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The theater company Clubbed Thumb says its mission is to develop and produce "funny, strange and provocative new plays by living American writers." Mission accomplished: "Wilder Gone," the second of three productions in Clubbed Thumb's Summerworks festival this year, is a funny, strange and provocative new play by Angela Hanks, a living and promising young playwright from Dallas. "Wilder Gone" is also from Dallas, which is to say from its history. Set in 1921, mostly on a contested piece of property on Wilder Street in a black neighborhood still arising from uncultivated farmland, it concerns a biracial woman named Thalia (Toni Ann DeNoble) who has come with her frustrated boyfriend, Streeter (Hubert Point Du Jour), to build a "nice quaint" house after losing her ancestral home near Houston. But describing "Wilder Gone" this way is like describing a watercolor by the metals and dyes that compose it chemically. Yes, Ms. Hanks has serious business in mind: Thalia, protective of her light skinned privilege, resists marrying Streeter, who is darker. And her nearest new neighbor, an aspiring preacher named Mabel (Crystal Dickinson), resents Thalia's claim on property she has long intended as the site of a grand, if hand sewn, revival tent. Then there are the mysteriously hunky preacher, John Jack; the madame and part time mystic, Dotte; the industrious newsboy, Oliver Oak, who is also a clerk at the five and dime and sure, why not? the local baker; and Peanut Brittle, a 14 year old orphan who lives in a boardinghouse and is Mabel's only congregant so far. They each have serious even, as promised, provocative issues pushing them through the plot, which is basically framed as the competition between soil and spirit: building a house and building faith. Notably, four of the seven characters have lost one or both of their parents, making the search for some kind of stability resonate. And though no white people interlope to overstate the point, racism, internalized or otherwise, hums in the background. "Do you feel all right in the world?" Thalia asks Streeter. She means as a black man, and from her own experience, even as someone who can pass, she doubts it. But as the name Peanut Brittle suggests and as the blue sky and bricolage set by Reid Thompson confirms the top notes here are "funny" and "strange." The director Margot Bordelon draws out everything zany from the story's incongruous juxtapositions while maintaining a fleet pace, and has cast the play with actors who straddle the "provocative" line gracefully. Mabel's susceptibility to the pleasures of the flesh, and the ungodly eagerness of John Jack (Washington Kirk) to accommodate her, are somehow both coy and sexy while also giving the lie to stereotypes about people of faith and people of 1921. Likewise, Markita Prescott and Christopher Livingston, as Peanut Brittle and Oliver Oak, apply inventive comic veneers to characters built on loss. A sign that the funny and strange are staying within bounds is that the less outre moments do not seem out of place. The scenes between Thalia and Streeter, building their house while wrangling over their future, might almost come from a much more serious play, so frankly are they rendered. And the quiet moment in which Dotte (Nicole Lewis) reads Mabel's fate in tarot cards is an acting class in naturalism. You could wish it went on much longer. Still, fitting all this into 90 minutes makes for a perfect summer show, a trick Clubbed Thumb seems to have mastered. Earlier productions, including "Tin Cat Shoes" in May and, in previous seasons, "Men on Boats" and "Of Government," hit all the right notes; and the Summerworks home at the Wild Project in the East Village, with its garage door entry open to the street, makes seeing the plays seem like a friendly invitation instead of a cultural duty. The price seats are 25, or 20 for students helps with that as well. So you may want to check out the last of this year's Summerworks productions, "Plano" by Will Arbery, which runs June 20 through 30. But I don't mean to suggest that plays like these are mere fair weather friends. Despite its bright cheer and generally happy ending not to mention the rat a tat of laughter throughout "Wilder Gone" really does fulfill the "provocative" part of Clubbed Thumb's mission, insofar as hopefulness may now feel provocative. It's hard not to be moved, and challenged, when Streeter, answering Thalia's question, says yes, despite everything lined up against a poor black man in Texas in 1921, "I have felt all right in this world." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Q. I have a new iPhone 8 with iOS 11. I thought the new system was supposed to save photos in that new H.E.I.F. format to save space, but when I send pictures as mail attachments, they show up as JPG files. What gives? A. Apple's recent iOS 11 update does support the new High Efficiency Image File Format for photos; the company uses the file suffix .HEIC for images using the new standard. Additionally, the iOS 11 system uses the newer High Efficiency Video Codec (H.E.V.C.) for videos captured with compatible iPhones and other iOS devices. To be able to use the new formats, you need to be running iOS 11 on an iPhone 7 or later, or on one of the latest iPad Pro models. Macs running the new macOS High Sierra operating system are also compatible. Among other advantages, the new formats store higher quality images in less space. An H.E.I.F. photo can be about half the file size of a picture saved in the JPG format, and this allows you to store more photos on your phone. Because not every hardware and software maker out there immediately supports new formats, Apple has added tools to help iOS 11 users share and edit their photos and videos without hassle. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The Atlantic magazine on Thursday terminated its relationship with Kevin D. Williamson, the conservative writer whose hiring last month angered liberals and sparked an online debate about what views are considered acceptable in mainstream publications. It was Mr. Williamson's hard line stance on abortion namely, that it should be treated as premeditated homicide and punished accordingly, perhaps by hanging that generated the initial controversy over his hiring. It was that same viewpoint that led to his abrupt departure. Mr. Williamson expressed it during a Twitter exchange in September 2014. After hiring him in late March, Jeffrey Goldberg, the magazine's editor in chief, defended Mr. Williamson, saying that he did not want to judge people for their "worst tweets, or assertions, in isolation." But on Thursday, Mr. Goldberg wrote in a memo to his staff that he had come to see the writer's remarks on Twitter as something more than merely trollish. The editor cited a podcast episode from the same month in which Mr. Williamson elaborated on his anti abortion views which seemed in keeping with how he had described them on Twitter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The trend toward fan free tournaments gained new momentum on Monday when officials for the P.G.A. Championship announced that golf's first major championship this year would proceed without spectators from Aug. 6 to 9 at T.P.C. Harding Park in San Francisco. The decision was made in coordination with officials from the state of California and the city and county of San Francisco, taking into account the health and well being of participants during the coronavirus pandemic. The P.G.A. of America, which conducts the championship, had been considering moving the competition to another site, perhaps in the Southeast, although keeping the event in San Francisco had always been the preferred choice. The city last hosted a major tournament in 2012, when the United States Open was held at the Olympic Club. It will be the first major golf championship held at T.P.C. Harding Park. "We are both inspired and honored to 'play on,'" said Seth Waugh, the P.G.A. of America's chief executive. He added: "While the local community cannot be with us physically on site, we will certainly carry their spirit of resilience and unity with us as we stage our major championship, on their behalf, for all the world to see and enjoy." In a statement, the P.G.A. of America said it would continue to monitor Covid 19 developments in concert with local and national public health authorities. Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom said sports events could be played in California beginning this month under certain conditions, like a fan prohibition, and if they were approved by health officials. There were no fans in attendance when men's professional golf, suspended for three months because of the coronavirus pandemic, returned on June 11 with the Charles Schwab Challenge in Fort Worth. The P.G.A. Championship, originally scheduled for May 14 to 17, would be the first golf major of 2020 contested without fans but potentially not the last. The U.S. Open, which had been set for mid June until it was moved to Sept. 17 to 20, has also discussed a fan free event at the Winged Foot Golf Club in Westchester County, N.Y. Officials for the Masters tournament in Augusta, Ga., which was postponed from early April to Nov. 12 to 15, have said little about their plans but have privately discussed various contingencies, including barring spectators. The P.G.A. of America also faces an arduous decision on how to conduct the Ryder Cup, a biennial international golf competition the organization also sponsors. The event, scheduled for late September at Whistling Straits in Wisconsin, and renowned for its boisterous, partisan crowds, could conceivably be held without fans, but scores of pro golfers have called for the Ryder Cup to be postponed a year instead. Some players have suggested they will not play if the event's fairways are not lined with raucous crowds. At this point, only the Memorial Tournament in Dublin, Ohio, scheduled from July 16 to 19, is planning to host a limited number of spectators. State officials there approved a plan that caps the spectators allowed on the course at 8,000 daily for the event. The PGA Tour last weekend was in Hilton Head Island, S.C., where the RBC Heritage was also held without spectators, something the tour plans to continue as it hopscotches in succeeding weeks from Connecticut to Michigan, Ohio and Minnesota. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Bill O'Reilly and Harvey Weinstein may have come from different ends of the political spectrum, but it turns out they have a lot in common. They rose to positions of power around the same time and used their big, bullying voices to secure for themselves leading roles in American culture. Both men worked in industries that put up with gross behavior from male executives for decades, and both now stand accused of lording their status over women who have stepped forward to say that the men sexually harassed or otherwise abused them. Mr. O'Reilly, late of Fox News, and Mr. Weinstein, late of the Weinstein Company, share something else. They kept their alleged misconduct under wraps with the help of the nondisclosure agreements included as part of the numerous out of court settlements that allowed them to admit to no wrongdoing. The sums they paid their accusers bought them silence. A full, public airing did not come to be until those meddling reporters came along. The report in The New York Times this weekend that Mr. O'Reilly paid 32 million in a single settlement with the former Fox News analyst Lis Wiehl in January brings to 45 million the amount that has been paid to six women who accused him of harassment. With those settlements, Mr. O'Reilly was not only able to hold onto his top rated, prime time television show, an engine for his book and speaking empire, but he was also able, in February, to land a new 100 million contract from Fox News, the network that made him a star. Two months later, Fox News and its parent, 21st Century Fox, forced Mr. O'Reilly out. What changed? The allegations against Mr. O'Reilly, once conveniently swept aside, had suddenly become a problem. They had become a problem because they had become public (through the same Times reporters who first wrote about the 32 million payout, Emily Steel and Michael S. Schmidt). In a similar turn of events, earlier this month, Mr. Weinstein did not last a week at his company after The Times and then The New Yorker detailed sexual harassment and abuse claims against him going back decades. Now, a national reckoning is underway. Allegations of harassment and abuse have prompted action at Amazon Studios, where a female producer's accusation forced the resignation of its chief, Roy Price; at the APA talent agency, where allegations from at least three men against the agent Tyler Grasham led to his firing; at Vox Media, which dismissed its editorial director, Lockhart Steele, after a woman accused him of misconduct on Medium without naming him; and at Nickelodeon, which severed ties with "The Loud House" creator Chris Savino after several women leveled accusations. "My duty as an attorney is to my client and to assist her and protect her and support her in what she thinks is best for her life," Ms. Allred told me. "I don't think any woman should be sacrificed for the 'cause.'" For a number of women, she said, a confidential settlement is the right outcome. "Some clients want to protect their privacy they don't want anybody to know," she said. In most cases, Ms. Allred said, if there is no confidentiality agreement, there is no shot at a settlement. And she disputed the notion that out of court settlements somehow let the alleged harassers off scot free. "If the accused sexual harasser is paying my client 500,000, or 1 million or 2 million, that's not nuisance value," she said. "That's an admission that the accused feels that he has risk and that he has done something that he should not have done." Still, Mr. O'Reilly has lately asserted that he struck the deals only to "protect my family." Over the weekend, he used his website to call the latest Times report a "smear piece." In return for the 32 million he was said to have paid Ms. Wiehl, Mr. O'Reilly bought more than her silence. As part of the deal, the Times reported, all text messages and other communications between them were destroyed, and he got an affidavit, signed by Ms. Wiehl, in which she attested that she had "no claims" regarding the allegations in her initial complaint. Because of such agreements, it required months and months of reporting on the part of those who nailed down the stories on Mr. O'Reilly and Mr. Weinstein just as they stymied so many earlier efforts by others. Jessica E. Lessin, the editor in chief of the tech news website The Information, said that the use of nondisclosure agreements slowed its investigation into sexual harassment allegations in Silicon Valley specifically, against Justin Caldbeck of Binary Capital. (He resigned from Binary and apologized, saying it was wrong to "leverage a position of power in exchange for sexual gain.") | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Bob Dylan's protean career has created many entry points for a diverse audience: You may know him as a folk activist or an electric trickster, a country western outlaw or a born again preacher, an American Songbook interpreter or a Nobel Prize winning poet. Or you may not know him at all, unaware it's one of his songs your favorite artist is covering. The Irish playwright and director Conor McPherson, 48, was about 10 years old when he got into Dylan via the Beatles. Decades later, he somehow wrestled a coherent aesthetic universe out of 22 Dylan songs in the musical "Girl From the North Country," which is reopening on Broadway after a successful run at the Public Theater in 2018. Set in Duluth, Minn., in 1934, the show brings together the folks who live in a modest boardinghouse and those passing through. They are a motley bunch, yet feel as one sharing Dylan's songs. It is the same behind the scenes: Like McPherson, some members of the cast and creative team grew up with Dylan embedded in their life; others entered his world late and through a side door. The first Dylan song I heard that stuck with me was "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" during an episode of "Mad Men." Must have been in high school. I think the first record was "Blood on the Tracks" but then I got into '80s stuff that was on CD when I was growing up, like "Dylan the Dead." In college it was "Desire," which was big for my circle of friends. To be completely honest, I didn't put the name to the music before going for the role in the show . Then I realized that the Adele song I loved, "Make You Feel My Love," was by him. The famous song from "Forrest Gump" starts singing "Blowin' in the Wind" I had no idea it was Bob Dylan. Ensemble member "old enough to appreciate the Traveling Wilburys when they formed and know who all of them were" The first Bob Dylan song I remember hearing was "Rainy Day Women 12 35." I didn't get it because I was five, but I thought it sounded cool. My favorite is Nina Simone's version of "The Times They Are A Changin.' " I heard it for the first time on the subway and sobbed. I got a seat right away. I was big into alternative music in high school, and PJ Harvey's cover of "Highway 61 Revisited" was a favorite. This was the first in a long list of realizations that certain songs I really loved were written by Bob Dylan. I think the first song I heard was "The Times They Are A Changin.' " At the time, around 2010 or so, I was hearing some of my own thoughts about the political atmosphere. We talked about his lyrics in history class. I had always been a fan of Dylan's earlier music, the protest songs. After the Public Theater run, my wife, Shannon, and I were driving from N.Y.C. to Oshawa, Ontario, to visit family. On the way, we tuned into a classic rock station. A Dylan tune I didn't recognize came on, but I weirdly found myself singing all the lyrics. And then it hit me: It was "Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anyone Seen My Love?)"! With all due respect, I like our version better. About 40 years ago, my older brother, John, came home with Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde." I'd never seen a double album. The way it unfolded to show a full body shot of Dylan in that great outfit with the scarf and all those shades of brown was very cool. Johnny is gone now but I still have his album. It reminds me of my brother when he was young. My parents listened to a lot of gospel and soul music. I remember being in the back seat of my mom's Volvo and she would always play Shirley Caesar's "Gotta Serve Somebody." I didn't know Dylan wrote it at the time, but it was always a part of my childhood. A few years later, I saw his Kennedy Center special and Shirley Caesar honored him by singing that song. Plays Mrs. Neilsen and is "north of 25" I wasn't really familiar with Bob Dylan's music my parents, who are from Haiti, mainly played Haitian music. When I started working on the reading of "Girl From the North Country" at the Public Theater, I remember learning the material and just feeling like the music was tugging on my soul. It was familiar yet very spiritual. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
A small study of patients who were severely ill from the coronavirus hints that treatment with antibodies from recovered patients may modestly help recovery and survival, scientists reported on Friday. The study, although far from conclusive, is said to be the largest of subjects recovering from Covid 19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. Thirty nine hospitalized patients were given intravenous infusions of antibodies from patients who had recovered from the condition. The course of illness in patients who received the convalescent plasma was compared to that of similar patients identified through electronic health records who did not get the treatment. This is a weak form of comparison, prone to error. And researchers are wary of studies that take place at a single institution, because the results often are not applicable to patients elsewhere. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
For the first time that we know, an interstellar visitor has zoomed through our solar system. The small space rock, tentatively called A/2017 U1, is about a quarter of a mile long and astronomers across the world are racing to study it before it departs just as quickly as it arrived. "We've never seen anything like this before," said Rob Weryk, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. On Oct. 19, Dr. Weryk was reviewing images captured by the university's Pan STARRS 1 telescope on the island of Maui when he came across the object. At first he thought it was a type of space rock known as a near earth object, but he realized its motion did not make sense. It was much faster than any asteroid or comet he had seen before. He quickly realized that it was not of this solar system. "It's moving so fast that the Sun can't capture it into an orbit," Dr. Weryk said. After contacting a colleague at the European Space Agency to discuss the find, he submitted it to the Minor Planet Center, which tracks objects in the solar system, to share with other astronomers. "I was not expecting to see anything like this during my career, even though we knew it was possible and that these objects exist," said Davide Farnocchia, a navigational engineer with NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Astronomers had predicted such an occurrence, but this is the first time that it has been recorded. For the past few days Dr. Farnocchia has been calculating the strange object's path. "It was obvious that the object has a hyperbolic orbit," he said, meaning that its trajectory is open ended rather than elliptical like the objects in our solar system. That shows that it came from outside the solar system and will leave the solar system. The object came closest to the Sun on Sept. 9, at a distance of about 23 million miles. With a boost from the star's gravity, it zoomed by at about 55 miles per second with respect to the Sun, Dr. Farnocchia said. Then on Oct. 14 the object came within about 15 million miles of Earth, zipping by at about 37 miles per second, with respect to the Earth. That's more than three times as much velocity as the escape trajectory for the New Horizons spacecraft, which completed a flyby of Pluto in 2015, he said. Scientists around the world are watching its journey, hoping to glean as much information as they can before it gets too far away. "We are just scrambling right now to secure big telescope time, prepare our observations and download the data," said Karen Meech, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. Because the object came from outside our solar system, it may be made up of completely different material than the asteroids and comets that we have studied. She and other astronomers think that in the next few weeks they will have more insight into the composition and size of A/2017 U1, and in time, where exactly it came from. Dr. Meech noted that scientists did not have much warning about this object when it came into the solar system because it was blocked by the brightness of the sun. It very much came without warning, she said. But there is no need to panic, said Lindley Johnson, NASA's planetary defense officer. In the realm of things that could hit Earth and obliterate our existences, an interstellar Armageddon is pretty low on the list. "The near earth asteroids are many times, hundreds of thousands of times, more likely to occur, and even those are extremely rare events," Mr. Johnson said. "It's really nothing that people should worry about. I certainly don't lie awake worrying about it." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
It is striking how right wing groups and politicians are using the pandemic to promote their own narrower interests. The Texas governor uses the health crisis to try to ban abortions, while the Trump administration pushes its anti immigrant, anti China agenda. Groups demanding that states reopen tout their "right" to carry assault rifles openly, a few members of Congress use the information they need to legislate wisely to cash out in the stock market, and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, aims to punish Democratic leaning states by withholding funds for treating patients. For these people, there is no bigger picture, no we're all in this together, no shame. If there's anything more despicable than war profiteering, it's profiteering from a pandemic while thousands are dying horrible deaths. We need the government to coordinate a response to Covid 19 based on medical science, focused on concern for the welfare of the people. On Wednesday, however, The Times reported two stories of shameless profiteering by Trump administration cronies. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
MILAN A black car pulled up outside of 12 Via Gesu, Milan's "via dell'uomo" (or men's street, lined with men's shops) on Saturday, and out stepped a tiny blonde in a spill of ruffles, accompanied by a Jack Russell terrier with its own entourage of staff members. She picked her way into the Versace headquarters, negotiating the pebbled stone of the courtyard in her stilettos and refusing a waiter's offer of a paper cone of french fries with an upturned hand. Earlier that afternoon Ms. Versace had shown her new men's collection, preceded by a film by Bruce Weber, a campaign shot in Chicago with the models Gigi Hadid and Karlie Kloss. She had returned to Via Gesu, once her brother Gianni's home and now the company headquarters, for a party during men's fashion week to celebrate the collaboration and Mr. Weber. But the talk of the show had been the soundtrack, music both classics and unreleased tracks by Ms. Versace's late friend Prince. "Donatella would like to use this special occasion as an opportunity to share this incredible music from a dear, and much missed friend," read a statement from the company. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
LAWRENCE, Kan. The 14 year run of Big 12 basketball championships ended two weeks ago, when Kansas's crown passed to Texas Tech and Kansas State. A yearlong reign as conference tournament champions came to a close last weekend, with the Jayhawks beaten by Iowa State in the final. There will be no flashy Big 12 championship rings to pass out to the players next season, no new year to add to the league championship banner in the Allen Fieldhouse rafters. At Kansas, a fixture in the N.C.A.A. tournament, a season that began with great and usual expectations and with the Jayhawks being ranked No. 1 in the country has instead become one of trial, quite literally, and tribulation. "It's a real test of the fans," said Kevin Willmott, who won an Oscar last month for co writing Spike Lee's "BlacKkKlansman," and teaches film studies at the university. Follow our live coverage of the N.C.A.A. tournament here. One key player was lost to a season ending injury. Another is stuck in N.C.A.A. enforcement limbo. A third just went home. The coaches, drawn into a recruiting scandal playing out in federal court, sometimes feel as if they spend as much time conferring with their lawyers as they do with their team. Of the dramatic arc that has unfolded, Willmott, who sat behind the Jayhawks' bench for a game two weeks ago, said: "It's probably not a film, but probably an episode of a TV show where you get your character tested a little bit. We've had a great thing for a long time. We're not used to the ball not falling our way." The fans still turn up, of course. Allen Fieldhouse was dutifully full on the final day of the regular season, with 16,300 fans shoehorned into the venerable old barn, just as they have been for every Kansas basketball home game since Nov. 28, 2001. As the final seconds wound down, the students behind each basket serenaded the home team with their haunting "Rock Chalk Jayhawk" chant, marking another victory over Baylor, which has never won here, and cementing another perfect season at home the 20th since Allen Fieldhouse opened in 1955. It was all so familiar and yet, as virtually everyone in the building could sense, it was not. The hulking junior center Udoka Azubuike, as potent a post player as there is in college basketball when healthy, has been lost for the season because of torn ligaments in his right hand. The deadeye guard Lagerald Vick, the team's only senior and a starter on last year's Final Four team returned home to Memphis several weeks ago for personal reasons and will not return. Forward Silvio De Sousa, who practices with the team and sits on the bench in street clothes with Azubuike during games, has been barred from playing by the N.C.A.A. since a shoe company consultant testified in October that he funneled money to De Sousa's guardian. What has given this season a darker tint, though, is the uncertainty about what fallout lies ahead from the F.B.I. corruption investigation that has roiled college basketball, ensnaring not only Kansas but Louisville, Arizona, Louisiana State, Oklahoma State, Southern California, Auburn and North Carolina State, among others. Kansas took its uncomfortable turn in the spotlight last October when T.J. Gassnola, a basketball consultant for Adidas, which has a 12 year, 191 million apparel contract with the university's athletic programs, testified in a Brooklyn courtroom that he had arranged payments to the families of two Kansas players. Though Gassnola said he never told Kansas Coach Bill Self about the payments, lawyers for the former Adidas executive James Gatto on trial pointed to text messages between Gassnola and Self and a Kansas assistant, Kurtis Townsend, in which Gassnola pledged his help in landing players. Another trial, for bribery charges against three defendants in the corruption case, is set to begin in April, shortly after the Final Four. Self said the revelations in the case, which the N.C.A.A. is investigating, have not been troublesome to his players other than De Souza, who the university has argued is being punished unjustly but acknowledged that the developments have hovered over the coaching staff and will continue to do so. He called the case "draining." "It's not so much that we've done anything, but we're trying to get a game plan on when's our next move? When can we do this? So from that standpoint, everybody deals with distractions, but this has been a big distraction for the coaches, not the players." The depleted Jayhawks roster is a bigger concern. It has left Kansas with a starting lineup of four freshmen surrounding Dedric Lawson, a junior forward who transferred from Memphis. There has been a predictable level of inconsistency a 29 point blowout loss at Texas Tech, for example, was followed two days later by a 15 point thumping of Kansas State. "It's '50 First Dates' Drew Barrymore could star in it with our team," Self said, referring to the movie. "It's something new every day." As frank as Self is about his team's relative shortcomings, he is not at all disappointed in its 25 9 record, given the absence of three crucial players, the difficult schedule and the lineup's collective inexperience. "The freshmen have done pretty well, but it's not your typical freshmen like Duke has or some other people have," Self said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Michelangelo probably had osteoarthritis, but his commitment to art may have kept his hands functional until his death in 1564. Those are the conclusions drawn by doctors who studied three portraits of Michelangelo from ages 60 to 65 by other artists. The paintings show that the small joints of his left hand were affected by noninflammatory degenerative changes, yet earlier portrayals show no such deformity. "Continuous and intense work could have helped Michelangelo to keep the use of his hands for as long as possible," said Davide Lazzeri, a specialist in plastic reconstructive and aesthetic surgery at the Villa Salaria Clinic in Rome and an author of a report in The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
