaccine in the United States. The professionals can spread useful information in ways that we understand and believe, or they can bat down inaccurate information and conspiracy theories. We've seen plenty of both this year. I spoke with Dr. Austin Chiang, a 35 year old gastroenterologist in Philadelphia who makes engaging and informative TikTok videos about topics as varied as symptoms of pancreatic cancer and what happens to the stomachs of competitive eaters. Dr. Chiang tries to focus on spreading helpful and accurate health information because he believes it's more persuasive and less exhausting than trying to disprove all the false health ideas, he said. "I'm trying to take a diplomatic approach," Dr. Chiang said. "If I only debunked people, I would come across as vindictive or mean and that's not effective." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The actress Sophie Turner is part of two of the biggest pop culture universes three if you count the Jonas Brothers. "I hate being me in public," she said. "I would rather be a character."Credit...Valerie Chiang for The New York Times The actress Sophie Turner is part of two of the biggest pop culture universes three if you count the Jonas Brothers. "I hate being me in public," she said. "I would rather be a character." After years of tragedy, upheaval and cataclysm, Winterfell is now secure and on the way to recovery in the capable hands of the new Queen in the North, Sansa Stark. But on a bright spring afternoon, the actress who plays her surveyed a new kingdom. From a high rise hotel at the southern tip of Manhattan, Sophie Turner gazed out at the glittering harbor and beyond to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, timeworn landmarks that nevertheless retain their power to dazzle, especially during the early blushes of your honeymoon with the city. Turner relocated here from London last year, realizing a lifelong dream to live in New York sure, that life only includes 23 years so far, but a dream's a dream when she moved in with the pop star Joe Jonas. At that moment in March, Jonas was still just her fiance. "Game of Thrones" hadn't yet debuted its divisive final season, and "Dark Phoenix," the new "X Men" film she leads this summer as more established stars like James McAvoy and Jennifer Lawrence take a back seat, was far enough away to barely feel real. "I still feel in the bubble a bit," she said. But things move fast when you're 23, and even faster when you're stepping from one of the world's biggest pop culture franchises into another. In the coming weeks she would marry Jonas in Vegas, march in the Technicolor peacock parade at the Met Gala, do goat yoga for Vogue, cavort with a unicorn for Harper's Bazaar and parse the infamous "Game of Thrones" coffee cup on "The Tonight Show," all while driving Daenerys Targaryen toward incendiary madness as Sansa on the HBO series. Read the recap of the "Game of Thrones" series finale. On June 7 comes "Dark Phoenix," in which both she and her titular character, nee Jean Grey, leave comfortable cocoons to see if they might be capable of even more than they realize. For Turner that means moving on from "Thrones," her home for most of the past decade, to find out if her own personal cache of superpowers includes the ability to carry a Marvel movie. "Game of Thrones" was the defining pop culture franchise of the decade. (Avengers, schmavengers.) But for a girl who grew up in a tiny English village (Chesterton, about 65 miles northwest of London) and then joined the show at 13, the cloistered production was also a haven from a world that was becoming more complicated with the fame and exposure that come from being on a hit TV show. The cast was collectively an emotional wreck as the production neared its end "It was just a huge cry fest; the makeup artists hated us" and in the immediate aftermath, Turner felt a spike of existential terror. "I started to think, who am I without it?" she said. "What do I do? What do I like? I don't have an identity." Which is understandable. But the truth is Turner is poised to become the biggest star to emerge from the show, a charismatic young celebrity whose fame and opportunities will likely only expand now that she's not shooting "Thrones" seven months a year. At a time when pop culture is defined by universes, she's part of two of the biggest three if you count the Jonas Brothers. (The video for "Sucker" that she starred in with the band and her equally glamorous sister in law, Priyanka Chopra, has been watched more than 130 million times, nearly quadruple the total for an average episode of "Game of Thrones.") But she's still not entirely used to it. "I hate being me in public," she said. "I would rather be a character." She's known for trolling the paparazzi, and you can glimpse something of her personality in the photos of her making odd faces with Joe Jonas or aiming her own camera at the photographers the wry playfulness, mixed with a self protectiveness that won't quite let her just ignore them and move on. In person she is funny and easygoing, and frank about her past struggles with depression and feelings of insecurity. The notion is hard to square with the statuesque actress sitting in front of you, reclining comfortably and casually swigging from a bottle of green tea, a tattoo of a Stark wolf and a line from the show ("The Pack Survives") visible on her arm. But it's this combination of easy confidence and vulnerability that made Sansa's extreme trajectory over eight seasons, from callow neophyte to commanding leader, seem believable. It's the same quality that made Kinberg want her for Jean Grey, an emotionally delicate hero with more power than she knows how to handle. "She is this 5 foot 9 inch extraordinary looking human who also feels as insecure and broken as the rest of us," he said of Turner. The period after "Thrones" ended was "a big healing time for me," she said, and she spent it doing as little as possible. When we talked at the end of that stretch, she was as curious as anyone to see how the next few months would go, even as she allowed that it was nerve racking to have the film coming so closely behind "Game of Thrones," given the scrutiny each and by extension, she would receive. As of Sunday the first half of the equation has been settled and ... let's say the reviews were mixed. Less for Turner, whose Sansa was a bright spot in the final episodes, than for the loudly loathed season itself. On most Monday mornings Twitter felt like a Bellagio fountain of GameofThrones haterade, and more than 1 million people signed a symbolic petition to have the final season remade. She added, "All of these petitions and things like that I think it's disrespectful to the crew, and the writers, and the filmmakers who have worked tirelessly over 10 years, and for 11 months shooting the last season." These are the summer movies you should see. But unlike many associated with the show, Turner has dealt with fan scorn from the beginning. People hated Sansa in the early days dimwittedly so, generally, given that she was by design besotted with the medieval fantasy tropes that the show aimed to shatter. "A few people didn't understand that she was a brilliant actress, merely because she was doing things they didn't like," the creators D.B. Weiss and David Benioff wrote in a joint email. But "we knew that as the character came into her own, and as Sophie came into her own, people would come to see them both for what they are." Which happened, eventually. Over the years Sansa was the avatar for the show's best and worst impulses. The once immature girl with romantic dreams of wearing a crown ultimately got there by becoming savvy and strong, one of several nuanced, exceedingly capable women in a story whose men, by the end, were mostly dunces. She was also run through the wringer, to the point that, after Sansa was raped on her wedding night in Season 5, Turner found herself at the center of a national outcry over the show's use of sexual violence. Then this past season, the writers had the nerve to have Sansa seem to credit the abuse with making her strong. "I don't think that was the intention," she said. "It was that she was strong in spite of all of the horrific things that she's gone through, not because of them." But no matter what she was going through onscreen, she said, it was often easier than the experience of growing up in public. Turner is, by any conceivable definition, beautiful. But she was also, not so long ago, a 16 year old girl being bombarded with her own image at a time when her image was often the last thing she wanted to see. She leaned hard on her onscreen sister, Maisie Williams (Arya Stark), the one other girl in the world who understood what it was like to grow up inside "Game of Thrones." "To go home at the end of the day, if I felt really fat that day or if I felt like my face looked weird or I had huge zits, to be able to go home to the hotel room and sit there and cry with Maisie it was the best thing for us," Turner said. "I'm glad I wasn't crying on my own." To make things worse, the social media hordes picked her apart punishing Turner for Sansa's perceived sins as much as anything and she was feeling very much like the inexperienced actor she was. On set she was known for a breezy professionalism that belied her youth. But she struggled with bouts of anxiety and depression, which she's learned to manage through therapy. She also took comfort in Sansa even as the poor girl was being put through an ever more baroque series of horrors, Turner often found it a more comfortable space to occupy than her own skin. She says now that she admires Sansa, specifically the way she learned to work the angles and thrive in a tough situation. In a way, Turner did, too. Thrust into a slightly overwhelming situation, she watched and she learned. She learned how to be an actor by observing Peter Dinklage and Lena Headey, she said, especially their naturalism and the way they could enter a room and immediately make it their own. But whatever her self criticisms, her talent was apparent from the start. Dinklage, who as Tyrion Lannister shared many early scenes with her as well as some of the best moments in the final season, said Turner "has a beautiful stillness to her as an actor that's incredibly rare." Chastain was struck by Turner's poise when she met her before shooting began. But she also sensed the uncertainty of an actor transitioning into a higher profile phase of her career. "There was this idea of like, What am I allowed to do? What am I allowed to say? Who am I allowed to be?" Chastain said. "It's really exciting for me to see Soph understand that everything that's happening to her is because of her she created this." For Turner, her trajectory is not unlike that of any young adult stepping out into the world. "It feels like 'Game of Thrones' was secondary school; now 'X Men' is university," she said. Her "Thrones" pack scattered to the winds, Turner has created a new one with Jonas, whom she married earlier this month in a surprise ceremony in Las Vegas. (They had been engaged since 2017.) An Elvis impersonator presided; Diplo posted video to Instagram. "I take a lot of inspiration from him," she said of Jonas. "He went through a breakup with his band, who are also his brothers, and that's got to be really, really difficult. For him to have a wonderful family life and wonderful relationships with his brothers, and still turn out to be a very grounded normal person, is astounding to me." The band is back on tour this summer, and together the couples form an extraordinarily attractive and talented group of young people doing young people things hitting the slopes in Switzerland, pouring body shots upon gobsmacked Penn State students. But to Turner, there's nothing extraordinary about it. "It just feels normal to us," she said. The paparazzi, she insists, are only there for Jonas. "I'm just like a tag along," she said, which is patently ridiculous. But the upshot is that even now, even in New York, she's still bombarded with her image more than she'd like. "Social media just sucks," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
LIFE insurance and annuities are supposed to accomplish straightforward goals: life insurance provides for your family if you die unexpectedly and annuities guarantee a steady stream of income in retirement. But right now, both are being promoted for their tax benefits. Money put into these products grows on a tax deferred basis just as it does in retirement accounts. In the case of annuities, the money is eventually taxed as ordinary income when it is taken out. With permanent life insurance, the death benefit goes to the beneficiaries free of income tax, but if it is a permanent policy, as opposed to a term policy, the owner of the policy could also borrow against its cash value and never pay income tax on it. (The insurance company charges interest on the borrowed money, though, and that loan reduces the value of the death benefit if it is not paid back.) And while insurance companies are using the tax issue as a selling point, that is by no means the full picture. I have written recent columns on how this year's tax increases have influenced behavior around estate planning and investments. As in those two cases, the decision to buy various life insurance policies or annuities can be unduly influenced by the tax advantages inherent in insurance. Many policies carry high upfront and management fees, have limited investment options and penalize people for withdrawing their money within a few years of buying the policy or annuity. With these downsides, insurance companies are regularly looking for reasons to sell their products beyond the death benefits of insurance and the steady income stream of annuities. "Oftentimes these products are sold based on the moment in time," said Richard Coppa, managing director of Wealth Health, a financial advisory firm. "A couple of years ago, they were sold on guaranteed returns of 6 or 7 percent because people were so fearful. Today, it's uncertainty about taxes because many of the favorable tax treatments out there are subject to negotiation." He said there were certainly people who were afraid of running out of money in retirement who could benefit from an annuity. He pointed to people with 250,000 to 500,000 in assets who could calculate how much money on top of Social Security they would need and buy an annuity that would cover that. "I think you really need to run the numbers and understand the charges and compare those to an investment portfolio where you'll get an expected rate of return," he said. Given the lure of tax deferred savings, how should people weigh that against the risks and downsides of insurance and annuities? Thomas Pauloski, national managing director at Bernstein Global Wealth Management and a former insurance company executive, said people could go wrong when they did not fully consider how long they wanted to keep their money in an insurance policy and how much the company was charging them in fees. If they are going to pull out the money out in a few years, insurance makes little sense since fees will cancel out any gains. What's trickier is knowing what those fees are going to be, even over the long haul. Mr. Pauloski said among permanent insurance options as opposed to term insurance, which has no cash value only so called private placement life insurance policies were clear about their fees, but that was because these policies were custom made for someone paying a premium often in excess of 1 million. With more common forms of permanent insurance, like universal and whole life, finding the fees becomes more difficult, he said, because of how they get embedded in the policies. More confusing still is how the returns on the cash value of the policy are presented, since they can mask the high fees. "Any insurance illustration is going to have a lot of assumptions built into it," he said. "It assumes, for one, that today's pretax dividend is going to continue forever. That is simply not going to happen." When presented with a proposal for a client, he said he often went back to the insurance company and asked it to redo the calculations with lower, more realistic assumptions. Even that, he said, is not perfect because it assumes a consistency that is unlikely. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' With annuities, the fees start to pile up when people elect additional features, like a guaranteed, minimum payout. Those fees reduce the return and the value of the tax deferral. Since the annuity company paid a commission to the broker who sold the annuity, there are also so called surrender fees for taking your money out in the first five to 10 years of the annuity. "My premise is annuities are second only to hedge funds in their ability to separate people from their money," said Richard Del Monte, president of Del Monte Group, an investment adviser. "Generally speaking, they're awful but there are specific situations." Among Mr. Del Monte's exceptions are older annuities that have high guarantees and favorable terms for adding more money; another is the offerings of stripped down, low cost deferred annuities from newer annuity companies. These aim to preserve the benefit of the tax deferral through low management costs and no extras. Mitchell Caplan, chief executive of Jefferson National, one of those low cost annuity providers, conducted a study on the value of tax deferral to make the case for his company's offerings. It analyzed what assets were best held in tax deferred accounts and at what point fees reached a level that negated the benefit of that deferral. Mr. Caplan said the study found that annuity management fees over 1 percent began to reduce the value of owning assets in a tax deferred account. (Jefferson National charges a flat annual fee of 240, which, based on its average account size, is about 0.10 percent. It also does not pay commissions to advisers who sell them.) Joseph W. Spada, senior principal at Summit Financial Resources and a longtime skeptic of annuities, said lower cost annuities allowed his wealthy clients to own high tax investments like hedge funds without worrying about their tax consequences. He recommended them, he said, when clients had fully funded all of their other tax deferred vehicles, like retirement accounts. For people in high tax states like New York, this strategy could make particular sense, Mr. Pauloski said. If the return on a hedge fund were 10 percent, an investor in a high tax state might give up half of that to taxes. If an annuity owned the same fund, though, the return could be closer to 9 percent if the annuity fees were low enough. Mr. Spada said he put 1.5 million of his own money into a Jefferson National annuity because he could not put any more into his pension plan and wanted to maintain his allocation to high tax tactical investments in a tax deferred way. But he said he also had a client with a net worth of 100 million who put 7 million into one of his annuities. "It's not so he can get more retirement income that he's never going to need," Mr. Spada said. "I told him to let it grow tax free and leave it to charity or put it into a stretch account and leave it to his kids." Mr. Spada said that fears over access to the money because of penalties and taxes were overblown when it came to low fee annuities. If people were able to leave the money in an annuity for 10 years, they would have about the same amount after paying penalties and taxes as they would if the money been in taxable accounts. Most people do not have millions of dollars to put into these products. They have to consider annuities and insurance in a more basic way. "What I'm trying to do is to get people to stop thinking about life insurance as a plug in for something else and start thinking about it as a risk adjusted investment," Mr. Pauloski said "The one risk we really can't do anything about with our portfolios is an early death and, in the case of annuities, it's outliving our assets. Use those insurance products to provide a better risk adjusted return over the lifetime of their portfolio." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Now Lives In a two bedroom loft near Gramercy Park with his fiance, Ross Matsubara. Claim to Fame Mr. Santos is a founder of Homepolish, a two year old start up that offers personalized interior design services by the hour through its network of 500 designers. The idea is to make interior design more accessible and affordable (a three hour single day session is 349). Homepolish recently raised 20 million in funding led by Andy Hunt, a founder of Warby Parker. Clients have included the Goop offices and web savvy tastemakers including Leandra Medine, Patrick Janelle and Danielle Snyder. "They have enough money, but they don't have enough time," Mr. Santos said of his clients. "They want to be engaged in design, but they don't want to execute it themselves." Big Break After quitting an interior design firm in 2011, Mr. Santos, who studied business and architecture at Stanford, started a one man firm called 50 for Fifty, which offered 50 minute design consultations for 50. The New York magazine design editor Wendy Goodman heard about it and featured his two bedroom apartment in Murray Hill as a Space of the Week in 2012. His future business partner, Will Nathan, saw the article and hired Mr. Santos to redo his one bedroom apartment in Chelsea. They started Homepolish soon after. Latest Project Mr. Santos recently designed the SoHo loft for the Sweetgreen founders Nathaniel Ru and Jon Neman. The two bedroom bachelor pad has lots of plants, daybeds, midcentury modern furniture and open spaces for parties. He is also working on his own two bedroom apartment near Gramercy Park, which he moved to last October. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The prince is, on first impression, a small person. The title character in the Gate Theater of Dublin's thrilling production of "Hamlet," which opened on Monday night at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn under the inspired direction of Yael Farber, initially registers as a fine figurine of a man, delicate of frame and feature. Do not underestimate him. There is great stature in his sorrow and his rage. He can think circles around any hulking politician, and he moves as fast he thinks. You just know that he is always the smartest person in any room he occupies. And that this is both his blessing and his curse. Hamlet is portrayed by the Ethiopian Irish actress Ruth Negga, and the double sidedness of this most complex of Shakespeare's heroes has rarely been better served. Negga, best known to American audiences for her Oscar nominated role in the 2016 film "Loving," has created a portrait of the theater's most endlessly analyzed prince that is drawn in lines of lightning. Though the text places his age around 30, this Hamlet seems both younger and wiser than such a number would indicate. He has the outraged, childlike astonishment of someone surprised by hard grief for the first time in his life and a concomitant disgust for the corrupt adult world that has shaped his existence. Yet there is a part of him that sees beyond his immediate feelings and sneers at them. Hamlet can't help reveling in the sheer, artful nimbleness of his mind, nor can anyone who sees Negga's remarkable performance in this fast, fluid production. At the same time, he aches with an awareness of how small such displays of intellect are in terms of the really big picture, the one dominated by the shadow of death. I started to write that the fact that this man is played by a woman is irrelevant. But there is one sense in which the basic disparity between this actress and this role feeds the quickening sensibility that infuses every aspect of Farber's interpretation, which cannily condenses and rearranges the text for speed and focus. For what is conveyed here with glittering incisiveness is the work's sense of life as theater, in which playing roles expands and constricts the possibilities in being human. In this world, Negga's Hamlet rules as the Player Prince. That worldview is achieved without the winking, meta theatrical touches that have become so familiar in contemporary Shakespeare. Farber the South African born creator of viscerally stirring reimaginings of classics like "Miss Julie" and "The Crucible" understands that there is no need to add layers of directorial self consciousness when your main character is the ultimate self conscious auteur. Hamlet, you may recall, is the guy who after he discovers his dad has been murdered by his uncle (and new stepfather) decides to put on "an antic disposition," the better to enact revenge under the cloak of assumed madness. He stages a whole play to "catch the conscience of the king." He is never more relaxed than in the company of a traveling troupe of actors. More than with his girlfriend, Ophelia (Aoife Duffin) or best friend, Horatio (Mark Huberman); certainly more than with any member of his family, Hamlet feels close spiritual kinship with these journeyman thespians. They, at least, know they're playing parts. Accordingly as impeccably realized by Susan Hilferty (set and costumes) John Torres (lighting) and Tom Lane (music and sound) the palace of Elsinore is not presented as the futuristic surveillance state so common to recent productions. Instead, its look is part fairy tale playhouse (cascading curtains play a spectacularly evocative role), part Magritte tinged surrealism (death assumes the implicit form of three vacant eyed men in bowler hats, pulling corpses on gurneys). An awareness of an audience is also essential to this mise en scene. Hamlet's first soliloquy is spoken to a confidante, Ophelia, whom at that point he feels he can trust. The wicked Claudius (Owen Roe, fabulous as a manipulative Fascist for the ages) delivers his aborted prayer of repentance not to an unseen God but to a very visible priest, whom the King winds up manhandling. When Hamlet stages his "mousetrap" play in which performers replicate the murder of his father the members of the court take their seats in an empty aisle in the audience. That means that all of us, not just Hamlet, are craning our necks to clock the reactions of Claudius and his queen, Gertrude (Fiona Bell). Negga's Hamlet is never happier than when he's masterminding such snares of illusions. That is, until he remembers why he's doing what he's doing to begin with. And beneath it all, always, lurks the awareness of death. Negga's quicksilver performance keeps recalibrating all these levels of reaction. Too often, when a Hamlet is this good, I'm impatient whenever he's not onstage. Not so this time. Everyone else and I mean everyone, including the thunderous ghost of Hamlet's father (Steve Hartland); a Polonius who postures like a matinee idol manque (Nick Dunning); and his fire breathing son, Laertes (Gavin Drea) is filled with surprises and insights. Their relationships are defined in startling physical details, especially in how they touch one another. (Note the repeated coercive wrist grip in different contexts.) As incarnated by Duffin (who similarly exposed all nerves in the ravishing monologue play "A Girl Is a Half Formed Thing"), Ophelia is a young woman whose nascent sexual awakening makes her dangerously vulnerable to shame. Her relationship with Hamlet is painfully credible here, rendered in the heartbreaking terms of young lovers who feel they have only each other to stand against the world and then realize they don't have even that. Bell's Gertrude is a hard pragmatist when we first meet her, seemingly able to live comfortably with her Faustian bargain for power. (Is it a coincidence that her dress for Claudius's triumphal inaugural scene brings to mind Melania Trump?) But in the famous encounter in Gertrude's bedroom, when Hamlet visits her after the play within the play, something remarkable happens. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Now Lives She splits her time between a one bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and a one bedroom apartment in East Los Angeles. Claim to Fame Ms. Grant is a rising young photographer who has found a niche shooting fashionable pop music stars, including her sister, who goes by the stage name Lana Del Rey. (Ms. Grant is officially Caroline but has been called Chuck her entire life.) Her first magazine cover came in 2015 when she photographed Charli XCX for Galore magazine. Later that year, she photographed the rapper YG for Fader Magazine. For Ms. Del Rey's 2015 album "Honeymoon," Ms. Grant photographed her on a Hollywood sightseeing bus. "I had a dream about shooting her in a StarLine tour bus, and a week later she called me saying she had rented a StarLine bus," Ms. Grant said. "It was serendipitous." Big Break As a senior at Parsons School of Design majoring in photography, Ms. Grant submitted a series of portraits called "Alpha Females" for her thesis project, which followed the lives of the blogger Leandra Medine, Tina Flaherty, a businesswoman and philanthropist, and Ms. Del Rey. "I've always been attracted to strong female personalities and wanted to capture them in their natural environments," Ms. Grant said. One of the judges was be Jody Quon, the photography director of New York magazine. Ms. Quon apparently liked the work, for after Ms. Grant graduated she sent her to Salt Lake City to photograph a community of Mormon women for the magazine. Ms. Grant has been shooting ever since. