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The Hayward designer Marin Hopper will be at Bergdorf Goodman from 3 to 4:30 p.m. to present her luxe handbag designs, including a Venetian brocade shopper ( 1,800) that takes inspiration from Golden Age Hollywood. And from 5:30 to 8 p.m., the Italian outerwear label Peuterey will host a shopping event at Bloomingdale's on 59th Street. The stylist Mary Alice Stephenson will be on hand if you're torn between, say, a taffeta parka ( 1,250) and a puffer jacket with a fox fur collar ( 1,195). On Wednesday, Warby Parker will open in Grand Central. Metro North commuters will find smart updates on classics like round lens glasses in intensely hued acetate ( 145). At 25 Grand Central Terminal. The model Josephine Skriver has teamed up with the eyewear label Illesteva to make her favorite style, the Palm Beach, a rounded cat eye in an exclusive creamy marble color ( 240). The proceeds will support Keep a Child Alive, which provides treatment and care to children with AIDS in Africa and India. At 814 Lexington Avenue. The ready to wear label Sachin Babi has teamed up with W Hotels on a capsule collection in celebration of the opening of W Goa. It includes an off the shoulder ruffle tunic with pompom tassels resembling the marigold flowers ubiquitous at weddings in the region ( 660). At whotelsthestore.com. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The Pepsi Challenge Is Returning, but This Time for the Social Media Generation The Pepsi Challenge is back, with a twist. Forget the blind taste tests that pitted Pepsi against Coke, a hallmark of the classic, wildly successful advertising campaign that made its debut 40 years ago. This time, Pepsi has signed a crowd of celebrities, including Usher, Serena Williams and Usain Bolt, to recruit consumers to participate in a series of challenges meant for the social media generation. The yearlong promotion begins on Wednesday. "We've taken the DNA of the Pepsi challenge, then reinterpreted it for a new generation," said Brad Jakeman, president of PepsiCo's global beverages group. "Now more than ever, we are in a world where the consumer expects to hear from the brands they love in whole different ways." Every month, Pepsi "ambassadors" will use social media to issue a new challenge many of which blend social responsibility with popular culture that encourages consumers to "do something different." Later this month, for instance, the fashion designer Nicola Formichetti will present the first challenge from Hong Kong to bring light to poor communities across the globe using plastic Pepsi bottles filled with water and bleach to refract sunlight. All the challenges will focus on social media in some way, and they could involve technology, music or sports. Over the summer, the singer Usher will participate in a video that involves footage from space. (No, PepsiCo executives said, they are not sending Usher into orbit.) Pepsi has declined to reveal exact details of the challenges. Reviving the Pepsi Challenge represents an effort by the brand to stand out by exploiting the mass recognition of a previously successful idea. Other marketers and media companies also have deployed a similar strategy, bringing back characters and ideas with built in recognition. Pepsi's archrival, Coca Cola, for instance, recently announced a new yearlong campaign to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of its iconic bottle. And there are, of course, the movie franchise sequels that now dominate the box office. Yet the approach comes with a risk: that the remake of a retro idea doesn't live up to the hype of the past. "You don't want to milk the equity," Mr. Jakeman said. "You actually want to add to it." Mr. Jakeman added that it was easier to stand out with big, bold advertising campaigns years ago, before the age of commercial skipping and the proliferation of social media. "All you had to do was make a television commercial," he said. "It is not about one big epic television commercial anymore. It is about this continuing dialogue." The new advertisements come as Pepsi is aiming to expand its global presence, particularly in emerging markets. A major part of the new Pepsi Challenge involves bringing a local perspective to the global campaign and creating individual and distinct campaigns region by region. Elizabeth Holmes Hones Her Defense in Day 2 of Testimony Kevin Spacey was ordered to pay 31 million to the 'House of Cards' studio after sexual harassment allegations. The plan, which represents a broader push across the marketing industry, is a recognition of the global nature of the Internet but it also takes regional cultural differences into consideration. Pepsi, for example, will challenge consumers in India to create their own Pepsi ads that could be shown during this year's Indian Premier League cricket games, which are sponsored, as it so happens, by Pepsi. There are also plans for a music challenge in Latin America and a food related challenge in Thailand. "The context in which consumers live really mandated for us as a brand to be as locally relevant as possible," said Carla Hassan, PepsiCo's chief marketing officer for the Middle East and Africa region. "There are cultural differences and also behavioral differences. We want to make sure we're being respectful to the cultural norms." One challenge Pepsi plans to introduce in several countries in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Lebanon, will ask consumers to record the sounds around them the shouts of fruit vendors or clangs of construction, for instance and upload them to the Pepsi Challenge website or through a mobile app developed specifically for the region. A celebrity producer will use them to create a compilation of various sounds. "At the end of the day, people connect with things that are really personal to them," Ms. Hassan said. Like a wave of other brands today, Pepsi is also using the ad campaign to appeal to the millennial generation's sense of responsibility to give back. Every time consumers use the hashtag PepsiChallenge on their social media profiles, Pepsi will donate 1 to the Liter of Light organization, which has provided sustainable lighting to more than 18 countries, including Kenya and Colombia. Millennials have embraced these types of click driven, purpose driven campaigns the Ice Bucket Challenge, for example, exploded on the Internet last summer but it's not clear whether people will be as eager to support a corporate challenge. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Simon Schuster, one of the country's major publishing houses, named Jonathan Karp its new chief executive on Thursday, succeeding Carolyn Reidy, who died earlier this month. Mr. Karp, previously the president and publisher of Simon Schuster's adult publishing division, will be charged with leading the company through a challenging period, as it remains up for sale during a pandemic. Some of the books it has coming out this year are "The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir" by John Bolton, a memoir by Alex Trebek called "The Answer Is ...," and "The Art of Her Deal: The Untold Story of Melania Trump" by the Washington Post reporter Mary Jordan. A longtime editor who has been with Simon Schuster for 10 years and was considered a natural successor to Ms. Reidy, Mr. Karp oversaw the publication of "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson, "Born to Run" by Bruce Springsteen and "Frederick Douglass" by David Blight, which won a Pulitzer Prize in History. "We've been through a lot together over the past four months," Mr. Karp said in an email to the Simon Schuster staff on Thursday. "Our mission remains the same: to publish the most satisfying books we can find, with passion and purpose and profitability. What has changed are the times into which we will be discovering and publishing these books. As we search for meaning in the chaos and joy amid the sadness, the books we champion will serve as a beacon and a balm." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Elephants are afraid of bees. Let that sink in for a second. The largest animal on land is so terrified of a tiny insect that it will flap its ears, stir up dust and make noises when it hears the buzz of a beehive. Of course a bee's stinger can't penetrate the thick hide of an elephant. But when bees swarm and African bees swarm aggressively hundreds of bees might sting an elephant in its most sensitive areas, the trunk, mouth and eyes. And they hurt. The threat of bees is so intensely felt by elephants that conservationists are using it to help prevent the kinds of conflict that put the behemoths at risk. The endangered animals have sometimes been shot by farmers trying to save their crops from elephants foraging at night for late night snacks, or by poachers allowed access to help guard the fields. In a new study published this week, the same team, led by Lucy King, an Oxford University research associate, found that Asian elephants are also afraid of bees, though perhaps less so. It's the first step toward showing that the control strategy can also work in countries like Sri Lanka, India, Nepal and Thailand, where Asian elephants are 10 times more endangered than their African cousins. READ: Hunt Elephants to Save Them? Some Countries See No Other Choice The Asian elephants behaved a little differently: They didn't shake their heads or shower themselves with dust, but they did make noises, shying away from the bees and touching one another's trunks or putting a trunk into another's mouth, perhaps as a sign of reassurance or comfort. The Asian elephants also sometimes slapped their trunks against the ground in fear. It's not clear whether Asian elephants react differently to bees because the bees in Asia are less aggressive. Or maybe the elephants simply have different behavioral responses, the way people from one culture might laugh if they're nervous and those from another might fidget or talk fast, said John Poulsen, a tropical ecologist and assistant professor at Duke University, who has helped conduct similar elephant bee research. In Africa, Save the Elephants, a nonprofit conservationist group, builds wire and beehive fences at a cost of about 1,000 for a one acre farm roughly one fifth the cost of an electrified fence, said Dr. King, who also heads the human elephant coexistence program for the charity. The farm gets protection against elephants and a modest new source of income from a twice a year honey harvest. The beehives have to be strung on a wire sturdy enough to hold them up, but not so sturdy that the hives can't sway in the breeze. Dr. King learned early on that a swinging hive causes the bees to flee, becoming more active and scaring the elephants. Elephants are so smart that if they don't have the "negative conditioning" of a few stings for instance, if researchers just play a recording of buzzing bees they quickly learn that the threat isn't real, Dr. King said. The fences also serve as a psychological barrier for the farmers, making them think twice before slashing and burning more forest for farmland, she said. READ: Elephants: Large, Long Living and Less Prone to Cancer So far, the beehive fences are being used or tested in 11 countries in Africa and four in Asia, and the farmers seem to appreciate the approach, with more than 200 volunteering to participate in the last year. "When I first started, I had to really persuade people to try it," Dr. King said in a Skype call from Kenya. "They thought I was absolutely insane. Then they thought, well, she's giving us free beehives, so whatever. Now people are queuing up to do it." Dr. King acknowledged that a fear of bees won't be enough to keep the elephants away. When the fields are filled with bounty, for instance, farmers may need to scare off elephants by taking advantage of their other fears, like the sound of barking dogs or shots fired into the air. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
In a study not yet published in a journal, scientists have reported that the new coronavirus was present in wastewater in Barcelona, Spain in March 2019, a finding that, if confirmed, would show that the pathogen had emerged much earlier than previously thought. But independent experts who reviewed the findings said they doubted the claim. The study was flawed, they said, and other lines of evidence strongly suggest the virus emerged in China late last year. Up until now, the earliest evidence of the virus anywhere in the world has been from December 2019 in China and it was only known to have hit mainland Spain in February 2020. "Barcelona is a city that is frequented by Chinese people, in tourism and business, so probably this happened also elsewhere, and probably at the same time," said the lead author, Albert Bosch, a professor in the Department of Microbiology of the University of Barcelona who has been studying viruses in wastewater for more than 40 years. Several experts not involved in the research pointed out problems with the new study, which has not yet been subjected to the critical review by outside experts that occurs before publication in a scientific journal. They suggested that the tests might very well have produced false positives because of contamination or improper storage of the samples. "I don't trust the results," said Irene Xagoraraki, an environmental engineer at Michigan State University. Researchers at the University of Barcelona posted their findings online on June 13. Most of their report described research on wastewater treatments from early 2020. The surprising finding about March 2019 was only mentioned briefly at the end of the report. The research gained more attention when the university issued a news release on Friday. For months, scientists have been struggling to assemble clues about the origin of the new coronavirus. The earliest official reports came from the city of Wuhan in China in December 2019. Researchers have studied the mutations that have arisen in coronavirus samples collected from across the world since then and have estimated on the basis of their findings that the samples shared a common ancestor that dated to late 2019. More evidence for the origin of the novel coronavirus has come from other viruses that scientists have found in animals. The closest relatives to the coronavirus infect bats in China. Because the virus can be shed in feces, researchers have begun examining wastewater to detect the pathogen's genes. In Europe, Australia and the United States, researchers discovered rising levels of the virus's genes in wastewater days before confirmed cases began to arise. These discoveries have led a number of researchers to examine frozen wastewater samples from earlier periods, seeking evidence of the virus's presence before anyone knew to look for it. Last week, Italian researchers reported finding the virus in Milan and Turin on December 18, two months before northern Italy was besieged by Covid 19 cases. Separately, in Spain, Dr. Bosch and his colleagues began taking weekly samples of wastewater from two of Barcelona's treatment plants in April. They found the virus in these samples, prompting them to look back at earlier samples. The researchers found the virus in a number of samples from early 2020, in the months before the pandemic struck Spain. Dr. Bosch and his colleagues then went back even further, examining nine samples taken every few weeks or months between January 2018 and December 2019. In a single sample, taken March 12, 2019, they got a positive result from their tests for the virus. Dr. Bosch found it plausible that the virus could appear in March but not show up in more recent samples. "Respiratory viruses usually have peaks around this time of the year," Dr. Bosch said. "Probably the virus then disappeared." But Dr. Xagoraraki noted that the researchers used tests that search for bits of three different genes. The only tests that came back positive were for a gene called RdRp. One of the other tests, for a gene called N, is known to be more sensitive. "It should have shown a signal as well," Dr. Xagoraraki said. It was possible that the positive results were the result of contamination from other samples that did have the virus, Dr. Xagoraraki said. She also doubted whether the delicate coronavirus could have survived for over a year without the sample having been put in a deep freeze. "If the samples were not stored in 80 degrees, you can't trust the results," she said. Gertjan Medema of the KWR Water Research Institute in the Netherlands said that the study came from a "knowledgeable research team," and so should be taken seriously. But, he added, "they need to confirm this finding in multiple ways." Dr. Bosch said that his team would not be able to repeat the experiments in the positive sample from March 2019 because it was depleted during the first test. "We proved it from this sample but we cannot repeat it," he said. But contamination was unlikely, he said. "The way we work, when there is contamination, we notice it." Another way to confirm the finding would be to search through stored samples of blood from patients in Barcelona hospitals in March 2019. If the virus were circulating, even briefly, in Spain, some people would most likely have been hospitalized complaining of flulike symptoms. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
A description of "Becks," about a lesbian musician who returns to the more conservative environment in which she grew up, makes it sound like an earnest, shopworn indie drama. But the movie exemplifies how small judgments in pace, performance and soundtrack can transcend modest trappings. Much of the credit is due to the film's charismatic, tone perfect lead, Lena Hall, who won a Tony in 2014 for "Hedwig and the Angry Inch." She plays Becks, a Brooklyn guitarist and singer who follows her girlfriend (Hayley Kiyoko) to Los Angeles only to catch her with another woman. Becks goes to live with her mother, Ann (Christine Lahti), a former nun, in the St. Louis area. Ann is still working on embracing her daughter's sexual orientation, and it's a measure of the movie's nuance that they never quite reach an accord. Unsure of what's next, Becks performs in a bar run by a friend (Dan Fogler) and offers guitar lessons though her only pupil is Elyse (Mena Suvari), the wife of a man Becks knew in high school as a bully. That Becks and Elyse will become more than friends is a predictable development, but the movie makes it persuasive by taking its time. Perhaps recognizing their biggest asset, the directors, Elizabeth Rohrbaugh and Daniel Powell, allow Ms. Hall's numbers to play out at length. (The songs are by Alyssa Robbins, the movie's real life inspiration, and Steve Salett.) If the screenplay perhaps backs itself into a corner, its irresolution feels true to life. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
"Bust of a Boy With a Turban"; left, by Gerrit Dou, and "King Caspar" by Hendrik Heerschop at the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam. AMSTERDAM Rembrandt's 1661 painting, "Two African Men," is one of the Dutch old master's more inscrutable works. One man, dressed in a Roman style costume and shawl, seems to be giving a speech, while another man leans attentively over his shoulder. The canvas was painted with a thin layers of earth tones and looks unfinished, but it bears the artist's signature. Why did Rembrandt paint it, and who were his subjects? These were some of the questions that came to mind for Stephanie Archangel in 2015 as she found herself lingering in front of the work at the Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery in The Hague. A sociologist by training, she had been searching in paintings "for black people in which I could recognize myself," said Ms. Archangel, who was born and raised on Curacao, an island that was once a Dutch colony. Described by the Mauritshuis's website as likely showing "free men who lived in Amsterdam," Rembrandt's portraits seemed "human and worthy," Ms. Archangel said. "It was the first time I saw black people in the 17th century painted by a Dutch master looking proudly back at me," said Ms. Archangel, who is now a junior curator at the Rijksmuseum. "I was wondering if that was true or not, or if it was my imagination, or just my hope to see that kind of proud representation." This was the genesis of the exhibition at the Rembrandt House, "HERE: Black in Rembrandt's Time," the product of a four year process of research and investigation by Ms. Archangel, Mr. Kolfin and their colleagues at the museum. Note: The Rembrandt House Museum is closed as part of the response to the coronavirus pandemic. The show includes 56 paintings, prints and art objects from the Dutch Golden Age, including seven by Rembrandt. ("Two African Men," the inspiration for the exhibition, isn't one of them, though; as a condition of its donation, it is never allowed to leave the Mauritshuis.) In addition, the exhibition includes 15 contemporary artworks linked to the subject matter. "HERE: Black in Rembrandt's Time," is part of a cultural paradigm shift in the Netherlands, where the Dutch Golden Age has long been associated almost exclusively with the achievements and the portraits of the 17th century white, mostly male elite. This so called decolonization of museums has not been embraced by everyone, but for some people who have not seen their histories reflected in museum displays, it seems like a move in the right direction. Ms. Archangel said that the focus of the show is on images that present "the many different roles that black people played in society, and the many different roles they played in paintings for artists." The exhibition, she added, "portrays more than what we knew before, which were mostly images of servants and enslaved people." In the 17th century, the Netherlands was deeply involved in the international slave trade, but slavery was prohibited on Dutch soil. People of African descent who lived in the Netherlands at that time came as servants brought over by immigrant families, said Mark Ponte, an historian with the Amsterdam City Archives, and the lead researcher for the Rembrandt House exhibition. Mr. Ponte specializes in early modern migration and the history of the trans Atlantic slave trade: Using marriage, birth and death records, he was able to reconstruct a network of about 100 black people who lived in Amsterdam during Rembrandt's time. The women he identified were mostly servants in the homes of Sephardic Jewish families who had emigrated to the Netherlands from Portugal, and most of the men were Brazilian sailors who worked in the shipping trade. Mapping their addresses in the city center, Mr. Ponte discovered that many lived in what is now called the Jewish Cultural Quarter, where Rembrandt once had a studio; some of them may have served as his models. Mr. Ponte and the curators said they wanted to connect the black residents of Rembrandt's neighborhood to the images the artist created. In total, Rembrandt created at least 26 images of black subjects, by Mr. Kolfin's count (12 paintings, eight etchings and six drawings), and most of these were probably based on his neighbors, whether they posed for him, or he observed them on the street. "Dutch artists like to paint what's in front of them," said Mr. Kolfin. From the 1620s to the 1660s, there was a marked increase in Africans in Amsterdam, he added, as evidenced by Mr. Ponte's research. "But it's been impossible to link the names to the faces, which is disappointing," Mr. Koflin added. Rembrandt was certainly not the only old master who painted black subjects. Thousands of images of the African diaspora in European art dating back to antiquity are listed in "The Image of the Black in Western Art," a series of 10 books, initiated in the 1960s and now released through Harvard University Press. Black people can be found "in quite a large number of 17th century images," Mr. Kolfin said. "However, always small, or positioned in the background or a corner, always subsidiary." When a painter featured a black figure as a central subject, he said, usually they would be cast in a biblical role, such as Caspar, one of the three Wise Men, or as a eunuch. Adrienne L. Childs, an independent scholar who co curated the exhibition "The Black Figure in the European Imaginary" at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum in 2017, said that the vast majority of those images are either stereotypical or exoticized portrayals. In cases of portraits, they were often used by the painter to signal the status of the white figures in the painting, since having slaves or servants was considered to be a sign of power and wealth. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
SAN FRANCISCO It has become common wisdom that too much time spent on smartphones and social media is responsible for a recent spike in anxiety, depression and other mental health problems, especially among teenagers. But a growing number of academic researchers have produced studies that suggest the common wisdom is wrong. The latest research, published on Friday by two psychology professors, combs through about 40 studies that have examined the link between social media use and both depression and anxiety among adolescents. That link, according to the professors, is small and inconsistent. "There doesn't seem to be an evidence base that would explain the level of panic and consternation around these issues," said Candice L. Odgers, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, and the lead author of the paper, which was published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. The debate over the harm we and especially our children are doing to ourselves by staring into phones is generally predicated on the assumption that the machines we carry in our pockets pose a significant risk to our mental health. Worries about smartphones have led Congress to pass legislation to examine the impact of heavy smartphone use and pushed investors to pressure big tech companies to change the way they approach young customers. The World Health Organization said last year that infants under a year old should not be exposed to electronic screens and that children between the ages of 2 and 4 should not have more than an hour of "sedentary screen time" each day. Even in Silicon Valley, technology executives have made a point of keeping the devices and the software they develop away from their own children. The researchers worry that the focus on keeping children away from screens is making it hard to have more productive conversations about topics like how to make phones more useful for low income people, who tend to use them more, or how to protect the privacy of teenagers who share their lives online. "Many of the people who are terrifying kids about screens, they have hit a vein of attention from society and they are going to ride that. But that is super bad for society," said Andrew Przybylski, the director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute, who has published several studies on the topic. The new article by Ms. Odgers and Michaeline R. Jensen of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro comes just a few weeks after the publication of an analysis by Amy Orben, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, and shortly before the planned publication of similar work from Jeff Hancock, the founder of the Stanford Social Media Lab. Both reached similar conclusions. "The current dominant discourse around phones and well being is a lot of hype and a lot of fear," Mr. Hancock said. "But if you compare the effects of your phone to eating properly or sleeping or smoking, it's not even close." Mr. Hancock's analysis of about 226 studies on the well being of phone users concluded that "when you look at all these different kinds of well being, the net effect size is essentially zero." The debate about screen time and mental health goes back to the early days of the iPhone. In 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics published a widely cited paper that warned doctors about "Facebook depression." But by 2016, as more research came out, the academy revised that statement, deleting any mention of Facebook depression and emphasizing the conflicting evidence and the potential positive benefits of using social media. Megan Moreno, one of the lead authors of the revised statement, said the original statement had been a problem "because it created panic without a strong basis of evidence." Dr. Moreno, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin, said that in her own medical practice, she tends to be struck by the number of children with mental health problems who are helped by social media because of the resources and connections it provides. Concern about the connection between smartphones and mental health has also been fed by high profile works like a 2017 article in The Atlantic and a related book by the psychologist Jean Twenge, who argued that a recent rise in suicide and depression among teenagers was linked to the arrival of smartphones. In her article, "Have Smartphones Ruined a Generation?," Ms. Twenge attributed the sudden rise in reports of anxiety, depression and suicide from teens after 2012 to the spread of smartphones and social media. Ms. Twenge's critics argue that her work found a correlation between the appearance of smartphones and a real rise in reports of mental health issues, but that it did not establish that phones were the cause. It could, researchers argue, just as easily be that the rise in depression led teenagers to excessive phone use at a time when there were many other potential explanations for depression and anxiety. What's more, anxiety and suicide rates appear not to have risen in large parts of Europe, where phones have also become more prevalent. "Why else might American kids be anxious other than telephones?" Mr. Hancock said. "How about climate change? How about income inequality? How about more student debt? There are so many big giant structural issues that have a huge impact on us but are invisible and that we aren't looking at." Ms. Twenge remains committed to her position, and she points to several more recent studies by other academics who have found a specific link between social media use and poor mental health. One paper found that when a group of college students gave up social media for three weeks, their sense of loneliness and depression declined. She also reminded her mother that their conversation was taking place during a video chat with Ms. Odgers's son the kind of intergenerational connection that was impossible before smartphones. Ms. Odgers acknowledged that she was reluctant to give her two children more time on their iPads. But she recently tried playing the video game Fortnite with her son and found it an unexpectedly positive experience. "It's hard work because it's not the environment we were raised in," she said. "It can be a little scary at times. I have those moments, too." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Twitter said Tuesday that it would add more context to topics that trend on its service, an effort to clean up a feature that has often been used to amplify hate and disinformation. The change comes as Twitter and other social media companies struggle to respond to disinformation surrounding the U.S. presidential election. But it stops short of a solution that some Twitter employees and external activists have proposed: eradicating Trending Topics altogether. Twitter offers trends as a way for users to identify which topics are most popular. The trends serve as an on ramp for new users who are learning how to find information on Twitter and to help all users navigate news topics. They can be curated according to personal interests or geographic location. But the system has often been gamed by bots and internet trolls to spread false, hateful or misleading information. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Makan Delrahim, the Trump administration's top antitrust regulator. "All enforcement decisions will be based on the facts and the law," he said recently. "Not on politics." WASHINGTON A year ago, Makan Delrahim predicted that AT T's 85.4 billion purchase of Time Warner would be approved by regulators. "I don't see this as a major antitrust problem," Mr. Delrahim, then a law professor, said to a Canadian television network. Now, five weeks into his job as the top antitrust regulator at the Justice Department, Mr. Delrahim has taken a different position. The department has threatened to block the deal in court unless AT T sells off major assets. Mr. Delrahim's position has thrown a surprising twist into a blockbuster deal, which has been watched for signs about how the Trump administration would handle giant mergers. On Wednesday, the dispute spilled into the public with conflicting versions about what the Justice Department wants. In one account, the agency offered two paths: Sell Turner Broadcasting, including CNN, or offload DirecTV, according to several people at the companies. In another, AT T offered to sell CNN, according to two officials at the agency. Randall L. Stephenson, AT T's chief executive, said on Wednesday that he had never offered to sell CNN. On Thursday, appearing at The New York Times's DealBook conference, he said the company was ready to go to court against the Justice Department. "To suggest that selling some of the key franchises of the business that are the most desired for your business plan makes no business sense," Mr. Stephenson said. The public spat has put a political cloud over the deal. President Trump has been critical of CNN and the deal. Several Democratic lawmakers have called for hearings to determine whether politics played a role in what is supposed to be an independent process. The Justice Department declined to comment on Thursday. Pushing AT T to unload a big part of its business to get the deal approved goes against Mr. Delrahim's history, antitrust experts say. His past comments have largely been in line with more free market oriented Republican views, and he was widely expected to be more lenient on mergers than predecessors in the Obama administration. "This is bold," said Diana Moss, president of the American Antitrust Institute, a nonprofit that generally favors stronger antitrust enforcement. "It signals they are willing to consider the anticompetitive effects of big deals, and on the remedy side they would use structural remedies, which would signal a potential change in policy." In an interview late last month, Mr. Delrahim strongly rejected the idea that the White House had tried to or could influence his thinking. At the time, he would not discuss AT T's bid for Time Warner or any other pending mergers. "All enforcement decisions will be based on the facts and the law. Not on politics," Mr. Delrahim said. "That would be antithetical to everything I've stood for." Mr. Delrahim, 48, was born in Tehran, but his family moved to Los Angeles when he was almost 10, around the time of the Islamic Revolution. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles, as an undergraduate and then went to law school at George Washington University. After a few years in corporate law, he spent time as an aide on Capitol Hill, working on some technology and antitrust issues. President George W. Bush later nominated him to be a top official at the Justice Department, where he focused on international antitrust enforcement. After his time there, he returned to corporate law in Los Angeles, representing numerous large technology, health and telecommunications companies. In his recent interview, he said that the Justice Department did not need to intervene just because a company was big, even a monopoly. He also said the government should not startle business markets with an abrupt change in its approach to antitrust legal theory. "There are people who think big is just bad," he said. "They don't understand why, but there is an instinctive reaction to big business these days." He added that it was dangerous to go after companies without clear evidence that they were harming competitors. That view is more aligned with left leaning consumer groups that have pushed for greater antitrust enforcement. After the news this week that the Justice Department was taking a deeper look at the deal, some Democrats, including Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, praised the tough stance. "AT T and Time Warner is an enormous test because we are just seeing online video disrupting the dominant cable broadband providers," said Gene Kimmelman, president of the nonprofit organization Public Knowledge and an antitrust official during the Obama administration. "And it would be a disaster for consumers and the competitive landscape if those developments are wiped out or diminished by the approval of this deal." For years, though, antitrust officials have generally approved mergers of companies that do not have competing businesses. These are known as vertical mergers, and because AT T is a telecommunications company, while Time Warner creates media content like movies, their deal would fit that category. Problems with those mergers have generally been resolved with settlements known as consent decrees, which restrict the new company's behavior or operations. Mr. Delrahim is skeptical of such consent decrees, especially demands for "behavioral remedies." The Obama administration approved Comcast's purchase of NBC Universal in 2011 with a stack of behavioral requirements, including a requirement that Comcast make NBC content available to competing cable and streaming services. During his interview last month, Mr. Delrahim said industries moved too fast for those remedies to be effective. "What's interesting is that you see the president getting criticized for commenting on certain mergers and you have senators who will write with comments on the same exact merger," Mr. Delrahim said. "I find that fascinating but maybe not new in Washington." And while he insisted that his decisions would be made independently, it was clear that Mr. Trump was not totally out of mind. When he arrived at the Justice Department in late September, Mr. Delrahim received a hat as a welcome gift. It reads: "Makan Antitrust Great Again." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
In a room full of stars, which one is the sun? That's a thing your Carpetbagger often wonders as he wanders through a dense thicket of celebrities at an award season party. At these soirees, almost everyone is famous, but there is always one person so additionally compelling think a Meryl or a Leo that the center of gravity shifts when they enter. The Hollywood parties this weekend, all held in advance of Sunday's Golden Globes, haven't lacked for big names like Bradley Cooper, Nicole Kidman and Viola Davis. Still, they were reduced to mere satellites whenever Billy Porter showed up, swanning through each crowd in a new wrap dress and cackling with evident pleasure. "I'm black, I'm turning 50, and I'm fierce!" Porter crowed to me Friday night. He was at W Magazine's party at the Chateau Marmont to celebrate his Golden Globe nomination for best actor for the FX drama "Pose," and though most of the men in our orbit wore tasteful suits, Porter was in a black dress with peekaboo cutouts and a wide brimmed Gucci hat that was half cowboy, half coven. "It reminds me a little of Diane Keaton," said Sarah Silverman, coming over to pay respects. Earlier in the day, Porter had turned heads at the American Film Institute luncheon, where he posed for pictures with the likes of Mahershala Ali while wearing a goldenrod gown. No other dress in the room received quite as many compliments. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The 62nd annual Grammy Awards were on Sunday. Here are highlights from the show: None Billie Eilish won five awards, including record, album and song of the year, capping a night that also saw multiple wins for Lizzo and Lil Nas X. None Our critics and writers weigh in on the best and worst moments. It was a big night for the Grammys' rookie class, Jon Caramanica writes. Hear the Popcast dissecting the show. None Lizzo and host Alicia Keys kicked off the show by addressing the death of the basketball star Kobe Bryant. None The ousted Grammys chief Deborah Dugan is at war with the Recording Academy. In a speech, Keys seemed to reference the turmoil. None Check out the red carpet looks. See the complete list of winners below: "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?," Billie Eilish | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
SAN FRANCISCO Facebook said Friday that it would drop a proposed reclassification of its stock that would have solidified Mark Zuckerberg's control over the social network, in a victory for shareholders in a class action lawsuit against the social giant. The reclassification was proposed last year as a way to preserve the voting power of Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive, at Facebook, even as he gave away the majority of his stock for charitable purposes. But the move incited a shareholder suit that would have put Mr. Zuckerberg in a Delaware courtroom next week to testify on the matter. By dropping the reclassification move, Facebook sidestepped Mr. Zuckerberg's appearance in court at a time when the company is facing criticism on several fronts. Facebook is turning over more than 3,000 Russia linked digital advertisements to Congress after questions over the company's role in the 2016 presidential election. The social network has also been scrutinized recently over ads that could have been used to target racists. "We're thrilled that Facebook has dropped the reclassification," said Stuart Grant, a partner at the law firm Grant Eisenhofer, who represented institutional Facebook investors in the lawsuit. "Today's move is a total victory for stockholders." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
By the middle of this summer, Kyle Krause still regarded the idea of owning an Italian soccer team as somewhere between an ambition and a pipe dream. It was the kind of thing, he said, that he would like to do "someday." Not quite six weeks later, it is a reality: Krause Group, the family business, has taken a controlling interest in the Serie A club Parma. It will take a 90 percent stake in the club, with its current majority owners a group of local industrialists retaining the rest. Krause joined the North American ownership club with what even he acknowledged was "astonishing speed" for any transaction, let alone one in which a family that made its fortune from the Kum Go chain of convenience stores in the American Midwest bought into the complex, emotionally fraught world of European soccer. The Krause Group, which had revenues of 2.8 billion last year, has been searching "earnestly" for opportunities to become involved in Serie A for some time, he said. He picked the brains of both Commisso and Saputo, both of whom made it clear their door "was always open" for advice and help. But it was only in early August that discussions started over the potential purchase of Parma, a former Serie A title contender that had ceased to exist, at least officially, after going bankrupt five years ago. "It has not been an easy five weeks," Krause said. "But from my standpoint, to some extent the club's previous financial complications meant that this was a cleaner, smoother transaction." Two decades ago, Parma was one of Italy's most glamorous teams. Backed by Calisto Tanzi and his Parmalat dairy empire, it acquired some of the world's best players and competed regularly for domestic and Continental titles. Its history this century is more checkered. After Parmalat's collapse in a financial scandal in 2003, the club listed between owners and flirted with bankruptcy. Twice it was sold for the nominal sum of one euro. In 2015, after yet another corruption scandal and with a mountain of debt, it was declared insolvent. Parma had to start again officially as a new entity in Italy's fourth division. Backed by Nuovo Inizio, a group comprising several high profile local investors, it won an astounding three consecutive promotions and returned to Serie A in 2018. To Krause, that group of owners are "heroes" for "saving the team for the city," but he said it was now time for "logical change," and for the club to pass into the hands of a group that has the financial firepower to take Parma "back to where it deserves to be." That is not likely to be an overnight transformation. Though Krause has plenty of experience in soccer his family has owned the Des Moines Menace of the United Soccer League, a lower tier of the American soccer pyramid, for more than two decades he does not pretend to be an expert in the intricacies of Serie A. He will take advice from his minority partners on how to best plot Parma's future, though he said it will more likely focus on young players than the sorts of headline grabbing signings the club made in the 1990s. "All of our investments, what we do as a family, is look for long term, generational, continued success," he said. "We are not here for the quick dollar." Krause's desire to buy in to Serie A at a time when the coronavirus pandemic threatens to undermine the revenue streams that keep European soccer afloat, with some estimates suggesting the continent's clubs might lose as much as 4.5 billion this year is, in part, romantic. His family has Italian ancestry, and the company already has investments in wineries and resorts in Italy. But it is also, he said, rooted in economic sense. He cited the "collective investment" of the league's owners in new infrastructure, and ongoing talks with a number of private equity firms to take a stake in the league's marketing and broadcasting business, as proof that Serie A is growing and could yet regain the status it had before the rise of the Premier League. "There are plenty of opportunities," Krause said. "It used to be the No. 1 league in the world. There is no reason it cannot get back to that, or close to it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
"There's a powerful group of people out there that are secretly running the world. I'm talking about the guys no one knows about. The guys that are invisible. The top 1 percent of the top 1 percent. The guys that play God without permission." In the very first episode of "Mr. Robot," the brilliant hacker Elliot Alderson described his quarry in memorable terms. Only now, in the series's final season, does it appear he's truly on their trail and in their cross hairs. In the latest installment of Sam Esmail's techno thriller, Elliot and his alternate personality Mr. Robot (modeled after his father; that's important, as we'll soon see) hold a meeting in their secret base with one of those guys: Phillip Price. The figurehead chief executive of the giant conglomerate E Corp, Price has just saved Elliot's life after Elliot fell into a trap set by the nefarious hacker terrorist collective the Dark Army. Now he's ready to tell Elliot whom he's really up against. Over a dazzling montage of real world news footage and shiny happy stock advertising imagery, Price tells Elliot and Mr. Robot the story of the real guys behind the guys behind the guys: the Deus Group. Founded after the fall of the Berlin Wall by the ambitious Chinese bureaucrat Zhi Zhang better known by her hacker alias, Whiterose this elite organization took advantage of the collapse of Communism by putting the whole world up for sale. The first gulf war , the internet, the rise of authoritarianism, the depredations of late capitalism all of it was the Deus Group's doing. What Deus members like Price didn't realize until it was too late is that it was all a means to an end. Every world shaking event and paradigm shift brought Whiterose one step closer to the fruition of her secret billion dollar project beneath the nuclear power plant in Washington Township, where Elliot and his family used to live. Now that project, whatever it may be, is being packed up and shipped off to Chinese controlled Congo. After that, patsies and flunkies like Price and Elliot are superfluous to Whiterose's needs. In other words, they're dead men walking. It's a lot to digest, even for a conspiratorially minded audience. Fortunately, it's also entertaining to digest, thanks to Esmail's flair for striking imagery. His news footage montage seamlessly splices B.D. Wong's character, Zhang, into meetings with everyone from Fidel Castro to Vladimir Putin to the Queen of England, "Forrest Gump" style. And when the scene cuts back to Price, Elliot and Mr. Robot, the contrast between Whiterose's world of power and influence and their own shabby surroundings they're holed up in the shuttered offices of Elliot's former cybersecurity employer, staring at Post it notes with names and clues written on them as the sun filters in through dingy windows is striking. It communicates just how outclassed Elliot is against these godlike opponents. He's not the only badly overmatched character in the episode. The F.B.I. agent Dom DiPierro dutifully follows the orders of the Dark Army operatives threatening her family and outs her slain supervisor, Agent Santiago, as a double agent for a drug cartel, rather than for his true employer, the Dark Army. But because she is unable to say for certain whether the agent investigating the case believed her cover story, the Dark Army takes matters into its own hands and tosses him from a building, making it look like a suicide. In a show with no shortage of bottomed out, depressive performances, Grace Gummer is a standout as Agent DiPierro. She looks completely, utterly exhausted by her situation, able to put one foot in front of the other only because the Dark Army will torture her loved ones to death if she stops moving. By contrast, Elliot has two thin strands of hope to cling to. First, he needs Whiterose to convene a meeting of the Deus Group; Price forces her hand by announcing his plans to resign as E Corp's chief executive, which necessitates an in person gathering to choose his successor. Second, he needs to hack Price's go between with the group, the E Corp attorney Susan Jacobs; unfortunately, his sister, Darlene, killed her for her role in the Jefferson Township chemical leak that killed her and Elliot's father. Darlene reveals that dark secret after she and Elliot get together following the sudden death of their abusive mother. This, too, is a striking contrast: To see our daring hacker heroes attend to painfully ordinary business like arranging a cremation, grieving in a chapel, and going through their mother's personal effects is to see a whole new side of them both. Neither Elliot nor Darlene really care about the death of their mom, but her passing enables them to process their grief over the murder of their childhood friend Angela, which they had never been properly able to do until now. It's then that another group of shadowy figures emerges from hiding, at least to us in the audience. In passing, Darlene mentions the return of Vera, the drug dealer who murdered Elliot's girlfriend Shayla back in Season 1. Furious, Elliot demands to know why Darlene never told him; she insists that she did. But even Elliot's Mr. Robot persona denies having been told. Then the show cuts to the high rise boardroom where Elliot had his first encounter with E Corp's inner circle in the pilot "the guys no one knows about," as he called them at the time. In this interior limbo lurk Elliot's mother and his child self, two other alternate personalities. They're waiting for someone, his mother says. Not for Elliot, not even for Mr. Robot: "For the other one." So there's another personality buried in Elliot somewhere an echo of the Deus Group, a true power behind it all. Adding additional layers to an already complicated plot is tricky business, of course. But the mysteries are so intriguing, and Esmail's command of his craft so sure, that the investment seems sound as a pound. None As he did in the season premiere, Mr. Robot narrates the episode rather than Elliot. It's a sign of how single minded Elliot has become in his pursuit of vengeance that he no longer has the time or the inclination to talk to his "friend" in the audience. None Surreal sight gag of the night: A man in a full body snowman costume, offering his condolences to Elliot and Darlene as they argue about their dead mother on a subway platform. None Bets on Elliot's secret persona? My best guess is the horror film slasher who first wore the money man mask that Elliot's collective fsociety adopted as a symbol, but I'm perfectly happy to have no real idea until the show reveals it. None Darlene can't quite bring herself to say aloud that she murdered Susan Jacobs; her guilt and self loathing forces Elliot to complete the puzzle on his own. None As an inveterate adolescent Walkman user, I found its use as an ersatz Proustian madeleine for Elliot's, Darlene's and Angela's childhoods to be astutely observed. None That creepy taxidermist who serves as Darlene's Dark Army handler returns, issuing threats with a smile in a shop called "La Mort Heureuse." I'm not sure Camus would approve. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
The fictional chess star overcame her childhood as an orphan, she battled her addiction to pills and alcohol, and she managed to make it into the world championship in Russia. The problem now? She had spent all her money on clothing and couldn't afford her 3,000 trip to the biggest game of all time. "You could give me the black dress," Beth's friend suggests on an episode of "The Queen's Gambit." "Or the purple one." In a field dominated by men, thick glasses and ill fitting white button down shirts, Beth Harmon is a sudden style idol. Yes, she's a character developed from Walter Tevis's novel of the same name and now outfitted by Gabriele Binder on a hit Netflix series. But somehow, she may be able to broker an introduction from the chess world to the fashion world, an unlikely yet beautiful pairing. "The Queen's Gambit" takes place in the 1960s, and at that time, there were only a few female American and Russian players who were in the major leagues. Ms. Binder looked back at the ways the men dressed, and they had a "geeky, nerdy fashion." The women's looks were similar. Beth, played by Anya Taylor Joy is anything but nerdy. And this may be a game changer. As it were. "Chess will never be the same," said Cathleen Sheehan, a professor and the acting chair of F.I.T.'s Fashion Design M.F.A. program in New York. "This story brings international glamour, humanity and relatable history to the game of chess. Each time the scene changed, I found myself excited to see what she'd be wearing next." Inspired by Edie Sedgwick, Jean Seberg, Pierre Cardin and Balenciaga, Ms. Binder created a dizzying array of looks that take Beth from her orphan days in Kentucky through her chess tournaments in Las Vegas, Paris and Moscow. No fewer than a dozen of her outfits contain geometric patterns mirroring the chessboard, but Ms. Binder would never do anything so obvious as to print a chessboard onto a top or a skirt. Instead, for example, Beth tiptoed into the chess world with a simple checkered sleeveless dress over a fitted white button down that doesn't veer far from the style at the time. She was trying desperately to find her own way in the fashion and chess scene and her outfit reflects this, Ms. Binder said. By the time the series finishes, Beth steps out in a white wool coat paired with a white hat totally on point for a chess queen. There's also the makeup, which helps transform Beth from an orphan into a high glam chess starlet, reflecting her state of mind along the way (like a floating eyeliner look to underscore a hangover). "It was exaggerated makeup to support that she's really besides herself, not fitting into the idea of a chess player," Ms. Binder said. "It was a kind of, 'This is me, and I'm fragile.'" Jennifer Shahade, a two time U.S. women's chess champion, and women's program director at US Chess in Philadelphia, said she always saw the game as a glamorous sport. Ms. Shahade was able to party with her peers on rest days; she left the country for the first time at the age of 15 to play a world youth championship in Brazil; and she celebrated her 16th birthday in Iceland for another chess excursion. It's a side of chess that those on the outside of the game don't necessarily ever get to see. "The glamour fed into my work ethic and vice versa," Ms. Shahade said. "The overlap between chess and glamour is not new, but this is the first time I've seen it depicted so brilliantly onscreen, which takes it to an even higher level of imagination." While this may not be the first time chess has entered the fashion scene, this may be the largest move it has made. In 2005, Alexander McQueen did a chess inspired fashion show, during which a chessboard was projected onto the floor and each model represented a chess piece. Then, at New York Fashion Week in 2010, G Star, the brand from Amsterdam, featured Magnus Carlsen, a grandmaster, playing a chess match before the runway show. G Star also created an advertising campaign around Mr. Carlsen. Still, fashion and chess never really gelled. The World Chess Hall of Fame teamed with the St. Louis Fashion Fund in 2018 to challenge newbie designers to create stylish chess outfits. Spoiler alert: Grandmasters continue to sport their usual simple black suits. "Although top grandmasters dress up much better than let's say 15 years ago, there is a way to go for U.S. top players like Fabiano Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura to be recognized as a style icon," said Lennart Ootes, a chess photographer and broadcaster in Amsterdam. "Chess has been featured in countless movies and commercials as a metaphor for strategic decisions, but you will hardly see a chess player on a red carpet." Now that "The Queen's Gambit" has arrived however, it appears that chess is having a fashion moment. In late November the exhibit "Keith Haring: Radiant Gambit" will open at the World Chess Hall of Fame. It will include Mr. Haring's custom street art chess sets. Also scheduled for a program at the Chess Hall of Fame is Michael Drummond, the St. Louis fashion designer featured on "Project Runway." His exhibit, "Being Played," looks at the effects of fashion and climate using figures from chess as a metaphor. (We're here for the black minidress made entirely out of chess pieces.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