After more than a week of statements, petitions, arguments and questions, we asked Michelle Cottle, an editorial board member who's been chronicling President Trump's impeachment trial for Opinion each day from Capitol Hill, to offer some much needed clarity. Below are Ms. Cottle's responses to a selection of questions from readers about the proceedings. They have been edited for length and clarity. Rachel L. Harris and Lisa Tarchak, senior editorial assistants Proof may not be enough Michael S. Freeman, Narberth, Pa.: There seem to be several Republican senators who don't agree with the analysis of Alan Dershowitz (a lawyer for President Trump) yet insist that what Mr. Trump is accused of is not impeachable. Have any of those senators offered a view of what would be an impeachable act? In the absence of clarity from the language in Article 2 of the Constitution, how does any politician decide what is the threshold? The question of what constitutes an impeachable offense has been one of the central points of debate in this whole mess. Senators can talk about how this or that behavior clearly does or does not clear the bar, but to a large degree their views on impeachable offenses boil down to something akin to the old definition of pornography: They know it when they see it. And the way they see it has much to do with their political team. The House managers nodded to this during their opening arguments last week when they played a 1999 video clip of Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and one of the president's chief defenders, sharing his view of impeachable offenses during the Clinton impeachment trial: "What's a high crime? How about if an important person hurts somebody of low means. It's not very scholarly, but I think it's the truth," Mr. Graham says in the clip. "I think that's what they meant by 'high crimes.' Doesn't have to be a crime. It's just when you start using your office and you're acting in a way that hurts people, you've committed a high crime." Needless to say, Mr. Graham no longer believes what he said although, to be fair it's hard to know for certain what he believes. In the early stages of the Trump impeachment investigation, he said that evidence of a quid pro quo would be cause for concern. As that evidence has emerged, he has changed his tune. Republican Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and John Kennedy of Louisiana have both suggested that proving a quid pro quo is not enough, and that the real test should be whether the president's intentions were corrupt. They obviously do not agree that the House managers have made this case. Mark Penn and Andrew Stein write that "only a broader course correction to the center will give Democrats a fighting chance in 2022" and beyond. Tory Gavito and Adam Jentleson write that the Virgina loss should "shock Democrats into confronting the powerful role that racially coded attacks play in American politics." Ezra Klein speaks to David Shor, who discusses his fear that Democrats face electoral catastrophe unless they shift their messaging. Ross Douthat writes that the outcome of the Virginia gubernatorial race shows Democrats need a "new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." Gail Mangham, Prescott, Ariz.: I'm trying to square my view that the refusal of the Republicans to allow witnesses is a form of obstruction of justice with the Republican view that Trump's decision to disallow witnesses, like John Bolton and others, is not obstruction of justice. Need some help on this point. MC: You and me both. The defense's claim is all about process. They insist the House did such an unfair, slapdash job with its inquiry that the entire impeachment, including many of the subpoenas it issued, were illegitimate and, as such, the president would have been irresponsible to participate. Furthermore, they argue, if the Senate now validates the House's shoddy work, it will set a terrible precedent, making it too easy for the House to impeach future presidents. What is the chief justice doing there? Darrie Ganzhorn, Santa Cruz, Calif.: What is Chief Justice John Roberts's role and responsibility in this trial? Does he have any say in whether there will be witnesses? MC: As presiding officer, the chief justice has spent most of his days keeping the process on track gaveling sessions in and out and preventing partisan spats from getting out of hand. At one point late in the first trial session, he scolded the House managers and the president's team for excessive jerkiness. During the question and answer period, he read the questions aloud and gently tried to keep the teams of lawyers within the five minute time limit for answers. Eager to avoid the appearance of partisanship, the chief justice has avoided wading into the content of the arguments, declining to push back on even outrageous legal claims being floated. (And Mr. Dershowitz has floated some doozies for the defense.) He did take a stand against outing the whistle blower, refusing to read aloud any questions that cited the individual by name. Much as the vice president does during normal sessions of the Senate, the chief justice is also there to serve as the deciding vote in case of a tie. This may or may not apply to a vote on witnesses, as there is some dispute about whether the chief justice should break ties on procedural motions. Rick Bissonnette, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio: If impeachment managers petition Justice Roberts for a witness and he grants their petition, can the Senate overrule that decision with a simple majority? MC: As with so much about impeachment, this too is a matter of dispute. Three legal scholars argued in The Times this week that the chief justice can unilaterally call witnesses, based in part on the latest (1986) version of impeachment rules and regulations. The chief justice could reject this interpretation, which would likely lead to minor chaos as the Senate parliamentarian and others got sucked into the discussion. But! Even if the chief justice did unilaterally subpoena John Bolton or others, the Senate could still refuse to hear the testimony. Result? More chaos. Clash of the executive and legislative Mike Roche, Califon, N.J.: Has the Government Accountability Office's conclusion been introduced into the proceedings? MC: The report from the G.A.O. (Congress's accounting watchdog) has made an appearance, though it has not been discussed in detail. It was cited in the trial memorandum that the House impeachment investigators submitted, and Representative Adam Schiff mentioned it more than once in the House managers' opening arguments. Robert Ray, part of the president's defense team, dismissed it as just another political clash between the executive and legislative branches. For the president, 'everything is personal' Richard L. Thomas, Los Angeles: Why does the White House accuse Democrats of trying to "undo" the 2016 election? If Trump were actually to be convicted in the Senate trial, what, if anything, would happen, other than Vice President Mike Pence, whom Trump's supporters also voted for, becoming president. MC: Going back to the Mueller investigation and even earlier, the goal of the president and his defenders has been to portray any criticism or questioning of his behavior as politically motivated. As Mr. Trump tells it, Democrats, the media and elements of the Deep State are so bitter that he won in 2016 that they've all joined forces to end his presidency by any means necessary. For him, everything is personal. His argument doesn't require proof. It just has to inflame partisan tensions. 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 |
As a supporter of reading with children and a fan of traditional print books, I cannot say I am entirely surprised by the results of new research suggesting that print books are the best way to go when reading with young children. Reading books is one of the great and ongoing pleasures of my life, and although I read all kinds of things on screens, I cling to the print book, the paper book, or what we all secretly call "the book book." I am willing to travel with a heavy bag full of books in order to enjoy the pleasure of turning paper pages on the airplane, and watching my bookmark (yes, of course, I have a bookmark fetish) move further and further through the book on the hotel night table. But when it comes to books for young children, there's a certain research imperative to figure out the role that screens can or should or might play in those first exposures to the written word. The topics new parents are talking about. Evidence based guidance. Personal stories that matter. Sign up now to get NYT Parenting in your inbox every week. Reading is my cause, and has been for years. I am the national medical director of Reach Out and Read, a nonprofit that supports pediatricians in counseling parents and children to read together and providing books at checkups. Written language will be only more important in our children's lives as the world becomes more and more networked, in the largest written word based community that has ever existed. Our children will grow up to depend on their facility with reading and writing in their jobs, their personal relationships, their ability to access information and news, and their participation in civic discourse at every level. How can we help them into the world of written language, in all its many modern manifestations? In a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, researchers at the University of Michigan asked 37 parents to read similar stories to their 2 to 3 year olds in three different formats (the order was varied for the different families): a print book, a basic electronic book (no bells or whistles) on a tablet, and an enhanced electronic book with animation and/or sound effects (tap a sea gull or a dog and hear the sounds they make). The interactions were videotaped and coded, looking at the number and kinds of verbalizations by parents and by children, at the amount of collaborative reading that went on, and at the general emotional tenor of the interaction. Reading print books together generated more verbalizations about the story from parents and from toddlers, more back and forth "dialogic" collaboration. ("What's happening here?" "Remember when you went to the beach with Dad?") Dr. Tiffany Munzer, a fellow in developmental behavioral pediatrics at the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital, who was the first author on the study, said the researchers had wanted to study toddlers in particular because of a concern that the toddlers might be particularly susceptible to distraction by electronic enhancements. That was why the enhanced books were compared to print books but also to nonenhanced electronic books. "They were susceptible," Dr. Munzer said, "but the basic electronic book without the enhancements was also distracting to toddlers, and they had less engagement with their parents than with print books." So while earlier research had suggested that the enhancements were problematic for young children, the results of this study suggested that even a nonenhanced story on the tablet screen seemed less likely to generate that parent child dialogue. "The tablet itself made it harder for parents and children to engage in the rich back and forth turn taking that was happening in print books," Dr. Munzer said. The researchers can only speculate about why; it may be because of the patterns we are all accustomed to in using our devices. Perhaps "the tablet is designed to be more of a personal device, perhaps parents and children use it independently at home," Dr. Munzer said. There were also some struggles over who got to control the tablet, and more "negative format related comments," like "Don't touch that button." And a print book, with a young child, may be a better piece of technology, if the goal is dialogue and conversational turn taking. "A print book is just so good at eliciting these interactions," Dr. Munzer said. "You're comparing a tablet with the gold standard." Read more in our guide: How to Raise a Reader I was one of the co authors of a commentary accompanying the study, which acknowledged the many potential benefits of electronic books for children, but argued for continuing to rely on print books for the very young, including in programs that encourage parent child reading. My colleague, Dr. Suzy Tomopoulos, assistant professor in the department of pediatrics at N.Y.U. School of Medicine, who was the lead author on the commentary, said that whatever the medium, "parents need to read together with their child, use what they're reading, and expand on the text." With younger children, she said, there's evidence that they get distracted with e books, and there's a lot of technology being actively marketed to parents nowadays. "You don't need a lot of bells and whistles to support your child's development," she said. "Engaging the child and talking to the child does a wonderful job of supporting early child development." Reach Out and Read has a partnership with Scholastic, which this week released the seventh edition of its Kids Family Reading Report, a national survey of school age children and parents. It found that though 58 percent of the kids surveyed said they love or like reading books for fun, there has been an incremental decrease in reading frequency among the children surveyed since 2010. And as children reach the age when they are expected to have fully mastered reading, they seem to be reading less for fun. In what the report called a "decline by 9," the percentage of kids who report reading books for fun five to seven days a week dropped to 35 percent of 9 year olds from 57 percent of 8 year olds. Lauren Tarshis, senior vice president at Scholastic and a contributor to the report, pointed to the focus on third grade as the pivotal year when children are expected to achieve full fluency as readers. The worry is that is that the pressure and the testing at that stage may contribute to the perception that reading is no longer so much fun. "I keep saying to my colleagues, it made me feel sorrowful," Ms. Tarshis said. "If you have reading in your life as something you see as a way of transporting you, opening doors, it's just a wonderful, wonderful thing." The report also highlighted the importance of "reading role models," pointing out that the children who are frequent readers have people in their lives who enjoy reading, and parents who read frequently. This is hardly a surprise, though again, in the digital era, it might raise the question of just how our children can tell what it is that we are doing on our devices. But clearly parents play an important role. The book that stimulates the dialogue between parent and toddler is also the child's introduction to the pleasures of written language and stories. The pleasure that a parent takes in reading helps shape a growing child's attitude. And the message to parents should not be that they're doing it wrong (we all know we're doing things wrong, just as we all know that we're doing our best), but that parents really matter. "Parents today work harder than ever," Dr. Munzer said. "Our goal is to help families reflect on activities they engage in that spark connections." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
SEATTLE There is a strange in betweenness to life in the nation's coronavirus capital. Classes continue on the University of Washington's campus, some half empty, others completely full. I have been teaching here 13 years, and faculty members have been getting detailed, palpably anxious instructions from administrators on how to teach online and on hand washing and social distance, and reminders that no one on our 46,000 student campus has tested positive for the coronavirus that causes Covid 19. For now. The local schools my children attend were deep cleaned last weekend, and they were still open on Thursday. Rumors fly through middle schoolers' text strings, neighborhood message boards, conversations in the grocery line. We're all at the store daily, stocking up on canned goods and paper towels, awaiting news of school closings and home quarantines. Costco is overrun. A friend told me about a beleaguered Costco employee who had to stand in a corner of the store yelling, "No toilet paper!" over and over, and redirecting shoppers from the empty pallets. Of course, the dangers here are much greater than running out of toilet paper. Ten have died, most of them residents of one suburban nursing facility. The county government bought a motel to quarantine infected patients. It is likely to get worse: Analysis by scientists who studied the local cases indicates that the virus may well have been present in the area for up to six weeks. Like the seasonal flu, the coronavirus is most dangerous to the old and medically vulnerable, but the only way to halt its spread is to change nearly everyone's behavior. The tech companies that dominate this region's economy have been the most aggressive in making changes. Microsoft and Amazon moved quickly to cancel nonessential travel. Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook have recommended that employees in the area work from home if they can until the end of March. Yet the Emerald City Comic Con, which drew nearly 100,000 people last year to downtown, is still on. Flights continue at Seattle Tacoma International Airport. Passengers are screened for the virus as they arrive from China, but Seattleites are not necessarily screened as we depart. A region so dependent on tourism and international travel is reluctant to slow down. But we may have to, and not just in the near term. I wonder when the flight cancellations will begin. Maybe Comic Con won't happen. Maybe my children will spend this summer making up the lost time in school. Maybe I will be teaching my spring classes remotely, one of thousands of telecommuters whose absence from the roads will at last make our region's traffic jams go away. It is humbling to be so uncertain about the future in this overeducated boomtown, this hub of technology, medical research and global health that usually spends its time eradicating epidemics, not succumbing to them. It is humbling to be at the mercy of such a seemingly unstoppable virus amid a rickety and inequitable American health care system. The crisis is also forcing us to refocus our attention locally, hitting pause on the national news and global business and the perpetual crossing of time zones that is a feature of life for so many of us in the nation's rainy upper left. We citizens of this high speed, 21st century place are now getting a taste for what life was like in the American cities of the 19th century, which were regularly devastated by typhoid and cholera and tuberculosis. Then and now, being a global crossroads made Seattle vulnerable. More than 1,400 Seattleites died in the influenza pandemic of 1918, a mortality rate spiked by the movement of people through the region's port and crowded military bases. These diseases also had no vaccine or cure at the time, but their dangers were far greater because so little was understood about how to prevent their spread. Another humbling realization is that the steps Seattle took to confront that epidemic were much the same as those we take now: Avoid crowds, stay home, wash your hands. Our only modern twists are hand sanitizer and substituting elbow bumps for handshakes. Our skin may crack from all the hand washing and sanitizing, but at least we understand how to best protect ourselves. But we are a long way from the cataclysm of 1918. For now, we gain a new appreciation for the people and institutions that keep a city running. We turn on the local news, scan the bulletins from the county public health department, listen to the news conferences held by the mayor and the county executive. There's uncertainty there, too: Can the public health agencies denuded by budget cuts meet surging needs? Are there enough local news outlets to fully report the story? Shouldn't we all stop going to work or school now? Local leaders don't know what is going to happen either. But they calm us with their consistency and expertise, and we trust them. It shouldn't take a global pandemic to force us to slow down our routines, to appreciate the communities in which we live, to properly wash our hands. But it has. So life in Seattle will go on, quieter and more local than before. I will keep reading the local news. I will plan my next lectures, grateful for the software that will let me deliver them virtually if necessary. I will look toward a spring with perhaps far less travel, fewer reasons to leave home. Or perhaps not. Who can tell? I will be grateful for what we have and get used to living with uncertainty. Margaret O'Mara ( margaretomara) is a professor of history at the University of Washington and the author of "The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America." 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 |
Think QAnon Is on the Fringe? So Was the Tea Party Democrats dismissed it as a fringe group of conspiracy minded zealots. Moderate Republicans fretted over its potential to hurt their party's image, while more conservative lawmakers carefully sought to harness its grass roots energy. Sympathetic media outlets covered its rallies, portraying it as an emerging strain of populist politics a protest movement born of frustration with a corrupt, unaccountable elite. Then, to everyone's surprise, its supporters started winning elections. That is a description of the Tea Party movement, which emerged in 2009 from the right wing fringes and proceeded to become a major, enduring force in American conservatism. But it could just as easily be a description of QAnon, the pro Trump conspiracy movement that has emerged as a possible inheritor to the Tea Party's mantle as the most potent grass roots force in right wing politics. This week, QAnon most likely got its first member of Congress: Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia who won a primary runoff in a heavily Republican district on Tuesday. Ms. Greene has publicly supported QAnon, appearing on QAnon shows and espousing the movement's unfounded belief that President Trump is on the verge of breaking up a shadowy cabal of Satan worshiping pedophiles. Other QAnon affiliated candidates have won primaries at the federal and state level, though few in districts as conservative as Ms. Greene's. QAnon, which draws its beliefs from the cryptic message board posts of an anonymous writer claiming to have access to high level government intelligence, lacks the leadership structure and the dark money connections of the early Tea Party. It also lacks realistic goals or anything resembling a coherent policy agenda. Its followers are internet vigilantes gripped by paranoid and violent revenge fantasies, not lower my taxes conservatives or opponents of the Affordable Care Act. But following Ms. Greene's primary win, some Washington insiders have begun to wonder if QAnon's potential influence is being similarly underestimated. They worry that, just as the Tea Party gave cover to a racist "birther" movement that propelled conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama into the Republican mainstream, QAnon's extreme views which have led some followers to commit serious crimes may prove difficult to contain. "They're delusional to dismiss it as a powerless fringe," said Steve Schmidt, a longtime G.O.P. strategist and campaign veteran who has become a Trump critic. "The Republican Party is becoming the home to an amalgam of conspiracy theorists, fringe players, extremists and white nationalists that is out in the open in a startling way." To be clear: QAnon's ideas are far more extreme than the Tea Party's ever were. Tea Party supporters objected to Wall Street bailouts and the growing federal deficit; QAnon adherents believe that Hillary Clinton and George Soros are drinking the blood of innocent children. While Tea Party supporters generally sought to oust their political opponents at the ballot box, QAnon supporters cheer for top Democrats to be either imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay or rounded up and executed. But there are more parallels than you'd think, especially when it comes to how the political establishments of their times reacted to each group's rise. When the Tea Party emerged in early 2009, many commentators mocked the idea that it could ever achieve political power, calling it a "display of hysteria" by "frothing right wingers." Michael R. Bloomberg, then the mayor of New York, characterized the Tea Party as a passing fad, comparing it to the burst of support for Ross Perot's 1992 presidential campaign. Republican Party leaders took it more seriously, but they, too, seemed to think that they could harness its energy without indulging its more extreme elements. Then, in January 2010, Scott Brown, a little known Republican lawmaker from Massachusetts, won a Senate seat in a shock upset over his Democratic opponent, Martha Coakley, partly because of support from the Tea Party. And it became clear to members of both parties that they had been wrong to underestimate the Tea Party's potential. Today, pundits tend to portray QAnon as an extreme but marginal movement a kind of John Birch Society for the 4chan age. And some polling has suggested that the movement remains broadly unpopular. But QAnon followers have left the dark corners of the internet and established a large and growing presence on mainstream social media platforms. Twitter recently announced it was removing or limiting the visibility of more than 150,000 QAnon related accounts, and NBC News reported this week that a Facebook internal investigation into QAnon's presence on its platform found thousands of active QAnon groups and pages, with millions of followers among them. Even after Ms. Greene's primary victory this week, few lawmakers have acknowledged QAnon directly. (One Republican lawmaker, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, called it "a fabrication" that has "no place in Congress" on Wednesday.) But its followers have routinely used social media to push extreme views including opposition to mask wearing, false fears about child exploitation, and the "Spygate" conspiracy theory into conservative media. At least one Fox News commentator has spoken approvingly of the movement. And dozens of QAnon candidates are running as anti establishment outsiders in Republican primaries this year, just as Tea Party candidates did in the 2010 midterm elections. The similarities between QAnon and the Tea Party aren't just historical. Some of the same activists are involved in both movements, and organizations like the Tea Party Patriots have provided fodder for QAnon's social media campaigns, such as a recent viral video of doctors making false claims about Covid 19. One notable difference is that while the Tea Party gained influence during a period when Republicans were out of power, QAnon is growing during the Trump administration, with the president's tacit blessing. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump congratulated Ms. Greene on her primary win, calling her a "future Republican star." (He made no mention of the video in which she called Mr. Trump's presidency a "once in a lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan worshiping pedophiles out.") Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co author of "The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism," said that QAnon represented, in some ways, an extension of the Tea Party's skepticism of mainstream authorities. "The movement of conspiratorial thinking to the center of the Republican Party isn't totally new," Ms. Williamson said. "But the centrality of that conspiratorial thinking was something striking about the Tea Party, and it's something even more striking about QAnon." One advantage QAnon has over earlier insurgent movements is improved technology. John Birch Society members had to resort to pamphleteering and newspaper ads, and the Tea Party which kicked off with a CNBC anchor's televised rant relied heavily on the existing conservative media apparatus to spread its message. But QAnon is native to the internet, and moves at the speed of social media. Since 2017, QAnon followers have built out an impressive media ecosystem encompassing Facebook groups, YouTube channels and Discord servers. These spaces serve both as sources of news and as virtual water coolers where followers socialize, trade new theories and memes, and strategize about growing their ranks. The other big difference, of course, is who's in the Oval Office. Mr. Trump has not directly addressed QAnon, but he has conspicuously avoided denouncing it, and has shared dozens of posts from believers on his social media accounts. Geoffrey Kabaservice, director of political studies at the Niskanen Center, a libertarian think tank, said that while QAnon would likely not take over the Republican Party as thoroughly as the Tea Party did in 2010, it could continue growing if top Republicans were unwilling or unable to contain it. "It won't naturally be flushed out of the system," he said. "The Republican Party would have to take active steps to flush it out of the system. And that likely won't happen under President Donald Trump." Bill Kristol, the conservative commentator and critic of Mr. Trump, was more skeptical about QAnon's influence on the Republican Party. He pointed out that there had always been extreme outliers in both parties of Congress whose influence tended to be diluted by more moderate voices over time. But that was in the pre Trump era, he admitted. Who knew what QAnon might become, with a presidential stamp of approval? "Trump's embrace is what makes this different, and more worrisome," Mr. Kristol said. "If Trump is the president, and he's embracing this, are we so confident that it's not the future?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