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Yaovi Gaffa, 20, chained in a room at a prayer camp near Lome, Togo, in April. Chaining is a last resort for families in West Africa, where psychiatry is virtually unknown.Credit...Joao Silva/The New York Times Yaovi Gaffa, 20, chained in a room at a prayer camp near Lome, Togo, in April. Chaining is a last resort for families in West Africa, where psychiatry is virtually unknown. KPOVE, Togo The church grounds here sprawled through a strange, dreamlike forest. More than 150 men and women were chained by the ankle to a tree or concrete block, a short walk from the central place of worship. Most were experiencing the fearsome delusions of schizophrenia. On a recent visit, some glared, while others slept or muttered to themselves. A few pushed to their feet and gestured wildly, their cries piercing the stillness. Until this year, Koffi Gbedjeha, 45, a carpenter and father of four, was one of them a resident of the Jesus Is the Solution prayer camp here, shackled like the others, his family and camp staff members said. For more than two years, his youngest sister, Akossiwa, 27, tended to him. Rising early each morning, she walked along a cool red earth path to the human forest; each day, amid the stirring bodies and clinking chains, she emptied her brother's chamber pot, swept the ground and cooked his meals over a charcoal fire. "Don't you pray for me," Mr. Gbedjeha (pronounced guh BED zhe ha) sometimes shouted at camp workers who asked God to cast out the dark spirits they believed were making him sick. "I should be praying for you." Every society struggles to care for people with mental illness. In parts of West Africa, where psychiatry is virtually unknown, the chain is often a last resort for desperate families who cannot control a loved one in the grip of psychosis. Religious retreats, known as prayer camps, set up makeshift psychiatric wards, usually with prayer as the only intervention. Nine camps visited recently in Togo ranged from small family operations to this one, Jesus Is the Solution, by far the largest and most elaborate. In West Africa, hundreds of people with mental illness live in awful conditions. One organization is fighting for a new approach to treatment. This video was supported by The Global Reporting Centre. HEADLINE: PRAYING FOR A CURE April 27, 2015 SUMMARY: In West Africa, hundreds of people with mental illnesses live in unimaginable conditions. One organization is fighting to give people back their dignity with a new approach to mental health treatment. Opening Shot: woman in chains on block (00:05:29) Patient: Who did this? / It hurts? SOUND UP: Prayer center, patients shouting MANY OF THESE PEOPLE HAVE MENTAL ILLNESSES. THEIR DESPERATE FAMILIES HAVE LEFT THEM HERE BECAUSE THEY HAVE NOWHERE ELSE TO TURN. DAILY PRAYERS ARE THEIR ONLY TREATMENT. (00:26:10) TITLE CARD Praying for a Cure By The International Reporting Program THIS PRAYER CENTRE IS ONE OF THE LARGEST IN TOGO, AND ONE OF MANY ACROSS WEST AFRICA. THIS EVANGELICAL PASTOR SAYS HE'S DOING GOD'S WORK HERE. (00:40:11) LT: Paul Noumonvi Pastor, "Jesus is the Solution" Prayer Center (00:44:27) PN: If someone is sick with mental illness, / they come here and we will pray for them / and by the grace of God, they will be healed. (00:54:00) GA: A man or a woman tied to a block, / it's not the family's fault.They don't know what to do. B roll of Gregoire hugging patient (01:03:09) LT: Gregoire Ahongbonon Founder, Saint Camille de Lellis GREGOIRE AHONGBONON HAS SPENT HIS LIFE TRYING TO PROVIDE AN ALTERNATIVE FOR PEOPLE WITH MENTAL ILLNESSES. (01:11:19) GA: People with mental illnesses are the forgotten of the forgotten. / They are treated as if they've been possessed by witchcraft. / They're treated like garbage, like human trash in our society. AHONGBONON IS THE FOUNDER OF SAINT CAMILLE DE LELLIS, A MENTAL HEALTH ORGANIZATION THAT RUNS EIGHT CENTRES IN IVORY COAST, BENIN, AND BURKINA FASO. Map of Benin / Benin b roll WE VISITED HIM IN BENIN, ONE OF THE POOREST COUNTRIES IN THE WORLD. THE GOVERNMENT SPENDS LITTLE ON HEALTH CARE. MEDICAL TREATMENT FOR PEOPLE WITH MENTAL ILLNESS IS ALMOST NONEXISTENT. Gregoire Interview (01:46:09) GA: They are the last concern of our authorities. / In Benin, where I'm from, there is just one psychiatric hospital. / If you have no money, they won't take you. SUV Sequence AHONGBONON USED TO RUN A SUCCESSFUL TIRE REPAIR BUSINESS. BUT IN THE 1980S, IT WENT UNDER AND HE FELL INTO DEPRESSION. (02:04:14) GA: I lost so much that I almost killed myself. / I started living a very, very miserable life. Gregoire meeting man and giving him bread HE REALIZED THAT IN WEST AFRICA, MOST PEOPLE WITH MENTAL ILLNESSES GET NO TREATMENT. HE STARTED SAINT CAMILLE TO PROVIDE CARE TO ANYONE WHO NEEDED IT. SOUND UP: Consultation between patient and male nurse Avrankou B Roll consultation, waiting room, getting pills CLOSE TO 300 NEW PATIENTS COME TO SAINT CAMILLE'S CENTRES IN BENIN EVERY MONTH. THEY GET FOOD AND SHELTER, A DIAGNOSIS, AND, FOR A SMALL FEE, REGULAR DOSES OF PSYCHOTROPIC MEDICATION. SOUND UP: John mumbling, water being poured on John's head, shaving AT ONE CENTRE, AHONGBONON BROUGHT IN JOHN OFF THE STREETS. THE STAFF CLEANED HIM, SHAVED HIS HEAD AND GAVE HIM FRESH CLOTHES. (02:54:00) GA: He spent nights and days without ever washing himself. / These are people who will even drink / water from the streets, from the gutters. SOUND UP: John with nurse in consultation room JOHN RECEIVED ROUTINE MEDICAL TESTS AND A PSYCHIATRIC ASSESSMENT. MOST PATIENTS HERE HAVE SEVERE MENTAL ILLNESSES LIKE SCHIZOPHRENIA AND BIPOLAR DISORDER. (03:14:15) LT: Pierre Sans Volunteer psychiatrist PIERRE SANS, A VOLUNTEER PSYCHIATRIST, SAYS THE DRUGS PATIENTS TAKE ARE EFFECTIVE, EVEN WITHOUT PSYCHOTHERAPY. (03:22:01) PS: A very sick person, with many hallucinations, / Saint Camille brings them out of it very quickly. / Sometimes in a few days. It's absolutely astounding. Man sleeping on floor, patients in waiting room BUT SAINT CAMILLE CANNOT MONITOR PATIENTS OVER THE LONG TERM, WHICH MEANS THEY RISK BEING OVER MEDICATED. (03:36:24) PS: We see patients that had an acute psychotic episode / that we continue to treat with heavy medications. / That's where we have a real problem. / Are they really people with schizophrenia / that must continue to be treated with heavy medication? SOUND UP: Nurse talking (03:53:23) Nurse: Are you eating well? Are you getting enough water? NURSES PROVIDE MOST OF THE CARE. SAINT CAMILLE GIVES THEM BASIC TRAINING, BUT MUCH OF THE TIME, THEY'RE ON THEIR OWN. AHONGBONON DOESN'T DENY THE CHALLENGES. (04:07:15) GA: But to me, the most important thing / is not necessarily healing every single person. / It's the dignity of each person. / That's our goal. Patient sewing sequence AT SAINT CAMILLE, PATIENTS ALSO LEARN PRACTICAL SKILLS THEY CAN USE TO EARN MONEY. SOUND UP: In Bakery RAYMOND MADOU WAS ONE OF SAINT CAMILLE'S PATIENTS. ONCE HE BEGAN TO TAKE MEDICATION FOR BIPOLAR DISORDER, AHONGBONON HELPED HIM SET UP THIS BAKERY. HE NOW RUNS IT WITH OTHER RECOVERED PATIENTS. (04:41:28) Ray: Work is what makes a person. / Without work, we are nothing. / If the others also find work to do, / they will also find joy in life, like I did. BEFORE HE CAME TO ST CAMILLE, MADOU'S FAMILY TRIED EVERYTHING THEY COULD TO HELP HIM. (05:01:09) Ray: Every year, I relapsed. / My parents took me to traditional healers. / They spent all their money. Woman praying, sad man in chains LIKE MANY OTHERS, HE ENDED UP CHAINED AT A PRAYER CENTRE LIKE THIS ONE. ACROSS WEST AFRICA, THESE PLACES OF WORSHIP PROMISE TO CURE ANY AILMENT, INCLUDING MENTAL ILLNESS. THEY APPEAL TO FAMILIES WITH VERY FEW OPTIONS. Gregoire getting into SUV AHONGBONON BELIEVES SAINT CAMILLE HAS HELPED TO SHUT DOWN PRAYER CENTRES IN BENIN. (05:33:21) GA: There was a prayer centre here / where there were more than 250 sick people. / But today, there are no more sick people there / because when we started, the families saw the results / and they went and unchained the sick people / and brought them to us. BUT PRAYER CENTRES ARE STILL THRIVING IN NEIGHBOURING TOGO. AHONGBONON TOOK US TO THE LARGEST ONE HE'S SEEN. SOUND UP: Car motor driving IT'S CALLED JESUS IS THE SOLUTION. IT'S RUN BY PAUL NOUMONVI. (06:04:05) PN: I've had my ministry here for 12 years. NOUMONVI'S CENTRE HAS BECOME ONE OF THE LARGEST IN TOGO. HE TOLD US PATIENTS DON'T PAY FOR TREATMENT, BUT FAMILIES SOMETIMES GIVE GIFTS WHEN THEY'RE HEALED. HE ALSO RUNS PRAYER GATHERINGS THAT ATTRACT THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE WHO DONATE TO HIS CHURCH. SOUND UP of prayer gathering (06:25:01) PN: Over here is where they stay. HE TOOK US BEHIND THE PRAYER HALL, WHERE PEOPLE WITH MENTAL ILLNESSES ARE KEPT. Turn the corner THERE ARE 153 MEN AND WOMEN HERE. SOUND UP: Inside prayer camp PATIENTS STAY FOR WEEKS, MONTHS, EVEN YEARS, OFTEN WITHOUT ANY DIAGNOSIS. Gregoire talking to man in chains Gregoire approaches Victorine (07:03:06) Victorine: Welcome! (07:09:04) GA: What's your name? (07:10:20) Victorine: Victorine. (07:12:29) Victorine: I wasn't sick. / (07:14:28) I am not crazy. THESE PEOPLE SLEEP OUTSIDE IN ALL WEATHER, LIVING IN THEIR OWN FILTH, UNTIL NOUMONVI SEES A SIGN THAT THEY ARE HEALED. (07:26:00) PN: If I start to pray for someone and he finds the cure, / he himself will ask to be bathed. / But as long as he is not healed, / if we tell him that he has to go and wash, he will say no. More shots of prayer centre AHONGBONON NOW WANTS TO EXPAND SAINT CAMILLE TO TOGO. Gregoire Koffi (07:46:19) GA: Brother. Hello, my very dear brother. / (07:50:00) How are you? / (07:52:06) What is your name? / (07:54:10) Koffi. / (07:55:27) Have courage, Koffi. HE WANTS TO ENSURE THAT PEOPLE WITH MENTAL ILLNESSES ALWAYS HAVE A SAFE PLACE TO GO. Picture stays on Koffi Gregoire (08:03:09) GA: Because as long as there is one man in chains, / it is humanity that is chained. / When I see a man tied to wood or in chains, / I see my own image. / (08:15:17) And it's the image of each and every one of us. END Credits: Maura Forrest Linda Givetash Gian Paolo Mendoza David Rummel In West Africa, hundreds of people with mental illness live in awful conditions. One organization is fighting for a new approach to treatment. This video was supported by The Global Reporting Centre. "I wondered if he would ever get better," said Ms. Gbedjeha, who put everything else on hold to care for her brother: sleeping on the ground along with other families, passing endless afternoons alone, reading the Bible and praying, feeling an encroaching despair with each passing month. "I wanted to return to my life." She did what she could to maintain an identity beyond caregiving, sewing when she had materials and volunteering to clean the pastor's house now and again. Then, one morning in January, she walked to the forest of shackled people and found only her brother's broken chain. She looked for him, frantically, but there was no trace. The camp quickly assembled a search party. Mr. Gbedjeha was on the run. Good estimates of the number of West Africans with mental illnesses living in chains are not available, in part because people are shackled out of sight by family members, traditional healers and at prayer camps. The camps in Togo vary widely in character. They include Jesus Is the Solution, a large operation, as well as bare bones family outfits like Sitsope, which means "place of refuge," and Rama, both on the outskirts of the capital, Lome. The camps often reflect the personality of the head pastor, whether grandiose or humble, and tend to have a sleepy, sun drained rhythm, with the day's quiet occasionally punctuated by an outburst from someone in chains or the scurry of chickens. In Western countries, hundreds of thousands of people with psychosis or other severe mental health problems land in prison, including more than 100,000 in the United States alone. In Indonesia and other parts of Asia, restraints like shackles, wooden stocks, even cages are also common. Surveys, like one by psychiatrists at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, put the prevalence of schizophrenia, characterized by hallucinations and delusions, at 0.5 to 2.5 percent, roughly the same as the global prevalence. That is at least a million people in countries where chaining is common, like Togo, Ghana and Nigeria. Chaining people against their will violates the United Nations' disability rights convention, which most West African countries, including Togo, Ghana and Nigeria, have ratified. But religious feeling is strong in this part of the world, and the pastors who run the camps preach that, through them, God can heal almost any ailment especially ones thought to be essentially spiritual, like psychosis. In the Rama camp one afternoon, three boys chased a soccer ball in a shaded, dusty yard between small cabins; past the cabins was a fenced field with a row of cinder block bunkers. Kodjo Didier Akarabi, 47, who had been left at the camp a year earlier by two brothers, was folded into the corner of one of them. "I stay here now because I see things," he said, his eyes watchful and his wiry frame naked beneath a small sheet. The camp secretary said that workers kept him chained because he had wandered off, and that they were tending to him until his family could be found. In the rear of the Sitsope camp, three young men were chained in a row of concrete, three sided bunkers with walls broken and cracked over the years "by the people kept here lashing out," a pastor said. And at midmorning, the New Jerusalem camp near Atakpame, Togo, was all but deserted, the church's members out working the surrounding fields. "When the person is alert and thinking clearly, that's when we know to take the chain off," said Kwami Somenou, an assistant pastor at the New Jerusalem camp. Sometimes people do not improve, Mr. Somenou said, and in those cases, "we pray for some resolution, and usually the family takes the person back." At Jesus Is the Solution, Paul Noumonvi, a charismatic pastor, has built a retreat that includes an open air church the size of an airplane hangar, a cafeteria, cabins, an outdoor "ward" for residents with mental illnesses, and, down the road, a walled off compound that encloses his spacious house. At a recent revival, thousands of worshipers thronged the camp, and pastors from around the Plateaux Region in southern Togo joined Mr. Noumonvi for a five hour service amplified by microphones and enlivened by a band. People raised their arms in praise, and some threw themselves to the ground, overcome with feeling. A police detail circulated, keeping an eye on the gate, the proceedings and the pastor's house. After the service, Mr. Noumonvi received visitors on his shaded back porch. In an interview, he said that the camp had been in operation for 12 years and that praying for people with mental problems was a service he offered. Each family is required to provide food, cleanup and a chain, but he does not ask for payment, he said, adding that the camp currently held 175 people. "Many of these people already have tried other things, like traditional healers, herbs and drugs, but the problem didn't go away," he said. "As for healing, we believe a spell has been cast on them. It can be witchcraft this is the cause of the illness. When a person is reasonable again, acting normally, rationally, we say, 'O.K., this person is healed.' " Anthropological studies in the region have found that people will often remove a relative from a prayer camp if they are not satisfied and try something else, whether a hospital, a healer, another camp or medication. "West African families are as practical as anyone else, whatever their beliefs about mental illness," said Dr. Julian Eaton, the global mental health adviser for CBM, an international Christian organization working on development and disability issues. Mr. Gbedjeha, the eldest of five, was his family's rock. When his younger brother Komlan quit trade school, Mr. Gbedjeha persuaded him to persist and to become a motorbike mechanic. When an aunt was using his sisters as housekeepers, he made sure they were sent back home to the family village. "He was so important to us, because he fought for us all the time," his sister Akossiwa said. So his siblings were deeply shaken when he began having serious mental problems in his early 30s problems that he denied. He would denounce strangers on the street as sorcerers or demons, they said, and then have conversations with figures invisible to everyone but him. "I was the only one who could really talk to him," Komlan said. "I wanted him to go to the hospital, because something was very wrong." His siblings gathered in their home village Djagble, just outside the capital with their mother, uncles and aunts. The elders favored traditional healers who used herbal concoctions, incantations and spells to drive away evil spirits or remove curses. But Komlan and his sisters knew that their older brother, who had studied to be a pastor, would not agree to traditional methods. So they suggested a compromise: Why not use his Christian faith in the service of recovery? The family had heard about Jesus Is the Solution, about 100 miles north. The elders agreed but not Mr. Gbedjeha. "We had to capture him," Komlan said. One night in December 2012, when Mr. Gbedjeha was at a sister's home, acting bizarrely, she dissolved a strong sedative into his soup, and he fell into a deep sleep. Komlan and two friends stole into his room and tied him up. "I cried and cried, seeing him like that," Komlan said. "He, Koffi, who always was there for me." At Jesus Is the Solution, the camp secretary registered Mr. Gbedjeha as a patient and told Komlan the family would be responsible for his care and feeding. The siblings begged the youngest, Akossiwa, who was unmarried, to mind her brother; she reluctantly agreed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
For nearly 14 years, Nick Denton and Gawker.com have defined Gawker Media. But over the last several months, a split of some kind between the company, its founder and its flagship site became inevitable: Gawker Media, under financial pressure from a 140 million legal judgment in an invasion of privacy lawsuit brought by Hulk Hogan, the former professional wrestler, also encountered a seemingly unbeatable adversary in the form of Peter Thiel, the billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur who was financing legal efforts against the company. Left with few options, Gawker Media filed for bankruptcy and put itself up for sale in June. On Thursday, less than 48 hours after Univision's 135 million bid won an auction for Gawker Media, the bond finally broke. Gawker.com will shut down next week, and Mr. Denton, whose sites pioneered a wry, conversational and brash form of web journalism that would influence publications across the internet, will leave the company. "Sadly, neither I nor Gawker.com, the buccaneering flagship of the group I built with my colleagues, are coming along for this next stage," Mr. Denton wrote in a note to the staff on Thursday afternoon shortly after a bankruptcy judge approved the company's sale to Univision. The fate of Gawker.com had been the subject of much speculation ever since the Hogan verdict. Still, it was an abrupt outcome after what had been a long period of uncertainty. "It was a culmination of a year of dread," said John Cook, the executive editor of Gawker Media. "Through a year of just utter constant trauma and assault, it was the thing that I was trying to prevent it was the thing that we were all trying to keep from happening." Gawker.com's archives will remain online, but after Monday it will not publish new material, Mr. Denton wrote in his note. As for Mr. Denton, he said he would "move on to other projects," but provided few clues as to what those were except to say they would be "out of the news and gossip business." Before the bankruptcy hearing, Mr. Denton gathered the staff of Gawker.com in a windowless conference room at Gawker's offices to tell them the site would stop publishing. "I'm not going to say we lost, but Peter Thiel achieved his objective," Mr. Denton said, according to a person at the meeting. Founded in 2003 as one of Gawker Media's first two blogs, Gawker.com initially covered news and gossip about New York media and society. The site was considered by many as an incubator of talent, and its journalists have gone on to work at places like The New Yorker and New York magazine. Mr. Denton, a former financial journalist, was known for saying that journalists shared the most interesting stories they knew not in their articles but with each other at the bar after work. Gawker.com, perhaps more than any other site, reflected an attempt to change that. Its articles could be at turns witty and caustic, humorous and weighty. Mr. Denton often said that if something was interesting, it was news. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. But the site also attracted criticism for publishing articles that detractors said were in bad taste. Last summer, an article about a married male media executive who sought to hire a gay escort was published and then removed. The article drew widespread condemnation, and its removal led to the resignation of two top editors. In the aftermath, Mr. Denton vowed to make Gawker nicer, and the site shifted its focus to politics. Gawker Media's portfolio of sites also includes the technology site Gizmodo; the sports site Deadspin; and Jezebel, a site aimed at women. The news that Gawker.com was shutting down was met with an outpouring of both relief and grief on social media. A number of journalists and news organizations tweeted and published articles that read like eulogies. "The loss of Gawker is huge terrible," Glenn Greenwald, the journalist, wrote on Twitter. "Most people disagreeing don't read it." The site's demise could also reignite the debate about press freedom and whether anyone with an agenda and deep enough pockets should be able to sink a news organization. No layoffs were planned in connection with the shutdown, and journalists had been assured they would be offered jobs elsewhere at the company. But the shuttering of Gawker.com nevertheless represents a victory for Mr. Thiel, whose fight with the company began in 2007, when Valleywag, one of Gawker Media's now defunct blogs, published an article saying he was gay. "Since cruelty and recklessness were intrinsic parts of Gawker's business model, it seemed only a matter of time before they would try to pretend that journalism justified the very worst," Mr. Thiel wrote in an Op Ed for The New York Times published this week. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
TripAdvisor Modified Its Approach to Reviews and Sexual Assault. Did It Go Far Enough? What she wanted to do was warn others. In Ethiopia last October, the 30 year old aid worker went on a group kayaking trip, expecting an enjoyable adventure. Instead it turned into a harrowing ordeal: The woman woke up in her hotel room in the early morning, she said, and found one of the tour guides on top of her. He had broken into her room and raped her, she said, before her roommate woke up and helped restrain the man. The woman, who goes by K the sound of the first letter of her name asked that her real name not be used. K went through the motions multiple medical exams, a police report, informing her employer and was medically evacuated from the country. After weeks of therapy, she decided to warn others by writing a review on TripAdvisor. What she assumed would take a few minutes has exploded into a public battle with one of the biggest companies in the travel world. K said her review wasn't approved by TripAdvisor because it didn't meet the platform's policies, which require all reviews to be written in the first person and posted from the TripAdvisor account of the person who had the experience. K said that would open her up to possible harassment online and expose her identity to colleagues and Ethiopian authorities, who are investigating the incident. Since then, a petition calling for the company to change its policy has gained more than 500,000 signatures. TripAdvisor announced new changes this week, but K and activists behind the petition say they fall short of what's needed. In the sharing economy, people increasingly rely on online and often anonymous reviews from others on where to stay, eat, shop and more. They are willing to trust suggestions from strangers because this practice offers convenience and the comfort of multiple, varied experiences. Still, the review system depends on the unspoken expectation that everyone involved is writing truthfully. That comes to a head when safety and security is threatened. Whose responsibility is it to ensure that people see information about unsafe places? How can the information in reviews best be vetted? TripAdvisor is the world's largest platform for reviews of travel accommodations and other businesses, and its policy, since the company started accepting user reviews nearly 20 years ago, states that only first person reviews are allowed to ensure that experiences are authentic and true. People can change user names so other users don't see their real name, but the account has to be created with a real name and linked to an email address. These reviews and opinions now number around 760 million, written by travelers and reviewed by a combination of human and computer moderation. Will new search features really help? On Tuesday, the company rolled out new online features intended to help users find reviews about safety more easily. "The need for better access to safety information while traveling has never been greater," Lindsay Nelson, TripAdvisor's president of core experience, wrote on the company's blog. One such feature is a filter that allows users to search specifically for reviews concerning sexual assault and sexual misconduct by employees. TripAdvisor said that it found 1,100 reviews concerning sexual assault from the last year. These reviews are available in 28 languages. A user must trigger this feature, though. Additionally, if a safety claim has been made against an organization, a notification will automatically appear at the top of a review, alerting users to the issue. "TripAdvisor has its own posting guidelines to ensure the integrity of our content," Desiree Fish, a spokeswoman for the company, said. "These guidelines lead to credibility and trust. Not only can we check for fraud, but Travelers want to hear from other travelers about their experiences. It allows them to make an informed decision." K is battling the requirement that reviews be written in first person. She said that the man who attacked her runs a one man, tour guide business, and he has a 4.5 star rating on the site. "I tried to post a review which was a warning," she said. "I said 'this tour guide raped a German tourist,' but it wasn't written in first person, so it was rejected." Frustrated, K asked friends to leave reviews sharing her experience, but those also did not meet TripAdvisor's rules. In emails seen by The Times, a TripAdvisor employee advised K to create an account under a different username where she could write a first person review without revealing her identity an option that TripAdvisor has offered other survivors of sexual violence, according to the emails. This, K said, was an unreasonable expectation. "I'm not leaving a first person, in detailed, account of my rape," K said. "I don't want to be contacted and threatened or trolled, even on a burner account. Why can't TripAdvisor have someone who can make sure my experience is seen without re traumatizing survivors?" After The Guardian published a story about K's experience, the advocacy group change.org helped start a petition demanding TripAdvisor "stop covering up sexual assaults." That petition, which currently has more than 522,000 signatures, calls the company out for not removing, penalizing or more visibly marking businesses where people have said they have been attacked. The petition's backers took K's story to the street on Wednesday in a small protest outside TripAdvisor's New York offices, a day after the platform added the two new safety features. "It seems like a niche issue," said Will Decamp, a 28 year old who works in television development and attended the protest. "But think about TripAdvisor's global reach. I mean people, so many hundreds of thousands of people, are planning their trips using TripAdvisor. For them not to be aware of some of these issues is dangerous." Mr. Decamp and the change.org team believe that the new TripAdvisor features do not go far enough, only addressing the issue of review visibility. They want the company to allow survivors to share their experiences through anonymous channels or not in first person. "It's a positive step and they care about the issue and we know that they can do better," said Molly Dorozenski, senior campaigns director at change.org. "But they haven't really considered the point of view of the survivor yet." K agrees and wants the company to add a hotline or another more private and direct channel for survivors to share their stories. "They've addressed the issue about visibility, but what they haven't addressed is the issue of making it easier for survivors to leave a review," K said. "For people who have been assaulted, it is difficult to write a review because it is traumatizing." This is the second time in two years that TripAdvisor has come under fire for the way it handles user reviews and posts related to sexual assault. Kristie Love, a 44 year old from Texas, wrote a post on TripAdvisor about being raped at a resort in Mexico in 2010. But company policy at the time only allowed posts that were "family friendly," and hers was repeatedly removed. In 2017 her story received widespread attention after it was reported by The Journal Sentinel of Milwaukee. In the face of criticism, the company changed the family friendly policy to allow reviews about sexual assault and other forms of violence. It began placing a badge on the pages of properties where sexual assault and other major concerns were said to have occurred. It said that it would make more changes in the future. The badge system has also been criticized. Ms. Love said she initially felt that TripAdvisor had not made enough changes. Her thinking has changed. "TripAdvisor isn't responsible for my rape," she said. "I don't believe that TripAdvisor is here to play judge and jury." Ms. Love said that she has been following K's story and that option to leave a review from a "burner account" is reasonable. "That's exactly what I was trying to do two years ago," Ms. Love said. "The best way that we can protect other people is to get the story out there." TripAdvisor said that it is continuing to speak with survivors, including K, and to work with organizations to create more useful long term solutions that keep travelers safe. On Wednesday, the company published a list of tips in partnership with No More, an initiative working to end domestic violence and sexual assault, about how to stay safe during different points of the travel process. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
SAN FRANCISCO First Snapchat did it. Then Instagram and Facebook jumped in. Now Twitter is joining in, too. On Tuesday, Twitter said it would introduce a feature called Fleets, allowing users to post ephemeral photos or text that will automatically disappear after 24 hours. Fleets, a name that refers to the "fleeting" nature of a thought or expression, will roll out to all iPhone and Android users globally over the coming days, the company said. Twitter said its main "global town square" service, which people such as President Trump use to broadcast their thoughts to followers, remained its marquee product. But the company said it recognized that many users simply lurked on the platform and rarely posted. Fleets, it said, could make it easier for people to communicate without worrying about wider scrutiny of their posts. "We've learned that some people feel more comfortable joining conversations on Twitter with this ephemeral format, so what they're saying lives just for a moment in time," said Joshua Harris, a Twitter director of design. "We can create a space with less pressure that allows people to express themselves in a way that feels a bit more safe." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