It's the bane of a new mother's life: She's exhausted, but her male partner wants sex. And besides, she still has to get up for those middle of the night feedings. But female burying beetles have solved the problem brilliantly, according to a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications. Not only do they zap fathers with an anti aphrodisiac, but they get them to help out with child care. "They are a very modern family," said Sandra Steiger, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Ulm in Germany, and the lead researcher, who studied 400 pairs of beetles over three years. Although evolutionary biologists have long recognized that burying beetles black with red markings are unusual because males and females care for their broods together, researchers have uncovered the physiological mechanisms by which this sex versus parenting detente is mediated. When the immature, wingless beetle larvae are most dependent, researchers found, the mother stops producing eggs and releases a chemical that functions as an anti aphrodisiac. The father gets the message through his antennae. Both parents then hunker down for the species preserving imperative: Kids first. Protect and feed. Three days later, when the larvae are independent enough to toddle off and feed themselves, the parents resume copulating. A burying beetle faces a conflict: Should it devote its tiny resources to creating more eggs or securing the survival of its offspring? By taking a break from procreation in order to nourish their young, burying beetles strike an elegant balance. Unlike primates, which change behavior and appearance to advertise when they are in heat and ovulating, burying beetles broadcast the opposite information. As soon as beetle eggs metamorphose into vulnerable larvae, the mother releases a hormone that blocks her egg production and, at the same time, produces the buzz kill pheromone. Unlike burying beetles, most insects lay eggs and move on. For the few that take care of offspring, including honey bees and ants, females do the parenting. "Burying beetles are supercool," said Marlene Zuk, a professor of ecology, evolution and behavior at the University of Minnesota. "I applaud the researchers. We could just say that organisms do what they do and sometimes there's parental care and sometimes not. But how do you make such an incredibly unusual behavior happen when it does? This closes the loop." For their research, Dr. Steiger and her team ventured into the forest by the university and left mouse carcasses "You can just order them, frozen, on the Internet," she explained to attract the beetles. Drawn by the smell of a carcass, burying beetles strip it of fur, roll it up, coat it with a protective secretion (somewhat akin to antibacterial liquid) and bury it. Then they use it for food and as a breeding chamber. Because researchers did not know the age of the forest burying beetles, they took them to the lab to breed a fresh first generation. Researchers paired off males and females, provided them with peat and carrion, and began observations. It turns out that male burying beetles are mad for sex. Even as the female lays eggs on the carcass over about 20 hours, the male still copulates with her, to guarantee he is the father of the offspring. This is because in the wild, other male beetles, attracted by the carrion and the female, will sneak in and try to copulate with the female, Dr. Steiger said. "It was ridiculous, because in our lab there was no one else, but the father still kept copulating, just to make sure," she said. Dr. Zuk, the author of "Sex on Six Legs," amplified: "Even if beetles don't perceive a competitor, it's better to be cautious," and keep copulating. "Just like it's way better for your smoke alarm to go off if you only burn toast, than for you to miss a fire." Around 60 hours after the eggs were laid, they developed into about 15 to 20 larvae. And that was when the adult male and female abruptly stopped having sex. Instead, the mother and father each predigested carrion for their hungry larvae, who signaled they wanted to be fed by showing, as researchers wrote, "a specialized begging behavior, in which they rear up and wave their legs, thereby touching the parents' mouthpart to obtain food." The researchers also analyzed chemicals released by the females throughout the breeding and nurturing cycles. As Dr. Steiger noted, human females can signal that they are not in the mood for sex, regardless of whether they are ovulating. But burying beetle females can't "decouple that message," she said. "They can't lie. It's a problem in biology." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The trailer opens with a picture of an olive green house, then a sunny yellow kitchen. A narrator extols the virtues of the world famous chicken and dumplings that the family matriarch once made there. Now comes the piano with the grandchildren's photos on it, a picture of the late grandfather and a parade of others, all members of a family named Royal, just one generation removed from the first of them to graduate from college. "This is my family," the narrator says, as the figure 51,283.50 lingers on screen. "And this is the amount of money that tore us all apart." The narrator is Amanda Brown, the 32 year old granddaughter of the owner of that money, and many of us have seen this movie before, or lived it. Older relatives fall gravely ill. Their wishes regarding their care and assets are unclear. Siblings converge, huddle, bicker, then go to war with one another. Money goes to lawyers that could have gone to heirs, and fissures form that never heal. Ms. Brown's describes her film, "Black Heirlooms," in part as a personal and cultural examination of the persistent gap in net worth between white and black families the so called wealth gap. But it is also about the extended uncomfortable, intergenerational conversations that we do not have enough of and that her family did not have until it was too late. So as we dive into turkey hash this weekend with a larger than normal group of family members around the table, we might want to swallow hard and ask ourselves this, out loud: Could what happened to the Royals happen to us? And what are we going to do to prevent it? Twenty years ago, no one would have expected that Ms. Brown would be the one urging us to ask these questions. She spent her first 14 years in Oklahoma City, the daughter of a minister and an accountant turned lawyer. Leaving Texas, where she went to high school, to attend Howard University in Washington was bold, given that her parents and grandmother wanted her close to home and the family; making pointed inquiries about family finances was out of the question. "There is a hierarchy of information," she said. "You're not privy to what is considered adult business. It's particularly true in the African American community and, I would argue, in communities of color in general." Her grandfather, Vonley, died before she was born, but his picture remains in the homes of many of her aunts and uncles. He had his hands in the grocery business, real estate, taxi cabs and livestock, and all eight of his children graduated from college, even though he and his wife, Edna Mae Royal, did not finish high school. In the decades after Mr. Royal's death, family members tried to get Ms. Royal to make her wishes known about how she wanted them to divide her assets once she died. "We attempted, on too many occasions, to get Mom to do something like this," said Gary Royal, one of Edna Mae Royal's sons and Ms. Brown's uncle. "But we didn't want to give her the impression that we were trying to gain some kind of advantage. We backed off to let her do what she wanted to do." In 2009, Ms. Royal, who is now 90 and did not respond to messages seeking comment, had a stroke. Her children were soon in disagreement about where she should live once she got out of the hospital, whether she was competent to make that choice herself and who should have power of attorney if she wasn't. Vonley and Edna Mae Royal, Ms. Brown's grandparents. Their children are divided. "You don't want to be having a crash course in how to make these decisions," Ms. Brown said. "There should have been a conversation long before it was necessary. Not only are you clouded by emotions, but the person who needs to have a voice, my grandmother, wasn't available." Eventually, the family ended up in court. Ms. Royal returned to her own home, and three of the older siblings rarely see her and do not speak to the five other siblings who now help look after her. Gary Royal, 68, who described himself as a classic mama's boy in an interview on Thanksgiving eve, said that the community members saw the family as unique, tightly bound and admirable. "We never thought we would come to this," he said. He was also adamant that his and the two other older siblings' concern had nothing to do with money or property that they may not inherit now and everything to do with their mother's welfare. The dollars in question, in addition to the property, do not add up to enough to make much of a difference to anyone once divided by eight. "Her premise is based on a lie," he said of Ms. Brown's film. "This issue about wealth is a falsehood. This family did not break up over money." Ms. Brown disputes that and is not a filmmaker trying to make a name for herself. Her day job is in community organizing, and a project in Chicago related to intergenerational communication and the transfer of values is what made her want to put her own family's difficult history on film. She eventually became the director of community engagement at the New York Restoration Project, which was founded by Bette Midler. But all along, she's been at work on the film, and this year, her Kickstarter campaignbecame one of the small percentage that is successful at both collecting a five figure sum and landing much more money than the original ask. Ms. Brown said she was trying to address two issues. The first is the racial wealth gap. According to 2011 census figures, the most recent ones available, households in the "white alone" (not of Hispanic origin) category had a median net worth of 110,500. The figure for blacks is 6,314, the lowest of any category. Her family is much better off. Still, to her, there is something incredibly sad about how hard her grandmother worked to maintain her money in certificates of deposit for years and hold on to her plots of land. Now, not every family member will benefit, and Ms. Brown asks herself whether her grandmother's effort was for naught. "I'm speaking about her business, and it's still embedded in me that it's not my place to be talking about this," she said. "But now that the family is divided, what was the point of working so hard to keep everything intact? If she won't talk about it, I owe it to future generations to keep it from happening again." Encouraging conversations along those lines is her second aim. To that end, she has shown an 18 minute version of her film in New York, Atlanta, Raleigh and Washington so far and will be at Princeton University next week. One audience member offered an excellent bit of advice: Start any conversation with an older relative by asking them what sort of care they might want while they are still alive. That way, you're leading with your concern for them and won't arouse as much suspicion about intent or greed. Ms. Brown notes that even people who do have a will often don't take the next step and consider end of life care on their own. "The care is a hugely common source of conflict that people don't discuss because they think too much about the post mortem will as opposed to the living will," she said. Her family is the case in point in her film, and some relatives will not soon forgive her for it. Others joke that one thing that certain older family members from both sides of the conflict agree on is that there is more shame in her talking about the division than there is in the actual division itself. But there is also some hope. The Royal grandchildren are still mostly on speaking terms, even though some of their parents are not. And they talk about the conflict, on film, albeit with some prodding from Ms. Brown. Generational change is indeed afoot, fueled by the put it all out there nature of our semipublic lives online. Ms. Brown says she believes it transcends race and is mostly for the good. " 'Black Heirlooms' isn't trying to dictate who is right and wrong in my family," she said. "My knowledge of what happened is limited because we weren't able to have conversations about it. So instead of having them with just my family, now I'm having them communitywide." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
111 TREES: How One Village Celebrates the Birth of Every Girl Girls are one with nature in the illustrations for this inspiring true story about a grieving Indian boy who wrapped his arms around trees when he missed his mother and grew into a man who plants them to honor daughters. Their tall, cylindrical bodies and rich brown skin mirror the trunks they tie with sacred threads; their leafy clothes sprout blooms of pink and gold; their limbs reach for fruit where once there was barren, overmined land; for prosperity and education where there was poverty and neglect. An afterword lists eco feminist causes. While volunteering at P.S. 175, across the street from a trash filled vacant lot that kids call "the haunted garden," Hillery ("Mr. Tony") has an idea. Soon students are helping him clear the lot and plant 400 seedlings, "one for each kid." Vegetables, herbs, berries, even watermelon. Hartland's joyful folk art illustrations bop from the gray toned jazzy vibrancy of a bustling city neighborhood to the colorful harvest of a lush urban farm. Includes a step by step guide to starting a garden "anywhere." 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. This color saturated, mouthwatering whirlwind of a book by a Caldecott honoree activates all five senses. Based on Tamaki's experience volunteering at a small community kitchen that feeds the hungry, it bursts with energy from the moment its diverse group of characters starts chopping and slicing, whisking and whipping. (See them fly through the air on the cover!) Viewed from above and below, zoomed in and zoomed out, they pour and stir through swirls of steam, splashes of liquid. Until that first delicious slurp, when the rhyming cacophony of speech bubbles and shout bubbles settles to a quiet reverie, sated by everyday kindness. Animals stand in for people in this lesson for little ones set in the "perfect" town of Sunnyville. One thoughtless toss of a candy wrapper by Rhino creates a garbage dump when everyone else follows suit; one flower picked in the park by Giraffe leads to a flowerless park; one loud song played in public by Penguin causes deafening discord. Soon Sunnyville has "lost its twinkle completely" and everyone is grumpy. Then Mouse wonders: What if she plants one flower and waters it? Skip the preachy back matter and you just might motivate a future do gooder. BUTTERFLIES BELONG HERE: A Story of One Idea, Thirty Kids, and a World of Butterflies Written by Deborah Hopkinson. Illustrated by Meilo So. While the title is misleading (the characters and their project are fictional), the premise, of an immigrant girl who relates both to an endangered butterfly's journey to its new home and to a shy caterpillar's shedding of its skin, is smart. After learning English via books about butterflies, our narrator initiates the building of a monarch way station (a guide for which is included). So's gorgeous illustrations pit boldly defined monarchs against a feathery watercolor world. STAND UP! SPEAK UP! A Story Inspired by the Climate Change Revolution Upset by natural disasters she sees on TV, a city girl, with the help of her spunky dog, does what she can to fight climate change. Signing up others leads to a gatefold of activity: rooftop beekeeping, rubber tire tree planting, book sharing, clothing swapping, food composting. The inside jacket turns into an all purpose sign. Joyner ("The Pink Hat") raises chickens in Australia. The message of this book, which focuses on a student body's divided opinion about an issue vital to its future, is that disagreements can lead to fruitful discussion, better understanding and great ideas. When a development project (promising much needed education resources) calls for cutting down a tree that's part of an endangered, thousand year old species linked to the Indigenous peoples of Chile, kids on opposite sides unite to find a solution. When Kamala and Maya Harris were little girls long before Kamala became our first Black female vice presidential candidate and her sister became a lawyer and public policy advocate they dreamed of turning their apartment building's courtyard into a playground. In this retelling of the story by Maya's daughter, they hang up posters, knock on doors, hold a tag sale and make it happen. Illustrations by an artist who worked on the movie "Coco," plus family photos. Jennifer Krauss is the children's books editor of the Book Review. 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 |
The disco ball was spinning like a glitter moon and a pair of go go dancers grooved in neon wigs at a Brooklyn nightclub during the recent 20th anniversary party of Ultra Music, one of the record labels behind the explosive growth of dance music in the United States. As a D.J.'s mix boomed, Patrick Moxey, Ultra's silver haired founder and president, received guests with hugs and a wide smile. But the party, he said, was not all celebration. It was also an acknowledgment of the struggle one might say hustle over the years to bring electronic dance music, or E.D.M., from its underground origins into the commercial mainstream. If Ultra and the larger dance world face a struggle these days, it is simply to maintain the genre's momentum. Once viewed by the music industry as a minor subculture, E.D.M. is now a vital part of the pop world, fueling an expanding festival market and providing much of the underlying sound of Top 40 radio. Mr. Moxey and Ultra worked in the trenches of the American market for years, pushing now famous acts like Calvin Harris and David Guetta to radio programmers when dance music was still considered a risk. Today the label is reaping its rewards through a partnership with Sony, and with hit acts like OMI and Kygo, a 24 year old Norwegian D.J. and producer who will perform at Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Jan. 21. Ultra, which released its first single in 1996, made its name with compilation CDs like "Ultra.Dance" and "Ultra.Chilled" that came out like clockwork each year and invariably featured a scantily clad woman on the cover. But these days the label's focus is on the popularity of singles on streaming platforms like Spotify and YouTube. Albums, Mr. Moxey said, are almost an afterthought. "We've moved back to a model that's closer to the Motown model of the '50s and '60s," Mr. Moxey, 49, said in an interview at the label's loft near the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan. "The pressure is all on the song." While streaming has begun to catch on with consumers, its value remains disputed in the music industry, since the fractions of pennies that labels and artists make for each stream is vastly less than the revenue from one CD or album download. That calculation may be why Adele withheld "25," her blockbuster album, from streaming services. But Ultra has fully embraced streaming. The label declined to provide specific numbers, but Mr. Moxey said that Ultra had always been profitable and that it continued to grow by 10 percent to 15 percent a year, even as the rest of the record business has struggled to keep its revenue flat. Gigantic numbers of streams help make the difference for Ultra. The more than 2,000 videos on its YouTube page have garnered four billion views, and Kygo who has yet to release a full album racked up a billion streams on Spotify in just one year. At Ultra's office, the plaques on the wall commemorate not just sales figures but also YouTube subscriber milestones. "Streaming is our friend," said Mr. Moxey, whose slowly enunciated speech speeds up when he talks about the global spread of dance music online. "Nothing is more cumbersome than a piece of plastic when all you want is the music." Three years ago Sony Music Entertainment bought 50 percent of Ultra to establish itself in the growing dance world, giving Mr. Moxey a dual role as Sony's president for electronic music. The deal also gives Ultra a measure of financial security, and the label can now count on Sony's global infrastructure to help sell records. The artists Mr. Moxey signs are promoted by Sony labels throughout the world, or by Ultra's own staff of 25. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. Jeff Bezos gives 100 million to the Obama Foundation. Doug Morris, the chief executive of Sony Music Entertainment, speaks approvingly of Mr. Moxey as an old school record business hustler. "Anyone who has his own business and keeps it open as long as he did it," Mr. Morris said, "is doing something right." Mr. Moxey got his start in dance while at the University of Chicago in the 1980s, the golden age of house music in that city. He came to New York in 1987 to attend the graduate film program at New York University but dropped out after a week, he said, and started D.J.ing at warehouse parties and working with hip hop acts at record labels, where the top executives, he said, scoffed at the dance world. "Somebody would say, 'Across the swimming pool, that's the D.J. from Atlanta, that's the D.J. from London, from Paris, from L.A.,' " Mr. Moxey recalled. "We would hand them a 12 inch vinyl record. That's how you broke the record. That was the Internet." Mr. Moxey built the label in part through a knack for turning an ordinary song into a hit by finding the right producer to remix it. That formula has continued to work for Ultra, which in 2014 hired the German D.J. Robin Schulz to remix the Mr. Probz track "Waves." Shortly thereafter, the label had another hit with "Cheerleader," a reggae tinged song by the Jamaican singer OMI that was remixed by another young German producer, Felix Jaehn, and that went to No. 1 on iTunes around the world. When asked why Ultra had hired him, Mr. Jaehn noted that it happened shortly after the success of the "Waves" remix. "So they saw that phenomenon happen before and they probably thought, 'Let's ask the next German D.J. to try it again,'" he said. In the E.D.M. world, the perennial question behind the scenes is whether the popularity of the genre is all a bubble waiting to pop. The dance festival company SFX Entertainment went public in late 2013 at a value of more than 1 billion, but its stock has been pummeled by the market, and last week the company disclosed that it was considering bankruptcy. Mr. Moxey dismissed the suggestion of a bubble, saying that the dance world was healthy and growing. "There's no bubble to pop," he said, adding that the development of streaming had strengthened the business. "It has allowed the songs to get out to the audience quickly and in an exciting way to a global audience," he said. "And dance music works in any local language, because it's mainly the beat." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The most recent, less than Super Bowl notwithstanding, the N.F.L. continues to be a behemoth, dominating the sports landscape in revenue, attendance and television ratings. That popularity has over the years tempted entrepreneurs to try to cash in by starting professional football leagues of their own. The latest effort is the Alliance of American Football, which plays its first games on Saturday. There have been plenty of pretenders to the N.F.L.'s crown over the years. None have succeeded, but all had their share of novelty. Weird rules A touchdown was worth seven points; teams could then go for a conversion from scrimmage for one more "action point." No sudden death overtime; a full 15 minute quarter was played. No preseason. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The moonfish, or opah, is the first fish shown to be fully warm blooded, researchers report in the journal Science. Although some large predatory fish, like tuna, can temporarily warm their muscles or organs, the opah is the only fish that warms its heart. A silvery fish the size of an automobile tire, the opah is found in oceans around the world. To warm its organs, the fish harnesses the heat generated by rapidly flapping its pectoral fins. The heat gives the moonfish a competitive advantage in the chilly waters that it lives in, several hundred feet below the ocean's surface. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
MISSOULA, Mont. We were in our driveway, car keys in hand, 10 minutes before our reservation time, when I chickened out. I was supposed to dine at a restaurant in the middle of a pandemic for the purpose of journalism, of course. Montana, where I live, is opening up. I already had the lead of the column written: On Tuesday evening I rolled the dice and ate a meal inside a restaurant for the first time in roughly 12 weeks. I went not because I really wanted to, but because I wanted to know what it would feel like to attempt to "return to normal" in a world where things are decidedly not normal. My partner and I never got in the car. Instead, we stood by our front porch and debated. Six new cases had just been announced an hour earlier in the county 30 minutes down the road an unusual spike. Are we overreacting? But one of the six cases is already in the hospital does that matter? Is this worth it? The looks on our faces were tortured, a good sign we should pause. We retreated back to the couch where we've spent most evenings since early March. I was hesitant from the start. Nothing about sitting in an enclosed public space for an extended period and eating food made on surfaces I haven't personally scoured seemed like fun. Nor did it seem sensible. For the past two months I've spent big chunks of my day doomscrolling through bad news and preprint studies about mask effectiveness and virus transmission. If you're going to eat at a restaurant in America in May 2020, you probably couldn't pick a better state than Montana. Since late April, the state has reported multiple days of zero new cases, with reasonably widespread testing. My county hasn't had a new official case in weeks and there are currently zero active cases. While infections are still trending up in many other states that are easing restrictions, the virus appears suppressed enough here to make a genuine case for a phased reopening of businesses. I support phased reopening. Yet a lack of federal guidance leaves even residents of states that are trying to reopen responsibly with difficult choices. Is going out to eat helping my local economy or putting myself and service workers at unnecessary risk? If we're reopening, do I still need to isolate for a certain time before I show up at a restaurant? Do I need to get a test before dining out? If I do get tested, am I depriving someone who is more deserving? After I hit "confirm" on my online reservation I started asking myself even more of these questions, all of them portending awkwardness. Should I wear a mask? I wear a mask whenever I'm in public it feels reckless not to. OK, so I wear the mask. But I'll be ... eating? Am I supposed to put it on and take it off in between bites and sips? Is that idiotic? Or is it simply being respectful of the restaurant staff? Or is my mere presence as a patron idiotic and reckless? Dining out a relaxing treat! I emailed the restaurant before the reservation about its mask policy. I was hoping for some strict guidance but the owners had none, leaving it to staff and patrons to decide individually. They were gracious and lovely, but also unwilling to set that policy themselves. They're trying to walk a fine line in the hope of making everyone comfortable. And when it comes to dining out, it seems few people are. A Slate poll of 6,000 Americans showed 73 percent of respondents were not ready to eat indoors at a restaurant even with reduced seating. Even though the lockdown protests are supported by President Trump, that uncertainty seems to transcend party lines just half of Republicans said they were comfortable eating indoors. Even in Georgia, which is reopening with enthusiasm, the number of diners on Saturday was down by about 84 percent compared with the same day one year ago. In Montana, restaurants have to comply with phased reopening guidelines reservations only, 50 percent capacity, tables six feet apart, no bar seating, no cash. But other procedures (temperature checks, masks) are not required, which means the choice is passed down, until it ends up with the consumer. For many Americans, this personal calculus is a treasured freedom. For me, the uncertainty is crippling. And I suspect I'm not alone in feeling less confident in my ability to assess risk than ever before. It's not just my family's health I may be endangering. What if my little reporting experiment made me an asymptomatic carrier and I unwittingly spread the virus to essential workers at the grocery store later in the week? We're understandably fatigued by quarantine. For the past week, my Instagram feed has been full of local establishments celebrating their reopenings. I felt myself judging those who'd show up while also judging myself with no new cases in my town, was I really doing the right thing staying at home? Standing in the driveway, I realized that the meal would not be a respite from daily life, but a reminder of its many anxieties. So we fired up some leftovers. I relaxed a little. I felt a deep gratitude and even some pride in realizing that, over the past few months, we've managed to recreate some of the little comforts we used to seek out in public in our little quarantine life. The science fiction writer Philip Jose Farmer once summed up purgatory as "hell with hope," an apt descriptor for the current moment. It's what makes the reopening here in Montana so bittersweet. For the first time in a while, a hopeful future feels possible. But right now, at least for me, it's still just out of reach. 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 |
There was a commotion over in the corner of the Krestovsky Stadium in St. Petersburg. A whole section of fans seemed to have turned its eyes away from the field and trained them instead on a glass fronted suite. They stood on their seats and craned their necks and peered over shoulders to try to get a better view. The game itself was compelling sport: Lionel Messi and the rest of his Argentina teammates were toiling against Nigeria, when anything but a victory would have been enough to send them home in ignominy, eliminated from the 2018 World Cup in the group stage. Even that, though, could not compete with the show playing out in the suite. Diego Maradona always had that ability, to draw the eye and to capture the attention. There were times when he resented it, when his magnetism seemed more a burden than a charm, when all he dreamed of was to be left alone, to be free of the adulation that had stalked him since he was 16. This was not one of those times. Clad in a bright blue T shirt, Maradona was playing to the crowd, toying with it, basking in his offstage spotlight. His every emotion, his every sensation, seemed heightened, exaggerated, performed. He rose from agony to ecstasy and all the way back. He raised his arms to the heavens, and sank in his seat. He unfurled a giant banner of himself. At one point he fell asleep. He cheered and groaned and then, later, he collapsed. On his flight back to Moscow later that night, Maradona would send a WhatsApp voice note to a handful of Argentine journalists, blaming his state and his display on having drunk rather too much wine. By then, though, darker theories were circulating. Smudges on the glass front of the executive box were taken to be evidence of cocaine. Social media examined just how often Maradona had rubbed his nose. An image taken a few days earlier, of Maradona seated on a private jet, with what appeared to be a bag of white powder next to him, circulated online. Little of the comment expressed sympathy for a man who had struggled with drug addiction for much of his adult life. If anything, the abiding reaction was one of admiration: Here was Maradona living up to his image as a rock star, an unrepentant bad boy, the man who gave us the Hand of God proving that only the devil may care. That is not to say they would have been ignorant of what Maradona meant. They would have heard the stories and seen the videos of his goals and the photos of his brilliance. That, after all, is how legends work: They become lore, passed from one generation to another. But they are still memories at one remove. Millions came to the Maradona story in his chaotic retirement years. For them, his brilliance on the field was the background. What they experienced, firsthand, were the drugs and the scandals. He became, in effect, the star of his own reality television show, a celebrity rather than an athlete: Maradona, rather than Diego. Just as Keith Richards is now more readily thought of for his hedonism than his music, to many Maradona was first and foremost an outlaw, not a player. And rather than hampering his legend, it expanded it. There are those, among soccer's greats, who almost single handedly transformed the game, who heralded a shift between eras, who left the sport changed from when they found it. Johan Cruyff's ideas and his ideals fundamentally altered our perception of how soccer should be played, our reckoning of beauty. Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have shifted the parameters of greatness, the window of what might be possible, our definitions of positions. It is not to quarrel with his greatness to suggest that Maradona's impact was different. He did not hint at the next step the game would take. He bent individual games to his will. He shaped whole teams and entire tournaments by his own hand, lifting the otherwise ordinary to greatness. He changed history, but he was no harbinger of the future. He was, instead, the exact opposite. Maradona was the apotheosis of the game as it used to be. Almost everything in his story is redolent of a lost age, and barely any of it would have been possible even a few years after his retirement. He stayed at his first club, Argentinos Juniors, for five years. Despite a couple of attempts, unlike almost any Argentine teenage sensation of the last 20 years, he was not spirited away to Europe at the first opportunity. When he did leave, it was for Boca Juniors, because at that stage South American clubs could still attract high caliber talent. When Maradona did finally arrive in Europe, first at Barcelona and then at Napoli, neither club did all it might have to protect their prized asset, to help him cope with all that confronted him. The best years of his career came in Naples, not at one of the world's established superpowers but at an underperforming club in a chaotic, downtrodden city. Most of all, though, the way he played would soon become all but extinct. Maradona was the embodiment of Argentina's pibe ideal as Jonathan Wilson described him in The Guardian, he was the fulfillment of a prophecy written three decades before a free spirit, a creature of pure imagination. He was an autodidact, rather than a product of intense coaching. He was allowed to interpret the game as he wished albeit in the face of a level of brutality that is also no longer feasible rather than constrained by a defined role in a regimented tactical scheme. He was, in that sense, the last of the great individuals. That only magnifies his status. Maradona was not a bridge between eras. He was the zenith, the climax, the end. All of that is bound up in the way he was viewed long after his retirement, as the memories of what he could do on the field started to fade, as successive generations came to him through well worn stories and grainy YouTube footage. Maradona, though he did not know it, served as midwife to that change. In 1987, at the height of his fame, his Napoli team was drawn to face Real Madrid in the first round of the European Cup. It was a mouthwatering matchup: the champion of Italy against the champion of Spain, the Neapolitan forward line of Maradona, Bruno Giordano and Careca the Ma Gi Ca against the Real of Emilio Butragueno and his Quinta del Buitre. Silvio Berlusconi, the owner of A.C. Milan, greeted the draw with horror. Why on earth would soccer allow this to happen, he thought: the game of the year tossed away in the first round of a competition, when it might make a suitable final, a showpiece around which to build the season. Berlusconi tasked Alex Fynn, then working with the advertising agency Saatchi Saatchi, to work on a concept for what he called the European Television League, in which games like this would not only be more common, but saved until the later rounds. It would prove to be the idea that resulted, five years later, in the formation of the Champions League, and the dawn of the new soccer. That soccer, as it turned out, would not only not have space for Maradona the player, it would not be able to accommodate Maradona the idea. The concentration of power in the hands of a few superclubs and the rush of money into the sport would set off an arms race in tactics and coaching and recruitment. Within a few years, it would rid the game of its wildness and its improvisation and its renegade streak. Maradona, and all that he represented, would be consigned to the past. He would, in his later years, come to be an avatar for soccer as it once was, to inspire a nostalgia for all that we have lost. He meant so much to so many even those who had no memory of him because he stood as a symbol of the culmination, the apex, of what it used to be. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
In the city center, just a 15 minute walk from the cobblestone alleys of the Old City of Jerusalem, trendy restaurants and boutiques even coffee bars that double as late night performance venues have blossomed. Their youthful, often tattooed clientele offer a curious juxtaposition to the religious pilgrims roaming the Holy City . A growing tech scene there are upward of 500 start ups in the city has fueled the metamorphosis. So have art schools, with about 2,500 students combined; many of those students are remaining thanks to city and nonprofit spaces supporting arts minded entrepreneurs. The city's creative energy is on full display at Machane Yehuda Market, also in the city center. In recent years, the 19th century, open air market for spices, meat, flowers and produce has had a second shift at sundown when it transforms into a lively night life scene with frequent D.J. hosted events. In this sprawling labyrinth, artisan beer halls, tapas and falafel stands, and upscale restaurants open their graffiti adorned garage style doors to welcome the city's multi culti cool kids. For a meal that is as much a party as a dining experience, this nine year old restaurant inside the Machane Yehuda Market, run by the acclaimed chefs Assaf Granit, Yossi Elad and Uri Navon, embodies the boisterous spirit and flavors of contemporary Jerusalem. As dishes arrive fattoush salad with Bryndza cheese, mini open faced corned beef sandwiches topped with chipotle aioli, and "Shikshukit," ground lamb with tahini and lemon Arabic funk blares. Impromptu dancing erupts when the staff gives a signal by banging on kitchen pots. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
"Relic," an intimate portrait of an older, declining woman whose daughter wants to put her in a long term care home, takes on additional charge given how many people have died of Covid 19 in such facilities. The first essential of a good horror film is an isolated place. Any desolate locale will do: cabin in the woods, empty motel, middle of the ocean, Detroit, just somewhere no one can hear you scream. Populate it with potential victims, add a monster and you've got everything you need to make things go bump in the night. This is why horror is the cinematic genre best suited to the Covid 19 era, when isolation has become not just a way of life, but necessary to avoid deaths. Social distancing has quarantined us in our homes, increasingly alienated and lonely, eyeing strangers a little more warily. The frustration that Jack Torrance feels toward his family in "The Shining" doesn't seem quite as foreign after a few months of remote learning. And the masks of so many serial killers in slasher movies suddenly seem fashion forward. Even though they were made before the pandemic, three new bold and chilling horror movies, all directed by women, have a new kind of topical resonance. "She Dies Tomorrow," which premieres on Friday, comes off as the most prescient since it's actually about a contagion, a peculiar one where a woman's sudden premonition that she will die the next day spreads, from one person to another sharing the same space. The first great shock in "Amulet" occurs when a scaly bat emerges from a toilet, a terrifying image that cannot help but remind one of wet markets in Wuhan. And even an intimate portrait of an older, declining woman whose daughter wants to put her in a home, like "Relic," takes on additional charge considering that more than 50,000 Americans have died of Covid 19 in such facilities. And yet, the sturdiest connective tissue among these dread filled movies is a sensitivity to the punishing nature of loneliness and the sinister aspects of solitude. "She Dies Tomorrow" is very different from the virus movies like "Contagion" and "Outbreak" that have suddenly become popular again with scientists racing against the clock to save the world. Amy Seimetz, who starred in the recent remake of "Pet Sematary" and helped create the TV series "The Girlfriend Experience," has made a more eccentric, startlingly assured mood piece with the whispering vibe of a moody indie record. Its first 15 minutes portrays a woman named Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) in her house alone, starting with a shot of her eye and then often lingering in close ups. She is convinced of her impending doom, but seems oddly resigned to it. In dreamy visuals Seimetz films her listening to music, dancing, online shopping, gazing into the distance, trying to cry but failing. When she tells a friend Jane (played with exquisite fragility by Jane Adams), she is met by disbelief. No one connects in this movie. Everyone appears in their own world, staring past the person they are talking to, if they are looking at them at all. Jane retreats to her empty home, putters about the basement, and is suddenly struck by a terrible realization: She knows she will also die tomorrow. Then this sense of doom keeps spreading. There's something unsettling (and creepily familiar) about the lack of panic. What if the apocalypse came and everyone sadly shrugged? Or maybe more to the point: What if no one tried to stave it off? One woman regrets she stuck in a relationship too long. Another starts kissing a guy and while neither seems particularly passionate, what little interest they have peters out. But everyone seems depressed and haunted by the sense that they will ultimately die alone, an old theme with new urgency in a time when the pandemic limits loved ones from mourning together at a funeral. The real monster of this movie is not a virus, but loneliness itself. This pandemic hasn't created what the former surgeon general Vivek Murthy calls a "loneliness epidemic," so much as laid it bare. More Americans live alone than ever before and those who tell pollsters they are lonely have doubled since the 1980s. Research has shown that lack of social support does not just increase depression and mental health problems, but also has a physical impact, particularly for older adults. Two of these horror movies, which portray the tense relationship between an older woman and her caregiver, speak to this situation. "Relic" is a nuanced character study, a portrait of a disordered mind that hints, at supernatural terror. In her debut film, the director Natalie Erika James shows us a family whose ties have frayed. The grandmother, Edna (Robyn Nevin), has vanished and her daughter, Kay (Emily Mortimer), and granddaughter (Bella Heathcote) search for her. Kay has grown distant from her mother, and argues with her daughter about putting her in a home. In between these mundane family scenes are flashbacks to a cabin in the woods housing a solitary figure. The house begins to work like a metaphor both for the shaky foundations of their relationships as well as the mind of Edna. James uses the tools of scary movies (ominous strings, titled camerawork, buzzing flies) but roots them in realism. The result is one of the most emotionally draining movies in memory, the rare scary movie that evokes Kenneth Lonergan's sensitive play "The Waverly Gallery," another portrait of a family dealing with the declining mind of a matriarch suffering from Alzheimer's. With wild white hair, dirty bare feet and glassy eyes, Nevin looks like an aging Ophelia. Like so many great horror characters, Edna is both frightening and frightened, lashing out at her relatives, before wailing in tears: "Where's everyone?" When her granddaughter asks her if she ever gets lonely, she doesn't even answer. This is a movie about an isolation worse than solitude: that of being separated from your mind. While there are enough grotesque images to satisfy most horror fans, the most terrifying shots of this movie are Post it notes Edna places throughout the house, reminders that say "take pills" or "flush." As the tension escalates, these notes become more heartbreaking, signposts that signal growing tension. The viscerally gross and emotionally complex climax is kicked off when her daughter finds the final one that hits her with a devastating impact: "I am loved." If "She Dies Tomorrow" imagines the uncanny despair of knowing you're going to die quickly, "Relic" shows the pain of dying slowly, how the gradual deterioration of one mind can scar an entire family. Despite a large female audience, the horror genre has historically and shamefully ignored female directors. Only two years ago, Jason Blum, the most powerful producer in the genre, laid the blame on the lack of women wanting to direct horror films. (After blowback, he apologized.) These three movies demonstrate how much is lost by showing only male perspectives. Whereas all these movies focus on complex relationships between women, "Amulet" digs the deepest into gender dynamics. Like the other films, it portrays several figures in solitude, starting with long scenes of a lonely soldier, Tomaz (Alec Secareanu), perhaps suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, standing guard in the woods. Then the action fast forwards to after the war when he signs up to help a reclusive young woman, Magda (Carla Juri), take care of her invalid mother, who lives in the attic. No one is exactly who he or she appear to be. And neither is the movie. There are many twists, but what begins as a story about a man's tortured past pivots ferociously into a supernatural revenge tale. It explores the question of forgiving men who did bad things. It's not didactic, but if you want to find metoo themes, they are there. The actor Romola Garai makes an audacious directing debut, staging scenes of ugly horror with subtlety and misdirection, before setting you up for the full on assault, generating memorable set pieces, including one that makes overt what the creators of the chest burster scene in "Alien" only tried to imply. She also teases out some stellar performances, from an inscrutably tender Juri to a raucously entertaining one from Imelda Staunton, who plays a nun who introduces Tomaz to Magda and her mother. She's having a ball playing in gothic melodramatic style. Not since Darth Vader has anyone said "It is your destiny" with as much gravitas. I've always been skeptical of the idea that bad times make for good horror. The best scary movies work on fears more primal than those you find in the headlines. But clearly, horror articulates buried cultural anxieties, and right now, while the escalating case numbers and death tolls are the most important measures of the current crisis, there are other, less obvious, disasters going on, ones that will linger. Human beings are social animals, and pushing against those instincts will have consequences, some of which are the stuff of horror. These movies dredge up those hidden monsters. And it's fitting that they all had their premieres at drive in theaters, since there's something about watching images of isolation separated by glass and metal that only adds to their chill. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Garry Marshall, the noted producer and director, was talking about the best known character in one of his best known television shows. "I always wanted a tall Italian boy," he said in an oral history recorded in 2000 for the Television Academy. Instead it was a 5 foot 6 inch Jew named Henry Winkler who ended up playing the Fonz on "Happy Days," a portrayal so distinctive that what had been envisioned as a supporting role became one of the most recognizable characters in television history. The man responsible for that casting leap of faith was one of Mr. Marshall's fellow executive producers on the series, Thomas L. Miller. "Tom Miller was the whole key to casting Henry Winkler," Mr. Marshall said in the oral history. Mr. Winkler, who was an unknown when he auditioned for the role in 1973, concurred. "Tom took me to makeup, plucked my unibrow, told me what to do," he said in a phone interview. And it was Mr. Miller who called him that October on his birthday, no less and told him he had won the role. He had only just arrived in Los Angeles from the East Coast. "Two weeks into my stay, I hit the jackpot," Mr. Winkler said. "And a lot of it was thanks to Tom, who made sure that I came across with the right image, and Garry, who changed his mind about the character." Mr. Miller, who produced dozens of other TV shows, including "Perfect Strangers" and "Full House," died on April 5 in Salisbury, Conn. He was 79. The cause was heart disease, Warner Bros. Television, which had worked with the production company run by Mr. Miller and Robert L. Boyett, said in a statement. Mr. Miller was not generally known for the kinds of groundbreaking shows that draw critical acclaim and awards. What he and his production partners did draw were viewers. "Our award is that 30 million people are watching," Mr. Miller told The Los Angeles Times in 1990. "To me, the goal is to entertain." "Happy Days," which premiered in 1974, ran for a decade, 255 episodes in all. "Perfect Strangers" racked up 151 episodes from 1986 to 1993, overlapping for much of that time with "Full House" (192 episodes, 1987 95). Other long running shows that had Mr. Miller as an executive producer included the "Happy Days" spinoff "Laverne Shirley" (1976 83), "Valerie" (later renamed "The Hogan Family," 1986 91), "Step by Step" (1991 98) and "Family Matters" (1989 98). Some producers are less hands on once a TV series is launched, but Mr. Winkler said Mr. Miller had been an active presence on "Happy Days." "He was there at every shoot," Mr. Winkler said. "He was part of the family, and a creative part. He was there in the editing room. He knew where to put the violins for the emotional moments." "He understood the audience," Mr. Winkler added, "and then, if you had a problem, he understood you." Thomas Lee Miller was born on Aug. 31, 1940, in Milwaukee to Edward and Shirley Miller. He earned a bachelor's degree in drama and speech in 1962 at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, then set out for Los Angeles, where he worked for the director Billy Wilder on "Irma la Douce" (1963), "The Fortune Cookie" (1966) and other films. After four years with Mr. Wilder, he developed TV shows at 20th Century Fox, then became a vice president of development at Paramount Studios before embarking on his producing career, founding a production company with Edward K. Milkis. Miller Milkis Productions joined with Mr. Marshall, who died in 2016, to produce "Happy Days" (which was set in Mr. Miller's hometown) and "Laverne Shirley." Mr. Boyett eventually joined the group, and in the mid 1980s, after Mr. Milkis's departure, the company became Miller Boyett Productions. Miller Boyett shows, including "Full House" and "Family Matters," were a key part of ABC's Friday night sitcom lineup, known as TGIF. Mr. Miller and Mr. Boyett's most recent credits were on "Fuller House," a Netflix sequel to "Full House." In 2000, Mr. Miller and Mr. Boyett, his life partner as well as his business partner, relocated to New York, where they helped produce Broadway shows, including "Tootsie" last year. Mr. Miller, who lived in Salisbury, moved to Connecticut with Mr. Boyett in 2007. Mr. Boyett survives him, along with a brother, Robert, and a sister, Kitty Glass. Mr. Miller aimed for shows that didn't try to deliver a Message with a capital M but did have heart. "It's never about lecturing, it's about entertaining," he told The New York Times in 1990, "but we always like to have somebody in our shows make some human connections, so the people who watch it say, 'Yes, I understand that and I like it.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