In the 1890s, journalists covering the president were forced to stand vigil outside the White House fence, querying visitors for scraps of information and appealing for audiences with presidential aides. Today's reporters are concerned that President elect Donald J. Trump could send them back into the past. The White House press corps was stunned on Sunday by reports of a proposal by the Trump administration to eject reporters from their home in the West Wing a move that, if carried out, would uproot decades of established protocol whereby journalists are allowed to work in the White House close to senior officials. Reince Priebus, Mr. Trump's incoming chief of staff, appeared to backpedal on the idea after it was reported by Esquire magazine, saying that only the location of the press briefing room was being discussed and that the administration was merely considering a larger area to accommodate the hundreds of journalists seeking to cover Mr. Trump. But for jittery Washington reporters, it was yet another salvo from an administration that has shown an unusual willingness to berate and belittle the news media, at the behest of a president elect who has floated the idea of rolling back libel protections and, in a volcanic appearance last week, refused to take questions from CNN after it ran a story he did not like. The sense of alarm was clear last week when more than 100 reporters showed up to a routine meeting of the White House Correspondents' Association. The group, which promotes reporters' access to presidential administrations, pledged to be vigilant about responding to any erosion of press freedoms. "We are all in this together," said Jeff Mason of Reuters, the group's president. Since the 1970s, reporters from broadcast, print and radio outlets have worked in small cubicles on the former site of a West Wing swimming pool. The reporters can walk, without a security escort, to the offices of White House press aides and the press secretary to check in on developments or to pick up the latest gossip. It was not clear on Sunday whether the administration's idea to relocate the White House press corps might extend to evicting reporters from their office space. "That hasn't been determined," Mr. Priebus told Chuck Todd on NBC's "Meet the Press." Later, on ABC's "This Week," Mr. Priebus said, "The only thing that's been discussed is whether or not the initial press conferences are going to be in that small press room." Few presidents relish sharing their home with reporters who are responsible for questioning their every move. But journalists have been granted space in the White House since the William McKinley administration, and their presence is seen as a potent symbol of a president's willingness to be held to account. Sean Spicer, the incoming White House press secretary, issued a statement on Sunday that did not address the issue of a dedicated work space. "While no decisions have been made, there is enormous interest in covering Donald Trump," he wrote. "The current briefing room only has 49 seats, so we have looked at rooms within the White House to conduct briefings that have additional capacity." Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. In a two hour meeting on Sunday, Mr. Mason told Mr. Spicer that it would be "unacceptable" to evict reporters from their work space. Mr. Spicer did not appear to disavow such a plan, only agreeing to discuss any changes ahead of time. "We object strenuously to any move that would shield the president and his advisers from the scrutiny of an on site White House press corps," Mr. Mason wrote in an email. Mr. Trump's communications team has pledged to shake up the status quo, inviting nontraditional journalists, including talk radio hosts and conservative bloggers, to the West Wing and prohibiting television coverage of daily press briefings, an idea that is supported by some former press secretaries of both political parties. Mr. Spicer denounced the news media last week at a news conference, describing CNN and BuzzFeed News as "sad" and "pathetic" for reporting on unverified allegations about Mr. Trump and Russia. But initial discussions between the White House press corps and the new administration have been described as diplomatic, with Mr. Trump's team pledging to retain reporters' access to the president's motorcade and his flights on Air Force One. Bob Schieffer, a longtime CBS News anchor who has covered eight presidential administrations, said he was not surprised to see tensions between a new president and the news media. "They're not the first administration that's come to office thinking they can control every single word that's said about them," he said in an interview. "It's their call, they can do what they want to do, and if the public puts up with it, they'll continue to do it that way." But, he added: "If they think they're not going to get the same intense coverage, they've been smoking something." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
WASHINGTON Federal Reserve officials are struggling to get comfortable with the persistent sluggishness of price inflation as they move toward raising interest rates later this year. Officials at the Fed's most recent meeting in July said they were almost ready to raise rates because they expected the economy's continuing upward trajectory to eventually push prices up, too, according to an official account of the meeting published by the Fed on Wednesday. But inflation continues to defy those expectations. Overall consumer prices rose just 0.2 percent over the 12 months ending in July, according to a separate government report also published on Wednesday, well below the 2 percent annual pace the Fed considers healthy. The meeting account said "almost all members" of the Federal Open Market Committee "indicated that they would need to see more evidence that economic growth was sufficiently strong" to bring inflation closer to its target before they were ready to raise rates for the first time since the financial crisis. Several analysts said the uncertain tone of the minutes suggested the Fed was somewhat less likely to start raising rates at its next meeting, in mid September. Investors, too, reduced their bets on a September liftoff, as reflected in the prices of financial assets tied to interest rates. The yield on the benchmark 10 year Treasury fell to 2.129 percent on Wednesday as investors bet rates would remain a little lower a little longer. Stock indexes recovered from their lows for the day after the 2 p.m. release of the minutes before falling back again. The Standard Poor's 500 stock index closed at 2,079.61, down 0.83 percent. "The bet is still that they achieve liftoff in September," Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial in Chicago, wrote in an analysis after the Fed distributed its latest bag of tea leaves. "However, Fed officials need to telegraph that soon if they actually intend to do so." The Fed's Button on the Economy When it comes to raising or lowering interest rates, what the Fed is really trying to do is balance growth and inflation. But they have a limited set of tools to accomplish their goal. With interest rates in the headlines, it almost sounds like The Fed can push a button, and mortgage payments and credit card fees across the land will march up or down. But that's not how it happens. Here is how the Fed actually influences interest rates: Banks often need to borrow money to make sure they have enough for me and you and businesses to withdraw cash. Sometimes, they even need to loan each other money overnight. The rate that they charge each other for those loans is called the "federal funds rate. (serious)" Remember that term because that's The Fed's main lever on the economy. It's actually the only rate the fed can control. The theory goes that if it's cheaper for banks to borrow, they'll lend more money at better rates to regular people and businesses. The economy should grow when that borrowed money is used for things like buying cars and houses, or hiring employees. But grow too quickly, and inflation the price of things can become a problem: Your dollar doesn't go as far. When rates are low, it also means savers get a raw deal. Banks don't pay much to hold onto your money. Those are some of the reasons that The Fed also wants to be able to push that Federal Funds Rate back up again. They buy back bonds to take cash out of the economy. With less money out there, borrowing gets more expensive and your dollar is worth more. If the Fed does it right, great. If it doesn't, well, we'll all have a problem. When it comes to raising or lowering interest rates, what the Fed is really trying to do is balance growth and inflation. But they have a limited set of tools to accomplish their goal. The minutes said most of the meeting's 17 participants "judged that the conditions for policy firming had not yet been achieved, but they noted that conditions were approaching that point." The Fed did not clarify how soon it planned to complete the journey. Kenneth J. Taubes, chief investment officer at Pioneer Investments in Boston, said that he was not concerned about the exact timing, but would not mind getting it over with. Noting that equity markets stopped climbing about eight months ago, he said that markets seemed to be waiting for the Fed. Some investors fear that disruptions will intensify when the Fed finally pulls the trigger, but Mr. Taubes said he has a more optimistic view. He said any short term disruptions were likely to fade as investors recognized that the Fed was still holding rates at unusually low levels, maintaining a significant degree of stimulus. "If anything," Mr. Taubes said, "it might be a buying opportunity." Fed officials, in the minutes and in recent public statements, have sounded increasingly convinced that the central bank is approaching the limit of its ability to improve labor market conditions. The share of Americans with jobs remains much lower than before the recession, and wage growth has been slow despite the fact the unemployment rate has fallen to 5.3 percent as of July. Historically, the Fed has been reluctant to let the jobless rate fall too much lower than that, fearing it will unleash faster inflation by doing so. "Many members thought that labor market underutilization would be largely eliminated in the near term if economic activity evolved as they expected," the minutes said, describing the view that the unemployment rate is nearing the lowest level consistent with stable inflation. The Fed's standard view, widely shared by outside economists, is that tighter labor market conditions will contribute to faster inflation as workers are able to extract larger wage increases. Last September, the Fed predicted that prices would rise between 1.6 and 1.9 percent in 2015. Fed officials continue to predict inflation will increase in the coming months, and the latest data provided some support for that view. Prices excluding food and energy rose 1.8 percent over the last year, and the Fed regards that measure as a better predictor of future inflation. A minority of Fed officials argues that the central bank should wait to raise rates until prices are rising more rapidly, a position the International Monetary Fund has repeatedly endorsed. Narayana Kocherlakota, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, suggested in an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that the Fed should be expanding its stimulus campaign. "The U.S. inflation outlook thus provides no justification for policy tightening at this juncture," Mr. Kocherlakota wrote. "Given that outlook, the F.O.M.C. should ease, not tighten, monetary policy by, for example, buying more long term assets or by reducing the interest rate that it pays on excess reserves held by banks." That view, however, has gained little traction in an internal debate that is mostly about when, not whether, to raise rates. By contrast, some officials said the economy's cumulative progress since the Great Recession is now sufficient that the decision to start raising interest rates should not turn on the latest batch of economic data. "I am not expecting the data signals to point uniformly in the same direction; I don't need this," Dennis Lockhart, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, said in a speech earlier this month that echoed the argument described in the minutes of the July meeting. "Given the progress made over the recovery and the overall recent tone of the economy, I for one do not intend to let the gyrating needle of monthly data be the decisive factor in decision making." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The audience in the Amargosa Opera House on Oct. 1, 2005, to see the season's first performance of Marta Becket's show "Masquerade." Marta Becket was a New York ballerina and Broadway dancer on tour with her one woman show in 1967 when she peered into an abandoned social hall in Death Valley Junction, Calif., and visualized her future: a theater of her own. The floor was warped. Mud streaked the walls. Kangaroo rats were running wild. Yet it was there, amid the alkali flats, whistling winds and triple digit heat of the Mojave Desert, that Ms. Becket and her husband resettled and built the Amargosa Opera House, where she performed her ballets and pantomimes for the next 40 years. Ms. Becket turned the Amargosa into a cultural institution in a desolate area, an attraction to tourists, ranchers, farmers and even prostitutes from a local bordello. "I found my ship out here in the desert when I was 43," she said in "Amargosa," a 2000 documentary about her directed by Todd Robinson. "I'm still dancing, and I'm going to keep moving until I drop." When Ms. Becket died on Monday at 92, her only survivor was the theater,the walls and ceiling she painted depicting a colorful audience that would never leave: Renaissance royalty, nuns and monks, clowns and jousters, revelers and cherubs and Clive Barnes, the longtime drama critic of The New York Times, a playful nod to her theatrical past. Rhonda Shade, the general manager of the opera house, confirmed the death.Ms. Becket had recently had several bouts of pneumonia, she said. Ms. Becket and her husband, Thomas Williams, were camping in Death Valley in 1967 when a flat tire on their trailer forced them to find a garage nearly 40 miles away, in Death Valley Junction. While Mr. Williams was repairing the tire, Ms. Becket wandered over to a collection of buildings, including a hotel, that had been erected in the 1920s by Pacific Coast Borax, a mining company. She was, she later recalled, drawn hypnotically to the largest structure, Corkhill Hall, where miners had gathered years before. She and her husband found that they could rent the building for 45 a month, and set about renovating it. The roof was fixed. Folger's coffee cans were turned into stage lights. Ms. Becket sewed the curtains and costumes and painted the sets. Her first performance came early the next year. Attendance for her shows was sparse at first: Sometimes she would look out from the stage at an audience of no one. After a flash desert flood in 1968 left a foot of mud inside the theater, she had an epiphany during the cleanup: She would paint an audience on its walls, one that was always packed and keep her company when no one else showed up. "People would tell me that I was wasting my time painting on the walls of a building that I would never own or that I couldn't sell and it could be torn down any time," she said in the documentary about the years she needed to complete the work. "I would say to them that no one can take away the hours of joy that I had painting it." Her distant outpost was, in time, visited by National Geographic, Life and People magazines. News crews came by to learn why this lithe and determined dancer had left Manhattan for artistic salvation in the desert, where she played to audiences in tulle. "Am I eccentric?" she asked in an interview with The New York Times in 1999. "Is it eccentric to love your work so much that you would go anywhere in the world to do it?" The nonprofit business that she had started by staring dreamily into a ramschackle building was not so tiny. During the year ended Sept. 30, 2013, revenue from performances totaled 321,122, though after expenses the opera house lost 35,545. She was born Martha Beckett in Greenwich Village on Aug. 9, 1924, the only child of Henry Beckett, a reporter for The New York Post and other newspapers, and the former Helen Brown, who at one time owned a furniture store. Her parents separated when Martha was young, and her mother took her to live in Pennsylvania before returning to Manhattan. Young Martha was precociously creative. She wrote plays under the pseudonym of a Russian peasant. She played the piano. She danced. "Ballet could absorb all of me, physically and spiritually," she wrote in her memoir. "In dance I am the instrument instead of the player of the instrument. In painting, there again, I am the only eye behind the brush. In dance, I become the painting." Her mother, persuaded that vaudeville was returning, pushed her to develop a nightclub act rather than finish high school. That began her dancing career. She joined the corps de ballet at Radio City Music Hall. She tried to raise money to stage her own ballets. She danced on Broadway in the 1946 revival of "Show Boat," then in "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" and "Wonderful Town." "Show Boat" marked a shift for her in how she defined herself. Thanks to misspellings in the program, Martha Beckett became Marta Becket. "That's me, I realized," she wrote. "That was me all along, and now the truth is uncovered in the Playbill." She was no longer the namesake of a grandmother she never knew and no longer her mother's "little Martha." In the decade or so before she found Death Valley Junction, she led a peripatetic dancer's life while also modeling and painting. (She also illustrated a book by George Balanchine about his ballets.) She went on the road with her one woman shows, traveling with Mr. Williams, who became her manager. But their marriage gradually fell apart, and they divorced in the mid 1980s, by which time another man, Tom Willett, a genial jack of all trades, had found his way to Amargosa. He became her close friend and onstage comic foil until his death in 2005. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
I'm writing on behalf of six other leaders of large academic health systems in some of America's Covid 19 "hot spots" to urge our national leadership to resist pressure to lift tough social restrictions intended to subdue this outbreak and save thousands of lives. While some say the economic damage of these measures will cause more harm than the disease itself, these steps will actually ensure our economic health, since commerce cannot thrive until we have substantially contained the virus. If we waver in our commitment to the public health, the consequences will devastate our families, friends, co workers and neighbors, medically and financially. The statistical modeling of the viral spread is highly predictable, locally and globally, as the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus map shows. Each of us has run best and worst case scenarios based upon the number of infected patients we have, the doubling time of viral spread, and the predicted number of patients who will be admitted to hospitals and require an intensive care unit and a ventilator. For example, if today we have 25 Covid 19 patients in the hospital, with two in intensive care and one on a ventilator, the model predicts that with a three day doubling rate, there will be a surge of about 800 I.C.U. patients in 30 days. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
In the six months since Hurricane Sandy hit, office tenants have been flocking to a huge glass tower in Jersey City despite its being right along the waterfront. It may seem counterintuitive for companies to pointedly search for office space near the water, but the 500,000 square foot building at 111 Town Square Place in Newport is a hybrid data center and office building that offers tenants backup generators, redundant power and an extensive fiber optic network. Should another storm hit, these tenants are betting that the building will remain untouched. "The continuity of my business is critical," said Larry Fredella, a vice president at Constellation Brands, a publicly traded wine and beer company. Mr. Fredella's office relocated to the Newport building from one in Hoboken that had been damaged during the storm. "I can't be displaced from my office, and this building never lost power during any point during the storm or in its aftermath." Like many commercial markets across the country, Jersey City has been struggling. The vacancy rate is inching upward and rents are sliding downward. The city has been particularly hard hit by the shrinking of the financial services industry, which, much like in Midtown Manhattan, had been a primary driver of growth. In the first quarter of this year the vacancy rate was 9.2 percent, an increase of half a percentage point over the previous quarter, according to data from Cushman Wakefield. Average rents dropped to 32.92 a square foot in the first quarter, compared with 33.45 in the fourth quarter of last year, according to data from Newmark Grubb Knight Frank. "The primary drivers for Jersey City and the Hudson waterfront have historically been financial services and insurance," said Robert Sammons, the head of research for the New York tristate region for Newmark Grubb Knight Frank. While it is diversifying slightly, Mr. Sammons said, a number of new blocks of space have come on the market, posing a challenge. This includes nearly 238,000 square feet at 10 Exchange Place, where a number of full floor tenants have leases expiring in the first quarter of next year, and 135,000 square feet at 480 Washington Boulevard as a sublet from UBS Paine Webber, which is downsizing. Goldman Sachs is also considering subletting several hundred thousand square feet of space that it reportedly has never occupied at its building at 30 Hudson Street, Mr. Sammons said. The building at 111 Town Square Place, however, may be bucking this trend. While other buildings in the New York metropolitan area have been retrofitting to become storm safe, this building has been able to promote its existing systems. Prices there have been rising slowly and it is more than 90 percent occupied, after struggling to fill more than 100,000 square feet that was vacated last year by its anchor tenant, Charles Schwab. Michael T. Marchese, an associate director at Newmark Grubb Knight Frank, recently signed a five year lease there for 2,500 square feet on behalf of the consulting firm Day Zimmermann. "The first time we toured the building they were asking 26 a square foot, but six months later, when we realized that this was the building we wanted to be in, the asking rents had gone up by a few dollars," Mr. Marchese said. The original structure was a seven story industrial warehouse with a heavy duty reinforced steel and concrete frame. LeFrak kept the original warehouse structure and built atop it to create the office tower. The developer master leased the building to Recruit USA, a subsidiary of the Recruit Company of Japan. The company invested 100 million to turn about 200,000 square feet of the building into a data center, leaving the remainder as traditional office space. In November 2001, Recruit USA's deal expired and the LeFrak Organization took over the leasing of the building. It signed Charles Schwab as an anchor tenant for more than 110,000 square feet. Last July the bank's lease expired, and the landlord has been working to lease the space ever since, a challenge with all the competition from other buildings. Leasing was slow at first, but activity picked up after Hurricane Sandy, according to Brian Decillis, the regional leasing director for Newport for the LeFrak Organization. From the large amount of space vacated by Charles Schwab, more than half is now leased, with about 33,000 square feet remaining vacant. "This building is specifically designed to serve customers who want extra infrastructure, so in a strange way, the timing worked out," he said. The data center installed by Recruit USA is now paying off for the landlord: among the building's technical feats are two power feeds that run into the building from the public utility, so that if one power line goes down there is redundancy. There are six 2,000 kilowatt generators on the roof and three uninterrupted power supply plants, which are essentially batteries that kick in before the generators to ensure that there is not even a millisecond of power lost. The building also boasts a cooling tower for its data center and extensive fiber to maintain connectivity and speed. The tenants that have recently moved into the building include Clinical Mind, a medical market company; CarrierDomain, a technology services provider, and International SOS, which provides medical, clinical and security services. Average rents are in the low 30s a square foot and do not include tenants' electrical usage. In addition to its technology prowess, the building at 111 Town Square Place is also well suited for small tenants, said David Stifelman, an executive director at Cushman Wakefield of New Jersey. "This building, because of its shape as a long rectangle, it divides very well for smaller users," Mr. Stifelman said. He recently represented IT Cosmetics, a cosmetics company that sells on the shopping channel QVC, in a five year lease for 7,095 square feet at the building. IT Cosmetics suffered some damage from the storm at its former office space, but the primary reason the company chose to relocate to this building was its suitability for a small tenant, Mr. Stifelman said. "What is great is that even though they may have a relatively small office, they can still have a presence on the floor and have amazing views." The building also has proximity to transportation. The PATH train has an entrance in the building, which, in addition to its data capabilities, was a draw for International SOS. "We looked at a number of buildings in the New York metro area, on both sides of the river," said William Nelligan, the chief executive in the United States for International SOS. "We made a decision to select this building, primarily due to proximity to transportation; the technology capabilities was a function of our decision, but only one factor." This is the company's first office in the New York metro area. Over all, Mr. Decillis said, he is confident he will soon lease all of the remaining space: "This is a unique building, and we are excited by the mix of tenants and the demand that we are seeing." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
SAN FRANCISCO Google unveiled an initiative on Thursday to help train Americans for jobs in technology and committed to donating 1 billion over the next five years to nonprofits in education and professional training. The new program, Grow With Google, will create an online destination for job seekers to get training and professional certificates and for businesses to improve their web services. The company's goal, executives said, is to allow anyone with an internet connection to become proficient with technology and prepare for a job in areas like information technology support and app development. Google detailed its job training program as Silicon Valley faces increasing criticism over what some say is an unchecked influence over business and society. Google is also among a number of companies facing scrutiny over the role their internet services played in Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Sundar Pichai, Google's chief executive, unveiled the initiative during a speech on Thursday in the company's Pittsburgh office, far from the search giant's Silicon Valley headquarters. He noted the city's transformation from an industrial manufacturing center for steel to a hub of robotics and artificial intelligence engineering. "We understand there's uncertainty and even concern about the pace of technological change, but we know that technology will be an engine of America's growth for years to come," Mr. Pichai said. "The nature of work is fundamentally changing, and that is shifting the link between education, training and opportunity." Google plans to donate 1 billion to nonprofits through its charitable arm, Google.org, with the aim of addressing the gap between the skills required by modern companies and the skills that are taught in schools. Google said it was donating 10 million to Goodwill Industries, for example, for digital job training programs. Company employees also will volunteer one million hours at those nonprofits. Much like a political campaign, Google will go on the road to spread the message about its new program, it said. In the coming months, company officials will make stops in Indianapolis; Oklahoma City; Lansing, Mich.; and Savannah, Ga. Google is not the only big tech company that has gone on a charm offensive in recent months. Under fire from President Trump for producing most of its devices in China, Apple announced in May that it was creating a 1 billion fund to invest in advanced manufacturing in the United States. Amazon, another frequent target of Mr. Trump, said in January that it was planning to hire 100,000 new employees over the next 18 months. And Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's high profile chief operating officer, made the rounds on Capitol Hill this week, offering explanations to congressional leaders about her company's role in last year's election. Google has long been a leader in research on artificial intelligence, and Mr. Pichai has made it the centerpiece of his company's plans. Google and its parent company, Alphabet, are leaning on A.I. technology in all manner of products, from new smartphones to self driving cars. But with that automation comes disruption and concern that breakthroughs may upend entire industries and eliminate millions of jobs, particularly in trucking and transportation. Pittsburgh is one traditional manufacturing city, however, that could gain from advances in artificial intelligence. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in the city have been on the cutting edge of work on autonomous vehicles, and other big tech outfits like Uber and Amazon also have offices there. Google has been put under a harsh light over the last year, an unaccustomed spot for a company that has long been one of the tech industry's most admired outfits and is still considered one of the best places in the world to work. The European Union levied the largest antitrust fine in history against Google for unfairly favoring its own services over those of its rivals. A group of former employees sued the company, accusing it of paying women less than men. It also suffered an exodus of advertisers from its video platform, YouTube, after evidence that ads appeared next to extremist videos. More recently, it has been mired in the spreading investigation of Russian interference in the election. Company representatives are expected to speak at House and Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on Nov. 1, along with Facebook and Twitter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
RONALD K. BROWN/EVIDENCE at the Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College in Annandale on Hudson, N.Y. (July 5 6, 8 p.m.; July 7, 2 p.m.). Meshell Ndegeocello's music is a rich mix of soul, R B, rap, rock and other influences, which makes her an apt collaborator for Brown, whose choreography is also a potent blend of styles, including West African and contemporary dance. And both use their art to tap into something deeply spiritual. This week, they present the premiere of "Mercy," with Ndegeocello performing the original score live. Joining that work is "Grace." Created by Brown 20 years ago, it depicts the journey of a goddess who has come to Earth to welcome its inhabitants to heaven. 845 758 7900, fishercenter.bard.edu BRYANT PARK CONTEMPORARY DANCE PICNIC PERFORMANCES (July 5, 6 p.m.). Have a picnic in this Midtown park and enjoy some al fresco dance while you're at it. This annual summer series features an array of local dance troupes who each contribute a short work to the eclectic program. In the final week of this year's series, the participants are David Dorfman Dance, a longtime, reliably joyful member of the city's modern dance scene; the Francesca Harper Project, another energetic group; URBAN/TRIBE, a young company founded by Mathew James; and Earl Mosley's Institute of the Arts, featuring students from Mosley's summer dance intensive. bryantpark.org/programs/contemporary dance JACOB'S PILLOW DANCE FESTIVAL in Becket, Mass. (through August 25). Works by Merce Cunningham, performed by Compagnie CNDC Angers/Robert Swinston, can be seen here through Sunday, parallel to performances by David Rousseve/Reality. Beginning on Wednesday, Dance Theater of Harlem returns to mark its 50th anniversary and honor its founder, Arthur Mitchell, who died last fall. To celebrate and commemorate, the company will perform works by George Balanchine, Anabelle Lopez Ochoa, Christopher Wheeldon and Darrell Grand Moultrie. Nearby at the Doris Duke Theater, Reggie Wilson's Fist and Heel Performance Group presents the premiere of "Power," which combines Wilson's exploration of African spiritual traditions with recent research into the Shakers to imagine what a Black Shaker ritual might look like. 413 243 0745, jacobspillow.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