This four bedroom penthouse sits on a plateau at the foot of the Grossvenediger, an 11,700 foot glacier topped mountain that looms over the village of Neukirchen am Grossvenediger, in the Austrian Alps. Built in 2016 on the second floor of a south facing farmhouse style chalet with overhanging eaves, the 1,615 square foot apartment has exposed beams and vaulted rafters with a ceiling peak of about 16 feet, said Florian Hofer, a managing director in Austria for Engel Volkers, which has the listing. Balconies at either end of the penthouse and a loggia overlook some of the 16 other nearby chalets with mountain views reminiscent of "The Sound of Music," which was set in Salzburg. Steps lead from a ground level entry to the penthouse's thick wood door. The wood clad great room encompasses the living, dining and kitchen areas, with wide plank floors, a fireplace and a floor to ceiling, triple insulated glass door that slides open to a loggia protected from the elements on three sides. The balcony has decorative wood railings with fanciful carvings near the chalet's peak. A short hall leads to a spa bathroom with a glass walled sauna and an adjacent relaxation area with mountain views. A second door from the spa opens to the main bedroom. Three bedrooms have en suite baths and double doors to a back balcony. The fourth bedroom opens to the front balcony. Two parking spots in an underground community garage are reserved for the penthouse, with a walk of about 40 yards along a path to the chalet. Neukirchen am Grossvenediger, with about 2,500 residents, is in the western portion of the 715 square mile Hohe Tauern National Park. The penthouse is within 30 minutes of five ski areas, including Kitzbuhel, a fashionable winter resort with tony shops at its medieval center and an annual downhill race event, the Hahnenkamm. Zell am See, a city of about 10,000 known for winter sports and summers on the shores of Lake Zell, is 40 minutes east. The medieval city of Salzburg, with about 150,000 residents and a claim to fame as the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, is 90 miles north. Salzburg Airport provides flights to other European cities. Munich International Airport is a two hour drive. Salzburg has enjoyed a solid decade of housing market growth, with prices in the city rising 110 percent during that period (and even more at the high end), brokers said. That's in line with national trends: Housing prices across Austria surged upward in 2019, growing by about 8 percent year over year, according to Oesterreichische Nationalbank, the central bank of Austria. The city attracts large numbers of tourists and students attending one of its three universities. Buyers often seek renovated apartments in Salzburg's Baroque town center, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as well as lakeside homes in the Salzkammergut, a nearby region of lakes, valleys, rolling hills and steep alpine mountains. When the coronavirus pandemic shuttered the market for about six weeks starting in mid March, "there was a postponement of certain discussions and transactions, but not a real shutdown," said Mark Husges, a license partner of Engel Volkers Salzburg. Prices remained "extremely stable and will continue to rise as they did the past couple of years," Mr. Husges added. "I don't see any negative consequence of Covid on real estate prices." Although about half of Salzburg's residents rent their homes, "people have reconsidered their options," Mr. Husges said, with a push to more suburban areas with "small houses and small gardens," in case of a second lockdown. "Before Covid, they would have spent money on a city apartment," he added. Inventory is low in Salzburg city, where new development is curtailed by numerous "green land zones," she said. Pickings are also slim in the Salzkammergut. "Because of the lockdown, people found it is worthwhile to have their own property on a lake, instead of being locked up in an apartment," she said. Some clients, shopping virtually, "bought properties without even going inside, without even going to the location." Sales have been helped by the ability to get "good financing" with very low interest rates, she said. The markets in Salzburg and Vienna, about 200 miles east, run between 5,000 and 7,000 euros a square meter ( 550 to 770 a square foot), said Alex Koch de Gooreynd, a partner at Knight Frank who works on the international residential sales team. Innsbruck and Bregenz are about 5 percent more expensive, said Richard Buxbaum, the head of residential property at the Vienna based agency Otto Immobilien. The high end begins just below 750,000 euros ( 900,000) and goes up to 15 million euros ( 17.8 million), Ms. Muhr said. A newer two story, 3,200 square foot brick house with a basement and with garage on a quarter acre lot in a good neighborhood might get 3 million euros ( 3.5 million). New penthouses with roof gardens run 20,000 euros ( 23,700) a square meter. Properties with views of the Hohensalzburg Fortress, a fully preserved medieval castle above Salzburg's historical center, command an extra 25 percent. Demand is particularly high in Kitzbuhel, "a very expensive market," in part to its proximity to Munich (about 90 minutes) and Salzburg (60 minutes). "Prices there went through the roof," Ms. Muhr said. In Vienna, prestigious mansions changed hands in 2020 "for as much as 11.5 million euros ( 13.6 million). Exclusive freehold apartments have reached top prices per square meter of up to 24,500 euros ( 29 million)," said John Philipp Niemann, a managing director in Vienna for Engel Volkers. Many high net worth Germans move their residences to Austria "because of the lack of an inheritance tax," Ms. Muhr said, though taxes are typically higher in Austria than in other European Union nations. British and Dutch citizens tend to buy in the ski areas, while Italian buyers go to Vienna, Salzburg or Innsbruck, which is closer to Italy, she said. Chinese clients also buy in Vienna. Swiss nationals and Austrians living abroad also buy in Vienna, Mr. Niemann said, with the majority of buyers gravitating "toward luxury new developments and refurbished heritage buildings with state of the art fittings and amenities." Americans "love Salzburg as a cultural and holiday destination as well as a place to live," Mr. Husges said. Buyers in ski and vacation areas like Zell am See and Kitzbuhel as well as Innsbruck are mainly from Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Britain, Mr. Hofer said. This chalet is on a plot licensed for tourist use. Though the owner can live there, the penthouse must be rented out "for a certain number of weeks each year," Mr. Hofer said. In order to purchase Austrian real estate, Americans and other buyers outside the European Union must form a corporation in Austria or elsewhere in the European Union. A tax adviser should be consulted, Mr. Hofer added. In Salzburg state, using a property as a holiday home or for tourist lodging "is subject to stringent restrictions, unless the property is in one of the few municipalities that have not yet reached its maximum quota of second homes, currently 16 percent," said Dr. Johann Brundl, a notary. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Plus, two Times Talks events. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'DANCE NATION' at Playwrights Horizons (previews start on April 13; opens on May 8). A playwright with an abiding and sometimes grotesque interest in the female body, Clare Barron comes to Playwrights Horizons with a drama about a preteen dance competition. The director and choreographer Lee Sunday Evans oversees the spangled, cutthroat fun. Eboni Booth, Ellen Maddow and Thomas Jay Ryan star. 212 279 4200, playwrightshorizons.org 'LIGHT SHINING IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE' at New York Theater Workshop (previews start on April 18; opens on May 7). The director Rachel Chavkin says she wants a revolution, and in this revival of Caryl Churchill's 1976 drama, she's exploring insurrection in 17th century England. Vinie Burrows, Rob Campbell and Mikeah Ernest Jennings star in a play about Levellers, Ranters and a time when a nation almost remade itself. 212 460 5475, nytw.org 'MY FAIR LADY' at the Vivian Beaumont Theater (in previews; opens on April 19). Lerner and Loewe's musical comedy confection returns to Broadway with the loverly Lauren Ambrose as the spirited flower seller Eliza Doolittle and Harry Hadden Paton as her eccentric phonetician, Henry Higgins. Bartlett Sher's lush production for Lincoln Center Theater includes Diana Rigg as Mrs. Higgins and Norbert Leo Butz as Eliza's church bound father. 212 239 6200, lct.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
NASHVILLE Since long before it was a country, our country has been in flames. When we arrived on our big ships and decimated this land's original peoples with our viruses and our guns, when we used our Christian faith as a justification for killing both "heretic" and "heathen," we founded this country in flames. And every month, every week, every day, for the last 400 years, we have been setting new fires. White Christians who came before us captured human beings and beat them and raped them and stole their babies from them and stole their parents from them and stole their husbands and their wives from them and locked them in chains and made them work in inhuman conditions. Our spiritual ancestors went to church and listened to their pastors argue that these human beings weren't human at all. Our pastors don't tell us that anymore, but we are still setting fires. Christians set a fire every time we allow our leaders to weaponize our fears against us. We set a fire every time our faith in good police officers prevents us from seeing the bad ones. Christian voters preserve a system that permits police violence, unjust prosecutions and hellhole prisons filled with people who should have received the same addiction treatment we give our own troubled kids. We set a fire every time we fail to scrutinize a police culture that allows an officer's own fear and hatred to justify the most casual brutality against another human being. It would be almost unbelievable to match an adjective like "casual" with a noun like "brutality," but we have seen the videos. Watch the faces of justice shove an old man aside and leave him bleeding on the ground. Watch them drive their vehicles into protesters protected by the United States Constitution. Watch them fire rubber bullets directly at journalists doing work that is also protected by the United States Constitution. In video after video, note their unconcern with people who are bleeding or screaming in pain. Make yourself look. Study the air of perfect nonchalance on Derek Chauvin's face as he kneels on the neck of George Floyd. Register the blithe indifference in his posture, the way he puts his hand in his pocket as though he were just walking along the street on a sunny summer day. Nothing in his whole body suggests concern. He is not the least bit troubled by taking another human life. Every single aspect of our criminal justice system is permeated by racism, but too many Christians continue to vote for "law and order" candidates anyway, failing to notice that more cops and more weapons and more prisons have done exactly nothing to make us safer. Failing to notice that they have instead endangered all Americans, but black people most of all. We should know better by now. There are so many resources to help us know better, yet too many Christians ignore the history books that document the terrible legacy of slavery. We ignore the novelists who tell us why the caged bird sings. We ignore the poets who teach us the cruel cost of a dream deferred. In our carefully preserved ignorance, we pile all their books up in a great pyre, and we set them on fire. We set the fire when we heard a peaceful crowd singing, "We shall overcome someday," and understood that someday would never be today, that someday was at best still decades and decades away. We set the fire when we heard a peaceful crowd singing, "Lean on me when you're not strong," and believed it was time to call in the military. We set the fire when our "Christian" president cleared a peaceful crowd by spraying them with tear gas as though they were enemy combatants, marched to a nearby church for a photo op and held up a Bible to imply that God is on his side. We have to stop letting this president turn our faith into a travesty. Love is the only way to put out this fire, love and listening and the hard work of changing, but this "Christian" president doesn't want to put out the fire. Fire is his homeplace. Fire is his native land. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
THOMPSONS, Tex. Can one of the most promising and troubled technologies for fighting global warming survive during the administration of Donald J. Trump? The technology, carbon capture, involves pulling carbon dioxide out of smokestacks and industrial processes before the climate altering gas can make its way into the atmosphere. Mr. Trump's denial of the overwhelming scientific evidence supporting climate change, a view shared by many of his cabinet nominees, might appear to doom any such environmental initiatives. But the new Petra Nova plant about to start running here, about 30 miles southwest of Houston, is a bright spot for the technology's supporters. It is being completed essentially on time and within its budget, unlike many previous such projects. When it fires up, the plant, which is attached to one of the power company NRG's hulking coal burning units, will draw 90 percent of the CO from the emissions produced by 240 megawatts of generated power. That is a fraction of the roughly 3,700 megawatts produced at this gargantuan plant, the largest in the Lone Star State. Still, it is enough to capture 1.6 million tons of carbon dioxide each year equivalent to the greenhouse gas produced by driving 3.5 billion miles, or the CO from generating electricity for 214,338 homes. From a tower hundreds of feet above the Petra Nova operation, the carbon capture system looks like a fever dream of an Erector set fanatic, with mazes of pipes and gleaming tanks set off from the main plant's skyscraping smokestacks and busy coal conveyors. Petra Nova uses the most common technology for carbon capture. The exhaust stream, pushed down a snaking conduit to the Petra Nova equipment, is exposed to a solution of chemicals known as amines, which bond with the carbon dioxide. That solution is pumped to a regenerator, or stripper, which heats the amine and releases the CO . Petra Nova, a billion dollar joint venture of NRG and JX Nippon Oil and Gas Exploration, will not just grab the CO , it will use it, pushing compressed CO through a new pipeline 81 miles to an oil field. The gas will be injected into wells, a technique known as enhanced oil recovery, that should increase production to 15,000 barrels a day from about 300 barrels a day. And since NRG owns a quarter of the oil recovery project, what comes out of the ground will help pay for the carbon capture operation. The plant, which has received 190 million from the federal government, can be economically viable if the price of oil is about 50 a barrel, said David Knox, an NRG spokesman. The company expects to declare the plant operational in January, Mr. Knox said. Aware of problems with carbon capture projects around the country and of the risks of hubris, he said: "We're not going to declare victory before it's time." If the price of oil stabilizes or rises, and if tax breaks for developing the technology continue and markets for carbon storage develop, he said, utilities might ask, "why would I not want to put a carbon capture system on my plant?" But developing large scale carbon capture has been neither straightforward nor easy. So far, problems have bedeviled major projects, often costing far more than projected and taking longer to complete. The federal government has canceled projects like Future Gen, which was granted more than 1 billion by the Obama administration. Carbon capture systems are not just expensive to build; they tend to be power hungry, and make the plant less efficient over all a problem known as "parasitic load." The Petra Nova carbon capture process gets its energy from a separate power plant constructed for the purpose, which NRG says makes the system more efficient than it would otherwise be, and frees up all of the capacity of the main power plant to sell all of the electricity it produces. The company estimates that the next plant it builds could cost 20 percent less, thanks to lessons learned this time around. If Petra Nova succeeds, it means a boost for carbon capture. Despite carbon capture's problems, its supporters, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency, call the technology, known as carbon capture sequestration, crucial for meeting emissions standards that can prevent the worst effects of climate change. "If you don't have C.C.S., the chance of success goes down, and the cost of success goes up," said Julio Friedmann, an expert at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories in California and a former Energy Department official. "If you do have C.C.S., the chance of success goes up and the cost of success goes down." Carbon capture is proving itself, said David Mohler, the deputy assistant secretary for clean coal and carbon management at the federal Energy Department. Developing technologies often involves delay and cost overruns initially, he said. "You cannot engineer all the bugs out from inside a cubicle you really have to do this stuff in the real world," he said. Driving down costs, he noted, is what engineers and businesses do through research, development and production. He cited the plummeting cost of initially expensive technologies like solar power. "We do figure things out as we go," he said. What the Trump administration will do with carbon capture is, at this point, anyone's guess. "The technology only makes sense in a world where you are seeking to avoid putting CO into the atmosphere," said Mark Brownstein, a vice president for the climate and energy program at the Environmental Defense Fund. But some supporters of the technology see reasons for hope. "I actually think it's a moment of optimism," said Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, who met with Mr. Trump last month as a potential agriculture secretary. Ms. Heitkamp co sponsored legislation with another Democrat, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, to expand and extend tax breaks for carbon capture projects. "What I saw with the president elect was a laserlike focus on jobs," she said. "I think he was intrigued" about the economic opportunity that carbon capture could provide to keep coal power generation in the national mix, she added. One of the pillars of Mr. Trump's campaign was his intention to revive the fortunes of the coal industry through support of so called clean coal. And while the exact meaning of the much used phrase is open to interpretation, it generally includes not just technologies that remove soot and smog causing pollutants, but also carbon dioxide. Ms. Heitkamp said that businesses, too, were likely to continue development of carbon capture technology, since they planned their plant investments on a curve of decades and are loath to change course because of a single election. "The decision they are making is not, what does the political outlook look like today? What's it look like over the life of this plant?" Although she concedes that a full scale revival of coal's fortunes is unlikely, carbon capture could be a way to extend the life of current facilities while keeping the nation's energy mix diverse. Jeff Erikson, general manager at the Global C.C.S. Institute, which promotes the technology, said he did not expect to see a great number of new coal plants on the way. "I wouldn't say carbon capture is going to rescue the coal industry," he said, but pointed out that there is great potential for applying carbon capture to diverse natural gas plants and to industrial applications. Captured carbon can be used not just for oil production but a widening range of industrial processes, or can even be pumped into the ground. One of the most innovative approaches to carbon capture is being tried 50 miles east of the Petra Nova plant, in La Porte, Tex., where a consortium of companies is trying an entirely new approach to low carbon power generation. In a 140 million, 50 megawatt demonstration project, the company, Net Power, will use superheated carbon dioxide in much the same way that conventional power plants use steam to drive turbines. This system, invented by a British engineer, Rodney Allam, eliminates the inefficiency inherent in heating water into steam and cooling it again. The power plant produces a stream of very pure, pressurized carbon dioxide that is ready for pipelines without much of the additional processing that conventional carbon capture systems require. Even if the United States government shows little interest in reducing the nation's carbon footprint under Mr. Trump and a Republican Congress, consortium officials say they expect to find ready customers from companies in the United States and around the globe, where the threat of climate change is fully acknowledged. "We see this very much playing into all parts of the world," said Daniel McCarthy, executive vice president for CB I's technology operating group. Environmentalists remain divided on the issue of carbon capture, said John Coequyt, global climate policy director for Sierra Club. "This is the issue where the biggest range of positions exists within the environmental community," he said. Groups like the Clean Air Task Force favor it strongly. Other factions call clean coal a fig leaf to keep coal, with all of its environmental baggage, in the energy mix. And many suggest the billions of dollars spent on trying to capture carbon would be better directed to the technologies that don't pollute the atmosphere in the first place. Dr. Friedmann, the former energy official, predicted that the technology would prove its usefulness. "It's convenient to just say 'Keep it in the ground,' " he said, referring to an antifossil fuel slogan. "What I prefer to say is 'Keep it from the air.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
THE MOTION OF THE BODY THROUGH SPACE By Lionel Shriver Call it the pity paradigm: A novel can be judged a success if it generates the right amount of sympathy for a character, no matter how flawed, hopeless or confused that character might be. This paradigm shines a light on our most delicate and aspirational selves because who hasn't felt misunderstood, even damnable, as characters in fiction so often feel, while still yearning for sympathy and a happy ending? It is the rare writer who forswears this paradigm through pessimism or scruple. Think of the dark filament connecting Cormac McCarthy's early work to Ottessa Moshfegh's. If most contemporary novelists are preoccupied with redemption, and if this leaves fiction open to accusations of being, in the main, one big sop to human vanity, well, that's why the likes of McCarthy and Moshfegh are so refreshing. The prospective thrill of a new novel by the iconoclast Lionel Shriver is located here, in anticipating the skewing of pieties, your pity be damned. In novels like "We Need to Talk About Kevin" and "The Mandibles," Shriver mocks dogmas and punctures myths. In her public remarks, she has not shied from controversy. Her 15th novel, "The Motion of the Body Through Space," is certainly no wilting lily. The dialogue is barbed and the characters immediately at odds. When Remington Alabaster (his outlandish name itself a kind of poke in the eye of the faint reader) announces his intention, after a lifetime of inertia, to run a marathon at the age of 64, his wife, Serenata Terpsichore (a still bolder poke), flies at him as if he had announced plans to perfect the art of human sacrifice. Actually, a serial killer Serenata might respect. But a marathoner? She asks Remington if he's aware that his ambition is "hopelessly trite." "You're going to be a real bitch about this, aren't you?" Remington asks. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. Read an excerpt from "The Motion of the Body Through Space." What follows is largely an account of how their joint prediction proves true. Serenata wonders what might have provoked her husband of 33 years to challenge himself in such a grueling and uncharacteristic way. Does he hope to lose the gut? Tap a runner's high? Later, the reader learns what she well knows: A civil engineer at the Albany Department of Transportation, Remington was forced into early retirement after a run in with his African American superior, Lucinda Okonkwo, whose only professional virtue, in Serenata's estimation, is the intersectionality that has "airlifted" her to her "level of incompetence." Remington's disenfranchisement might explain his desire to reclaim his self respect, but Serenata cannot replay this sorry episode another day. If Serenata has little pity for Remington, Shriver demonstrates plenty for Serenata. Remington's resolve to firm up comes on the heels of his wife's sudden infirmity: After decades of daily exercise, Serenata's knees have gone kaput. The pursuit of his choosing, then, seems like an encroachment on Serenata's sense of self and Shriver establishes early the many ways the world has already encroached on Serenata. At the age of 16, in a time when tattoos were still the private domain of longshoremen, Serenata inked a bumblebee on her right wrist, only to watch in horror as the culture changed and everyone followed suit with his or her own twist. Humanity at large turns out to be Serenata's true antagonist (and Shriver's main target), always co opting her best ideas. She liked sushi. Now everyone likes sushi. She used to wear scrunchies to keep her ponytail in check. Now anyone can go into the CVS and buy a pack of 10. As for "Breaking Bad," Serenata was a fan "before anyone else had ever heard of it." She wore Uggs before you wore Uggs. Also, Serenata invented physical fitness. "I invented it for myself," she replies. Serenata is wronged but always right; the narrative insists on it. Remington's running preoccupies, then consumes her. She thinks it will end with a marathon; he hires a trainer and sets his sights on a triathlon. The trainer is a hot young thing called Bambi Buffer whose designs on Remington are as subtle as her name. Now Serenata's marriage is threatened by more than personal bests. The book wisely points to a precedent for this power imbalance: Serenata's children felt similarly abandoned by their mother when she disappeared for long stretches to fill an extreme daily quota of exercise. Now one of them is a hopeless Christian loser and the other a drug dealer. But just when Shriver might have insisted Serenata have a long, hard look at her past actions, she pulls back, locates the wit and wisdom of dealing drugs and takes aim at all the fish in the believer's barrel. The children become more fodder for confirming the inanities of the human race while failing utterly to work on Serenata as actual humans she might have harmed. The novel is good at establishing the us versus them mentality of a long marriage. Any weathered union, no matter how stressed, falls effortlessly into old grooves, where companionship is renewed almost out of habit. The peculiar nature of one of those old grooves, however, is as troubling a word Serenata disdains as the blithe neglect of her children: She and Remington skirt the controversial subject of fitness by returning to the comforts of casual racism. These conversations between the couple seem calibrated to provoke while stopping short of, say, identifying Pepe the Frog as the family pet. What they tend to highlight above all is a world divided and subdivided into "us" and "them." The reader's sympathy for Serenata's plight, then, depends upon how much feeling can be generated for a character wrenched from her long accustomed "us" when, in the first instance, that "us" relies on a host of racial grievances to establish and reinforce itself. "Thought experiment," Remington announces over dinner one night, during one of their momentary truces, before asking Serenata how she would feel if the man following her through a deserted place turns out to be white. Throughout "The Motion of the Body Through Space," I was desperate to do one of two things: to extend my sympathies to Serenata, or to watch as Shriver served her up as harshly as Serenata herself would have. But for all the ways Serenata might appear to deserve a second look she is a woman of 60 betrayed by her body, tossed over by her husband and cast aside by her profession as a voice over artist doomed by changing cultural mores her refusal to extend sympathy to anyone but herself makes generosity toward her a very hard sell. And Shriver's sympathies, so clearly and uniquely reserved for Serenata, restrain her from real daring as she sets about restoring an order to her world consistently denied Remington's. As the book resolves itself into a comedy in which all's well that ends well Serenata complains, she rails, she is dared to think twice and declines, and she feels enormously sorry for herself I kept thinking: Who cares? There is a provocative argument running through this unrelentingly didactic book, which posits that extreme sports might be a kind of white sickness. "There's a ... regression, a ... narrowing, a ... retreat," Serenata remarks to her husband about men like himself. "A lowering of horizons ... a crawling into a hole." The implication Shriver makes here before beating a hasty retreat is that with no new worlds to conquer, white men like Remington, lacking new daring, must turn inward and subject the one final small domain remaining to them their bodily selves to grueling and self loathing events like the Ironman. I found it ironic, and lamentable, that Shriver did not deal as boldly with Serenata as she does with her race. I would much rather have white men like me running triathlons and doing burpies than opening fire in Walmart to express their racial grievances, but it's just this sort of weak thinking that gets under Serenata's thin skin. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
New York media types aren't quick to pass up a party, even one celebrating a book that predicts their demise. So it was on Wednesday night that several guests who work in advertising were at the Greenwich Hotel in TriBeCa, where the wine and old fashioneds flowed freely and a new book called "The End of Advertising" and its author, Andrew Essex, were being saluted. Mr. Essex, chief executive of Tribeca Enterprises, the firm behind the Tribeca Film Festival, is a relatively recent defector from the ad world, where he was a co founder and the chief executive of the agency Droga5. The fete was hosted by Jane Rosenthal, a movie producer who founded the Tribeca Film Festival with Robert De Niro and Craig Hatkoff and is now the executive chairwoman of Tribeca Enterprises. After Ms. Rosenthal offered a toast to Mr. Essex, he took the opportunity to offer a caveat. "It's not all over. It's just over for people who are producing" bad stuff, he said, using a more profane term. ("I'll take it," one of his guests shouted.) But his outlook for Madison Avenue is not sunny. Mr. Essex did not leave advertising so much as flee it, as per his new book. He described his discovery and subsequent enchantment with ad blocking software and criticized most advertising, including television commercials, as being annoying, excessive and lacking creativity. The future of marketing will need to rely on creative, innovative models, Mr. Essex wrote, pointing to "The Lego Movie" and New York's Citi Bike bicycle share program as promising examples. For the past two years, in fact, the Tribeca Film Festival has handed out an award for the best "storytelling" by brands working with artists and filmmakers. Those mixing in the hotel's chic, library like atmosphere seemed to be latching on to the message that creativity would win the day. Rather than the feeling of impending doom, one marketing executive from Bank of America said it was a thrilling time to be working in the industry, with the shifts in the way ads reach the public forcing innovation. Still, even those whose contact with the advertising world is mainly fictional can sense the challenges the industry faces. The actor John Slattery, best known for playing the ad executive Roger Sterling in the series "Mad Men," emerged as a surprise guest at the event, courtesy of Ms. Rosenthal. (Mr. Essex, in his book, referred to Roger Sterling to describe his role at Droga5, though he emphasized on Wednesday that the comparison did not extend to any of the character's more salacious behavior on the show.) Mr. Slattery said he was about halfway through Mr. Essex's book. Advertising is a difficult business today, he said, with the advent of platforms like Facebook and Google. "How do you get seen in all the noise?" he asked. Or, as Mr. Essex put it in his book: "When traditional advertising was first invented, there were 16 or so waking hours in a day. That baseline hasn't changed, but the number of things frenetically competing for our attention at any given moment has, we all know, increased exponentially." Reading the book has already paid off for Mr. Slattery. "I didn't know about ad blocking, period, and downloaded it," he said, marveling at the software, of which he is now a fan. When asked whether he watched TV commercials, he shook his head no. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