A few years ago, when Imogen Lloyd Webber was debating the merits of buying an apartment on West 42nd Street, she emailed her father for his thoughts on the matter. "No, you are not living on 42nd Street. NO!" came the response from Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer of shows "Cats," "Evita," "Phantom of the Opera" with long residencies in the neighborhood he was nixing so firmly. "Dad very rarely says 'no' to me," said the British born Ms. Lloyd Webber, 39, who has such nice manners handwritten thank you notes on Smythson stationery are reflexive that it's hard to imagine anyone saying no to her. "That was the first bit of parental advice I can remember his giving in a long time, and the first time I can remember his being that firm on a subject: 'No, you are not doing that.' "His memory about 42nd Street was from back in the day, before Disney came. And to be fair, now that I work around there, living near Port Authority probably would do my head in," continued Ms. Lloyd Webber, a senior editor at Broadway.com; the royals correspondent for People Now, a daily live web news show; and an author of three books, including "The Intelligent Conversationalist" (St. Martin's Griffin), a sort of Baedeker for the intellectually bewildered. Subtitled "31 Cheat Sheets That Will Show You How to Talk to Anyone About Anything, Anytime" topics include geography, economics, biology and world history the guide was published last month and is dedicated to her father. "He has three copies, and he said that it's very useful and that he's been referring to it. I almost started crying," she said. "It means so much that I've done something that Dad can call up. He told me, 'You're very useful on World War I.' " Real estate reconnaissance continued. In the fall of 2013, when Ms. Lloyd Webber walked into a one bedroom duplex condominium in East Midtown, with blond hardwood floors and 17 foot ceilings, "I just knew," she said. "It's very much open plan, and it suited me." This time, there was older generation validation. "My stepmother is wonderful and also a very sensible woman, especially about property," she said, referring to Madeleine Lloyd Webber, the composer's third wife. "She was in town for something, and so she came over to look at the apartment. And when she said, 'Yes, absolutely, I think you should do it,' I was, like, 'O.K.!' " Ms. Lloyd Webber rented out the flat she owned near Trafalgar Square in London and moved to Manhattan half a dozen years ago, when her first book, "The Single Girl's Survival Guide," was published in the United States. "There were all these opportunities in America," she said. Such opportunities included stints as a commentator on Fox News and MSNBC, a correspondent on "Extra" and a panelist on the radio show "Imus in the Morning." During Ms. Lloyd Webber's first years in the city, home was a succession of unprepossessing apartments, including a tiny fifth floor walk up in the West Village and a cookie cutter one bedroom in a postwar building on West 57th Street, "where I could hear everything my next door neighbors were doing," she said. Her eagerness to put down roots in New York City hardened into resolve when her London tenants showed themselves to be a bad bunch. "They didn't pay the rent. They stole everything in the apartment from the TV to my plates, and I felt very violated," Ms. Lloyd Webber recalled. "I made a decision that was more emotional than financial to sell the flat, because I just couldn't deal with it anymore." Still, she did well enough in the transaction to swing the 1.595 million purchase price of the condo. The new apartment's stark white walls didn't suit Ms. Lloyd Webber, so she went a few shades warmer, then furnished the space mostly through the good offices of Crate Barrel. The haul included glass topped side tables, open bookcases, ivory leather bar stools, accent chairs with rattan panels, a sand colored sofa that she really didn't think she needed "I said my old one would be fine, and my stepmother said it wasn't going to work; she, of course, was right" and a glass topped round dining table that was a particular object of desire. "My godfather has the most beautiful round table, and I've always been obsessed with getting one," Ms. Lloyd Webber said. "This is the first apartment I've had that was big enough. I walked in and I said, 'The table is going to be there,' " she said, pointing to a spot near the breakfast bar. "Everything else had to work around it." The apartment's neutral palette serves as the background for the art a portrait of one of the feline principals in "Cats" by John Napier, the set designer for the original production, and, notably, a painting of Amy Winehouse by the pop artist Gerald Laing, Ms. Lloyd Webber's close friend. "At his first exhibition of Amy Winehouse works, I could only afford a print," Ms. Lloyd Webber said. "Then he died, and my mother's uncle sadly passed away. He left me some money, and I wanted something that reminded me of him and of Laing, so I bought this painting." But there was still plenty of blank wall space. When her father came to see the apartment soon after the closing, "he realized it needed art," Ms. Lloyd Webber said. "He collects art. He has the Pre Raphaelites, but he also has modern art, which I adore." She continued: "There's a technique now where you take high resolution photographs of artworks and then you can blow them up and put them on canvas and paint over them. I picked three of Dad's pictures that are my favorite pieces of his" "Ghetto Theater" by David Bomberg, a still life by Irma Stern and "After the Blitz" by L.S. Lowry "and he had them done, which was an amazing housewarming gift." The apartment's homier, more down to earth touches have come courtesy of Ms. Lloyd Webber's mother, Sarah Hugill: the large bouquet of silk flowers on the dining room table "Aren't they amazing? She did well there" and the many family photographs, among them an image of infant Imogen being held by her mother while her father, with equal tenderness, holds a cat. A particular favorite is the picture of Ms. Lloyd Webber's beloved maternal grandfather, Tony Hugill, which hangs by the front door. "He worked with Ian Fleming during World War II in naval intelligence," Ms. Lloyd Webber said. "He's the most wonderful man I've ever known, extraordinarily decent. He's a good person to see when you're leaving and when you come home." There are some bars nearby, and Ms. Lloyd Webber's apartment is on the second floor. On Fridays and Saturdays in the wee small hours she can hear the revelers, and she wishes it were otherwise. But don't cry for her, New York City. "This is the nicest place I've ever lived in," she said. "I can walk to my office in Times Square, but it's far enough away that I get away from all the craziness. I have a real neighborhood, and I love being part of the community of my building. I'm the only woman on the condo board!" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
THE NEW NEGRO The Life of Alain Locke By Jeffrey C. Stewart 932 pp. Oxford University Press. 39.95. Alain LeRoy Locke's drive to revolutionize black culture was fueled in no small part by his sense of self importance. "When a man has something to be conceited over," he wrote, "I call it self respect." Unlike many of his colleagues and rivals in the black freedom struggle of the early 20th century, Locke, a trailblazer of the Harlem Renaissance, believed that art and the Great Migration, not political protest, were the keys to black progress. Black Americans would only forge a new and authentic sense of themselves, he argued, by pursuing artistic excellence and insisting on physical mobility. Psychological devotion to self determination would transcend white racism and render stereotypes of black people obsolete. As Locke wrote in a draft of "The New Negro," his seminal 1925 essay, "The question is no longer what whites think of the Negro but of what the Negro wants to do and what price he is willing to pay to do it." Jeffrey C. Stewart's majestic biography, also titled "The New Negro," gives Locke the attention his life deserves, but the book is more than a catalog of this now largely overlooked philosopher and critic's achievements. Stewart, a historian and professor of black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, also renders the tangled knot of art, sexuality and yearning for liberation that propelled Locke's work. Locke never completely untied that knot for himself, but he grappled with it until his death. Locke was born in Philadelphia in 1885. His father, Pliny, was a law school graduate and frustrated radical who died when Locke was 6. Locke's mother, Mary, provided a tenuously middle class life for Alain with her salary as a teacher, and raised her son to play the aristocrat from the time he was young. Locke dressed immaculately and was taught not to kiss or touch strangers, for fear of germs. He and his mother disdained contamination in all forms, and made every effort to distance themselves from poor black people, to avoid being stained by association. Locke grew up determined to demonstrate his worth not by uplifting those less fortunate, but by cultivating a reverence for the arts. He was educated among wealthy white students at one of the city's finest public high schools, and enrolled at Harvard at 19. Even before college, Locke knew he was gay and that he would live his life as a gay man. These contradictory commitments to respectable, elitist and homophobic black Victorianism on the one hand, and to his gay lifestyle on the other produced a friction that sparked Locke's intellectual fire. He was discreet about his queerness, but it was a public secret among those who knew him. After a stint at Oxford as the first African American Rhodes scholar, Locke returned to Harvard and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy. Upon attaining his degree, he stepped confidently into the black intellectual vanguard, although he never gained the celebrity of the hetero patriarchal "race men" of his time, like W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. In Locke's view, publicly lauded black leadership was inhibited by its obsession with politics, protest and propaganda. In Stewart's words, Locke believed that "the function of literature, art, the theater and so on was to complete the process of self integration" and "produce a black subjectivity that could become the agent of a cultural and social revolution in America." Locke turned his beliefs into action during the Harlem Renaissance, when he developed his theory of the "New Negro," which became popular among black thought leaders. Locke's version was distinguished by his ideas about migration, modernity and the city. He preferred Greenwich Village, where he eventually bought an apartment, but Harlem was a symbol: a caldron of black diversity and cultural production. The urban black citizen of Harlem would be a new man, an artist with a novel voice and purpose, unburdened by antiquated folk traditions and tired racial stigma. Stewart suggests that Locke's forays into poetry and fiction were stunted by his inability to speak openly about his sexuality. But he was a prolific essayist and critic, reviewing the work of black writers like Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen and Rene Maran. He edited a series of influential "Bronze Booklets," including Ralph Bunche's treatise "A World View of Race," and managed fraught relationships with paternalistic white patrons to protect the artists he cared for and strengthen his own position in the art world. By the time Locke curated the American Negro Exposition in Chicago in 1940, his status as one of the most prominent figures in black art was beyond question. Under Locke's stewardship, the black arts revolution of the 1920s was undeniably, if obliquely, queer. As a mentor of black artists, he was sexist and often exploitative. He ignored women almost completely and was prone to infatuation with younger, intellectually stimulating men. In some cases, his objects of affection fell in the gray area between adolescence and adulthood, though Stewart is uncertain whether Locke had partners under the age of 19. Many of these men welcomed Locke's advances as they searched for artistic direction and comfort with their own sexuality. Locke was a guide, teaching his students about fine art and gay manhood, a dance between raindrops in a storm of homophobia and racism. Locke's romantic partners were also muses. He indulged in their bodies and ideas, benefiting intellectually from the exchange even when his sexual desires went unconsummated. Perhaps the best example of this pattern is Locke's courtship of Langston Hughes, the poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance, with whom Locke fell in love. Hughes never quite reciprocated Locke's adoration, but his virtuosity was magnetic. He propelled Locke toward a new appreciation of the crises and triumphs of ordinary black people. Locke's conception of black brilliance evolved through his exposure to young and attractive thinkers. The breadth of Locke's work is stunning, and Stewart refuses to emphasize Locke's activities during the Harlem Renaissance at the expense of other contributions. Locke was never truly revered as a philosopher, but he produced original research in the field of value theory, including, for example, on the role emotions play in the formation of values and opinions. He was the first among his peers to take the anthropologist Franz Boas's work to its logical end and declare racial science illegitimate, pointing out that races were national and social groups rather than biological categories. Locke also advocated a return to African aesthetic principles, not as a counternarrative to Western racism but as a means of exalting African forms and techniques. He made a home at Howard University, where he worked for four decades despite uneasy relationships with administrators, who did not care for his lifestyle or his intellectual interests. Frail and prone to a variety of ailments, Locke died from cardiac illness in 1954. Stewart treats seemingly every sentence Locke wrote with great care, reconstructing his wanderings through Europe and Africa, black theater, communism and other geographic and intellectual terrain. The cost of this choice is the length and pace of the book, which is sharply written but unlikely to get readers' adrenaline pumping. The benefits of his thoroughness, however, are manifold. Chief among them is the book's example as a master class in how to trace the lineage of a biographical subject's ideas and predilections. The attachment and longing Locke experienced in relationships with his mother, friends and lovers exerted as much influence on his work as the texts he read and lectures he attended. One finishes Stewart's book haunted by the realization that this must be true for us all. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
SAN DIEGO In 2020, the Federal Reserve is hoping to give patience another try. The Fed had an active 2019, as officials shifted away from a steady set of interest rate increases to pause before cutting rates three times in the face of trade tensions and global weakness. But at their final meeting last year, Fed officials signaled they plan to keep interest rates unchanged, at least for now. Fed officials saw their current rate setting "as likely to remain appropriate for a time," so long as incoming economic information "remained broadly consistent" with the Fed's outlook for continued solid growth, according to minutes from the central bank's Dec. 10 11 meeting, released Friday. Policymakers, including Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, made clear last month that they were comfortable leaving interest rates unchanged. Meeting notes underline that the pause could be an extended one. Officials are waiting to see how last year's cuts, along with a possible easing of trade tensions, will affect the American economy. Fed meeting participants "expected sustained expansion of economic activity, strong labor market conditions, and inflation near the Committee's symmetric 2 percent objective," the minutes show. "This outlook reflected, at least in part, the support provided by the current stance of monetary policy." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The choreography of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries all offer much to anticipate in the next six months. The early Danish ballet master August Bournonville whose work cleanses the palate with both the felicity of its dance construction and its open temperament has scarcely been represented in America since the 2011 visit of the Royal Danish Ballet. An end to this drought comes Jan. 13 through 18, when that company's soloists perform an anthology of his dances at the Joyce Theater. More remarkably, though, on Feb. 12, Ballet Arizona in Phoenix will become the first American company ever to perform Bournonville's exuberant three act "Napoli" (1842); its artistic director is Ib Andersen, who is staging this production. Of all the ballets of the 19th century, "Napoli" is the one that best celebrates this world, real life, vitality and joy. The ballets of Balanchine dominate the repertories of both America and the globe. One Balanchine revival stands out this autumn: Pacific Northwest Ballet's revival of "Jewels" in Seattle (Sept. 26 to Oct. 5). Since this full length plotless trilogy has now become central to the world repertory from Houston to Moscow, what's special about this version? No fewer than five of its leading roles will be coached by their original dancers: Violette Verdy and Mimi Paul ("Emeralds"), Edward Villella ("Rubies"), Suzanne Farrell and Jacques d'Amboise ("Diamonds"). What makes this even more valuable is that it is an evolving effort. Several of these artists worked on Pacific Northwest's last "Jewels" revival, with special effect in "Emeralds." Sarasota Ballet in Florida, as usual, gives us the leading American way with Balanchine's British contemporary Frederick Ashton. The company's best calling card is Ashton's 1937 "skating" classic, "Les Patineurs." On Oct. 18 and 19 in New York, this work will be the closing event of City Center's Fall for Dance season. Then in December, back home in Florida, the company revives Ashton's 1960 two act "La Fille Mal Gardee" a rapturous ballet that touches some of the same life enhancing notes as "Napoli," but with a more tender emphasis on love's intimacy. And Ashton's "Jazz Calendar," a slighter work, joins the repertory on Feb. 27. For the last 30 years, premieres at New York City Ballet have been events more often to be dreaded than welcomed. Yet the few finest works of the 21st century have been created here; and now I find that I am eager to see at least four of the company's premieres this fall and winter. Three striking choreographers are preparing four premieres for the troupe's fall and winter seasons at the David H. Koch Theater: Justin Peck, Alexei Ratmansky and Troy Schumacher. Works by Mr. Peck and Mr. Schumacher will be seen on Sept. 23 at the company's opening night gala. Let's hope they aren't sabotaged by fashion designers; this is to be a couture gala, not least onstage. The least known of these choreographers is Mr. Schumacher, a City Ballet corps dancer who in 2010 founded his own company, BalletCollective. His two works in that troupe's Joyce Theater 2013 season made a strong impression: original, complex, fresh, touching, set to 21st century music. In those, his idiom looked chamber scale. Will his debut creation for City Ballet (six dancers, 10 minutes, to Judd Greenstein's score "Clearing, Dawn, Dance") tell us whether he is ready to handle his home troupe in its home theater? This fall will bring us more evidence of his work with BalletCollective, when the company has a two night season at the Skirball Center, on Oct. 29 and 30. This season repeats his 2013 creation "The Impulse Wants Company." It also includes a world premiere that uses several images from a painting that David Salle created as a source blueprint libretto for this collaboration (though the actual art may not be incorporated into the performance); the score is by Ellis Ludwig Leone. There's no doubt about the importance of Mr. Peck in July, he became City Ballet's resident choreographer and yet everybody, it seems, has a different set of reservations about him. Let's hope he remains an important talent. At City Ballet he presents one piece at the fall gala (to Cesar Franck music, with Mary Katrantzou costumes) and another on Feb. 4 (to Aaron Copland's "Rodeo" ballet score). Most works by Mr. Ratmansky are satisfying even when imperfect; he remains the most mature and affecting creative voice in ballet today. And he tends to create better pieces at City Ballet than anywhere else. His next premiere there opens on Oct. 2, to Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition." Away from ballet, the big premiere promises to be by Mark Morris at the opening night of Fall for Dance on Oct. 8. It's set to a selection of Mendelssohn's "Songs Without Words," as arranged for piano and violin; and I love the wit of its title "Words." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
I know that when first spotted in late October, all tobacco moleskin and fair trade goose down, you were everything to me. That was then. You might accuse me of having intimacy issues, and you would probably be correct. Four months of you turned out to be too much. It's true you kept me warm and safe and, yes, I'm sorry, but it's over. Familiarity, as it happens, does breed contempt. One entire interminable season in your company turned out to be more than enough. I'm ready to dump you in a plastic Hefty bag and kick you to the curb. As it happens, I am not alone. "After wearing the same smelly coat, the same scarf, the same vile hosiery all winter, you just want to burn them," Stephanie Solomon, senior vice president and fashion director of Lord Taylor, said on the day of the vernal equinox. "The second the weather gets a little bit hopeful, you want to run right out and buy something that says spring." At issue, of course, is the question of when that hopeful day will arrive. It snowed on the first day of spring on the East Coast and remained so cold for the week thereafter that Olive Bette's boutique on Madison Avenue posted a placard outside with a popular and unprintable three letter Internet acronym. "After Tuesday even the calendar goes," what the heck, or initials to that effect. And it is true that despite all the blather laid on about the importance of catwalks and star designers and top stylists and dictatorial magazine editors, there remains just one truly significant influencer in fashion, and that is Mother Nature. "We're in the weather business," Ms. Solomon said. "I've been doing this for 30 years, and it's always been that way." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
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. Wednesday was, of course, impeachment day "when America moves its presidents to the spam folder," as Trevor Noah put it on "The Daily Show." President Trump raged on Twitter as the House passed two articles of impeachment, accusing him of abuse of power and obstructing Congress. Every Republican in the House defended Trump; one said Jesus Christ had gotten fairer treatment from Pontius Pilate than Trump got from Congress. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Credit...Andrew White for The New York Times Can't Take Your Fancy Dog Hiking in the Country? Hire a Pro Two years ago, Dane and Brooke Carillo brought home Mackey, an English cream golden retriever, to their two bedroom apartment in Manhattan, but they quickly realized he wasn't cut out for city life. When they leave for work, "Mackey's usually a little sullen, a little sad," said Mr. Carillo, 34, a finance trader who lives in a co op in Chelsea. To make sure the puppy stayed active, they first hired professional dog walkers to take Mackey on twice daily, 45 minute strolls. But it wasn't enough. "He likes to be outside when we're in New York, but he doesn't love to walk that far," Mr. Carillo said. On a friend's recommendation, they hired a company called My Dog Hikes to whisk Mackey away to the New Jersey countryside for three hour hikes in the woods every Monday. "He gets super excited," Mr. Carillo said. "We were concerned with his exertion, to make sure, as a puppy, he wasn't just laying around." Call them coddling or overindulgent, but affluent dog owners like the Carillos have given rise to newfangled services like My Dog Hikes and Kristi's Kanines. For 85 to 130 a day, they will take city dogs hiking in beautiful places like Harriman State Park and South Mountain Reservation, while their owners are cooped up in cubicles. (Harriman requires that dogs be on a leash no longer than six feet and must have a rabies tag; Essex County parks require dogs be leashed except in designated areas.) For an extra charge, the dogs even get a post hike bath. "He's so much more alive when he's outside the city," Mr. Carillo said. At 9 a.m. on a brisk October Monday in SoHo, three dogs were lined up outside a dry cleaner, like children waiting for the school bus. They barked, wagged their tails and jumped on their hind legs as a black Toyota 4Runner pulled up to the curb. The dogs made a beeline for Andrea Klein, 33, the founder of My Dog Hikes, and her lead hiker, Mia Godwin, 27, who guided them into the back seat and secured them with tether like seatbelts clipped to their harnesses. "Closing!" Ms. Klein said in her alpha dog voice, as her charges tucked their paws under their furry bodies. With everyone buckled in, they drove to the Upper West Side to pick up four more dogs. Among those waiting was Elena Atkin, 59, a homemaker who works with various charities. She and her husband, Doug, a venture capitalist, adopted Emy, a Labrador mix, from a rescue organization in Sag Harbor, N.Y., but they didn't want her sitting around the apartment all day. So eight years ago, they signed Emy up for three hikes a week with My Dog Hikes. (She recently scaled back to once a week. On her off days, Emy goes running with a professional dog runner along the East River promenade.) One of the program's perks is an annual "pawrent teacher conference," where owners and their dogs meet at a bar to mingle and talk about each dog's behavior. It had taken place the previous night at Black Door, a dog friendly bar in Chelsea. "I got to meet Emy's playmates," Ms. Atkin said. "Emy has her own life outside of the home. Who knew?" Once the dogs are comfortably situated, the team drives about 45 minutes to South Mountain Reservation in West Orange, N.J., a pristine 2,100 acre nature preserve with rigorous trails marked by a collection of miniature fairy houses. In the gravel parking lot, the dogs disembark one by one, so Ms. Klein and Ms. Godwin can sort them into groups and escort them onto the trail. Or rather, so the dogs can escort them. With the parking lot out of sight, the hikers unleash the dogs one by one. A few pups take a bathroom break. Theo, the gray Weimaraner, tears up and down the path. Otis, an amber pit bull, barrels through the trees. How is Ms. Klein so sure the dogs won't run away? As an animal behaviorist, she trained most of the dogs herself. But just in case, every dog wears a waterproof GPS tracker. "This is an extreme amount of trust, when you tell people from the city, 'We're going to be taking your dog off leash hiking,'" Ms. Godwin said. She and Ms. Klein perform regular head counts. Both are efficient and easily manage 14 dogs for about three miles, while carrying knapsacks stocked with medical supplies and water jugs. "I treat this like a Fortune 100 company," said Ms. Klein, who previously worked on Wall Street. But sometimes, pet parents are tougher than C.E.O.s. "They have their intricacies." Raisen, a Border terrier, wears a collar because her owner wants her to, even though Ms. Klein would prefer she wear a harness. Dog hikers say that the field trips can have a profound effect on dogs' behavior, particularly those confined by cramped apartments. "For city dogs who live in this very controlled, sterile environment, there's a lot of doggy impulses they have, but can never exhibit," said Jennifer Wheeler, 36, an owner of NYC Doggies in Greenwich Village, which began offering hikes in 2011. "It's good physically, but it's even better psychologically for them to be off leash in nature, having a sensory experience. Not only do they transform on the hikes, but they become better adjusted to city life." Think of it as the canine equivalent of self care. Evelyn Lasry, 55, who owns Two Palms, a printmaking studio and gallery in SoHo, has certainly noticed a change in her 6 year old yellow Labrador, Augustus. Six months ago, she enrolled him in twice weekly hikes with Kristi's Kanines, a hiking service that caters mostly to Upper East Side pooches. The physical and behavioral changes, she said, have been remarkable. "He's so much more fit. He has that sexy waist now," Ms. Lasry said. "When he gets home, he comes running in with a smile on his face and running around in circles." Dog hiking services regularly post social media photos and videos mid hike, so owners can live vicariously through their pets' adventures. "I'm a writer, so I'm always sitting at my desk," said Julie Salamon, 65, a journalist and the author of "Wendy and the Lost Boys." Her late shepherd mix, Maggie, hiked with NYC Doggies. "Periodically, I'd get a little notification from Facebook that there was a video posted, so while Maggie was out on the hike, I could watch her on the video." By 2:30 p.m., the dogs start to fade, pausing for water. Ms. Klein and Ms. Godwin clip their leashes back on and return to the car for a tick check. The women sit cross legged in the gravel parking lot, cradling each dog like an infant while looking for ticks. Owners are required to certify their dogs' tick medication, but every so often Klein and Godwin find a few. "I've become a connoisseur, unfortunately," Ms. Klein said, picking a tick off Mackey. Tuckered out from a day on the trail, some of the dogs fall asleep. On the drive back to the city, Klein and Godwin recap each dog's behavior on the hike and draft report cards to email their owners. "Mackey has come a long way! Our individual training sessions paid off!" read one report card, which rated him an A. "He checks in often with the pack leader and plays nicely. He loves to swim, chase and chew sticks." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Perhaps Santa Had to Shout to His Eight Reindeer Because They Fell Asleep None Reindeer can't fly around the world helping distribute gifts to all the good boys and girls in a single night at least, as far as science can tell. But they are capable of other impressive feats. On the Arctic island of Svalbard, Norway, the shaggy white creatures eat almost nonstop to store up fat during the summer months of the midnight sun. Then, during the long winter of total darkness and little food, they live mostly off energy reserves. "They are normal mammals only about three months a year," said Walter Arnold, a professor at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna who studies animals' adaptations to cold. The rest of the time, extreme conditions demand extreme behaviors. For instance, some research suggested that Svalbard reindeer lacked standard circadian rhythms, leading to speculation that their body clocks had been lost over evolutionary time. But Dr. Arnold and colleagues recently reported in a small study in Scientific Reports that they do have a circadian cycle. Like most other things about them, it is a bit peculiar. The variations are sometimes so slight that observing them required years of monitoring with sensitive sensors that sit in the reindeers' stomachs. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Dr. Arnold and his collaborators used pill shaped metal capsules containing the sensors. Once swallowed, the capsules stay harmlessly in the animal's stomach as long as it lives, transmitting information about temperature, movement and heart rate. When the researchers looked at roughly two years of data from four reindeer, they saw interesting patterns. "From our physiological data, it was clear from the first glance, the first analysis, that in body temperature there was clearly a diurnal rhythm," said Dr. Arnold. Further analysis showed rhythms in other measurements, too. In the months leading up to summer, there is sun but not yet much greenery. Then, t he cycles of the reindeers' circadian clock have their highest highs and lowest lows, perhaps driving the animals to forage what is available during the day and prepare for what's ahead. When summer arrives, the reindeer's circadian cycles are weak, and perhaps easier to ignore. During that season, reindeer must stay awake at all hours to eat as much as possible. Svalbard reindeer under the midnight sun. They must stay awake at all hours to eat as much as possible in the summer. "They just don't listen to the clock anymore. They are shift workers during that time," said Dr. Arnold. Staying up late may be key to survival: If they slept more during the precious period when they are actually able to graze, they might not be able to make it through winter. The intense activity of summer, abetted by their peculiar clocks, is eventually replaced by a winter of striking somnolence. They do not hibernate, but they get very close. "I would call them walking hibernators," said Dr. Arnold. The study's measurements show that in winter, the reindeers' metabolic rate is suppressed to just a third of its summer high not a state that would lend itself to taking off from rooftops. Humans who ignore their clocks, far from thriving, have higher rates of some cancers, heart disease and other health problems. How do reindeer manage? "We have no idea how this works," said Dr. Arnold, noting that there are still many mysteries in the lifestyles of animals in the planet's most extreme habitats. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The Federal Reserve rolled out the first stage of its corporate bond buying program on Tuesday, stepping into totally uncharted territory: buying longer dated company debt. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York said it would start buying exchange traded funds, which trade like stocks but have broad exposure to corporate bonds. It will then begin to buy bonds directly "in the near future," according to a Monday night release. Even before buying a single bond, the Fed managed to achieve its primary goal: restarting the frozen corporate debt market. It first announced that it would set up the programs on March 23, and the mere promise of a backstop revived the market, allowing companies to issue debt to raise needed cash amid the coronavirus economic downturn. Once they are fully up and running, the Fed's programs will buy both newly issued debt on the primary market and debt that is already being traded on a secondary market. The programs were expanded on April 9 to include some junk bonds. April was a record month for United States investment grade bond sales, which totaled more than 300 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The market for shakier bonds has also been revived. "A lot of the heavy lifting has already been done," Subadra Rajappa, head of United States rates strategy at Societe Generale, said before the announcement. The Fed is first buying E.T.F.s mostly investment grade but some high yield because they "serve as an efficient mechanism to access the corporate bond market" as the direct programs get up and running, it said in a footnote on Monday. BlackRock Inc., which is the largest issuer of E.T.F.s, will run the program for at least its first three months. The New York Fed had previously announced that it had picked the firm's advisory business to handle the purchases based on technical know how. According to the Fed's investment management agreement, BlackRock will not charge asset management fees on E.T.F.s in the program, and will pay back the value of other fees it earns on its own E.T.F.s. Nevertheless, the firm is a beneficiary of the program as a market backstop. BlackRock's high yield fund, HYG, bounced on the initial news of the corporate bond facility and took another leg up after the Fed expanded program criteria in April to include riskier debt. Some of those gains have since faded, but it is a sign that in improving broader market functioning, the Fed's program announcement helped the fund. It is unclear how extensively the two central bank programs will be used. The pricing and terms are such that the direct buying facility in particular may not see huge use, economists and strategists said. Instead, it will serve as a kind of safety blanket assuring investors that the Fed will step in if markets become volatile. In particular, companies must demonstrate that they were not able to access credit from a bank or on the open market at reasonable terms before using the primary market program, which could create a stigma. 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. "There's a good chance the primary facility may not be used," said Gennadiy Goldberg at TD Securities in New York. "It's a good outcome if they intend to be a market backstop, it's actually OK." The mere announcement of the programs has already enabled a wave of new corporate bond issuance. Boeing raised 25 billion in a late April bond sale. Outstanding bonds have also recovered, and as the Fed pledged to buy debt from recently downgraded companies, it lifted prices and reduced rates on debt that had been issued by so called "fallen angels," including Ford Motor. When it comes to the secondary market program, which focuses on already issued bonds, the Fed said in its investment management agreement released Monday that purchases would vary based on market conditions, with a goal of "reducing the broad based deterioration of liquidity seen in March 2020 to levels that correspond more closely to prevailing economic conditions" that will eventually transition into "a reduced, steady pace" of buying to maintain market functioning. Given that secondary market functioning has largely returned to normal, that could be a quick process. While the program has been cheered by many on Wall Street for reinvigorating credit markets, there are critics of the central bank's actions to shore up the big companies that tap corporate debt markets. The antimonopoly group American Economic Liberties Project has been characterizing the corporate program as a "bailout" for companies like Boeing, which has managed to issue debt since the Fed announced that the program was coming and restored market functioning. Some analysts said the idea that helping larger companies is a problem is misplaced. "This is all about, in the end, supporting employment," said Steven Friedman, a former New York Fed official who is now senior macroeconomist at the investment management firm MacKay Shields. "The companies that employ people need access to credit" and "it's really about the survivability of firms," he said. The Fed has announced initiatives to help smaller companies and governments, but those are also never before attempted and have yet to get up and running. It has set out plans for a "Main Street" lending program for midsize companies, and has said it will buy municipal bonds to boost states and large cities and counties. This facility is the first Fed emergency lending program backed by a recent congressional appropriation to begin operating. Lawmakers earmarked 454 billion to provide insurance against losses to the Fed programs, and some have been eager to see it used. Representative Katie Porter, a Democrat from California, sent the Fed and Treasury a letter last week asking why they had not tapped the money yet. The Treasury has earmarked 75 billion in total funding for the corporate bond buying program, with 25 billion of that meant to support bond buying through the secondary market program and 50 billion meant to back up direct bond purchases. That funding could support 750 billion in total purchases, though it may not use that capacity. "Companies are out there financing, they're out there raising liquidity," Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell said at his April 29 news conference. "The ultimate demand for the facilities is quite difficult to predict, because there is this announcement effect that it really gets the market functioning again. Of course we have to follow through, though." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Credit...Jim McAuley for The New York Times PASO ROBLES, Calif. This state is rife with roadside attractions, from the colossal drive through redwood trees off Route 101 to the historic Wigwam Motel on Route 66 in San Bernardino. But there is nothing quite like the mind bending spectacle now on display at dusk in the hills of Paso Robles here, a popular wine destination. That is the witching hour when thousands of solar powered glass orbs on stems, created by the artist Bruce Munro, enfold visitors in an earthbound aurora borealis of shifting hues. Since it opened in May, "Field of Light at Sensorio" the 60 year old British artist's largest such installation to date has drawn thousands of tourists and become an Instagram phenomenon. The subtly changing patterns of this light safari, activated by a nebula of fiber optic cables attached to hidden projectors, seem to inspire a cathedral like awe among ticket holders, who pay 19 to 30 for an evening stroll along 15 acres of illuminated walkways. (A V.I.P. dinner on a terrace with killer views will set you back 95.) "It's like Pandora in 'Avatar,'" said Marc J. Zilversmit, a criminal defense lawyer from San Francisco, referring to the lush alien world with bioluminescent species in the James Cameron film. "It's a beautiful CinemaScope of an alternative universe." The arrival of "Field of Light" in "Paso," as Paso Robles is commonly called, is perhaps fitting. A four hour drive from San Francisco and Los Angeles, the area has morphed from a folksy cowboy outpost with cattle drives to a grape mecca with some 300 vineyards and perfect rows of lavender spilling down hillsides. Mr. Munro's work, on view through Jan. 5, is only the first phase of Sensorio an ambitious, 386 acre attraction on a former turkey ranch owned by Kenneth Hunter III, a real estate developer and founder of an oil and gas company, and his wife, Bobbi. Plans for Sensorio include themed interactive exhibits, a 4,000 square foot wine center and a resort hotel with a conference center. With its time sequence ticketing and Sensorio branded hoodies for sale, "Field of Light" joins a coterie of art entertainments at wineries and related establishments seeking to infuse culture into viticulture what has been called the Vine Art Movement. Some, like the Donum Estate in Sonoma, already have serious permanent collections. It also heralds a global wave of experiential light displays such as Leo Villareal's "Illuminated River," which lit up four bridges across the River Thames in London, and "Vivid Sydney," an annual extravaganza in which multimedia light projections, sculptures and other installations reimagine the city's architecture. Mr. Munro, who works out of a 16th century barn in Wiltshire, England, has become the Christo and Jeanne Claude of fiber optic light environments. He created his first "Field of Light" in 2004, when he "planted" 15,000 stems in the field adjoining his studio. The otherworldly display prompted a Royal Air Force helicopter to circle around to get a better look, at which point the waggish artist turned the "E.T." like installation off. Earlier in his career, Mr. Munro worked in the illuminated sign business, steeping himself in manufacturing and production processes. "I put aside all my artistic aspirations and learned how things got made," he said. "That's an important lesson for any young artist." Mr. Munro committed himself to light as an artistic medium after his father died in 1999. To commemorate their relationship, he created "CD Sea" in 2010, a shimmering inland ocean of 600,000 discarded CDs. At Salisbury Cathedral the same year, he animated the nave with a "Light Shower" of teardrop shaped prisms that appeared to float in space; it was accompanied by a series of lit "Water Towers" in synchronized colors crafted from recycled plastic bottles and other materials. "I'm not trying to make art that's complex to understand," Mr. Munro said in a Skype interview. "I want to express what it means to be alive in a genuine way." His installations have appeared at the Victoria Albert Museum in London, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Jegu Light Art Festival in South Korea and elsewhere. "There is a pleasing handmade quality and playfulness to his work," said Alexander Sturgis, the director of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford, which commissioned "Impression: Time Crossing Culture," a digitally animated sculpture inspired by a clock dial. Mr. Munro conceived of his best known scheme in 1992 while camping near Uluru, a sandstone monolith in Australia also known as Ayers Rock, which is sacred to Aboriginal people. He envisioned a dreamlike work that might bloom at night like dormant desert seeds responding to rain. "It felt like there was energy in the ground," he recalled. "Your body picks up on these things." Twenty four years later, "The Field of Light Uluru" opened at the Aboriginal owed Ayers Rock Resort. The feverish reaction has led to camel tours and "Field of Light by Heli" tours. (The site is open until December 2020.) Mr. Munro's installations are temporary, underscoring their ethereal, magic mushroom quality. Their ephemeral nature "allows the landscape to be itself and recover and hopefully inspire other artists," Mr. Munro said. His goal is to connect people with nature a bond he compares to "the root systems of trees talking to each other," though he is quick to add that he doesn't want to sound like a flake. Mr. and Mrs. Hunter had planned to build a golf course on the property, but shifted focus after encountering Mr. Munro's art in Australia. "I was attracted like a bug in a candle," Mr. Hunter recalled. For Mr. Munro, the site offered the opportunity to "light a valley," as he put it. The existing landscape was redesigned to block views of industrial buildings. During a recent visit, waves of light cast the gnarled branches of blue oak trees into relief. Visitors strolled the trails with hushed voices. "I like how the lights gently go up," Allison Dufty, a museum audio tour writer in Oakland, observed. "It's big enough to feel you can get lost in it." The melding of wine and art is a hallmark of venerable European institutions like Chateau Mouton Rothschild near Bordeaux, France, which pioneered the artist designed label craze in the 1940s by commissioning Chagall, Miro and Braque. Since 2015, the Donum Estate in Sonoma has placed large scale sculptures in the landscape, including works by Ai Weiwei, Yayoi Kusama, Keith Haring and Yue Minjun, whose bronze "Contemporary Terra Cotta Warriors" commune with grapevines. Allan Warburg, the Danish businessman who owns Donum with his wife, Mei, lives in Hong Kong and works closely with the artists. "The placement has been quite an obsession," he said in a telephone interview. "I don't know how to make wine or art so it's the only contribution I can make." Mr. Warburg added, "Walking around the landscape with a couple of glasses of wine, objects become more beautiful." "Art is a calling card," said Tom Matthews, the executive editor of Wine Spectator. "Can it be commercialized? Yes. But so can museums." Some are dubious of the so called Vine Art Movement. "Equating wine with art flatters the people who buy wine into thinking they're participating in something larger than they are," said James Conaway, the author of "Napa at Last Light." And there have been some spectacular busts: Copia, an ambitious museum dedicated to wine, food and the arts, opened to much fanfare in 2001 then closed in 2008. But as public light spectacles flourish at places like the Morton Arboretum outside Chicago where some 183,000 people braved subzero temperatures last winter to experience an interactive light show by the design firm Lightswitch they cast their spell wide. Images on social media have difficulty conveying the works' subtle, hypnotic spells. People assume that "light is about brightness," Mr. Munro, the wizard of Wiltshire, said. "You just need a whisper of light." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
PENNY DREADFUL: CITY OF ANGELS 10:10 p.m. on Showtime. John Logan, the creator behind the fantasy horror series "Penny Dreadful," which ended in 2016, follows it up with this spinoff. Set in 1938 Los Angeles, "City of Angels" delivers a packed narrative: A Mexican American detective, Tiago Vega (Daniel Zovatto), and his partner, Lewis Michener (Nathan Lane), investigate the grisly murder of a prominent Beverly Hills family. Their search plays out while the city is building its freeway system and displacing Chicano families in the process. A shape shifting demon inspired by Mexican folklore (played by Natalie Dormer of "Game of Thrones") somehow ties into all of this, while subplots involving Nazi insurgents and police brutality bring the series, or at least its themes, to the present. "Even though our show is set in 1938, it has to be about 2020 or it has no reason to exist," Logan said in a recent interview with The New York Times. "Race relations, social engineering, politics, espionage all of that was bubbling away exactly the way it's bubbling away now." The series finale of HOMELAND leads in at 9 p.m. GOD FRIENDED ME 8 p.m. on CBS. The spiritual journey at the heart of this comedy drama wraps up after two seasons. Miles (Brandon Micheal Hall), an atheist podcast producer, has been helping New Yorkers sent to him as friend suggestions on Facebook by an account called God. In this two hour series finale, Miles works to reunite an estranged father and son and reconsiders his faith after the God account nudges him in the direction of his ailing sister. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Flamenco dancers rarely perform without live music. A solo dancer surrounded by singers, guitarists and percussionists flirtatious interchanges flaring up, various members of the clan staking out or ceding the spotlight is a familiar image. That dancer musician banter is a pleasure of the form. But the synergy between the dancer Rocio Molina and the singer Rosario Guerrero, known as La Tremendita is unlike anything I've witnessed in my (albeit limited) flamenco going experience: stranger, stronger, more affectionate and more electric. On Thursday at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, as part of Flamenco Festival 2014, these two prodigious performers, joined by the bassist Pablo Martin, offered the United States premiere of their collaborative "Afectos," with choreography by Ms. Molina and original music by Mr. Martin and La Tremendita. (Her real last name, which means warrior, is as fitting as her stage name.) Ms. Molina who, at 30, is part of a boundary pushing generation of flamenco artists has a compact, voluptuous physique that you might call feminine and a plump, round face that, at first glance, looks cute. But one of her striking qualities (aside from lush technique, magnetic presence and extraordinary command of rhythm) is her ability to play up that conventional femininity or absolutely shatter it, sometimes in the same instant. She can be demure one moment, luxuriating in an upper spine arch, and terrifying the next, unleashing a barrage of steps that seem to come from many bodies, not one. Her creaturely hands suggest pleading or punishing, grasping or giving up. There are no traditional, full skirted flamenco dresses in her wardrobe (most of which hangs from a coat rack and, after several onstage costume changes, lies strewn on the floor), but there is a trench coat and a red bolero jacket, the kind more often worn by male dancers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The job of artistic designer at Fendi has finally been filled. The storied Roman fashion house and fur specialist announced on Wednesday that the British fashion designer Kim Jones would replace Karl Lagerfeld, who died in February of last year, in the role. Mr. Jones will be responsible for the haute couture, ready to wear and fur collections for women, Fendi said in a statement. He will also maintain his current position as artistic director of Dior Men in Paris. It is the second major designer move by Fendi's owner, LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the world's largest luxury group by sales, since the coronavirus pandemic began. (The French company appointed Matthew Williams as Givenchy's new designer in June.) As such, it reflects the luxury group's commitment to forging ahead with its brands and buzzy designers, even as questions swirl around the future of fashion, shopping and the entire traditional show system. In a statement, LVMH's chief executive, Bernard Arnault, called Mr. Jones "a great talent," adding that he had proved his ability to adapt to the codes of assorted LVMH houses "with great modernity and audacity." The hire represents a doubling down on a bet by LVMH that fur will continue to be a hallmark of luxury, at a time when it is increasingly being seen as an unethical relic of another era. And as the industry faces a reckoning on race and diversity, the hiring of a white man already in its employ at Dior for one of the most plum design titles in the business also could be seen as going against the trend of confronting fashion's systemic racism, and LVMH's stated commitments to tackling that. The choice of Mr. Jones is the culmination of more than a year of discussions and apparent soul searching by LVMH, which built Fendi into a billion dollar brand. Fendi has been a core pillar of its fashion empire since it purchased an initial stake in the company from the Fendi family in a joint venture with Prada in 1999 (in 2001, LVMH became the brand's sole owner). Along with Silvia Fendi, the only family member still in the company, who will continue to design Fendi accessories and men's wear once Mr. Jones arrives, Mr. Lagerfeld was integral to that growth. Over a 54 year tenure at Fendi, Mr. Lagerfeld created the concept of "fun fur" when fur was seen as the stale province of the bourgeoisie. He held "haute fourrure" shows on the couture calendar even as fur increasingly fell out of fashion. He and Ms. Fendi appeared on the catwalk together at the end of every women's wear show. Though it was often suggested that Ms. Fendi, who referred to Mr. Lagerfeld as a mentor, might assume sole creative ownership of the brand after his death, executives at LVMH were open about their belief in the benefit of two creative personalities sparking off each other. (Along with Mr. Jones, another name thought to be in the running for the position was Maria Grazia Chiuri, artistic director of women's wear at Dior.) Designer pairings can be a risk, given the egos that are sometimes involved. But along with Miuccia Prada's recent decision to name Raf Simons as co creative director of Prada, pairing Mr. Jones and Ms. Fendi may also signal a new approach to team building in fashion. A fetishization of the single visionary has more often been the norm, and several high profile talents like Mr. Jones and Virgil Abloh have increasingly juggled multiple design responsibilities across top fashion houses. Fendi's chief executive, Serge Brunschwig, called Mr. Jones "one of the most talented and relevant designers of today." For his part, Mr. Jones said: "I would like to profoundly thank Mr. Arnault, Mr. Brunschwig and Silvia Venturini Fendi for this incredible opportunity. Working across two such prestigious houses is a true honor as a designer and to be able to join the house of Fendi as well as continuing my work at Dior Men's is a huge privilege." A graduate of the London art and design school Central Saint Martins and one of the brightest stars on the luxury men's wear scene, Mr. Jones has long been ascendant at LVMH. Before joining Dior Men's in 2018, he worked at Louis Vuitton as their men's wear designer for seven years. There, he brought his longstanding love and encyclopedic knowledge of luxe street wear athletic tech fabrics, big sneakers, oversize graphic T shirts and elegant tracksuits, but also crocodile backpacks and cashmere baseball tops to a superbrand that had been overly content to sell its male clientele little more than monogrammed leather cases, belts and wallets. More recently, at Dior, his shows merging suiting with streetwear and reworking tailoring for a modern audience generated buzz beyond the men's market. They have shown Mr. Jones to be more plugged in to the outside world than some of his industry peers. In July, for example, a week after the brand was criticized for casting an all white ensemble of models for its women's wear couture presentation as Black Lives Matter protests raged worldwide, Mr. Jones featured only Black models in his spring 2021 collection. It was designed in collaboration with the acclaimed Ghanaian portrait painter Amoako Boafo. In December, Mr. Jones was named designer of the year at the Fashion Awards in London. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