With the RF, Mazda gives the Miata the Targa treatment. While the car looks sharp and the retractable top's operation is a show in itself, there are drawbacks like increased wind noise and reduced visibility. Do you like the idea of slicing through traffic in a Mazda MX 5 Miata but have stopped short of owning it for fear vandals will slice through the soft top? Two letters should alleviate that anxiety: RF. This version of Mazda's diminutive smile machine has a solid folding roof impervious to knives. It's quieter while driving with the top up, too. For those who know and love the Miata (a moniker used only in the United States), fear not. The extra weight of the RF for retractable fastback is kept to 113 pounds and gives the car perfect 50/50 balance front to rear. The suspension is tweaked to compensate for the mechanism's additional mass. Unlike the awkward appearance of the retractable hardtop model discontinued a few years ago, the RF's roofline provides a newfound stubby elegance. I was even asked if my tester, coated in rich Machine Gray paint, was Italian. The top also gives everyone within 50 feet a ballet performance as the buttresses rise rearward and the roof panel pirouettes back behind the two seats. For an encore, the 13 second operation can happen while motoring through a parking lot at up to six miles an hour. The crowd goes wild. As expected, the RF is more expensive. To begin with, it's not available on the base Sport model that gets sun worshipers into a soft top MX 5 for 25,750. RF demands moving to the Club or Grand Touring models. The hardtop costs 2,955 for the Club (which starts at 32,430), or 2,555 for the tested GT ( 33,495). Unlike a soft top, it never needs to be replaced because of weathering or age. Or hooligans. Those craving the open sky feeling of the original MX 5 will feel claustrophobic. Only the roof panel above tucks away. The rear structure remains, making the RF something less than a convertible. Checking rearward for a lane change? The view is mostly of the pillar. Fortunately, blind spot detection is standard. The rear hardware also generates a good amount of wind noise in the cabin above 40 m.p.h. If memory serves, my hair was tousled a bit more in the RF, too. Everything else that's right about the MX 5 experience remains. Full disclosure: I've owned an original year Miata for over 27 years. Each time I drop into the driver's seat of any generation, there's an automatic grin reflex. It's a car that's worn like a jet pack or Ironman's suit. Tire grip is clearly felt. Brakes bite firmly and progressively. There's communication with the road without harshness. It fits like a glove. For large and tall people, it will be a snug one. The powertrain stays the same. A 2 liter 4 cylinder provides 155 horsepower and 148 pound feet of torque. Choose between a 6 speed manual and an optional 6 speed automatic with steering wheel paddle shifters. Power is routed to the rear tires. Mazda says 60 percent of MX 5s are sold with the manual gearbox, possibly the highest rate in the industry for cars offering the choice. The manual is widely considered among the best in the business. I understand why automatics are popular for those slogging though traffic jams. I'm not a card carrying member of the Save the Manuals club, but I'll opine that it's the way to go in this car. The precision snickety snick dynamic of the short throw lever is a joy, not a chore. Miatas are all about balance, not brute force. Dashing from stoplight to 60 m.p.h. in about 6.5 seconds is plenty quick. The Environmental Protection Agency's fuel economy rating is unchanged from the soft top. On specified premium gasoline, it is rated at 26 miles per gallon in the city, 33 highway. Save for a small button to operate the top, the intimate cockpit is essentially unchanged. Clear, concise controls and gauges make for an optimal place for drivers to do business. Some will pine for steering wheel reach adjustment, though. Seats, using a unique suspension design similar to an Aeron office chair, mold nicely to passengers. Storage cubbies are at a premium, with no traditional glove box or door pockets. The user interface, employing both knob and touch screen operation, is simple and flexible. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are not along for the ride. With the top up or down, the trunk size remains the same: small. It's good for storing the owner's manual in a dedicated slot and one carry on size suitcase. Yup, that small. The modern MX 5 soft top can be raised and lowered manually from the seat in just a few seconds. In my 27 years with a cloth top, it's been cut just once. Still, 18 years of sun and rain had taken a toll on the vinyl and, fortunately, insurance covered the new one. Not to give you any ideas. The RF is a relative bargain considering that the Mercedes SLC and BMW Z4, with retractable hardtops, start their price climb at around 50,000. But their hardtops fully retract for a less fenced in feeling. The strength of the RF? Couples can converse easily on the way to a weekend getaway with the top up and take in the sun on arrival. They might fight over who gets to drive, though. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
KARIYA, Japan As Toyota's president Akio Toyoda faces American lawmakers on Wednesday, his company will be facing something else here in Japan's auto manufacturing heartland: an unprecedented level of opprobrium. Come what may, Toyota used to be able to count on a reflexive loyalty in this small city, where the rows of smoke stacks and metal roofed factories rise like something out of Dickens. But after years of feeling the sting of Toyota's cost cutting, some of the workers and suppliers that used to be the company's biggest cheerleaders are instead experiencing a sense of grim pleasure over the company's woes. The change is rooted in the changing behavior of Japanese corporations. Communities like Kariya that once enjoyed a near familial relationship with Toyota, have been feeling forsaken for years as this country's social contract has changed. While employment is still for life for Toyota's full time workers, some complain that the company is now miserly with wage increases. Over time it has steadily reduced the ranks of its short term contractors and pressured its suppliers to decrease prices. For decades, thousands of tiny auto parts companies like Sankyo Seiko were Toyota's loyal legions, and toiled in relative obscurity to supply the behemoth. But the auto giant's demands in recent years for ever lower prices have driven many of these companies out of business. After successive price cuts, Toyota now pays them about 30 percent less for the same part than it did a decade ago, despite the higher cost of raw materials like steel, many companies say. "Toyota just squeezes us, like it's trying to wring water from a dry towel," said Masayuki Nishioka, 49, whose factory in Kariya makes the rubber seals for Toyota's car windows. Last month something snapped for Sankyo's owner, Teruo Moewaki. He appeared on local television to do the unthinkable: criticize Toyota, announcing that he would no longer accept orders from the automaker or its affiliates. "I said on TV what they all want to say, but are afraid to," said Mr. Moewaki, 60, standing in the dark one room workshop where he and his three employees operate gritty machines. "Toyota said we were all one big family. But now they are betraying us." The outburst turned Mr. Moewaki into an instant local celebrity. But he is not the only one speaking out. To hear many here tell it, in good times Toyota failed to increase wages for employees and forced painful price cuts on parts suppliers even as it earned record profits. Since the global downturn, these critics say, Toyota has released thousands of contract workers and squeezed parts makers even further. While this may seem like normal, even prudent, management, many in Japan see it as an act of betrayal. In fact, Toyota has become a symbol here of how corporate Japan has begun to violate the nation's unspoken postwar social contract, in which big paternalistic companies share the wealth with employees and business partners in good times and help them weather the bad. Osamu Miura, laid off by Toyota, with leaflets and a sign asking to be allowed to work. Torin Boyd/Polaris, for The New York Times "Toyota is attacked so much because it has become the face of corporate Japan," said Hisao Inoue, the author of two books on Toyota. "All Japan's social problems, economic problems, political problems all seem to pile up on Toyota." Mr. Inoue said the criticism can be unfair, and is part of a broader reaction here against globalization and the embrace of American style competition under former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Still, some dozen books have been published in the last five years, with titles like "The Dark Side of Toyota" and "The Toyota You Don't Know." Even through the early 1990s economic collapse, as big companies squeezed costs or shifted production overseas to compete with lower price rivals from South Korea and China, this manufacturing belt around the central city of Nagoya, an area known as the Detroit of Japan, seemed immune. Toyota continued to grow even as Japan stumbled in other industries, like consumer electronics. Now there is a palpable sense of alarm in the air. Cities like Kariya appear to be turning into a new rust belt of abandoned industrial neighborhoods, with economists estimating the number of small manufacturers in this part of Japan has dropped by half in the last two decades to about 180,000. Unemployment has also taken off in Aichi prefecture, where Nagoya is located, doubling to 4.5 percent last year from the year before. One of the newly jobless is Osamu Miura, who worked for two years monitoring quality control at a sprawling plant making Prius hybrids in nearby Toyota City, where the automaker is based. Two months ago, the company said it would not renew his contract, making him one of thousands in that category after the global financial crisis began. But unlike most of the others, Mr. Miura has refused to go quietly. Every day, he has donned his immaculate company uniform and Toyota cap to report for work at the factory gate, where he is invariably turned away. On a recent rainy afternoon, a half dozen current and former Toyota employees, members of a small labor union, joined him in front of the gate to hand out fliers to passing workers. "Toyota is going in the wrong direction, and so is Japan," said Mr. Miura, 40, who taped a blue placard to his chest that said, "Let me work!" "Standing up against Toyota is still a taboo," said Hiroshi Oba, 56, a Toyota employee at the Prius plant who said he was putting his chances for promotion at risk by standing with Mr. Miura, "but these job cuts are a social problem that we cannot ignore." Paul Nolasco, a spokesman for Toyota, said the company was aware of such criticisms, but called them one sided. He said that while the number of contract workers had fallen to 2,300 early this year, from 10,000 before the Lehman Brothers crisis in September 2008, some 900 contract workers have been given full time jobs since 2008. It is also hard to gauge the full extent of anger at Toyota. Japan's establishment media have been restrained in their criticism even during the recalls for fear of angering the company, the nation's largest advertiser. Toyota critics here say the community still frowns on criticism of the region's largest employer, making many afraid to speak out. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
WAXAHACHIE, Tex. Most Americans suffered serious losses during and after the recession, knocked off balance by layoffs, stagnant pay and the collapse of home values. But apart from the superrich, one group's fortunes appear to have held remarkably steady: seniors. Supported by income from Social Security, pensions and investments, as well as an increasing number of paychecks from delaying retirement, older people not only weathered the economic downturn that began in 2007 but made significant gains, a New York Times analysis of government data has found. People on the leading edge of the baby boom and those born during World War II the 25 million Americans now between the ages of 65 and 74 have emerged as particularly well positioned in the nation's economic timeline. While there are plenty of individual exceptions, as a group they are better off financially than past generations and may well enjoy a more successful old age than future ones, even those merely a decade younger. "These are people who have been blessed with good economic circumstances, especially those who were able to ride the wave of postwar economic growth," said Gary V. Engelhardt, an economist at Syracuse. "They're definitely in a sweet spot." Older Americans' ability to rise during the postrecession years when most households were falling reflects a broader trend that has unfolded in recent decades. In the past, the elderly were usually poorer than other age groups. Now, they are the last generation to widely enjoy a traditional pension, and are prime beneficiaries of a government safety net targeted at older Americans. They also have profited from the long rise in real estate prices that preceded the recession. As a result, more seniors now fall into the middle class defined in this case between the 40th and 80th income percentile than ever before. A widow who says she enjoys her freedom too much to date, Ms. Berryhill dines out with friends from time to time and recently took in a country music concert. Her yearly vacation is a San Diego trip to see grandchildren, but this year she expects to splurge on an Alaskan cruise. Ms. Berryhill's past career in customer service at two banks did not make her rich. But her retirement is comfortable. "I feel like I'm doing all right," said Ms. Berryhill, whose red framed glasses offset her snowy, spiked hair. "I really enjoy it." Some researchers have found that the economic success of seniors is masking an even deeper gulf in income inequality between the upper tier and everyone else than what is evident in the overall statistics. More secure in their finances, many older Americans have congregated in traditional retirement communities. The Villages a Central Florida haven for seniors with its low crime and dozens of golf courses has been the fastest growing American metropolitan area for the last two years. Millions of other elderly people have settled in middle income suburban and exurban areas like Waxahachie. Living in the muggy weather and neighborhoods of classic gingerbread houses, most seniors here are thriving, riding an overall population boom. But the current crop reflects some different choices from those who lived in the area three decades ago. For one thing, many more of them are working to supplement their income. 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 whole meaning of retirement is changing," said Gary Koenig, vice president for economic and consumer security at the AARP Public Policy Institute. "People are living longer; they have to fund more years of retirement." Charles Kozlovsky, 73, retired from his job driving an 18 wheeler in 2009. Two years later he went to work as a school bus driver. The job keeps him busy but the work can be stressful; on a recent day a student was suspended from his bus for bad behavior. "Things got a little bit better when I started driving a school bus," Mr. Kozlovsky said. As recently as the late 1990s, only one in five Americans in their late 60s had a job. Now, that number has jumped to almost one in three. And unlike in their parents' generation, more women are earning paychecks than in the past, contributing to household income. Researchers say these factors are in large part responsible for the substantial rise in median household income that seniors in their late 60s and early 70s have experienced since 1989, even as Americans in their prime working years have mostly treaded water or lost ground. Not everyone, of course, can work later in life. Health problems and age discrimination present major hurdles. And many of those who find jobs consider them barely adequate. Pat Cherry, 72, has been earning minimum wage at a job in the library of the city run Waxahachie Senior Activity Center. Ms. Cherry, who is divorced, had to retire early from a bookkeeping job after an autoimmune disease caused her to miss too much work. She could barely pay her bills until she found the part time job through a government sponsored work program, but it expired last month. Ms. Cherry is worried no one will hire her again. "I need the money desperately," she said. Still, for those seniors who manage to work longer, the benefits can be significant, providing a much needed enhancement to retirement income. And for those with enough money from a job to postpone receiving their monthly checks from the government, the value of future Social Security payments rises by about 8 percent for each year of waiting, up to age 70. Social Security benefits make up more than half the total income for a majority of the nation's elderly 52 percent of married people and 74 percent of unmarried people, according to the federal government. Kathleen McGarry, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles whose research focuses on the well being of seniors, calls Social Security "the single most important tool in combating poverty among the elderly." For Jim Engel, 72, his government benefit offered a lifeline after he lost his bakery business during the recession. The checks let him put off the sale of his nest egg, a Tennessee walking horse barn, allowing time for property values to recover. To be sure, many older people have trouble making ends meet and some are saddled with responsibilities that exceed the reaches of the safety net. Mary Walker, 74, who fled New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina with no more than an extra pair of underwear in her purse, is now raising two young great grandchildren on her own not far from Waxahachie. "At this age I shouldn't be struggling," she said. But older Americans in general are significantly wealthier compared to previous generations. The median assets of people ages 65 to 74 doubled between 1989 and 2013, a far greater gain than other age groups experienced. And while there has been a decline from the peak since 2007, largely because of the real estate bust, this age group lost less than others. Government data on consumer spending reflects the new reality. Adjusted for inflation, older Americans spent 18 percent more per household in 2013 than in the late 1980s, while spending for other age groups remained relatively flat. Higher health care costs, which fall more heavily on the elderly, accounted for a portion of the difference, but seniors spent 57 percent more on entertainment, and significantly more on a wide range of items, including homes, rental cars and alcoholic beverages. Ms. Berryhill was 66 when she retired. Her husband, Warren Berryhill, died of heart problems seven years ago. At age 68, he was still working full time as a debt collector. "We thought it would give us more money to retire on when we did retire," Ms. Berryhill said. Ms. Berryhill is much better off than her parents, who grew up during the Depression. Her father, who was a gasoline truck driver, had to retire at age 61 because of a heart ailment. Her mother did not work outside the home. They were always able to pay their bills, but Ms. Berryhill said they never took a vacation trip, let alone left Texas. "We weren't rich but we didn't hurt for being hungry or anything like that," Ms. Berryhill said. She worries how her two children will fare. Their paychecks are bigger, but Social Security payouts, she fears, could be smaller when her children reach retirement age. They might have to take out loans to help pay for their children's college educations. They have 401(k) savings plans at work but those are not as generous as her employer sponsored pension. But she always taught her children to save, and she cannot do much more now, she says, than hope for the best. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
On Monday, the N.F.L. team in Washington announced that it would be retiring the name "Redskins" and its feather topped Indian head logo, abruptly reversing its staunch defense of a name long considered as a racial slur. But there's one unexpected place where the team's logo will be preserved, at least through 2027: in the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington. A baby blanket with the logo hangs near the entrance of "Americans," an exhibition that opened in 2018. It's installed in a soaring hall, along with ads, toys, film clips, toys, weapons and hundreds of other Indian themed objects which range, depending on the beholder, from the kitschy to the charming to the offensive. The point? To illuminate the paradox that Native American names, symbols and stories are ubiquitous in American life, even if actual Indians are largely invisible. And they aren't just ubiquitous, the show argues, but central to American identity. "It's spooky, weird and subversive," Paul Chaat Smith, a curator who created the exhibition with Cecile R. Ganteaume, said of the profusion of Native imagery. "We wanted to make the point that this is part of American life, going back 300 years, since before the founding," he said. "From Paul Revere to Kanye West, why does this never go out of style?" The museum is closed because of the coronavirus, but much of the exhibition can be seen online. We talked with Mr. Smith, who is Comanche, about the exhibition, the name change and how to think about our attachment to Native American imagery. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. When you follow something like that for years, for decades, it's stunning when it changes on a dime. We're very pleased with the decision. We want to get out of the mascot business. Some say these names honor the warriors, and provide a way to introduce Native culture. But an N.F.L. team is not the ideal venue to educate the public about Native issues. And if it's such a good idea, show me the equivalent honoring of Chicanos, Asian Americans or any other group. It only happens to us. When the exhibition opened, the focus on pop culture appropriation, rather than on authentic native culture, was seen as something of a departure for the museum. What was the idea behind it? Since the museum opened more than 10 years ago, we've found that people are very sympathetic to Native Americans. They are inclined to think Native culture is valuable and important. But people were becoming culture tourists. They go and learn some things, but it has nothing to do with them. They weren't going to leave and be reminded of Indians, the way they are with African Americans, who are just present in the culture in a much different way. You realize, "Wow, it's kind of interesting how our whole lives we are surrounded by Indian imagery." So we can make the argument that Indians are central to U.S. national identity. You have Indians on brake fluid, weapons systems, sports teams, all sorts of other things that have nothing to do with Indians or each other. But it's meant to say something about authenticity, about Americanness. Did it seem risky to put some of this stuff on view? With the sports material, that's what the activists said: This stuff should be in a museum. We're pleased we could put it in a museum. The Washington's team name is gone. The Land O' Lakes Maiden is also gone. Should all this stuff just go away? We wanted to avoid being prescriptive, to say, "This team name is bad. It's a slur. But this other one is not." Some things are obnoxious. We should get rid of some things. But we are not trying to be the police force to shame people. It doesn't help us to eliminate everything. The problem with Native Americans is the invisibility in American life. Some of these images are at least meant to be flattering, right? You don't have an Aunt Jemima thing. A lot of it is meant to be very favorable. But it's still really singular nobody else gets plastered on every product. The show also re examines four stories involving Indians that circulate widely in American culture, including Thanksgiving (the subject of a very funny video) and the Battle of Little Bighorn. The show calls Custer's defeat a national shock akin to the Kennedy assassination. But a few years later, some of the warriors are celebrities. And pretty soon the Plains Indians, who numbered only 30,000, came to symbolize all Indians, and even America itself. How did that happen? It's one of the craziest things. There was a sense of national tragedy after Custer's defeat. But pretty soon, Sitting Bull goes on lecture tour in the East. There was a range of opinion, but a lot of people saw these Sioux folks, these Cheyenne folks, as wonderful Americans. After Little Bighorn, people said "Hey, we kind of like Indians. It's what makes us different, this special sauce of American Indians." But there were still acts of dispossession happening. All these things are coexisting. Historians have long written about the connections between the U.S. Army victory in the Civil War and conquest of Native American territory in the West. But now the general public has become more aware of it, in part thanks to recent debates over Confederate and other Civil War monuments. Does that surprise you? Ten years ago, you would see discussion of all these famous generals in the Civil War. Then you'd see them involved the Plains Indian warfare, but it would never be connected. They were treated as completely discrete political developments. It's amazing to see how fast people are making these connections, like the recent incident with the statue of Ulysses S. Grant. He was a brilliant general in the Civil War, then a president. But he was also behind some of the campaigns that resulted in the Black Hills being dispossessed. For me, that's always eventually what you want to get to: a kind of complexity. It's not helpful to see history in black and white. People can have a strong reaction to their team name, or their Boy Scout rituals, being challenged. Are there Indian themed objects you have an emotional connection to? I'm from the 20th century, born in the '50s. People of that time, when you see nothing really positive in your regular life about Native people, then you see some Indian object, and it can be very positive. We know it's corny, it's a fantasy and it's not really about us. But it is some kind of visibility. I like the fact that Elvis Presley made two bad movies "Stay Away Joe" and "Flaming Star" in which he played Native Americans. The biggest star in the world thought Indians were interesting. Of course, we want realistic movies and better movies. We've had people who came into our museum, including dignitaries from reservations, wearing caps for the Braves or other teams. Maybe it's ironic. Maybe they think it should be changed, but they still support the teams. For people of a certain generation, that's powerful. It's saying, "Hey man, we're still here." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The Amazon founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, and his wife, MacKenzie, pledged 2 billion on Thursday for a new fund to start preschools and help homeless families. The money, put into what he called the Day 1 Fund, is by far the largest philanthropic donation by Mr. Bezos, the world's richest person. It will support organizations that provide shelter and food for homeless families, and will start a network of nonprofit Montessori inspired preschools for underserved communities. "If our own great grandchildren don't have lives better than ours, something has gone very wrong," Mr. Bezos wrote on Twitter announcing the fund. His largest known philanthropic contribution to date was 33 million in scholarships to support the education of undocumented students who graduated from high school in the United States. Earlier this month, he made his first major political contribution, putting 10 million into a bipartisan political action committee to support military veterans running for Congress. Other tech founders have come to see philanthropy as a major part of their legacy. Bill Gates, a founder of Microsoft, committed "the vast majority" of his assets to the foundation he started with his wife, Melinda. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla, said they would give 99 percent of their Facebook shares, valued at around 45 billion at the time of their 2015 announcement, to philanthropic work. Other tech leaders, including Paul Allen of Microsoft, Larry Ellison of Oracle and Brian Chesky of Airbnb, have signed the Giving Pledge, vowing to give away at least half of their wealth either during their lifetime or in their will. Mr. Bezos said the new education effort would build and run a national nonprofit network of free Montessori inspired preschools. "I'm excited about that because it will give us the opportunity to learn, invent, and improve," he wrote. "We'll use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession. The child will be the customer." Mr. Bezos went to Montessori schools and has said it developed his sense of exploration and focus. The fund's homeless work will involve "annual leadership awards" to groups doing "compassionate, needle moving work to provide shelter and hunger support to address the immediate needs of young families," Mr. Bezos said. He cited Mary's Place, a nonprofit in the Seattle area that Amazon has worked with in recent years, as inspiration. Amazon has donated temporary space to Mary's Place and is building a shelter for 50 families with children that have life threatening illnesses into a headquarters tower under construction. "We have 600 shelter beds tonight, and they are full every night, all year long," said Marty Hartman, the executive director of Mary's Place. "For Jeff and MacKenzie to embrace that no child should sleep outside and take it across the country is an incredible vision." She declined to say if the Bezoses have personally toured Mary's Place and met with homeless families it serves but said they have "had verbal communication" and are kept up to date on Amazon's work with the organization. Earlier this year, Amazon publicly opposed a new per employee business tax in its hometown of Seattle that would have raised about 50 million a year for homeless services and affordable housing construction. The city council repealed the tax under pressure from Amazon, other business and some homeowners. Last summer, Mr. Bezos went on Twitter to ask the public for suggestions for how he should give away some of his wealth, and tens of thousands of people replied. He said he was interested in using philanthropy to solve problems of the "here and now." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