We wanted to see where stylish New York teenagers were gravitating. We found that just as music and fashion brought young people together in the past, streetwear and skater brands are bringing them together today. Jeffrey Henson Scales, who is from California, has been photographing American youth culture for decades. I grew up in New York, and as a teenager I would gather with my peers at influential SoHo shops like Antique Boutique and Unique Clothing Warehouse, and wait in line for the latest release at Tower Records. Long the home to trendy high end stores, SoHo is now dotted with skate shops and sneaker stores like Supreme, Palace and Stadium Goods. Other shops like Billionaire Boys Club, VFiles and NikeLab 21M NYC, all on Mercer Street, are nearby. The product drops at many of these shops, complete with elaborate security details and police barricades, draw hundreds of regular fans and resellers who come from all over the country. It is here that we found tribes of young people hanging out, showing off their gear. One might call their style "the new geek." They have fully embraced "normcore" fashion, but with branded limited releases and collaborations. It is not price but exclusivity, the scarcity model, that drives the new geeks. And those limited editions go to those who know about the releases first and get there first. Christoph was one of the elder statesmen of our shoot. I noticed him because he moved so fluidly through the Mercer Street crowd. A big fan of Raf Simons, he represented the ultimate evolution of the new geek style. His look was more sophisticated than most of the kids who stood on line, but it was still influenced by skateboard, sport and sneaker culture. The collective confidence and curation skills of these two boys showed in every piece of clothing: the brands they chose, the way their sneakers were tied, how their socks were worn. Ari Zamler, a self described "hypebeast," was visiting from Detroit and celebrated his 12th birthday by standing in line for a Supreme drop. Kenyon Rezendes is a skater and BMX biker from New Bedford, Mass. This crew of boys lived in the neighborhood and were in line for a new Palace collaboration. Some of the items that they get at the drops they also resell. Their knowledge, sophistication and awareness of their appearance belied their young age. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
You won't find the familiar bottles of liquor at Yours Sincerely, a cocktail bar that opened in January next to a faux English pub called Dear Bushwick. Instead, the 30 house cocktails are dispensed from a neat row of custom taps with porcelain doll heads and served in graduated glass beakers, like the kind found in high school chemistry class. All that is left for the tattooed and bearded bartenders to do is add ice and an aromatic spritz a refreshing break from the mixology bars that insist on making each cocktail by hand from scratch. It occupies a former five and dime store on an otherwise quiet stretch of Wilson Avenue in residential Bushwick lined with vinyl sided homes. Inside, the space is long and narrow; the decor is grandmotherly yet cool. Framed paintings of flowers hang on the dark green walls. A chandelier casts a feeble light on the marble bar. A long banquette and a few tables offer patrons a place to gather and set down their beakers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The Federal Reserve is almost universally expected to cut interest rates when its meeting wraps up on Wednesday, the first reduction since officials slashed them to near zero in 2008, during the dark days of the financial crisis. It's a turning point, and a precautionary one. Uncertainty stirred up by President Trump's trade war and slowing global growth threaten the economic outlook, even though the domestic job market is strong and consumers are spending. The Fed is eager to fend off a slowdown at a time when inflation is subdued and interest rates remain historically low, leaving the central bank with limited ammunition to bolster the economy should it fall into recession. Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, will have a chance to explain the decision and offer guidance about what comes next at his 2:30 p.m. news conference following the 2 p.m. announcement of the decision. Here's what to watch. Most investors expect the Fed to make a quarter point rate cut at this meeting. But it's possible that officials could opt for something more dramatic: In 2007, for instance, the Fed slashed rates by a half point as it tried to get ahead of slowing growth. Back then, most economic indicators were holding up, but financial conditions were tightening and the housing market had sharply decelerated. This time around, the Fed's hints that one or more rate cuts are coming have been enough to keep credit easily available. Half point cuts are appropriate "when time is of the essence, namely, in financial crises or if you're behind the ball on economic data," said Michael Feroli, the chief United States economist at J.P. Morgan. "Neither of those two situations seem to be the case right now." When investors interpreted a speech by John C. Williams, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as a sign that the Fed might cut by a half point, his bank took the unusual step of clarifying that his comments were not meant as a policy signal. Many Fed watchers see that pushback as a hint that July's move is likely to be small. But that leads to another question: Will the Fed cut rates again this year? Markets think so. Mr. Powell will have a chance to clarify what's driving a cut and his comments will help shed light on whether it will stand alone or if the Fed is sufficiently worried to consider additional moves down the road. It could be the case that the Fed got spooked in late May and early June, as Mr. Trump threatened to slap tariffs on Mexico over immigration issues, markets gyrated and job gains staged a short lived slowdown. Officials laid the groundwork for a coming cut at their June policy meeting, and now they may have to follow through even though trade tensions have eased somewhat, stock indexes are again tracing record highs and the job market added an impressive 224,000 positions last month. If a July rate cut is merely a confirmation of previous messaging, it's not clear that there will be another one. Alternately, the Fed might be vaccinating the economy against risks it judges as real and continuing, based on the pullback in global manufacturing, weak inflation and signs of bond market skittishness. If those forward looking signals are guiding policymakers, another cut could look prudent even if most domestic economic numbers hold up. Mr. Powell could duck the question of what happens next, buying himself and the committee more wiggle room. Even if officials cut rates for purely technocratic reasons, some onlookers will suspect that they have caved under pressure. The Fed prizes its freedom from politics, because monetary policy works best when its stewards are free to make choices that will lead to long run economic success, rather than serving short run partisan interests. A few key lines in the Fed's post meeting statement will be worth watching. The Fed will not release fresh economic projections until its September meeting, so how it characterizes the economy will offer insight into how the full committee views the current situation. Mr. Powell may be their leader, but all five Fed governors and five of the 12 regional presidents have equal votes on monetary policy, so the range of opinions matters. In their last statement, officials said that while growth was likely to hold up, "uncertainties about this outlook have increased." In light of "uncertainties and muted inflation pressures, the committee will closely monitor the implications of incoming information for the economic outlook and will act as appropriate to sustain the expansion," the statement said. Those were clues that a cut was coming soon. Central bankers could reiterate those views or ditch them if they want to send a signal about the future. Covid's impact on the supply chain continues. The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain and made all kinds of products harder to find. In turn, scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher as inflation remains stubbornly high. Almost anything manufactured is in short supply. That includes everything from toilet paper to new cars. The disruptions go back to the beginning of the pandemic, when factories in Asia and Europe were forced to shut down and shipping companies cut their schedules. First, demand for home goods spiked. Money that Americans once spent on experiences were redirected to things for their homes. The surge clogged the system for transporting goods to the factories that needed them and finished products piled up because of a shortage of shipping containers. Now, ports are struggling to keep up. In North America and Europe, where containers are arriving, the heavy influx of ships is overwhelming ports. With warehouses full, containers are piling up. The chaos in global shipping is likely to persist as a result of the massive traffic jam. No one really knows when the crisis will end. Shortages and delays are likely to affect this year's Christmas and holiday shopping season, but what happens after that is unclear. Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said he expects supply chain problems to persist "likely well into next year." It's also important to keep an eye on dissenting votes. It is possible that Eric Rosengren, the president of the Fed's Boston branch, will vote against a move to lower rates. That would be the second no vote of Mr. Powell's tenure, and the first in favor of higher rates. Some Fed watchers think that Esther George, the Kansas City Fed president, could also dissent in favor of keeping rates steady. Finally, the Fed could use its statement to offer up a new plan for how it will deal with its massive bond holdings. Policymakers have been shrinking their balance sheet, which grew as the Fed bought government backed securities to bolster the economy in and after the recession. That unwinding, which is probably slowing the economy slightly by driving some interest rates higher, is scheduled to end in September. It's possible that officials would stop the process early, so their policy is uniformly pointed toward bolstering growth. If you're looking for a quiet signal about whether another cut is possible, pay attention to whether policymakers fixate on America's inflation shortfall in their statement or if Mr. Powell does during his news conference. Officials have increasingly worried about stubbornly weak price gains, and while Mr. Powell has said he expects inflation to gradually rise, progress has been slow. The Fed formally adopted a 2 percent goal in 2012, and has since failed to sustainably achieve it. The central bank's preferred inflation gauge rose just 1.6 percent in the year through June. Charles L. Evans, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said on July 16 that he would be comfortable with a "couple" of cuts this year "on the basis of inflation alone." "Even now, the best forward looking measures of inflation are closer to one and a half" percent, Janet L. Yellen, the former Fed chair, said in Aspen, Colo., on Sunday. "And it looks like inflation expectations are slipping. And that's dangerous, because inflation expectations play a role in the prices that firms actually set." Dangerous may seem like an extreme word who doesn't like low prices? but inflation is grease on the wheels of a healthy economy. It gives companies a little headroom to raise wages, and it lifts interest rates, leaving the Fed with more room to cut them in a downturn. What does it mean for my wallet? Expectations of a rate cut have already invigorated markets, pushing the S P 500 stock index to new highs. What happens to stocks on Wednesday will largely hinge on future guidance: If the Fed signals that more easing might come, asset prices might soar. If it hints that it will be cautious when spiking the proverbial punch bowl, the response may be less ecstatic. Likewise, mortgage rates have already fallen on anticipation of a rate cut. The Fed's signaling could determine how they evolve. Credit card rates could decline over time, as well, but they are influenced by other factors including credit scores and do not track as directly with the Fed's rate. Ultimately, any move itself is likely to be small, so how it ultimately guides the economy might prove to be the bigger deal. "If cutting rates once or twice helps grease the skids a little bit to keep the expansion going, that's going to be good for everybody," said Greg McBride, the chief financial analyst at Bankrate.com. The risk of cutting rates is if it "signals the economy is in trouble, or it's inflating the next asset bubble." What the critics say From the Wall Street Journal editorial page to Twitter, critics have been denouncing the Fed's anticipated move as unneeded and even dangerous. Their logic is that the economy is still growing solidly, global risks have yet to clearly weigh on United States economic data, and markets are partying. While the risk of stoking runaway inflation looks remote, low rates could fuel risk taking, particularly among financial firms. Practically, it is unlikely that one tiny rate cut would be enough to either avert economic crisis or send markets careening toward a cliff. But the back and forth shows that the coming move could mark an important change in posture one that has people on high alert. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
And, yes, he speaks. After a delay that prompted online conspiracy theories, the most common one being that Disney was trying to silence Mr. Trump, Disney World unveiled an audio animatronic robot in his life size likeness on Monday as part of its famed Hall of Presidents exhibit. The revamped 25 minute show finds Mr. Trump, or at least a silicone skinned version of him, joining his 43 presidential predecessors. He stands next to a seated Abraham Lincoln in the center of the stage with his signature hair, his suit jacket unbuttoned and his tie dangling extra low. "Above all, to be American is to be an optimist to believe that we can always do better and that the best days of our great nation are still ahead of us," the Trump figure says. The Hall of Presidents, in the Liberty Square area of the Magic Kingdom, one of four theme parks in Orlando, Fla., that constitute Disney World, was closed on Jan. 17, three days before Mr. Trump's inauguration. "Currently being prepared to welcome our new president," a red, white and blue sign at the entrance has read since. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Kalutas live fast and die young or, at least, the males do. Male kalutas, small mouselike marsupials found in the arid regions of Northwestern Australia, are semelparous, meaning that shortly after they mate, they drop dead. This extreme reproductive strategy is rare among vertebrates only a few dozen are known to reproduce in this fashion, and most of them are fish. Kalutas are dasyurids, the only group of mammals known to contain semelparous species. Only around a fifth of the species in this group of carnivorous marsupials which includes Tasmanian devils, quolls and pouched mice are semelparous and, until recently, scientists were not sure if kalutas were among them. Now there is no doubt that, for male kalutas, sex is suicide. In a study, published in April in the Journal of Zoology, researchers from the University of Western Australia and the University of Queensland confirmed that kalutas exhibit what is known as obligate male semelparity. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. "We found that males only mate during one highly synchronized breeding season and then they all die," said Genevieve Hayes, a vertebrate ecologist and the lead author of the study. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
133 West Third Street (between Macdougal Street and Avenue of the Americas) These two brick West Village walk ups one with four stories and another behind it with three stories total 6,158 square feet. The front building features three two bedroom apartments and a ramen restaurant, while the rear building has four one bedroom duplexes. Six apartments are free market and one is rent controlled. The 750 square foot ground floor restaurant does its prep work and cooking in a one story extension between the two buildings. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Q. How do I change the name that my Windows 10 computer uses to greet me when I log into my PC? A. You should be able to change the welcome screen name in the settings area for your user account on the computer. If you signed up for an online Microsoft account when you originally set up the PC, you can get to these settings by signing in directly to that account on the web. (Keep in mind that when you edit the information here, the changes are also reflected on other apps and devices that use the Microsoft account.) You can also make changes by going to the Start menu, selecting Settings and clicking on the Accounts icon. (For a shortcut right to the Settings window, press the Windows and I keys on the keyboard.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Cainan Weber as the Nutcracker and Ralph Ippolito as the Mouse King, In "The Nutcracker at Wethersfield." You may have seen the "The Nutcracker" countless times. Watching it every year might be a holiday tradition. But have you ever been inside it? This weekend, I stood in front of a house I had never visited before, but familiar music made it seem like a place I had long known. Then the door opened and I walked right into the ballet. This dreamlike experience and how it is sustained is the great achievement of "The Nutcracker at Wethersfield," which BalletCollective is presenting through Dec. 23 at the Wethersfield Estate in Amenia, N.Y. (The production will be also streamed for free on its website Dec. 23 26.) This special achievement is connected to a more basic one. Most if not all live "Nutcrackers" in the area have been canceled, including the one that matters most to the cast of this production. Its artistic director and choreographer, Troy Schumacher, and almost all of its 23 dancers are members of New York City Ballet, whose benchmark Balanchine production they won't be performing this year. (A 2019 recording is streaming through Jan. 3 on Marquee TV.) But an immersive "Nutcracker" at a secluded estate is possible during the pandemic. In this carefully designed operation, masked guests cluster in seven to eight socially distanced pods, self selected groups of two to six people. I say "guests" because you can't buy tickets, exactly. Pandemic restrictions don't allow that. Instead, underwriters contributing a minimum of 5,000 are invited to bring a group. Forty percent of the slots are offered for free to local nonprofits and essential workers and to a few critics like me so that we may tell the tale. A more intimate "Nutcracker," this is in some senses a reduced one. For the opening party scene, it's just the nuclear family Mom and Dad, Fritz and Marie (played by adults) plus an avuncular Drosselmeyer with a gift for magic and three pods of audience guests huddling in the corners. It's remarkable, though, how much is retained: the cozy atmosphere, two dancing toys, four giant mice. The Tchaikovsky music is piped in, but some guests experience an interlude in an ornate room during which the violinist Lauren Cauley plays a bit of the composer's "Sleeping Beauty" (in a new electro acoustic arrangement by Darian Donovan Thomas). It's a nice addition to the party, and also part of the not quite flawless pacing and spacing occupying the first guests while later arrivals watch a repeat of the opening section. At points when the process stalls, you can observe and admire the nevertheless impressive mechanism. Peeking through windows from the outside is how you witness bedtime and the arrival of the mice. Each audience group sees a different view. In mine, all the performers Drosselmeyer, the father, a mouse couldn't resist messing with a chess board, as if they had all been watching "The Queen's Gambit." Most of the fresh particularities are like that: small, on the cute side. The human size Nutcracker crosses swords with the Mouse King in a courtyard, scaring him off rather than killing him, and with no help from Marie. But then we follow the Nutcracker into wonder. At the edge of an oval pool, we watch a gorgeously framed "Waltz of the Snowflakes" in the distance, the dancers doing their best on a grassy slope. We follow topiary paths strewn with fairy lights into the tent, where a table has been set for each pod, topped with fake and untouchable treats. In the center is a stage, which means there can be real dancing. most of the usual divertissement from Act II minus "Coffee" and "Tea," and their ethnic stereotype pitfalls. Mr. Schumacher's choreography is adequate, skillfully meeting the challenge of in the round staging with an occasional felicity but no real magic. The dancing was also fine, up to City Ballet standards but not City Ballet heights. As can happen in the Balanchine production, the Sugarplum Fairy (Ashley Laracey, who alternates with Sara Mearns) was outshone by the Dewdrop, Mira Nadon, who glowed with amplitude and ballerina authority amid eight waltzing flowers. But while part of the point of this production is to get members of a great company dancing again, it's not really about great choreography or great dancing. Nor is it really about the full Nutcracker story, which is partially left behind in favor of the journey. After we leave the house, we never see Marie and her family again. It's as if we have become them. That transformation is the true magic of this solution to a pandemic problem. What I found most moving was the mime by which the dancers and a few ushers guided us through the ballet. This was danced courtesy, a warm welcome, and as much as the setting, it invited me right into the heart of a ballet I felt lucky not to have missed. Through Dec. 23 at Wethersfield Estate, Amenia, N.Y.; and streaming Dec. 23 26, nutcrackeratwethersfield.com. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
LONDON A generation ago, Sky, then an upstart satellite broadcaster, outbid rivals for the rights to televise the Premier League. The deal revolutionized the fortunes of the TV service, and helped turn the British soccer league into one of the world's most watched and lucrative in sports. Another transformation now appears to be underway. Amazon, which is increasingly pushing beyond its e commerce origins, won rights on Thursday to broadcast Premier League games in Britain for the first time. Amazon's deal highlights the seismic shifts happening in sports and television entertainment, as deep pocketed digital outlets compete with traditional broadcasters like NBC, Disney and, in Europe, Sky. The fierce battle between Silicon Valley companies and historically dominant studios and broadcasters has extended from developing new scripted shows to broadcasting live sports. The matches that Amazon will broadcast, available to its Prime members in Britain, are relatively minor. It will showcase 20, scheduled at times when there tends to be lower viewership than normal. But Amazon's victory was in how it can deliver the games: While digital companies have typically bought only the digital streaming rights to sporting events, Amazon's deal includes the exclusive rights for the matches it shows. Amazon has been pushing aggressively into sports. Last year, the company agreed to pay about 50 million to stream 10 "Thursday Night Football" games, an arrangement that Amazon and the National Football League have since extended for even more money. Amazon also bought exclusive rights to show the United States Open tennis tournament in Britain, as well as the men's ATP World Tour. Amazon is not the only tech company hungry for live sports. Facebook made a major bid last year to stream cricket matches from the Indian Premier League and is streaming Major League Baseball games, while Twitter has streamed baseball and professional hockey games. Google's YouTube and Hulu, a streaming service, have recently been promoting their live TV offerings by emphasizing the sports available on their networks, including the National Basketball Association finals currently underway. For Amazon, the ability to show sports could be a way to get more people to sign up for Prime subscriptions, which cost 119 in the United States and about 106 in Britain. In his annual letter to shareholders this year, Amazon's chief executive, Jeff Bezos, disclosed that 100 million people around the world had Prime subscriptions. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The company has also sought to develop scripted entertainment, earning awards and acclaim with shows like "Transparent" and "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," though it still lags behind competitors like Netflix. In Britain, Amazon will share the broadcast rights to the Premier League with two British heavyweights Sky Sports and BT Sport. Sky and BT will televise the vast majority of matches on offer, totaling 180 in all. Those matches will be at times that are more likely to garner high levels of viewership. The auction for Premier League broadcast rights was held in February, but only Sky Sports and BT won partial rights at the time. "We welcome Amazon as an exciting new partner, and we know Prime Video will provide an excellent service on which fans can consume the Premier League," Richard Scudamore, the Premier League's executive chairman, said in a statement on Thursday. Neither Amazon nor the Premier League said how much the company had paid for the rights. But Sky said after the auction in February that it had paid 3.58 billion pounds, or about 4.8 billion, over three years for its matches, while BT Sport paid a total of PS885 million. The transformation of the broadcast landscape mirrors one a quarter century ago. Sky was only three years old in 1992 when it bid more than PS300 million for the rights to televise live top flight soccer matches in Britain. At the time, the move stunned the world of soccer and gave Sky an identity. The huge influx of cash several times what had previously been paid for equivalent rights helped Premier League clubs lure top players from all over the world. Digital media companies have long proclaimed an interest in sports rights, but they have largely failed to enter competitive bids for marquee properties. And while sports leagues are eager to increase the number of bidders, they have shown a reluctance to turn over rights wholesale to digital partners, preferring instead to craft deals that include digital streaming on top of traditional TV broadcasting. But the format of the Premier League's auction makes it easier for digital media companies to compete. While most large rights packages in the United States are for seven seasons or more, the Premier League offers only three season blocks, lowering the get in cost. The 200 Premier League games on offer were also split into seven packages of 32 or 20 games each, making it easier for Amazon to dip a toe in the water, albeit in a smaller market than the United States. The revenue for the Premier League rights in Britain is supplemented by income from broadcast deals elsewhere, including in the United States, where NBC televises the matches, and in China, where the digital broadcaster PPTV holds the rights. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Agnes Mateus in "Rebota Rebota y en Tu Cara Explota" ("It Bounces It Bounces and Then Explodes in Your Face"), which she co directed. REIMS, France Many European theatergoers associate this French city with the working class alienation and growing nationalism depicted in Thomas Ostermeier's production of "Returning to Reims," which became an international hit after its Berlin premiere in 2017. Yet a young festival in Reims is working to paint a different picture, by welcoming productions from around the Continent. Reims Scenes d'Europe, an ambitious multidisciplinary event founded in 2009 by the theater director Ludovic Lagarde, looks outward, not inward. Jointly managed by seven local venues, it was designed as a showcase for contemporary creation from around Europe. This year's edition, the 10th, focused on emerging artists from Spain. The productions were only a small sample of what Spanish theater has to offer, but some themes cropped up time and again. Creative duos and collectives outnumbered individual directors, a trend also seen in France in recent years. Religion historically a major source of artistic inspiration in Spain, a deeply Roman Catholic country and sexuality were ubiquitous topics, with violence often lurking beneath the surface. The artists appearing in Reims also shared a tangible thirst for social change, especially when it comes to gender equality. Most striking in that regard was "Rebota Rebota y en Tu Cara Explota" ("It Bounces It Bounces and Then Explodes in Your Face"), directed by Agnes Mateus and Quim Tarrida and performed at the Comedie de Reims. This is practically a one woman show for Ms. Mateus, who takes no prisoners in a series of blunt, uncompromising monologues. We meet her on a white carpet, on which she twerks and grabs her crotch while wearing a sinister, teeth baring clown mask. She proceeds to list belittling words reserved for women, before delving into the troubling gender politics of fairy tales and the public perception of female stars. None of this is new territory, but Ms. Mateus explores it with gusto and self deprecation. Her angular features have a rare expressive range, and she can sustain an absurd joke: In one extended skit, she dons a penis face mask in order to walk a mile, as she puts it, in the shoes of a "dickhead." Along the way, "Rebota Rebota" sure handedly connects the dots between gender inequality and physical violence against women. Between Ms. Mateus's monologues, the audience is shown videos of female bodies lying motionless in deserted urban settings. A simmering rage imbues even the slightest jokes some of which are delivered in French until it boils over. Ms. Mateus puts herself in physical danger during the final scenes, which include knife throwing. It's a chillingly effective choice, because her vulnerability sets the scene for the unironic anguish that permeates her final words. "Let no one ask me why we can't relax a little," she screams in Spanish, looking distraught, before the names of victims of domestic violence appear behind her. Another production that attempted to take on the patriarchy went about it in a perplexing way. "Esto No es la Casa de Bernarda Alba" ("This Is Not the House of Bernarda Alba") takes Federico Garcia Lorca's 1945 tale of female repression in Catholic Spain and recasts it with men. Nearly every role in the play, which centers on a tyrannical mother and her five daughters, was played by a male actor. The directors, Carlota Ferrer and Jose Manuel Mora, said in the playbill that the goal was to produce a "radical feminist discourse." Some feminists would beg to differ: Gender swaps are increasingly common in theater, but they are generally intended to rectify the historical dominance of male centric narratives, with women taking on roles intended for men. Men taking over Lorca's "drama of women," as the play's subtitle puts it, produces entirely different effects. Some in the cast, including Jose Luis Torrijo as the servant Poncia, brought a quiet dignity to their characters, but others generated unwitting comedy. With his muscular frame, Jaime Lorente often looked awkward in his green dress as the young, impulsive Adela, while Eusebio Poncela played the matriarch, Bernarda, like a Tony Soprano style paterfamilias in a suit. There is value in seeing men take on "unmanly" roles, but this particular swap undermined the play's distinctive family dynamics. Ms. Ferrer and Mr. Mora tacked on a monologue about gender based violence at the end, delivered by Mr. Lorente. Rather than a logical conclusion, however, it felt like a well meaning statement of intent earnest, but not quite earned. Desire and repression also featured in two recent plays performed as part of a special afternoon dedicated to emerging playwrights. Sergio Martinez Vila's "L'Obeissance de la Femme du Berger" ("The Obedience of the Shepherd's Wife") and Maria Velasco's "Delivre Toi de Mes Desirs" ("Break Free From My Desires") offered up characters grappling with their sexual urges, sometimes graphically. Both were performed in French in limited productions, specific to Reims Scenes d'Europe, designed to bring attention to the texts. "L'Obeissance" was both the more complete and the more frustrating. Its central female characters a young student and an older woman who awaits the death of her husband are intriguing and vividly drawn. The third character, however, is a proud pornographer who spends much of his stage time elaborating on violent sexual scenarios and either ignoring his infant daughter or threatening to sell her. The shock value is a cheap ploy, and the play's three voices never quite coalesced. Ms. Velasco's "Delivre Toi" tackles an interracial relationship, with another odd swap. The white heroine was played by a black actress, Mata Gabin, while the black hero was performed by a white man, Fabien Joubert. This only highlighted the play's weaknesses: The couple's dirty talk, which included "ethnic cleansing" and "you colonized me with your sperm," was cringe inducing, and failed to illuminate the complexity of the subject matter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The Playlist: Christine and the Queens' Clever Pop, and 8 More New Songs None Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos and anything else that strikes them as intriguing. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. Heloise Letissier, the French songwriter who releases her electronic pop as Christine and the Queens, often makes simultaneous statements via songs and choreographed video clips. "Doesn't Matter" arrives in two audio versions, with vocals in French and (slightly fractured) English. The two chord track sets up a push and pull between low, viscous sustained tones and a crisply artificial beat; she sings, "It doesn't matter, does it/If I know any exit" and about believing in God. The video is less cloudy. It's a guy gal dance in a parking lot that starts out playful and ends up bitterly combative. In that relationship, something has gone irrevocably wrong. JON PARELES The final song on Future's new mixtape "Beastmode 2" has the pulse of a valedictory and the mood of a confession. He still swallows his syllables when the sentiments get rough, and at plenty of moments on this hypnotic moan "My mama stressing out, she say these drugs got me"; "Said it was cheaper not to keep her and it's killing me" he badly needs a hug, but is too proud to do anything but hurt himself. JON CARAMANICA What's so great about Ella Mai's "Boo'd Up" one of this year's most effective R B singles is how it floats and radiates warm light. Ms. Mai is a controlled, soft singer, and she uses the beat as a beacon, following it faithfully and never stomping on it. A less gentle remix does this song no good, though especially one featuring a tepid Quavo verse. Nicki Minaj gets a needless charge from tossing off a line about the sexuality of the female rapper Dej Loaf. Let Ms. Mai radiate unimpeded. J.C. Here is an extremely effervescent modern new wave thumper from Holland, who has been championed as K pop's first openly gay performer. Unlike his debut single, "Neverland," which felt modest and constrained, "I'm Not Afraid" has 1983 attitude with a contemporary splash of dance floor dynamism. J.C. The calypso master David Rudder wrote "The Immigrants" in 1998; it's perfectly topical 20 years later. "So much trouble in the home of the brave and the land of the free/Am I an immigrant or am I a new slave/Made for all brutality?" Gaby Moreno a legal immigrant from Guatemala in 2000 sings in a teeming orchestral arrangement by Van Dyke Parks, who answers her voice with huffing strings, sassy horns and burbling woodwinds. Released to mark the Fourth of July, it's a benefit single for the Central American Resource Center of California. J.P. Rayland Baxter, a songwriter based in Nashville, has an oblique take on the pervasiveness of guns in America: a Paul McCartney style ballad with a plush, full scale orchestral buildup as he sings about fear, violence, media posturing and the allure of gun ownership: "Maybe you need one/One in your left hand and one in your right." By the end, a chorus joins him to croon, "Bang, bang, bang." J.P. The voices are gentle, sharing unisons and then harmonizing with wistful, enigmatic tidings: "I miss you already/you were too gone too soon/I can't understand you/The phone is gone." The beat is steady and usually unemphatic; the song circles through three chords again and again. But there's a mesmerizing intricacy to the indie rock understatement of "Lunar Rover." Those three chords thicken with ambiguous layers of polytonality, the beat mutates with ever shifting details (note the cymbals) and multitudes of violin parts entwine everything else. Given a chance, it's immersive. J.P. If you had to, you could say that the sound of Harold O'Neal's small groups files neatly enough under contemporary jazz. But his solo piano recordings merit a special identity. They've got the quiver and shading of great Romantic piano, with Duke Ellington's panoramic blues folded in. On "Piano Cinema," his newest album, a subtle animator is Mr. O'Neal's use of rubato, his careful and affecting interruptions of his own flow, up from underneath jolts against the glide. He begins "Paintings in D" with a chiming oscillation between chords then drifts into a passage that almost swings, the energy rising and the harmony falling. By the time he returns to the original movement, things are less fluid, but quicker flowing. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO There's complex math behind the meditation of "Chat 2," a collaboration from an EP by the electronic musicians Pontiac Streator and Ulla Strauss. Only a few elements are involved: something that sounds like a plunking mixture of hand drum and thumb piano, something that sounds like sampled and sustained electric guitar chords and something generating a sustained, single note blip. But the plunk keeps shifting its meter; the electric guitar hovers and vanishes; the blip comes and goes. Maybe the musicians were counting; maybe it was as murky and intuitive as it sounds. J.P. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Kayakers on one of the many canals near Lubbenau, Germany.Credit...Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times A kayak trip in the Spreewald a wooded moorland that has been designated a Unesco protected biosphere reserve is an easy train trip from the city. From its source in southeastern Germany, near the Czech border, the Spree River flows steadily to the northwest, until it joins the Havel River in the Berlin borough of Spandau. Before it reaches the Havel, the Spree slices Berlin in two: a jagged cut from east to west. A double decker regional train follows the Spree from Berlin's Alexanderplatz station through the concrete and clubs of East Berlin and into the open fields of Brandenburg, a state in the former German Democratic Republic. The train glides past lonely farmhouses and stumbling calves, unconcerned by their proximity to a major metropolis, headed for the Spreewald, a wooded moorland (named for the river that runs through it) that is crisscrossed by roughly 80 0 miles of waterways . At the train stop for Tropical Islands, a theme park with white sand and palm trees built inside the otherworldly dome of the former Brand Briesen Airfield, passengers in board shorts and flip flops file out. Those in zip off pants and SPF 50 stay on. Two stations later, they reach their own destination: Lubbenau. On a warm spring morning in April, my partner and I took the train to Lubbenau for the first time after more than a year of living in Berlin. Over the next few months, I returned to the area twice, seeking the same rush I had felt on my first day trip there: a sudden certitude in the superiority of nature over the routines and vices of city life. In other words, a breath of fresh air. On that first visit, we followed our fellow passengers off the train at the Lubbenau station, feeling sartorially unprepared in our jeans and sneakers, and cut through the town to the kayak rental shop. For visitors to the area, Lubbenau like other Spreewald towns, such as Lubben and Burg serves a primarily utilitarian purpose: a place to rent kayaks and bikes, or book accommodations and tours. This year, the towns in the region are commemorating "Fontanejahr": a yearlong celebration of the 200th birthday of the Prussian writer Theodor Fontane, whose travelogues, written in the latter half of the 19th century, extolled Spreewald for its unspoiled character and natural beauty. Lubbenau itself is subdued, slow paced and, like all German holiday villages worth their salt, features a castle. (Lubbenau's is more Austen than Grimm.) Downtown, tourists strolled cobblestone streets or sat at cafes, nursing ice creams or pilsner or both. The more ambitious visitors passed us on our way to the kayak rental shop, wafting a trail of mosquito repellent in their wake. After stepping unsteadily into our royal blue, two seater kayak, we pushed off from the dock. In just a few minutes on the river, we had drifted away from civilization, and Lubbenau's mild pleasures were replaced by more complicated ones. A few leggy spiders made themselves comfortable near my knees in the shade of the kayak's thick plastic hull. Crickets whirred under baroque summer clouds, and frogs drowned out the distant roar of planes headed to Berlin's Schonefeld Airport. The Spreewald was designated a Unesco protected biosphere reserve in 1991. The area is home to about 5,000 species of plants and animals kingfishers, otters, ospreys, river mussels, storks, butterflies, eagles. Its moorland is dotted with birch, alder, pine, willow and linden trees, between which rest hivelike stacks of hay called "Schober," which make for an iconically Spreewaldian image. Snug inside the Spreewald's network of waterways are the villages of Lehde and Leipe, with fewer than 300 residents between them. Though both towns are partly accessible by car, many of the houses in Lehde and Leipe are completely cut off from the mainland (save for footbridges) and rest on Kaupen, little sand islands. Leipe offers peaceful, waterside accommodation and a cafe known for its "Hefeplinzen," blintzes brushed with cinnamon sugar and butter. They are soft and yeasty, and we ate them with cappuccinos topped high with whipped cream. After spiking our blood sugar, we folded our legs back into the boat and turned our plastic vessel toward Lehde. A short distance from Lubbenau by foot, boat or bike via a stretch of the 161 mile long Gurkenradweg (literally: pickle bike path) visitors stop in Lehde for a pint of the local Babben beer, a meal at the popular restaurant, Kaupen No. 6, or a stroll through the Freilandmuseum Lehde, an open air local history museum. While visiting Lehde during another trip to the region in May, a commotion on the water made us look up from our glasses of Babben: a Sorbic wedding party was on its way to a ceremony in one of the museum's historic buildings. Much of the lore, culture and traditions of the Spreewald come from the Sorbs and the Wends: descendants from Slavic tribes who have been in the region for hundreds of years. Some 60,000 Sorbs and Wends live in Lusatia, a region encompassing sections of both Germany and Poland, and comprise one of Germany's few recognized minorities. In modern times, Sorbic customs and languages have faded in part due to pressures to assume a more uniform national identity, and in part, and more gently, through the passage of time . Still, Sorbic culture permeates the area, and more recently the Sorbian language has been reintroduced into local school curriculums. Today, many of the Spreewald's signs are bilingual: in German and in Sorbian. We had paddled for more than 20 minutes toward Lehde before we consulted the laminated map the kayak rental company had provided and realized we were lost. Ten minutes after leaving Leipe, we had taken a fork in the river, and since then we hadn't seen another soul. We were now floating down a watery avenue framed by vines dripping white flowers into the river; a stork flew overhead. Over the generations, this management system has faced a battery of external challenges most recently the Europe wide drought in 2018. But it is mining in the region that has had the most enduring impact. When, for instance, years of heavy rain caused the water collected in nearby open pit mines to pour into the Spreewald's tributaries in the early 2010s, iron ochre from the mines' water turned Spreewald a murky brown: a threat not only to the ecosystem, but also to the health of tourism in the area and, by extension, the livelihoods of the Spreewald's residents. The traditions of the Kahns Like the gondoliers of Venice, the figure that stands as symbol for Spreewald is the Kahn captain. Kahns are punts made, historically, of wood, and propelled through the water with a pole tipped with metal teeth. The profession is a traditional one that often runs through the generations. "It's a family matter for most people," explains Steffen Franke, 46, who is the head of Kahnfahrgenossenschaft Lubbenau, a professional cooperative for Kahn captains, "so the father naturally likes the son to follow in his footsteps." Steffen Bulow, 47, a Lehde local and Kahn captain, learned how to punt when he was 6 years old. It was how he would visit his grandmother's house, and how his family tended their asparagus crop, more than half a mile from their home. "We had to, even in the summertime, reach the field using the punt at least once, maybe twice a day," he tells me. By 16, Mr. Bulow became a Kahn captain. Though today it is not his full time job, as it was his father's, he still takes the boat out on weekends and holidays. In the towns' harbors, tourists hire Kahn captains for a less aerobic tour of the waterways, featuring, more often than not, a round of schnapps. Every year, Sebastian Kilka, 39, a fifth generation farmer, and one of Lehde's last, punts his cattle to and from the pasture. The operation, he says, is generally a smooth one though animal instincts do sometimes kick in at inopportune moments. "I had problems this year," he said with a laugh, "because my big bull said, 'I don't want to go boating anymore.'" It took the encouragement of six or seven men before the bull complied. Eventually, my partner and I found our location on the laminated map, just as our thirst bettered our sense of unbridled freedom. We had drifted away from our destination of Lehde but were nearing another stop, recommended to us by the kayak rental manager. So half an hour later, we parked our boat on the banks of Wotschofska, an island home to its eponymous Gasthaus. Like many of the Gasthauses in the Spreewald, Wotschofska is a combination hotel and restaurant. And like most every local establishment, their menu is a variation on a theme: blood sausage (Grutzwurst), potatoes served with quark and dribbled with linseed oil, and, in late spring and early summer, white asparagus, engorged on salt water and blanketed in hollandaise sauce. We sat on folding beach chairs in the sun to watch the traffic of Kahns and kayaks. Everyone, even those with small children, appeared to be in a genuinely good mood. Many of them, like ourselves, were probably destined for a late afternoon train back to the city, away from this waterlogged fairy tale world where restaurants have kayak parking lots and mail is delivered by boat. When our drinks ran dry, we stretched our sore shoulders, and slid into our kayak and back out into the water. 52 PLACES AND MUCH, MUCH MORE Follow our 52 Places traveler, Sebastian Modak, on Instagram as he travels the world, and discover more Travel coverage by following us on Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: Each week you'll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to photos from all over the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Since the playing of the first United States Open in 1895, the year after the United States Golf Association was founded, the procedure to settle a tie after regulation play in the tournament was straightforward: a playoff consisted of 18 more holes of golf. The thinking was that only a full round would provide a full and complete examination to determine the champion. Playoffs occur in the U.S. Open more commonly than most realize. Of the 119 played to date, 33 have resulted in playoffs, or about one in every four. Most years, those playoffs followed the original procedure, or some variant of an additional 18 holes. But from 1928 through 1931, playoffs were settled at 36 holes, with the 1931 playoff requiring two additional 36 hole rounds a total of 144 holes played before the rule was changed back to 18 holes. The procedure was further modified in 1953 to include continuous hole by hole play at sudden death until a winner emerged in case of a tie after the initial 18 hole playoff. The last playoff occurred in 2008 at Torrey Pines as Tiger Woods, playing on what turned out to be a cracked femur, won in 19 holes over Rocco Mediate. In 1913, a 20 year old former caddie, Francis Ouimet, defeated two of the greatest golfers in the world, the Britons Harry Vardon and Ted Ray, in an 18 hole playoff at the Country Club, outside Boston, transforming golf from a game for the elites to one with populist and diverse appeal. Ouimet's win set off the first big golf boom in America. In 1929, in the first U.S. Open at Winged Foot Golf Club in Westchester County, N.Y., Bobby Jones after dissipating a six stroke lead with just seven holes to play made a curling 12 foot putt on the 18th hole to force a tie. He went on to defeat Al Espinosa in a 36 hole playoff by a whopping 23 strokes. Ben Hogan won an 18 hole playoff at Merion Golf Club, near Philadelphia, in 1950, 16 months after a horrific head on crash with a Greyhound bus that almost crippled him. Red Smith immortalized Hogan's performance, "Maybe once in the lifetime of any of us it is possible to say with accuracy and without mawkishness, 'This was a spiritual victory, an absolute triumph of will!'" But in 2018, the U.S.G.A. quietly changed the playoff format to a two hole aggregate score, with play commencing directly after the conclusion of play on the final day. Sudden death would follow, if necessary. It was a dramatic, if unheralded, change, and if it had been applied to the hole by hole scores of the 33 playoffs played before it, it would have produced drastically different results in 15 of the previous U.S. Open playoffs. Ouimet would have lost to Vardon on the sixth playoff hole in 1913; Jones would have lost to Espinosa on the second hole in 1929; and Hogan would have lost to Lloyd Mangrum on the second playoff hole in 1950. Some of the biggest triumphs in golf history as we have come to know them would be erased. In justifying the change to the two hole aggregate playoff structure, Mike Davis, the U.S.G.A. chief executive, has said, "Golf really in this day and age has gotten to the point where everyone wants to see a Sunday finish." Jeff Hall, the U.S.G.A.'s managing director of rules, explained the thinking behind the decision to force a finish on the final day: "We consulted with important constituencies, not the least of which are players. We talked to fans on site and we talked to fans that were taking in the championship through the broadcast; obviously, our television partners are part of that discussion as well. So many people have a vested interest in getting a result on Sunday." The decision highlights the importance of prime time TV broadcasts, likely a major impetus for the playoff change, which would incur additional costs if the finale went past Sunday. One person with knowledge of the decision who spoke on condition of anonymity said, "This new playoff method potentially injects a flukiness that's inappropriate for the national championship. Wouldn't it be a shame if a lucky bounce or an unlucky one determined the winner in a two hole playoff? Over 18 holes, luck would largely be taken out of the equation." A retired senior level U.S.G.A. executive perhaps summed up the new playoff rule best, "The U.S. Open is supposed to be an arduous exam, not a pop quiz." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Some kinds of climate change are good. The eight week repertory announced by American Ballet Theater for its annual spring season at the Metropolitan Opera House is the best news for this company in more than 25 years. More than that, it refreshes the whole New York dance environment. Instead of relying chiefly on fare choreographed over a century ago in inadequate productions (as it once did), the company is giving extensive time to important 20th and 21st century ballets. Above all, this season is the biggest demonstration to date of work by the prolific Alexei Ratmansky, who, after leaving his post as artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet in 2008, became, in 2009, Ballet Theater's artist in residence. But, although he's created at least one ballet a year for the company since then, he's never been allotted more than a week of any Metropolitan Opera season. By contrast, 2016 brings something of a Ratmansky Festival. Mr. Ratmansky is not the most radical thing in ballet today, but he's emerged as its most valuable and most multifaceted choreographer. No important ballet maker seems less beholden to the sometimes crippling legacy of George Balanchine; no choreographer anywhere today is more extraordinarily steeped in history, and not only ballet history. There are two all Ratmansky programs, the week of May 17 23. The first is the return of his "Shostakovich Trilogy," made for the company in 2013. This remarkably imaginative work one of the very few full length plotless dance creations to date is, like Balanchine's "Jewels," a triptych of ballets that have been performed separately but that together add up. Their portrait of Shostakovich's inner world and sense of creativity within the climate of Soviet Russia is complex, intricate, strange, poetic. (When Ballet Theater next visits Russia, it should take this trilogy above all.) Then the company presents a week of "The Golden Cockerel" (June 6 11), Mr. Ratmansky's full length version of a 1907 Rimsky Korsakov score arranged by the musicologist Yannis Samprovalakis. (Mr. Ratmansky first staged it in 2012 for the Royal Danish Ballet; it incorporates aspects of Michel Fokine's 1937 one act ballet version.) And the season ends with his 2015 production of "The Sleeping Beauty," a history changing investigation of the ballet classic as it was performed from its 1890 premiere to the 1921 London production by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. The Ballet Theater season also includes two full length ballets by Frederick Ashton. The company's association with this choreographer goes back to the 1940s, and its recent revivals of "Cinderella" (1948), "Sylvia" (1952), "The Dream" (1964), "Monotones I and II" (1965 66), the "Meditation from 'Thais'" (1971) and "A Month in the Country" (1976) have been especially distinguished. This is the first season in which Ashton has occupied more than a week. It opens with eight performances of "Sylvia" (May 9 14), which was reconstructed for both Ashton's Royal Ballet and Ballet Theater in the 2004 5 season. Remarkably, Ballet Theater has danced it better of the two. A special highlight is the return, after 10 years, of Ashton's "La Fille Mal Gardee," a ballet that touches on comedy, joy and innocence in ways that prove profound. This is my home ballet. Its heroine is a farmer's child, as am I. Work in the farmyard and the fields occurs here as it did throughout my childhood; harvest is as central to its world as love. "Fille" a ballet conceived in Bordeaux in 1789 by the choreographer Jean Dauberval is set in France; but the heart of Ashton's "Fille" belongs in East Anglia, the part of England where Ashton lived and where I was born. Exposing children to decent live performances can take some ingenuity. Lili Chopra and Violaine Huisman, organizers of the inaugural Tilt Kids Festival, which takes place in Manhattan and Brooklyn, are hoping to improve the theatrical climate with a month of performances that focus on dance, theater, music, circus and, yes, gastronomy in the form of a flavor workshop designed for children. There's even a sex talk for parents. Food, sex and art? It can't be much of a surprise that Tilt is a joint venture by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the French Institute Alliance Francaise. Ms. Chopra, the artistic director of the institute, said Tilt, designed for kids 3 and up, is trying to mirror a trend in France toward more sophisticated offerings for families and children, in which art doesn't fall under the rubric of education. As Ms. Chopra sees it, this kind of fare can play a part in "preparing the audience for tomorrow." But that's not to say it won't also be playful, too. Tilt, which runs March 4 to April 3, will include a premiere by the theater group 600 Highwaymen, as well as "Carousel of Ideas," a day of events featuring interactive performances by the choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and Bouchra Ouizguen. Jerome Bel will reprise his "Ballet," which explores movement in trained and untrained bodies, for the younger generation. And for more than a month, the visual artist Prune Nourry will present "Anima," a collaboration with a group of magicians, designers and an anthropologist, in which she creates an immersive installation forest at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn. Jazz and Tap, Together Again Jazz and tap dance are like siblings who grew up together but then grew apart. One measure of their continued estrangement is that in the nearly 30 year existence of Jazz at Lincoln Center, the organization has featured tap dancers only a handful of times. For lovers of tap, it's good news that the intrepid hoofer Michela Marino Lerman has been appearing with increasing frequency at Dizzy's Club Coca Cola, but the last major collaboration between tap dancers and Wynton Marsalis's Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in its home theater complex came during a program called " Jazz, Tap and Theater" in 2009. Prominent in that show was Jared Grimes, a favorite of Mr. Marsalis and a smooth virtuoso who earned a 2014 Fred Astaire award for his bring down the house tapping in the retro Broadway revue "After Midnight." In "Jazz, Tap and Theater," his friskiness enlivened "Spaces," a short, episodic work composed by Mr. Marsalis to evoke animals: a monkey, a chicken, a frog. On April 1 and 2, Mr. Grimes will return to Jazz at Lincoln Center in a new version of "Spaces" expanded to 90 minutes. He won't be alone. This time he will be joined by Lil Buck, the master of Memphis jookin. Both men are wizards who habitually move their bodies in ways that appear to be physically impossible. Alone, together and in call and response with the orchestra, these dancers are guaranteed to astonish. The question is whether they with the choreographic assistance of the former New York City Ballet dancer Damian Woetzel can sustain a 90 minute show. In the months before a performance at Roulette in Brooklyn last summer, Keely Garfield considered calling it off. She was planning to remount "Wow," her warmly received 2014 mash up of dance and Kate Bush songs, which aspired to utter sincerity in an age of pervasive irony. As she explained in a recent phone interview without getting too specific her life had taken "a bit of a nose dive in terms of personal and professional turmoil. It was a really, really, really rough time." So instead of resurrecting an elaborate evening length work, she started something new: the similarly titled but only loosely related "Pow," which she presented as an alluring work in progress at Roulette, and which has its premiere Friday, Feb. 26, at the 92nd Street Y's Harkness Dance Festival. "There's a Zen saying: 'Fall down seven times, stand up eight,'" Ms. Garfield said. "And 'Pow' was that. I was like, you know what? I'm going to stand up for the eighth time." Performed by Ms. Garfield and two dancers whom she aptly calls "supersonic" Molly Lieber and Paul Hamilton "Pow" repurposes material from "Wow" and other older works. Ms. Garfield, whose wacky, deeply felt dances can make you laugh, cry and laugh cry, describes the results as "a meditation on the nature of valor," an idea that extends through much of her work. "I feel that dancing itself is a valiant act," she said. "Continually having to make something from nothing and then relinquish it back into the void that seems courageous every time." She'll be exercising courage all around town this spring. Members of the Gibney Dance Company will perform a reimagining of "Wow" at their Lower Manhattan home, May 11 14. And Ms. Garfield presents a new work for students from the New School possibly making an appearance herself May 6 and 7 at New York Live Arts. SIOBHAN BURKE See what's coming to the stage in our classical music spring preview and our theater previews from Ben Brantley and Charles Isherwood. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