As wild insect populations decline and commercial honeybee colonies suffer maladies, farmers are seeking new ways to pollinate their crops. Some hire alternative insects, like blue orchard bees. Others drive huge pollen spraying rigs, or daub each flower by hand with a paintbrush. In the future, some may blow bubbles. In a study published Wednesday in iScience, researchers describe a type of soap bubble which, when laced with pollen, can propagate fruit as well as any of these other methods, save perhaps for bees themselves. Eijiro Miyako, an associate professor in the School of Materials Science at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, has spent years looking for a better artificial pollination method especially one that could replace hand pollination, which he said farmers have told him is "really hard work and annoying." In 2017, he and some colleagues built a new tool: a tiny drone lined with horsehair coated in a special gel. But the machine was clumsy and difficult to control: "It sometimes broke the flowers," Dr. Miyako said. More recently, during a day in the park with his son, it occurred to Dr. Miyako that soap bubbles are much gentler. They also have a large surface area, are easily dispersed, and don't cost very much. He and a postdoctoral researcher, Xi Yang, headed to the lab to build a better bubble. The first task was mixing the right soap. (As any enterprising former child knows, you can make bubbles out of a lot of different kinds.) It was a balancing act: too little soap, and you can't make very many bubbles at once. But too much, or the wrong kind, and the soap interferes with the pollen. The sweet spot was a 0.4 percent concentration of a surfactant called lauramidopropyl betaine, common in baby shampoo. The researchers settled on a pollen concentration that worked out to about 2,000 grains per bubble. They also juiced the solution with substances previously shown to enhance aspects of pollen germination and a polymer that strengthened the bubbles. They took their superbubbles to a pear orchard, and blew them at each of 50 pear flowers. Ninety five percent of the flowers later bore fruit. This was the same success rate as hand pollinated pears but required less time and effort, and much less pollen about 1/30,000th the amount, Dr. Miyako said. The bubble based approach "does appear to have potential," said Dave Goulson, a biology professor at the University of Sussex in England and an expert in pollination. But, he added, there are still many things bees can do that bubbles can't, like collecting pollen in the first place, which is half the job. Dr. Goulson is also concerned that if farmers no longer rely on insects, they might start using more pesticides. This harms wild pollinators, which are responsible for keeping alive the vast majority of the world's non crop plants. (They help crops a lot, too. In the pear field experiment, 58 percent of the flowers in the supposedly untouched control group also produced fruits, "probably because of the influence of naturally pollinating insects," the authors wrote.) "It concerns me that our response to the pollination crisis is to find ways to do without pollinators, rather than investing our efforts in looking after our environment better," Dr. Goulson said. Lila Westreich, a doctoral candidate in pollinator ecology at the University of Washington, fears that the bubble solution itself could harm local insects, as well as the bacteria that naturally occurs on flowers, which "plays an important role in the microbiome and health of native bees," she said. But she thinks bubble pollination could be a good alternative to trucking in nonnative pollinators. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Joya Studio (19 Vanderbilt Avenue), near the Navy Yard, produces scented candles for more than 100 brands, from tastemaker designer labels to Nike. Since February, the front section of its manufacturing facility has been transformed into a boutique that's evocative of a high end art gallery, with hanging oak display cases backed with slabs of hot rolled steel. (Periodically, the cases slide aside, making room for the delivery trucks that pull into the cavernous space.) Joya's owner, Frederick Bouchardy, fills the store with personal picks, including the Claude Galien cologne his grandfather wore, Le Baigneur beard and face oil, thick leather coasters and a selection of art books. A few doors down is Parlor Coffee (11 Vanderbilt Avenue), a roastery that supplies beans to restaurants like Semilla and El Rey. On Sundays, it is open for shopping and tasting, with the aroma of beans spinning in a vintage Probat UG 22 roaster frequently drifting through the brick walled space. Connoisseur caliber accessories are for sale (Japanese glass Kalita brewers, Bonavita kettles, Aeropress coffee makers) as are, of course, the brand's beans. Along with choices such as Kenya Miiri, which is slightly sweet and not especially strong, there are seasonal offerings, including a limited edition blend from the Gesha area of Ethiopia available starting Nov. 28. A few blocks away, Myrtle Avenue nicknamed "Murder Avenue" in prior times includes a few noteworthy boutiques. Green in Bklyn (432 Myrtle Avenue), for example, focuses on eco friendly items, including Klean Kanteen reusable water bottles; it's also a reliable spot for gifts. Many are stylish souvenirs of the borough, such as the illustrator Claudia Pearson's dish towels adorned with brownstones, and some are simply appealing, including chunky bars of soap from Marseille and colorfully printed children's backpacks. Since it opened almost a decade ago, Barking Brown (468 Myrtle Avenue), down the street, has steadily built a loyal following of neighbors and parents visiting their children at Pratt. The main appeal is unpretentious women's clothing and accessories, including breezy dresses, faux suede jackets, dangling earrings and roomy Matt Nat handbags. There's a wide range of choices well under 100. Near the entrance sits a large display of unisex hats, like bowlers and pageboy caps, from brands like Kangol. A few doors down, 21Tara (388 Myrtle Avenue) stocks fair trade artisanal items like soft cotton Gudri blankets, African Indigo scarves and wood printed pillows made in Jaipur, India. There's a bit of a hippie feel to the boutique, with incense, sandalwood oil and malachite stones as part of the mix. Patterned cotton dresses by Mata Traders are also for sale. Su'juk (216 Greene Avenue) offers highly wearable vintage women's clothing and an assortment of items like kilims from Morocco, jewelry by Rachel Weisberg and Sarah Klass, R Co hair products and face cleansers by Dirty Mermaid Beauty. In back, there's an area for hair services, including blowouts and cuts; on Sundays, tarot readings are offered. Nearby, Urban Vintage (294 Grand Avenue) is more than just a store. It is also an inviting cafe, founded by two sisters who grew up in the neighborhood. On the retail side, there are items that are ideal for last minute gifts, like crisply packaged Gentlemen's Hardware tool kits, Tilly Doro jewelry and greeting cards from Pepper Press. There's well chosen used furniture, too, starting at around 150, amid the vintage pieces used for cafe seating. When you're ready for something to eat, there are great choices of prepared food and places to sit at Peck's (455A Myrtle Avenue), where best sellers include gougeres baked with Gruyere, black pepper and chives, and lamb shawarma sandwiches. And Mekelburg's (293 Grand Avenue) serves homey options like meatloaf sandwiches; up front is a large counter filled with cheeses and smoked meats, many supplied by purveyors based nearby. Mekelburg's also has more than a dozen beers on tap. Clementine Bakery (299 Greene Avenue) serves vegan baked goods, sweet and savory, to eat in or take home, that are creative and (mostly) seasonal. On a recent visit, choices included apple spice cranberry bread, pumpkin cupcakes and scones baked with kale and vegan mozzarella. This summer, the business expanded into a bright space next door to its original location, which draws steady crowds, especially on weekends. For something more formal, the Finch (212 Greene Avenue) has become a popular choice, and it earned a Michelin star last year. The restaurant serves expertly prepared food in a relaxed atmosphere, with what are arguably the best seats on a perch that borders the open kitchen. The cooks use top tier ingredients, typically with a local and seasonal provenance, in specialties like grass fed beef tartare and squid ink tagliatelle with littleneck clams and shishito peppers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Under the vaulted glass roof of the Winter Garden, birds twitter and swoop in a grove of palm trees, and the gleaming stone steps climb up and up, curving out toward a vast wall of windows with sweeping Hudson River views. It's a dramatic setting, no question, and if you people watch a while at Brookfield Place, an upscale mall in Lower Manhattan that's a magnet for office workers and visitors to the nearby 9/11 Memorial, you'll see small children give into it unselfconsciously. Last week, a little girl in stripes spun and twirled in the open space where the staircase plateaus; down below, a little boy in a puffer coat danced up a few steps and promenaded a momentary detour into joyful abandon. Grown ups, though? They need some coaxing to let go of the everyday. That's the conceit, anyway, of "Oasis," a charming, cheering new piece of site specific theater from the company Third Rail Projects that opened in the Winter Garden last week, transforming that staircase into the stage it cries out to be. Spilling down those steps, the oasis of the title is an islet of tropical greenery (the set is by Dan Daly) inhabited by a beneficent mischief maker called the Muse (Madison Krekel). This is a realm of pleasure and rejuvenation, worlds away from the busy environs where the targets of her magic spend their stressed out days. (Judging by the costumes, designed by Jessy Smith, the era is the 1980s.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Credit...Chona Kasinger for The New York Times Coronavirus Cost to Businesses and Workers: 'It Has All Gone to Hell' A week ago, Mark Canlis's restaurant in Seattle was offering a 135 tasting menu to a bustling dining room every night. Eileen Hornor's inn on the Maine coast was booking rooms for the busy spring graduation season. And Kalena Masching, a real estate agent in California, was fielding multiple offers on a 1.2 million home. Then the coronavirus outbreak changed everything. Today, Mr. Canlis's restaurant is preparing to become a drive through operation serving burgers. Ms. Hornor is bleeding cash as she refunds deposits for scores of canceled reservations. And Ms. Masching is scrambling to save her sale after one offer after another fell through. "Last week, I would have told you nothing had changed," she said. "This week, it has all gone to hell." For weeks, forecasters have warned of the coronavirus's potential to disrupt the American economy. But there was little hard evidence beyond delayed shipments of goods from China and stomach churning volatility in financial markets. Not since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has a crisis enveloped so much of the economy so quickly. Broadway is dark. The college basketball tournaments are canceled and professional sports are on indefinite hold. Conferences, concerts and St. Patrick's Day parades have been called off or postponed. Even Disneyland which stayed open through a recession a decade ago that wiped out millions of American jobs and trillions of dollars in wealth is shuttered. "This hits the heart of the economy, and it hits the economy on all sides," said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton. "It's not just that we're slowing down things. We're actually hitting the pause button, and there is no precedent, there is no mold for that." "I have people who rely on me to be able to pay their rent," she said. "Not only do I have no money coming in, I'm kind of hemorrhaging cash in terms of refunds for everyone." Now that the outbreak is hitting the consumers, the damage is all but certain to spread. JPMorgan Chase said Thursday that it expected the U.S. economy to contract in the first two quarters of the year, which would meet a common definition of a recession. A survey of prominent academic economists, also released Thursday, found that a majority thought the outbreak was likely to cause a "major recession." For caterers, function halls and others whose business depends on large groups of people gathering together, business dried up nearly overnight. "It started Tuesday," said Elizabeth Perez, the co owner and marketing director for the Pavilion Grille in Boca Raton, Fla. "They were canceling Thursday night with a dinner for 47 people, and that was the first one." Then an Ultimate Chefs' dinner for 120 scheduled for March 22 was postponed. A bar mitzvah for 150 on May 30 canceled. "That's at least 10,000," Ms. Perez said. She normally employs 20 people at an event to serve food and bus tables. Since they are hourly workers, if there is no event, there is no pay. Last weekend, Ms. Masching, a broker with Redfin in Silicon Valley, got three offers on a 1.2 million home she had listed in Mountain View. But by Monday, two people had rescinded their offers and the third tried to back out, citing stock market losses, after her client had accepted. At the same time, she said, prospective buyers are deciding to hold back offers on the belief that the carnage could eventually lead to lower home prices. 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. "Most of our clients are using stock for their down payment, and they don't have the purchasing power they did even two weeks ago," she said. In much of the country, offices remain open, restaurants remain full and day to day life remains relatively normal, albeit with fewer handshakes and more hand washing. But in places where the virus is already widespread, the downturn is well underway. In Seattle, the place hit hardest so far by the outbreak in the United States, the normally bustling South Lake Union neighborhood has been eerily quiet since Amazon and other tech companies with headquarters in the area told their employees to work from home. That has been a disaster for Tom Douglas, a local chef with a dozen restaurants. Business is down 90 percent from usual. "This is a serious natural disaster I don't think a lot of people are thinking about it that way just because there's no winds and there's no floods," he said. "But this is a real natural disaster that's affecting people at the most basic level." The pullback from public life is sending shock waves beyond the hospitality industry. When restaurants close their doors, they no longer need tablecloths delivered by linen services or beer from local brewers. When people stop flying, they no longer need taxis to the airport or 5 bottles of water from the airport newsstand. Baden Sports, a sporting goods manufacturer in the Seattle suburb of Renton, provides basketballs and baseballs for youth leagues and college tournaments, many of which are now being canceled. Jake Licht, who runs the company, has imposed a hiring freeze and is drawing up a budget in preparation for a recession. "This is moving so fast," Mr. Licht said. "We had meetings and planning sessions three days ago that have already been invalidated. This is an hour by hour management challenge." The speed of the crisis has outpaced economists' ability to track it. As the stock market gyrated in recent days, economic data most of it from February, before the outbreak was widespread in the United States continued to look rosy. Even indicators that usually serve as early warning systems have yet to catch up: New claims for unemployment insurance actually fell last week and remain near a multidecade low. Still, there are early signs of a crisis that is still gaining steam. Measures of consumer sentiment fell sharply in early March, and indexes of business conditions have cratered. Airlines, ports, hotels and other directly affected industries have already announced layoffs or employee furloughs. Postings for restaurant jobs were down 26 percent last week compared with the same week a year ago, according to data from the job marketplace ZipRecruiter. Job listings in catering were down 39 percent and those in aviation down 44 percent. The workers who are feeling the effects of the pullback first are the ones least able to afford it: low wage, hourly employees, many of whom aren't paid if they miss work. Only one third of leisure and hospitality workers have access to any paid time off, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Wallace McLeod has worked at TapWerks Ale House in Oklahoma City's Bricktown district for five years, but he had never seen business as slow at the bar as it was on Thursday night. With 212 taps split between two stories, the pub would have been rocking with patrons heading to the Cher concert at the Chesapeake Energy Arena a few blocks away. "I wouldn't be able to talk to you right now if the concert were going on," he said in an interview. Instead, Cher's event was postponed, the bar was largely empty and a night that should have brought in as much as 13,000 in sales would be lucky to reach 4,000 if the regulars toughed it out. Bartenders expecting to make over 200 for the night would be lucky to bring home 80, Mr. McLeod said which meant they, too, would rein in their spending. "You have less money," Mr. McLeod said, noting he would have to put off a birthday party for his daughter. "You can't do as many things as you're used to doing." The strength of the economy before the coronavirus hit may provide some protection. Companies that have spent recent years struggling to attract and retain workers may be reluctant to lay them off, especially if they expect a relatively rapid rebound. Many businesses are doing whatever they can to hold on until then. Canlis is one of Seattle's highest end restaurants, with a piano player who entertains customers at the bar and a four course tasting menu that runs 135 a person. But when the outbreak began to spread in Seattle, business started to dry up. Mr. Canlis, one of the owners, realized that his business was "one headline away" from putting 100 plus employees out of a job. So over a three hour meeting in an apartment overlooking the city, the managers worked out a new plan. This week, the restaurant will start selling bagel sandwiches in the morning, running a drive through serving burgers and veggie melts for lunch and delivering dinner to the doorsteps of Seattle residents. "Fine dining is not what Seattle needs right now," the restaurant said in an Instagram post announcing the change. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
"In my head, I churn over every sentence ten times, delete a word, add an adjective, and learn my text by heart, paragraph by paragraph," wrote Jean Dominique Bauby in his memoir, "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." In the book, Mr. Bauby, a journalist and editor, recalled his life before and after a paralyzing stroke that left him virtually unable to move a muscle; he tapped out the book letter by letter, by blinking an eyelid. Thousands of people are reduced to similarly painstaking means of communication as a result of injuries suffered in accidents or combat, of strokes, or of neurodegenerative disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., that disable the ability to speak. Now, scientists are reporting that they have developed a virtual prosthetic voice, a system that decodes the brain's vocal intentions and translates them into mostly understandable speech, with no need to move a muscle, even those in the mouth. (The physicist and author Stephen Hawking used a muscle in his cheek to type keyboard characters , which a computer synthesized into speech.) "It's formidable work, and it moves us up another level toward restoring speech" by decoding brain signals, said Dr. Anthony Ritaccio, a neurologist and neuroscientist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., who was not a member of the research group. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Researchers have developed other virtual speech aids. Those work by decoding the brain signals responsible for recognizing letters and words, the verbal representations of speech. But those approaches lack the speed and fluidity of natural speaking. The new system, described on Wednesday in the journal Nature , deciphers the brain's motor commands guiding vocal movement during speech the tap of the tongue, the narrowing of the lips and generates intelligible sentences that approximate a speaker's natural cadence. Experts said the new work represented a "proof of principle," a preview of what may be possible after further experimentation and refinement. The system was tested on people who speak normally; it has not been tested in people whose neurological conditions or injuries, such as common strokes, could make the decoding difficult or impossible. For the new trial, scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, and U.C. Berkeley recruited five people who were in the hospital being evaluated for epilepsy surgery. Many people with epilepsy do poorly on medication and opt to undergo brain surgery. Before operating, doctors must first locate the "hot spot" in each person's brain where the seizures originate; this is done with electrodes that are placed in the brain, or on its surface, and listen for telltale electrical storms. Pinpointing this location can take weeks. In the interim, patients go through their days with electrodes implanted in or near brain regions that are involved in movement and auditory signaling. These patients often consent to additional experiments that piggyback on those implants. Five such patients at U.C.S.F. agreed to test the virtual voice generator. Each had been implanted with one or two electrode arrays: stamp size pads, containing hundreds of tiny electrodes, that were placed on the surface of the brain. As each participant recited hundreds of sentences, the electrodes recorded the firing patterns of neurons in the motor cortex. The researchers associated those patterns with the subtle movements of the patient's lips, tongue, larynx and jaw that occur during natural speech. The team then translated those movements into spoken sentences. Native English speakers were asked to listen to the sentences to test the fluency of the virtual voices. As much as 70 percent of what was spoken by the virtual system was intelligible, the study found. "We showed, by decoding the brain activity guiding articulation, we could simulate speech that is more accurate and natural sounding than synthesized speech based on extracting sound representations from the brain," said Dr. Edward Chang, a professor of neurosurgery at U.C.S.F. and an author of the new study. His colleagues were Gopala K. Anumanchipalli, also of U.C.S.F., and Josh Chartier, who is affiliated with both U.C.S.F. and Berkeley. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Three tiers of walnut bookshelves, under a vaulted ceiling painted with muses and zodiac signs, line the walls of the financier J.P. Morgan's private study at the Morgan Library Museum. You've shot your selfies in Rockefeller Center, you've combed the sale racks at Bloomingdale's and now you're ready to discover the museums of New York like a proper local. Join me! I've got a plan to introduce you to three midsize institutions and one little diversion, all close enough for a single afternoon's tour (and with enough time in there for a bite). We'll be walking from 36th to 47th Streets, on the eastern stretches of Midtown Manhattan; this guide proceeds south to north, but it works just as well in the other direction . Check opening times before you go; Monday is a day off for most of these destinations, and hours can change around the holidays. Our first stop is the Morgan Library Museum (225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street; general admission, 22), a citadel of the first Gilded Age that continues to collect and surprise in this second one . Start in the grand, original palazzo, completed in 1906, which the architect Charles McKim designed to house the financier J. Pierpont Morgan's collection of manuscripts, early books and old masters. Feel free to gawk at Morgan's study, where paintings by Perugino and Hans Memling hang in front of red damask wallpaper, and don't miss the unfailingly crisp Della Robbia ceramic reliefs in the marble soaked rotunda. Morgan's private library is kitted out with three tiers of Circassian walnut bookshelves, under a vaulted ceiling painted with muses and zodiac signs. Here you can scrutinize manuscript acquisitions old and new: One case contains sheet music by the 13 year old Franz Schubert (his earliest surviving composition) and a pop up book from the contemporary artist Kara Walker, featuring her disquieting silhouettes. Right now the Morgan also has temporary exhibitions devoted to Giuseppe Verdi, John Singer Sargent and the photographer Duane Michals. Where the Morgan excels particularly is in shows of drawings, and in its intimate "Cube" gallery, more than two dozen sheets by Guercino, the 17th century Italian polymath, reveal the vigor and experimentation that went into his Baroque altarpieces. Highlights in this show, "Guercino: Virtuoso Draftsman," include a tender and refined drawing of Christ crowned with thorns, dating to 1647 and done with an unusual combination of black, red and white chalk. In one of the central cases, don't miss the incredible seated male nude, probably depicting Seneca committing suicide in the bath, that Guercino energetically drew on the back of a letter. (Through Feb. 2.) One block east of the Morgan Library is Scandinavia House (58 Park Avenue, between 37th and 38th Streets; free admission), an institution devoted to the culture of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Along with a library and a concert hall where on Dec. 15 you can catch the Swedish Church Choir of New York, celebrating the feast of Saint Lucia, a Nordic tradition Scandinavia House contains a small gallery. Up now is "Cutting Edges," a group show of abstract painting drawn from a private Norwegian collection. (Through Feb. 15.) The most interesting work among these hard edge geometric compositions might be the interlocking X's and squares by the veteran Finnish artist Paul Osipow. Almost none of the artists here have had much American exposure; enjoy it, and maybe buy some good Scandinavian licorice in the gift shop downstairs. ) Turn left when you leave Scandinavia House and walk a few blocks up Park Avenue into Grand Central Terminal, the jewel of our otherwise decrepit transit system. (We aren't in Copenhagen anymore, Toto although, to continue the Scandi mood, you might enjoy a cinnamon bun or an open faced sandwich in the station's tasty Great Northern Food Hall.) Spend a few minutes admiring the sparely beautiful celestial mural that arches over the main concourse, though try to do so without blocking poor commuters running for their trains. Then make your way into the annex of the New York Transit Museum (free admission), right off the main concourse, where locomotive loving kids and adults can enjoy the annual Holiday Train Show . Engines and rail cars whip around a miniature Grand Central, Chrysler Building and Empire State Building, past the gentrification victims CBGB and the Lenox Lounge, and all the way out to the country. You'll see a model of the Polar Express, as well as of an M.T.A. subway train a lot cleaner than any you were on today. (Through Feb. 23.) Walk east from Grand Central toward the United Nations. Our last stop is the calm oasis of Japan Society (333 East 47th Street ; general admission, 12), which complements its language courses, public debates, festivals and film programs with a reliably intelligent art gallery. The current show is "Made in Tokyo: Architecture and Living: 1964 2020" (through Jan. 26), which was curated with verve by the architecture firm Atelier Bow Wow and looks at changes in the built environment between the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the games opening there next summer. You'll find 50 year old drawings by Kenzo Tange of the Yoyogi National Stadium , where Olympians competed under an iconic swooping roof, as well as a model of Kengo Kuma's nearly complete timber clad New National Stadium. Compared with the concrete expanses of Tokyo, the world's largest city, the New York you'll step back into afterward should feel positively villagelike. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Shortly after they began dating, Lina Marie Mano and Andrew Silvestri started playing a game called 20 questions. "We made individual lists of 20 questions that we could ask each other any time we wanted," said Mr. Silvestri, 34, the head of data center public policy and community development at Google in Oklahoma City. "We made a rule that no matter the question, we had to be totally honest with our answers," he said. "It was a nice way to clear the air about a lot of things, or to simply learn new things, or to possibly come to know more about each other than we had previously known." Ms. Mano learned just how good Mr. Silvestri was at playing the game when he fielded her first question "Do you prefer dating blondes or brunettes?," a little too smoothly. Ms. Mano wasn't thrilled. "I guess I wasted that question," she said. Several other questions, especially those regarding past relationships, produced the kind of delicate answers that took the couple from frivolity to fragility. "Those questions didn't always go over so well, but that was the point," said Ms. Mano, 35, the senior merchandise planner in fine apparel and couture collections for the Neiman Marcus Group in Dallas. "The whole idea was to create question and answer sessions that brought new information into our conversations," she said, "or at the very least, added much more depth and insight to anything we chatted about. It was great." Mr. Silvestri had just returned from a failed date, and began telling anyone within earshot, including Ms. Mano, all about it. "I was on a Bumble date, appropriately enough," he said. "The plan was to go out for drinks and then to dinner, but midway through the date, we both knew it wasn't going anywhere, so we decided to cut the evening short right then and there." After the woeful tale, he was introduced to Ms. Mano. "Hey, are you single," he asked, "Why don't we go out?" Ms. Mano recalled "laughing it off and then ignoring him." "I actually thought he was funny and very cute," she added, "but I didn't think he really meant what he said, because he lived in Oklahoma City and I lived in Dallas." Yet before going their separate ways, they both felt they had made an immediate connection, having spent a few hours telling stories and laughing with one another. She said yes, setting into motion a long distance relationship that began with a first date at a restaurant in Oklahoma City. They were part of a larger group that night, all of whom heard Ms. Mano continually call Mr. Silvestri, "Alex," the name of a mutual friend who was already a part of the group. Mr. Silvestri laughed it off, as did Ms. Mano, and the next night, he took her to an Oklahoma City basketball game against the visiting Phoenix Suns. "My big fear was that we were going to end up on the Kiss Cam," Ms. Mano said. "Thankfully that didn't happen." Kiss or no kiss, Mr. Silvestri said: "I fell for her pretty fast and pretty hard. One morning in March 2017, Ms. Mano and Mr. Silvestri began making plans for a trip to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, one of Mr. Silvestri's favorite places. "There is always such a hectic scene there," he said. "But if you go around to the back of the memorial, which faces Virginia and the river, it's like a different world, so peaceful and quiet. "When I was in college, I always imagined bringing my future wife there," he added. On the day of the trip, Mr. Silvestri delighted in telling Ms. Mano that it just so happened to be Date No. 25, reminding her, as per their arrangement, that she was officially his girlfriend. "I had no idea he was actually counting our dates," Ms. Mano said. Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. "When Lina came into my life, I was running around about 100 miles per hour, like a madman, always dealing with work or education related issues," Mr. Silvestri said. "But she centered my spirit, allowing me to calm down and refocus, and to realize that nothing is more important than family." Ms. Mano credited Mr. Silvestri "with kind of pushing me to be a more open and strong person." "I'm sort of shy," she said, "but Andrew pushes me out of my comfort zone sometimes and allows me to have a voice." Two years later, in January 2019, the couple returned to the Lincoln Memorial, and this time, Mr. Silvestri dropped to one knee, and asked Ms. Mano Question No. 19 on his 20 question list: "Will you marry me?" Then, in August 2019, Mr. Silvestri, the youngest of three children, was dealt a crushing blow when his mother died from complications of pancreatic cancer. "Our getting engaged was a moment for us to really celebrate life and take advantage of family, then suddenly, my mom was not there to help us celebrate," said Mr. Silvestri, beginning to cry. "It was just devastating." Ms. Mano, who has an older sister, said "losing his mother only made Andrew lean heavier on family." "If he's not around family," she said, "he's usually trying to get family together." They were married July 25 at the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center in Oklahoma City before 100 guests. The groom's father, Paul Silvestri, who was ordained by Church of Christ, officiated. The coronavirus forced the couple to drop their original wedding date, March 21, and to shave 150 family members and friends from their guest list. "Andrew and Lina, in just a few minutes you are going to step into a life that is full of new possibilities, new dreams and new hopes," the groom's father said. "You see, this marriage was in the making nearly 35 years ago beginning on the day Andrew was born. "I don't think a day passed by where we didn't pray and ask God to bring just the right woman for Andrew to marry and asking God to also prepare Andrew to be the right man for the woman he chose," he told the bride. "You are God's answer to all these years of prayer and we couldn't be happier." Neither could the newlyweds, who, according to the rules of a game they began playing four years earlier, still have one question left to ask each other. The subject of that official 20th question could be anything in the coming years, given what could lie ahead. Children? Promotions? Vacation plans? "Having used up all of our other questions has made this last one that much more valuable," the groom said. "The possibilities are endless." The Bride's Attire She donned an Oscar de la Renta Landon silk V neck trumpet gown with draped ruffle back and illusion neckline. She also wore, Miu Miu metallic leather sandals with crystal studded straps, embellished butterfly earrings by Nicola Bathie, and a yellow gold Cartier love bracelet given to her by the groom on their wedding day. The Groom's Attire He wore a midnight navy blue pin dot tuxedo with Giuseppe Zanotti's Lewis cup crystal embellished black suede loafers, his grandfathers gold cuff links, and a Z Blue Dial Milgauss Rolex watch, given to him by the bride on their wedding day. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
ON this big night out, Gisele Bundchen, darling of the cameras, is decked out in diamond earrings from Van Cleef Arpels. The cover girl Shalom Harlow wears rocks from Harry Winston. And Madonna, that proto Gaga, is bejeweled in Cartier. But none of the gems actually belongs to them. At the May gala of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute, these A listers are simply borrowing their baubles from some big names in diamonds, a common P.R. tactic in the high glitz business of gems. Yet jewels from Laurence Graff, perhaps the biggest dealer in seriously big stones, are rare this evening. "The people who wear Graff jewelry own it," says Henri Barguirdjian, who heads Mr. Graff's United States sales operation. "I think it is a bit of an insult to our clients who actually purchased our jewelry," he adds, referring to the notion of non owners wearing Graff jewels. "If you spend 1 million, that is a lot of money. Do you want a little model wearing it?" It might seem remarkable that anyone would spurn a little free fashion buzz, particularly in a business like diamonds, and particularly in tough economic times. Lending jewels to boldface names is standard practice. Standard, perhaps but not at Graff Diamonds. The retail business, however, is only part of an empire that extends from luxe showrooms in London to gritty diamond mines in southern Africa to cutting rooms in Antwerp, Belgium, and beyond. It is a world that at times seems impervious to the fortunes of mere mortals, though not, it turns out, to the shifting sands of the global economy. Beneath the headquarters of Graff on Albemarle Street, in the Mayfair section of London, is a warren of workrooms. There, 170 people produce the jewelry that Graff sells worldwide. But now Mr. Graff is pushing into China, where the number of billionaires is climbing annually and ranks second only to that of the United States. Everyone else is piling in, too. The exploding market for diamonds in China, it seems, is yet another sign of its rising economic might, or at least the willingness of its ultrarich to spend and spend big. "We make more sales to newer money than to older money," Mr. Graff says in explaining China's appeal. "Americans are not attracted in the same way in spending money on jewelry as in the Far East." Let others fret over a mere carat or two. Mr. Graff's purchases of giant gems awe the diamond world. Over the decades, he has sold many major stones, including the Magnificence, a 244 carat white diamond, and the Maharajah, a 78 carat yellow diamond. Graff Diamonds hit the headlines in 2009 when robbers made off with 65 million of gems from its shop in Mayfair, in the largest jewel heist in British history. (The jewels have not been recovered.) His customers have included Oprah Winfrey, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Denzel Washington, Victoria Beckham and Danielle Steel. In the past three years, Mr. Graff spent more than 100 million on four diamonds. That's right: 100 million to buy just four stones. For one of them, a flawless, 24.78 carat pink diamond, he paid a record 46 million last year at a Geneva auction. And he is not likely to lend it to anyone for the evening. Today, Mr. Graff's offerings include a necklace of 26 stones cut from the Lesotho Promise, a 603 carat rough stone that he bought for 12.4 million from the Letseng Mine in the African country of Lesotho. The company now values the necklace at more than 60 million. Also for sale is the Graff Constellation, a 102.79 carat flawless round diamond that was cut from the 18.4 million, 478 carat Light of Letseng. Not that he buys only rough stones. He paid 24 million for the 35.5 carat Wittelsbach diamond, a fancy blue stone that is a rival to the Hope Diamond. In a controversial move, he recut the diamond to remove imperfections, prompting criticism that he had essentially painted over a Rembrandt. The Wittelsbach Graff sold recently for an undisclosed amount. Mr. Graff oversees a network of 32 stores worldwide, and owns 12.14 percent of Gem Diamonds, a publicly traded mining company. Through a 51 percent stake, he controls the South African Diamond Corporation, which cuts and polishes diamonds; Safdico has 520 employees in places like Johannesburg, Antwerp, Mauritius and Botswana. Though Hollywood celebrities are often photographed wearing big gems, "they are not big purchasers," Mr. Graff, 73, says. "They don't have that sort of money." Increasingly, the sort of money that moves this market is Chinese. Though buyers rarely disclose purchases, experts agree that the Chinese appetite for diamonds particularly for colored diamonds is growing. The American diamond market, like the American economy, has slowed in recent years. Mr. Graff plans only one new store in United States, in San Francisco, a city that has many visitors from Asia. Graff already has three stores in East Asia, and plans to open one in mainland China and one on Taiwan. The swing to Asia, and China in particular, has startled even Graff's veteran management. "If you had told me five years ago that the biggest buyers would come from the People's Republic of China, we would have laughed," says Mr. Barguirdjian, Mr. Graff's longtime lieutenant. "It took us by surprise. America used to be the No. 1 market. Now that is being challenged." Graff, of course, is hardly the only player in China. Competition there, even for Graff, is fierce. DeBeers has two stores in China and is opening three more this year. Tiffany Company has 15 stores in China among its total of 240, and is planning more. Leviev, another major diamond dealer, has no stores in China, though it just finished a two week exhibit in Shanghai and Beijing. DIAMONDS are in many ways a hush hush business. The inner workings of Graff, like those of most of the big players, are difficult to penetrate. While Compagnie Financiere Richemont, owner of Cartier and Van Cleef, is traded on the Swiss stock exchange, it does not break out those jewelers' earnings. Nor does DeBeers Diamond Jewelry, the retail operation DeBeers owns with the luxury giant LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, disclose the profits from its retail stores. At Graff, one must depend on Mr. Graff's numbers. Sitting in his elegant shop on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Mr. Graff, dressed in a tailored blue suit and blue tie, says 2010 was a good year for his empire. His companies, he says, generated worldwide sales of nearly 1 billion. Of that, 437 million came from Graff Diamonds, the retail arm, which turned a profit of 64 million after taxes. The Lesotho Promise, shown left, a 603 carat rough diamond, was bought by Laurence Graff for 12.4 million. It yielded the 26 multi shaped polished diamonds, right, all of which were set in a necklace now valued at more than 60 million. The balance of his operations include his stake in Safdico, the diamond and polishing business, as well as Diamond Works, a wholesale diamond company. Those two are in turn under the umbrella of AE Holdings. All are based in countries known as tax havens AE in Switzerland, Safdico in Mauritius and Diamond Works in Luxembourg. Revenue from those businesses last year totaled 550 million, Mr. Graff says, but margins are far lower than in the retail business. (He declines to elaborate.) All of this has been highly lucrative for him. The Sunday Times of London has estimated his wealth at 3.2 billion in 2010. His holdings also include a vineyard and a resort in South Africa, as well as an art collection that includes Picassos and Warhols. He gave up his British residency 11 years ago, moving to Geneva and Gstaad, Switzerland, where the personal income tax rate is far lower than in Britain. Like Harry Winston, who died more than three decades ago, Mr. Graff has made his fortune selling big diamonds. But his beginnings were humble. The son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, he grew up in the hard scrabble East End of London. "From an early age, I could see a little area called Black Lion Yard where the Jewish people bought diamonds," he recalls. It was, he says, a place where people wanted to put their money in something that seemed safe, something tangible. "It has been the same forever," he says. "Whether it was royal families in different parts of the world, or today, when people worry that their dollars are worth nothing, they want assets that will increase in value silent assets that you can put in your pocket because tomorrow, anything can go wrong." As a young man, Mr. Graff was such a poor student that by the time he was 14, his mother had arranged for him to work as an apprentice for a jeweler, doing chores like washing floors and fetching sandwiches. He lost that job. "I guess I was not good enough," he recalled. Shortly thereafter, he went into a jewelry business with a partner. That venture went into debt, and Mr. Graff decided to take it over. Within six months he had paid off the debt and, displaying a certain panache for sales, began traveling around Britain, selling jewelry made with semi precious stones. Mr. Graff later helped make some of the costume jewelry that Elizabeth Taylor wore in her film role as Cleopatra, alongside Richard Burton. Soon Mr. Graff was traveling to Asia. His first coup was on a trip to Singapore, where a local department store bought his collection. By the 1970s, he was off to Japan, Hong Kong and the Middle East. "I went everywhere," he says. "I was the first real Westerner who came into that market as a wholesaler: a man carrying a case of jewels." Starting in the 1970s, Mr. Graff began selling jewels to the sultan of Brunei. Mr. Graff became close enough to the royal family that the sultan's brother lent him his Aston Martin during his visits. On a trip to the Philippines, he sold millions of dollars in jewelry to Imelda Marcos. By the time wealthy Arabs arrived in London in the 1980s, Mr. Graff was the man to see. At that time, prices for big stones were beginning to rise. A watershed moment came in 1987: Francois Curiel, who heads the jewelry department for Christie's, president of Christie's Asia, recalled that in that year, a red diamond weighing 0.95 carat sold for 880,000, or 926,000 a carat. Before that, the highest price per carat for a diamond was 127,000. That was an anomaly, but prices for large colored stones have since been rising. WHEN the petrodollars stopped gushing, Mr. Graff looked beyond the Middle East. In 1998, he bought his 51 percent of Safdico. Three years later, he opened his first store in the United States. To establish his brand here, he struck a deal to open a number of boutiques in Saks Fifth Avenue stores. "That got our name out overnight," he says. Despite all the publicity about major diamond sales, even experienced dealers still struggle to read the tea leaves. At a Christie's jewelry auction in April this year, the Graff team decided to bid up to 2.6 million for a fancy blue 3.25 carat diamond that was estimated to sell for 3 million to 3.2 million. (On top of the auction price, buyers must pay Christie's an additional 20 percent.) Graff's thinking was that a retailer could not possibly charge a big enough mark up over 3 million to spend more for the stone. When a buyer agreed to a total of 3.66 million, Mr. Barguirdjian concluded that the buyer was probably a private individual in Asia, because "three carats is too small for an American." He was half right: it was an individual, but from Europe. Just how Graff manages to carry an inventory worth many hundreds of millions is one of the great puzzles of the diamond market. Even experts scratch their heads about its finances. One veteran jeweler, who did not want to comment publicly on industry names, says of Mr. Graff: It is "a mystery where he gets the financing to carry so much inventory." But Mr. Graff says that carrying the inventory is no problem. While the world of Graff might seem unaffected by the ups and downs of the workaday economy, it was in fact hurt by the recent slowdown. In 2008 and 2009, even the superrich pulled back. In 2008, Graff Diamonds turned a pretax profit of 77 million on sales of 538 million, according to its chief financial officer, Nick Paine. In 2009, sales dropped to 432 million, and pretax profits to 62 million. Last year, sales were virtually flat, but pretax profits jumped to 86 million, mostly because of sales of smaller pieces with higher mark ups. Which raises the question of how large his inventory of large stones has become. Mr. Graff says he can turn a bigger profit by buying large, rough stones. "I will make my money on buying the rough, in my polishing it and getting it to a certain level of market price," he says. It can take from three months to a year to cut a rough stone. Cutting the Lesotho stone into 26 pieces, for instance, took nearly a year and involved more than a dozen people, he says. Over time, the appetite for big stones hasn't surprised Martin Rapaport, publisher of the Rapaport Diamond Report, an industry bible. Big diamonds are a way to move money without a trace. "Billionaires everywhere in the world like to keep some of their wealth in something easily transportable," he says. Mr. Graff, now in his eighth decade, is circumspect about the future. His son Francois, 47, works for him in London. But two years ago, a potentially smooth family transition seemed at risk. Mr. Graff and his wife of 47 years, Anne Marie, were set to divorce after Mr. Graff fathered a child with a woman who had worked for him. The London tabloids screamed that it would be the largest divorce settlement in British history. At the last minute, the couple reconciled. And Mr. Graff is open in recognizing his daughter. "She carries my name and her mother's name," he said last week. The Graff family empire, flawless or not, seems to be diamond hard. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Beyond the noisy throngs marveling at the dinosaurs, the dioramas and the immense blue whale, up on the fifth floor where visitors are not allowed, the American Museum of Natural History takes on an entirely different character. The neatly labeled metal lockers that line the hallway are much like the stacks of a research library, except that instead of books there are many of the museum's millions of specimens, from ants in amber to dry mounted birds. Signs point the way to invertebrates, entomology, ornithology. Here, it is the quiet home of the Richard Gilder Graduate School, whose 13 students are earning doctorates in the specialized field of comparative biology, teasing out what fossils from the Gobi Desert and leeches and frogs have to reveal about the evolutionary tree of life. The museum is the first in the nation accredited to offer a doctorate in its own name. But around the country, all kinds of museums are venturing deeper into the world of education, finding new ways to use their collections in research and teacher training, and bringing in more students, in person and virtually. Many have entered into partnerships with local universities. Last year, Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry introduced a master's in science education with the Illinois Institute of Technology. The Getty Conservation Institute is in partnership with the University of California, Los Angeles, in a master's in conservation of ethnographic and archeological materials. The Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York joins with Parsons, the New School for Design, in a master's in the history of decorative arts and design. And it may not be long before others try to follow the Natural History Museum's lead in offering their own degree. "We've had inquiries from quite a few other museums, and they're watching what we're doing with interest," says John Flynn, the paleontologist who is dean of the Gilder Graduate School, in its third year and accredited since 2009. "Many museums already have a lot of what you need the collections, the curators, the libraries, the tradition of research." "There's been a redefinition of the schoolhouse, as the roles of different institutions are being blurred," says Ellen V. Futter, the president of the museum. All told, about 100 graduate students, including visiting students from the museum's longtime partner universities and postdoctoral fellows, roam the fifth floor. Gilder itself accepts only four or five students a year, an eclectic group of American and international scholars, some straight from college, some with master's degrees and years of work experience as a veterinary technician or a high school biology teacher. On a sunny morning this spring, the four first years and two visiting students from other New York grad schools gathered for their "Evolution" seminar in a cozy classroom that reflects the museum's Victorian character. It has a fireplace, bay window with window seats, and huge mounted caribou head with elaborately arching antlers. "Evolution" is one of only three required classes. (The others are "Grantsmanship, Ethics and Communications," in which students write grant proposals and sometimes get money and "Systematics and Biogeography," which deals with the relationships among species and organization of life, past and present.) For an hour and a half, Jin Meng, a paleontology curator who team teaches the class, talked about the morphological differences between New World and Old World monkeys, the history of the research and fossil finds, and how delicately Darwin had to approach the new concept of human evolution. In many ways, it could have been a graduate seminar at any research university. But the Natural History Museum's program has some real differences. It is four years instead of the usual five. And most students go on extended field trips around the globe. For Shaena Montanari, a third year paleontology student interested in chemically analyzing dinosaur fossils to learn what they ate, the Gobi Desert has been a trove of specimens. "The Gobi is very fossiliferous," she says. "That's a word, right? Anyway, there's a lot of fossils there, very well preserved. You can even find a dinosaur brooding on a nest of eggs." The quest to map and fill in the evolutionary tree of life is both the hallmark of the museum's scientific program and the focus of most of the students' research. How are frogs that burrow related to frogs that climb trees? How have leeches adapted to survive exclusively on blood? Dawn Roje, a first year student researching flatfish, says that having that common interest is one of the pleasures of the program. "I've done the university thing, and in a big biology department my interests wouldn't be in the mainstream," says Ms. Roje, who is going to Madagascar in the fall to gather tissue samples. "Here we all share an interest in phylogenetics. We're all into that tree of life thing. I like being one of the white sheep, not the black sheep in the group." Elective courses change from year to year, depending on students' interest. This year's offerings include a field course in Mexico on parasitology and another on major events in vertebrate evolution. And because many will move on to academia, students are required to complete two teaching stints, one as a teaching assistant in a university course and another that can be in a less formal setting, like one of the museum's education programs. For his informal teaching, Mr. Kvist worked with a student in the museum's undergraduate research program, a 10 week summer internship. He taught her DNA extraction and sequencing, and she was listed as an author on an article, "Teaching Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology," published this year in The American Biology Teacher. "The saying 'see one, do one, teach one' really became evident to me," Mr. Kvist says. "It's true that you never fully understand something unless you've taught it to someone else." Given the size of the program, with 50 or more applicants a year, it is an achievement just to be admitted. The doctoral students get full support tuition, a stipend and at least 2,000 of unrestricted research money, which can be supplemented by grants or further support from the school. Mr. Gilder, the brokerage founder who is the museum's largest donor, provided a 50 million endowment for the school. The students get to work closely with the curators the museum's tenured scientists, the equivalent of full professors at a university. And they have access to the specimens gathered over the 142 years of the museum's history, shelves crammed with wet samples and jars of iguanas, floor space taken up with large tanks for alligator and komodo dragon specimens. There are endless halls of insect specimens, and rooms where fossils are carefully brushed out of the sand they were buried in. There are state of the art molecular labs and an imaging lab in which students can take CT scans of a rotating specimen and magnify them the better to count how many scales a lizard has on its legs. Several of the graduate students say they have always been critter people as interested in ants and bees and leeches as in more cuddly mammals. Phil Barden, a first year student who studies fossil ants in amber, confessed wistfully that he sometimes misses live ants and watching the way they move. "I'm going to set up a live colony in my office," he says. "I just have to go out and collect a few queens." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Greg Boatwright is heading for a nervous breakdown. If that wasn't obvious after the series premiere last week, in which his favorite call girl gave him an X rated 60th birthday present and he regaled his party guests with a speech disavowing his life's work, it certainly is now. Midway through this week's episode, Greg orders his young philosophy students to put away their laptops and smartphones so that he can deliver another deeply pessimistic monologue. This time, the subject is empathy. "Imagine," he instructs them, "that I am a man of immense wealth and power, who could do a lot of good things for a lot of people and the world. But because of my crippling self loathing, I just keep taking more of everything for myself. If you can imagine such a person exists." Bitter laughter fills the room, and what was implicit in the premiere becomes explicit: Greg's crisis is about Donald Trump. As he sees it, empathy is no longer a viable mode of dissent. Sure, he argues, one can acknowledge that "psychic pain" dictates this, er, imaginary man's behavior. But acknowledging that distress accomplishes nothing besides lulling a person into complacency. "Are you suggesting that we not strive to choose empathy over fear?" asks his nervous teaching assistant. "Because that's kind of the cornerstone of your philosophy." This has the potential to be a rich conversation, even if you don't share Greg's bleak point of view. I only wish Alan Ball, the creator of "Here and Now" and the author of its first two episodes, had found a different way to start it. A subtler screenwriter might have heeded that ancient writing workshop maxim "Show, don't tell." But a show's political agenda doesn't have to be subtle to be effective, as both seasons of FX's blunt yet poignant "American Crime Story" have proven. The bigger problem is that Ball is dictating what each of his characters represents before we have much insight into who they are. Ashley is the screen on which society's racism is projected. Kristen, who talks openly about slut shaming and menstruation in class, is becoming the show's avatar for feminism. She's had the bad luck of contracting chlamydia from her very first sexual encounter, and when Ashley takes her to Planned Parenthood, Kristen beats up an anti abortion protester who calls her a "dumb whore." Both sisters get arrested, but while the cops goof around with Kristen, who finds the whole experience exhilarating, a female officer humiliates Ashley, forcing her to remove her wig, questioning her about her expensive purse and cracking that the tampon she finds inside it explains Ashley's bad mood. The upshot? Ashley embraces her natural hair. Sure, why not? Apart from my certainty that even the nastiest female cop wouldn't have made that tampon joke, what's irritating about this story line is that it's just as didactic as Greg's lecture. It doesn't give us any insight into who Ashley and Kristen are as individuals. From the clunkiness of its plot points to the laundry list of racial and gender issues it neatly checks off, the episode reduces one character to the archetypal oppressed black woman and the other to the archetypal entitled white girl. Audrey's story line, which casts her as a true believer in the power of empathy, is just as frustrating. We discover what her Empathy Initiative actually does, sort of, when the principal of Kristen's high school seeks her advice on what to do about a "Northern European Heritage Society" that some students have recently organized. Many students are, understandably, angry about what they see as a school sanctioned neo Nazi organization. So, Audrey brings the factions together and, thanks to the magic of "I feel" statements, quickly gets the white kids to back down. Well, that was easy. Then there's poor Duc, who's stuck with this episode's worst subplot. In a painfully expository exchange ("Fairfax Press loves the latest draft of your book, not to mention your Twitter and Instagram followings"), we learn that he's visiting Vancouver to meet with a potential publisher. Fairfax, which also happens to have published Greg's groundbreaking book, offers him a deal, with the caveat that he has to ask his father to write the foreword. This scene apparently exists to reinforce what was already apparent from the premiere: Duc is living in Greg's shadow. Got it. More ridiculous is the sequence in which Duc, who's supposed to be celibate, beds a series of women in quick succession. These erotic thriller shots are interspersed with flashbacks to his childhood in Vietnam, where a young Duc is forced to watch a prostitute, presumably his mother, sleep with clients. (At first, because there's no dialogue and the editing is so ambiguous, I thought the whole sequence was an abstinence induced hallucination.) By the end of the Vancouver trip, this compulsively healthy "motivational architect" is swimming in empty beer bottles, junk food wrappers and shame. I guess this means he's a secret sex addict? Duc and Ashley aren't the only characters of color whose lives are defined solely by their identity markers or their past trauma. When we finally get a few minutes with Farid's family, we find that they talk and think mostly about being Muslim. He worries that his wife will be attacked for wearing her hijab, and both parents are concerned about what might become of their religiously committed, gender fluid son, Navid, who likes to wear a veil and heavy eye makeup at home. Navid also has some kind of fascination with Kristen, which raises the slightly more interesting question of whether these two families are being drawn together by some force greater than themselves. The only relief from the episode's doomsaying monologues and menagerie of marginalized identities that stand in for multidimensional personalities is Ramon's story which is, thankfully, too weird to be summed up by the fact that he's gay and Colombian. He now knows that Farid is the boy from his dream. We find out that the doctor is also disturbed by their encounter, and that the Persian phrase Ramon heard Farid's mother utter in the dream means, "It's coming." So, what exactly is coming? Well, Ramon and Henry's relationship has gotten so sweet, I'm worried something tragic is about to befall the two characters who make me feel feelings. Meanwhile, Ramon, known to his older siblings as "Baby Jesus," wonders if he's been "chosen." If not, maybe schizophrenia is what's coming. When he catches his family debating how to handle that possibility, he vows not to "come at it from fear." Messianic Ramon has picked his side of the empathy vs. fear dichotomy. Audrey chose empathy long ago, for better or worse. Greg, Duc, Ashley and the Shokranis seem consumed by various fears. And, as exasperating as I found this episode, I'm curious to watch "Here and Now" track the ways its characters are served by the approaches to living they've chosen. I just hope they become real people at some point along the way. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
To be photographed by Bill Cunningham, spontaneously, enthusiastically, on the street, put an extra skip into many a mode ish step. The appearance of the resulting photo in one of Bill's New York Times columns, On the Street or Evening Hours, was the fashion equivalent of a papal blessing. Why? Because Bill knew, and everyone knew that Bill knew. Exactly what did Bill know? It's not entirely clear. Bill was an enigma wrapped in a bright blue French sanitation worker's jacket. When I saw him flying down Fifth Avenue on his trusty bicycle, flitting from event to runway, like a kingfisher on crack, relentlessly documenting the vanities of New York City, I often used to speculate about his inner dialogue. "Fashion Climbing" is a record of Bill's early years, found among his papers after his death in 2016. Set against a backdrop of postwar retail, high society and fashion, this obscenely enjoyable romp fills in part of the Cunningham back story and provides tantalizing peeks into the psyche of the guarded and mysterious Bill. Read Bill Cunningham's own thoughts on his career In 1933, Bill Cunningham's mother came home to their "drab, puritanical" Boston Catholic enclave and caught her son vamping through the house in his sister's pink organdy full skirted dress. She gave him a beating. Bill was 4. Almost 90 years later, in the age of trans, it's hard not to wince. But young Bill is undeterred. He charges ahead, living vicariously through his sisters, buying dresses and furs for his horrified mother, obsessively unpacking and examining her wedding gown, and frantically reimagining the family Christmas tree, in July. What was driving him? He describes it as "some devilish fire, flaming inside the deepest corners of my soul." Was he sublimating homosexuality? Even as I write the question I can see the ghost of Bill he has screeched to a halt on that bicycle and is dismounting glowering reproachfully at me for indulging in such clunky Freudian speculation. Bill hailed from the never complain never explain generation. Retail provides an early outlet for his devilish fire. An after school job at Jordan Marsh "my favorite departments were better dresses, furs and handbags" gave teenage Bill an opportunity to study fashion design and construction. When Bonwit Teller opens in Boston, Bill describes the process in detail, including the anti Semitic missteps of the marketing campaign. Bill dives into the fray, making himself indispensable. In 1948, he walks away from a Harvard scholarship in order to join Bonwit's training program in New York City, such is the ferocity of that devilish fire. Bill's quirky, unpretentious voice guides the reader through the postwar period of Manhattan glamour. Having got the measure of retail, he starts a millinery business using the name William J. (The omission of the last name was an attempt to minimize the cringings of his conventional family.) Designing, fabricating and selling hats instantly consumes his waking hours, with one major exception: fancy pants costume parties. During this period, Bill concocts surreal and demented costumes for himself and his friends, involving, among other items, excitable chickens and a life size papier mache elephant. Other than some accidental nudity and some unscheduled encounters with the cops, it's all good, clean high society fun. There is a notable absence of anything louche or hedonistic in this entire book. In the late '50s, women stop caring about hats and start ratting their hair into domes and beehives. Even though Bill saw this coming, he went into denial: "I put my hatted head in the proverbial ostrich hole." The demise of hats leads to a career in fashion reporting, where his atrocious spelling and "plain Jane" sentences raise a few eyebrows. The narrative grinds to a halt with the ascent of Andre Courreges and the arrival of the white gogo boot. The book concludes with two rip roaringly opinionated essays: "On Society" and "On Taste." Certain leitmotifs emerge to form the pillars of Bill's eccentric personality. At the top of the list we have his self imposed deprivations. In the early years, he allows himself a fur collared trench, flamboyant shirts and ties, and Ollie, "a large black beatnik French poodle." Over time these frou frous fall away and his knees start to show through his worn pants. "I have the strongest desire to escape to the discomforts of the poor," he declares, and he means it. Austerity becomes his drug of choice. He appears to make a contract with himself: I will remain in this world of glamour but only as a sack cloth and ashes observer who lives on a diet of Ovaltine and leftover hors d'oeuvres, and stays in crummy Parisian hotels while others dine at the Ritz. His rationale? Independence. "Money's the cheapest thing; freedom is the most expensive" was one of Bill's favorite axioms. On a related note, we have Bill's make do and mend, zero waste sensibility. Costumes and hats are often made from discards and objets trouves. Any garret, no matter how grim, can be transformed into a nifty salon de chapeaux with a dollop of white paint and some moth eaten Austrian drapes bought from the Salvation Army. Just be sure to shake the cockroaches out of any hat before placing it on madam's head. In "Fashion Climbing," madam is king. Men barely get a look in. At the Dior show, we hear nothing of Monsieur Dior himself, only an orgasmic account of his muse and collaborator, the legendary Madame Bricard, "drenched and preserved in the artifice of fashion to the point where men were her slaves." A young Yves Saint Laurent is glossed over while Coco Chanel "that delicious 80 year plus Witch of the West" is described in hilarious detail. Surrounded by tyrannical divas, lethal vendeuses and "the star spangled bitches" of fashion, Bill appears totally happy. Authenticity is an obsession that runs throughout the book. Bill Cunningham delights in yanking back the curtain on the vicious rituals of copying that infiltrated the Paris salons of the postwar years. He discloses his own struggle it reads like a milliner's version of "The Pilgrim's Progress" to avoid the dominant influences of the day and create original work. When he leaves hats and becomes a reporter, plagiarists and designers who are resting on their laurels are called out. He judges fashion based on one simple criterion: What happens when frock meets client? Anybody can dress a rail thin model. It takes talent and originality to transform real, average bodies into objects of fascination. So what did Bill know? Over time he became a fashion sage. At some point in the late 20th century, I recall asking him if he had any insights into the current scene. The cloistered fashion universe had loosened its stays and was rapidly transforming into a chaotic global spectator sport. Celebrities were infiltrating. Trends were arriving and not disappearing. Order was being replaced by chaos. "Oh, young fellah," he replied, sounding like Jimmy Stewart playing Bill Cunningham, "fashion is a mirror, reflecting the culture. The culture is chaotic, so fashion is just doing its job." "Fashion Climbing," with its truncated timeline, leaves the reader gasping for more. Bill remained at the center of the fashion circus until his death. In addition to his appreciation for grandes dames, he became a devotee of the unconventional, including punk, vogueing and drag, and designers like Alexander McQueen, John Galliano and the Belgian and Japanese avant gardists. His visionary approach to street photography became the lingua franca of social media. His observations about fashion and culture sharpened over time. I can only hope there's another installment lurking in his archives to give us further insights into the much missed Bill and the devilish fire that raged hotter as the years went by. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Street protests roiled cities across the world in 2019. Latin America in particular experienced greater social unrest than at any time in recent memory. Political crises and mass mobilizations broke out in Haiti, Honduras, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile and elsewhere. In recent weeks, protests have subsided but not ceased, and 2020 may well bring more turmoil. The upheaval stems from many of the region's persistent problems, more salient in some countries than others: economic stagnation, politicized judiciaries, corruption, crime and, in a few cases, authoritarian rule. Latin America is the second most unequal region in the world. The failure to address these problems and to fulfill promises made has caused governments to lose legitimacy in the eyes of their people. These citizens are increasingly dissatisfied with how democracy works or doesn't work in their countries. But just as germane to the current moment is the widespread perception of a lack of fairness that economic and political elites enjoy a set of privileges and prerogatives denied to most citizens. Some of the region's pent up resentments are aimed at the sense of entitlement exhibited by those who hold the most power and influence and who too often do not give others the respect and dignity they deserve. The protests, amplified by social media, revealed that despite some real social and economic gains especially in South America's commodity producing countries in the late 2000s the path of social mobility for most citizens remains precarious. Anger was contained until economic growth began to slow down in 2013. Social fractures surfaced, compounded by governments' incapacity to satisfy heightened expectations of new middle classes. Nowhere has the demonstrations been more surprising and violent than in Chile, long regarded as among the region's best economic performers and a model of social peace and political stability. That perception was shattered in October, when millions took to the streets to demand profound changes to the country's economic and institutional model. Lucia Dammert, a professor at the University of Santiago in Chile, suggests that though warning signs were evident, the country's favorable image makes Chile "the unthinkable crisis." When I lived in Chile in the early years of the democratic transition after the dictator Augusto Pinochet's rule ended in 1990, most citizens desired a consensus, and the governing parties generally delivered. But they were also constrained by the outmoded Constitution imposed by the dictatorship. Over time, a disconnect developed between political parties of all stripes and groups of citizens who felt poorly represented. Chile has one of Latin America's highest per capita incomes, but education and health services are out of reach for many citizens, household debt is high and most economic power remains in the hands of just a few. New generations, not shaped by the Pinochet years, have been less complacent and more demanding of wide ranging reforms. As Ms. Dammert noted, a new Chile is being forged that "has a young face and much less fear in expressing discontent." The generational shift is profound and fundamental to understanding what is happening elsewhere in Latin America (and around the world). The divide can also be discerned in Colombia, where university students have been at the forefront of anti government protests. To be sure, student protests were common when I studied in Colombia in the mid 1970s. Today, however, demonstrators connect rapidly through social media and have multiple grievances and demands, including better public services, higher pensions and the full implementation of the 2016 peace accord between the government and the former Revolutionary Armed Force of Colombia, or FARC, rebels. In Peru, strong economic growth in recent decades has been offset by a political class that has been mired in a crisis of credibility. In the 1980s, I saw firsthand the inability to curb hyperinflation and a virulent insurgency that brought down political parties. In late September, riding a wave of anti corruption popular sentiment all of Peru's living former presidents are facing corruption charges President Martin Vizcarra dissolved Congress, viewed as corrupt and divorced from the will of the people. Like elsewhere in Latin America, society's rising demands and expectations are outpacing the capacity of the government to respond. The term elite also applies to governments in the region, spanning across the ideological spectrum. It captures both political party cadres in democratic societies such as Chile, Peru and Colombia, but also governments that, in the name of ridding the country of the traditional establishment, have amassed enormous wealth and power, destroying or eroding democratic institutions in the process. President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, who led the left wing Sandinistas to help overthrow the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, now heads a repressive, authoritarian regime and wields vast political and economic power. Although former President Evo Morales of Bolivia presided over significant economic growth and poverty reduction, his refusal to give up power and comply with democratic rules has enraged many citizens. Venezuela, which was Latin America's richest economy when I lived there in the early 1980s, is the most tragic example of how anti elite sentiment can be manipulated to destroy democracy and install a dictatorship. Latin American political and economic elites are far from homogeneous. Some are committed to serious social and political reforms that deal with underlying causes of ongoing unrest. Some favor increasing taxes on the wealthy. There are countless examples, especially at the local level, of innovative programs that helped level the playing field by revamping education systems or generating opportunities for social and economic development. Responding to a real social demand, in Chile all parties have agreed to draft a new Constitution to replace the one enacted under Pinochet. Though this will hardly resolve the crisis, it is a step in the right direction. Unlike some other countries in the region, Chile has the resources it needs to, for example, enlarge pensions and improve public services such as education and health care. Such measures are important to increasing incomes and helping reduce the wide gap between rich and poor. But after living in Latin America over the course of five decades, I have seen too few sustained efforts to create paths of social mobility that are secure and stable. Undoing that trend demands not only sound growth and redistribution policies, but also the opening up of greater access to economic and political power, breaking the nexus between private interests and the political class, and attaining equal justice under the law. At the dawn of a new decade, that urgent cry can be heard on streets throughout Latin America. Michael Shifter is the president of the Inter American Dialogue, a Washington based think tank focusing on Western Hemisphere affairs. 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 |
Last week several headlines wrongly heralded the health effects of a handshake, saying that a firm shake could prevent a heart attack, while a weak one was a harbinger of an early death. Individuals with more subtle handshakes can take a deep breath, because those assertions were false. The confusion emerged because writers conflated hand grip with a handshake. Although studies have found that handshakes transmit disease and affect first impressions, there is no research that supports any connection to longevity. There was nothing wrong with the study that inspired these reports. Published last Wednesday in the journal The Lancet, it found that people with lower hand grip strengths had higher risks of suffering a heart attack or stroke and dying from cardiovascular disease. But nowhere in the study did the authors mention anything about handshakes, and handshakes and grip strength are "completely different," said Dr. Sripal Bangalore, an interventional cardiologist from NYU Langone Medical Center who was not involved in the study. Hand grip is measured with a device called a Jamar dynamometer, which is essentially a spring with a dial that registers the force of a person's grip when they squeeze as hard as they can. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Ulysses, the young protagonist of "Saturday Church," is first seen at the burial of his father, a soldier killed overseas. The New York teen, played by Luka Kain, has delicate features and carries an air of quiet about him. He and his younger brother will now be looked after by both their mother Amara (Margot Bingham) and strict Aunt Rose (Regina Taylor). The latter does not mince words after Ulysses is discovered trying on his mother's shoes. "If I ever hear of you even looking at women's clothing, I will beat it out of you. You are a man. Start acting like one," she says, enunciating each word with controlled rage. But the boy is in no way conflicted about his sexual orientation he's just surrounded by disapproval. As a form of escape, he imagines his life as a musical, and the movie is dotted with song and dance, beginning with a particularly audacious locker room scene in which Ulysses' jock tormentors turn into backup dancers. For real life affinity, Ulysses seeks companionship on the pier by Manhattan's Christopher Street, where he is enlisted into Saturday Church, a program for at risk L.G.B.T.Q. youth. (The program in the movie is based on a real one.) The film was written and directed by Damon Cardasis, making his feature debut. It is a disarmingly and consistently sensitive movie that remains engaging even when its reach sometimes exceeds its grasp. (A musical number set in what might be the world's tidiest homeless shelter doesn't quite make it.) The wonderful cast brings the story home, and Mr. Kain in particular is a real find. When Ulysses first puts on lip gloss in a room full of people who accept him, the smile that plays on his face is both ebullient and heart rending. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
SO LONG Models that have reached the end of the line include the Fisker Karma plug in hybrid. Every fall, the new car season brings fresh models and industrywide optimism, but it's also the time when automakers are forced to acknowledge what's not selling as discontinued models disappear from company Web sites and dealership lots. With few exceptions, a canceled car is a slow selling car. Some vehicles fail to meet expectations from the very start. Many more lose their relevance over time. It's a rare automobile that is introduced with a firm expiration date in mind. While models like the BMW M3 and the Volkswagen Golf R are skipping 2014 because of redesigns, the vehicles presented here are truly dead. Don't expect to see new models wearing these badges anytime soon, if ever: ACURA ZDX The genre bending ZDX combined the ride height of an S.U.V., the roofline of a coupe and the four doors of a sedan. From the driver's seat it was as well sorted as the more conventional MDX, but the ZDX's styling left buyers confused enough that Acura never met its modest goal of 5,000 sales a year. AUDI TT RS Audi's performance division conjured a 360 horsepower turbocharged 5 cylinder engine and a sweet shifting 6 speed manual to create the RS. The result was powerful and nimble enough to transform the humble TT its underlying platform is shared with the Volkswagen Golf into a legitimate Porsche rival. CADILLAC ESCALADE EXT Outward appearances suggest that the EXT rode on four standard tires, but what really carried this reskinned Chevrolet Avalanche was the Escalade name. The business case was just as tenuous as that of the failed Lincoln Blackwood, yet with an 11 year run the Escalade EXT disproved the notion that a luxury pickup is a sales proof oxymoron. CHEVROLET AVALANCHE Many will remember the Avalanche by its distinctive "midgate" between the bed and the cabin. Its place in history is more significant: the Avalanche was a harbinger of today's trucks that place as much emphasis on moving people as they do on hauling cargo. The Avalanche was undone by the gentrification of conventional pickups, including Chevy's own Silverado. CHEVROLET CORVETTE Z06 AND ZR1 The new 2014 Corvette Stingray has sent the high performance variants on sabbatical. While the Z06 and ZR1 had distinct personalities, rumors suggest that Chevrolet's succession plan calls for a single car to replace the duo. Whether it will be closer in spirit to the brutal, track ready Z06 or the sophisticated six figure ZR1 remains to be seen. FORD MUSTANG BOSS 302 The Boss's fate was sealed before it even went on sale: Ford promised to sell this rowdy special edition Mustang for just two years. Its throwback name evoked the muscle car's glory days while its 302 cubic inch V 8 was a modern 444 horsepower dynamo. NISSAN ALTIMA COUPE It's a small pool of car buyers that prefers two door coupes built on the underpinnings of sensible family sedans. Toyota buried its Camry based Solara coupe four years ago. With Nissan now doing the same, Honda's two door Accord stands alone. SUZUKI Perpetually besieged Suzuki gave up on the United States market in late 2012, just as it was finding its feet. The newest of its models the SX4 subcompact and the Kizashi midsize sedan were genuinely good cars. Its Grand Vitara S.U.V. and Equator pickup, not so much. TOYOTA MATRIX Toyota's small hatchback should be remembered as a survivor. When General Motors shuttered the Pontiac brand in 2009, Toyota lost the mechanical twin (the Pontiac Vibe) that gave the Matrix scale and the experimental joint manufacturing plant where both cars were built. Rather than call it quits, Toyota relocated the tooling to Cambridge, Ontario, and gave the Matrix another four years of life. VOLVO C30 For conservative Volvo, the plucky C30 hatchback was a rare departure from conventional high volume segments. With its 5 cylinder engine and all glass rear hatch, the C30 packed loads of charisma into a package that was simply too small for most luxury buyers. VOLVO C70 The 1998 C70 was the first modern Volvo to break out of the brand's boxy design language. Initially sold as a coupe and soft top convertible, the C70 later became a single model with a retractable hardtop. The Swedish automaker is focusing on mainstream segments as it reboots its lineup under its new owner, the Chinese automaker Geely. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
This week I've been revisiting the music of Johann Johannsson, the Icelandic composer who died on Feb. 9 at 48. I struggled to appreciate his 2016 album "Orphee," on Deutsche Grammophon, but I have immense respect for his film scores, which are so complex and carefully considered that they transcend mere accompaniment. Take, for example, his soundtrack for the Stephen Hawking biopic "The Theory of Everything," for which he won a Golden Globe in 2015. From the beginning, Johannsson's music captures the movie's mathematical and cosmic wonder. The score opens with a circular piano ostinato evocative of geometric precision. But the moment strings are added to the mix, the music takes flight to the heavens. JOSHUA BARONE I vividly remember the kid in the candy store look the conductor Yannick Nezet Seguin had last season when I went backstage to watch him rehearse Wagner with the Metropolitan Opera's orchestra for the first time. You can see him almost fighting back smiles in some passages here as they work together on the overture to "Der Fliegende Hollander." The Met has gone through tough times since then, with the suspension of its former music director, James Levine, amid sexual misconduct accusations. So when the company announced this week that Mr. Nezet Seguin would succeed Mr. Levine as music director next season, two years ahead of schedule, it was this memory of joyful music making that came back to me. MICHAEL COOPER Until last week I had never heard Britten's Piano Concerto, which Leif Ove Andsnes performed with the New York Philharmonic. The piece is striking for how integrated the solo part is with the orchestral accompaniment. (Often the concerto could pass for a symphony, much like the Saint Saens "Organ" Symphony, which followed the intermission.) But it is also surprisingly funny. I sat next to one of our critics, and we both chuckled throughout. You can hear the humor in this recording with Mr. Andsnes and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, especially in the second movement, a beguiling and ironic waltz. As played by the orchestra, the theme is way over the top. For a brief moment, it repeats as a solo piano passage, which Mr. Andsnes delivered with a clever balance of satire and enigmatic nuance that revealed something darker beneath all the exuberance. JOSHUA BARONE The American soprano Heidi Melton is singing Sieglinde beautifully this week in the New York Philharmonic's performance of Act I from Wagner's "Die Walkure." She has been earning international acclaim as a Wagnerian in recent seasons. Here she is in a recording studio singing the sublime opening of the Act II love duet from "Tristan und Isolde" (a moment of amorous calm before the sensual storm) with the tenor Stuart Skelton and the forces of the English National Opera. In keeping with the company's mission, the German libretto is performed in English translation. Catch the lovely passage about halfway in, when Ms. Melton sings this couplet: "In my breast the sun is hiding,/High above the stars are shining." ANTHONY TOMMASINI During the announcement of the 2018 19 season of the New York Philharmonic, Jaap van Zweden's first as music director, one of the moments that signaled change involved the young pianist and composer Conrad Tao. He has been commissioned to write a piece that will be paired with, of all things, Bruckner's august Eighth Symphony. During a brief video interview that was screened, Mr. Tao sheepishly admitted that he doesn't really know Bruckner's Eighth and probably wouldn't have spent time with it had he not been tapped for the gig. Will this new piece sound anything like his "Iridescence for Piano and iPad," which he performs here? I love the passage when cosmic piano chords leap about while haunting electronic voices and riffs flicker in the background. Call me crazy, but I think Bruckner would have liked it. ANTHONY TOMMASINI The Los Angeles Philharmonic's next season boasts several alluring themes and programs; one of the most exciting is a series devoted to works by William Grant Still, whose symphonies will be paired with works by Ellington, Gershwin and the contemporary composer Adolphus Hailstork. The announcement reminded me of a recently issued recording that adds to Still's legacy, in a minor yet memorable fashion. The third release in New World Records' ongoing Harlem Renaissance archival series, "Black Manhattan," features Still's 1919 arrangement of "The Slow Drag Blues," a tune by Q. Roscoe Snowden. Throughout their performance, the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra channels the work's bluesy effervescence. But it's the re entry of the full ensemble, after a solo piano interlude, that delights me most on each listen as Still's complementary lines mingle with real elan. Why isn't his music played more often in New York? SETH COLTER WALLS It was the concept that drew me to the new CD "Ciaconna: The Bass of Time," from Crier Records, but it was the young violinist Robyn Bollinger who held me captive. Through solo works of Biber, Bach, Bartok and Berio, Ms. Bollinger explores the lineage of the chaconne or passacaglia, call it what you will, with its often obsessive focus on a bass figure. As so often, Berio's obsessions, in his "Sequenza VIII," are idiosyncratic, particularly when after a long, somewhat static buildup he seizes on a little twittering figure and sets it in manic perpetual motion, finally letting go only reluctantly. JAMES R. OESTREICH Unlike the cheering throng in Zankel Hall on Thursday evening, I found the French pianist Alexandre Tharaud's performance of Bach's "Goldberg" Variations somewhat disappointing in its unevenness: at times, brilliantly virtuosic; at others, matter of fact and almost studentish. So I was grateful for his encore, a headlong tear through Scarlatti's Sonata in D minor (K. 141). It was a wild ride, with much more fire and panache than his version here. JAMES R. OESTREICH | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
BOX SHAPED vehicles have been rolling around the fringes of the automotive world for at least a century. Credit for creating the modern minivan, and making it a fixture of family transportation, goes to Chrysler, though fans of the Volkswagen Microbus and Corvair Greenbrier may argue the point. In the 27 years since their introduction, Chrysler has revised its van many times. Here are significant turning points in the minivan's history: GENERATION I: 1984 90 The first Dodge Caravans and Plymouth Voyagers came in three trim levels, and in a nod to the much loved woody wagons of the past, the top of the line LE came with flanks of artificial wood. The standard engine was a 2.2 liter 4 cylinder; a 2.6 liter 4 cylinder, made by Mitsubishi, was available. In 1987 Chrysler added stretched versions, with "Grand" appended to their names, that increased grocery space behind the third seat. The Chrysler brand got its own minivan in 1990. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Vail Resorts will hold a 96 hour sale on hotels, ground transportation, ski rentals and more across its properties in the Rockies and beyond next week. Running Feb. 23 to 26, the deal includes rooms at Keystone Lodge Spa in Keystone, Colo., from 179, a 45 percent reduction; condos in nearby Breckenridge from 173, which is 40 percent off; and the Lodge at Vail, a RockResort, also 40 percent off starting at 253. Travelers can also book ground transportation from Colorado Mountain Express for 15 off per person, and ski rentals at 20 percent off. The ski country savings are eligible for travel through the end of the ski season, which varies by property but is usually in early April, and is also available for trips in November. Skiers at Fernie Alpine Resort in the Canadian Rockies have a new and truly cold way to chill out, the Ice Bar at Lizard Creek Lodge. Unlike ice bars at seasonal ice hotels, this one is indoors, and permanent, with a bar made of an ice block kept inside a 200 square foot refrigerator unit cum lounge. Up to 20 people at a time can hit the bar in loaner Helly Hansen down parkas for a shot of vodka from a global selection. NEW BIKING TRIPS, AT HOME AND ABROAD Bicycle Adventures has announced 14 new trips for 2016, ranging from Midwestern rails to trails routes to rides beneath snow capped volcanoes in South America. Its seven day tour on the Katy Trail, the longest former rail route repurposed as a cycling path, will cover 240 miles through Missouri in July (from 3,124 a person), and the six day ride on the Mickelson Trail in South Dakota's Black Hills region includes visits to nearby Badlands and Mount Rushmore National Parks from June to August (from 2,444). The four day trip along the Hiawatha Trail in northern Idaho, a former rail route with tunnels and trestles intact, also runs June to August (from 2,294). Abroad, the company has introduced a new 10 day trip in southern Chile's Lake District available in March (from 4,946) and a 10 day summer trip in Spain's northern Basque Region that travels along the sea, through the Rioja wine region and to the Pyrenees Mountains (from 6,096). Starwood Hotels Resorts has announced it will open the Le Meridien Visconti Rome by year end with a rooftop terrace overlooking the Villa Borghese. The company will spend about 20 million to renovate the existing Visconti Palace Hotel into the 240 room newcomer. Rooms will be understated in modern style, with organic materials including wood and stone and neutral tones. Public spaces aim to be social, including the lobby, which will host a coffee and spirits bar stocked with coffee table books on Italian art and food. Room rates have not yet been determined. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
This commercial condo unit in Queens Crossing, a 12 story shopping and office complex in Flushing, has a total of 6,817 square feet and has been fully renovated. Other tenants in the building, which was built in 2007, include TD Bank, Paris Baguette and Kung Fu Tea. Coda Bar Kitchen Stage, a restaurant opening in early 2020, signed a 15 year lease for a 2,500 square foot space in Hell's Kitchen, with a five year option. This four story, mixed use building was built in 1900 and has six residential units, all of which are occupied. This four story building in East Harlem has six rent stabilized units and one commercial unit, occupied by the Alliance for Positive Change Keith Haring ASC Harlem Center. 315 East 104th Street (between Second and First Avenues) This four story, mixed use building in East Harlem has 5,900 square feet. Built in 1900, it contains six rent stabilized apartments and one commercial space, occupied by the Alliance for Positive Change Keith Haring ASC Harlem Center. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Welcome to the Running newsletter! Every Saturday morning, we email runners with news, advice and some motivation to help you get up and running. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. As anyone who has suffered a running injury knows, it can be hard to start running again. The good news after being sidelined for several months with a stress fracture is that I can start running again. In running, fear can be both good or bad. On the plus side, fear keeps me from charging down a rocky trail and risking a fall (that, and I like my teeth). But that same fear that tries to make me protect myself also means I'm so worried about re cracking my leg that I am having trouble returning to training. is a mental skills coach and consultant who is certified through the Association for Applied Sport Psychology. She is the author of "On Top of Your Game: Mental Skills to Maximize Your Athletic Performance," and co author of the forthcoming "Rebound: Training Your Mind to Bounce Back Stronger from Sports Injuries." I asked her about fear, regrets and how to move forward when things don't run your way. JAM: I suspect fear isn't always bad. Fear of not being prepared for a race makes us train for it, right? CC: There's an inverted U relationship with fear for performance athletes. Sometimes fear can drive focus to what's really important, and to how you want to prepare for an event. It's a protective mechanism there to help you pay attention to what you're doing, but sometimes it ends up going past that, over a tipping point into something that holds us back. JAM: I know a lot of really good runners who won't try a marathon because they say they're scared of the distance. CC: It's something that they've never accomplished before. Also with longer distances, it's this thinking about 26.2 miles instead of breaking it down into smaller, shorter goals. You don't have to run 26.2 miles right now, in this minute. You don't need to think "Oh my God how do I do that right now" because right now you couldn't! Instead of thinking in that moment "how am I going to get through 26.2 miles?" it should be "what race do I want to sign up for, how many weeks do I need to train and what does my first week look like?" JAM: My first marathon did not go well, and I thought I'd never try again because I was scared of failing again. CC: What happens on one race day doesn't mean it's going to happen on the next race day. If you feel like it didn't go well or didn't go the way you expected, our brains want to generalize that as the entire experience. So think about what are some of the things you did well and what are some of the things you can do differently. Recognize all aspects of it. It's not like being a soccer player or basketball player or baseball player, where you have a lot of immediate feedback that you can implement right away. You can't just go the next week and run another marathon or most people won't. Also remember it's not just that day. It's every decision you made going into it: every time you ran when you didn't want to run, every time you took a day off when your body needed it. It sucks when you do all the training and spend all that money and the race doesn't go the way you want, but just because it happened doesn't mean that's going to happen again. JAM: Right I know a lot of people were disappointed in their Boston Marathon times because they struggled in the heat. CC: Sometimes we have a secret goal. You may say that because the weather's not that great, you've adjusted your goal, so you'll be happy if you run it in X. But really you're holding on to your secret goal and tell yourself "I'm going to be mad if I don't hit the goal I know I'm capable of on a fantastic day." We're gauging our feelings of success based on that goal, even if it's not realistic. JAM: Is it common to be scared to start running again after an injury? I've been shocked at how fearful I've been about coming back from a stress fracture. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Tami Combs, a 58 year old yoga instructor from Indiana, bought concert tickets to see the Rolling Stones, Elton John, Chicago and Sturgill Simpson this year. But after the coronavirus pandemic struck, the concerts were postponed one by seven months, the rest indefinitely. She now wants her money back, but says she is having trouble getting a refund from Ticketmaster. "I have about 3,000 tied up in these tickets," Ms. Combs said in an interview. "This is my money that they are holding hostage." Ms. Combs is far from alone as the pandemic is triggering widespread anger at ticketing companies like Ticketmaster and StubHub. Online, fans are fuming about being unable to get refunds for concerts that have been postponed, often with no rescheduled dates in sight. As they see it, ticketing outlets are being greedy at a time of crisis, holding billions of dollars in consumers' cash that people now need for essentials. Their anger is being stoked by the sense that some vendors switched their refund policies mid crisis to avoid repaying consumers. Fans have drawn attention to the fact that Ticketmaster recently adjusted the language on its website. Whereas a few weeks ago, it said that people can get refunds "if your event is postponed, rescheduled or canceled," now it only lists cancellation as a basis for getting your money back, though it suggests there may be other circumstances in which refunds might be considered. And last week a Wisconsin man sued StubHub the biggest marketplace for ticket resales after the company recently dropped its refund policy, offering instead coupons worth 120 percent of what customers had paid for canceled events. Ticketmaster said that, while it's true it changed language to clarify matters, its refund policy has remained the same for years. StubHub, as the middleman between buyers and sellers of secondhand tickets, says that handling refunds for the huge number of canceled concerts is simply not manageable. For the companies, though, the problem is much more than a matter of optics. The live entertainment industry has come to a grinding halt, with more than 20,000 events suspended in the last few weeks. If the pandemic does not subside soon, the peak summer touring season could be delayed as well. Ticketmaster sells more than 30 billion in tickets each year, but most of that money is forwarded each week to venues, festival promoters and other clients. StubHub sells almost 5 billion in tickets a year, and pays the resellers who provide its inventory many of them professional scalpers. Last week, Pollstar, a trade publication that covers the touring business, said that the top 200 tours of 2020 had been expected to generate about 12 billion in ticket sales worldwide, but the concert industry could lose nearly 9 billion if shows remain dark for the rest of the year which promoters and talent agents say is a possibility. Still, John Breyault, vice president of public policy at the National Consumers League, urged industry players to refund payments, and to do so promptly. "We have never seen such a quick and total collapse in the live event industry, as in many industries," Mr. Breyault said, "but at the end of the day we can't lose sight that these are dire financial times for consumers." The office of the New York State Attorney General said that since the first week of February it has received thousands of consumer complaints tied to the virus, on issues such as price gouging or fake medical treatments, but only 10 so far touching on ticketing matters. But experts say they expect an increase in formal complaints as more and more concerts are postponed. For many fans online, one serious concern is whether companies jettisoned their refund policies when they saw the tidal wave of claims building. Ticketmaster, which is owned by the concert giant Live Nation Entertainment, acknowledged that it had made changes to parts of its website once the coronavirus stalled the touring business last month, but that its underlying refund policy has not changed. That policy which customers must click to accept when they buy tickets says that refunds are processed automatically for cancellations, but that organizers of events may place "limitations" on refunds when it comes to postponed or rescheduled shows. "In the past, with a routine volume of event interruptions, we and our event organizers have been able to consistently offer more flexibility with refunds for postponed and rescheduled events," Ticketmaster said in a statement. "However, considering the currently unprecedented volume of affected events, we are focused on supporting organizers as they work to determine venue availability, new dates and refund policies, while rescheduling thousands of events in what continues to be an evolving situation." Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, the president of StubHub, said that the company had long issued refunds to ticket buyers before recovering charges from sellers, but that the huge number of cancellations has made that almost impossible. "The complications that arise, and just the magnitude of this timing challenge, is frankly challenging for any intermediary in the normal course of practice," Ms. Singh Cassidy said in an interview, "when practically speaking, that normal course no longer exists." StubHub, which was recently acquired by Viagogo, another secondary ticketing marketplace, for 4 billion, declined to comment on the lawsuit against it. The potential loss of revenue facing Live Nation and StubHub has also drawn interest from Wall Street. Last month, Moody's Investor Service downgraded Live Nation's debt over concerns about concert cancellations. For ordinary consumers, though, the question is simply whether they are getting their money back. Marcus Franz, 27, spent more than 1,000 on tickets to an Elton John show at Madison Square Garden that has since been postponed. Mr. Franz said he bought four tickets at 250 apiece for the April concert, two for him and his wife and two he had hoped to resell for extra money. Even if the concert is rescheduled, Mr. Franz said, he is unlikely to be able to attend he is moving to Texas soon. "I think when you postpone a concert, with a date to be decided," he said in an interview, "the right thing to do would be to cancel those concerts, figure out what's going on, and then set them back up in the future." That may indeed happen. The major concert promoters and talent companies are now negotiating over plans to offer what some called a "refund window" in coming weeks a period of perhaps 30 days when customers would be given the option to obtain refunds for postponed shows, according to multiple executives at these companies, who spoke anonymously because the negotiations are continuing. They may want to act before more angry fans turn to the courts as Matthew McMillan, who sued StubHub in Wisconsin, has already done, albeit in a dispute over a refund for hockey tickets. In the music industry, one lawsuit, filed in 2017, addressed the issue of when a postponement is really a cancellation. A fan of Janet Jackson sued Live Nation and a resale ticketing site, Vivid Seats, in California after a protracted delay to one of her tours. The lawsuit was settled, though it was not disclosed whether this involved any financial payment to her or other disappointed ticket holders; Ticketmaster said that the terms of the settlement are confidential. But other experts said getting legal traction will be tough because the ticketing companies will be protected by their careful contractual language or the courts will be sympathetic to the industry's argument that the virus was a catastrophic event beyond its control. Timothy J. Dennin, a lawyer who often litigates class action suits, said it will be hard for fans to say they are suffering damage when an event is postponed and they could go sometime in the future, while rescheduling too soon could be dangerous. "In my view this is a Black Swan event that is no one's fault," he said in an email, adding later in an interview about the ticketing companies: "They are not responsible for the pandemic." Even if companies can rely on legal protection, some experts argue that for the benefit of their long term reputation they ought to consider paying refunds to their customers anyway. "People will remember how companies act in this crisis," said Ross Johnson, a crisis communications expert based in Los Angeles. "This is a whole different ballgame for the Ticketmasters of the world. What they should be doing is saying, 'We feel your pain.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