It was late in the summer of 1995, weeks of labor strife having consumed the N.B.A., and an off season lockout had come to an end. David Stern, suddenly viewed by players as more corporate pariah than patriarchal commissioner, was asked about Michael Jordan's uncharacteristic (anti owner) activism, which one national commentator had compared to a "drive by shooting." Mercifully free of crisis mode, back to being the guardian of all things N.B.A., Papa Stern was having none of that. "Damn the people who say that Michael was just being greedy, that he should just shut up and play," he said, though actually beginning with a more vigorous four letter word. "That's a code." It was nearly a quarter century before Laura Ingraham and LeBron James, before "shut up and dribble" became a widely mouthed phrase for the 21st century often used as coded racist criticism of black players. Stern, who died on Wednesday at age 77 after having a brain hemorrhage in December, could plainly see that America was a long way from being post racial. He would say that people and least of all him should never delude themselves about that, no matter how popular and prosperous the league was becoming on the backs of Jordan and other black stars. Within a culture he knew could easily turn on young men of color for something as simple as the grooming choice of cornrows, this was a fine line Stern walked and the calculated game he played across three expansionist decades at the helm. Within the league which included players, owners, executives, even news media regulars there could be related skirmishes, even protracted battles. But inside its boundaries, he would insist, there were adversaries but no actual enemies. The son of a Manhattan delicatessen owner, Stern carried a proud childhood ethos, having grown up in leafy Teaneck, N.J., which in 1976 was described by The New York Times as a "national model for successful suburban integration" and the "first Northern suburb to vote in favor of busing to achieve integrated schools in the early 1960s." Before settling permanently in Westchester County, Stern lived in Teaneck with his wife and two young sons while commuting into Manhattan as a young lawyer. In his spare time, he worked pro bono on a 1970s anti housing discrimination case in Northern New Jersey, which later resulted in a settlement that The Times would call groundbreaking. While working on a book about the N.B.A.'s growth pains in the mid 1990s, my co author Armen Keteyian and I interviewed Lee Porter, a fair housing supporter, who told us that Stern had been her legal and spiritual adviser in developing a strategy to entrap Bergen County real estate brokers who habitually steered black couples away from white neighborhoods and towns. During that period, she and her colleagues spent so much time huddling with Stern at his home that two decades later she could recall the exact address. So understand that the N.B.A. work environment Stern entered in the 1970s as counsel for a professional basketball league with an increasingly black player base, scuffling for respect was not unfamiliar to him. Yet when Stern asked George Gallantz his mentor at the firm of Proskauer, Rose, Goetz and Mendelsohn and the overseer of the N.B.A.'s outside counsel account if he thought it was a good career move to accept Commissioner Larry O'Brien's offer to work solely for the league in 1978, Gallantz looked at him with disbelief. "How can you put your life in the hands of one client?" he asked his ambitious, combative and whip smart protege. The N.B.A. at the time could barely pay its bills, but Stern wanted to be where the action was. His mind was made up. Basketball felt like a calling. He sheepishly told Gallantz that he'd "give it a try." By the time Stern ceded the top job to his handpicked successor, Adam Silver, and became commissioner emeritus in 2014, he had 48 years in association with the league that was, by reputation, America's most progressive. Sitting alongside Stern at N.B.A. headquarters in Manhattan days before the baton was officially passed, Silver told me: "His dad owned a deli. He went to public school. He was a regular guy who was not born into this." Yet the argument could be made and Stern would probably have been the first to make it that he was born for the challenges and crises that inevitably loomed, like the so called Malice at the Palace. In all my years of covering Stern, I never saw him grimmer than he was on the November 2004 night in New York when he announced suspensions for three Indiana Pacers Ron Artest, Stephen Jackson and Jermaine O'Neal who had brawled in the stands and on the court with abusive and likely inebriated fans at the Detroit Pistons' home arena, The Palace of Auburn Hills. But if moving the needle on social and racial advancement were life affirming benefits of an influential business, protecting its widespread marketability and growing the pie no matter how it eventually was sliced was always the mission that came first for Stern. "One nothing," Stern said when asked if there had been a hierarchal vote on the need to go nuclear, especially on Artest, who is now known as Metta World Peace and was suspended for more than 70 games. While Stern seldom hid from debate or debacle, the litigator in him on occasion was obscured by the autocrat. Looking back on his controversial 2011 veto of New Orleans's trading of Chris Paul to the Los Angeles Lakers, Stern admitted in 2016 that he should have better explained his responsibility to execute the best deal possible after the league had taken temporary ownership of the franchise during the search for a buyer. There would be more behavioral disorder, precipitated by players, owners and even a referee, Tim Donaghy, who was prosecuted in 2007 for betting on games he worked. Labor management conflagrations would come close to season cancellations. Reactions by Stern the 2005 player dress code he championed, for one would be criticized as pandering overreaction to that same segment of society he had denounced for speaking in racial code or objecting to cornrows. During a painful and costly in season lockout in 2011, HBO's Bryant Gumbel went so far as to call Stern "some kind of modern plantation overseer." Never one to waste a counterpunching opportunity, he told me in a telephone interview: "I have worked harder for inclusiveness and diversity than he could ever understand. So when I heard what he said I sat back and waited for the emails from the people who know me, who have worked with me." He named one, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and reminded me of how Dr. Harry Edwards, the civil rights activist, had praised him in the aftermath of the Pacers fans brawl as "an honest broker of the product who, at the end of the day, respects the men who play in his league and the community from which they come." Gumbel's charge gained little traction, but it rankled Stern a lifelong Democrat who called President Obama's election "profoundly transformational" that his honest broker reputation didn't necessarily resonate with a younger, less obliged generation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
As communities tighten rules on social distancing, the short term rental has become a fraught piece of turf. In areas like the Jersey Shore and Newport Beach, Calif., and in states like Pennsylvania and Vermont, officials have severely restricted short term rentals to discourage residents of urban hot zones from spreading the coronavirus to lower density locations. Recent evidence has shown that their caution is justified. But throughout the country, hotel groups and hosts on platforms like Airbnb and VRBO continue to make direct appeals to guests seeking refuge from the pandemic. And they are finding takers. In Raleigh, N.C., Sheri Outlaw offers a "Sparkling Clean Social Distancing Space" through Airbnb, in the little house behind her home where her great grandparents once lived. As soon as the virus appeared, Ms. Outlaw's catering business tanked. Then she lost all of her Airbnb bookings in early March, when the company offered 100 percent refunds for stays booked on or before March 14, and with a check in between March 14 and May 31, regardless of the host's cancellation policy. (Airbnb is paying out 250 million to hosts in partial compensation.) A local couple called; they were in the process of separating and wanted a place where one spouse could stay while the other remained at home with their children, alternating every week. The unit is now booked through April at 40 a night, less than half of the usual weekday rate. "I wear my gloves, pour my bleach, spray my Lysol," Ms. Outlaw said of her cleaning routine. If she had new guests every day, she would be less secure about her own safety, she said, "but it's the same couple." Airbnb hosts are not allowed to use the words "Covid 19," "coronavirus" or "quarantine" in listing titles, or to claim that their lodgings are free of the virus. But it is still easy to promote the idea of a salubrious refuge. Tania Varga describes her off the grid two bedroom rental cabin on 12 acres of redwood forest, with an outdoor tub and a sauna, near Santa Cruz, Calif., as a "Social Distancing Retreat" on Airbnb. "'Social Distancing' on the Potomac" was the Airbnb header describing Bryan and Cathy Gray's riverfront cottage near Harpers Ferry, W.Va., in early April. "Most of our reservations for the latter part of March and April were canceled, but we have two properties that are completely self contained and quite isolated geographically," Mr. Gray said, adding that the header used to be "Plum Lazy on the Potomac." (He has since returned to that wording and is booking stays of a minimum of 14 days, as requested by Jefferson County in West Virginia.) "We want to be responsible and not encourage people to come out and interact in town, or with other people, but we did recognize that there were people looking for an opportunity to get out of a crowded city," he said. The properties are thoroughly cleaned and lie fallow for several days between bookings, Mr. Gray said, so he and his wife are not worried about risks from potentially infected guests. Far more alarming to them is the prospect of losing business. Ms. Gray was recently laid off from her job as a sales representative for Cambria, a company that produces engineered quartz. (Mr. Gray works from home as an art director and designer.) "If we get one or two bookings a month on the two properties, that will pay our mortgage," she said. The unit is priced at 145 per night. As of April 8, eight of 10 hotel rooms in the United States were vacant, according to the American Hotel and Lodging Association. (The association's Hospitality for Hope initiative will turn empty rooms into temporary housing for health care and emergency workers, and potentially into makeshift hospitals. More than 15,000 hotels have signed on.) Airbnb experienced a 25 percent year over year decline globally in March, said Kristina Sprindyte, a representative of AirDNA, which collects data on host based short term rental platforms. In an April 13 email, Ms. Sprindyte noted "a surge in longer bookings" on Airbnb, "moving away" from the typical four day average of reservations made on the platform. "Globally, 50 percent of nights booked in the past several weeks are for at least two weeks in length." Extended stays bring committed revenue, allow hosts to develop relationships of trust with their guests and, in some places, sidestep regulations banning short term rentals. "Before that, I positioned one of my units as a perfect place to wait out the virus, and that's because I had gotten several inquiries from Boston and New York," Mr. Stark said. His tenant, Jill Peterson, a graphic designer from Brooklyn, had retreated to northern Vermont in mid March with her boyfriend, who lives in Boston, and said she intends to remain through May. She pays 1,500 a month for the three bedroom house in Middlebury, which has a river running through the backyard. Other rental platforms are baking in bargains for longer term stays. Sonder, a hospitality company with 13,000 units in 30 cities internationally, is offering a 30 percent discount on bookings from one to two weeks, 40 percent off on stays of 14 days to a month and 45 percent off for 30 days or longer. (The company lists one and two bedroom properties in neighborhoods like East Austin in Texas and Old City in Philadelphia, most for less than 100 a night.) It also has relaxed its policy to allow guests to re book without penalty for up to a year after the time of cancellation. Francis Davidson, Sonder's founder and chief executive, said a survey demonstrated interest among people who require temporary housing because of the virus. In addition to potential users in self isolation are those who have been interrupted in the process of moving, blocked from returning to home countries, forced to leave college dorms or are working as visiting journalists or health care providers. The units, which Mr. Davidson described as falling between a hotel room and an Airbnb, also may be rented for business use by "people who don't have a good work setup at home," he said. He declined to disclose the percentage of units currently occupied, saying only, "It's still substantially less than at normal times." The units, he added, tend to be grouped within buildings rather than scattered among private residences and are not targets of the same pushback as other short term rentals in dense urban settings, where occupants resent the coming and going of strangers, particularly in a pandemic. Like Sonder, D. Alexander is a young hospitality company that positions itself between traditional hotels and more informal housing platforms. Operating in three regions northwestern coastal Florida, eastern Tennessee and red rock Arizona it owns and rents luxury houses with four bedrooms or more. Conceived with the idea of using technology to minimize physical contact with hosts or their surrogates, D. Alexander units are ideal for those seeking isolation, said Alex Allison, a founder and the chief executive of the company. Guests are given unique mobile entry codes and high speed internet access and don't have to interact with a soul. In forecasting the future of travel, Mr. Allison said he saw an increasing demand for destinations where people could work comfortably for long periods, and that was before Covid 19. "We are now focused on solving the needs of people impacted by the virus," he said. Internationally, the idea of a rented sanctuary is taken to the pinnacle of luxury with Le Bijou, a group of 42 apartments in nine locations in Switzerland. Started in 2013 to provide "hotel service without the hotel guests," according to the website, the company is offering "quarantine apartments" in Zurich that average 500 a night half the usual cost and may include a kitchenette, fireplace, exercise room or office. Private chefs deliver food to the door for an extra fee; you can also get in room coronavirus testing from a private health clinic. The most hard core health service, involving a team providing round the clock care, is 5,000 a day, said Alexander Hubner, who founded Le Bijou with his wife, Madeleine Hubner. "In the end, we're just a medium size business" that was severely hobbled by the virus, Mr. Hubner said, adding that while the Swiss government is offering low interest loans to help businesses, they do not apply to the cleaning company he employs. "From my point of view, it is the duty for every entrepreneur to have a plan B." He is also donating rooms to health care workers who need a break, which he pays for out of his own pocket, he said. Those who take him up on the offer usually stay for two days. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
In 1984, a New York Times story proclaimed Terese Capucilli "the most powerful dramatic dancer of the decade" for her interpretations of signature roles by the matriarch of modern dance, Martha Graham. Ms. Capucilli, part of the last generation of dancers to be coached by Graham, performed with that troupe for over 25 years and later served as an artistic director. She was also the fourth of seven children born to Italian American parents; it's that heritage, and her remarkable career, that has earned her the Lifetime Achievement Award at this year's Fini International Dance Festival. Run by the choreographer Antonio Fini, the festival celebrates connections between Italian and American artists and this year welcomes companies from Rome and Bologna. A gala performance at Ailey Citigroup Theater on Thursday, Aug. 31, caps 10 days of workshops in New York, following similar events held in July in Mr. Fini's birthplace, Calabria. Fittingly, that's the toe to Italy's cartographic boot. (405 West 55th Street, finidance.nyc) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
This interview contains spoilers for the Season 1 finale of "The Righteous Gemstones." The problem with being a blowhard is there's usually some kind of blowback. Danny McBride's characters have a tendency to learn that lesson the hard way, their arcs traversing a kind of warped hero's journey from cockiness to comeuppance, through chagrin and bodily injury to redemption. (Sort of.) For his character Jesse Gemstone in the HBO comedy "The Righteous Gemstones," that journey included cocaine, prostitutes, blackmail, multiple attempts at vehicular homicide and, by the end of Sunday's Season 1 finale, getting shot by his wife a tough run for any Christian minister. His redemption is still pending. As in his previous HBO series, "Eastbound and Down" and "Vice Principals," which he cocreated, McBride's character in "Gemstones" embodies a particular brand of unreconstructed male, less oblivious to his privilege than untroubled by it. In "Gemstones" he follows form, playing the blinged out heir apparent in a family of mega rich Southern megachurch ministers, headed by the cunning and recently widowed patriarch, Eli Gemstone (John Goodman). Near the end of the finale, Jesse's conniving uncle (Walton Goggins) is struck by lightning and then revived by a stinging bee, in a way that leaves open the possibility of divine intervention. McBride, who with "Gemstones" notched his first credit as a lone creator, said the ambiguity was by design: He was interested in skewering hypocrisy, but not faith per se, even that of the Gemstones. In a phone interview last week, McBride, who was born in Georgia and lives in Charleston, S.C., talked about struggling with church as a child and what he hopes the series can accomplish. (It was renewed for a second season.) He also talked about an interesting query he received from Kanye West. These are edited excerpts from that conversation. That bee in the finale: Was there a reason that you were drawn to that specific image? The idea just came to us that there would maybe be this sign that the family would see, and you don't really know what that is. When you're brought up religious, it's easy sometimes to see things and be like, "That's the Lord working through that." But someone who doesn't agree could just be like, "That's a expletive bee that came in at the wrong time." So we just tried to keep it vague. The headline of this show is about megachurches, but it feels more than anything like a story about fathers. Did you think of it that way? Yeah, that definitely was at the core. Even the Bible, the New Testament, is just a big story about a father and son, so it felt like that was the right angle to take on this season. In particular, you have Jesse dealing with where he's failing his youngest son, and how he's failed his oldest son. Then, you even get that peek back into Jesse's childhood and how he tries to emulate how his father disciplined them, like smacking people at church lunch. But it just doesn't have the same effect. Hopefully, if we get a chance to do this show for as long as we want, we'll get a chance to explore all the different dynamics that arise in a family. Does it feel personal for you in that way? This grappling with the father son relationship? I think it is for anybody, you know? Once you have a kid, it starts to make you think about everything around you differently, and about how you want to do things, or how things were done when you were a kid. McBride has a son and a daughter. I think that's what was interesting about setting this story with religion. Because in some regards, that is what religion does for a lot of people. It lays out a path: "This should work for you; this should get you what you need." And the Gemstones, they're preaching about what people need to do to make it work. But when you see behind the curtain, it's so obvious that they're struggling deeply with how to make things work. I've read that you grew up going to church but struggled with it once your parents split. When my parents were together, we went to church all the time. And then when they split up, and we tried to stay at that church, people were a little judgmental about my mom getting a divorce. This was in the mid 80s, so it was more of a stigma than it is now. So my mom just kind of stopped going. And then it trickled down to us. She would drop us off at church, me and my sister, and we would go to Sunday school, go to church, and then she would pick us up afterward. After a little while, it just became like: "What are we doing? Why are we going to this place that my mom's not even comfortable stepping into?" So we just kind of stopped going. Certainly another theme seems to be about how women get shoved constantly into the background. Was there a conscious attempt to engage some of the current discussions about gender equality? Or was it coming more from that personal place? It's probably a combination. Whenever we're trying to come up with ideas, I won't say that we go and look at headlines and try to figure out what is important today. But I think subconsciously it does affect your decisions. We always try, if we can, to stay one step back from exactly what's happening now because in some regards, you could attach yourself to a story that might not be timeless. But also my own childhood growing up, and being raised by a strong woman, that seemed like a natural fit for Edi Patterson's character as we were creating her. Patterson plays Jesse's sister, Judy. I've heard you were inspired to tackle this subject by your surroundings since moving down to Charleston. When I moved back here, there are so many more churches that it made me think about my own childhood going to church. I really hadn't thought about church in ages, and yeah, it made me curious about what church is like now. When I started seeing these megachurches, it just felt like the right kind of world to set our story in. Have you gotten any pushback down there personally? I haven't, really. I've got to say, I get messages from people all the time, and they're like: "I'm a Christian, and I love the show. I think this is hilarious." I think most people go to church because they do make mistakes, and they're not perfect human beings. So having that sort of view on the show, in a way, makes it more relatable than if it was something where we're just railing on believers. To me, that just doesn't seem interesting. You've talked about this show as a critique of hypocrisy. But the finale seems to complete a redemptive arc for Gemstones. Is that what you were going for? They're not going to stop being hypocrites if they're still raking in millions, right? They might be moving forward, but at the end of the day, the victory is pretty cheap laughs : They got back the money that was stolen from them that they stole from other people. I think ultimately, though, the family suffered this incredible loss and they needed to find a way forward. And they ended up finding that way by relying on each other. I think that's relatable. Does it redeem a character for what they do? I don't know. I think there's a way for characters to be relatable, and you can sympathize with them, but at the same time root for them to get what's coming to them. We always talk about liking the Sopranos. You don't need to keep being told that being in the mob is bad. You get it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Ashley Fetters's article about missing the in person interaction with co workers is right on target. I'd add one more thing to what's missing: diversity. Outside of our schools, what better place than the workplace to learn about others whose color is different, whose culture and religion are different, whose sexual orientation is different, whose views are different? The sickness of divisiveness can be cured only if we see one another as human beings, all wanting the same things. The workplace provides that opportunity, around the conference table, the lunch counter and the water cooler. I miss being in the same room as my students, especially the direct eye contact that's so automatic in a classroom and so difficult on Zoom. I miss the demarcation between office and non office time that commuting afforded me. I miss the family and friends I haven't seen in more than seven months. I know that I'm among the lucky ones, with a home and food on the table and fulfilling work to keep me busy and a partner to share all this with. But Ashley Fetters's article reminded me how much I miss those "weak ties" that are actually among the most resilient. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
How to watch: From 3 a.m. Eastern to noon on Tennis Channel, and from noon to 3 p.m. on NBC; streaming on Tennis Channel and NBCSN apps. The twists of fate that determine tournament draws can seem quite cruel at times. Dominic Thiem and Rafael Nadal, who have faced each other in the past two French Open finals, are in the same half of the draw this time. Both start their campaigns on Sunday, with Nadal seeking his 13th French Open title and Thiem hoping to win his second consecutive Grand Slam tournament. But even without looking that far into the tournament, there are plenty of first round matchups that seem as if they shouldn't have happened until the third round at least. Here are some matches to keep an eye on. Because of the number of matches cycling through courts, the times for individual matchups are, at best, a guess and are certain to fluctuate based on the times at which earlier play is completed. All times are Eastern. Serena Williams, chasing a record tying 24th Grand Slam singles title, is least comfortable on the red clay of Roland Garros she has won only three of her major titles there. (Although it is a testament to her abilities that a tournament at which she has won titles can be considered weaker ground.) In the past three years, she has at least made it to the finals of each of the other Grand Slam events, but she has not made it past the fourth round at Roland Garros since 2018. At the United States Open this year, she seemed to leave every ounce of her energy on the court. Williams's frustrations and ecstasies during her matches were broadcast as if to inform viewers that winning is not a straightforward process but a struggle that even one of the sport's greats must grapple with every day. Now, she'll face a familiar challenge on her path to victory in Kristie Ahn, a fellow American. Ahn and Williams faced each other in the first round of the U.S. Open as well, a bad break for Ahn. She reached the fourth round of the U.S. Open as a wild card in 2019 and seems perpetually on the brink of a breakthrough. With Williams once again in front of her, it seems unlikely that this year's French Open will be her stage for that. Gael Monfils, the eighth seed, is unparalleled in his ability to entertain. An extremely athletic player, his pace allows him to sustain long points, and his use of circus shots is unique not just in variety but in frequency. Underlying the showmanship is a player who, on his best day, is capable of standing toe to toe with the world's best. Although a regular in the second week of Grand Slam events, he has lost two matches in the lead up to Roland Garros, and he will need to get up to speed quickly if he's going to have a good result. Alexander Bublik, ranked 56th in the world, is best known for his serving ability. Many opponents tend to step back from the baseline to give themselves time to return it. But in a simple yet unorthodox counter, Bublik has taken up hitting low underarm serves sporadically, not only forcing his opponents to deal with an unusual ball, but making them shift their overall return positioning to be more to his liking. This strategy has drawn some ire from opponents, but there is nothing illegal or unsporting about it, and in a clay court era defined by players like Nadal and Thiem, who both stand well behind the baseline, it may help rewrite the playbook. At the U.S. Open, Thiem became the latest player to win a first major title as he outlasted Alexander Zverev in five sets. Before that, it was Marin Cilic, the winner of the U.S. Open in 2014, who was the latest first time major champion. Cilic, who has not reached the final of a Grand Slam tournament since the 2018 Australian Open, has struggled to maintain the high level of play that made him a mainstay in the top 10 from 2014 18. In 2019, he did not even reach the quarterfinal of a Grand Slam, for only the second time since 2012. Cilic will now face the unenviable task of playing Thiem, who is both confident after his performance at the U.S. Open and generally more well suited for clay court tennis. Thiem has been a finalist at the French Open for the past two years, losing both times to Rafael Nadal. With his victory at the U.S. Open still fresh, Thiem is among the favorites to reach his third Roland Garros final, and, with Nadal having lost in the quarterfinals of the preparatory tournament in Rome, some think Thiem has a strong opportunity to challenge Nadal's dominance. Thiem's defensive game is well suited to clay, and with early reports on court conditions suggesting that this year's surface at Roland Garros will be faster than in previous iterations, the sudden swing from hardcourts to clay may play into the hands of those who thrived in New York. Garbine Muguruza, the 2016 French Open champion, was returning to her prime, reaching the final at the Australian Open, before the pandemic halted play. She had a disappointing result at the U.S. Open, losing in the second round to Tsvetana Pironkova, but showed upon her return to clay at the Italian Open that she is still on an upswing. During a run to the semifinals, she beat Victoria Azarenka and Coco Gauff before eventually losing in a tight three set match against Simona Halep, the top seed at Roland Garros. Tamara Zidansek, a promising young Slovenian player, has a limited history on the WTA Tour, but at the lower levels of professional tennis, her greatest successes have come on clay courts. She is the two time reigning champion of the Bol Ladies Open, hosted in Croatia on red clay, and she won the doubles competition at the Palermo Open alongside Arantxa Rus in August. Although she is faced with a nearly impossible task, Zidansek can make a good showing for herself. A good performance, even if it is a losing one, may give her the confidence that she can compete with established players on the biggest stages, and help her settle into her ascent on the tour. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