An Rong Xu for The New York Times An Rong Xu for The New York Times Credit... An Rong Xu for The New York Times Maurizio Cattelan, Naughty as Ever, Plays Games and Tours the Whitney "Let's follow this lady and see where she goes," Maurizio Cattelan said on a recent Tuesday afternoon while ambling around the West Chelsea section of Manhattan in a T shirt and black track pants, holding a beat up black bicycle, whose mammoth chain and lock he wore around his waist. Perhaps the idea being proposed sounded creepy. Certainly it wasn't the most chivalrous thing a man of 56 had ever suggested doing to a woman roughly half his age. But mere seconds before, he had been pooh poohing a suggestion to go look at art, saying there really was no need since "the best art is on the street." It's a game Mr. Cattelan, impish prince of the art world, loves to play. Early in his career, Mr. Cattelan, who is from Padua, Italy, won a coveted space at the Venice Biennial and, instead of filling it with one of his large conceptual sculptures, sold the wall space to an advertising agency. (It installed a billboard for perfume.) A few years later, he was approached by the prominent collector Peter Brant to do a portrait of Mr. Brant's wife, Stephanie Seymour, and created not a regal statue in her likeness but a legless dead eyed mannequin Mr. Cattelan took to calling "Trophy Wife." And in 2011, Mr. Cattelan was honored with a career retrospective at the Guggenheim and upended its conventions by announcing his retirement and hanging 128 of his sculptures among them Pope John Paul II (being hit by a meteorite) and Hitler (kneeling in prayer) in the rotunda, connected by a giant aluminum truss. For those having trouble imagining the visual, it looked as if the building was a vortex expelling the art through the skylight toward the great beyond. But visualizing it is not really necessary, given the release of "Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back," a probing, wistful and, at times, hilarious documentary that is currently playing a two week run at the Quad Cinema in New York, after which it will expand to 20 other American cities. It was directed by Maura Axelrod, a former producer for ABC News, who accompanied Mr. Cattelan on this recent jaunt to make sure he shared just enough about the movie, even buying him Popsicles, as if to chill his penchant for hot topics. They met nearly two decades ago, when he ran into her at a gallery opening for an artist she was dating and tried to pick her up. After she said no, they became good friends instead. What is it like being with Maurizio? "Chaos," Ms. Axelrod said. "Total chaos." The woman in the metallic skirt continued west on 23rd Street, and so did Mr. Cattelan, weaving a yarn about her supposed back story. She works for a publicity or marketing company, he surmised. Possibly as "the assistant to the assistant." The Starbucks cup in her hand contained something with mocha. "Or cinnamon," he added. Her turn left onto 10th Avenue indicated she was heading to Greenwich Village. "Meatpacking!" Mr. Cattelan said, with mock disapproval. "In the afternoon!" Moments later, she walked into Cookshop. Mr. Cattelan wanted to keep pursuing. Ms. Axelrod informed him that enough was enough. A trip to the Whitney was a better idea, she said. Finding out that it was closed for the day was all Mr. Cattelan needed to get enthusiasm. "Private tour," he said. "I did it at the Louvre." So a reporter took out his iPhone and dialed the office of the museum's director, Adam Weinberg, as Mr. Cattelan spouted instructions about what to say. "Tell them you're a Pulitzer Prize finalist," he said. "You were recently on the very, very shortlist. If they say no, write very bad things about them." Then, he jumped on his bike and sped south, going the opposite way of the traffic, as a photographer raced behind trying to get a shot. Ms. Guzman Sufrin received her assignment to escort Mr. Cattelan around with a certain amount of trepidation, aware perhaps that she might be getting punked. At times, watching them interact was like stepping into the art world equivalent of "The Cat in the Hat," as he asked one insouciant question after another and she (along with others) gently fended him off. Was this museum like a number of others currently in the news headed for administrative upheaval? Might anyone have a Coke can to place on the floor for the construction crew to flatten? They were, after all moving things around in one of those trainlike electric carts. Also, why did Ms. Guzman Sufrin have a dual last name? Was this being mean to her father? Yet as Mr. Cattelan stepped into the gallery on the sixth floor, another side of him emerged. He was thoughtful. He was smart. He appeared to possess a near encyclopedic knowledge of everything that was on display. Finally, our strange little band reached the piece de resistance, a virtual reality work by Jordan Wolfson that depicted the savage beating of a young man with a baseball bat. After removing his glasses, he declared it to be "Jordan Wolfson at his best." But he was clearly thrown by the violence, in a way Richard Prince whose work is somehow more malevolent than Mr. Cattelan's might not have been. For a minute, it even looked as though Mr. Cattelan might cry. "Underneath it all, Maurizio's a good person," Ms. Axelrod said. "He's not careening through life trying to upset people. His overall approach is playful. Although maybe not the Stephanie Seymour piece. That might be the exception." As Mr. Cattelan told it, he never imagined when Ms. Axelrod inquired about getting some footage at the Guggenheim retrospective what this would grow to. "She wanted five or 10 minutes," he said. "Then it was another five or 10 minutes. Probably, if I had known it was going to be a movie from Day 1, I would have said no." She said: "That's how I sold it to you. But I knew there was a movie." In particular, Ms. Axelrod said, the announcement of his retirement before the Guggenheim show provided a framing device, a central question to ask with the film: Was it evidence of his underlying despair, an act of genuine self preservation from an artist whose comedic impulses mask darker, more depressive impulses? Or was it the ultimate prank being played on the easily manipulated and hype driven art world, a way of spurring curiosity and auction prices? Mr. Cattelan, perhaps aware that the question holds more power than the answer, provides evidence in both directions. Last May, Christie's sold Mr. Cattelan's sculpture of Hitler, "Him," for 17.2 million, the largest amount ever paid for one of his works. In September, the Guggenheim unveiled his first sculpture in more than five years: a Marcel Duchamp inspired solid gold toilet on which museumgoers could interact in the most personal of ways. "Would I do this without an audience?" said Mr. Cattelan, who in 2010 also founded "Toilet Paper," an art world picture magazine. "No. It's pornography in the end." On the other hand, one of Mr. Cattelan's best known sculptures is a depiction of Pinocchio, face down in a swimming pool, having drowned. Which many in the film present as being a serious self reflective piece centering on Mr. Cattelan's intense fears of being discovered as a fraud and destroyed. Viewed this way, retirement is not so much about career enhancement as it is a way to deal with his palpable dread and performance anxiety. "Instead of having someone kill me, I was killing myself," he said, staring out at the High Line. "It was suicide instead of execution." Those closest to him usually lean toward the idea of Mr. Cattelan as more tortured genius than cynical con man. In the film, one of his former girlfriends actually posits he is destined to die alone. "No," he said. "I know already who I am. And now the idea of not seeing it is funnier!" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Doug Varone's ornate movement tends to crackle like electricity: Churning this way and that, it appears to be propelled less by muscles and bones than by centrifugal force. Dancers run backward in semicircles, pause as if in mid thought and, led by a swinging arm, carry on in the opposite direction. Mr. Varone's dances, in other words, can be seriously windswept. "Dome," his newest work performed by Doug Varone and Dancers at the Joyce Theater on Tuesday, is different. Taking inspiration from Christopher Rouse's eerie Trombone Concerto, Mr. Varone has created a dystopian setting in which the focus for eight dancers is immobility. They're together yet alone; the distances between bodies are accentuated by Jane Cox's painterly lighting that casts the stage in a chilly apricot. It's as if the dome is the sky, and they're trapped within. At the start, the curtain slowly rises to reveal two dancers, Julia Burrer and Hsiao Jou Tang, lingering in simple positions a lunge, a passe before tipping over. While the choreography still involves Mr. Varone's serpentine patterns, the effect is slower, more ominous. Costumes by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung feature layered, earth tone pants and tops that have the look of being lived in for days. Frequently frozen in space and not reacting obviously to one another, the dancers fall to their knees, skitter to the side or hold their arms straight as they face away from the audience toward the back of the stage or the wings. "Dome" is a departure, but Mr. Varone could have stretched his vision further; in breaking away from his formula, he creates new ones. Did the curtain have to fall as slowly as it rose? "Dome" suffers from such obvious touches. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
's third novel, "Ordinary People," begins with a glamorous London bash celebrating the 2008 election of Barack Obama. It's a dazzling opening scene studded with the sharp observations at which Evans excels, bringing to vivid life a capacious social world while simultaneously commenting on it. The wealthy hosts of this party (they chose their south London neighborhood "for its creative energy and the charisma of its poverty") have invited "all the important, successful and beautiful people" they know. It's a long list. To a soundtrack of Kris Kross and Jay Z, people "kept on coming, men in good moods and just so trainers, women with varying degrees of fake hair, their curls, their tresses, their long straight manes trailing down their backs as they walked into the music, like so many Beyonces." After this sweeping establishing shot, Evans zooms in on Michael and Melissa. Pushing 40, they're still gorgeous, even if their glow has begun to fade, their once steamy relationship faltering. As they drive away from the party, Michael hopes they will make love. Melissa hopes they won't. Arriving home, she spots a mouse under the tub and soon they're bickering about household chores as she disappears into a long sleeved nightgown. The novel's title refers to a John Legend ballad about the struggle to keep a relationship alive once the initial passion subsides. Despite the Obama party that opens the novel and the fact that most of its central characters are black, "Ordinary People" doesn't turn out to be the big, meaty social novel that the first pages promise, but a rambling, smallish drama of domesticity and its discontents. Melissa and Michael aren't the book's only unhappy couple. Michael's friend Damian, a frustrated novelist, sneaks smokes in his backyard and wonders why he let his practical, maternal wife, Stephanie, drag him to a semidetached house in the hinterlands. He blames Stephanie, a stolid homemaker, for his artistic failures. Damian imagines he would be happier married to someone a bit sexier, a bit edgier, someone more like Melissa. Or how he imagines Melissa. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Rolling Stone has agreed to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by the University of Virginia fraternity at the center of a discredited article about an alleged gang rape, effectively closing the door on a pivotal and damaging chapter in the magazine's history. Under the terms of the settlement, the magazine agreed to pay the Virginia Alpha Chapter of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity 1.65 million. The fraternity had originally sought a trial by jury and 25 million in damages. "It has been nearly three years since we and the entire University of Virginia community were shocked by the now infamous article," the fraternity said in a statement, "and we are pleased to be able to close the book on that trying ordeal and its aftermath." The fraternity said it planned to donate "a significant portion" of the settlement to groups that offer sexual assault awareness education, prevention training and victim counseling services on college campuses. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
For people living in the ancient city of Babylon, Marduk was their patron god, and thus it is not a surprise that Babylonian astronomers took an interest in tracking the comings and goings of the planet Jupiter, which they regarded as a celestial manifestation of Marduk. What is perhaps more surprising is the sophistication with which they tracked the planet, judging from inscriptions on a small clay tablet dating to between 350 B.C. and 50 B.C. The tablet, a couple of inches wide and a couple of inches tall, reveals that the Babylonian astronomers employed a sort of precalculus in describing Jupiter's motion across the night sky relative to the distant background stars. Until now, credit for this kind of mathematical technique had gone to Europeans who lived some 15 centuries later. "That is a truly astonishing find," said Mathieu Ossendrijver, a professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, who describes his archaeological astronomy discovery in an article on Thursday in the journal Science. Mathematical calculations on four other tablets show that the Babylonians realized that the area under the curve on such a graph represented the distance traveled. "I think it's quite a remarkable discovery," said Alexander Jones, a professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, who was not involved with the research. "It's really quite clear from the text." Ancient Babylon, situated in what is now Iraq, south of Baghdad, was a thriving metropolis, a center of trade and science. Early Babylonian mathematicians who lived between 1800 B.C. and 1600 B.C. had figured out, for example, how to calculate the area of a trapezoid, and even how to divide a trapezoid into two smaller trapezoids of equal area. For the most part, Babylonians used their mathematical skills for mundane calculations, like figuring out the size of a plot of land. But on some tablets from the later Babylonian period, there appear to be some trapezoid calculations related to astronomical observations. But it was not clear what the Babylonian astronomers were calculating. A year ago, a visitor showed Dr. Ossendrijver a stack of photographs of Babylonian tablets that are now held by the British Museum in London. He saw a tablet he had not seen before. This tablet, with impressions of cuneiform script pressed into clay, did not mention trapezoids, but it recorded the motion of Jupiter, and the numbers matched those on the tablets with the trapezoid calculations. "I was certain now it was Jupiter," Dr. Ossendrijver said. When Jupiter first appears in the night sky, it moves at a certain velocity relative to the background stars. Because Jupiter and Earth both constantly move in their orbits, to observers on Earth, Jupiter appears to slow down, and 120 days after it becomes visible, it comes to a standstill and reverses course. In September, Dr. Ossendrijver went to the British Museum, where the tablets were taken in the late 19th century after being excavated. A close up look of the new tablet confirmed it: The Babylonians were calculating the distance Jupiter traveled in the sky from its appearance to its position 60 days later. Using the technique of splitting a trapezoid into two smaller ones of equal area, they then figured out how long it took Jupiter to travel half that distance. Dr. Ossendrijver said he did not know the astronomical or astrological motivation for these calculations. It was an abstract concept not known elsewhere at the time. "Ancient Greek astronomers and mathematicians didn't make plots of something against time," Dr. Ossendrijver said. He said that until now, such calculations were not known until the 14th century by scholars in England and France. These mathematicians of the Middle Ages perhaps had seen some as yet unknown texts dating to Babylonian times, or they developed the same techniques independently. "It anticipates integral calculus," Dr. Ossendrijver said. "This is utterly familiar to any modern physicist or mathematician." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The investor enthusiasm that began with President Trump's unexpected victory in November has burst out anew on Wall Street, even as Washington remains gridlocked and evidence of any real pickup in the economy is scarce. Stocks have surged 5 percent since Mr. Trump took office on Jan. 20. And that is on top of the 6 percent rally that followed his win in November. The cause for bullishness on Tuesday was Mr. Trump's new call to cut the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, from 35 percent deficits, perhaps, be damned. "C.E.O.s are pragmatists," said Bill George, a Harvard Business School professor who formerly ran Medtronic, the giant medical device maker. "If you cut my taxes and ease up on regulations, then I will like you. The bigger question is, can he get anything done?" The market impact of the Trump presidency is based so far on prospects with details and congressional dynamics left to be sorted out rather than accomplishments. But plenty of other factors are providing a tailwind for traders, including unexpectedly strong earnings reports from blue chip companies like Caterpillar and McDonald's and the receding chances that French voters will turn their backs on Europe. Technology giants like Apple, Facebook and Amazon have shown robust growth, lifting the Nasdaq index past 6,000 for the first time on Tuesday, a 26 percent gain from a year ago. Blair Effron, a founder of Centerview Partners, a prominent independent investment bank on Wall Street, said he believed that beyond any immediate policy shift in Washington, investors had taken their cue from signs of healthier growth globally. Not all the signals domestically are coming in strong, however. The government's initial report on the economy's first quarter performance is due Friday, and it is expected to be weak. And even if Mr. Trump manages to get Congress to pass a tax overhaul, and corporate profits then boom, that will not necessarily translate into better overall economic performance, warned Diane Swonk, a veteran independent economist in Chicago. "We have to distinguish between pro profit and pro growth policies," she said. "A pro profit approach increases the share of the pie going to corporate earnings and shareholders. Pro growth policies increase the size of the pie." So far, Ms. Swonk said, the Trump administration seems to favor the former. And while Wall Street will always reward rising corporate profits with higher share prices in the short term, the country's long term prospects will be undermined if that trend is not accompanied by policies that lead to faster economic growth. "It's easy to cut taxes, but reform is harder," Ms. Swonk said. "It's more about closing loopholes than reducing rates because if you just go to 15 percent, you're going to leave a large hole in the federal budget." While the prospects for a tax overhaul are murky on Capitol Hill, especially in light of the failure of House Republicans in March to agree on a replacement for President Barack Obama's signature health care law, executives say they are encouraged by the business friendly stance of the White House. Bruce Van Saun, chief executive of Citizens Financial Group, said he was initially concerned by Mr. Trump's pronouncements on trade and immigration when he took office in January. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. "I feel better because in the first 100 days, the president's tone on those issues has moderated," Mr. Van Saun said. At the same time, executive actions, like requiring government agencies to roll back two existing regulations for every new one, have also played well with business leaders, especially in the financial services industry. "That's caused some of the regulatory apparatus to pause and appreciate there is a new sheriff in town and the rules of the game are changing," said Mr. Van Saun, who took over at Citizens, a regional banking chain based in Rhode Island, after more than two decades on Wall Street. What is more, Mr. Van Saun added, "the commitment to the positive elements of the platform lower taxes, less regulation and pro energy policies continues to be there." Energy industry executives are hoping that Mr. Trump will deliver on his promises to reduce regulation in their sector and open up new areas for drilling and development. "If you watch what he does as opposed to the noise around him, so far so good," said Charif Souki, chairman of Houston based Tellurian and a leading industry spokesman for increasing natural gas exports from the United States. Scott Sheffield, executive chairman of Pioneer Natural Resources, a major oil and gas independent, echoed Mr. Souki's cautiously optimistic assessment of President Trump. "I think generally he's doing well," Mr. Sheffield said. "I think the Republicans have to get together and get something done." To be sure, Mr. Trump has spent more time listening to business leaders in the first few months of his presidency than actually delivering on what they want. "In the first 100 days of his presidency, Trump has given more attention to C.E.O.s than Obama did in eight years," said Mr. George, who is not a supporter of Mr. Trump. "What he does is a whole different story. But they do feel like he's listening, and there's a lot of ego gratification in having the president listen to you." If the president cannot deliver, or the economy fails to pick up speed, investors may be setting themselves up for a fall, warned Torsten Slok, chief international economist for Deutsche Bank. "Expectations for the future are wild," Mr. Slok said. "There is quite a disconnect between what the data suggests and where the stock market is trading." Still, even if it looks frothy, the euphoria is not approaching tech bubble levels circa 2000. "In 2000, the price to earnings ratio for Nasdaq was 170; today it is trading at 26 times," Charlie Bilello, the director of research at the investment advisory firm Pension Partners, said, referring to a common gauge for measuring stock valuations. "That is not cheap, but it's not crazy. We are definitely not at the level where the average guy quits his job to trade stocks." That may be true, but there is no doubt that the explosion in the market value of these companies has taken many investment professionals by surprise, even if most investors agree that their corporate fundamentals are solid. Since the financial crisis of 2008, four stocks Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon have been at the heart of the United States stock market rally. They have now all reached sizes 400 billion to 800 billion that in terms of value compare with the gross domestic product of many countries. With the rollback of the health care law put off and big infrastructure spending plans still up in the air, bulls and bears alike on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms will be focused on the prospects for a tax overhaul in the coming months. But within the business community itself, there are sharp differences between industries that stand to gain and those that stand to lose as the tax code is redrawn. A low overall corporate tax rate would be great but would not be worth giving up provisions like the mortgage interest deduction or homeowners' ability to write off state and local taxes, said William E. Brown, the president of the National Association of Realtors. At the same time, smaller manufacturers and others worry that they might still be subject to a nearly 40 percent rate even if larger corporations use their political clout to guarantee a hefty cut. Suku V. Radia, the chief executive of Bankers Trust, Iowa's largest independently owned bank, said he was eager to learn more details, like the impact of a major tax cut on the budget deficit. "It is obviously a significant drop from where we are currently, and I'd like to at least be able to better understand what do we do to make up for it," he said. "What is the loss of revenues going to be, and how are we trying to fill the gap?" Whatever details come out of the White House, getting a tax bill passed will be anything but easy. "I don't think there is such a thing as 'tax simplification,'" Mr. Radia said. "It's inherently complicated." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Nothing less than high drama suits Christina Aguilera's voice. She can be brassy, tearful, sultry, gritty, breathy, sweet or furious. She can belt and she can tease; she can aim a note as directly as a missile or turn its trajectory into an aerobatic spiral of leaping, quivering, scalloping melismas. Her voice is not an instrument for making modest statements; it's about peaks of self affirmation, indescribable sensual pleasures, steely counterattacks and abysses of sorrow. She unleashes all of them on "Liberation," her eighth studio album and her first since "Lotus" in 2012. It's a return to the pop fray after multiple seasons as a coach on "The Voice" that made sure viewers didn't forget her vocal mastery. It's an album of extreme ups and downs: wretched and ecstatic, calculating and abandoned, seesawing between angst and raunch. Heard as a whole unlikely as that might be in 2018 it's an album that moves through trauma, lust, resistance, obsession and, finally, lasting love. Her extravagant vocal flourishes connect with sweeping emotion. Top 10 pop the realm where Ms. Aguilera has repeatedly proved herself since "Genie in a Bottle" in 1999 doesn't always reward big, natural voices as it once did, especially for singers who aren't named Adele. Auto Tune; hip hop; and the nasal, narcotized, dispirited voices of SoundCloud rap compete with, and often out stream, the kind of soulful vocal storytelling that would have had Ms. Aguilera flourishing in previous eras. A voice like hers has become something like a turntable: a vintage prize, a modern novelty, a niche taste. Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder. Ms. Aguilera has adapted. Collaborating with stoned sounding, scratchy voiced rappers in electronic soundscapes is one of her necessary skills. "Accelerate," produced by Kanye West and associates, was released as a single in advance of "Liberation"; with Ty Dolla Sign and 2 Chainz leering at her over synthesizers, she tremulously sings, "Fill me up, that's what I need." Over a slow, slinky, trap meets dancehall groove in "Right Moves," she coos just above a whisper about how someone can "love me till I can't think straight," abetted by two Jamaican dancehall performers, Keida and Shenseea. And in the nearly single entendre "Pipe," set to narrow bandwidth trap drum sounds and keyboard tones, Ms. Aguilera is tremulous and accommodating with the rapper XNDA, sing songing up and down a few notes: "Got a couple secrets that I'd really like to see if you could keep." "Liberation" presents itself as a new disclosure. Its cover photo is a headshot of Ms. Aguilera seemingly without makeup that reveals shock! freckles. Actually, the album reworks ideas that Ms. Aguilera has brandished at least since her 2002 album, "Stripped": that women can be combative, sexy, compassionate, imperfect, sometimes self doubting, sometimes victimized, sometimes even self destructive, but still strong and worthy. Now she delivers those convictions as an adult. Ms. Aguilera, 37, has been married and divorced. She is a mother of two and a seasoned celebrity who has been a national presence since her debut on the early 1990s version of "The Mickey Mouse Club" alongside Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake. She shares "Fall in Line" with another former child star, Demi Lovato; it's a defiant dirge addressed directly to "little girls" and it insists, "You do not owe them your body and your soul." A hard rock guitar riff backs Ms. Aguilera's roughest Janis Joplin style growls in "Sick of Sittin'," which rails about the aftermath of money and fame: "I've been working too hard not to be living." She also flaunts her experience more playfully. In "Like I Do" produced by Anderson.Paak with a flutelike loop as a hook Ms. Aguilera responds to come ons from the rapper GoldLink by singing, "Boy you already know my story/You were raised in all my glory" and, later, "Can't play me, boy, I'm out of your league." But she still flirts with him: "Just might have to show you/show you what I do." The album's seduction songs do their job. But its doleful ones leap out. In "Masochist," the chords are major and cushiony, but the lyrics are about compulsively returning to an abusive relationship: "Loving you is so bad for me/But I just can't walk away." The slow, blipping electronic track "Deserve," written by the chronically despairing Julia Michaels and the producer MNEK (Uzoechi Emenike), zeros in on how the narrator sabotages her own romance. "Maria" Ms. Aguilera's middle name places her in utter existential misery, almost sobbing in her bluesy lower range: "How did I get so low?/When did I turn so cold?" And "Twice," written by Kirby Lauryen, mournfully ponders sin, forgiveness and redemption, with only a gospelly piano accompanying a choir of Ms. Aguilera's vocals. Like a rom com, the album closes with something like a wedding: "Unless It's With You," another song with a gospel foundation. It's a backhanded proposal with an understated, ambivalent buildup musing on independence, uncertainty and "fairy tales of fake happiness." But after her decision is made "I don't wanna get married/Unless it's with you" Ms. Aguilera's voice leaps free, exulting in its range, its forcefulness, its grain and its melodic curlicues. She eases back just as the song ends, but she's made her point: Only her own choices will contain her. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
"Saturday Night Live" became the latest topical comedy series to suspend its season amid concerns about the coronavirus pandemic. "S.N.L.," the late night NBC variety sketch program, had been on a scheduled hiatus after its March 7 broadcast and was expected to return on March 28. But the series "will now not resume production until further notice," NBC said in a statement on Monday. The network added, "We will monitor the situation closely and make decisions about future shows on an ongoing basis as further information develops." "S.N.L.," which is currently in its 45th season and is broadcast from NBC's New York headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, joins the ranks of other programs like "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," "Late Night With Seth Meyers" and "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert," which have all halted their seasons during the spread of the coronavirus. During its many years on the air, "S.N.L." has occasionally been suspended in midseason by writers' strikes. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the show was back on the air in less than a month; its Sept. 29 season premiere that year opened memorably with an introduction by then Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and the singer songwriter Paul Simon, who performed "The Boxer," a song about showing resilience in the face of hardship. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The battle lines are taking shape in what is certain to be a sharp fight and possibly a long one over the film ratings system and the way it handles smoking. The dispute centers on a class action complaint seeking to prevent films with tobacco imagery from receiving G, PG or PG 13 ratings from the Motion Picture Association of America. On Monday, the complaint which was filed last month against the major film studios, theater owners and their ratings system was assigned to Judge Richard Seeborg, a 2009 Obama appointee who will now oversee the dispute in federal court. Days earlier, lawyers for the studios and the motion picture association had objected in a filing to the assignment of the case to a magistrate. If nothing else, the move signaled they were paying close attention. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