A 10 to 15 year lease is available for 4,790 square feet of corner retail space in this 11 story commercial building a block from Union Square Park in the Flatiron district, with 147 feet of wraparound frontage on the ground floor. Also included are an awning and a flag that could be used for branding, 18 foot ceilings and a 1,000 square foot storage basement. The previous tenant was a Pier 1 Imports home decor store, which stretched an additional 13,000 square feet on the East 15th Street side of the building. That larger space was recently leased to the Well, a private wellness club to open in the spring. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
When the Hall of Fame running back Earl Campbell retired in 1986 following eight seasons of highlight reel collisions, defenders throughout the National Football League breathed a respectful sigh of relief. No one dished out more punishment than Campbell or did less to avoid it. "Every time you hit him," a linebacker said, "you lower your own I.Q." Campbell uses a metal walker today not surprising for someone who's had both knees replaced, endured multiple back surgeries and been treated for substance abuse. "I think if I'd gotten a real physical like they do now, CAT scans and everything," he admits, "probably I wouldn't have been able to play." That thought rankles Campbell, who views his battered frame as a proud reminder of a game unblemished by silly rules and complaints. "I can't play because I've got a hangnail. ... I don't play because my head hurt," he says, mocking the current combatants. "That wouldn't have got the job done back in my day." Of course, pro football remains a dangerous game. The average career is 3.3 years and shrinking, as more players retire early because of injury or fear of lasting damage. Still, Campbell's words reflect a growing sense of unease about the league. Too violent, too soft, too nationalistic, too unpatriotic is pro football in trouble? There was a day, writes The New York Times Magazine's chief national correspondent, Mark Leibovich, in "Big Game," a gossipy, insightful and wickedly entertaining journey through the N.F.L. sausage factory, when the league could make sticky problems disappear. Not anymore. Since 2014, when his story begins, pro football has been shredded by scandal, from the video gone viral of the running back Ray Rice knocking his fiancee senseless to the murder conviction and suicide of the tight end Aaron Hernandez, whose multiple concussions produced "the most severe case" of chronic traumatic encephalopathy that medical experts had ever seen in someone so young. Meantime, the N.F.L.'s marquee player was suspended for (allegedly) deflating footballs, while a second string quarterback ignited a firestorm by kneeling in protest during the national anthem. Who's minding this mess? Leibovich starts at the top. An effective N.F.L. commissioner must be adept at two things, he contends. First, manage the needs of the billionaire team owners, which the current commissioner, Roger Goodell, does quite nicely. Second, protect the league from serious scandals and lesser embarrassments, which he seems unable to master. The gaffe prone Goodell calls to mind the words supposedly uttered by Winston Churchill about Secretary of State John Foster Dulles: "A bull who carries his china shop along with him." Two years ago, with the concussion issue now a national story, Goodell, the father of twin girls, was asked whether he would allow a son to play football. Yes, he replied, "because of the values" one gets from the game. A fine answer, until he added: "There is risk in life. There is risk in sitting on the couch." None Week 11 Takeaways: Here is what we learned this week. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Jets Lose Again: Falling to the Miami Dolphins, the Jets' receiver Elijah Moore offered consolation. 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. These words don't quite rise to the musings of the Dallas Cowboys owner, Jerry Jones, who compared the concussion flap to "a pimple on a baby's ass," but they did arouse considerable suspicion about the league's intentions. Moreover, Leibovich says, they speak to a problem that continues to dog the unscripted Goodell, as when he credited the players for getting arrested less frequently in 2015 than in previous years. Who would even think to touch the subject, much less praise those lucky enough to avoid jail? Blunders aside, Goodell has been good for the owners, who pay him about 40 million a year. He's won them multibillion dollar television contracts while cheerleading their coldhearted "relocation" of teams the Rams, Raiders and Chargers, most recently to larger market cities. But Goodell's greatest gift has been to turn a seasonal game into a year round bonanza. Fans now spend months anticipating the once mundane N.F.L. draft. If a Sunday triple header, a Monday night game and an occasional Saturday contest don't suffice, one can turn on "Thursday Night Football." Still not enough? Join a fantasy league on NFL.com. There are no days off anymore. The owners, for the most part, are Republican, conservative and warily pro Trump. Only a few are women usually the wife or daughter of a deceased male owner. Neither age nor infirmity is a disqualifier to these popes of football, whose tenure generally ends at death. Among Leibovich's favorites is the New York Jets owner, Woody Johnson, heir to the J J fortune and a Trump megadonor currently serving as our ambassador to Britain. A mere pup at 71, the Woodman strikes Leibovich, if not long suffering Jets fans, as the cheerfully inept custodian of treasures he didn't quite earn "like an overgrown third grader who collects toy trains and rotten quarterbacks." Another is Johnson's polar opposite, Jerry Jones, 75, a self made oilman with a cartoon size ego. Jones is a journalist's dream. He has no filter, he'll talk to anybody, and he favors down home "Jerryisms" too crude to be quoted here. In one revealing sequence, Leibovich asks Jones and the New England Patriots owner, Robert Kraft, 77, if they'd rather win another Super Bowl or be enshrined in the N.F.L. Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. Kraft, who sports five Super Bowl rings but is not a Hall of Famer, gives the diplomatic answer: another Super Bowl. Jones, a three time Super Bowl winner who is a Hall of Famer, responds like the honest megalomaniac he is: Hall of Fame. It's worth noting that Jones was interviewed on the Cowboys' regal team bus while drinking Johnnie Walker Blue from a 24 ounce plastic cup "filled and refilled to the top." Leibovich tried but failed to keep pace. His last memory is of Jones heading to a bar for some beers and cigars. "This man's liver belongs in Canton," he marvels. Though a lifelong Patriots fan (like me), Leibovich hasn't much good to say about Kraft or Coach Bill Belichick partly, one suspects, because their fawning embrace of Donald Trump makes him queasy. (The more discreet Tom Brady scores some points for having once ignored Trump's creepy public invitation to pursue his daughter Ivanka.) Fort Belichick is "a paranoid and joyless place," we are told, run by "a mumbling control freak" and an increasingly distracted owner. Kraft, a widower, is now a regular on the Manhattan/Hamptons social scene. "Boston is a village compared to New York," he confides to Leibovich words he'll probably come to regret. The team trademark "We Are All Patriots" is a running joke among the players. "Oh yeah, we're all Patriots," one former player remarks, "until Belichick finds someone cheaper." Brady, meanwhile, has hired a controversial trainer turned guru as a gesture of independence. His family, fearing for his safety, is urging him to retire. At 41, Brady is noncommittal. He has no real hobbies; he exists to play football. "If you want to compete with me," he tells Leibovich, "you have to give up your life." Which Brady has done. "It will end badly," his father, Tom Sr., predicts. "It's a cold business." The 2018 N.F.L. season is shaping up poorly. TV ratings have declined 17 percent in the past few years, the most alarming drop registered among hard core fans white, male, 50 ish dismayed by the protests of black players over police brutality and other race charged issues. To compound matters, the man stirring the pot most vigorously has been trying for decades to become a team owner, without success. He also happens to be the president of the United States. As payback, perhaps, he's been among the loudest critics of the new rules to protect players from concussions, complaining that they've sissified the game. Now he's pressuring the league to suspend any "son of a bitch" who kneels during the national anthem, adding, as if the protesters were illegal immigrants, that "maybe they shouldn't be in the country." The owners, clearly flummoxed, have been unable to find common ground or to pacify their fellow billionaire tormentor, who recently bragged to Jones that the dispute is a "very winning" issue for him. Opinion polls show he may be right. Reading "Big Game" a sparkling narrative one gets the sense that, "dangerous times" aside, the N.F.L. will survive on the magnetism of the sport it so clumsily represents. Forget the greedy owners, the controversies, the Trumpian eruptions. Think instead of the last two Super Bowls the historic Patriots comeback followed by the upset of mighty New England by the storybook Philadelphia Eagles, a perennial doormat. Pro football, minus the baggage, can be electrifying and redemptive. It's September, time for kickoff. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
IOWA CITY The tree wasn't growing correctly. The projection cues weren't right. A mouse got stuck as it scurried up a pole. The Nutcracker's sword broke, then broke again. "Stop, please," Christopher Wheeldon called out patiently for the umpteenth time as the technical team of his new production of "The Nutcracker," for the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago, worked away at a table in the newly rebuilt, gleaming Hancher Auditorium here recently. "It's hard to make magic," Mr. Wheeldon, the British born choreographer, said with a laugh during a break. "But I've done this enough to know what the process is. It may feel like chaos now, but it's all going to work." As if predictable chaos wasn't enough, Mr. Wheeldon was in a wheelchair: Several days earlier, he had stepped backward off the darkened stage, falling into the orchestra pit and breaking his ankle. "It's frustrating not being able to rush up and down between the stage and the front of house," he said. "It's a lesson in patience and trust." It was Day 2 of a week of stage rehearsals at the Hancher, where the Joffrey would present five preview performances before opening in Chicago on Saturday, Dec. 10. A week of onstage rehearsal and previews is an unusual luxury for a ballet company. But a lot rides on this "Nutcracker," a 4 million reimagining of the traditional story it's set at the 1893 Chicago world's fair that will serve as replacement of the Robert Joffrey production that the company has performed every December for 28 years. In a neat bit of symmetry, its 1987 premiere was at the former Hancher (closed after flooding in 2008 and rebuilt in a new spot); Ashley Wheater, the director of the Joffrey who was then a company member, danced as the Snow King. Like most American ballet troupes, the Joffrey depends heavily on the box office revenues of its Christmas season "Nutcracker" to balance the books. Why spend money on a new one? "When I came back to take over the company in 2007, I saw a production that was absolutely in tatters," Mr. Wheater said. "For me, it was a necessity." Mr. Wheeldon, 43, who recently directed and choreographed the Tony Award winning "An American in Paris" on Broadway, is a star of the ballet world, with among much else several full length, critically applauded narrative ballets to his credit. One thing he has clearly mastered: his directorial bedside manner. During a 12 hour day of slow going rehearsal, he remained calm and warmly encouraging, giving detailed instructions to dancers ("Miguel, more crazy genius face!" "Amanda, you need to be having a much worse nightmare.") and staying in constant dialogue with his team seated nearby: Natasha Katz (lighting), Julian Crouch (sets and costumes), Ben Pearcy (projections) and the puppeteer Basil Twist. Since Mr. Wheater wanted a "Nutcracker" that would be specific to Chicago and the Joffrey, Mr. Wheeldon has relocated the story from its traditional setting of an upper middle class German household. Now it's set in a worker's shack on the site of the World's Columbian Exposition, which commemorated the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World. In this telling, Marie, the young heroine of the tale (danced by an adult rather than a child here) is the daughter of Polish immigrants. Her mother, who will later incarnate the Sugar Plum Fairy role in the different guise of a golden sculpture that presides over the world's fair, is a single parent, raising her and her brother, Franz, alone. He added that when he was thinking about the story, he had no intention of making a political statement but that his "Nutcracker" had turned out to be oddly topical. "Immigrants did build the world's fair," he said. "We imagined the Christmas party happening in a worker's shack, with the impresario who is building the fair as the Drosselmeier figure, arriving with gifts for the workers." At the same time, Mr. Wheeldon said, "'The Nutcracker' still needs to be 'The Nutcracker' and deliver what people want and what is dictated by Tchaikovsky's score: the tree growing, the snow, the journey to a magical land." To help his story ideas fit into the existing structure of the ballet, Mr. Wheeldon called on Brian Selznick, a writer and illustrator of children's books, whose work he had long admired. Mr. Selznick's immediate response was to feel nervous. "I was aware that I was going to be talking to a great choreographer about things I knew nothing about," he said in a telephone interview from New York. But by the time they had finished their first brainstorming session, they had finessed a number of plot points and set the story five months before the opening of the fair to provide a Christmas setting. (Mr. Wheeldon noted that this also aligned the time frame with the first performance of "The Nutcracker," in December 1892, in St. Petersburg.) Mr. Selznick went home and wrote a 15 page outline. "When I got it," Mr. Wheeldon said, "I thought it would make the most phenomenal movie, but we have to strip away, which is what we did over the next year. It's still a pretty action packed 'Nutcracker.'" The second act, he said, was a child's fantasy of the world's fair rather than of the Land of the Sweets, filled with pavilions representing countries from all over the world and showing their dances, which echo the round the world divertissements in the traditional version. "The structure is intact; in some ways, this is quite a traditional 'Nutcracker,'" Mr. Wheeldon said. "It just focuses more on community and on people making the most of what they have. What is technically complicated about the show is that people must appear to be making their own Christmas out of bits and pieces." Mr. Twist, who like the rest of the creative team has collaborated with Mr. Wheeldon before, said he was using puppetry, shadow effects and silk effects in the ballet. "With the growing tree, for example, they wanted a tiny tree to start, and we had to figure out how to get from that to an enormous tree, so we pull in shadows, scenery and projections," he said. It was "An American in Paris," Mr. Wheeldon said, that taught him the importance of combining visual elements. As soon as you are aware that you are watching projections, he said, "you lose the magic." Part of this has to do with how sophisticated we have become as viewers. "Because we are now constantly on our phones and devices, our eyes are trained to watch images," he said, "and it has to be really well done. When you combine projection with animation and light and moving parts, it takes you on an almost three dimensional cinematic journey." He added that it was exacting, demanding hours of painstaking planning and focused attention from the entire creative and technical team. "Broadway people can't conceive how ballet does this in such a short time," he said. He went back to work, concentrating on a group of children in the snow scene. "Smile!" he called out. "You're in 'The Nutcracker!'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Brett Carlsen for The New York Times Brett Carlsen for The New York Times Credit... Brett Carlsen for The New York Times This academic year, administrators have wrestled with a deluge of student demands related to cultural and racial issues on campus. Some have been met. Here's a recap: Charged with a sluggish response to racist incidents, Timothy M. Wolfe and R. Bowen Loftin, top University of Missouri officials, cave when football players threaten to strike, raising the specter of a forfeit penalty of more than 1 million. Mary Spellman, dean of students at Claremont McKenna College in California, steps down after making a statement about students not fitting "our C.M.C. mold." Erika Christakis quits teaching at Yale, citing lack of "civil dialogue and open inquiry" after a brouhaha over her criticism of university guidelines on culturally sensitive Halloween costumes. Melissa A. Click, assistant professor of communications, is fired by Mizzou on Feb. 25 after being charged with misdemeanor assault for her confrontation with a student videographer (agrees to community service to avoid prosecution) and after Republicans in the State Legislature call for her dismissal. Jonathan Veitch, president of Occidental College and target of sit ins last semester, over handling of diversity initiatives and sexual assault cases. Andrea M. Quenette, communications professor at University of Kansas, on leave after using the N word in a class discussion, causing "shock and disbelief" and a discrimination complaint. Mulledy Hall and McSherry Hall named for Georgetown presidents who organized the sale of 272 slaves to settle university debts are renamed. Students further demand the creation of an endowment, at the current value of the sale's profit, to recruit "black identifying" professors. Trustees abandon Lord Jeffery Amherst, commander who endorsed plan to "extirpate" Indians with smallpox laden blankets, as symbol and unofficial mascot of Amherst College. School name will remain. Brown faculty vote on Feb. 2 that Columbus Day will be known as Indigenous People's Day, prompted by students objecting: "We don't celebrate genocide." Yale's Calhoun College, named for the white supremacist John C. Calhoun. (In the interim, three portraits of Calhoun are removed from the college.) Harvard Law School's seal, which bears the coat of arms of the Royall family, slave owners who suppressed a rebellion by burning 77 people alive. Aycock Auditorium at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, named for the governor who aided a white supremacy campaign in the late 19th century. Duke and East Carolina University have already renamed Aycock buildings. Statue of Cecil Rhodes, of Rhodes Scholar and imperialism fame, despite a monthslong drive by students to have him removed from the facade of Oriel College at the University of Oxford, in Oxford, England. Historical context will be provided. Chancellor further riles protesters by suggesting China for students needing "bland" safe spaces. Student demand that Lynch Memorial Hall, named for 11th president of Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania, be renamed because of racial connotations of word "lynch." A backlash led to the backpedaling. Harvard and Princeton drop the title of "master" term dating to medieval universities for heads of residential colleges; Yale is mulling the same. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Can ballet express a modern view of the sexes? In the Western contemporary world, women and men often hold equal status at work, as leaders, as voters, as breadwinners. This kind of equality, however, is precisely what ballet cannot show. Instead, it creates an either or dualism from the difference between man and woman. He does most of the partnering (traditionally, all of it). She rises onto point. When he does the same (seldom), the effect is comic. The foot is a relatively tiny part of the body; yet its significance becomes colossal. The meanings that flow from ballet are not only about gender. Yet the use of pointwork places the woman on a different level of being. And so ballet remains a sexist view of the world one that privileges the woman, certainly, but on terms that let her shine only by doing what no man can. Should we agree with the choreographer George Balanchine (1904 83) that "ballet is woman"? Or do we qualify this, as the choreographer Pam Tanowitz (born in 1969) has recently done, by saying that ballet is a man's idea of woman? At the end of the last century, ballet seemed distinctly moribund. Five of its greatest choreographers (Balanchine, Antony Tudor, Frederick Ashton, Kenneth MacMillan and Jerome Robbins) had died since 1983. No successors of their status were in view. Ballet now has regained most of its health. A number of 21st century ballets have entered international repertory. The great ballerina roles, from "Giselle" (1841) to "Mozartiana" (1981), have a fresh, varied abundance of interpreters. The dance realms of 19th century ballet were harems (sometimes literally, as in one all female scene of "Le Corsaire," where odalisques and concubines dance on point with flowers in happy captivity). From the Romantic ballet, initiated by "La Sylphide" in 1836 to the classical creations of Marius Petipa in late 19th century St. Petersburg ("The Sleeping Beauty"), feminine loveliness was the climate amid which a man looked, traveled and found love. Those ballets are classic examples of the male gaze. The format, admittedly, permitted variations. The heroines of "Giselle" and "Swan Lake" are complex tragic heroines, with conflicted inner lives; the heroine of "Coppelia" outwits the ballet's two leading men. In the 20th century, Balanchine created what many feel are the most marvelous women's roles in the repertory. Yet largely those, too, were variations on the 19th century theme, predicated on the women's combination of power and beauty and the man's capacity to adore and serve. In 1975, the dance critic Arlene Croce wrote: "Balanchine's world is pervaded by a modern consciousness; his women do not always live for love, and their destinies are seldom confined by the men they lean on. Sexual complicity in conflict with individual freedom is a central theme of the Balanchine pas de deux, and more often than not it is dramatized from the woman's point of view. ... For Balanchine it is the man who sees and follows and it is the woman who acts and guides." Forty years on, however, we can see more clearly the limits of that view. Even in Balanchine's many plotless ballets, men tend to be consorts and cavaliers, while few of his women with or without stories are wives, fewer are mothers, none work for a living, few seem trapped by their societies. And where the man is an artist, the woman is his muse; the roles may not, for Balanchine, be reversed. Before and during the Balanchine era, the ballerina was queen bee of ballet's realm. So it's startling to find that the internationally celebrated ballerina Margot Fonteyn, reflecting in her book "The Magic of Dance" (1979) about the impact of her younger partner Rudolf Nureyev on ballet, announced, "The era of the ballerina is over." A good thing, too, she added: The ballerina had ruled the roost for far too long. There would still be ballerinas but they would no longer reign supreme, as linchpins of ballet's construction and its meanings. It was time for change. The implications of that change are still emerging. Today we're watching Men's Lib. Its latest stages have included giving a new equivalence in partnering, whether opposite sex or same sex. Here the choreographic archetype was established by Ashton in the 1960s. In the exceptional pas de deux of "The Dream" (1964), Oberon not only partners Titania, but he also sometimes does so while performing the same steps. The 1960s fashion buzzword was unisex; Ashton gave that meaning in ballet terms. In this crucial respect, Ashton who in some ways seemed more old fashioned than his contemporary Balanchine was the one moving forward. And it was Ashton, in "The Dream" and other ballets, who dramatized the woman's joy in sex, her capacity for sexual rapture, as Balanchine never did. In Ashton's wake, the British choreographer Kenneth MacMillan went further. "No one has ever known more about the humiliation of women," a former Royal Ballet dancer wrote in a recent email. It was at first tempting to reply that MacMillan seemed all too keen on the humiliation of women. In his ballets, women are raped, subdued and manipulated; some meet their deaths directly after (as a result of?) intensely acrobatic pas de deux. Yet the female dancer's point has stayed with me. We inhabit a world where many women are enslaved, demeaned, abused. Should ballet be an art that reflects only their glorification? Nothing is trivial in the same choreographer's "Shostakovich Trilogy" (American Ballet Theater, 2013); its men and women are all overshadowed by the melancholy oppression of a world implicitly set in Stalinist Russia, but each woman is vividly distinct. Its final ballet, "Piano Concerto No. 1," ends brilliantly with a figure so fast it's easy to miss: The two ballerinas partner their two men in supported pirouettes, and the men hold the balances we've associated with the women. The status quo is suddenly flipped. One 21st century ballet has neatly turned the harem formula upside down. Justin Peck's "Rodeo" (New York City Ballet, 2015). It begins with an all male ensemble of 15 men. Their athleticism sets the tone. When a single woman arrives, she proves her mettle on their terms. In due course, she also finds love with one of them, but not the usual kind of male veneration that enshrines her. There's quiet, intimate give and take between her and her partner. You follow their nascent affection from both points of view. None of these ballets place the woman at the top of the pile. (Fonteyn was right.) And what's most remarkable about them is their new views of masculinity rather than femininity. In ballet, as in Western society, the new man exhibits more vulnerability, while letting the woman share some of the partnering. She's treated with less sexism and less sublimity. The second issue, more complex, has been discussed too little. Can a ballet made by a woman reflect a specifically female point of view? Ballets from "Giselle" to "Rodeo" give us men's ideas of women's points of view; but are there themes and viewpoints that a woman is more likely to show? One answer is Nijinska, whose masterpieces "Les Biches" and "Les Noces" are still revived by the Royal Ballet and elsewhere. Another is Twyla Tharp, who, from "Short Stories" (1980) to "Waiting at the Station" (2013), has shown among much else the frustrations of marriage from the woman's point of view. There is still controversy (chiefly in Balanchine centric circles) about whether Tharpian movement can combine with pointwork. It certainly can, but the debate shows you that Ms. Tharp has sometimes taken femininity in ballet where it hasn't been before. Still, it can be no accident that so many female dance makers came from modern dance rather than ballet. No ballet maker has achieved the revisionist power with which Martha Graham showed women rewriting both history and myth. Could this yet happen? Can anyone, female or male, give new feminist meaning to pointwork? My mind returns to one of the three heroines in Christopher Wheeldon's "The Winter's Tale" (Royal Ballet, 2014). Hermione, the maligned wife of the neurotically jealous ruler Leontes, is tried for adultery. Repeatedly, at her moment of greatest anguish, she rises onto point as she turns through huge, plaintive arabesques. The foot, doing what men's feet are never seen to do in seriousness, helps to give a full bodied, expansive voice to one woman and thus to all women. More, please; much more. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
A critically endangered black rhinoceros was released upon arriving at Zakouma National Park in Chad. Black Rhinos Roam Chad for the First Time in 46 Years Pigs don't fly yet, but rhinos do. Six black rhinoceroses were flown from South Africa to Zakouma National Park in Chad last week, reuniting the threatened animal with a land it has not roamed in nearly five decades. Chad is one of several African countries that have recently sought to start their own small black rhino populations in an attempt to protect the species from extinction. It is a participant in the African Rhino Conservation Plan, which hopes to significantly grow the number of rhinos in Africa over the next five years. Veterinarians in South Africa began training the six rhinos three months ago to prepare them for the trip, said Janine Raftopoulos, head of corporate communications for South African National Parks. The handlers kept the rhinos in bomas, or small enclosures, so they would be accustomed to spending time in confined spaces. The rhinos were sedated for the flight and accompanied by support staff and veterinarians. They were closely monitored throughout the trip to Chad. Up until the mid 20th century, black rhinos dominated the landscape of Chad, grazing and attracting tourists. But they also attracted poachers, who hunted them for their horns, which are coveted for traditional Chinese medicinal practices and are displayed as status symbols. The population of black rhinos is down 97.6 percent since 1960. Some estimate that as few as 5,500 are left on the continent, according to the African Wildlife Foundation. "That Zakouma National Park in Chad is considered sufficiently secure for a new rhino population is to be welcomed," she said. According to the African Wildlife Foundation, 98 percent of the current black rhino population exists in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Namibia. South Africa, which is home to 40 percent of the rhinos, has already moved some of them to other countries, like Botswana. Chad and South Africa have agreed "to share experiences and expertise in conservation matters and to assist each other on a reciprocal basis," Mr. Matlakeng said in a speech last week, welcoming the rhinos to Chad. Transporting the animals to create a new population is a plan that can prove effective, Ms. Dean said. "Some subspecies are performing really well, with an annual growth rate at 9 percent or even higher," she said in an email. But moving the rhinos to a place where they once were and no longer are isn't enough. The population must be managed and protected, and law enforcement must play a role, Ms. Dean said. There should also be biological management, guided by effective monitoring. The rhinos cannot be dropped into a location and expected to mate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was in her 80s when she took over the internet. Then came the movies. The Supreme Court justice, who died on Friday at 87, became an unlikely pop culture celebrity late in her life. Though private in her personal life, she was publicly known for the delivery of pointed and powerful court opinions, which became the fodder that kindled Ginsburg's internet fame. A Tumblr blog called Notorious R.B.G. a play on the name of the rapper Notorious B.I.G., who was born in Brooklyn like Justice Ginsburg was started by a law student in 2013 and excerpted the justice's opinions, as well as images and news articles about her. It laid the groundwork for an increased interest in her life. A biography, "Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg," was published in 2015 by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik, the law student who started the blog. Three years later, the documentary "RBG" became a summer hit and earned an Oscar nomination. A biopic, "On the Basis of Sex," written by her nephew, was also released that year. The documentary "RBG" chronicles Ginsburg's upbringing, her time as a law student at Harvard, where she was one of nine women in her class, her marriage to to Martin Ginsburg and her rise to the Supreme Court. It was nominated for a best documentary Oscar in 2019. (The Oscar went to "Free Solo.") The film helped bring Ginsburg more prominently into the realm of bona fide celebrity and it was a role she willingly accepted. "She knows the fact that she's doing this, and embracing it, means so much to young women because she's teaching, every time she gives a speech or talks to people," Theodore B. Olson, the conservative lawyer and a longtime friend, told The Times in 2018. In his review, A.O. Scott wrote that the documentary is "a loving and informative documentary portrait of Justice Ginsburg during her 85th year on earth and her 25th on the bench," and that the movie helped explain how she became such a cultural icon. "On the Basis of Sex," a 2018 biopic starring Felicity Jones, depicts Ginsburg's time at Harvard Law and the suit she argued with her husband that would become one of the building blocks of the laws that prohibited gender discrimination. Her nephew, Daniel Stiepleman, spent several years writing the script, consulting her throughout the process. The film "does a brisk, coherent job of articulating what Ginsburg accomplished and why it mattered, dramatizing both her personal stake in feminist legal activism and the intellectual discipline with which she approached it," our critic wrote in his review. Stream "On the Basis of Sex" on Sling or Amazon Prime. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Sons of Kemet, one of two bands led by the English saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, left, performed Saturday at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tenn. KNOXVILLE, Tenn. The Big Ears Festival started 10 years ago, disappeared, returned, reorganized as a nonprofit and has quietly grown year by year, filling theaters, clubs and galleries in downtown Knoxville. About 18,000 people attended this year's festival from March 21 24. Rejecting musical genre classifications and spurning descriptions like "avant garde" or "experimental," Big Ears has never spelled out its aesthetic guidelines, and by now it doesn't have to. It draws an audience that's curious and ready to listen intently. The Big Ears lineup this year encompassed rock (Spiritualized, Mercury Rev), jazz (the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Bill Frisell, Mary Halvorson, Tim Berne), contemporary classical music (Bryce Dessner, Anna Thorvaldsdottir), string band music (Punch Brothers, Bela Fleck), free improvisation (Evan Parker, Susie Ibarra), a folk opera (Rachel Grimes's "The Way Forth"), a ballet ("Lucy Negro Redux"), silent films with live scores and a midnight to noon drone marathon that changed performers every half hour. It featured multiple concerts of music by the pioneering Minimalist composers Alvin Lucier and Harold Budd; it celebrated the unconventional vocal techniques of the singers Joan La Barbara and Meredith Monk. It honored the 50th anniversary of the jazz and beyond label ECM Records and it gathered luminaries from Chicago's "Great Black Music" collective, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music. Instead of sales metrics or star power, Big Ears contemplates the perceptual properties of music: shades of dissonance and consonance, the particular qualities of a drone, the ever changing applications of subtlety and brute force. There was music to soothe, music to jolt, music to ponder and music to dance to. Here are 15 of the most intriguing performers and performances. The English musician Shabaka Hutchings brought two of his groups to Big Ears, both of them built around his fat toned, indefatigable tenor saxophone with beats derived from dance music and his far from secret resource carnival rhythms (he has Barbadian roots). He allows himself an extended solo now and then, but most of the time he pumps out short, hard riffs, all sinew and drive. Sons of Kemet is a four piece band: just Hutchings, two drummers, and a tuba player who occupies the entire low register. It was muscular enough, but a late night club set by Hutchings, a drummer, and a keyboardist who cranked up distorted rave bass lines was so forceful it set off a mosh pit. The Canadian composer Kara Lis Coverdale has released diverse albums of electronic music; she has also worked since her teens as a church organist. She used the pipe organ at the Church Street United Methodist Church for an eerie 47 minute piece that started with one of the very highest notes of the organ, alone: a keening whistle from somewhere far out of reach. Much of the piece stayed in those distant realms, sustaining tones beyond the power of human breath and letting tentative melodies hang in midair. She barely touched upon the earthy heft available in the organ's lower register; this was an elevated, disembodied contemplation, patiently celestial. When punk had barely dawned, This Heat was already post punk. From its start in 1976, This Heat was a contrarian band, dispensing corrosive noise, intricate math rock patterns and cryptic, often politically charged lyrics. Two of its founders, Charles Bullen (on guitar) and Charles Hayward (on drums), revived the band's repertoire in 2016 with This Is Not This Heat. Its Big Ears set was utterly precise in its cantankerousness, from the electronic screeching that ushered the band onstage to songs that blared and stopped cold, droned steadily or crashed and flailed, and set the Declaration of Independence to Arab tinged reggae (in "Independence"); the songs' bristling cynicism defies obsolescence. Big Ears, the group announced, would be its next to last show. Strictly speaking, Artifacts Trio Nicole Mitchell on flute, Tomeka Reid on cello and Mike Reed on drums started as a cover band. In 2015, the 50th anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music, the trio revived compositions from the multitude of albums the association's members have released: some swinging, some introspective, some textural. The lean, straightforward trio format and the tricky but frisky repertoire made an ideal showcase for Mitchell's prodigious, playful virtuosity and Reid's double duties of propulsion and melodic counterpoint. Playing solo classical guitar in ways that blur easy classifications of folk or jazz, Ralph Towner makes it seem as if his music were inventing itself on the spot. Phrases of melody appear in fluctuating tempos, as if they just occurred to him, soon followed by knotty chords that instantly recast the tune; swinging rhythms arise, take over for a while, then melt away. Each detail arrives as a discovery, though it's clear that Towner has deep structure behind his spontaneity. He unveiled some brand new pieces, and he cheerfully noted his recovery from triple bypass surgery by playing a standard: "My Foolish Heart." The methodical turns exhilarating in the music of Nik Bartsch and his quartet, Ronin. Bartsch starts with patterns often a terse little riff in an odd meter that get stacked up in countless ways, ricocheting from keyboard to bass clarinet to drums to electric bass, getting subdivided or having multiple instruments suddenly pile on. The repetition comes from Minimalism, the rhythmic flair from jazz and the unabashed impact from rock as all the parts click into place. Since the 1960s, Richard Thompson has been writing songs that face the bleak realities of mortality and hard luck. Backed by a string orchestra, he performed "K.I.A.: Killed in Action," a set of songs about World War I based on letters and diaries from the era. It was somber, detailed and unflinching, with the strings as full participants. When Thompson sang "Gas," about soldiers confronting poison gas for the first time, sustained strings switched to brittle pizzicato, conveying the sudden feeling of being unable to breathe. Lonnie Holley, a widely collected sculptor and painter from Alabama, started recording music in 2006 and released his first album in 2012, when he was 62. His voice is a bluesy, otherworldly moan with a hint of Sam Cooke and an occasional growl; his songs are verbal and musical improvisations, ruminating on the state of the world and the state of his soul. The Messthetics backed him on Friday afternoon with leisurely vamps topped by echoey keyboard and guitar as he sang about a fallen angel and about trying to reach the doorknob to heaven. His family once hoped Holley would be a preacher; between songs, he warned about a digital landscape where the "playground of foolishness" soon leads to the "quicksand field of stupidity." All dressed in white, Meredith Monk and her four woman ensemble of singers, dancers and musicians performed "Cellular Songs," a collection of pieces that contemplates both biological cells and musical ones: the little cyclical figures that Monk assembles into compositions. With wordless syllables and occasional lyrics, and vocal styles suggesting a world of allusions, the songs hinted at games and rituals, with hints of comedy, and a group embrace at the end became an affirmation of solidarity. For decades, the Art Ensemble of Chicago was a close knit quintet, until the deaths of some founding members. But at Big Ears, the Art Ensemble still including its founder Roscoe Mitchell on alto saxophone and its longtime drummer, Famoudou Don Moye appeared with more than a dozen musicians, including strings, brass, theremin, a singer (Rodolfo Cordova Lebron) and a poet (Moor Mother). Its set was just as sprawling, touching on improvisational orchestral squall, dissonant chamber jazz, a kind of parlor song and a musical jungle full of birdcalls. Its best moments were its most focused ones: swinging vamps propelled by Moye's drumming, pointedly political poetry declaimed by Moor Mother her "We Are on the Edge" is the title of an Art Ensemble album due April 26 and a perpetual motion tour de force by Mitchell, using circular breathing for a stretch of nonstop piping and squealing and scurrying that insisted, without a word, that after 50 years the Art Ensemble isn't finished. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
That this suggested relationship was between men (the excellent Antonio Brown, Talli Jackson and Cain Coleman Jr.) didn't prompt a question from the woman behind me. Apart from a slight residue of defiance in straight at the audience stares, the dancers treated their all male interactions matter of factly, bringing out the tender beauty in supported balances and underplaying the penetration of one man's foot through the hole made by the other's bent leg. Decades after Mr. Jones danced with Mr. Zane (who died in 1988), it is the standard issue postmodernism, not the gender politics, that retains the power to disconcert. In the later "Duet" (1995, revised 2002), the movement is more sensuous, but the sermon and the conversation in the soundscore explicitly direct attention to the difficulty of paying attention, an effort the work only partly rewards. It matters little that the duet was danced by Mr. Brown and a woman, I Ling Liu. In "Shared Distance" (1982, reconstructed 2014), casting did make a difference. This is a gymnastic duet in which the smaller partner may be tossed around by the larger one, but is clearly dominant, whether spooning or sitting atop a head. On Saturday, it mattered some that the smaller one was a woman and more that the woman was Jenna Riegel, whose gusto, playing off Mr. Jackson's stoicism, made "Shared Distance" the most alive selection among these works from the past. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
In Hans Christian Andersen's "The Most Incredible Thing" (1870), the usually impressive choreographer Justin Peck has chosen a story whose details he can't tell clearly and whose overall point he makes hackneyed. Ingenuity shines forth here and there; and Mr. Peck occasionally reveals new aspects of skill. But this 43 minute piece proves a damp squib. Its many dances seem not central but peripheral. At Tuesday's premiere with New York City Ballet at the David H. Koch Theater, it was uncomfortable to observe how much time, thought, travail and money had gone into making a ballet so disappointingly drab and tame. (There are dozens of elaborate costumes, none of which I long to see again.) Mr. Peck's artistic associates Bryce Dessner (composer), Marcel Dzama (designer), Brandon Stirling Baker (lighting designer) are part of the problem. So, unfortunately, is the choreography. The crucial point of Andersen's tale in which the one who could do the most incredible thing should have the king's daughter and half his kingdom is that, though art may be destroyed, its energy lives on independently as a vital force. This could work in ballet, an art that's often brilliant at suggesting radiant transcendence, uncrushable life force, miraculous invention. We don't even have to invoke the past masters Marius Petipa or George Balanchine, we have only to think of Mr. Peck's effusively pure dance 2014 hit "Everywhere We Go": Its extraordinary supply of self changing formations sums up something close to the heart of this Andersen story. In "The Most Incredible Thing," the dashing young Creator (Taylor Stanley) aims to win the hand of the Princess (Sterling Hyltin) by presenting her a clock that performs different marvels (people and actions) on each of the 12 hours. (Remember those e cards with the 12 days of Christmas? Andersen's description makes those look like child's play.) When the Destroyer (Amar Ramasar) smashes the clock and is about to become the Princess's husband, the clock's shattered denizens return to life and destroy him. The creation of the clock had seemed the incredible feat that deserved the Princess; then the destruction more so. It's the artifact's survival, however, that truly proves most unbelievable of all and brings artist and princess together. Yet in Mr. Dzama's visual staging, the two dimensional clock face is a tedious central spectacle, and Mr. Peck makes it less clear that the Creator made it than you'd like. As for the three dimensional people who pour forth from that machine, Mr. Peck makes them neither enchanting pieces of clockwork (the dolls in Leonide Massine's 1919 ballet "La Boutique Fantasque" have more life than the humans who want to buy them) nor miraculously real (the forlorn title character of Michel Fokine's 1911 "Petrouchka" is a puppet with an anguished inner life). Mr. Peck's toy figures merely arrive like a conventional divertissement suite, a series of party pieces generally duller than the fairy tale figures who turn up in the "Sleeping Beauty" wedding. One o'clock in Andersen's version brings Moses writing down "There is only one God." Why does Mr. Peck think a cuckoo (Tiler Peck) is a valid equivalent? She's a very busy bee I wish Mr. Dzama's winged outfit let us see her coloratura steps better but she has nothing to do with how a cuckoo sings or flies, let alone how a cuckoo clock functions. Brief flashes of inspiration occur, often at baffling moments. I don't know why the King is played by two tall men (Russell Janzen and Ask la Cour) as a single faceless, giant bivalve that magically sunders into two to reveal the Princess but the effect is so compellingly fantastic that it's engrossing. I have no notion why the Spring Bird is represented by a woman (Gwyneth Muller) in full length scarlet doing an act in the manner of the early modern dancer Loie Fuller, with elongated sleeves and fabric suggesting flickering flames but, for a few seconds, Mr. Peck, Mr. Dzama and Ms. Muller bring Fuller's fire dance alive out of history. When the Destroyer arrives, he's wonderfully arresting. Like the god Janus of Roman mythology, he has two faces, one on the back of his head. He, in everything he does, is the most real person in the piece. But when the creations come back to life, Mr. Dessner's music lapses into a pastiche of Philip Glass and Michael Nyman. Though Mr. Dzama uses several bright colors, his set and Mr. Baker's lighting make the story somber; theirs is a realm where the sun forgot to shine. Mr. Peck, 28, became City Ballet's resident choreographer last year. To date, the largest complaints about him have been old fashioned ones, namely that he has nothing to say and that he doesn't make male female duets with dramatic depth. "The Most Incredible Thing" starts to refute these, but at a first viewing not effectively. Creator and Princess no sooner meet, near the start of the work, than they go into a formulaic this thing called love duet, with no getting to know you courtesy and some foolish upside down lifts. She, curiously, becomes more freshly lifelike when she's with the Destroyer: a tense, dark number as if she's falling reluctantly under his spell. When she's reunited with the Creator, they reprise their earlier pas de deux, this time without the lifts that, at this later stage of the story, would no longer have seemed improper. There'll be more to say of this ballet during the season. There are two casts; it returns to repertory in April and May. In the present program it's preceded by three ballets that were new in October Myles Thatcher's "Polaris," Robert Binet's "The Blue of Distance" and Troy Schumacher's "Common Ground" and by Christopher Wheeldon's "Estancia," which hasn't been seen since 2010, the year of its creation. The Thatcher, Binet and Schumacher works are all pleasing and make their dancers highly attractive. "Estancia," amiably dated when new, now looks harmlessly silly. Now, Mr. Wheeldon certainly has something to say: principally, that, in Argentina, when there aren't young women to kiss, there are always horses. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