An infusion of new money and the arrival of Conde Nast have helped the Odeon regain its social standing.Credit...Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times The restaurant acquires new life thanks to the arrival of Conde Nast downtown (plus regular infusions of new money). An infusion of new money and the arrival of Conde Nast have helped the Odeon regain its social standing. The publisher and TriBeCa resident Judith Regan was in her reliable old neighborhood restaurant the Odeon the other day when she smelled something different in the air, and it certainly wasn't a new entree on the menu. She was right. The joint is jumping. The bartender with her glasses and slash of red lipstick looks like a younger Jenna Lyons. Who's that by the window eating a nicoise? Jonathan Burnham, the senior vice president and publisher of HarperCollins. And by the wall near the bar, having an omelet? Pamela McCarthy, the longtime deputy editor of The New Yorker. And that guy in the booth by the back? The clothing designer Steven Alan. In recent years, the Odeon, mellowed in middle age, had been a favored setting for the sort of celebrity interviews Ms. Bell and her cohort assign, its dark corners and relative desertion offering privacy as well as pedigree. Now, thanks to the arrival of Conde Nast at nearby One World Trade Center and the subsequent influx of editors and executives, it's probably too noisy to capture the musings of Jennifer Lawrence or Kanye West. Pilar Guzman, editor in chief of Conde Nast Traveler, is another new regular; so are the "dude itors" from GQ. And the Voguettes come, two by two as if to Noah's Ark: on a recent Monday Chioma Nnadi, the fashion news director of Vogue.com, and Chloe Malle, the magazine's social editor and the daughter of Candice Bergen and Louis Malle. They were accompanied by Shala Monroque, a statuesque fashion world fixture and ex girlfriend of the gallerist Larry Gagosian. The Odeon arrived in TriBeCa in October 1980, opened by the British born Brian McNally, his younger brother Keith McNally, and Keith's American girlfriend, Lynn Wagenknecht, with 150,000 in seed money from their families and a couple of close friends. Keith McNally had acquired a substantial customer Rolodex after working as a headwaiter at One Fifth, a restaurant near the north end of Washington Square Park that was decorated like the inside of a cruise ship and had become popular among artists, writers and the cast of "Saturday Night Live," which had many of its post show parties there. (Brian had been the bartender there and Lynn had waited tables.) The three were taking a significant risk. Back then, getting south of the Holland Tunnel was for taxi drivers an endeavor somewhat akin to passing through the Bermuda Triangle. High end furniture showrooms did not yet exist. Odeon, said the author Jay McInerney, who helped put it on the map and is now a wine columnist for Hearst, was: "an oasis in the desert. There wasn't much down there. There was commercial industrial activity during the day, and at night they were very dark streets." The McNallys and Ms. Wagenknecht, 62, who has a degree in art history from Stanford and spends much of her spare time painting, had both a voracious appetite for culture (Keith, 64, had briefly been an actor, starring in plays by Alan Bennett) and coolheaded business sense. "We didn't do drugs," Ms. Wagenknecht said. "We were actually sort of naive about them." The food was always good, mostly impervious to the loopy trends (verticality, foam, pig trotters) that overtook restaurant culture over the next two decades. During that time, Ms. Wagenknecht and Keith McNally would marry and then divorce, Brian would break off from Keith in a feud that lasted many years, and each brother would open other restaurants. But Odeon hung on, in part because of the influx of art galleries and the opening of nearby nightspots. People would repair there "before and after the Mudd Club, before and after Area," the artist Ross Bleckner said. "We would pull down the metal gate in front at 4 a.m. and people inside could stay until 6 a.m.," Brian McNally said. The writer Dirk Wittenborn, who often accompanied his good friend John Belushi there, said, "No place was open that late." (And it no longer is, closing down no later than midnight these days, reflecting the new lock step of affluent Manhattanites to the Google calendar.) Many longtime customers recall Mr. Belushi taking over the kitchen one night, although getting the particulars is about as likely as explaining the Cuban missile crisis. There were other actors as well, like Harvey Keitel, who went there with a date early on, using the occasion to try out a long coveted belted leather trench coat like the ones he used to see in movies about World War II but was nervous to wear himself. "I thought 'Now's the perfect time, because no one's around on the street,'" Mr. Keitel said. "So I put on the trench coat, I go down to the Odeon, and there's a guy sitting there in a booth on the opposite side of the bar, and he looks at me and he says, 'Harv.' Real slow. I peer down and it's Jack Nicholson. And the next thing out of his mouth is 'You're wearing a leather trench coat?' That was the first and last time I ever wore it." Another evening that didn't end so well was a party celebrating the gallerist Mary Boone's 30th birthday, with the sort of crowd that she described in New York glitterati shorthand as "everybody." This meant a pile of big artists, among them David Salle, Julian Schnabel and Jean Michel Basquiat. Sometime during the course of the evening, Mr. Schnabel and Mr. Basquiat went downstairs to the bathrooms and decided to do a little art project of their own, soaking all the toilet paper in the toilet bowls, after which they threw them up on the walls. "Like snowballs," Ms. Boone said, describing perhaps the duo's only creative efforts from that time not to be sold later on by her or Mr. Gagosian, another super gallerist regular at the Odeon, for millions of dollars. "Keith just threw us out," Ms. Boone said. "We didn't get to have birthday cake." Over the next few years, the Odeon's supremacy ("a downtown Elaine's," is how the publisher Morgan Entrekin put it) only seemed to increase. Keith Haring began coming in, as did Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe and Calvin Klein. But by the publication of Mr. McInerney's first novel, "Bright Lights, Big City" in 1984, which had a picture of the Odeon on the cover and scenes set there, the relationship between Brian and Keith was beginning to fray. "Keith was the driving pulse of the place," Brian McNally said. "I was, by definition, less responsible." (Keith said at first that he would prefer to answer questions about the Odeon over email. When asked for a little more than that, he said he'd like not to be interviewed at all.) Brian left the operation and went on to start a number of restaurants, including 150 Wooster Street, the Canal Bar and, most successfully, Indochine. During the aughts, he moved to Saigon, Vietnam, where he still spends part of the year. Keith and Lynn began colonizing the rest of the city, heading first to the Upper West Side with their second successful update on the French bistro Cafe Luxembourg (Odeon for the Central Park set). After that came Nell's, a dinner spot and nightclub on West 14th Street that Ms. Wagenknecht ran until 2006. In 1989, the couple opened Lucky Strike on Grand Street. Following the couple's divorce in the early '90s, Ms. Wagenknecht bought Keith out of Cafe Luxembourg and the Odeon, both of which she operates today; Keith kept Lucky Strike. "She deserved it," Brian said. "Why not?" After a brief detour in film direction, Keith began building his empire. Many of his restaurants have been remixes of the original concept: Balthazar (which one might think of Hard Rock Odeon) in SoHo, Pastis ("Sex and the City" Odeon) in the meatpacking district, Schiller's Liquor Bar (hipster Odeon) on the Lower East Side and Minetta Tavern (hedge fund Odeon) in Greenwich Village. There was also Pulino's on the Bowery, an upscale pizzeria recently refashioned as, you guessed it, yet another French bistro, Cherche Midi. (Bowery Odeon). Meanwhile, the original was changing in profound ways. AIDS killed many of the restaurant's loyalists, as well as its employees. "I can't tell you how many waiters died," Brian McNally said. Others overdosed (see Mr. Belushi 1982) or moved away, particularly as the city and the economy changed. Out went the artists. In rolled the bankers and their blond wives, their bodies honed at nearby Flywheel, followed by Bugaboo strollers. "TriBeCa became what it is today, and I left," Mr. Bleckner said. And though the McNallys and Ms. Wagenknecht remained and even capitalized on the transformation of the city, they are smart and introspective enough to feel somewhat conflicted about it. Looking out a packed dining room, Ms. Wagenknecht offered that even now, when creative people have returned to the fold, she can barely identify anyone eating there. The expression on her face was actually a little sad, like a person who appears to have gotten over the death of a loved one decades ago and then finds the person's picture buried at the bottom of a desk drawer. Later this year, Keith is opening a new restaurant near ground zero in the coming Beekman Hotel and Ms. Wagenknecht is aware it will take some of her new customers away. But with Elaine's gone and the idea of a convivial lunch in New York increasingly old fashioned, the regulars at the revivified Odeon seem merely grateful it's still here. They chalk up its success over the years including as a local refuge after 9/11 and through two financial crises to its excellent service (no one at Odeon seems to wait more than 15 to 20 minutes for anything, and that's on a bad day) and a broadly appealing menu that now includes a kale salad ("In the '80s it was kiwi," Ms. Wagenknecht said of the ingredient du hour) along with ye olde reliable oysters and soft, perfect omelets. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
When Derek Jeter retired after the 2014 season, the Yankees did not have an obvious internal candidate to replace him, and that was not a problem. They believed, and so did their fans, that the team's next shortstop, no matter what, would be a good one, and he was: Didi Gregorius, acquired in a trade, blossomed into a dynamic all around player during five seasons in pinstripes after an inauspicious start. Some professional sports franchises, because of their prestige and success, tend to engender a certain faith when making decisions, especially big ones. The Yankees are one of them. The New England Patriots are another. For the last three months, the Patriots' conspicuous quiet through the draft and free agency insinuated that Jarrett Stidham, a fourth round pick in 2019, would replace the Hall of Fame bound Tom Brady at quarterback. That seemed ludicrous and totally believable all at once. With eight Super Bowl victories with six as New England's coach Bill Belichick has the organizational standing to say, and do, just about anything short of proclaiming his dog, a magnificent Alaskan Klee Kai named Nike, as special teams coordinator. That includes not just moving on from perhaps the best quarterback in league history in Brady, who signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers earlier this off season, but anointing as his successor a player who has attempted only four N.F.L. passes. How the team adapted in that time, and thus the roster, was governed as much by what Brady did well as what he did not. If healthy, Newton allows the offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels to scheme a way to capitalize on the threat of his mobility or keep defenses honest with his arm, using the run pass option. As other teams expended precious draft capital or lavished expensive contracts on quarterbacks, the Patriots waited. They stayed away from Marcus Mariota and Andy Dalton and Jameis Winston, all of whom signed short term deals as backups, and opted not to draft a quarterback though, as Belichick indicated afterward, that was not necessarily by design. The Patriots have long cultivated a reputation as a team that skirts the boundaries of fair play, from their involvement in the so called Spygate and Deflategate scandals to their most recent contretemps, in which they were fined 1.1 million and docked a 2021 third round draft pick for videotaping the Cincinnati Bengals' sideline during a game last December in Cleveland. This move for Newton leaked, as it happened, minutes before the videotaping punishment was levied grants New England yet another edge. For Newton, the appeal of the Patriots is simple: the opportunity to resurrect his career with a banner franchise, for a legendary coach, with a forgiving depth chart. If he wanted to remain a starter, New England presented his best option. But while Newton upgrades the position, it is unclear how much he can help transform the rest of the roster. Beyond Brady, the Patriots also lost, among others, the star tight end Rob Gronkowski, who came out of retirement to play with his buddy in Tampa Bay; the defensive stalwarts Kyle Van Noy and Jamie Collins; kicker Stephen Gostkowski; and the offensive line coach Dante Scarnecchia. The Patriots are not rebuilding but rather reinventing themselves, with a coach who loves to tinker. With Brady gone, the only person capable of cloaking the Patriots' deficiencies is Belichick, who is entrusted with squeezing a 12th consecutive division title from a team that will resemble none that he has overseen during his time in New England. After every coaching milestone, Belichick, who has won the third most games in league history (273), deflects questions about his legacy and redirects praise onto his players. He has won with an array of stars, in different ways, but never without Brady, his tether for two decades. Given his choice, Belichick did not pick Bubba Crosby. He picked a former star, an electrifying and charismatic presence. He chose Cam Newton. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
"The Other Story," an unwieldy but reasonably compelling Israeli drama from the director Avi Nesher, recalls the old Jewish joke about how two disputing parties can't both be right. (Or can they?) Given the complexity of the tensions the movie deals with between religious Jews and secular Israelis, and between secular Israelis and other religions perhaps its thematic murkiness is a feature, not a bug. The story revolves around Anat (Joy Rieger), a newly ultra Orthodox young woman who is preparing to marry a musician, Shahar (the singer Nathan Goshen). In the recent past, they were a secular couple; Shahar, a pop star and a drug user, took her into his world. He then brought Anat along when he became religious, a choice that her nonreligious paternal grandfather, Shlomo (Sasson Gabai), views as a rejection of his values. Her mother, Tali (Maya Dagan), imagines that the rift between her and her daughter will only grow once children are born. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Walking the streets of San Francisco during these coronavirus days, you'll see a sight rarer than Bigfoot: "for sale" and "for rent" signs. Six months ago, I'd have texted pictures of them immediately to friends who were hoping to move. You had to act fast if you wanted a good slot on the list of dozens of potential buyers. Now, some of those friends are posting on Instagram about their freshly built suburban homes, surrounded by trees, wild animals and lots of space. Living in San Francisco used to be an impossible dream; today, the dream is to escape it. For the first time since the tech crash of 2000, housing vacancies in San Francisco are skyrocketing, and rents on one bedroom apartments are down by 11 percent. Still, this isn't like previous economic busts. For the most part, the people leaving haven't lost their jobs, and they aren't being priced out of rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods; they're the ones who are rich enough to work remotely from a bucolic palace with high speed internet and a two car garage. And it's not just in San Francisco. Real estate services in Florida and Arizona are reporting similar patterns. Expensive cities are losing their luster, while smaller cities and towns feel like the wave of the future. It seems a harmless enough trend. After all, what could be bad about getting more fresh air and space to take walks? A lot, it turns out. The 20th century offers object lessons in why fleeing cities for suburban and exurban settings can backfire even if it seems like a good idea at first. In the early 1900s, many large cities were suffering from the side effects of rapid industrialization: they were polluted, full of high density housing with bad sanitation. Crime flourished under corrupt policing systems. There were disease outbreaks, too; in San Francisco, bubonic plague killed more than 100 people at the turn of the last century. In response, a new wave of utopian thinkers proposed moving to what Ebenezer Howard, a British urban planner, called "the garden city" in his 1902 manifesto "Garden Cities of To morrow." His garden cities would be planned communities of limited size, built with ample park space and free housing for people in need. Everyone could eat locally, from sprawling farms that ringed the city. Howard's ideas were so compelling that he was able to work with planners to build two English towns to his specifications Letchworth and Welwyn, both of which still stand today a few dozen miles outside London. Though both towns are pretty, they fell short of Howard's vision, which was to provide shelter for the needy as well as prosperous country folk. As the craze for these British style garden cities grew in the States, Frank Lloyd Wright wrote about building a uniquely American version. He called it Usonian the "Us" in the name stood for United States, to distinguish it from the Central and South American cities he didn't like. Wright argued that the Usonian city wouldn't be a flight from modernity instead, he would liberate ordinary people from high density industrial "tumor" metropolises through technology. Brand new inventions like telephones, radio and automobiles meant everyone's work could be done remotely. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Some of Wright's followers eventually built a garden city called Usonia in Westchester County, N.Y. Its 47 homes are still occupied, each at the end of a winding driveway, surrounded by flower beds and groves. It was supposed to be an idyllic rural community, progressive and affordable, welcoming people of all backgrounds. And yet, though its first homes were built in the late 1940s, it was decades before the self declared "diverse" community welcomed a Black family. This wasn't a unique problem; the progressive garden city of Greenbelt was also built for whites only. There were other issues, too. Though Usonia's homes were inexpensive in theory, the reality was that they were quite expensive to build and maintain. And to this day, everyone who lives there is dependent on cars. Those gardens that give the town its special character are at odds with a world of carbon belching transportation machines. Utopian communities like Usonia are still relatively rare, but Wright's urban plan became a template for thousands of midcentury American suburbs, with their low slung, ranch style homes and endless lawns. These suburbs, like their more idealistic ancestors, were a mess of contradictions. Supposedly democratic, they were ground zero for redlining policies. Plus, their commuter populations often depended on nearby light industries that flatlined in the 1990s. Eventually, wealthy young people fled these suburbs as urban cores bloomed in the early 2000s. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The Mavericks' Jose Juan Barea getting blood pulled from his ear by an Orreco research specialist. DALLAS Whether they are trying to keep their 34 year old playmaker Jose Juan Barea spry or aiming to help their 19 year old phenom Luka Doncic dodge the infamous rookie wall, the Dallas Mavericks turn to the same resource: A blood test. It is not just any blood test. The Mavericks import frequent testing from the Irish company Orreco, which is in its third season making personalized recommendations for Mavericks players regarding athletic workloads and diets, largely through the study of blood analysis. Although some in the sports medicine community have questioned whether the value of such blood work is overstated, Dallas leans heavily on Orreco's team of consultants and their assessments of how to maximize player readiness. "All the things N.B.A. teams talk about players' minutes, their load, their tracking data, their camera data all of that is external data used to try to predict what's going on internally," said Casey Smith, the head of Dallas's athletic training staff. "What we're doing is trying to get a little bit of a look at what's actually going on internally." Dallas is one of just two N.B.A. teams, along with the Knicks, to hire Orreco, which proposes customized remedies to combat fatigue and tries to identify increased risk for injury and illness by obtaining a range of data from players' blood and feeding it into machine learning programs. Taking cues from Orreco's findings, Smith and Jeremy Holsopple, the Mavericks' athletic performance director, tailor an individualized mix of training, rest and recovery for each of Dallas's 17 players. The Mavericks' owner, Mark Cuban, said the team pays Orreco nearly 150,000 per year. No Maverick has embraced this process more than Barea, who understands all too well that fatigued players face an increased risk of soft tissue injuries. Two seasons ago, amid worrisome forecasts from what Smith referred to as "the numbers," Barea tore a calf muscle in a November 2016 game against Boston. Ever since, Barea has proactively sought updates on his levels of oxidative stress (worrisome as they get higher) and white blood cell counts (which can indicate illness or infection when they spike or indicate less immune prevention as they get lower). "I like it," Barea said. "At this point in my career, you have to work more on the body. They let me know what's going on like what you need to eat or what you need to stop eating. I want the feedback." Four times a season, Orreco staff members come to Dallas to administer a full venous blood draw on Mavericks players. To supplement those visits, Dallas mixes in frequent capillary blood draws for its players in which a quick pinprick sample is taken to provide near instant readings of oxidative stress levels in the blood from a player's ear or index finger. League rules allow players to refuse any blood testing if they find the procedures too invasive, but the team says only one Maverick, whom they declined to identify, had done so. "It's your health, so it's your decision," Smith said. The samples, according to the Orreco co founder Dr. Brian Moore, enable the firm to analyze a player's hematology and biochemistry by assessing nearly 50 biomarkers. This includes examining creatine kinase to assess muscle damage and high sensitivity C reactive protein to measure inflammation two areas of particular concern for basketball players because of the nature of their on court movements. Hydration and nutrition indicators such as vitamin D levels, and iron and fatty acid profiles are among the additional variables analyzed to determine where each player lands on a four zone "readiness to perform" index. Along with the biomarker panels, Orreco's algorithms also take into account game minutes, air miles traveled, sleep data and reaction times that are obtained from wearable devices used during practices. The rules that allow players to opt out of blood testing are in place because regulating how teams use biometrics and the data such research produces specifically whether the data belongs to the teams, players or the league itself remains an evolving point of concern throughout the N.B.A. As a safeguard amid the rise of wearable technology in practice sessions, league policy threatens fines of up to 250,000 per team for the misuse of biometric data. Yet Smith insists that the collaboration with Orreco has improved the Mavericks' ability to track the onset of illness and keep players "more available" for games. In the 2016 17 season, according to data maintained by InStreetClothes.com, a website that tracks injuries in the N.B.A., Dallas players missed only four games due to illness less than half the league average of 8.5. The Mavericks then lost a league low zero games to illness last season, when the league average was 7.1 games per team, according to the site. "Does that mean we win more games?" Smith said. "Not necessarily. But it gives us a better shot." Still, with the sports and fitness world littered with treatments not supported by vetted published studies, some independent experts have their doubts. Dr. Anthony Romeo, the chief of orthopedics at the Rothman Institute in New York and a former team physician for the Chicago White Sox who also worked with the Chicago Bulls, said he would maintain "a healthy level of skepticism" about Orreco's work until it reveals more about the biomarkers it studies and the data being gathered. "At some point," Romeo said of Orreco, "they're going to have to share their data in a way that it can be repeated so that we know it's true." Said Dr. Robert Dimeff, a team physician for the Dallas Stars of the N.H.L. and a past president of the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine: "I think this is a research based tool at this point in time, but I don't think it's ready for prime time. What they're doing is something that in 10 years from now we may say, 'Wow, this is absolutely great information.' "We can't say that right now. But what they're doing is trying to put some science behind recommendations and I think that's very admirable." Despite such skepticism, Cuban remains one of the biggest proponents of Orreco's work. After watching an interview in which the openly data hungry Cuban discussed his growing fascination with artificial intelligence, Moore wrote to Cuban before the 2016 17 season with a pitch that Orreco could "optimize performance, accelerate recovery and prolong careers" by using "high end computing to find patterns in the data." "Our job is to help the Mavericks make better decisions," Moore said. "Managing player load is as important as understanding traditional basketball analytics,'' Cuban said. "Causation is always more valuable that correlation." Although the Mavericks are hardly alone in embracing bioanalytics, they are on a very short list of top level professional sports franchises that are willing to ignore the ultra secretive norm and publicly acknowledge its work with Orreco. Aside from the Mavericks, only Newcastle United of the English Premier League has acknowledged being an Orreco customer. Through a person with knowledge of the contract, The Times confirmed that the Knicks are the other N.B.A. team to use Orreco as extensively as the Mavericks. Orreco also consults with a handful of individual players, including Wilson Chandler of the Philadelphia 76ers and Quincy Pondexter of the San Antonio Spurs. The company, though, said it could not discuss the Knicks, or the two Major League Baseball clubs and another Premier League soccer team it counts as clients. Smith cited Quest Diagnostics' Blueprint Fit as another top practitioner in the field that he suspects has an N.B.A. clientele and acknowledged that several of his peers within the league are aware of what Dallas is doing, and asking lots of questions. "And I think there will be more," Smith said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Victor Llorente for The New York Times Victor Llorente for The New York Times Credit... Victor Llorente for The New York Times The Youngest (and Liveliest) 'Nutcracker' Audience of the Season The red velvet seats at the David H. Koch Theater were quickly filling up not with the usual ballet audience, but with squirming, shrieking and giggling elementary school students. On a Tuesday morning in December, the day after the first snow of the season, a couple thousand students spilled out from school buses and marched single file into the theater, where the New York City Ballet would perform "George Balanchine's The Nutcracker" just for them. Sitting in the front row of the orchestra's center section, their feet dangling above the floor, third graders from Girls Prep Bronx Elementary School, a charter school, discussed which parts of "The Nutcracker" they were most excited to see come to life onstage. "To see how the tree grows and how the Nutcracker gets bigger and how the mouses move," said Yerelyn Arana, 9, who brought her hands up to her chin to imitate a mouse's paws. The students from Girls Prep already knew plenty about the ballet, having been introduced to the characters and story as part of the Nutcracker Project, an in school curriculum that City Ballet offers each year to about 100 classrooms in more than 20 public schools, many of which have a shortage of arts programming. The program, which celebrated its 40th anniversary this year, dispatches dance teachers to run workshops in which students learn basic ballet technique, collaborate on writing a poem inspired by "The Nutcracker" and experiment with their own choreography. At the Tuesday matinee, City Ballet performed for an unusually responsive audience. The students laughed raucously when the Mouse King toppled to the floor ("like a dead cockroach," one later said). There were oohs and aahs of recognition when the first notes of "Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy" rang through the theater. And when the Christmas tree grew, more than tripling in size, one audience member wondered aloud if it was flying. The next morning, third graders at Girls Prep leapt and twirled in their school uniforms to the same Tchaikovsky tunes. Their eyes were trained on their City Ballet instructor, Callie Hatchett, who was shouting out ballet movements like "plie!" and "echappe!" and directing the girls to move through different formations with gesticulating arms. (Each class at Girls Prep is named after a woman of significance; these students are in the "Maria Tallchief class," named for the ballerina who played the Sugarplum Fairy when Balanchine first restaged "The Nutcracker" in 1954.) After their warm up, the students sat cross legged on the stage of their school auditorium in the southeast Bronx to discuss the show they had seen the previous day. They loved, they said, the vibrant dancing sweets and Mother Ginger's absurdly wide skirt. But the part of the show that captivated these 8 and 9 year olds the most was entirely unplanned: One of the young dancers, dressed as an angel in a long white dress and a golden halo, tripped on her skirt and fell onstage. The next week, after the sixth and final session of the workshop, the third graders would perform movement they learned in the workshop for their schoolmates and family members. The dance included ballet basics, as well as choreography of their own design, like back bridges and diva poses. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
On the last Friday in March, I lost hope. I have always believed in America: not in our inherent goodness I am too black for that but in our sheer animal will to survive. Crisis after crisis, our country has evolved to meet the moment, even if that meant changing the way we thought the world worked or striving to upend the imbalance of power. But on that Friday, I was on my couch working when the messages started to pour in. Friends sent me video after video of Republican senators debating stimulus measures to address the coronavirus crisis, standing in the Senate chamber, saying that the Green New Deal a proposal that I helped create was the reason millions of Americans would not receive the help that they need. I was furious. Of the nearly 2 trillion in aid proposed in that first version of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, known as the CARES Act, 500 billion went toward a business relief fund with little to no oversight. Fifty eight billion of this was earmarked for airlines, and a lax definition of eligible businesses created a loophole for oil and gas. The bill included no climate protections, so the claim that it was being held up over Green New Deal provisions was absurd. And the changes proposed by Democrats emissions reductions for airlines, limiting bailouts for fossil fuel industries, protections for airline workers were modest. The senators I saw did not mention those things. Nor did they mention that the airlines had requested 50 billion after spending 45 billion on stock buybacks over the past five years. They did not mention that emissions reductions requested would not be required until 2025 or that when they were, the reductions would be less than 3 percent per year. And no one stood up and asked why corporations should be exempt from loan terms when the rest of us are not. Why is it "opportunism" when we try to design policy that would address more than one problem at a time, but it's "efficiency" when businesses do the same? (The final version of the CARES Act does not provide targeted funding for fossil fuels and reduced the aid for passenger airlines to 25 billion. None of the climate policies mentioned were included in the final version of the bill.) Covid 19 and the economic collapse it has caused have laid bare how connected our problems are. Congress and the Federal Reserve are not going to lay out trillions of dollars, over and over, in perpetuity. Refusing to include measures related to climate and environmental justice in economic stimulus packages related to the coronavirus is not neutral when there is no guarantee of other opportunities to do so later. We need to design the stimulus not only to help the U.S. economy recover but to also become more resilient to the climate crisis, the next multitrillion dollar crisis headed our way. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Have you called your daughter by your wife's name or your son by his brother's name? Have you misplaced your car keys or forgotten where you parked at the mall? If you worry these might be signs of significant memory loss or the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, which causes a slow deterioration in memory and reasoning skills, fear not, experts said. Not all memory lapses are created equal. By the age of 45, the average person experiences a decline in memory, Dr. Gary W. Small, a professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in an email. Forgetting facts or events over time, absent mindedness and incorrectly recalling a detail are among six "normal" memory problems that should not cause concern, according to the Center for Brain Mind Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