As new luxury high rises like One57 garner stratospheric prices for their unobstructed Central Park views, some developers are focusing on the potential of the park's northern frontier. At a development on West 110th Street, developers hope to draw buyers farther north with the promise of Central Park views at a more modest price. Sales began last summer at One Morningside Park, a 22 story condominium at the corner of West 110th Street and Manhattan Avenue. Already more than 60 percent of the 54 units have sold, including a 525 square foot one bedroom that sold for 610,000, and a 2,160 square foot space combined from three units that sold for 2.738 million. Although the prices are lower than in neighborhoods farther south, they approach the top of the market for the immediate neighborhood, which sits at the junction of Morningside Heights, Manhattan Valley and Harlem. Nestled between Central Park and Morningside Park, the development provides park views from two sides as well as views of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. "The people who have bought here realize very quickly the value of this building," said Shlomi Reuveni, the Brown Harris Stevens Select broker who is marketing the development. "They have really captured an incredible opportunity here. By all indications there is a huge upside to this building in the future." One Morningside Park is one of a handful of properties built along the northern boundary of Central Park in recent years, tapping into the seemingly insatiable desire for skyline views. This summer at 111 Central Park North, a 19 story condo, an apartment sold for 2.2 million, and on Fifth Avenue, a three bedroom condo at One Museum Mile, designed by Robert A. M. Stern Architects, sold for 2.995 million, according to MNS. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Tracee Ellis Ross, left, and Michelle Obama chatting over breakfast at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Mrs. Obama has just published her memoir, "Becoming."Credit...Emily Berl for The New York Times Tracee Ellis Ross, left, and Michelle Obama chatting over breakfast at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Mrs. Obama has just published her memoir, "Becoming." On Thursday evening, Ms. Ross, one of several prominent moderators on the book tour, including Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon, interviewed Mrs. Obama at an exuberant show featuring videos, music from artists like the Jackson 5 and Lady Gaga and a discussion of her book and life. The next morning, the pair met again for a more intimate conversation for three at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Mrs. Obama, 54, was the nation's first African American first lady from 2009 through the beginning of 2017. Her new book chronicles not only her White House years, but also her larger trajectory: from her happy childhood in a cramped second floor apartment in Chicago, through her degrees at Princeton University and Harvard Law School, and on to a plum position at a corporate law firm. It was there that she met Barack Obama, still a law student himself, and the lone voice among her family and friends to urge her to follow her heart and jump from her well paid perch into the public sector. She found her stride in positions of advocacy for children and communities like her own. She continues that work to this day. Ms. Ross, 46, the daughter of the singer Diana Ross, is best known as an actress on the sitcom "black ish," for which she won a Golden Globe Award in 2017 as best actress in a comedy series. Before that, she starred on the series "Girlfriends" for eight seasons. Like Mrs. Obama, Ms. Ross is an outspoken advocate for women and girls. Over breakfast, the pair, who have a warm rapport and a texting friendship, discussed building bridges through storytelling whether by personal memoirs and MeToo, or more fractious talk with political opponents and spouses in marriage counseling. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. MICHELLE OBAMA Well, it was sort of necessary. When I give a regular speech, without a new book, I picture a nice auditorium somewhere. And people say, "We're giving you Oracle Arena in Oakland, Calif., which seats nearly 20,000 people ."And I'm like, "A stadium? It's not like that many people are going to come." Then it's full. TRACEE ELLIS ROSS I think doing this tour in smaller rooms would have felt exclusionary. OBAMA And if I say I'm coming somewhere, I want everyone to be able to come. GALANES You took some heat on pricing. OBAMA That's the second thing: I wanted a lot of young people to come, not just a handful. I wanted thousands of girls around the country to have this opportunity. So, I've given away 10 percent of every venue. And 10 percent of a lot of seats is a lot. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. GALANES During the preshow videos, there was huge applause for your line from the 2016 Democratic convention: "When they go low, we go high." But I think that quote's been misunderstood. You never said: "When they go low, we pretend it didn't happen." OBAMA "Going high" doesn't mean you don't feel the hurt, or you're not entitled to an emotion. It means that your response has to reflect the solution. It shouldn't come from a place of anger or vengefulness. Barack and I had to figure that out. Anger may feel good in the moment, but it's not going to move the ball forward. GALANES The most reported passage in your book involves President Trump. With his birther lie, you write, he put your family in physical danger, and you will never forgive him. You and your husband have been so disciplined about speaking out, why draw the line there? OBAMA First, let me explain our discipline. Barack and I are often attacked personally. But our work is about the nation. It's not about us. I would never deal with personal attacks as first lady. OBAMA Because we the media and the public we're treating this stuff too much like a game. No one knows what it's like to be commander in chief. They don't know the hardship, the dangers, the information he gets. Everyone thinks they know, but they don't. So, when people tell lies about the commander in chief, I know they don't understand what they're doing. When other people repeat it, they don't understand, either. What I wanted to explain is that when you do this, you escalate the risks. You put the person who's in charge of the welfare of this country and his family at risk. We have to stop it. I assume that Trump didn't get that when he was out of office. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt. And I hope that by personalizing it in the book, as a wife and mother whose kids go out into the world every day, to have someone just make something up about our existence is problematic. And since you brought it up, I lived with a bullet lodged in the window of the Truman balcony that was shot into the home where my family lived by someone with a high powered rifle. GALANES Is there a connection between the birther story and another line from the book: "A bully is a scared person hiding inside a scary person." Is that an argument for compassion, whether for Mr. Trump? Or for a racist? ROSS I didn't read it that way. What I saw is a sharing of humanity. Knowing other people's stories is how we connect with them. That's where the compassion is ignited. If people who don't know you hate you because of some idea they've made up about you, your honest life story is the thing that dismantles the walls between us. OBAMA When you travel around this country, like Barack and I have, we've been fortunate to see the country in its fullness: sitting at people's kitchen tables, going to people's churches and veterans' community halls. You learn two things: First, people are open to having strangers come into their homes and talk. And you know what? We would talk, and we would listen. And people would start going: "Oh! That's who you are. I've heard all this stuff about you on Fox News, but you're actually kind of reasonable." OBAMA And I choked on the word "white." Go figure! It was my first choke. GALANES You tortured yourself! You worried: "Am I good enough?" You were so little. Where did that feeling come from? OBAMA I think it seeps in through your skin, from society. Children are so perceptive, and we don't give them credit for it. We think we can do anything to them: expose them to racism, use bad words. We think they're playing, but no, they're taking it all in. I couldn't explain it back then, but I knew that stratification was happening early. I saw what was happening to the kids who got the words right, the gold stars, and what happened to the kids who didn't. ROSS "Am I good enough?" haunted me. It still does. As a little girl I taught myself to smile so my top lip would disappear because I thought that's what a pretty girl looked like. She had smaller lips. But you know what helps? Having a tribe of people around me who love me and see me even when I can't see myself. And one of the things I do now, when I leave people, is ask myself: Do I feel better or worse? GALANES Is the "good enough" question one that's particularly applied to women? I'm thinking of Hillary Clinton now. ROSS She was good enough. But one of the blind spots of patriarchy and privilege is that it doesn't see how we use different standards of worthiness when we're looking at black people or women. So much of what I took from the book is that we need to pivot in how we're using our stories. GALANES What do you mean by that? ROSS We're living in this time, because of social media, where everything is a sound bite. We lose the context of where things actually come from. We use our stories, and other people's stories, to make jokes about each other and to pit ourselves against each other instead of as a way to connect. OBAMA And this also gets distorted by whose stories are put out there. Part of why I knew my book had to be done, and done well, is because it's a rare moment in history that a black woman gets to tell her own story. Success stories look a certain way: they're male; they're white; they're wealthy. That's what power looks like because we've been taught that. And we question stories that are different from the ones we're used to. How many stories do you know where millions of people are hearing about strong women, told by a woman, and hearing her pain? GALANES An amazing feature of your story is the parade of accomplishments you assembled: Princeton, Harvard Law School, a top tier law firm, only to ... ROSS (laughing) Just so you know, I went to Brown. And I gave a TED Talk. GALANES But just when Mrs. Obama was in a position to cash in, she jumped. She said: This is not making me happy, and she started working in advocacy. You both have. OBAMA A lot of this is temperament. I was always that kid who couldn't keep her mouth shut and called out a bully. But what I've learned is that I'm best at doing things that have a deep meaning for me. How I decide what to advocate is personal. And I tell young girls to start with their own passions. There isn't just one way. Politics is a way. It's never been anything I wanted to do. But I am an advocate. GALANES And the ironic win win here, Mrs. Obama: You're poised to make a fortune as a corporate lawyer; you walk away for something that feeds your heart; and in the end, you make a ton of money on this book. ROSS (laughing) I can't believe you said that! OBAMA It's a fair point. But that's how passion works. I tell this to young people. Barack was never motivated by money. My father was never motivated by money. You want to pay your bills but you don't need a lot of stuff. I grew up without a lot of stuff. But if you can find the thing you care about and operate from that place, good will come from it. Steer clear of money; steer clear of fame. Those aren't goals. The hard part is digging into yourself and figuring out: What do I care about? That's how I've learned to live. ROSS I was raised with lots of things my mother's gift afforded us. But it was never what was important. It was how we treated each other as a family. That's where the joy came from. OBAMA But let me put this on the table too: My career swerve was a luxury. My dad didn't have the luxury of thinking about his passions. That's why my parents pushed me to have an education, so I could make choices. And that's what I want for my girls, and why I promote education. I want young people to have some security, so they're not just operating from a place of needing to pay the bills. So they get the wherewithal to find their passion. GALANES When I think back to your first moments on the national stage, helping your husband find his passion in politics, the thing that struck me was the meanness turned on you. Did you have enough experience in the world to expect that, or were you blindsided, too? OBAMA A little of both. I loved traveling through Iowa, sharing my story. Folks were so accepting and open and warm. People of all colors and backgrounds. None of the nasty stuff was happening on the ground. And I was effective because when I got in front of people, they saw me. What I didn't anticipate was the game of politics: It's not about the truth; it's about winning. The bigger my crowds got, that's when people said: We've got to shut her down. That's when the nasty stuff started. GALANES Mrs. Obama, the second revelation is about your going to marriage counseling, as a young mom, with your husband. Selfishly, I want to ask: Were you as annoyed as everyone else that a marriage counselor never says anything like: "The court finds in favor of Michelle"? OBAMA I think we all feel that. "I know I'm right. I just need someone to tell him that." But I hit a point of struggle. I was married to an ambitious man who traveled, and I had two little kids. That wasn't my plan, and it hacked into my insecurities. And what I learned in counseling was that I was asking him to make me happy. This light bulb went off! What do I need to make my life work for me? And I demanded it unapologetically. I asked for more help at home, more flexibility at work. And that's what I want for all women the power that comes with education and the leverage to walk away. ROSS That's the way I was raised, knowing I had choices. And the more we can pop these stories into girls' heads, the more choices we give them. OBAMA That's why girls have to be educated. If they're hanging on to bad choices because they don't have the power to walk away, that's how stuff never gets fixed. And I always put myself in a position where I knew I didn't need to be there: I don't need this job. I love my husband, but I don't need him to pay my bills or put my kids through school. That gives me leverage in life. GALANES How is marriage easier after the White House? OBAMA We celebrated our 26th anniversary this year. Now, I love my children. Obviously, I wanted them. But they are a big interruption to the process of a relationship. I joke with my girls: "You really got in the way of my marriage!" But now, after the presidency and the other jobs, the financial stress, we're getting to that point in our 50s when we're rediscovering each other. We're the same people. But we went through this maze. We've got cuts on our backs, but we're still holding hands. And it's like: "Are you good? You lost a shoe. Leave it. Leave the shoe." But we're still there together. GALANES Last question: First lady is a job that comes with recriminations: She gave too many parties, she didn't give enough parties. Who elected her? When did you reach the point, both of you, when you thought: This is my voice, and I'm good with it? ROSS About two years ago, I realized my life was actually mine. And that's been a big unfolding for me. Here I am! And then all of a sudden you're tripping on a new thing. Then there's a new arrival and a new dark hallway. It's a process. OBAMA That's why the book is called "Becoming." Because there's no one point where you just say: "Yeah!" Maybe now, at 54, I've done a lot of things. I think: "This is a big deal. It's over, and I did it." I had that sit down with Barack, too. Stepping back from it a little and recovering from some of the wounds, I can look him in the eye and go: "Man, you were amazing!" But it takes some time to get to that place, and it's always a process. You're going to have so many lives within a life. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
MAASTRICHT, Netherlands How can we tell it's a real Canaletto? "It's the way he characterizes the figures, just with a few squiggles," said Charles Beddington, a London based dealer in old master pictures, standing in front of a painting, "Old Somerset House From the River Thames," that he was offering at Tefaf Maastricht, Europe's biggest and most prestigious international art and antiques fair. "Like that dog," Mr. Beddington added, pointing to the cheeky detail of a hound squatting to do its business on the terrace of the mansion where Henrietta Maria, wife of King Charles I, once lived. That was one of the telltale details that persuaded Mr. Beddington, an authority on 18th century Italian painting, to include this long lost picture in his catalog of the 2007 exhibition, "Canaletto in England: A Venetian Artist Abroad, 1746 1755," at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Before then, it was thought that the original Canaletto of this subject was a canvas sold in 1988 at Christie's in New York. But that picture is now considered to be a copy by another artist. "That version doesn't have the dog," said Mr. Beddington, who added that the work available at Tefaf on behalf of its British owner was one of just three known paintings by Canaletto executed on mahogany panel. It was priced at six million pounds, or about 8 million. Mr. Beddington said he was "working" on its sale. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Hari Kondabolu gets his first Netflix comedy special. And the risque animated series "SuperMansion" returns on Sony Crackle. HARI KONDABOLU: WARN YOUR RELATIVES (2018) on Netflix. The comedian, writer and podcaster Hari Kondabolu has long mined racial and political issues for his material. "Warn Your Relatives" is no exception. In this stand up special, Mr. Kodabolu, a Queens born comic, talks terrorism and family matters, and revisits the time Tracy Morgan jeered at him. Mr. Kondabolu was recently thrust into the spotlight when "The Simpsons" responded to the criticism of its character Apu, an Indian convenience store owner, that was laid out in Mr. Kondabolu's documentary THE PROBLEM WITH APU. Stream the film on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play or Vudu. DAY OF WRATH (1948) on iTunes and FilmStruck. Set in a 17th century Danish village, this drama is about an older pastor and his young wife, who falls in love with her stepson. When she confesses her feelings to her husband, the shock takes his life and leads to her demise. The film's witch hunt theme has been described as an allegory for the Nazi occupation of Denmark. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
I've been in a lot of Zoom "classrooms" over the past month, teaching, talking with college students, some sent home from study abroad and continuing on with the language lessons that made so much more sense in another country, or with the art history discussions that were supposed to build to a museum trip, others who should have been in a big lecture hall or a cozy seminar room (remember big lecture halls and cozy seminar rooms?) in New York. Generally, the students I have encountered are valiantly hanging on to their classes, putting their intellectual energy into the effort of pursuing their lives and their goals and finding meaning while living through a time of crisis that upended their plans when it upended the world. When I gave a guest lecture over Zoom recently to a hundred or so students in an introductory journalism class at New York University, where I teach, I asked the students what advice they have for parents what had their parents done to support them, what could parents do to help their children through the scholastic endeavor of finishing out a semester that was never supposed to go this way? After all, the students and their parents have invested money and effort in this semester, and it will stand as part of the college experience how can adults help them see it through, help them make it as meaningful and valuable as possible? I had in mind that we would start with some obvious and practical advice: that if families have to share space or computer equipment, online class time should be prioritized; that as far as it's possible, given family constraints, students need a private and quiet place to work, and to participate in online lessons; that if a student's home is in a different time zone than the university's, classes may meet at what seem like odd hours. When I have "office hours" with my own students (remember offices?), or one on one conferences, I can often see the details of their stay home work spaces. Some are clearly in their childhood rooms, others are in the kitchen or the basement. Occasionally, I let myself comment on what I see who plays the guitar, what's the cat's name, looks like a beautiful day where you are, out that window. During class, I find myself very wistful when I can't see some of my students online it's become important to me to see their faces, and their reactions but I understand, of course, that sometimes it's not possible for technical reasons, or because people may be self conscious about their surroundings. But what the students wanted to talk about when I asked what their parents could do was a little different. For the most part, they wanted less active support and a little more distance. A colleague at N.Y.U., Professor Kaia Shivers, who teaches writing to first year students surveyed her class about what they would like from their parents, and came back with the No. 1 request: "To stop hovering over them like high school to see if they're finished with work." "It's really hard to get my work done because I don't want to have increased tensions with family," one student in the big class wrote to me. Another wrote, "I am used to working in a calm, quiet environment and being home is much more chaotic ... My parents have helped by giving me the distance I need to focus on my studies, and get used to moving back home after being away for so long." To be clear, I am doing these students a disservice if their comments come across as whining; they were simply responding to my invitation to describe what was getting in the way and what would help. By and large, the students I asked needed their parents to understand that college is different from high school, that the workload and the pressures can be high, and that they want less supervision and more support. "Remember that even though we're home right now, we've been doing school by ourselves this whole time, so we don't need someone to hover over us all of the time asking us about our schoolwork," wrote one student. Another student wrote that parents should be more open to "letting kids do their own thing and be on their own schedule ... I think that personally my parents have been too demanding with family time now that I am home when I have an extensive amount of work." And another suggested "not making students feel pressured to engage in family activities on a spur of the moment. Instead, work with them to plan moments to be together that actually fit with their schedule." Limit household distractions, suggested another: "Be mindful of schedules and class times, have conversations about something other than corona, be understanding and supportive." Dr. Julie Lumeng, who is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan, said, "Developmentally, a college student is supposed to be with their peers, not at home with their 50 year old parents." One of the most important things parents can do, she said, is give their children as many opportunities as possible to keep up with friends. "Being home is like a safe haven but they're not accomplishing the developmental task of young adulthood." Her own daughter's college friends, she said, are scattered in different time zones. "She said last week, do you mind if I skip dinner with the family and go hang out with my friends on Zoom and watch a movie on Netflix during dinner?," Dr. Lumeng said. "I was like, oh my God, please skip dinner and go hang out with your friends, much more important than having dinner with your parents and younger siblings." The No. 2 request from my colleague's group survey: students are "having difficulties adjusting to a schedule and being indoors, so be patient with balancing house chores and sleeping patterns." Dr. Lumeng also reminded parents that body rhythms shift in adolescence, and that there's a biological reason college students are likely to fall into bed later and get up later in the morning. "That's physiologically her sleep schedule, I'm going to respect it." Finally, it's also important for parents to recognize that although students do recognize the larger tragedies this epidemic has brought about, they are also still saddened by the disruption in their own lives. The No. 3 request for parents from the class survey: "To be more understanding that they're stressed." One wrote: "We are doing the best we can while having to maintain our academic standards in a completely different environment." "Be understanding of the grief their student may have for the upending of half a semester's worth of plans and routines. This may be your student's last semester with close friends, and they may have had exciting academic and extracurricular activities canceled." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
And we won't judge if you head back for a swim and a pina colada at the end of the day. 5 Caribbean Islands Where You Can Go Beyond the Beach Think of the Caribbean, and a certain image comes to mind: an unblemished white sand beach, lapped by clear turquoise waters. And there's little doubt that many of the millions of visitors who come to the region annually do so to simply sit at the beach with sunscreen, a must read novel and perhaps a rum based drink with pineapple garnish. The beach is delightful. But there are so many more reasons to vacation in the Caribbean. And some travelers, as my family likes to say, get itchy: to explore, to learn, to eat or to exercise. One of the Greater Antilles islands and a United States territory, Puerto Rico offers excellent coffee tours, delicious rum tours and some of the Caribbean's best salsa dancing. For our recent break from the beach, my 8 year old son, Sam, and I chose to play in the El Yunque rainforest, specifically in a section of the Rio Fajardo called Las Tinajas. At 29,000 acres, the El Yunque National Rainforest is one of the oldest forest reserves in the hemisphere and one of the most biologically diverse run by the U.S. Forest Service. Though severely damaged by Hurricane Maria in 2017, it is recovering. We joined the "Off the Beaten Path" trip, organized by Bespoke Lifestyle Management, an authorized tour operator recommended by a colleague. Bespoke picked us up in San Juan, and after a quick hour long drive east, and a muddy 20 minute hike from the private parking lot, our group of roughly two dozen trudged to a riverbed with lush tropical greenery, rushing cold water and enormous boulders. Rio Fajardo offered the perfect outdoor adventure for two urban dwellers. We clambered up rock walls and over enormous tree roots to slide, jump and swing into the deep natural pools. Our three guides shared the best leaping off points and strategies to safely ride the currents. We spotted mountain mullet fish with our snorkeling gear, and my little guy marveled at an underwater cave he discovered. With the European introduction of sugar cane, more than 5 million Africans are estimated to have been forcibly brought to the Caribbean during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries to work the plantations. In recent years, new museums, memorials and other sites have cropped up in the region to help tourists and residents alike better understand that painful history. To Martinique, the French overseas "department" in the Lesser Antilles, slave traders brought around 217,000 Africans to enslave. On cliffs along the island's southwestern coast, one can get a fuller picture of that legacy by visiting a haunting monument that overlooks Diamond Rock, a small and uninhabited island less than two miles offshore. Entitled Cap 110 Memoire and Fraternite, the large outdoor memorial at Anse Caffard consists of 15 white concrete sculptures, each more than 8 feet tall and weighing 4 and a half tons, placed tightly together in a triangle formation. Created by the local artist Laurent Valere, the memorial commemorates an 1830 disaster in which a slave ship crashed into rocks just offshore, drowning many Africans chained in the hold. The sculpture's triangular shape represents the triangle trade of slavery, and is oriented toward to the Gulf of Guinea in Africa, thought to be the ship's original port. "It's an amazing place with the Atlantic Ocean," Mr. Valere wrote in a text message. "It's a bit mystic and a special place because a lot of Africans have been buried there." For more history of the island, you can visit the La Savane des Esclaves, or Savannah of the Slaves, a 30 minute drive away. The powerful open air museum the brainchild of Gilbert Larose, a local descendant of enslaved Africans covers 400 years of island history, starting around 1570. The seven acre museum recreates a village of enslaved Africans just before emancipation in 1848, with thatched huts, cooking quarters and a medicinal garden, as well as several buildings demonstrating lives and customs of an indigenous tribe, the Caribs, before the arrival of Europeans. The museum also displays original photographs and tools for torture and punishment, and offers dance performances during the high season. Visitors are encouraged to wander and absorb on their own, but guided tours are available in French and in English for groups of more than 15. "At the beginning, the Martinicans took me for a madman," Mr. Larose wrote in an email. He started the project in 1999, when "to speak about slavery and medicinal plants was a little taboo." It opened to the public five years later. "You can't come on vacation to an island without knowing its history, its past," Mr. Larose said. IF YOU GO Access to the Cap 110 slave memorial is free; tickets for La Savane des Esclaves range from 5 euros, or around 5, for children to 12 euros for adults, with special prices for students and citizens of the island. Though a British colony for more than 300 years (Nevis is a dual island nation with neighboring St. Kitts, attaining independence in 1983), the island played a significant role in American history as the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton, one of the founding fathers of the United States. In 1755 (or perhaps 1757, it's a bit unclear), Hamilton was born in a two story Georgian style building overlooking Charlestown Harbor, and lived on Nevis until age 9 (or 7). Now called the Hamilton House, the building also houses the Museum of Nevis History, and serves as the meeting place of the island's legislative body. Another popular site for travelers and historians is Cottle Church, now partially a ruin. It was built in 1824 by John Cottle, a former president of Nevis, so that his family and those he had enslaved could worship together. The Anglican church was never consecrated since it was illegal at the time for slaves to take part in religious ceremonies. "It's a place of memory, very fascinating," Ms. Ngunjiri said. Back in Charlestown, the Horatio Nelson Museum displays artifacts and memorabilia belonging to Admiral Nelson, the British naval hero, who met his wife, Fanny Nisbet, at a party on Nevis and later married her there. "If the world knew the history hidden in the Caribbean, there would be a lot more people traveling here," Ms. Ngunjiri said. After absorbing that history, you can hike to the forests in search of the island's African Green Vervet monkeys. The nonnative animals arrived in the 17th century, and now number in the thousands on Nevis and St. Kitts. Farmers and gardeners may revile the monkeys for their voracious appetites, but many tourists are drawn to their heart shaped faces and soulful eyes. IF YOU GO For visitors to the island, both the Horatio Nelson museum and the Hamilton House charge 5 admission for adults, children under 12 are free; the price for Hamilton House is expected to increase to 10 (guess why). A third of Grenada, about 100 miles north of Venezuela, is agricultural, with top exports including nutmeg, cocoa and mace, with cinnamon, turmeric and other spices also being cultivated. Many farms on the oval shaped island were once devoted primarily to nutmeg, a top export and so important to the country it appears on the national flag. However, Hurricane Ivan in 2004 destroyed most of the nutmeg trees (as well as much of the island) and cocoa, whose trees mature faster than nutmeg, is increasing in importance. Introduced to Grenada by French settlers in 1714, raw cocoa for centuries was exported overseas for processing. But Grenada pioneered tree to bar chocolate in the region, with a former New Yorker named Mott Green establishing the Grenada Chocolate Company in the late 1990s. The island now has five chocolate factories, along with many cocoa farms, that will educate visitors on the various processes harvesting, drying, fermenting and more required to make chocolate and other cocoa products. At Belmont Estate, a 400 acre, 300 year old farm in the north of the island, travelers can tour the fields and cocoa processing facilities, and end their visit at the on site restaurant which serves organic vegetables grown on the farm as well as the local cocoa tea. Kim Russell, co owner of Crayfish Bay Organic Cocoa Estate, calls cocoa tea "an acid trip on chocolate." (His version includes coconut milk and a drop of rum, for enhancing the chocolate flavor.) He also offers tours of his farm and factory, but it's much more informal. Visitors should plan, he said, to "eat a lot of chocolate and listen to me talk for two hours." If you don't have a car, St. George's, Grenada's picturesque capital known for its brightly painted buildings and scenic harbor, offers the chance to learn about the island's sweet chocolate history at the new Tri Island Chocolate Factory Cafe, where visitors can make their own bars, and The House of Chocolate, a small museum, boutique and cafe. The mountainous volcanic plugs lie in the Pitons Management Area, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the trailhead begins in Fond Gens Libre, or "Valley of the Free People," a community culturally significant to the island, as the remote geography had provided a safe haven to those escaping slavery in the 18th century. Hiking with a certified guide is strongly recommended: Gros Piton is not an easy walk in the park. Rising roughly 2,619 feet above sea level, the mountain has a narrow rocky trail, lined with thick tropical brush and boulders up to your shins, requiring a scrambling ascent often with three points of contact (that is, using both hands and feet). The two hour hike up is strenuous and you won't be alone if your T shirt is drenched with sweat by the time you finish. Your hard work pays off at the top, where your view will include the Petit Piton, the blue green waters of the Caribbean and the neighboring island of St. Vincent. For more leisurely hiking, Pigeon Island National Landmark, on St. Lucia's northwest coast, offers dramatic views and military ruins from the 18th century. There's also the Diamond Falls Botanical Gardens, six verdant acres with mineral baths and a waterfall that changes color depending on the mix of rainwater and volcanic minerals, and Sulphur Springs Park, billed as a "drive in volcano," since one can drive right up to a live volcano that belches steam redolent of rotten eggs. You can also hit the mud baths. IF YOU GO: Fees to hike Gros Piton start at 50, but expect to pay more for various packages, especially if your hotel organizes your trip. For St. Lucia visitors, Pigeon Island costs 10 for adults and 3 for children ages 5 years to 12 years old. The entrance fee to the Botanical Gardens is 7 for adults, and 3.50 for children; admission to the baths are extra. Tours to Sulphur Springs begin at 100. 52 PLACES AND MUCH, MUCH MORE Discover where you should go in 2020, and find more Travel coverage by following us on Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter: Each week you'll receive tips on traveling smarter, stories on hot destinations and access to photos from all over the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