It's hard out here for a primp. On a warm Wednesday evening in November, Jean Shafiroff, a striking redhead, entered a ballroom inside the Plaza hotel. She wore a custom gown by the Harlem designer Victor de Souza: pink and blue striped silk taffeta, with a large bow on the bust and a train so long that it could have qualified for its own subway line. Think Jessica Rabbit as a candy striper. The occasion was a gala for the French Heritage Society, which seeks to preserve French culture and was attended by a who's who of counts and countesses. The setting was grand, the music was gay and the Taittinger Champagne flowed like blood from a guillotine. "When I get dressed up and go to a gala say the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet, A.B.T. or even some of the lesser galas it's a chance to sort of unwind," Mrs. Shafiroff said, referring to the American Ballet Theater. As she entered the ballroom, cameras flashed around her like fireflies in a summer meadow. As a rising member of the city's philanthropic class, Mrs. Shafiroff has been gaining prominence lately for her fund raising prowess as well as her proficiency in getting media attention. But her outsize presence on the gala circuit has also attracted a certain amount of society side eye, causing some to question whether her primary motive is philanthropy or publicity. Being social, of course, means being seen, so Mrs. Shafiroff attends three or four events a week in the busy fall season. And that is how, since embarking on a publicity push in late 2010, she has racked up almost 8,000 photographs on the website of the society photographer Patrick McMullan, and more than 100 mentions in Page Six, the gossip column in The New York Post. Even in the era of a social media celebrities, those are impressive numbers. "I see her as the new society," said Cristina Cuomo, a social arbiter and former longtime editor of Manhattan and Beach magazines. "The more she gets herself out there, the more effective she is at what she's doing. Her gaining notoriety goes hand in hand with her efforts to help these organizations that she supports." Mrs. Shafiroff exemplifies a new breed of hands on philanthropist, one who isn't necessarily born with the right family name, or introduced through debutante balls, or nurtured through the ranks of junior benefit committees. Instead, she is what her husband calls a working socialite, who regards the philanthropy circuit as a profession and is a master of promoting her own image alongside the charities she supports. He admiringly recounted his wife's moxie in soliciting donations from other wealthy New Yorkers. "I've seen calls where people were screaming at her," he said. "Screaming: 'How dare you call? How dare you ask for a gift?'" Mrs. Shafiroff exhaled sharply, like a small dog that had been hugged too hard, and interjected, "Well, not quite." "Jean gets in trouble," her husband said. "I don't get into trouble," she said, in protest. "Yes, she gets in trouble," he said. While husband and wife may spin it differently, there is no question that Mrs. Shafiroff is a fearsomely effective fund raiser. She has ramrod posture and diction to match, cultivations that emphasize a steely conversational focus on herself and her causes. But she came by her grit honestly: raised middle class in Hicksville, N.Y., the daughter of a schoolteacher and a stay at home mother. She caught the philanthropy bug as a brownie baking fund raiser for her daughters' schools, Dalton and Columbia Grammar and Preparatory, honing the talents that have made her an influencer on the charity circuit. Among them is the quid pro quo diplomacy that comes with being honored at a gala. Honorees are ostensibly recognized for their leadership, but in practice, it often means that one has either donated money or, just as important, will attract other donors. "You have to guarantee a certain contribution to the organization," said Mrs. Cuomo, the society editor. "There's also a sense of vanity. You know you're going to be celebrated and looked at, and you have to be willing. And Jean, because she likes that level of admiration, it really works to the benefit of the organization that she's supporting." As part of her charm offensive, Mrs. Shafiroff began writing six figure checks to select charities. In 2013, she donated 100,000 to the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services, a mental health and social services nonprofit, on whose board she has served for more than 20 years. That year, the organization presented her with the Madeleine Borg Lifetime Service Award at its spring gala, attended by the mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg. Mrs. Shafiroff has received a slew of other such honors, tracking closely with her generosity. In 2014 alone, according to her website, she was honored by Surgeons of Hope, the Ellen Hermanson Foundation, the Pet Philanthropy Circle and Animal Zone International. "She not only gives financially and helps us raise money, but she also rolls up her sleeves and gives her time," said Elsie McCabe Thompson, the society's president. These credentials come with other perks. As a ball gowned gatekeeper in the charity circuit, Mrs. Shafiroff helps select who is honored, and prospective candidates beat a path to her Park Avenue door. Cherie Blair, the wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, paid a visit in September. "She asked for a large gift for her foundation, and then she asked that I recommend her to be honored by a certain charity," Mrs. Shafiroff said, referring to the New York Women's Foundation, which funds health and economic programs for women and families, on whose board she serves. "I said, 'Absolutely.' I think she'd make a great honoree." Kerry Kennedy, the former wife of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, and the president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, paid a visit in November, according to Mrs. Shafiroff, who is a financial supporter of the organization. Ms. Smith said she sometimes balks under the sheer volume of solicitations that come from Mrs. Shafiroff's many publicity handlers. "What is ridiculous and sometimes quite annoying is that we will get pitched by every one of them," she said. She added, "If we fail to mention her, her publicists will complain, and I get the impression that she probably complained heavily to them." Her publicists, of course, frame things differently. "Jean is about getting the job done, and she hires specialists to build her brand and to make philanthropy recognized worldwide," said Ms. Lawlor, who runs the Lawlor Media Group, a boutique P.R. agency. Still, none of Mrs. Shafiroff's multiple publicists seemed thrilled to be serving on a team of rivals. Three different firms handled her new book, "Successful Philanthropy: How to Make a Life by What You Give," a guide for modern benefactors, leading to much bickering over who deserves credit for what. "She only needs one press agent," Mr. Hay said. "But for special events, if it makes her feel that she's extending her reach by hiring other press agents, as far as I'm concerned, she can hire dozens of them." At the French Heritage Society gala, Mrs. Shafiroff was in her element, hosting a table of friends and dependents including Ms. McCabe, the NYC Mission Society president; Mr. de Souza, the fashion designer; Mr. Hay; and Lady Liliana Cavendish. There were speeches, a salmon pastrami starter followed by chicken breast, and excitement when a party crasher was thrown out by security for trying to steal an armload of the event's gift bags a spectacle captured by Lady Liliana on her smartphone. Mr. McMullan, the photographer, stopped to take Mrs. Shafiroff's picture, prompting two tablemates to take out their cellphones and also start snapping images. Mrs. Shafiroff angled her swan neck and smiled. "How embarrassing," she murmured of the attention. "I'm a very fortunate person and I have an obligation to give back. I'm far from perfect, but I do believe it's O.K. to be able to enjoy your life as well." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The seemingly natural sparkle Anne Hathaway brings to her screen performances looks drained out of her for "The Last Thing He Wanted," an adaptation of Joan Didion's 1996 novel. This is apt. Hathaway's journalist character Elena McMahon is an exemplary Didion heroine: a woman worn down to her last nerve. Directed by Dee Rees ("Mudbound"), who wrote the screenplay with Marco Villalobos, the movie plunges Elena into the 1980s geopolitical turmoil around the United States's funding of Contras in Nicaragua. Didion's novel keeps historical details obscured: The book never mentions Ronald Reagan or his secretary of state, George Shultz. They appear here; Schultz, played by Julian Gamble, is practically a supporting character. Elena's misadventure motivation is personal: Her ailing father (Willem Dafoe) is himself a gun runner, and she imprudently chooses to carry out his last big score. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. There were good reasons to be skeptical of her 20 year old allegations: She'd changed her story and said some weird stuff, and even denied the whole thing under oath. And while the candidate had his flaws, he'd never been accused of sexual assault. So not everybody believed Juanita Broaddrick's claim that Bill Clinton raped her. "You cannot blame them," Ms. Broaddrick told me on the phone Wednesday. "Here I had lied in the Paula Jones suit, and that naturally threw very harsh criticism toward me, rightfully." You don't have to believe Mr. Clinton assaulted Ms. Broaddrick in 1978. If you're a journalist, it doesn't really matter what you believe, as long as you report what you know. But the handling of Ms. Broaddrick's story was one of the most damaging media mistakes of the Clinton years. And the treatment of Mr. Clinton's accusers by the Democratic Party and the media alike is one of the original sins that led to today's divided, partisan news environment. The mainstream American media in 1999, for reasons that are hard to explain or excuse today, got cold feet on a credible allegation of rape against the president. And after NBC News sat for weeks on an exclusive interview, Ms. Broaddrick went to the only people who would listen to her, Mr. Clinton's partisan enemies at The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. That move helped turn her straightforward allegation into a weaponized political story. And while Americans watching at home could make up their own minds about Ms. Broaddrick's credibility, they were left with new reasons to shake their heads at the media. The same thing is about to happen again. A former Senate aide for Joseph R. Biden Jr., Tara Reade, has accused the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee of sexually assaulting her in 1993. Reporters have found other accounts that indicate that she has been telling her version of events for a long time. There are, as with Ms. Broaddrick, reasons to doubt her story; there aren't good reasons not to hear her out. As The Times's executive editor, Dean Baquet, told me in an interview two weeks ago, Ms. Reade has "standing." And yet, Ms. Reade told me Wednesday that the only offers she's had to appear on television have come from Fox News, including a call from the prime time host Sean Hannity. She has so far turned them down. "I've been trying to just kind of wait to get someone in the middle," she said in a phone interview. "I don't want to be pigeonholed as a progressive, I don't want to be pigeonholed as a Trump supporter." CNN, NBC and MSNBC, whose DNA even in a pandemic is politics, have covered her on their websites and on air but haven't put her on camera. "They're not offering to put me on TV they're just doing stories," Ms. Reade told me. "No anchors, no nothing like that." She'd most like to tell her story to a network television anchor she admires CBS's Gayle King is one, she said but they haven't called. So she's planning to accept Fox News's offer for an interview to air this weekend, she said, with "someone a little more up the middle." She declined to say who, but a person who has spoken to her said Ms. Reade is in talks with Chris Wallace. The booking would be a coup for the conservative network, and give its on air hosts a club with which to beat a mainstream media that can't quite explain why it won't book Ms. Reade, while Julie Swetnick, a woman with a shaky claim against a Supreme Court nominee, got airtime during a prime time evening broadcast. Some of the reasons this story seems muffled right now are fairly straightforward: The global coronavirus pandemic has eclipsed almost everything else. There's also the way Ms. Reade first tried getting attention, mostly on Twitter, "stumbling forward with no P.R. person and no attorney," she said."I emailed Ronan Farrow like four times to the point of stalking and I didn't hear back," she added. "Now of course he's one of the investigative reporters on this." After The Times's story was published Thursday, Ms. Reade said that she had meant that Mr. Farrow had not initially responded to her, but they were now "actively communicating." 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. Then she found partisans willing to hear her out. First it was among supporters of Bernie Sanders, like the podcast host Katie Halper, who put Ms. Reade on her show. Then The Intercept, an anti establishment liberal news website, reported that a friend and brother of Ms. Reade's recalled her describing the incident. The traditional media, including the Times reporters Lisa Lerer and Sydney Ember, waded in carefully. Then the fast moving news site Business Insider reported other details that gave further weight to Ms. Reade's story. The reporter, Rich McHugh, had taken the story to Vanity Fair first, which declined to publish it, a spokesperson for Vanity Fair confirmed. The broadcast television networks, CNN and MSNBC have covered the story on their websites, while Fox News has covered developments breathlessly on air and online. There's still no clear explanation, however, for why Ms. Reade hasn't been on mainstream TV. Representatives for CNN and MSNBC declined to explain why they haven't booked a woman who is, whether you believe her or not, one of the few newsmakers right now who could cut through the pandemic. Their posture is all the more strange because, at this point, it's essentially symbolic. In 1999, you could argue that NBC's decision to hold back Lisa Myers's interview with Ms. Broaddrick had real political consequences: Taped in January, as the Senate took up impeachment charges against Mr. Clinton, it did not air until after the Senate voted not to convict the president in February. (Curiously, the only version online now is on the website of a conservative group.) Back then, the only way Americans were going to hear her voice was on television. But these days, if you want to judge Ms. Reade's story you can listen to her original podcast interview with Ms. Halper, or watch her on the populist Hill.TV online show "Rising," or the leftist news program "Democracy Now!" So the decisions by networks of how and whether to cover her have fewer consequences for how she's viewed, or even how Mr. Biden is viewed, than they do for how Americans view the media. "Typically, in a situation like this, media outlets would be competing intensely for the first major on camera interview, yet the only network calling Reade is Fox News," said Ryan Grim, the Washington bureau chief for The Intercept, who has championed Ms. Reade's story. "That the media isn't more concerned about the image ignoring this story creates, and the fodder it gives to cynical actors like Donald Trump Jr., gleefully parading the media's hypocrisy, suggests a potentially destructive lack of self awareness." There's still time for the biggest American outlets to own the story, as some print and digital organizations have begun to. They could investigate and break news that supports or undermines Ms. Reade's account, they could interview Mr. Biden directly, or they could give Ms. Reade herself a hearing. The alternative scenario is that Ms. Reade's allegation will become like Ms. Broaddrick's. "The rest of the mainstream media either ignored, dismissed or misrepresented her story, which was shameful," Ms. Myers, now retired from NBC, told me in a direct message on Twitter. "Many things have damaged the credibility of the mainstream media, but the obvious double standard in coverage of sexual misconduct allegations against politicians is high on the list." Ms. Broaddrick's name vanished into the right wing media and out of the official narrative then boomeranged back hard during the 2016 election, against the Clintons and against the media. Ms. Broaddrick embraced Donald J. Trump as a vehicle for her retribution. She showed up at a presidential debate, ironically as a kind of a shield against well reported allegations that Mr. Trump had assaulted women. On Wednesday, Ms. Broaddrick, 77, told me that she has been talking and texting with Ms. Reade, warning her that this is going to be hard. "It's the same stuff all over again," she said in a phone interview from her home in Arkansas. "People have got to learn that it doesn't matter who somebody supports if they can be vetted and investigated and we find that it's credible allegations then it doesn't matter what their political preference is." As for Ms. Reade, she says she knows many people won't believe her, or even really give her a hearing. "I think there are people who are hard wired to not believe it and that's OK they need to be able to justify their vote, and I have sympathy for that," she said. Others, of course, will believe her reflexively. Journalists cannot predict how viewers might react to television interviews with Ms. Reade, or where their reporting on her claims will lead. They don't have to. They should just make sure their audience knows they're reporting hard, and doing the work with an open mind. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Chris Murillo, 36, was a corporate lawyer and a cocktail connoisseur when, four years ago on New Year's Eve, he got the kind of idea that comes only after midnight and a few drinks. "I decided to start the first craft distillery in Queens," he said. "After sitting in an office for nine years, I finally needed to do something where I worked with my hands and got out and interacted with people." So he began making his own blend of Old Tom gin called Queens Courage, which is distilled in Pennsylvania, bottled in Brooklyn and sold in his new bar, Proof Gauge in Long Island City, Queens. The bar is in the commercial courtyard of the Falchi Building, a revamped industrial warehouse on the eastern edge of Long Island City. Follow the old rail tracks embedded in the asphalt, and it's just inside the glass lobby in a white sliver of a space that seats 12 at a copper top bar. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
When I was about 19 years old, I left home and my grandmother. She gave me a quilt that she had made. And this quilt was something that I didn't really care for. It had all these different colors and these different patches in it. And I was quite embarrassed by it. I had no value in it at all. When the dog got wet, I dried him off with it. When I needed to change the oil on the car, I laid it on the ground. I had no respect for this quilt. Many years later, as I was walking past one of those fancy antique stores that I could finally go in and shop, I saw in a window a quilt that looked just like the one that she had given me. And as I'm in the store wondering where that quilt was, there was an attendant who walked up to me and said, "Let me tell you about this quilt." It was made by an African American woman who was a former slave. And each patch in the quilt she had put in represented a part of her life. One part was from a dress she was wearing when she found out that she was free. Another part was from her wedding dress when she jumped the broom. And as I was hearing this story, I became so embarrassed. Here I was, a person who prides myself on celebrating our heritage, our culture, and I didn't even recognize the value in my grandmother's quilt. I dismissed her work and her story because it didn't look like what I thought it should. Now, whether we know it or not, we are all sewing our own quilts with our thoughts and behaviors, our experiences and our memories. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Before Pilobolus, before Momix, before Mummenchantz, there was Alwin Nikolais, the great magician of 20th century dance. Nikolais (1910 1993) created shape shifting, otherworldly visual wonders through original experiments with bodies, space, light and sound, and his work was hugely popular and influential from the 1950s until the 1990s. Today, however, it's not well known to general audiences. But Tuesday through Sunday, a program of four pieces, spanning his long career, comes to the Joyce Theater. The program "Tensile Involvement" (1955), "Gallery" (1978), "Mechanical Organ III" (1983) and "Crucible" (1985) is performed by the Ririe Woodbury Dance Company of Salt Lake City. The troupe has been the principal repository of the Nikolais repertory since 2003, when Murray Louis, the choreographer's partner of 40 years (creatively and in life), and Alberto del Saz, a former Nikolais dancer, decided it was important to keep the work alive. (Mr. Louis chose Ririe Woodbury because its founders had studied with Nikolais. He closed the Nikolais company in 1999.) Mr. Louis, a dancer and choreographer in his own right, died last week, leaving Mr. del Saz as the sole director of the Nikolais/Louis Foundation, which owns the rights to the work. "I do feel I have a responsibility to keep the work as close as possible to the original," Mr. del Saz said in a telephone interview from Angers, France, where he was teaching at the school that Nikolais once ran. "I really feel Nikolais was a true pioneer and a genius in the way he used multimedia and total theater. New dancers and audiences don't really know his work and how he has influenced so many people." The Joyce program shows one of the earliest and most famous of those multimedia works, "Tensile Involvement" (1955), in which the dancers have elastic strings attached to their hands and feet so that their movements seem to angle into infinite space. As in many Nikolais pieces, the concept is simple, but elaborately executed, with light used to create imagery that transforms the dancers into component parts of a whole. In other works, they wear costumes that alter their shapes, become blank surfaces for patterns of light, or, in "Gallery," appear as floating heads that keep popping up and disappearing. Although Nikolais was frequently criticized for depersonalizing his performers ("There is not an emotion anywhere on the premises," John Martin wrote in The New York Times in 1956), Mr. del Saz said that working with him was immensely satisfying. "You became extremely conscious of your surroundings because every movement in space affected how the piece looked," he said. "I felt I was an empty canvas that he used to create these illusions, and it was exciting." Mr. del Saz, who in 1983 came from Spain to the school that Nikolais and Mr. Louis ran in Lower Manhattan, said people often didn't understand how specific the technique was for a Nikolais dancer. "You really explore the body as a vehicle to create certain qualities," he said. "It's a very sophisticated, nuanced approach to movement and movement intention." Nikolais started dance late, at 23, after seeing a performance by the German Expressionist choreographer Mary Wigman. He had worked as a puppeteer and a pianist for silent films, but inspired by Wigman, he began to study with her student Truda Kaschmann, and later with Hanya Holm, another Wigman disciple, at the Bennington School of the Dance in Vermont. After serving in the Army in World War II, Nikolais became Holm's assistant, and her emphasis on spatial awareness and analysis had a profound effect on his work when he moved to New York, where he became dance director of the Henry Street Settlement Playhouse on the Lower East Side. At Henry Street, his headquarters until 1970, he began to devise the elaborate productions that he described in a 1966 essay as a "polygamy of motion, shape, color and sound." These productions were in strong contrast to the dramatic, psychologically motivated dance works that had prevailed in the 1940s and '50s works like Martha Graham's "Cave of the Heart" or "Errand Into the Maze" and they struck a resounding chord with audiences eager for electronic sounds and visual delights. (Nikolais's dances, the critic Deborah Jowitt wrote in "Time and the Dancing Image," "like Op Art, stoked a swelling interest in beauty that needed no explanation, in sensory delights, psychedelic effects and drugs that heightened perception.") The Nikolais school drew students from varied disciplines. "I'll never forget watching Nik and his dancers in a lecture demonstration," said Moses Pendleton, a founder of Pilobolus, and later Momix, who came to the school in 1970 after seeing a workshop at Dartmouth. "He was drumming and explained that the dancers were going to do something called improvisation. It was so magical and musical and funny and unpredictable that it changed me from a potential doctor or veterinarian into a dancer." Mr. Pendleton said in a telephone interview that when Nikolais and Mr. Louis later saw a trio (called Pilobolus) that he and two classmates had created, they offered to present it. "I think he really was a magician; he transformed us into artists," Mr. Pendleton said. By then, the Nikolais company was on the international map, and particularly popular in France, where Nikolais directed the Centre Nationale de Danse Contemporaine in Angers from 1979 to 1981. One of his pupils was the young Philippe Decoufle, who would later win fame as director of the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France. "What I learned from Nikolais is essential to my work now; how he could make bodies something else; objects, flowers, light and shade," Mr. Decoufle said in a telephone interview from New York, where he is directing a new production for the Cirque du Soleil on Broadway. "It's still very rare in dance that music, light, video are integrated as a whole. People are more worried about how they move than about a full vision of a show." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
By the time awards season rolls around each year, the inbox of anyone covering style fills up with so much pressing fashion minutiae that trepanation can suddenly seem like a desirable option. This week, for instance, came news that, for the 26th annual Palm Springs Film Festival awards gala, the British actor Eddie Redmayne was to be seen in a midnight blue stretch velvet two button Dylan jacket with a notch lapel and a "leather detail." That is not all. He also chose on a mild desert evening to wear a white dress shirt, a black satin bow tie, black wool evening trousers and black patent leather shoes. The shoes were lace ups, just so you know. It has been eons since show people and the fashion industry first forged a fateful and slightly unholy alliance or anyway since the Reagan era. Writing recently from Florence, Italy, the costume curator and historian Deborah Nadoolman Landis recalled attending an awards show in the mid 80s at which two actress nominees, Sissy Spacek and Sally Field, turned up in cardigans, housedresses and glasses. Nowadays if an actor of reputation tried walking around even at home while wearing a housedress, her personal stylist would quit on the spot. The Internet has seen to it that actors are on all the time now, never more so than during the monthslong sprint between the Toronto Film Festival in September and the Academy Awards next month. The 66 separate events Lupita Nyong'o attended last year during a well planned campaign for the Oscar are characteristic of the demands faced by performers. Looking good and fashionable all the time now comes with the job description. What is fascinating for even the most seasoned observer is noting how actors, the most malleable of creatures, transform themselves for the role. This year it's the men in particular who bear watching, as a crop like the nominees for the Screen Actors Guild Award suddenly appear everywhere, always looking like a million bucks. Check out Steve Carell, one time doofus from the "The Office" and now movie star suave in Gucci or Prada; or Benedict Cumberbatch, crisply graphic as a 1920s Leyendecker illustration in white tie and tails; or Michael Keaton, impeccable and model thin at 63, in Italian wool suits with high armholes and fashionably narrow trousers; or Jake Gyllenhaal in custom fitted Burberry; or Ethan Hawke, looking at 44 like a billboard model for Calvin Klein. That each appears as if he could have strolled off a Milanese runway is not accidental. Just as female stars all seem now to roll off the assembly line a perfect size 2, so their male counterparts somehow got the memo that the modern male movie star is molded in one suit size, the same 38 regular fashion models wear. "It has to do with the ever increasing craze of Internet coverage and gossip magazines," said Ilaria Urbinati, a celebrity stylist and a woman who has probably spent more time dressing Bradley Cooper than his mother ever did. "There are more and more awards shows, more press than ever, more exposure and more scrutiny," Ms. Urbinati said from Sun Valley, Idaho, where she was resting up for the coming onslaught. For major clients of Ms. Urbinati's, like Mr. Cooper, Ryan Reynolds, Chris Evans or David Oyelowo, the job of styling extends well beyond the red carpet. "I choose a lot of the clothes in their closets," she said, a strategy designed to accommodate the reality that even paparazzi shots tend to be highly staged. "If you see a picture of them out walking their dog, chances are I picked out the hat and the pants." For Long Nguyen, the creative director of Flaunt magazine, the fluidly symbiotic relationship actors now enjoy with top designers is a far cry from the 1990s, when many actors disdained an interest in fashion, considering it a compromise of their machismo and their pact with the Muse. "It was immensely difficult to get actors to pose for fashion photographers," Mr. Nguyen said. "Not because they didn't fit the clothes, but because they were, well, 'actors.' " Now, he added, it's hard to keep them away from the clothes rack, partly because, as female stars learned long ago, lucrative fashion side gigs make it possible to undertake roles in risky indie films (see: McConaughey, Matthew), but also because playing a professional clotheshorse is how some of the more bankable male stars began their careers. "I suspect the influence of Channing Tatum in all this," Jim Nelson, editor in chief of GQ, wrote in an email from Hawaii. Just as Mr. Redmayne did, Mr. Tatum had a thriving career as a model before taking to the boards. "It's a new kind of dance, a career balancing act, for young actors," Mr. Nelson said. "These days you're helped by the model looks and the fashion connections, but you also have to be willing to throw your vanity away a little as well, if you really want to break out." That balancing act may not be altogether new, suggested Lynn Hirschberg, editor at large at W magazine. "Men in general, and actors in particular, have a very love hate relationship with fashion, beauty and attention," said Ms. Hirschberg, who has charted the vagaries of Hollywood celebrity intimately for decades in publications like Vanity Fair. "They don't want to be vain or effeminate or like the girls, or seem like they're interested in anything but their craft." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
If You Think the Oscars Have Gotten More Political, Here's Why You're Right Last year, when the Oscars television audience fell to an all time low of 26.5 million viewers, some commentators said the awards had become too political. This year, it's easy to find Twitter users declaring they're skipping the broadcast to avoid politics, and a survey of potential viewers found that 39 percent of them may tune out for the same reason. Sometimes, "too political" means partisan acceptance speeches. But if that means movies with a political flavor, then those fed up fans are correct: the Oscars are particularly political this year. I analyzed all 554 best picture nominees over the Academy Awards' history and concluded that this year more contenders emphasize politics than in any of the past 75 years. Granted, many of those years had fewer best picture nominees, but even on a percentage basis, 2018 still ranks among the most political years in Oscar history. To reach this conclusion mathematically rather than anecdotally, it is necessary to classify all 554 films as political or apolitical, and this is no easy task. Nearly every film could be construed as political in some fashion: politics affects every human endeavor, and it's possible to interpret a film as commenting on any number of issues. So, I set some ground rules. To be considered political for my purposes, a film had to meet at least one of five standards: It could show an attempt to gain political power, as in "Citizen Kane" (1941) in which the main character runs for governor of New York. It could portray a debate over how to govern, as with the one man stand against Senate corruption in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (1939). It could cover political events past or present, as in the historic interviews depicted in "Frost/Nixon" (2008). It could explore conflict between sovereign powers, like the Cold War negotiations in "Bridge of Spies" (2015). Or it could very plainly be making a statement about an issue, like the overt antiwar message of "All Quiet on the Western Front" (1930). Of course, classifying films in this way can never be perfectly objective, but I did my best to handle all titles with consistency. With those rules in place, I count six of this year's best picture nominees as political. "BlacKkKlansman" deals with a Ku Klux Klan plot and the black power movement in the 1970s. "Vice" is a stylized recreation of the career of former Vice President Dick Cheney. "Black Panther" reimagines the classic comic book series about two cousins fighting for the throne of a fictional African superpower. "The Favourite" depicts two women competing for political clout under the thumb of Queen Anne. While perhaps not quite as clear cut as those four, "Green Book" shows a black pianist making a stand for civil rights by bravely touring the South in the 1960s. "Roma" takes a dark turn when a Mexico City student protest turns violent. Among the nominees for the academy's grand prize, only a pair of musical dramas "A Star Is Born" and "Bohemian Rhapsody" did not include enough of a political emphasis to classify them as such under these ground rules, though subtle political themes could certainly be teased out. With six politically tinged nominees, this year is tied with 1944 for the second most ever, behind the seven such nominees of 1943. Clearly, politics was on the minds of moviemakers and moviegoers alike at the height of World War II. In 1943, the winner was "Mrs. Miniver," the story of a British woman on the home front that concludes with a pro Allies speech so stirring that President Roosevelt had it printed and released via airplane over German occupied areas. In 1944, the triumph belonged to "Casablanca," the classic tale of wartime political intrigue and an American expatriate reluctant to be a hero. On a percentage basis, 75 percent of this year's nominees feature political themes, which sits in sixth place behind five years at 80 percent apiece. To put this in perspective, across all years only 38 percent of films were marked as political. But that mark of 38 percent has not remained constant over time. Through the 90 years of Oscar history, the data show a modest upward trend in the percentage of best picture nominees tackling issues each year. In the first 30 years of the Oscars, 34 percent of nominees were political; in the most recent 30 years, that figure has jumped to 41 percent. Not only do the 2018 nominees share a political theme, but two of them also go so far as to specifically put President Trump's face onscreen. In "Vice," his image briefly flashes by during a montage of the 1980s, though it surely was meant to convey a larger point about the tie ins between Dick Cheney's politics and Donald Trump's. In "BlacKkKlansman," the film concludes with a flash forward to the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. During that final sequence, the president delivers his infamous "many sides" comment, as Spike Lee suggests that the evil he filmed in the 1970s is still alive today. Going through the 554 best picture nominees, to the best of my research abilities I found only one other year in which a sitting president appears onscreen twice: 1976, when Gerald R. Ford could see himself on the silver screen a couple of times. In the opening scene of "All the President's Men," which dealt with The Washington Post's Watergate investigation, Ford stands and applauds as Richard M. Nixon, still the president, enters Congress to deliver the State of the Union address. In "Network," an ahead of its time cautionary tale about the corrupting power of television, Ford can be briefly seen on a TV in the control room before the screen flickers over to the eccentric newsman Howard Beale. By the time the Oscars rolled around, in March 1977, Ford had already lost the office to Jimmy Carter, and the Philadelphia boxing classic "Rocky" beat both films for best picture. "Rocky," incidentally, was the only best picture nominee that could be considered apolitical that year. In addition to "All the President's Men" and "Network," that crop of contenders included an alienated man contemplating a presidential assassination in "Taxi Driver," as well as Woody Guthrie strumming a pro union tune in "Bound for Glory." That makes "Rocky" one of only two apolitical films to beat a field composed entirely of political films, along with the 1984 biopic "Amadeus," the tale of rivalry between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri. Those years are a bit outside the norm because historically, political films have a small leg up. Apolitical films have won on 15 percent of their nominations, but political films have won on 19 percent of theirs. Perhaps that's a good sign for "BlacKkKlansman," "Black Panther," "Green Book," "The Favourite," "Roma" or "Vice." Because the Oscars are still very political, and they show no signs of dropping the campaign. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
In a potential blow to Crackle, the fledgling Sony Pictures Entertainment streaming service, Jerry Seinfeld's hit online series "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" is on the market. "Comedians in Cars," introduced in 2012 on Crackle, features Mr. Seinfeld having free form conversations with pals like Tina Fey and Jon Stewart. It was nominated for best variety series at the Emmys this year, and Sony has said the show which has roughly 50 episodes has generated more than 100 million streams. In the process, it put Crackle on the map. But Mr. Seinfeld's contract is expiring, and he has lately felt adrift at Sony, especially since June, when the studio parted ways with Steve Mosko, its television chairman and one of Mr. Seinfeld's longtime allies, according to multiple people briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect relationships. As a result, the people said, representatives for Mr. Seinfeld have been in talks with the likes of Netflix and Hulu about taking over distribution of "Comedians in Cars." In a statement, Sony said, "'Comedians in Cars' has been a great part of Crackle's programming lineup for years, and we look forward to continuing our relationship with Jerry Seinfeld." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Each week, technology reporters and columnists from The New York Times review the week's news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here. Greetings, nerds and Luddites. I'm Brian X. Chen, your personal tech columnist, and I'm here to guide you through the week's tech news. Let me get this off my chest: Does anyone else feel that Amazon is slowly taking over the world? Riding on the success of Amazon Prime, the company is offering incentives for Whole Foods shoppers to sign up for Prime. This week, Prime members started getting an extra 10 percent off items that are marked on sale (with a yellow tag) at all Whole Foods stores across the United States. To redeem the discount at the checkout counter, you open the Whole Foods app on your smartphone and scan a bar code. Amazon seems well aware that people are so unaccustomed to getting discounts at Whole Foods that they will exchange data about their grocery shopping habits for a few cents. The other day, I scanned the bar code at Whole Foods and shaved a dollar off my 56 grocery bill. Maybe in a few months, I'll save up enough to get a free bottle of kale juice. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. Richard Alston's one act "Carmen," recently performed by Miami City Ballet at the Broward Center here, is the best "Carmen" ballet I've seen. That is less a compliment than it sounds: Most "Carmen" ballets are clunkily melodramatic and choreographically dismal. This one, made for the Scottish Ballet in 2009, has its faults and problems, too. It uses Rodion Shchedrin's arch arrangement of Bizet's highlights (including two numbers from "L'Arlesienne"), for strings and percussion; and it follows the basic gist of the Shchedrin ballet (originally choreographed by Alberto Alonso) in retelling "Carmen" as a tale about four people Carmen, her rival lovers Jose and Escamillo, and a female Fate figure (who here is scaled down into the Fortuneteller). Its virtues, though, both make it rare among "Carmen" ballets and add to your knowledge of Miami City Ballet's excellent dancers. The title role proves a handsome vehicle for Patricia or Jeanette Delgado, depending on which performance you see. (I watched performances on Saturday and Sunday.) These sisters, this company's most winning dancers, epitomize its elegant sunniness. Though they share dark hair and eyes, memorably large dimples and effortless personal allure, their interpretations differ: Jeanette (the shorter) is the more fiery and explosive Carmen, Patricia the more fascinatingly dignified. Even when you've seen thousands of pirouettes, Jeanette's multiple turns on point (arms raised "en couronne" and wonderfully arched) are especially heart catching, while Patricia's supererect posture and the turns of her head raise the "Carmen" temperature. The finest choreography, however, is for the men, notably Corporal Don Jose and Escamillo, the Toreador. As soon as Jose (Jovani Furlan or Chase Swatosh) enters, to a highly syncopated version of his "Dragons d'Alcala" tune, the music's metric play stimulates Mr. Alston's gift for rhythm; Jose pounces keenly onto one beat and hovers in a momentary balance on another. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The pornographic film star Ron Jeremy has been charged with sexually assaulting 13 more women, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office said on Monday, bringing the total number of alleged victims to 17. The new charges include accusations that Mr. Jeremy, who is now 67 years old, sexually assaulted a 15 year old girl at a party in 2004. He was charged with lewd conduct and sexual penetration by a foreign object in that case. The additional accusations some of them involving multiple charges expand the case against the actor significantly. In total, he is charged with raping seven women and sexually assaulting 10 more. The newest charges which include five counts of forcible rape and six counts of sexual battery by restraint date from 2004 to this year. In June, Mr. Jeremy was charged with raping three women and sexually assaulting a fourth from 2014 to 2019. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Sunday, Nov. 5, marks the 47th running of the five borough marathon in New York City, currently called the TCS New York City Marathon. The race is expected to draw more than 50,000 runners this year, according to New York Road Runners, the group that organizes the event, but the marathon isn't just for participants: N.Y.R.R. as well as hotels and restaurants around the city have free or attractively priced events, packages and meals related to the race and open to the general public. "Spectators are integral to the spirit of the marathon, and there are lots of ways in town for them to get into the excitement of the day," said Chris Weiller, a spokesman for N.Y.R.R. N.Y.R.R., for example, has several events leading up to Nov. 5, including the TCS New York Marathon Pavilion, near the race's finish line at West 67th Street and Central Park West and open from Sunday, Oct. 29 through Friday, Nov. 3. The pavilion, which is free to enter, will host running themed programs all week like meet and greets with renowned runners (the running star Meb Keflezighi was among those in the lineup last year). Visit tcsnycmarathon.org to see the 2017 schedule. Also, on marathon eve, recreational runners and walkers can participate in the Abbott Dash to the Finish Line 5K, held at 8:30 a.m.; the race starts at the United Nations building on First Avenue and East 44th Street and ends at the marathon finish line. 50 a person, register online at nyrr.org/races and events. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
MIAMI Aerial spraying of insecticide began Thursday in the one mile square area of Miami where mosquitoes have infected people with the Zika virus, and officials reported some glimmers of progress. "We are very encouraged by the initial results, which showed a large proportion of the mosquitoes killed," Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said at a news conference here. But Dr. Frieden added, "This is going to take an intense effort." On Monday, faced with 14 locally transmitted infections, the C.D.C. took the unprecedented step of advising people to stay away from a location in the continental United States, urging pregnant women not to travel to the one square mile area where 12 of the cases are linked. On Thursday, the health department said it had completed testing in a 10 block section of the neighborhood and found no additional cases. "We feel comfortable now that in that one mile radius, we can take 10 blocks in that northwest corner and say we don't believe there is any active transmission of Zika," Gov. Rick Scott said at the news conference. Nevertheless, Dr. Frieden said, "we would not be surprised to see additional infections diagnosed" in a smaller core area. "That's the way Zika works," he said. "But what we want to see is the mosquito counts coming down." This week, the department has reported only one other case of local transmission of Zika, bringing the total to 15, but that was in another part of Miami Dade County with no connection to Wynwood. Officials said they were testing people in the community to see if the virus had spread but so far had found no evidence. The aerial spraying of a pesticide called Naled, conducted early Thursday morning, was undertaken after other methods of attacking the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which spreads the Zika virus, had only marginal success. "The Aedes aegypti mosquito has several bad things associated with it," Dr. Lyle Petersen of the C.D.C., who is managing the agency's Zika response, said in an interview. "It tends to breed in small pools of water, which are ubiquitous in any urban environment, and tends to be hard to reach. It tends to breed in cryptic environments that are hard to find. And it's just very hard to get rid of." The traditional methods used in Miami truck mounted spraying and backpack spraying with two types of pyrethroid insecticide have not killed enough mosquitoes, Dr. Petersen said. He said Naled, an insecticide that has been widely used in Florida but not in Miami, might work against city mosquitoes that could have become resistant to pyrethroids, the insecticides that had been used. He said the plan was to spray once a week with Naled to kill adult mosquitoes and once a week with insecticide to kill larvae. Also, Naled is good at providing a "rapid knockdown of mosquitoes," Dr. Frieden said. "It can get where no truck can get, where no backpack sprayer can get." Dr. Frieden stressed that Zika was not like West Nile virus, which spreads easily because it is carried by a different kind of mosquito. It is possible to stop Zika in its tracks more efficiently because the Aedes aegypti mosquito flies only a short distance, he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Sharks are not known for their taste for greenery. But at least one species of shark enjoys a salad of sea grass as well as the prey it hunts. The bonnethead shark, a diminutive species that reaches up to 3 feet in length, lives in the shallow sea grass meadows off both coasts of the Americas. It eats small squid and crustaceans ferreted from the swaying underwater fronds. But, researchers who have carefully monitored everything going in and out of captive bonnetheads say in a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that they also eat large quantities of seagrass. The grass isn't just passing inertly through the sharks' guts. They extract nutrition from it just as they do from the meaty portion of their diet. These sharks must, therefore, be reclassified as omnivores the first omnivorous sharks known to science. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. In 2007, researchers first reported that the digestive tracts of bonnethead sharks caught in the Gulf of Mexico were full of sea grass, up to 62 percent of the contents by weight. At the time, some reasoned that the grass might have been ingested incidentally, as the sharks dove for scurrying prey in the meadows. But Samantha Leigh, a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine, and lead author of the paper, and her colleagues wondered whether there was more to it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Oliver Smithies, a British born biochemist and inveterate tinkerer who shared a Nobel Prize for discovering a powerful tool for identifying the roles of individual genes in health and disease, died on Tuesday in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 91. His death, after a short illness, was announced by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Weatherspoon eminent distinguished professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the medical school. Dr. Smithies's discovery, known as gene targeting, allows scientists to disable individual genes in mice to understand what the genes do. The loss of a gene typically brings about changes in the appearance or the behavior of the mice, providing important clues about the gene's function. Mice are ideal models for people because about 90 percent of mouse genes correspond to human genes. Scientists have also used gene targeting technology to create mice that have symptoms of human diseases, including cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes and various cancers. These designer mice are widely used in research to understand the genetic causes of diseases and to develop and test potential new therapies. Dr. Smithies shared the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Mario R. Capecchi of the University of Utah and Sir Martin J. Evans of Cardiff University in Wales. The scientists worked separately but built on one another's research. In addition to gene targeting, Dr. Smithies invented a method of separating proteins with a jelly made from ordinary potato starch, a major advance that was cheaper, easier and more precise than existing technologies. His invention, called gel electrophoresis, is in wide use today. Behind Dr. Smithies's breakthroughs were ingenious homemade contraptions cobbled from everyday objects and junk. He thought of himself as an inventor and toolmaker and acknowledged that he could not pass a rubbish bin without pausing to inspect the contents a trait he said he shared with his paternal grandfather, who used to pick up nails and straighten them for later use. His tinkering did not go unnoticed. Colleagues at Oxford University, where Dr. Smithies pursued his graduate studies, set aside their discarded equipment for him, labeling it, "NBGBOKFO," or "No bloody good but O.K. for Oliver." The research that led to Dr. Smithies's Nobel grew out of experiments he had been doing in the early 1980s with a family of genes involved in sickle cell disease, an inherited form of anemia characterized by misshapen red blood cells. He had normal genes in his lab, and he thought there might be some way of using genetic material from them to repair the mutation involved in sickle cell disease. Dr. Smithies spent three years trying to insert bits of genetic material into cells to correct the gene. He turned cafeteria trays into oversize petri dishes and used electrical supplies and an infant washtub to build a device to force genetic material into cells. Most scientists thought gene targeting could not be done; many of his students drifted to other projects. Then came what Dr. Smithies, an amateur pilot, called his "runway moment." He was alone in a darkroom, developing an X ray film that would reveal whether gene targeting was possible. As he lifted the film from the fixative solution, he had the same sensation he got whenever he guided his plane through clouds and the landing strip came into view. The film showed 10 bars in a straight line and an 11th bar that was separate from the others. Each bar was a gene, and the 11th bar was the gene Dr. Smithies had altered. It was exactly where he had predicted it would be. Dr. Capecchi subsequently showed that gene targeting could be used not only to repair genes but also to turn them off. Then Dr. Smithies and Dr. Capecchi each showed that genetic changes made in one kind of cell, an embryonic stem cell, could be passed on, a discovery that enabled scientists to breed mice with specific disease conditions. Dr. Evans discovered embryonic stem cells in mice. Gene targeting technology was too inefficient to use to treat human diseases. But its wide adoption as a research tool transformed the field of genetics, which had previously relied largely on statistics to connect individual genes with illness or health. "For the first time in history, genetics has become an experimental science," Dr. Goran K. Hansson, a member of the 2007 Nobel Prize committee, said after the award was announced. Oliver Smithies was born on June 23, 1925, in Halifax, England. His father, William, was an insurance salesman; his mother, the former Doris Sykes, was a teacher in a technical college. A heart murmur prevented him from playing sports, so he amused himself by making things. He built a loudspeaker by stretching a pig's bladder across a wooden frame and made a radio controlled boat by using an ignition coil from a Ford Model T as a transmitter. He attended Heath Grammar School, a competitive high school that selected students based on standardized tests. He excelled in mathematics and received a scholarship to Oxford University, where he earned bachelor's degrees in physiology and chemistry and a doctorate in biochemistry. After a fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, he moved to the University of Toronto, where he found work as a research chemist. His lab chief, an expert on insulin, told Dr. Smithies that he could do whatever he wanted, as long as it was related to insulin. In the 1950s, insulin was derived from the pancreases of cows and pigs and was thought to be contaminated with another protein, which today is known as proinsulin. Dr. Smithies set out to find it. He turned to a method that uses electricity to separate proteins on filter paper. The electrical current typically causes proteins to migrate across the paper; the proteins separate as they move. But when Dr. Smithies ran the experiment, the insulin stuck to the paper. His search for something else to use summoned memories of the gooey liquid his mother had used to starch the collars of his father's shirts. The liquid, he recalled, set into a gel when it cooled. Would insulin move through the gel in the same way other proteins migrated across filter paper? Dr. Smithies found a bottle of starch in a chemical storeroom. He cooked the starch, cooled it, and waited as insulin, spurred by electricity, traveled through the goo. Over the next few months, Dr. Smithies worked at improving his method, using it to separate cabbage enzymes and, eventually, the proteins in blood plasma. He detected proteins in plasma that had not been seen by other researchers who had used the filter paper method, establishing the superiority of his technology. He went on to discover inherited differences in one of the proteins, a finding that shifted his research toward genetics. (He never completed his insulin study.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
148 East 98th Street (between Lexington and Third Avenues) An Israeli investor has bought this six story elevator mixed use building in Carnegie Hill in an off market transaction. The 2009 building features 11 free market one bedroom apartments, five with balconies, and a vacant 800 square foot office space. The 9,900 square foot building sold for 17.6 times the rent roll, with a 3.4 percent cap rate. Glenn Raff, one of the brokers, was also involved in the sale of the building in 2015 when it sold for 6.6 million. Lombardo's of Bay Ridge, a new Italian cafe whose specialty is brick oven pizza, along with pastries and coffee, has signed a 10 year lease for this 800 square foot single story storefront, with a 400 square foot basement, and part of a three story adjoining main building. The cafe, which is now open, has two entrances, and sliding windows to give it an al fresco feel in warm weather. This recently renovated 20 foot wide, five story brownstone, including a garden level, is on a tree lined street in the Upper West Side Central Park West historic district. It was built around 1892 in the Renaissance Revival style. The 6,156 square foot brownstone offers nine apartments one studio, five one bedrooms and three two bedrooms of which eight are free market and one rent stabilized. Each apartment has new wood floors and recessed lighting and is metered separately for electric and gas. Air rights total 770 square feet. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
ATLANTA Faced with the United States' surging coronavirus caseload and mounting public fears, college sports executives have discussed in recent days whether to reduce the number of venues at which games are played during the N.C.A.A. men's and women's basketball tournaments that begin in less than two weeks. A narrowed list of playing sites is one option N.C.A.A. executives are studying as the association prepares for the tournaments, which are among the marquee events in American sports and are scheduled in dozens of cities in the coming weeks. Executives and medical experts are also considering other possibilities, including holding games without spectators and proceeding normally but with enhanced efforts to promote public health, such as hand sanitizer stations. More: Track the spread of the coronavirus with our map by clicking here. "We're playing out every possible scenario, ranging from 'OK, we're full go' to modified go to 'Are we playing a game and we're certain that everyone in the arena is clean and there won't be any public?'" Brian Hainline, the N.C.A.A.'s chief medical officer, said on Saturday. He said it was "hard to imagine" the tournaments being canceled. As recently as Friday, Hainline said, officials talked about whether they could lower the number of tournament sites during what is known as March Madness. The men's tournament is expected to be played in 14 cities, including Atlanta, the site of the national championship game that is scheduled for April 6. The women's tournament, slated to conclude in New Orleans, is planned for even more cities. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