After a horrific appearance at No. 12, the five time Masters winner did not fade even with no hope of another green jacket and almost no one around to watch. AUGUSTA, Ga. Tiger Woods had just birdied three holes on Sunday at the Masters when he stood at the tee box at No. 18. A few of the men sitting around the 17th green did not bother to watch. This was no charge toward a sixth green jacket. It was the last act of a Sunday unlike any other in Woods's quarter century around the Augusta National Golf Club: He shot 76, equal to his worst round at any Masters. Yet that score was a far greater achievement than it, or his tie for 38th place at one under par, would suggest. "This sport is awfully lonely sometimes," said Woods, who entered the tournament as its defending champion. "You have to fight it. No one is going to bring you off the mound or call in a sub. You have to fight through it. That's what makes this game so unique and so difficult mentally." Few figures in the game could have pushed on quite like Woods, who appeared intent on salvaging something even if few people were watching. He birdied five of the final six holes and parred the other a better late showing than the new champion, Dustin Johnson, who finished at 20 under. Summoning the experience that he has judged particularly vital at the Masters, Woods somehow assembled the type of performance that ordinarily would have had the grounds swelling into roars. But it came only after an indisputably calamitous turn at No. 12, the very hole that Woods used as a springboard to his Masters victory just last year. Resplendent in his ritual Sunday red, he strode to the hole, a par 3 around Rae's Creek made even more dazzling this year by the soft colors of autumn after the coronavirus pandemic forced a postponement of the traditional April major. He had another tournament's worth of earned confidence, having made par there in his first two rounds and birdie on Saturday. Swing. Plop. The ball rolled into the water. "The wind was off the right for the first two guys, and then when I stepped up there, it switched to howling off the left," Woods said. "I didn't commit to the wind, and I also got ahead of it and pushed it, too, because I thought the wind would come more off the right and it was off the left, and that just started the problem from there." "From there," he added, "I hit a lot more shots and had a lot more experiences there in Rae's Creek." From the drop zone: Swing. Hit the green. Roll backward into the water. Again from the drop zone: The ball stayed dry, but it landed in a back bunker. Then, with Woods's legs forming part of a quadrilateral over the sand, he hit over the flagstick and into the water. He tried again from the bunker and finally reached the green safely. A putt just missed. Then, at last, technically a 10th stroke to a conclusion somewhere between merciful and wrenching. He evacuated the hole with a 56 on the day and his worst score on any single hole during his career on the PGA Tour. His gallery, already vastly diminished because of Augusta National's pandemic precautions, fled, too. "He had a bit of a disaster on that hole, didn't he?" said Shane Lowry, who was in Woods's group. "Look, this is what Augusta is when the wind is up like this. It's a pity we're not out there for the full day in this because it would have been a nice chance for some people to shoot good scores and move really far up the leaderboards." Woods certainly tried. But there is only so much to do on the last six holes when, even at the start of the day and before the torment at the hole known as Golden Bell, Woods needed the greatest comeback in Masters history if he was to keep his green jacket for another year. The observers thinned out more. Woods plodded on, invisible on almost all of the scoreboards around the course. No matter. Then to No. 18, the place that has seen champions go awash in glory. He peered down the 465 yard hole, the last test of a tournament lost. He drove it to the middle of the fairway, well right of the second bunker. Then came a push onto the green. A nifty putt for birdie earned claps but nothing like a roar. A reporter asked afterward about his motivation about whether he worried, at age 44 and with a career of triumph, pain and scrutiny, that it might fade away sometime. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
A motorized wheelchair that belonged to the physicist Stephen Hawking sold for nearly 400,000 at auction in London. The final price for an old red wheelchair exceeded expectations at a Christie's auction in London that ended on Thursday. A mystery buyer spent about 390,000 on the wheelchair, a motorized model that had belonged to the physicist and author Stephen W. Hawking, who died in March at age 76. That is more than 15 times the pre sale estimate made public by Christie's. It was among 22 items on offer from Dr. Hawking's estate in an online auction that began on Oct. 31. All of those were sold, and the total, about 1.8 million, was about seven times as much as had been predicted. "The results of this remarkable sale, with more than 400 registered bidders from 30 different countries, demonstrate the enormous admiration and affection with which Stephen Hawking was viewed around the world," according to a statement from Thomas Venning, the head of books and manuscripts for Christie's, and James Hyslop, the head of science and natural history. Altogether, the items auctioned, which also included possessions of Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, were sold for more than 2.3 million. The red wheelchair was used by Dr. Hawking during the late 1980s and early '90s; he stopped using it when he could no longer steer it with his hands. The physicist spent most of his life steadily losing control over his muscles because of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
I'm not sure when it came. I'm not exactly sure of the time or date or precise location in which the virus entered my body. I don't know how long it was there or when exactly my body started to fight it. All I know is that 67 days after my wife and I packed our bags and left Utah for vacation, I found myself in quarantine on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, at a port in Yokohama, Japan, on Feb. 3; that six days later I'd come down with an intense fever and extreme nausea; and that on Valentine's Day I would test positive for the new coronavirus. When we came aboard the cruise, we had already completed the first two months of a vacation that we had dreamed of for several years to celebrate our retirement. Singapore, Cambodia and other parts of Southeast Asia had already been checked off the list. Boarding the Diamond Princess on Jan. 6, we were looking forward to the next leg of the trip: A monthlong cruise followed by four months of exploring Thailand, then traveling to Australia, then hitting another cruise from Sydney to Hawaii. My wife and I had heard of the coronavirus by the time we boarded the ship from the news and other passengers but there weren't any major travel warnings or bans at the time for any of our destinations. As scheduled, we were set to disembark the cruise in Japan on Feb. 4. And ship life on that night before was cheerful and festive; everyone aboard was making plans to return home or go off on other adventures. We were busy meeting with new friends we had met aboard, exchanging phone numbers and email addresses, hoping to stay in contact and offering the usual goodbye hugs and well wishes. My wife and I returned to our cabin, packed our luggage and laid down to watch the evening news. Over a loudspeaker, the captain announced that some other passengers had tested positive for Covid 19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and that to protect all of us, we would need to stay in our cabins for at least two weeks. We had no fear or trepidation over being quarantined necessarily. My main thought at that time was regretting not having purchased a cabin with a window or a balcony. Two weeks lost out of the six months of time off we had planned didn't seem so bad. But we did worry then, like many people do now, about what it would mean for us if we began to cough or sneeze, or feel off in any way. Ship stewards, wearing face masks, delivered a digital thermometer to each passenger on the second day of quarantine. Every cabin was given face masks. The captain explained over the loudspeaker that we were to take our temperature every four hours. Almost like a new toy, we played along and each time my temperature was normal I'd proudly display it to my wife. By this point, tired and scared, we called the ships medical team for help. To my surprise, they never mentioned anything about the coronavirus. Then they asked if this was a medical emergency. I asked them if a 104 degree fever was a medical emergency. After a short pause, they informed me that they would place me on the list. No explanation was given for what exactly this list was or how long it would take for medical staff to come. We didn't hear back that night. My sleep was fitful that evening, between the fever, headache and nausea. My normally healthy body, which is in pretty good shape for 63 years, started to deteriorate I felt weak and overheated. Almost 24 hours after we called about my high fever, a man and a woman arrived in full protective gear in plastic face shields (reminiscent of those worn by riot police), in plastic gowns that stretched head to toe that were taped at the wrist to medical gloves not one part of their body exposed. When they came into the cabin like that, I figured something serious must be going on. Still, relieved that we finally seemed to be getting some help, I calmly explained my symptoms. Despite the doctor's very broken English, I was able to understand that he was asking how high my temperature was, and then through my equally broken Japanese we tried to tell him. I asked if anything could be done to lower my fever; the doctor did not seem to understand my question. Then, suddenly, he left. At no time during his visit did the doctor mention anything about the health of my wife or her exposure to me. My wife tried to get me to eat something, which was impossible, but she searched in her luggage and found a couple of Tylenol tablets, which helped to lower my fever for a short time. Yet it came roaring back. Another long night of cold showers turned into another day of lost appetite, headache and nausea. Each morning, the captain would make announcements over the loudspeaker, informing us of general announcements but always ending with a number of how many passengers had tested positive and would therefore be removed from the ship, which was docked in a port in Yokohama, then be taken to a hospital. We really started to wonder how bad things might get when we heard the number 60. It was surreal watching the reports on TV, seeing our ship on the news all over the world. One time, mid announcement, the captain actually said, "I know you probably already heard this on the news." The fear of the unknown can be frightening. I had all the symptoms of the new coronavirus that I was reading and hearing about with the exception of a constant cough. But we couldn't communicate with the medical help available. On the 13th, I woke up in a complete sweat, my sheets completely soaked. The fever had broken, my nausea was gone, my temperature was close to normal. I was able to eat breakfast. Then, funny enough, the phone rang in our room and it was the medical team explaining that they were going to take me to a hospital in Yokohoma, Chiba University Hospital. I tried to explain to them that I was feeling much better. The man on the phone said he would get back to me. By the time I got out of the shower, there was a knock on the door, and two men dressed in full body protective gear those same face shields and medical gowns and all were there to escort me off the ship. Without objection from the medical team watching and waiting for me, I hugged and kissed my wife. Then I was led down the ship corridor to a waiting ambulance. Once at the hospital, I was placed in isolation, tested for the virus and told to wait for the results. Twenty four hours later, I was informed by my doctor, who spoke great English, that I had tested positive for the virus. I was shocked because I no longer felt any symptoms. I stayed in the hospital in Yokohama, quarantined for 14 days, only leaving to get a C.T. scan, which confirmed that the virus had given me pneumonia: "It's what the virus does," the doctor told me. I asked other questions. But then I stopped asking them because every answer I got was, "We don't know;" including to the question "How long am I going to be here?" In the meantime, my wife along with the many other Americans on the Diamond Princess who didn't seem to be exhibiting symptoms was flown on a chartered flight by the United States government to Travis Air Force Base in California. On exactly the fourteenth day of my quarantine, the six tests for the virus the hospital staff had used came back negative. The U.S. embassy told me afterward that the Center for Diseases and Control and Prevention required two negative test results in a row, spaced 24 hours apart. I was tested again and the following day received the news that, thankfully, I had tested negative again; presumably, the coronavirus was gone from my body. Soon after that, I was told in an email from the C.D.C. that I had been removed from the No Fly List and could return home, without restrictions. I'm back in Utah now with my wife. But we have older parents who live about a mile away from us, so I am still self quarantined just to be safe. It's clear that some people are especially at risk, particularly the elderly or infirm; and that any of us could get unlucky and contract a case more severe than mine. But take this from someone who contracted it and survived: If you're healthy, it probably won't be so bad. The chances are your body will fight back and win. 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. 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Researchers studied 983 adults 65 and older with four or fewer years of schooling. Ninety percent were immigrants from the Dominican Republic, where there were limited opportunities for schooling. Many had learned to read outside of school, but 237 could not read or write. Over an average of three and a half years, the participants periodically took tests of memory, language and reasoning. Illiterate men and women were 2.65 times as likely as the literate to have dementia at the start of the study, and twice as likely to have developed it by the end. Illiterate people, however, did not show a faster rate of decline in skills than those who could read and write. The analysis, in Neurology, controlled for sex, hypertension, diabetes, heart disease and other dementia risk factors. "Early life exposures and early life social opportunities have an impact on later life," said the senior author, Jennifer J. Manly, a professor of neuropsychology at Columbia. "That's the underlying theme here. There's a life course of exposures and engagements and opportunities that lead to a healthy brain later in life." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
If writers can be said to have an animating concern that threads through their work memory for Proust, love for Austen then 's is none other than the animating force itself, the soul. Davis has been quietly publishing a novel every few years since 1988. She has gathered a small devoted following, and yet she is refreshingly unconcerned with wider success. Her writing exists outside of genre and trends and time. She operates in a mode that could be called surreal realism, where the boundaries between reality and fantasy dissolve into a place where imagination is akin to gravity and exerts a pull just as powerful. Her eighth novel is even more metaphysical and experimental than its predecessors. If a Hilma af Klint painting could become a book, it would be this one. "The Silk Road" opens with a mystery. Eight cosmic beings, whose memories of a shared childhood lead us to believe they are siblings (though they are perhaps variations on a single soul, reincarnations of one another), are taking a yoga class in a subterranean labyrinth somewhere in the arctic north. They are referred to only by their professions: the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman and the Cook. The class is led by the enigmatic Jee Moon, who is described as "shrouded in something aqueous." Someone, though we never learn who, fails to arise from corpse pose. It is deemed a murder, but no one is especially interested in solving it. The book's other mysteries seem more pressing to a reader what state of existence are these beings in, who is Jee Moon, where are we, what is the plague that has decimated the population and yet the novel is just as uninterested in answering them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Cameron Champ arrived at Olympia Fields with the words "Jacob Blake" and "Black Lives Matter" written on his shoes, in the wake of Blake being shot by police in Kenosha, Wis., about 90 miles north of the site of the BMW Championship. OLYMPIA FIELDS, Ill. Golf played on even as other sports in America stopped, and it gave Cameron Champ a chance to speak out at the BMW Championship. Then, with powerful words about a desire to find a solution to racial injustice. Champ is one of four players of Black heritage on the PGA Tour, and one of only two the other is Tiger Woods who reached the second of three events in the FedEx Cup postseason. He arrived at Olympia Fields wearing a white shoe on his right foot and a black shoe on his left. On the right shoe were the words "Jacob Blake" and "BLM" for the Black Lives Matter movement, in the wake of Blake being shot seven times in the back by police in Kenosha, Wis., about 90 miles to the north of Olympia Fields. Written on his sneakers is "Papa Champ," his grandfather who died late last year. His grandfather was Black, as is his father, Jeff, who briefly played minor league baseball. His grandfather grew up in the South during the Jim Crow era. "When people say all lives matter, yes, all lives matter, but so do Black lives," Champ said. "It's a situation where, again, as a country, as a whole we've kind of dug ourselves a hole. Now with media and people videotaping and seeing things, it's starting to come alive. People are starting to talk about it, which is the good thing. Without dialogue, without talking about it, nothing is going to happen. "It's a decent start, but obviously there's still a lot of stuff going on that quite frankly should not be happening at all," he said. "It just has to end." Champ was among the few players who were under par midway through the opening round of the BMW Championship until his round got away from him. He had two double bogeys on the front nine for a 42 that put him in danger of missing out on the Tour Championship next week. Hideki Matsuyama to made a 65 foot birdie putt on his final hole Thursday to lead the BMW Championship. Matsuyama, a Japanese player who has gone three years since his last victory, birdied two of his last three holes for a 3 under par 67, one of only three rounds under par on a course that was long, tough, firm, fast and nothing like the last two weeks. "I'm not sure really what I had going today, but that last putt, the long putt that went in, very happy with that one," Matsuyama said. "So we'll remember that one." Dustin Johnson, who won The Northern Trust last week at 30 under par, opened with a 71. He was told that even three straight rounds of 60 would not be enough to reach 30 under at Olympia Fields. "Yeah, but I would win," he said. Woods needs to finish around fourth to have any hope of returning to East Lake next week in Atlanta to chase the 15 million bonus for the FedEx Cup winner. He was hovering around even par a few shots out of the lead. Woods finished with three straight bogeys for a 73 and was running hotter than the weather. A three time U.S. Open champion, Woods knows all about control and patience and key pars putts. And then he let a reasonable round get away from him. The event has no spectators but Champ had a gallery Thursday that included PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan for the last few holes of his opening nine holes. Monahan was tracing developments Wednesday night when the N.B.A. did not play three playoff games, and other sports soon followed. Postponing the BMW Championship, even for a day, did not appear to be part of the conversation. Woods said he was in touch with Monahan on whether to play and "all the guys were on board." "Obviously, there was talk about it because of what happened," Woods said. "But we're all on board, on the same page." The PGA Tour released a statement before the round began that it supported the "player led, peaceful, powerful ways" the other leagues N.B.A., M.L.B., soccer, W.N.B.A. and women's tennis sought to bring about change. "The PGA Tour supports them and any of our own members standing up for issues they believe in," the statement said. The tour said in June, after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, that it was committed to racial equity and inclusion in the cities where it plays and would increase support for national movements. Monahan and golfer Justin Varner, who is Black, participated in a video discussion on race, after Varner posted to social media a description of his experiences growing up as a Black golfer in Gastonia, N.C. The protests hit home to Tony Finau, who is of Tongan and Samoan descent, and has talked about facing discrimination because of the color of his skin. His cousin is Sacramento Kings forward Jabari Parker. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Nate Hinton has emerged as one of the fashion industry's most promising young image makers.Credit...Rafael Rios for The New York Times The Man Behind the New Front Row Nate Hinton has emerged as one of the fashion industry's most promising young image makers. In the fashion world, there are a bunch of rules. Most people are scared to break them, sometimes for good reasons, other times not. About a year and a half ago, Kerby Jean Raymond, the creative director of the fashion line Pyer Moss, led subway challenged fashion editors to Crown Heights in Brooklyn for a show called "American, Also." A fantasy of black life free from the threat of racism and police brutality, it featured a 40 person gospel choir, artwork by Derrick Adams and references to "The Negro Motorist Green Book," a pre civil rights era travel guide. For reasons that extended beyond wokeness, Mr. Jean Raymond's show was one of the most acclaimed of the season. Then he followed it up with a decision to toss out the fashion calendar, in favor of showing just once a year. A select group of established designers had begun this move a few seasons before, but Mr. Jean Raymond was arguably the first who made that decision just when he was poised for stardom. Nate Hinton, the founder of the Hinton Group, a two year old fashion P.R. firm, understood the logic behind Mr. Jean Raymond's move. Mr. Hinton is his publicist and, therefore, a chief enabler, a guy whose job undoubtedly includes a certain amount of implementing the client's wishes. Still, sucking up wasn't principally what was going on when he helped Mr. Jean Raymond arrive at the conclusion that the fashion calendar was a relic. First, said Mr. Hinton, who is 39 and looks closer to 26, there was the cost of staging a show twice a year (usually 150,000 each time, at minimum). That made sense a decade ago, when having a fashion week slot was the only accepted way for a designer to build heat around a collection. Back then, sites like Style.com ran pictures within a day or two but hardly anyone saw them so the clothes weren't old news when they hit store shelves, and fashion magazines, several months later. Instagram changed that. Yet designers, egged on partly by the publicists who made money publicizing those shows, kept going broke trying to keep up. "It makes no sense," Mr. Hinton said during one of several interviews over the last week. "It cripples young designers." That is particularly true for his clients, many of whom are people of color in an industry that just five years ago had barely any brand name black designers. But now, Mr. Jean Raymond's approach to fashion week is spreading throughout the industry, along with an obvious question: What if Mr. Hinton, as one of fashion's most promising young image makers, reaches the top tier of the fashion heap by helping to kill fashion week? WHEN PEOPLE DISCUSS publicists an admittedly small group conversation usually centers on whether they lied on behalf of a client or said yes or no to a journalist's request for an interview. That makes them something like a fashion hybrid of a P.R. firm and a Hollywood agency. (Their all black suits even match the ones favored by agents at CAA and William Morris.) For many years, KCD's chief competitor has been PR Consulting, whose founder, Pierre Rougier, is largely inseparable from Nicolas Ghesquiere and Raf Simons, two erstwhile fashion darlings. Where friendliness was KCD's corporate mandate, PR Consulting helped create an air of exclusivity for Mr. Ghesquiere and Mr. Simons by dismissing those perceived as wannabes (or worse, middle market.) Mr. Hinton worked for both firms, and his solo career seems like an attempt to meld the friendly demeanor of Ed Filipowski (his boss at KCD, who died in January) with the clubby synergy that exists between Mr. Rougier and the curated circle of designers he represents. "That's how Kerby and I relate to each other," Mr. Hinton said. "It's part of why I understand his vision and what he wants. We know the same people, we share friends, we hang out." BACK WHEN MR. HINTON entered the industry, there wasn't just a dearth of black designers. There were few black behind the scenes people in positions of authority. "I don't even know if I can think of one," said Mr. Hinton, who has a level of candor, even chattiness, that for better and perhaps for worse, is uncharacteristic of publicists. Mr. Hinton grew up in Norfolk, Va. His mother was an anesthesia technician, and his father wasn't around, he said. "There was never enough money," Mr. Hinton said. "That's part of what motivated me." At Booker T. Washington High School in Norfolk, he staged fashion shows in which students modeled borrowed street wear from Iceberg and Girbaud. At Shaw University, a historically black college in Raleigh, N.C., he studied physics, but protons didn't capture his attention quite like Tom Ford did. In 2003, Mr. Hinton graduated with a degree in business administration. He moved to Washington, D.C., for a job at Federated, the department store conglomerate. A year later, he moved into an apartment in Paterson, N.J., and commuted to New York City, where he was hired as the sample supervisor at Prada (that's fashion speak for running the company closet). From there, he moved into the brand's public relations department. In 2011, he was hired by Mr. Rougier at PR Consulting. In 2012 he was fired by him after a dust up whose central elements operatics and pettiness sit atop fashion's periodic table. The end came after the actress Emma Watson picked a dress for the MTV Movie TV Awards. It was made by a little known brand called Brood, whose account representative at PR Consulting was Mr. Hinton. "It was like my first V.I.P. moment," he said. On the day of the show, Mr. Hinton got what he described as a violent flu and failed to get the news release out before his trip to the emergency room. People magazine was among several outlets that published pictures of Ms. Watson without naming his client. "I'm, like, slightly incapacitated," Mr. Hinton said. "I can't really respond to emails and texts. And so Pierre calls me, and he's going off on me." Looking back, Mr. Hinton realizes it would have been smart to text Mr. Rougier and say he was in the hospital; that not informing him had a flaky millennial quality. Still, Mr. Hinton said the final straw was the apology he didn't deliver. "I was fired for my reaction to that call, which was just as saucy as his," he said. (Mr. Rougier, asked about this, called Mr. Hinton "a great guy.") Soon after, Mr. Hinton was hired by KCD. Two of the firm's clients were Maxwell Osborne and Dao Yi Chow, who, as the creative directors of Public School, were among a tiny group of well known minority designers. "Nate really got close to them and became part of their team and their circle, and I think that opened his mind to what he really wanted to do," said Rachna Shah, a partner at KCD who served as his immediate supervisor. In 2016, Mr. Hinton received a phone call from one of Mr. Rougier's top aides. She informed him that Raf Simons was taking over Calvin Klein. Might Mr. Hinton come to work on the account? Mr. Hinton said he would, seeing it as an opportunity "to sort of clear my record with Pierre, if you will." "Also," he said, "it was Raf, and being able to order his clothes at a discount was great for me." (Mr. Hinton was kidding. But also not.) Mr. Jean Raymond gave Mr. Hinton and his five person team desks in the Pyer Moss offices in Chelsea. According to Mr. Jean Raymond, Mr. Hinton will also be getting equity in the company, though when and how much isn't totally clear. "It's in process," Mr. Hinton said. A number of clients Mr. Hinton later signed up failed to pay their bills; fees usually run about 7,000 a month. They parted ways with Mr. Hinton, and others joined up. One is Sergio Hudson, a Gianni Versace obsessed African American designer who made the pantsuit Demi Lovato wore to sing the national anthem at the Super Bowl. Another is Claudia Li, a New Zealander of Chinese descent whose clothes have a Comme des Garcons on the Q Train to Fort Greene vibe.Last week, she and Mr. Hinton stood in a conference room at her sunny garment district office preparing the seating chart for her Feb. 8 show. Ms. Li, 31, wore a white hooded sweatshirt and a pleated yellow and blue skirt she designed. Mr. Hinton had on a black Aliette hoodie, Acne Jeans ("my faves") and Rick Owens sneakers that look like Converse All Stars and sell for about 30 times the price. While Mr. Hinton moved around color coded Post its, Ms. Li talked about how lucky she was to work with him. For one, she said, her previous P.R. personcost too much. For another, Mr. Hinton "recognized the establishment without being enslaved by it." Mr. Hinton chimed in about the importance of speaking directly to consumers and building community around brands. "But we're not trying to say, 'Screw everyone,'" he said. "We'd love to have Anna Wintour at her show." I asked Mr. Hinton if he was in a position to call Ms. Wintour and plead Ms. Li's case. "I can call her," he said. "Would she answer the phone? Hell, no!" Of course, Mr. Hinton encountered Ms. Wintour when he worked the red carpet at the Met Gala for KCD. And he sort of knew her before that. "At Prada, I was responsible for delivering her clothing orders," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Paula Vogel's "Indecent," a well respected play that received three Tony Award nominations and two wins, will close on Broadway after struggling to gain traction at the box office. The last performance is scheduled for June 25 at which time it will have run for 15 previews and 79 regular performances. "Indecent" had a well reviewed Off Broadway production last year at the Vineyard Theater; its transfer to the Cort Theater was the Broadway debut of Ms. Vogel, a theater industry stalwart and a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the director Rebecca Taichman, who won a Tony for her work on Sunday night. The play was a passion project for Ms. Vogel and Ms. Taichman, who together developed its story, the history of the early 20th century work "God of Vengeance," a Yiddish play that was dogged by censorship and charges of obscenity. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