I've been feeling nostalgic lately. I miss life before the coronavirus, before the last election, before social media. I'm still looking at Instagram, but the accounts I'm drawn to are the ones that take me back somehow, whether it's all the way to the city of my childhood like the 1970s photographs I find on Retro New York and similar feeds or simply to the feeling of being out in the world without mask or gloves, rummaging around drawings, paintings and books. I started following the artist and designer Julian Montague for his reliable stream of graphic book covers. Sometimes he posts them in thematic groups four paperbacks decorated with dots, say, or a dozen with searing triangles and sometimes they're delivered straight up. Either way, the account's always good for a quick hit of the clean lines and simple colors that I associate with postwar optimism as well as midcentury design. Mr. Montague's own design work, with its hip, retro style, sits easily in this aesthetic, too. But what's kept me coming back the part where that old fashioned imaginative idealism burns brightest is Mr. Montague's fictional Thorold Gallery, a 1970s institution of uncertain location for which he designs catalogs and exhibition posters. Richard Tinkler's kaleidoscopic paintings and drawings are dense but delicate, every organic, colorful pattern clearly a labor of love. They're also impossible to photograph, which is what I like so much about the artist's lo fi Instagram feed. Apart from the occasional selfie, Mr. Tinkler almost exclusively shares snapshots of his own new work. He's prolific enough to post frequently, and the work always looks terrific. But even when he pairs complete views with close ups, there's only so much detail you can get through a three inch screen. The effect, though, is paradoxical I feel so vividly aware of the texture I'm missing that it's almost like having the texture itself. Butt Johnson's pseudonym started as a college joke, but now, some years into his working practice, the 41 year old Brooklyn artist is stuck with it. What he makes under this name are labor intensive, frequently eye bending drawings pieces that he posts from time to time on Instagram. But mostly his account is an endlessly fascinating commonplace book of other people's drawings from all over the world. And since you can call almost any kind of mark made on a flat surface a drawing, he's able to include things like ornamented saddlebags, illuminated manuscripts or Emily Dickinson's curious handwriting, along with plenty of works from the New York gallery scene the painter Hope Gangloff and the artist known as Jess being two recent highlights and charming ephemera like an early sketch of Kermit the Frog. Farrah Dupoux, a 28 year old native Upper West Sider who edits sound and plays piano for a living, said she started gathering midcentury New York street photography on a Tumblr blog in 2012. Since 2018, though, her acute eye for the best of old New York has made its home on her widely followed Instagram account. Drawing on a range of fine photographers, archives and public domain accounts, and focusing on candid shots of well dressed people and steeply angled shots of buildings, Ms. Dupoux assembles what feels like the all time greatest New York City walking trip, one that winds through the staggering variety of its last eight decades. You can start in Flushing at the Unisphere or in Brooklyn with a view of the Manhattan Bridge, hop the subway, pause for a snapshot, say hello to Bullwinkle or stop for a kiss. You may not make it back. Strictly speaking, Open Borders Books isn't an art account it's a bookstore. Founded in Jackson Heights, Queens, by a group of writers, artists and booksellers as a response to the pandemic, the project uses donation sourced, pay what you like books to raise money for local service organizations like the labor rights group Damayan and the Jackson Heights Community Fridge. They're also providing the neighborhood with a sorely needed bookstore and offering free local delivery. What this means on Instagram is a steady, nourishing supply of books all kinds of books pictured against red or blue gray watercolor paper. These days that means a lot. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
It was a difficult decision to leave the Smithsonian, he said, but the association "is an organization that looks those issues squarely in the face." His last day will be June 15, 2019; he said he would use the next six months to help with the transition to a new leader. Dr. Skorton, who previously served on the board of the association of medical colleges, succeeded G. Wayne Clough, another former university president, who led the Smithsonian for seven years. During Dr. Skorton's four year tenure, he oversaw important milestones, including the opening of the new National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall which opened in 2016, and the completion of a 1.88 billion capital campaign. He also was in charge of the Smithsonian's strategic plan, which includes ambitions to reach a greater audience. He said he was proud of the Smithsonian's collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, a project that will give the Smithsonian its first permanent gallery abroad. He said he had also made progress on diversity, including initiating the women's history initiative, "Because of Her Story," to tell a more complete account of women's achievements in the United States. He said he calculated that, during his term, 70 percent of new hires at director level had been women or people of color, including the first female director of the National Air and Space Museum and the first woman to be named director of the Museum of American History, an appointment announced this month. David Rubenstein, chairman of the Smithsonian's Board of Regents, said that the news that Dr. Skorton would be departing had been unexpected but that the board understood his passion for health care. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Credit...Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times Would it surprise you to learn that more than 30 years ago, before he'd even sauntered across the screen in "Dazed and Confused," Matthew McConaughey wrote a poem in which he vowed he'd someday become an author? As one of its lopsided verses declared: I think I'll write a book. A word about my life. I wonder who would give a damn About the pleasures and the strife? This was in 1989, when he didn't know all the twists and turns that awaited him the acting awards he'd win, the wife and children he'd have, the bracing dramas and banal rom coms he'd make. But he was certain he would live a life worth chronicling. Now that poem, rendered in its creator's arcane handwriting, appears at the start of his autobiography, "Greenlights," which Crown will publish on Tuesday. The book offers a shotgun seat to all the l i v i n that McConaughey has accumulated, from his upbringing in a tumultuous Texas family to his ascent as the ruggedly serene star of "Magic Mike," "True Detective" and "Dallas Buyers Club." "If it's a straight memoir" he stressed the second syllable with an unexpected French flair "as a publisher you could sell some books." What he hoped to produce, he said, was one where "the words on the page are still worthy to share if they were signed by anonymous, but at the same time be a book that only McConaughey could've wrote." Like the bestubbled dude you have seen whooping it up at WWE matches and sermonizing in luxury car commercials, McConaughey is alternately uninhibited and self serious. He is comfortable referring to himself in the third person and dismisses any suggestion that he has stumbled backward into his professional success. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. As he told me, he knows there are people who think, "Gosh dang, McConaughey just eases right into everything the guy doesn't seem to have any bumps, doesn't get hit crossing the road." He said he wrote "Greenlights" partly as a corrective to this perception, to show how much effort it has taken to get where he is. But McConaughey wants readers to look beyond the boldface name on its cover and focus on its fundamental message. No one can escape hardship, he said, but he can share the lessons "that helped me navigate the hard stuff like I say, 'get relative with the inevitable' sooner and in the best way possible for myself." Codifying his beliefs and putting them down on paper was one test. The next challenge comes as McConaughey releases "Greenlights" into a world that feels increasingly unsettled and dismissive of values systems one where, like millions of Americans, he and his family have spent the past several months spent "trying to outrun the ol' Covid," as he put it. "I'm still continuously testing and updating my philosophies, practically daily," he said. "And I can do better at a lot of them." It sounds brutal and, as McConaughey told me, "This is the reality, but there's humanity in that reality." Jim was tough on his sons, too, but, McConaughey, who is the youngest of three brothers, said, "I wouldn't give back one ass whupping I got for the values that are ingrained in me." When he reflects on his parents, McConaughey said, "The love was real. The passion was real." (A few days after McConaughey started filming "Dazed and Confused," Jim died of a heart attack while making love to Kay.) Kay McConaughey, now 88, said in an email that as she raised Matthew, she did not necessarily expect him to become an artist. "In fact, that subject was never brought up," she said. "I thought he was going to be a lawyer." Even so, she said that she often observed Matthew "jotting things down on small pieces of paper about what someone had said or what he thought about what was being said or a way he saw life." Having read "Greenlights" and seen how Matthew depicted her relationship with Jim, Kay McConaughey said, "It was a rocky and passionate love affair we had, but I do wish Matthew would have told more of the stories about me and his dad's love, affection and commitment to each other." Still, she said, she regarded her youngest son as a fundamentally forthright person. "What has remained consistent in Matthew's life is his honesty and being true to himself, knowing who he was and owning it." Matthew McConaughey recounts how he landed his breakthrough role as the likable sleaze Wooderson in "Dazed and Confused" by tracking down the film's casting director, Don Phillips, in an Austin bar and charming his way into an audition. A few years later, the not yet bankable actor mounted a successful campaign to persuade the director Joel Schumacher to cast him in a leading role in his adaptation of "A Time to Kill." To McConaughey, stories like these illustrate how he is not content to merely let life happen to him. "It's always been obvious to me that I do not have a laissez faire attitude," he said. "It's a state of being that I work at, continuously, daily, and I break a sweat to get it." Longtime colleagues say it's even more than that: Despite the agreeably disheveled image that McConaughey projects, they see him as someone who is perpetually preparing himself for opportunities and actively steering himself toward them. As his friend Richard Linklater, who directed him in several films including "Dazed and Confused," explained to me, "People underestimate the utter intentionality of what Matthew's done. He's really good at going from A to B to C. He's got a plan and he's just brave enough and brazen enough to execute it." The point of the "Dazed and Confused" audition story isn't that McConaughey simply happened to be in the right place at the right time, Linklater said: "He wasn't discovered in a bar he went over to the guy who he heard was casting it. Matthew's always playing the long game." In "Greenlights," McConaughey tells the back stories of some of his best known roles, but he does not take a film by film inventory of his entire career. Nor does he share any particularly salacious details from his personal life when he was still a single man, beyond a paragraph in which he writes: "I wore the leathers. I rode the Thunderbird. I took a lot of showers in the daylight hours, rarely alone. I partook." McConaughey told me that while such scenes are generally staples of celebrity tell alls, he felt that to include them "would be in bad taste and bad manners that's why bedrooms have doors on 'em." However, he does unhesitatingly share two different stories in which he awakens from wet dreams you read that right where he saw himself "floating downstream on my back in the Amazon River" while surrounded by jungle life and "African tribesmen lined up shoulder to shoulder on the ridge to the left of me." He interpreted these visions as subconscious exhortations to travel to Peru, where he immersed himself in the Amazon, and to Mali, where he sparred with a local wrestling champion. Sections like these shed light on the transcendental side of the author, who is a practicing Methodist but also describes himself as "an optimistic mystic," forever fine tuning his personal dials in search of further broadcasts from the universe. That approach to existence has sent McConaughey hunting for what he calls "greenlights" the traffic signals that mean go, which he prefers to spell as a single word and which he believes take skill and acumen to identify. To conclude that life is all about luck, he said, is to surrender to fatalism: "Quit letting yourself off the hook, McConaughey. If that's true, then run every red light. You've got your hands on the wheel. You're making choices. They matter." McConaughey said he has no interest in being anyone's spiritual guru and did not approach "Greenlights" as a work of self help. Friends say that yes, this is really how he talks and that his book is one more way that he is trying to express himself. "It's his way of wanting to be heard on another level," Linklater said. "It's another level of communication that you can't get in a role." Linklater explained that actors like McConaughey are vulnerable in their work: "They don't have total control," he said. "Even the most powerful actors Denzel Washington, Daniel Day Lewis are still at the mercy of the parts they're being offered. Actors need these other outlets." Sometimes McConaughey dispenses wisdom in miniature pearls, like the beloved bumper stickers he has reproduced throughout the book that sport pithy phrases like "Educate before you indict," "I am good at what I love, I don't love all that I'm good at" and "If you're high enough, the sun's always shining." And sometimes he expounds at greater length, like when I asked him how he appears to stay out of America's toxic culture wars and cultivates liberal and conservative fans alike. "I'm trying to keep in with it and not out of it," McConaughey replied. "For those people who say there's nothing but yellow lines and dead armadillos in the middle of the highway, I say to you this: the armadillos are just fine. Because the right and the left are so far out, they're not even on the asphalt anymore. They're in the frickin' desert." McConaughey said that he had already prepared for the writing process by reviewing the diaries and journals he has kept since he was a teenager. He said he did not work with a co author on "Greenlights" but got some needed motivation from his wife, Camila Alves McConaughey. "All of a sudden, my wife was like, 'Get in the truck, load up your food, water and tequila, and don't come back until you've got something,'" he recalled. "So, bam, I called a friend with a cabin and hit the desert." Since then, though, McConaughey, his wife and their three children have been living a sequestered life during what the actor calls "Covid times." McConaughey said he is a cooperative mask wearer and social distancer, but he could not help worrying about reopened schools and sports events leading to a rise of infections. "We may see this completely backfire," he said. It is both a propitious and a terrible time to be plugging a book about how the experiences of a Hollywood movie star can improve your life. And while McConaughey has reorganized himself for several weeks' worth of virtual promotion, his greater concerns are maintaining his family's welfare and keeping his own head on straight. In some moments he tried to alleviate his existential dread with humor. "Everyone's in a bit of a pickle, and it's not a little gherkin," he said. "It's one of those big two pounders you get at a roadside truck stop." Then he would abruptly describe the situation in starker terms: "We're going back to our most barbaric selves," he said. But to use an adage that McConaughey might endorse he tried to light a candle in the darkness and find some optimism at an otherwise dire time. "Could this actually be a banner year, where things got started?" he asked. "Where we got cleansed? A little evolution would be nice." Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
After 19 years at the Piers, the Armory Show will move to the Javits Center in 2021. The high profile art fair, which opened its 2020 edition earlier this week, has also been rescheduled for the fall, with the start of the galleries' art season. The next show will take place Sept. 9 through Sept. 12, 2021. The relocation comes in the wake of ongoing problems at the piers, where the Armory Show attracts up to 65,000 visitors each year, according to organizers. At the 2019 edition, city inspectors deemed one of the fair's piers structurally unsound just over a week before the fair's opening. Works had to be moved from the damaged location, Pier 92, leaving the Armory with two disconnected spaces (Piers 90 and 94) for its 2019 and 2020 editions. "Having piers that aren't next to each other has been challenging," Nicole Berry, executive director of the Armory Show, said in a telephone interview. "The Javits Center offers a better long term solution, to have everybody in one place." In its new location, the art fair will be much closer to public transportation as well as other cultural attractions aimed at the Armory's audience, like the new Hudson Yards development, the High Line and the Shed. The Javits Center also offers easy access to the many galleries in Chelsea, which open new season shows in September. Ms. Berry said: "It's an incredibly convenient location and that whole area is really taking off. It was kind of a no brainer." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Ever since its premiere, on March 31, 2017, the Netflix series "13 Reasons Why," about a teenage girl's suicide, has alarmed many health experts, who believe it glamorizes the topic for some young people. The show also has impressed critics, along with viewers young and old, who see it as an honest portrayal of adolescent distress. Now, a new study finds that suicide rates spiked in the month after the release of the series among boys aged 10 to 17. That month, April 2017, had the highest overall suicide rate for this age group in the past five years, the study found; the rate subsequently dropped back into line with recent trends, but remained elevated for the year. Suicide rates for girls aged 10 to 17 the demographic expected to identify most strongly with the show's protagonist did not increase significantly. The study, posted Monday by the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, is likely to fuel further debate about the merits of "13 Reasons Why," the third season of which is in production. "Suicide is a problem worldwide, and it's so hard to knock these rates down," said Lisa M. Horowitz, a staff scientist in the National Institute of Mental Health's Intramural Research Program, and an author of the paper. "The last thing we need is something that increases them." In a statement, a Netflix spokesperson said: "We've just seen this study and are looking into the research, which conflicts with last week's study from the University of Pennsylvania," which focused on young adults. "This is a critically important topic and we have worked hard to ensure that we handle this sensitive issue responsibly." If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1 800 273 8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. Here's what you can do when a loved one is severely depressed. The new study was correlational, meaning that the authors could not determine whether watching the show actually influenced the suicide of any viewer. But, unlike many previous claims of spikes in suicide rates, the researchers took into account seasonal differences in suicide rates, and recent trends. "They nicely controlled for this by looking across years and showing a discontinuity for this particular year only," said Matthew K. Nock, a psychologist at Harvard. In the analysis, a team led by Jeffrey A. Bridge, of the R esearch Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, analyzed suicide data from the Center for Disease Control between January 2013 and December 2017. After correcting for trends and seasonal effects, the team found that rates did not exceed expected levels in 2017 for people over age 18. But among those aged 10 to 17, the rate jumped nearly 30 percent in April 2017, and remained higher for the year. The study estimated that 195 more suicides occurred in 2017 in this age group than would be expected given current trends. Tips for Parents to Help Their Struggling Teens Are you concerned for your teen? If you worry that your teen might be experiencing depression or suicidal thoughts, there are a few things you can do to help. Dr. Christine Moutier, the chief medical officer of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, suggests these steps: Look for changes. Notice shifts in sleeping and eating habits in your teen, as well as any issues he or she might be having at school, such as slipping grades. Watch for angry outbursts, mood swings and a loss of interest in activities they used to love. Stay attuned to their social media posts as well. Keep the lines of communication open. If you notice something unusual, start a conversation. But your child might not want to talk. In that case, offer him or her help in finding a trusted person to share their struggles with instead. Seek out professional support. A child who expresses suicidal thoughts may benefit from a mental health evaluation and treatment. You can start by speaking with your child's pediatrician or a mental health professional. In an emergency: If you have immediate concern for your child's safety, do not leave him or her alone. Call a suicide prevention lifeline. Lock up any potentially lethal objects. Children who are actively trying to harm themselves should be taken to the closest emergency room. Resources If you're worried about someone in your life and don't know how to help, these resources can offer guidance:1. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1 800 273 8255 (TALK) 2. The Crisis Text Line: Text TALK to 741741 3. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention "This is the first report I've seen like this, and of course it was our greatest fear that this might be a possibility" with the show, said Dr. Victor Schwartz, chief medical officer at the JED Foundation, a teen suicide prevention group. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Dr. Schwartz also said that Netflix had consulted with the JED Foundation along the way, and that the second season had incorporated several of his group's recommendations. In a surprise, boys accounted for almost all of the increase in 2017. The research team had anticipated that girls, identifying with the star of the show, would be more vulnerable. Dr. Horowitz said that looking at suicide attempt data, which the researchers did not have, might have told another story. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
For the last year, speculation around Marc Jacobs and his brand has been at a fever pitch. The onetime crown prince of New York Fashion Week, creator of the most anticipated, most controversial show of each season, the one guaranteed to electrify the city and shore up its creative cred, beloved child of downtown, channeler of the moment, seemed to be teetering on a precipice. In 2013, when Mr. Jacobs, then also artistic director of Louis Vuitton, left the French brand to focus on his own house and Bernard Arnault, the LVMH chairman, spoke of an initial public offering, the one that would take Marc Jacobs the company out of the realm of niche and into the world of mega he was still a hometown hero. But the I.P.O. never materialized, rumors began to fester about problems in the business, and his retail kingdom on Bleecker Street shrank, and shrank again. A year ago at this time, he came under fire for cultural appropriation on the runway (remember the dreadlocks controversy?), and earlier this year Sebastian Suhl, his chief executive, left. Mr. Jacobs seemed, increasingly, peripheral to the conversation. All of which is to say that his show, which was also the last of New York Fashion Week, was a lot more than just a show. It was a litmus test: of his continued relevance, which is deeply intertwined with New York's relevance, and of his intentions. So what color did the strip turn? Every color of the rainbow. In a silent show held in the cavernous environs of the Park Avenue Armory, with the audience arrayed at the far edges of the space, the empty wood floor so vast that the people sitting across the way looked like little ants on their folding chairs, out came a stream of ideas and images, churned up and recombined, vivid and oversize. It was not a breakthrough; many of the pieces referred to collections Mr. Jacobs had done before, which he acknowledged in his program notes, writing that the show was "the reimagining of seasons past somewhere beyond the urban landscape of New York City." But it was a convincing staking of territory, a pointed reminder of exactly why this designer matters. There were giant pantsuits in primary shades or 1960s tablecloth prints with exaggerated buttons; darling are you here? sequined hostess gowns situated somewhere on the continuum between Gloria Swanson and "Grey Gardens"; and overblown cartoon floral parkas with matching clown pants, bags and shoes. There were coats bristling collars and cuffs of sparkling luau fringe and ruffled cellophane boleros. There were tiny psychedelic print silk minis worn with black tights and synthetic satin harem sweats paired with beaded macrame shells over bandeaus. Everything was accessorized with a head scarf (a nod to Kate Moss's 2009 Met Ball turban, designed by Mr. Jacobs), elbow length gloves, a big duffel or flight bag and sometimes also a fanny pack, jeweled Birkenstocks or sport slides, and a light wash of irony. The size of the room reinforced the implication of a journey his, ours, creative, literal, whatever as did the single file trek of the models, lending the whole thing an underlying resonance that plugged it into current events. And giving form to the question facing Mr. Jacobs as well as everyone else: Where do we go from here? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
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