JUSTIN TOWNES EARLE at the Music Hall of Williamsburg (May 24, 8 p.m.). This bill features the next generation of two musical families: Mr. Earle is the son of the country troubadour Steve Earle and named in part for the elder Mr. Earle's mentor Townes Van Zandt. Lilly Hiatt, who will be opening the concert, is the daughter of the singer songwriter John Hiatt ("Have a Little Faith in Me," among others). What ties them together is a passion for songs, specifically ones that transcend both genre and time: Even as these scions distinguish themselves musically (Mr. Earle skews traditional country, and Ms. Hiatt's sound is more grunge rock than Music Row), their work is still grounded in storytelling. 718 636 4100, musichallofwilliamsburg.com FESTIVAL OF DISRUPTION at Brooklyn Steel (May 19 20, 7 p.m.). Though music does fall within David Lynch's wide range of expertise, he won't be performing at the first New York edition of his two year old festival (previously, it has taken place in Los Angeles). Instead, Lynch will curate and host a weekend of film screenings, talks and music hip and forward thinking enough to justify the festival's Silicon Valley ready name, with experimental D.J.s such as Flying Lotus and Hudson Mohawke, irreverent singer songwriters like Angel Olsen and Jim James and genre bending indie pop from Au Revoir Simone and Animal Collective. Tickets for Saturday night's concert are sold out, but they are still available for Sunday's show. 888 929 7849, bowerypresents.com/venues/brooklyn steel ROBERT FINLEY at Rough Trade (May 20, 8 p.m.) and Mercury Lounge (May 23, 7:30 p.m.). Rock's current establishment is more conscious than any other of music's underrecognized forebears namely of unsung blues and R B artists. Hence the archival blues reissues from Jack White's Third Man Records, the belated celebration of Daptone Records' Charles Bradley and Sharon Jones, and now the emergence of Robert Finley, a previously anonymous Louisiana bluesman whose profile has been boosted in part by Dan Auerbach, best known as the frontman for the Black Keys. Mr. Finley was "discovered" at the age of 62 while busking in Arkansas, and now he's touring nationally, playing retro soul and blues that sounds fresh thanks to the only thing truly old fashioned about Mr. Finley: his commitment to putting on a great show. 718 388 4111, roughtrade.com/us/events 212 260 4700, mercuryeastpresents.com/mercurylounge I LOVE SOCA 10TH ANNIVERSARY at Manhattan Center Hammerstein Ballroom (May 18, 9 p.m.). Trinidad's legendary Carnival is long over, but that just means there are more soca artists bringing their talents to New York for the extended prelude to the city's own fete, the West Indian American Day Parade, held annually on Labor Day. Machel Montano, who heads up this soca celebration, is currently the genre's biggest star worldwide, and yet that title has earned him only nominal crossover success (he has worked with Major Lazer). If you check out this show, which also features Rupee, Voice and Iwer George, you just might come to believe that this bright, relentlessly high energy music deserves a bigger following stateside just make sure you're wearing your dancing shoes. 212 279 7740, ilovesocaevents.com KOOL KEITH at Elsewhere (May 19, 8 p.m.). Keith Matthew Thornton (a.k.a. Dr. Octagon, a.k.a. Kool Keith) is a New York hip hop pioneer hiding in plain sight. The Bronx born M.C. has been active since the early 1980s, first with the Ultramagnetic MCs and then under a string of different aliases through which he has presented variations on his profane, expansive and always fun raps over the past three decades. He'll be performing with his Soul'd U Out Band at Elsewhere alongside underground rockers Escape ism, TV Baby and Chorizo a fittingly eclectic lineup for a legacy artist who has always refused to hew to tradition. elsewherebrooklyn.com LEE ROY PARNELL at Opry City Stage (May 19, 8 p.m.). Lee Roy Parnell has hits, but you may not have heard them unless you're an aficionado of early 1990s country music. They're sturdy rock and blues tinged tunes that sound positively alien compared with the work of today's pop country stars, but they're totally in line with the style of the era. What sets Mr. Parnell apart, and what he's leaned into since his heyday, is his remarkable guitar playing; he even has his own signature Gibson. His songs endure, equal parts confessional and craft, yet their punctuation woeful slide solos and impressionistic a cappella arrangements make them transcendent. 212 388 5565, oprycitystage.com SEAN JONES QUINTET at Dizzy's Club Coca Cola (May 18 20, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). Intrepid and smoky toned and nearly always convincing, Mr. Jones held the first trumpet chair in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra for many years. Now he leads his own small ensembles and is preparing to begin his first year as head of the Peabody Institute's jazz program. This weekend Mr. Jones returns to Columbus Circle for three nights in a stellar quintet with the alto saxophonist Brian Hogans, the pianist Orrin Evans, the bassist Luques Curtis and the drummer Mark Whitfield Jr. 212 258 9595, jazz.org/dizzys BRIAN MARSELLA, CHRISTIAN MCBRIDE AND ANWAR MARSHALL at the Stone (May 24, 7 p.m.). Three excellent Philadelphia musicians, each with his own vantage point, come together to elevate a hometown hero. The pianist Hasaan Ibn Ali, who died in 1980, is widely respected among jazz musicians in Philadelphia for his frayed, locomotive style and his imaginative compositions, but he's hardly known anywhere else. (He is only thought to have recorded on one album, "The Max Roach Trio Featuring the Legendary Hasaan," from 1965.) Mr. McBride is a bassist of wide renown; Mr. Marsella, a pianist, and Mr. Marshall, a drummer, are young musicians on the rise. thestonenyc.com STEPHANIE RICHARDS at National Sawdust (May 19, 10 p.m.). This trumpeter's debut solo album, "Fullmoon," is a bold pronouncement, if you've got an hour. Recorded by Ms. Richards almost entirely alone, the album unfolds as a collection of slow chemical reactions resonances and overtones giving way to one another. She celebrates the album's release with help from the drummer Qasim Naqvi and J. A. Deane, a samples artist and the only other musician featured on the album. 646 779 8455, nationalsawdust.org JASON STEIN'S LOCKSMITH ISIDORE AND JAIMIE BRANCH'S MIDNIGHT EXPRESS at Nublu 151 (May 18, 8:30 p.m.). Mr. Stein, a dauntlessly experimental bass clarinetist, has been playing in the trio Locksmith Isidore for over a decade. Featuring the bassist Jason Roebke and the drummer Mike Pride, the group is about to release "After Caroline," a hot blooded album of originals by Mr. Stein, and will commemorate its release at this concert. The show will also present the debut of Jaimie Branch's Midnight Express, which will open. This new band features the trumpeter Ms. Branch, a breakout last year on the jazz avant garde; the pianist Jamie Saft; the bassist Michael Formanek; and Mr. Pride on drums. nublu.net SAMUEL TORRES at Aaron Davis Hall (May 18, 7:30 p.m.). Mr. Torres, a percussionist from Bogota, Colombia, is deeply experienced in Latin pop and jazz. He's performed with Arturo Sandoval, Paquito D'Rivera and Shakira, among a long list of others. He also makes his own music a broadly accessible composite of South American and Caribbean traditions. He's about to release a new album, "Alegria," featuring his Super Band; that 10 piece group plays here in celebration of the album's release. citycollegecenterforthearts.org VISION FESTIVAL at Roulette (May 23 28 at various times). This year, New York's iconic free jazz festival now in its 23rd annual iteration is working even harder than usual to bridge generations and modes, all while keeping its central focus on radical improvisation and political engagement. Established avant garde luminaries like Archie Shepp, Cooper Moore and Dave Burrell (this year's lifetime achievement award recipient) share the bill with younger artists like Ambrose Akinmusire and Mary Halvorson. There will also be panel discussions on gender equity and racial justice in the arts. artsforart.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
It only required a glance at the ultrasound for the doctor to know that he was looking at identical twins. The positioning of two amniotic sacs attached to one placenta was the giveaway. It would be a couple of months before he could tell the mother whether to expect two boys or two girls. What seemed certain was that her babies would share a biological sex. And yet at 14 weeks when Dr. Nicholas M. Fisk, a maternal fetal medicine specialist at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital at the time, i nspected the ultrasound, he saw something perplexing. As it turned out, the twins were neither fraternal nor identical. They fell into a third rare category known as semi identical or sesquizygotic twins. Although it would take several years to prove, he was looking at the first set of semi identical twins to be identified during pregnancy, according to a paper published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine. The pair share 100 percent of their mother's DNA, but only overlap in a portion of their father's DNA. "Broadly they are about three fourths identical," said Dr. Fisk, adding that "it's almost as rare as hen's teeth." Typically, identical twins are created when a single egg fertilized by a single sperm splits in two. What he suspects happened in this case was that a single egg was fertilized by two sperm before dividing. This should not be possible. "When a sperm enters an egg, the membrane locks down to stop any other sperm from getting in," said Dr. Fisk, who is now the deputy vice chancellor for research at the University of New South Wale s . "Even if another sperm got into an egg, you would end up with three sets of chromosomes and you don't survive." And yet when he and his colleagues undertook an exhaustive analysis of every single chromosome in the boy and the girl, what they found were two healthy babies. Each contained the normal number of chromosomes. But there were some areas where their DNA was identical and others where it was different. It was not unprecedented. Although no doctor had ever identified sesquizygotic twins during pregnancy, a doctor in the United States documented the first case of semi identical infants in 2007, according to the journal article. In the 2007 case, the girl had ambiguous genitalia, which led her parents to take her to a doctor. Like the Australian twins, the semi identical American pair were identical on their mother's side but only shared around half of their paternal DNA. Neither of the twins in the Australian case had ambiguous genitalia. "At age four, they are doing well and meeting their developmental goals," Dr. Fisk said . Dr. Mindy Christianson, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, said that the new case raises important questions about what's possible at fertilization. "The recent case was detected because the twins were male and female," she wrote in an email. "There may be other same sex twins out there that are also semi identical." Since publication of the study last week, Dr. Fisk has been swamped with inquiries from twins as old as 70 who are wondering if perhaps they went their whole lives without realizing they are semi identical. To determine whether this phenomenon might be more common than previously thought, Dr. Fisk reviewed genetic data from nearly 1,000 fraternal twins. He did not find any semi identical twins among them. All of this reinforces what Dr. Fisk said he enjoys about studying twins: There are many mysteries to be investigated. Even the matter of how precisely identical twins form, he said, is yet to be conclusively resolved. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Last week, "Mr. Robot" dropped a bomb on its protagonist. This week, the fallout began. Elliot Alderson, our hacker hero, has just learned that his beloved father molested him. There's no such thing as a good time for a revelation of that nature. But only hours remain before Elliot is scheduled to hack the Deus Group and bring their empire to an end. Meanwhile, his sister, Darlene, is being held at knife point by Dark Army goons alongside the F.B.I. agent Dom DiPierro, and their lives are in danger unless Elliot can be tracked down. The timing could not have been worse. Elliot beings the episode in a state of blank faced shock. As his therapist, Krista, hurries him out of her apartment and takes a taxi to the closest police precinct to report the death of Fernando Vera at her own hands, Elliot seems barely to hear or understand what is happening. He snaps out of it as he and Krista say their goodbyes, but only to a point: Now that he knows what his father did to him as a child, he has no idea how to move forward. For Darlene and Dom, the threat is more immediate: They're being held prisoner by Janice, the Dark Army's infuriatingly chipper emissary. Janice toys with her F.B.I. captive, first outing Dom's romantic feelings for Darlene, then stabbing her in the lung, leaving her to slowly asphyxiate. Janice says she'll save Dom and spare her family, who've been held hostage in the middle of their Christmas festivities by a squad of Dark Army operatives, if and only if Darlene can locate Elliot. Unfortunately, Elliot's retreat from the real world has taken him off the grid. After he snaps out of his near catatonic state, he follows a vision of his child self to the Queens Museum, where he used to hide from his father as a kid. He screams an apology at his young alter ego for having failed to protect him(self) from his dad's depredations all those years ago. For a fighter like Elliot, who has spent months tilting at the biggest windmills in the entire world, a perceived failure to have fought back hard enough would naturally weigh heavy on his conscience. But his child self brought him back to the museum to show him that the opposite was true that he really did try his best to fight off his father. Entering a decrepit storage room, Elliot uncovers a key to his bedroom that he hid in its walls way back when he was a kid. It was an attempt, however ill conceived, to keep his father away from him. Elliot was a fighter even then, and the discovery of proof allows him to let himself off the hook. It also appears to give his Mr. Robot persona absent since Krista revealed the truth about the man after whom he is modeled a re entry point into Elliot's life. Mr. Robot exists, he says, to keep Elliot from getting hurt, a job that his father should have done but didn't. It was in this spirit that he repressed Elliot's memories of his molestation, memories he didn't want to see either. "I'm not your father," he tells Elliot. "I know," Elliot replies. "That's why I created you. You're the father I needed, not the father I had." Ruefully, Mr. Robot wishes he could go back in time to stop these terrible things from happening to Elliot, but Elliot stops him short. "Then I wouldn't be me," he says, "and I wouldn't have you." It's a touching moment of connection between these two halves of Elliot's psyche, who have gone to war more than once but now seem to have each other's best interests at heart. The biggest surprise of the episode? Dom DiPierro has a guardian angel, too, albeit one of the flesh and blood variety. When Janice fails to extract Elliot's whereabouts from either Darlene's phone or Darlene herself, Janice determines it is time to test her captive's honesty by deciding to kill Dom's family one by one unless and until Darlene coughs up the intel. (Which, to be clear, she does not have.) But Janice's call to her minions goes unanswered. Why? Because of an Irish gangster named Deegan McGuire (Alex Morf), whom we saw briefly come into contact with Dom episodes ago. In an apparent offscreen quid pro quo, she helped him skate on his charges in exchange for protecting her family from the Dark Army, which he does with apparent alacrity. Watching Janice speak to a murderer even cheerier than she is, failing to intimidate him as he drives away with the Dark Army agents gunned down and Dom's family safe, is one of the episode's most cathartic moments. A more physical and brutal catharsis follows immediately after. Taking advantage of the distraction, Dom yanks the knife from her own chest, slashes a Dark Army goon in the Achilles tendon, grabs his gun and kills Janice and her flunkies in a matter of seconds. She then shoos Darlene away, encouraging her to take the Dark Army down permanently. But this may prove easier said than done. The revelation about his father has gutted Elliot to the point where he feels he can no longer go through with the Deus Group hack he has suffered so much to plan. It is hard to hear him sob to Mr. Robot that he can't do it; anyone who has struggled with trauma or mental illness knows that feeling of having nothing left to give. Ending one of the final episodes of a riveting techno thriller on that note of powerlessness is a bold choice indeed. None The key to Elliot's childhood bedroom is shaped like the letter "E." It made me think of how long Elliot has been searching for the key to take "Evil Corp" down, and how long he has kept the key to his own psyche hidden. None Janice is the sort of villain who will cheerily tell a non sequitur story about some random factoid in tonight's case, the creation of concrete from limestone struck by lightning just to show her prisoners how unflappable she is. It's pure mustache twiddling, and the actress Ashlie Atkinson twirls with the best of them. She'll be missed. None I'm a sucker for the occasional ironic music cue, so hearing Andy Williams sing "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" while black clad Dark Army goons break into Dom's mother's house brought a smile to my face. None So did seeing Tyrell Wellick, who is lying dead in a forest somewhere, wish everyone happy holidays on behalf of E Corp in an auto playing taxi ad. "Merry Christmas from a dead guy" is about as cheery as "Mr. Robot" gets these days. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Until Megyn Kelly, no prime time Fox News anchor had tried to leap from partisan basic cable to the more pedigreed world of network news. Less than a month into her tenure at NBC, Ms. Kelly and her new employer which has placed a multimillion dollar bet on her success are learning just how daunting the transition can be. Even before it airs on Sunday, Ms. Kelly's interview with Alex Jones, the conspiracy monger and influential voice of the so called alt right, a far right, white nationalist movement, has generated a fierce backlash, just as the anchor is introducing herself to a broader audience. Parents of children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, which Mr. Jones called a hoax, asked NBC to spike the interview, saying it was extremely hurtful for her to offer a platform for Mr. Jones's views. Ms. Kelly was disinvited from a Sandy Hook charity event and accused by some viewers of chasing ratings by infecting NBC with Fox News style conservatism. On Friday, NBC's Connecticut affiliate said it would not broadcast Ms. Kelly's show this Sunday, citing community concerns. In an internal memo obtained by The New York Times, the station, WVIT, said that for many of its viewers and employees, including Sandy Hook parents, "those wounds are understandably still so raw." Earlier in the day, Mr. Jones's website, InfoWars, published audio of Ms. Kelly cajoling and flattering her interview subject as she tried to secure his cooperation for the segment. "I'm not looking to portray you as some boogeyman," Ms. Kelly can be heard saying. Assurances of fair coverage are standard practice in television journalism, where anchors seeking access routinely present their intentions in the best possible light. NBC is standing by Ms. Kelly, urging viewers to withhold judgment until the segment airs. But the firestorm has been an unwelcome surprise at the network. NBC is banking on Ms. Kelly, who is drawing a salary reported to be about 15 million, as its next flagship star. Her new show already faced an uphill fight against CBS's "60 Minutes," the No. 1 show in television news. And Ms. Kelly is about three months away from taking over the 9 a.m. hour on the "Today" show, a coveted soft news time slot. No TV personality wants to face the wrath of families of victims of a school shooting. And Ms. Kelly, who is predominantly known as a face of a conservative leaning cable news network, does not have a reservoir of good will with NBC's bigger audience to fall back on. Journalists, by and large, have offered support for Ms. Kelly, saying that Mr. Jones, who has spoken to President Trump and offered him advice, is certainly a worthy subject for journalistic scrutiny. Mr. Jones's beliefs, however suspect or offensive, reach a sizable audience around the country thanks to his popular radio show and website. Other shows, like Piers Morgan's prime time CNN show and ABC's "Nightline," featured interviews with Mr. Jones in 2013. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. "Megyn is a very good journalist, and I expect, especially in light of everything that's been said this week, that he will be held to account," Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN and former chief executive of NBC, said during a question and answer session with journalists this week. But Mr. Zucker added that NBC executives had "done themselves no favors" in the way the segment has been marketed to viewers. He also cited a damaging photograph of Ms. Kelly wearing sunglasses and smiling alongside Mr. Jones on the day of their interview. The image was distributed by Mr. Jones, not NBC, but by posing for it, Ms. Kelly conveyed the sense of a cozy encounter rather than a cross examination. "If you are going to do this story, the tease needs to be you holding up a picture of the dead kids at Sandy Hook and saying, 'How dare you?' And that's what you need to do," Mr. Zucker said. NBC has not released a transcript of Ms. Kelly's interview, leading some to speculate that her interrogation of Mr. Jones over his more contentious views for instance, that Sandy Hook was a hoax and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were carried out by the United States government was less than ferocious. NBC executives were retooling the segment in light of the criticism, and Ms. Kelly has contacted parents of Sandy Hook victims in recent days, asking if they would be willing to speak on camera to respond to Mr. Jones. Nicole Hockley and Mark Barden, parents of two of the 20 children who died at the school in Newtown, Conn., spoke with Ms. Kelly this week about an appearance on her show. "We declined to participate," Ms. Hockley wrote in a text message on Friday. Another Sandy Hook parent, who requested anonymity because of privacy concerns, said Ms. Kelly had made the case this week that by coming on her show, families could best explain to viewers how Mr. Jones's actions had hurt them. The parent declined to participate, saying it would create a sense of false equivalence with what they considered Mr. Jones's outrageous perspective. NBC said on Friday that at least one Sandy Hook parent was expected to appear in the segment. "We remain committed to giving viewers context and insight into a controversial and polarizing figure, how he relates to the president of the United States and influences others, and to getting this serious story right," the network said in a statement. "Tune in Sunday." The storm shows few signs of abating. Late Thursday, a law firm representing several Sandy Hook families sent a letter to NBC warning that "airing the interview will cause serious emotional distress to dozens of Sandy Hook families." At least one advertiser, JPMorgan Chase, has pulled its sponsorship of Sunday night's show, and Ms. Kelly said this week that she was taken aback by the level of backlash at the Jones segment. Chris Cuomo, the CNN anchor, said he believed network executives would be toiling until the last minute to ensure that Sunday's segment was seen as being responsive to the public criticism. "Coming from that world, I do not envy the job those producers and editors have right now," Mr. Cuomo said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Credit...Whitten Sabbatini for The New York Times It can also be a piece of pie, or custard so says a professor and author who spreads the magic of numbers through dessert recipes. CHICAGO We had just finished the mathematician Eugenia Cheng's splendid demonstration of nonassociativity where the order of operations counts as it does in, say, subtraction. Now she wanted to forge ahead with the next lesson, in knot theory. I suggested we wait until later. "Why?" she asked. "Well, we shouldn't eat two desserts before dinner, should we?" I said, and giggled nervously. "Why not?" she replied, not giggling. She tightened her apron strings and walked over to her stove. Of course. What was I thinking? Hadn't Dr. Cheng already made clear her conviction that in mathematics, rules are like eggs: meant to be broken, stirred, flipped over and taste tested? And that day, we had broken a lot of eggs. "You're absolutely right," I said, rushing to her side for the grand unveiling of another mathematically themed confection. Dr. Cheng pulled from the oven a perfectly baked specimen of what she calls Bach pie, named for the great composer beloved by mathematicians everywhere: an oblong rectangle of creamy dark chocolate studded with banana slices and topped by an Escher like braid of four glazed pastry plaits that followed divergent trajectories, never quite crisscrossing where you expected them to. The filling was a clever concatenation "BAnana added to CHocolate gives you Bach," Dr. Cheng said. The braiding illustrated the structure of a Bach prelude and the sorts of patterns that knot theorists study "to see how looped up the braids are," Dr. Cheng said, "and whether you can transform one braid into another by wiggling the different strings." The pie was a true union of art and math, too beautiful to besmirch, and besides, you're not supposed to untie knots with your teeth, are you? Dr. Cheng, 39, has a knack for brushing aside conventions and edicts, like so many pie crumbs from a cutting board. She is a theoretical mathematician who works in a rarefied field called category theory, which is so abstract that "even some pure mathematicians think it goes too far," Dr. Cheng said. "I spend a lot of time explaining mathematics on blogs, and I try to cut through the technicalities and make things easier to understand," said John Baez, a professor of math at the University of California, Riverside (and yes, a cousin of Joan). Still, his posts are aimed at scientists and others with some quantitative background. "Eugenia has gone all the way in," he said. "She's trying to explain math to everybody, with or without pre existing expertise, and I think she's doing wonderfully." So committed is Dr. Cheng to mass math demystification that she recently left a tenured professorship at the University of Sheffield in Britain to take a position at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she teaches math to art students, lectures widely and continues her research in category theory on the side. Dr. Cheng adopts a literal approach to making math more appetizing. "Math is about taking ingredients, putting them together, seeing what you can make out of them, and then deciding whether it's tasty or not," she said. Every chapter in "How to Bake p" offers recipes for desserts and other dishes that encapsulate mathematical themes. To demonstrate how math seeks to identify underlying similarities across a broad set of problems, for example, Dr. Cheng starts with a recipe that can be readily tweaked to make mayonnaise instead of hollandaise sauce. "Books might tell you that hollandaise sauce needs to be done differently," she writes, "but I ignore them to make my life simpler. Math is also there to make things simpler, by finding things that look the same if you ignore some small detail." Her recipe for lasagna illuminates the importance of context to math. Dr. Cheng lists among the basic ingredients "fresh lasagna noodles," and then points out that another cookbook might deem the noodles not truly basic and instead describe their preparation from scratch. So, too, do numbers change their character and degree of basicness depending on context. The number 5, for example, when viewed among the natural, or counting, numbers is one of those elemental creatures: a prime number, divisible only by 1 and itself. But in the context of the so called rational numbers, which include fractions, 5 loses its prime identity and gains versatility, able to be divided into ever tinier slivers, like a cake at a dieters' convention. The number 1 in its multiplicative identity is practically bedridden, leaving other numbers unchanged: 6 times 1 equals 6. In its additive capacity, however, 1 is unstoppable: if you keep adding 1 to itself, Dr. Cheng noted, you can generate all the natural numbers, out to infinity. "I admit I was skeptical at first about her analogies to cooking, but I ended up being completely sold," said Steven Strogatz, a professor of applied mathematics at Cornell University who also writes popular books. "She conveys the spirit of inventiveness and creativity in math that all mathematicians feel but do a very poor job communicating when teaching math. Refreshing is the word that keeps coming to mind." Dr. Cheng wears glasses, has long black hair and walks with an elegant, upright posture, like a dancer. She is alternately outgoing and reserved, passionate and matter of fact. She is a classically trained musician and owns a 1910 Steinway grand piano. She is also an extremely good cook. On a recent afternoon, we are in her well stocked kitchen, and she is stirring a mix of egg yolks, sugar and cream my lesson in nonassociativity, otherwise known as custard. This is something where the way you combine ingredients counts, she said. If you're making a cake, you can throw together the flour, sugar, butter and eggs however you please, and the cake will come out fine that's an associative process. Not so for preparing custard. You must first combine the sugar and egg yolks and whisk them into a froth before you pour in the cream. Blend the ingredients in a different order, she said, "and you end up with a runny mess." In math, too, you have associative operations like addition and multiplication, where you can change how your numbers are whisked together as you calculate and still emerge with the same answer: (4 5) 6 is the same as 4 (5 6). Subtraction, division and exponentiation are nonassociative operations: Who's clumped with whom matters. So, while 10 (6 4) will give you 8, (10 6) 4 leaves you with nothing. Dr. Cheng continues stirring the custard, peering into the pot to ensure that lumps aren't forming. "People ask me, do you eat your custard warm or cold?" she said. "I tell them, I eat it all at once." She adjusts the temperature of the burner, up and down, up and down. Getting the custard to come out just right can be tricky, she said harder than doing math, and more like living life. Dr. Cheng insists that the public has it all wrong about math being difficult, something that only the gifted mathletes among us can do. To the contrary, she says, math exists to make life smoother, to solve those problems that can be solved by applying math's most powerful tool: logic. Science may depend on forming hypotheses, doing experiments and gathering evidence that support or refute your hypothesis, but math is simply a matter of stating the terms of your argument and then defending those statements using logic. The key to thinking logically is to get comfortable with abstraction. Numbers are one type of abstraction that we take for granted: The number 3 can stand in for 3 bananas, 3 pies, 3 Bach partitas. The next step up in abstraction is to replace specific numbers by symbols like x and y, a powerful maneuver that allows you to apply your argument more broadly, just as a general purpose recipe for pie can be the vehicle for banana, blueberries, pumpkin, nuts, knots, you name it. As an example of abstraction at work, "How to Bake p" presents this little brain teaser: My father is three times as old as I am now, but in 10 years' time, he will be twice as old as me. How old am I? It then takes the reader through the solution by way of x y abstraction. Dr. Cheng recognizes that people can feel uncomfortable with some of the abstractions required by mathematical thinking, by the need to ignore the particulars of, say, this green round pillow and that square purple pillow in favor of an abstract ideal of a pillow that you're going to call x. But it's just a matter of practice, she said, before the idea starts to feel like a real object that you can manipulate with ease. "You become very good at separating what's relevant from what isn't, and that can be very useful in daily life," she said. Sometimes, she finds it "oddly satisfying" to mentally shave a bearded man or imagine how a furry dog would look like after a swim in a lake. "That's what abstraction is," she said. "You reveal the structure underneath." Dr. Cheng's upbringing in rural Sussex as one of two daughters led her readily to math love. Their mother, a statistician who had been considered the most brilliant math student at her Hong Kong high school, would keep her girls entertained at the beach for hours with books of logic puzzles. And because their mother commuted each day to a London accounting firm while their father had a child psychiatry practice near home, the girls grew accustomed to the idea of a briefcase mother and a father who made dinner. "I think Eugenia and I both benefited from the atypical setup," said Alethea Cheng Fitzpatrick, Dr. Cheng's older sister and now an architect in New York. "We didn't go into adulthood with any preconceptions about gender roles or gender abilities." Later, during graduate school at Cambridge University and three postdoctoral fellowships in Europe and the United States, Dr. Cheng would often find herself in a tiny minority. "I've been to conferences where there were more cubicles in the women's bathroom than there were women to use them," she said. Today, in the United States, less than 30 percent of graduate students and about 12 percent of tenured faculty members in math are women. Dr. Cheng is striving to change attitudes across the board. "I want to be a role model for men as well as women," she said. The custard is ready. The ideal becomes real. I finish the first bowl, and ask for more. Let x be me and y be my father. Today, y 3x. In 10 years, my father will be y 10 and twice my age, so y 10 2(x 10). Since 3x y, we can get rid of the y in that equation, as 3x 10 2(x 10). And since 2(x 10) is the same as 2x 20, we can now say 3x 10 2x 20. Finally, subtract 2x from both sides of the equation and you get x 10 20. Therefore, x 10, and I am 10 years old. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
UNCUT GEMS (2019) Stream on Netflix; rent on Amazon, Vudu and YouTube. The combination of Adam Sandler's performance in an atypical role and the Safdie brothers' energetic and adventurous style made waves when this crime thriller arrived in theaters last year. Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a jeweler and gambler who hopes that a black opal he has acquired from Ethiopia will be the key to his salvation. His plan, however, is quickly thrown into disarray by the basketball player Kevin Garnett, playing himself, who wants to borrow the gemstone for good luck. As he tries to extricate himself from one jam after another, Ratner must also contend with his estranged wife, Dinah (Idina Menzel), his mercurial mistress, Julia (Julia Fox), and his loan shark brother in law Arno (Eric Bogosian). JEOPARDY! TEACHERS TOURNAMENT 7 p.m. on ABC (check local listings). This competition is one of the long running quiz show's most beloved installments. Teachers from around the country have the opportunity to flex their intellectual muscles outside of the classroom and enjoy a rare moment in the public eye. Fifteen contestants will duke it out for the 100,000 prize and a place in the next Tournament of Champions. The first matchup, airing tonight, features Amanda Baltimore, a seventh grade science teacher; Peter Gouveia, a seventh grade English teacher; and Ivory Johnson, a high school social studies teacher. Game winners and the top four runners up will advance to the semifinal. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
CATCHING THE WIND Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour By Neal Gabler By the time Edward Kennedy died, in August 2009, he had represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate for nearly 47 years longer than any of his brothers had lived. He was eulogized as one of the most important legislators in American history, an assessment reflecting not only the affection he enjoyed on both sides of the aisle, but also genuine awe at his achievements. Over the course of five decades, Ted Kennedy had sponsored nearly 700 bills that became law, and left his imprint on scores of others. The Voting Rights Act of 1965; the Immigration and Nationality Act of that same year; the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990; the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 all bore his influence or were advanced by his efforts. None of this was foreordained or even all that likely. He was a Kennedy, of course, and Kennedys were born to advantage; but as a child and young man, he was seen within the family not merely as the last of the Kennedy brothers, but the least: the least talented, serious, capable, promising. The press, initially, saw him that way, too. During his first campaign for the Senate, at the age of 30 in 1962, he was derided as President John F. Kennedy's callow kid brother a man so obviously unqualified that his election, in the view of The New York Times, could only demean "the dignity of the Senate and the democratic process." Kennedy won that race, and set to work defying expectations. Still, the long, consequential career that followed would to the end remain, in profound ways, a struggle against the fates, the tides of history and, in no small part, his own failings. That struggle and its significance are the subjects of "Catching the Wind," the first installment of a two volume treatment by Neal Gabler, the author of well regarded books on Walt Disney and Walter Winchell. Kennedy's expansive life has yielded no shortage of biographies, but Gabler's is on its way toward becoming the most complete and ambitious. As a character study it is rich and insightful, frank in its judgments but deeply sympathetic to the man Gabler regards as "the most complex of the Kennedys." The story of Ted's brother Bobby is typically written in two acts: before and after the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963. Ted's time at center stage, so much longer than Bobby's, was more varied, consisting of numerous acts, twists, turns and apparent endings less a linear progression than, as Gabler describes it, a "cycle of sin and expiation," loss and renewal. Within weeks of entering office, Kennedy talked about staying there the rest of his life. He adored the Senate's traditions; he adapted quickly to its rhythms and norms. And, to the surprise of many, he was willing to work. John Kennedy had served eight years in the Senate without ever investing much of himself in it; he was often visibly bored by its slow moving machinery. But Ted Kennedy relished it: the pressing of levers, the working of gears, the intricate business of cutting a deal. No less important, as Gabler writes, "there was a joy in him, a great love of people." He drew them in whether voters back home or the Southern septuagenarians who ran the Senate won them over, made them willing, even eager, to support him. He was the most natural politician in his family, a close match in temperament to his grandfather John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, who had taught him, Gabler notes, "what empathy meant." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Our president has a talent for making everything about him. This impeachment proceeding has his name all over it, but is actually about something much bigger. It is about the direction our country takes and the way it will exist in the world. And it is very simple. All you have to decide is this: Was what President Trump did the kind of behavior you want to see emulated and repeated by future presidents, other elected officials and appointed officials? Are you laying out for the American people a new norm of acceptability? If that is what you wish to give us, vote "acquit." On the other hand, if you want to issue a stern warning to future elected and public officials that such behavior is not acceptable, is not what we are about and is damaging to our country, then vote "convict." Just as the impeachment proceedings are not just about Mr. Trump, they are also not just about you, your political future, your comfort zone, your approval ratings, your constituents. Try to remember: Your vote is about all of us. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Want to read more from Marc Stein? Sign up for his free weekly newsletter here. Andrew Bogut made his return to the N.B.A. on Wednesday, signing a rest of the season contract to rejoin the Golden State Warriors. The reunion came two years to the day since Bogut, the former No. 1 overall selection in the 2005 draft, sustained a gruesome leg injury. Bogut, 34, spent this season starring for the Sydney Kings in his native Australia and, by his own admission, was convinced "that the N.B.A. door had shut." But the Warriors began lobbying Bogut to rejoin them in December and made it to March with a roster opening for the 7 foot center, who wasn't available to be signed until the Kings' season ended last weekend. "I was kind of blown away," Bogut said in a telephone interview from Australia. "This wasn't a situation where I threw my hat in the ring to try to get signed in the N.B.A. I wouldn't do that. "To come back to the N.B.A., for me, was basically Golden State or nothing. But the fact it was Golden State it was the kind of opportunity that I would be kicking myself if I didn't take." When Bogut signed a two year deal with Sydney last April, he described it as "my official retirement from the N.B.A." He proceeded to win Most Valuable Player and Defensive Player of the Year honors in Australia's National Basketball League, averaging 11.4 points, 11.6 rebounds, 3.4 assists and 2.7 blocks per game. Bogut's contract with Sydney does not contain an N.B.A. release clause, but he told the Warriors that he would entertain the prospect of rejoining them on a short term basis after the Australian season as long as Sydney officials blessed it should Golden State still have a need. Had the Warriors succeeded in landing a recent free agent from the so called "buyout" market such as the swingman Wesley Matthews, who opted to sign with Indiana after securing his release from the Knicks they would have had no roster room for Bogut. But once it became clear that the Chicago Bulls would refuse to release the veteran center Robin Lopez before March 1, thus missing deadline for Lopez to retain his playoff eligibility with a new team, Golden State intensified its pursuit of Bogut as soon as the Kings were eliminated from the N.B.L. playoffs. As the Warriors continue to try to assimilate the former All Star center DeMarcus Cousins into their rotation, Bogut said he had "no illusions" about the fact that "some games I'll play and some games I won't." But Bogut insisted he was "happy to be a positive influence on that bench" no matter how much he plays. The Warriors assistant general manager Larry Harris, who was Milwaukee's general manager in 2005 when the Bucks selected Bogut with the top pick in the draft, made a recent scouting trip to Australia to assess the state of Bogut's game firsthand and convey the seriousness of Golden State's interest. Warriors Coach Steve Kerr referred to Bogut as "an insurance policy in the frontcourt." But Bogut's defensive know how and his familiarity with the Warriors' star trio of Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green certainly can't hurt the league's prohibitive championship favorites in the quest to improve on their woeful standing of 16th in defensive efficiency (109.5 points allowed per 100 possessions.) "I didn't foresee this happening but I'm excited as hell about it," Green told Bay Area reporters. He and Bogut quickly meshed as co anchors of a vaunted Golden State defense in 2014 15, when the Warriors began their five season run of dominance. After the Warriors won a league record 73 games in 2015 16 but blew a 3 1 lead to the LeBron James led Cavaliers in the N.B.A. finals, Bogut and the veteran forward Harrison Barnes were quickly jettisoned to Dallas to create the requisite salary cap space for Golden State to sign Kevin Durant. Bogut, though, said that returning to the Warriors nearly three years later to play alongside Durant would not "be weird" despite the contentious nature of his departure. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
LONDON In European soccer's relentless search for growth and new revenues, Spain's La Liga has been among the most aggressive of the continent's top leagues. Under a plan hatched and pressed by its chief executive, Javier Tebas, La Liga has planted its flag across the globe, opening offices in far flung cities not just obvious markets like New York and China, but also in Belgium and Singapore and South Africa, among others in a bid to scoop up new fans and television and sponsorship dollars. Tebas has even gone to court in the United States in an effort to hold a league game outside Spain. But there is one red line Tebas said that he is unwilling to cross: La Liga and its teams should not, he argued, be playing matches in Saudi Arabia. To Tebas, the kingdom, despite its high profile campaign to rebrand itself as a modern and tolerant society led by a youthful crown prince, should not be permitted to use international sporting events to mask its record of human rights abuses. So he could only watch with impotent fury earlier this month when the country's four biggest teams Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atletico Madrid and Valencia decamped to Saudi Arabia for the annual Spanish Super Cup. There was nothing Tebas could do to stop the games; the league plays no role in them. Instead, the Spanish soccer federation runs the competition, and it had struck a three year deal with Saudi authorities worth 120 million euros ( 133 million) to turn what was once a one game event into a four team tournament, and to crown its champion in the kingdom. The federation, he said, had simply followed the trail of new money, and had brought the teams along for the ride. "The bottom line is football has become a business and as a business it looks for income," Barcelona's since fired coach, Ernesto Valverde, had said upon arriving in Riyadh for the semifinals. "That's the reason we are all here." To Tebas, however, Spain's soccer federation had allowed itself and La Liga's biggest teams to be used in what he labeled reputation laundering. The games, he noted, were played barely a year after operatives from Saudi Arabia flew to Istanbul and, according to Turkish officials, brutally murdered a dissident journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, inside the Saudi embassy there. "We should not forget what happened," Tebas said. "This is very serious,'' he added. "Money is not the only thing that matters." Few Spanish fans traveled to the games, and the Spanish broadcaster that routinely had broadcast the game in previous years declined to do so this year, citing concerns over human rights in Saudi Arabia. The president of Spain's soccer federation, Luis Rubiales, defended the decision to play the games in the country, describing the tournament "as a tool of social change" because men and women would be permitted to sit side by side, in a country where women's rights are restricted. Saudi Arabia first allowed women to enter soccer stadiums in 2018, but in the past men and women were segregated at matches. And the soccer matches had ample precedents. In recent years, Saudi riches have lured in not only other soccer games, but title fights in professional boxing, auto races, tennis matches and even W.W.E. events. There is even a multiyear arrangement with snooker's governing body. A series of independent studies have concluded that a Saudi based channel named BeoutQ has been stealing and airing lucrative sports properties, including La Liga games, whose rights are owned by Qatar based beIN Sports. As Saudi Arabia continues to deny that it is hosting the network, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, organizations like La Liga and England's Premier League and even soccer governing bodies like UEFA and FIFA have found tackling the issue almost impossible, mainly because lawyers in Saudi Arabia have refused to take on them on as clients. "They were pirating the signal and there were institutions linked to the actual government," Tebas said of Saudi Arabian broadcasters. "They are still favoring actions that go against our property. And the wealth we are generating, we cannot have that wealth going there." Complicating matters further for Tebas are business moves in Spain's second division, which he also oversees as La Liga's chief executive, by Turki al Sheikh, a key confidant of the de facto Saudi leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and a member of the government. Sheikh last summer acquired the Andalusian team Almeria and since then has bankrolled a program to overhaul the team in a bid to win promotion to the first division, where it could compete against the likes of Real Madrid, Barcelona and Spain's other biggest clubs. Describing Sheikh as a man of "great financial clout," Tebas said the league would not allow Almeria to buy its way to success. Allowing it to do so would not only breach cost control regulations in Spain, Tebas said, but also leave him open to criticism personally, given how outspoken he has been about spending by Gulf backed teams in the past. Tebas has for years complained that Manchester City, owned by a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family, and Qatar owned Paris St. Germain have had an inflationary impact on European soccer's financial ecosystem. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The New York Times reported this month that expectant mothers are taking up marijuana in increasing numbers. We asked women who used marijuana during pregnancy to share their stories. Hundreds of readers wrote in; most had smoked, while a few vaped or ate marijuana laced edibles. Roughly half said they had used pot for a medical reason. Most felt marijuana use had not affected their children, or were not sure; just a handful worried the children might have suffered cognitive deficits. The Times followed up with a few of these women in greater depth. Where they wished to protect their privacy or avoid legal consequences, only first names are used. Formerly worked in advertising, New Jersey With her first pregnancy, Margaret was "super nervous about everything," she said. She drank only decaf coffee, skipped sushi and cold cuts, and ate mostly organic food. Her doctor had prescribed Zofran, which is used off label for nausea in pregnancy. She took it a few times, but didn't want to take it every day. "To me, it seemed unnatural," said Margaret. "Marijuana is a plant." At that point, her nausea was so debilitating she couldn't eat, touch food or even prepare it not an ideal situation with children in her charge. "A few puffs of a joint would allow me to function," she said. "It was not like I was toking up and eating Doritos." Her husband, who doesn't use pot, fretted that it could harm their growing baby. She searched online for information about pot use in pregnancy and wasn't worried by the studies she found. Eventually they came to an agreement. "If we had to choose between Zofran and weed, we'd definitely choose weed," she said. Pot use in pregnancy has been associated with lower birth weights and cognitive issues later in a child's life, but in the end all three children had "very healthy birth weights," Margaret said, and no noticeable adverse effects. Her doctors did not know about her marijuana use. Margaret had read articles about women getting a call from child protection services because they had used in pregnancy. A self described "minivan driving suburban mom," she never gave doctors a reason to test her. "This is my white privilege talking, but I really didn't think it could happen to me," she said. There are a few reasons Claire vapes marijuana, and they are the same regardless of whether she's pregnant: headache, cramps, nausea or, she said, "if I'm in a terrible, terrible mood, really impatient and irritable." Expecting her first child, Claire vaped once a week in her third trimester. But with her second child on the way, she took a puff or two every other day then went weeks without. She vapes because she doesn't get as stoned as she might with a joint, she said. While pregnant, she lived in Oregon, where pot is legal, and in another state where it's not. In neither place did she tell her midwife about her marijuana use. "Stigma is the only reason," she said. "Just anywhere, people don't like pregnant women to smoke pot." But Claire did check the internet for research on marijuana's potential harm to developing fetuses. She found a small study done in Jamaica that had tracked pot smoking mothers to be who didn't use tobacco or drink alcohol. The researchers found that infants exposed in the womb to THC marijuana's main psychoactive ingredient were more alert and better able to regulate themselves at 30 days old than babies whose mothers had not used marijuana. She took its findings with a grain of salt, but admitted that the study comforted her. "It was a little bit of wind beneath my sails," she said. Claire found other studies of pregnant women who smoked tobacco or drank alcohol, but very few involving women who were expecting and used pot exclusively, like her. She wishes there were more. "The group I'm in of lefty hippie professional women, it's definitely only marijuana," Claire said. "No one is drinking or smoking tobacco in pregnancy. They are being very careful." She thinks the federal government demonizes pot, but in her circles "there's a lot of trust in marijuana." Ms. Donath, a lifelong Texan, started smoking marijuana as a teenager. As a young expectant mother, she kept smoking joints through two pregnancies. "I really don't care what people think," said Ms. Donath. "I'm 50, and those two kids have graduated college." Research has shown that THC tetrahydrocannabinol can cross the placenta to reach the fetus, potentially harming brain development and reducing birth weight. But Ms. Donath saw no ill effects in cannabis use. Neither newborn had a low birth weight; actually, one was 10 pounds. And, she added, "both of my kids have above average intelligence." Unlike many 20 something mothers to be, Ms. Donath was straight with her doctors: "I have never not been honest with my doctors about everything I do." Her ob gyn was concerned about whether she smoked cigarettes or drank alcohol, but he never told her to quit marijuana. "Since it hasn't been studied that much, I can't advise you one way or another," she recalls him saying. Even though she has no regrets, Ms. Donath said, if her ob gyn had said marijuana was bad for her baby, she would have stopped using it. But at the time, she thought "it's my lungs, not my child's." Still, a 1988 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that smoking cannabis can reduce blood's ability to carry oxygen, which in theory could affect the fetus. When Jane was pregnant with the last of her three children, she was in a stressful marriage, suffering through nausea, and having contractions much too early. She took a calcium channel blocker and got progesterone injections to relax the contractions and postpone the birth. She started using pot to quell her nausea and cope with the stress. "I would occasionally take a puff to not be bedridden and worried about contracting all day long," she said. She was terrified of telling doctors about her decision, so she weighed the risks and benefits on her own. She also tried to stop smoking cigarettes. "I made quite an effort to quit," she said. It didn't work: "I couldn't get rid of two or three cigarettes." Today her daughter seems completely normal. "Maybe I'm desensitized, but I think she's just fine," Tycia said. She breast feeds Lilith and hopes to continue that as long as possible. Asked if she worries that marijuana's main psychoactive ingredient has been found in breast milk, she replied, "The responsible person in me wants to say, 'Yes, I am very concerned.' But honestly, no." Marijuana is natural, she said, and "just about everyone I know smokes or uses it in some form, so I feel it's O.K." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
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