DAVOS, Switzerland Is the "end of the euro" over? Among political and business leaders gathering here for the World Economic Forum's annual meeting, the talk seems to be have shifted away from doomsday forecasts of an imminent euro collapse. Instead, the debate is now focusing on the best way for the euro zone to weather an economic downturn and whether it can emerge stronger from the ordeal. Leaders like Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany are displaying a renewed will to preserve the common currency and are appearing more united. Business leaders have made clear their desperate desire to save the euro zone. And the European Central Bank's willingness to flood the banking system with cash has won crucial time. "Europe is a great and magnificent project," Mrs. Merkel, who is not normally known for florid pro European oratory, said Wednesday in Davos. "We wish to further develop this great achievement." But in light of the many policy mistakes made by Mrs. Merkel and other European leaders in the past, there are still plenty of doubters. Economists like Kenneth S. Rogoff at Harvard University remain skeptical that the euro can survive the tension between indebted, slow growing countries in the south and economically healthier ones in the north. Portugal's borrowing costs have been rising again, despite E.C.B. bond market intervention intended to be supportive. And Greece remains a disaster, desperately trying to negotiate a deal with its creditors as its economy plummets. On Thursday, David Cameron, the British prime minister, bashed the euro zone for what he said was its lack of competitiveness. He invited businesses to invest in Britain instead. "Europe's lack of competitiveness is its Achilles' heel," Mr. Cameron said here. It could just be the Alpine air, or the "we can save the world" vibe among forum participants. But the prevailing view seems to be that the euro crisis can be mastered and eventually turned into an opportunity for European countries to clear away obstacles to entrepreneurship and other impediments to faster growth. "A lot of people want to save the euro: This is the principal message from Davos this year," said Mario Moretti Polegato, president of Geox, the Italian shoe and apparel maker. "In the future when we remember this crisis, we will say this is when Europe learned what it needed to do." Mario Draghi, the president of the E.C.B., who will speak at Davos on Friday, is much praised here for presiding over a huge expansion of the low cost loans available to euro zone banks. By cutting interest rates and allowing banks to borrow money at 1 percent interest for three years instead of just one year, the E.C.B. poured hundreds of billions of euros into the financial system in December and eased fears of a collapse of the banking system. Those measures have not fixed the problem. But they have given leaders more time to address the euro zone's lack of a strong central government and its creaky economies. "The E.C.B. measures have really helped to create some space for thinking," said Erik Berglof, chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which provides financing in the former Soviet bloc and in new democracies in northern Africa. With the exception of Mr. Cameron, the tension among European leaders seems to have cooled. During her speech Wednesday, Mrs. Merkel spent less time hectoring other leaders about the need for austerity and more time talking about growth. On Thursday, she met in Berlin with the Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, and praised his efforts to create a more dynamic economy. "I have to say, we are following this with exceptional respect," Mrs. Merkel said after meeting with Mr. Rajoy. "Many of these are not easy steps, and for this reason we wish the government exceptional success with all the efforts that have been undertaken." "We are bound together in Europe, but we are also bound together by the euro," she said. "We want a stable, successful euro, and that can only happen when every one of us is successful." While it is important that E.U. leaders agree at a meeting Monday to constraints on government spending, Mrs. Merkel said, "it is equally important that we speak about growth and job creation and that every country will bring its suggestions to the table." There has been speculation that, despite official denials, Germany may be willing to support an expansion of the euro zone bailout fund, to reassure markets that there is an adequate firewall in case of some unexpected shock. Mrs. Merkel's comments are part of a marked shift in tone, reflecting in part entreaties from Mario Monti, the Italian prime minister. Mr. Monti has played a crucial role in changing the prevailing narrative about Europe, by showing more will than his predecessor, Silvio Berlusconi, to remove barriers to entrepreneurship. Unlike Greece or Portugal, Italy is considered too big to fail. If markets believe that Rome can manage its debt, that will go a long way to easing fears of a collapse of the euro. Mr. Polegato, the Geox president, said Mr. Monti had helped Italy win back credibility. "He is not a politician he is a technician," said Mr. Polegato, who described himself as a friend of Mr. Monti. "He is fostering trust in Italy." He said he was optimistic that Mr. Monti would cut regulatory overhead, like the multiple layers of approval needed to expand a building. Still, European leaders are having big problems arriving at a solution for Greece, the country that provoked the debt crisis in the first place. Greek leaders seem paralyzed, and it has become obvious that they will need additional aid to avoid a full scale default and economic collapse. The European Union's top economic official, Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn, said Thursday that more public money would be needed for Greece, even if private bondholders agreed to take a share of losses on Greek bonds. Mr. Rehn told Reuters that euro zone governments and E.U. institutions would need to make a contribution to reduce Greece's public debt to close to 120 percent of annual output by 2020. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
A few years ago, the folk singer Tom Rush released an album that included some disparaging comments about the Chinese crested dog. This wasn't all that surprising, since these dogs are "little fluffy white guys" as Mr. Rush described his wife's pets, the kind he was embarrassed to be seen with in the big dog town of Moose, Wyo., where he lived. To escape notice, he walked them at night on long retractable leashes, an exercise he described as "Trolling for Owls," the title of his album. He may now find the gumption to walk them during the day, in Moose or anywhere else in the country. The breed has a newly discovered heritage: Scientists reported Tuesday that the Chinese crested dog is one of a handful of breeds that trace part of their ancestry to the first dogs to populate the Americas 10,000 or more years ago. Heidi G. Parker and Elaine A. Ostrander and their colleagues at the National Institutes of Health, made the discovery in a large study of 1,346 dogs in 161 breeds that they conducted using some existing genomic information and by gathering DNA samples from people's pets at dog shows and other events. They published the results in Cell Reports. The research team was interested in both the general question of how dogs are related to each other and aiding the search for disease genes. Dr. Ostrander's lab also works on human cancers, and dogs can provide genetic clues. The new paper does not focus on disease genes, however. "We wanted to create a data set that would be a great reference," Dr. Ostrander said. Dogs were domesticated 15,000 or more years ago, scientists now think, perhaps in Asia or Europe or in both places independently. The fossil evidence indicates they accompanied the first people who migrated from Asia to America more than 10,000 years ago. But those dogs seem to have disappeared when Europeans brought their own Old World dogs over. Traces of ancient dogs in modern breeds have been glimpsed, but this study looks in depth at DNA from many individual dogs 170,000 points in the dog genome to find which breeds share large amounts of genetic material. Greger Larson at Oxford University, a specialist in ancient DNA who studies the first appearance of dogs from ancestral wolves, said that there has been a big focus on the early stages of domestication. "What's great about this study," he said, is that it brings whole genomes to bear "on breed development," which is something that appears to date back only 200 years. Before that, it seems there were types of dogs, like herders or guard dogs, but during the Victorian era, dog breeding became so mixed up that it is hard to trace breed ancestry back any further. The new research confirms much historical evidence about breed creation and has some intriguing new findings, like the list of breeds that show the heritage of ancient New World dogs. The researchers found several breeds that shared large chunks of DNA not found in other breeds: the Chihuahua, Chinese crested dog, rat terrier, toy fox terrier, American hairless terrier, Mexican hairless (or Xoloitzcuintli) and Peruvian hairless. They concluded that the DNA most likely comes from ancient American dogs. The Chinese crested dog, despite its name, seems not to have come from Asia at all. And the toy fox terrier is a lot closer to the rat terrier than to fox terriers. These terriers and the American hairless terrier seemed to be descended from what were called "feists," dogs that were common in the southern United States and may have been a mix of European hounds and Native American dogs. Among other discoveries, Dr. Parker said they found that some behaviors, like herding, were developed more than once. It seems that long before individual breeds were created, herding dogs were bred independently in Britain, Northern Europe and Southern Europe. The study shows how recent human movements affected dog breeds. For instance, traces of German shepherd were found unexpectedly in the Mexican hairless and Peruvian hairless, evidence that the dogs of the first Europeans in the Americas got around. As for Mr. Rush's dogs, they were not plain old Chinese crested dogs. As he pointed out, they were "powder puff apricot teacup" Chinese cresteds. So he may decide he wants to stay on the night shift after all. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Norman Rockwell's most famous paintings are going on tour. "Four Freedoms," four World War II era works inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1941 State of the Union address, will travel around the United States and France in the exhibition "Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt the Four Freedoms," scheduled to open in June 2018 at the New York Historical Society. The government turned the paintings, where were printed as covers of The Saturday Evening Post in 1943, into posters that helped raise 133 million for the war effort. They are "Freedom of Speech," depicting a dignified Everyman standing up to speak his mind; "Freedom of Worship," with a group in prayer; "Freedom From Want," with an idyllic family dinner; and "Freedom From Fear," which shows parents tucking in their children. Other paintings and drawings by Rockwell and by contemporaries like J.C. Leyendecker, Mead Schaeffer and Dorothea Lange will accompany the "Four Freedoms" in the show. The tour is organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., which will host the exhibition from June 2019 through August 2019. Other stops after that totaling six, with a possible seventh in Washington include the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich., the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia; and the Memorial de Caen in Normandy, in France. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The Dutch art dealer Jan Six says that "Portrait of a Young Gentleman" is by Rembrandt, and several high profile experts agree. AMSTERDAM The Dutch art dealer Jan Six is a direct descendant of a 17th century burgher who sat for one of Rembrandt's most important paintings, "Portrait of Jan Six." It has remained in his family's possession for 11 generations. Naturally, he grew up to become an old masters specialist. Mr. Six now says that he has discovered a new Rembrandt, a portrait of an unidentified young man that he purchased at a Christie's auction in London in 2016 for 137,000 pounds, or about 185,000. If he is right, "Portrait of a Young Gentleman" would be the first wholly unknown Rembrandt painting to be attributed in 44 years and worth many millions more. The painting has been endorsed as genuine by Ernst van de Wetering, the world's leading Rembrandt authority, who wrote a six volume encyclopedic register of the artist's works, "The Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings." With this attribution, Mr. van de Wetering places the "Portrait of a Young Gentleman" as Rembrandt painting No. 342. "I'm absolutely convinced," said Mr. van de Wetering in a telephone interview, adding that the painting was "no doubt an authentic Rembrandt and an interesting contribution to Rembrandt's oeuvre." Norbert Middelkoop, curator of paintings, prints and drawings at the Amsterdam Museum, also said, "I fully support the attribution." "It's absolutely an Amsterdam based portrait made by Rembrandt in 1634 or '35," he said in a telephone interview. "There are so many similarities to 100 percent secured works by Rembrandt." Bendor Grosvenor, a British art dealer known for discovering old master "sleepers" at auction, bid on the painting at Christie's as well. "I saw it in the flesh and I thought it was probably by Rembrandt," he said in an interview. "And since then Jan has done a great deal of research," he added, "and Ernst van de Wetering agrees it's by Rembrandt, so I don't know what more you could do, really." But other experts said that they were not yet ready to weigh in on the attribution. "We're following the research and we're very keen to hear what people are saying," said David de Witt, senior curator at the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam. "Right now we'd like to have a chance to join everyone else in studying the work and considering the evidence." Christie's had offered the painting as being from the "school of Rembrandt" and estimated its sale price at PS15,000 to PS20,000. Mr. Grosvenor said the work had been very dirty and covered in dark varnish, so it "wasn't entirely easy to get to grips with the picture." Mr. Six spent 18 months doing historical and technical analysis of the painting, including paint sample analysis, X radiography and other scanning technologies. He also showed the painting to about a dozen Rembrandt experts. Conservators at the Rijksmuseum, the Dutch national museum, also examined the painting using macro X ray fluorescence scanning, comparing its pigments with a pair of Rembrandt pendants, "Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit," which the museum purchased along with the Louvre in 2015 for 180 million. "It has many features in common with the Marten Soolmans portrait," said Petria Noble, head of paintings conservation, in a telephone interview, "but it requires more research." "I personally think it's possible" that it is a genuine Rembrandt, she added, "but what I still want to be able to do is to investigate further." Mr. Six said the painting had simply been overlooked. "My gut feeling is that the painting was hanging in a hallway of a country house for hundreds of years and people just neglected it," he said. "It seems fantastic but this does happen." The last full attribution of a previously unknown Rembrandt was "The Baptism of the Eunuch," a small early work, in 1974. A missing painting from Rembrandt's series on the five senses, "The Unconscious Patient (An Allegory of the Sense of Smell)," was rediscovered at an estate sale in New Jersey in 2015. Mr. Middelkoop said the new work is likely to attract a lot of scholarly interest: "It doesn't happen so often that a new Rembrandt appears out of the blue." Meanwhile, Mr. Six said he would sell the painting, but he did not yet name a price. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
We Tried Facebook's New Portal Device (So You Don't Have To) Facebook's new gadgets, Portal and Portal Plus, are meant to bring people closer together. So we Mike Isaac and Farhad Manjoo, two technology writers for The New York Times took the 199 and 349 devices for a test run over the last week to see if they could make us feel more connected to each other. We both installed the Portal, which starts shipping on Thursday, in our homes (our bedrooms, to be exact). The devices are video calling machines that people can use to talk through a screen to other Facebook users. They have a 12 megapixel camera with high definition video and artificial intelligence software; the camera follows people about as they move around. The Portal has raised some privacy concerns, especially since Facebook has been scrutinized for how much information it already has on users. Were we worried about what these always on devices might collect on us? Here's how it played out. Mike: Why, hello, Farhad! It's been a while since we last shared a column together. Farhad: I've had the time of my life not talking to you. Then last week, I learned I'd be getting Facebook's new video calling machine so you could call me up whenever you felt like it. Oh, boy. Do you know how The Times has been running ads showing all the hazards reporters have to go through to get important stories? I think agreeing to install a Facebook designed machine that puts me on speed dial for Mike Isaac should get me a starring role in one of those spots. Mike: You should be so lucky. So I have to say, waking up next to you in my bedroom was, uh, quite an experience. I put my Portal Plus on the desk that sits bedside. The screen saver cycled through my photo albums on Facebook and Instagram and also occasionally your face. What was your experience like initially? The unboxing process was funny to me. It felt like an Apple design moment; every piece of plastic and "pull here" tab was carefully placed, with the intentionality that Apple usually saves for its device packaging, but with a very Facebook y twist on things. There was an iconic Facebook thumb on my power cord holder, for example. Setting up my Portal Plus was easy. Popped the thing out of the box, plopped it on my desk, plugged it in, connected to Wi Fi and my Facebook account. From there, I think, I called you almost immediately. The great thing about these devices is that they are stationary and always on. When you want to call someone, you just tell it to call the person no looking for your phone, no holding the phone while you chat. It all just works with a single utterance. (Everything old is new: These devices are like landlines!) The problem with Amazon's Echo Show is its fixed viewing angle if you don't have it pointed exactly at you, it's hard to have a conversation. My kids, who use the Show to call my parents, are always fighting with each other about who gets to stand right in front of the screen. The Portal solves that problem in a neat way: It uses software to follow you around a room, always keeping the speaker in frame and cropped. I found this very useful. Mike: The hardest part for me was dealing with how much I instantly liked the device. I expected it to be chintzy because it's the company's first piece of hardware. But like you said, it wasn't. The screen is huge on my Portal Plus basically like an iPad Pro strapped to a tall Sonos and the calls were all crystal clear video quality. I will also admit I loved the augmented reality lenses, a flourish Facebook is adding to pretty much all of its camera based apps. Just like Snapchat, I can choose a filter that turns my face into a werewolf, or stick a (live) cat on my head as a hat. Cat as a Hat: a goofy gimmick worthy of Dr. Seuss but it works! Farhad: Of course, I can see people objecting wait, not only are you putting a Facebook connected machine in your house, but its camera will also follow you around the room, like some kind of digital Eye of Sauron?! Mike: That was my biggest problem and likely Facebook's most difficult hurdle to overcome when selling the Portal. It was the idea that I was putting an always on camera in my home, connected to Facebook, 24 hours a day. There was no shaking the feeling that I was being watched. Facebook anticipated this. To protect from that creepy feeling, they built a kill switch into the hardware that turns off the microphone and camera. They also provided a piece of plastic to physically sheathe the camera's eye. No more taping over the laptop lens like Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, once did. Facebook also went out of its way to let us know that all video chats are encrypted, and the company does not store the contents of the calls, nor does it listen in on them. But even that wasn't enough for me! Whenever I wasn't using the Portal, I unplugged it. I turned the camera around to face the window looking over the back yard. I would periodically check to make sure all lights or microphones were off when I took a phone call or text. Am I too paranoid? Maybe. But that's only because of the tech environment we find ourselves in, largely a situation of Facebook's own making. The company doesn't really have anyone to blame but itself. Farhad: I think your fears are reasonable, both about these types of devices in general and about one made by Facebook in particular. Facebook has a demonstrably worse record on privacy than many of its big tech peers. It also has a business model, targeted advertising, which encourages it to walk up to the limit of what users will accept, and sometimes to walk beyond that line. Let's not forget that Mark Zuckerberg once said that privacy is an outdated social norm. I don't think he believes that anymore, and Facebook has been working to improve how users can manage their private data on the platform. Still, if you're going to choose between a calling device made by Facebook and one made by Amazon or Apple, you wouldn't be crazy to discount Facebook's device because of its business model and history. All that said, a lot of people are just fine with the level of insight Facebook has into their lives. If you already chat and call on Facebook Messenger on your phone, then chatting and calling from Portal isn't putting you in any greater danger. Mike: Are you going to buy one? Farhad: Probably not not because I don't like it, but because I doubt it would be very useful for me. I have an Echo Show, and I like that it gives my kids an easy way to talk to my parents (who also have one). But it's not an everyday use case, and there are plenty of other ways to make video calls. Portal is better than the Show at making calls, and for a first piece of hardware, it's quite impressive. But it's still a device of fairly limited functionality a well designed luxury at this point. Mike: Agreed. But I'll admit: I'll miss our Portal calls when we return the units to Facebook. I guess we'll always have our Slack chats. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Richmond Hill, in southwestern Queens, can be an eye opener for the uninitiated home buyer. Neck rolls may even be in order. They'll help with the double take: Victorian houses with verandas and grassy lawns a few blocks from the subway; locals gallivanting on horseback in Forest Park; street parking on a Saturday. Perhaps the most unusual sight in this tree lined neighborhood: a for sale sign. "I really lucked out," said Ernest Gutierrez, 39, who, with his wife, Jennifer Deeb, 41, bought a seven bedroom Victorian house in the area for 780,000 last year in an off market deal. Mr. Gutierrez, a finance director for a media company who already owned a house two blocks away, got wind of the listing about a month before it was to hit the market for 800,000. He and Ms. Deeb met the sellers, whose family had lived in the house since 1961, and made the first and only offer entertained, promising to keep the house's historic character intact, and to someday pass it on to their three children. The sellers accepted the next day, despite the prospect of getting more on the open market, and the buyers became only the third owners in the house's 110 year history. To find the most difficult neighborhoods to crack, we asked the real estate website StreetEasy to analyze residential sales turnover in New York City since 2010, based on city Department of Finance records. StreetEasy excluded the borough of Staten Island, because it had insufficient data. We used neighborhood boundaries as defined on StreetEasy's website. The data included repeat sales of the same properties between 2010 and mid 2017. Richmond Hill, where Mr. Gutierrez and Ms. Deeb have settled, had 9 percent turnover; the neighborhood's southern section barely registered above zero, the lowest in the city. Bushwick had 3 percent turnover, the slowest in Brooklyn. Melrose, in the Bronx, had just under 2 percent. In Manhattan, the neighborhoods least likely to display a for sale sign were Marble Hill, with 5 percent turnover, followed by Chinatown, with 9 percent. By contrast, the neighborhood with the most sales activity was Downtown Brooklyn, where 51 percent of residential inventory sold. The turnover rate in the four boroughs overall was 15 percent in that period. Grant Long, the senior economist at StreetEasy, said the surge in Downtown Brooklyn was likely caused by a wave of condo construction in the area. Prices in many of the low turnover neighborhoods are climbing, spurred by lack of inventory. That's part of the problem, said the real estate appraiser Jonathan J. Miller. "It's money on paper," he said. "Because, where are you going to go?" Higher prices across the city, he said, encourage longtime owners to stay put. For buyers trying to break into these neighborhoods, browsing online listings may not get you anywhere. Many of these properties are not formally listed, while others are shopped around quietly before making a public debut. Sometimes, you just have to know "the guy" the broker in the neighborhood, who may or may not be a guy, whom everyone trusts. "I don't need signage," said Joseph Milone, the owner of Joseph Milone Realty, who relies on word of mouth, and eager buyers, to sell homes in Morris Park, the Bronx, where he has lived since 1979. Dan Scaglione, 51, an owner of Scaglione Brothers' Bakery Deli on Morris Park Avenue, became a part time salesman with the Pantiga Group realty three years ago, because patrons kept asking him for real estate leads. "Sellers just tell their friends and neighbors," he said. "If you don't know the neighborhood, you won't see the listings." Advertising is not his problem. "A couple months ago," he said, "I put a sign up, I walked back a block and a half to my business, and I had three calls already." The neighborhood, about an hour's subway ride from Midtown, has a bustling Little Italy, and has attracted a large Albanian population, as well as Hispanic and Chinese buyers. It's appealing to first time buyers, who spent a median 485,000 on a home here last quarter, according to StreetEasy. That's up almost 13 percent from last year, but still a relative steal in a community filled with spacious brick rowhouses. "If this one wasn't available, there's no doubt we'd still be looking," he said. Renovations are underway, with Mr. Caiola gutting the kitchen and replacing 1970s design faux pas. Next up: getting to know the neighbors. "There's a cafe we go to, where it's all old Italians sipping espressos," he said. It's a joy for Mr. Caiola's father, a second generation Italian American with roots in Calabria, who chats up locals on the block when he visits. On the other hand, Mr. Caiola said, "there's very little anonymity," which took some getting used to after living in Brooklyn rentals. "If you're new to the neighborhood, they've just got their eye on you. People actually say 'hi' to you." As climbing prices push home buyers farther from the city core, some are finding hidden gems and unexpected competition. "Sunset Park, it wasn't on our map," said Thomas Allen, 37, a private investigator, of the Brooklyn neighborhood south of trendier precincts like Park Slope. The turnover rate in Sunset Park is 8 percent, according to StreetEasy's analysis. Mr. Allen and his wife, Jennifer Jancuska, the resident choreographer for the Broadway show "Hamilton," had been renting in Park Slope for 12 years when their landlord sold to a developer early this year, and told them they had to move. With the help of Jay Molishever, an associate broker at Citi Habitats, they found a new listing for a two bedroom, one bath apartment in a low rise co op, right on Sunset Park, for 550,000. "I knew this was home, before we even saw the whole place," said Ms. Jancuska, who was impressed by the bustle of activity in the park neighbors practicing tai chi, couples dancing to Chinese pop and folk songs, early morning soccer games. Other buyers felt the same there were already three above asking price bids. "It's so much more diverse," said Caroline Bailey, 49, a copywriter who bought in a nearby co op in March, after renting in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, where she said, "we had diversity, but it was all white people from different countries like France." In her new building, the board meetings are conducted in both Chinese and English. "There's a lot of waving, and gesturing, and smiling, too," she said. She estimates that about 80 percent of the owners in her 36 unit co op are of Chinese descent, plus a mix of Latinos and South Asians. That echoes the neighborhood's two main streets, Eighth Avenue, a hub for Chinese immigrants mostly hailing from Fujian province, and Fifth Avenue, with many storefronts bearing signs in Spanish. Securing a new home in low turnover neighborhoods can take more than getting there first or waving a big wad of cash. In Richmond Hill, some residents are appalled by new owners who destroy historic elements of the mostly Victorian style houses. In their case, Mr. Gutierrez and Ms. Deeb appealed to the seller's love for the house. The couple vowed to keep the house intact, including stained glass windows, original oak and maple floors and dentil molding. They hope their children, Chloe, 16, Amelia, 12, and 8 month old Elliot, will take up the mantle one day. It didn't hurt that their agent, Regina Schaefer Santoro, an associate broker at Parkside Realty and a longtime resident, got Mr. Gutierrez in to see the house before it hit the market. Ms. Santoro is a friend of the seller, she said. To buy their new home, Mr. Gutierrez and Ms. Deeb had to sell their old Richmond Hill house. The buyers: Aaron and Alexandra Leeder, former renters in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. "They wanted somebody who cared about the house," said Mr. Leeder, 34, who works for TwentyPine, a job recruitment firm. Ms. Leeder, 32, is a preschool teacher who now cares for their daughter, 7 month old Vivienne. They bought the Gutierrez Deeb home, a 1920s detached three bedroom, for 580,000 last year, in a deal arranged by Ms. Santoro. Mr. Gutierrez said there was another offer on the table that was slightly higher. One of the deciding factors, he said, was a heartfelt letter from Ms. Leeder, about how she had grown up in nearby Forest Hills, and how she'd like to raise a family in the area. "It was kind of a nice passing of the baton," Mr. Leeder said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The Clippers, who have never made it to the conference finals in the playoffs, entered the season with arguably their best roster ever, stretching back to the 1970 71 season when they were known as the Buffalo Braves. Last summer, they acquired Kawhi Leonard and Paul George, giving the team a fearsome duo to go toe to toe with the other starry Los Angeles pair, LeBron James and Anthony Davis of the Lakers. But the Clippers seemed to have difficulty gelling all season. Even so, they were the second seed in the Western Conference and were on the doorstep of the conference finals, up 3 1 on the Denver Nuggets. But for the second consecutive series, the Nuggets reeled off three straight wins to advance to the next round, shocking the Clippers. Rivers joined the Clippers in 2013, five years after winning a championship with the Boston Celtics. In his first year, Rivers led the Clippers to 57 wins and a first round playoff win. This would be his most successful season. The next year, Rivers was promoted to president of basketball operations giving him the rare authority over personnel decisions and on court play. But in 2017, Rivers lost the front office job after the Clippers continued to falter in the playoffs, even with the All Stars Blake Griffin, Chris Paul and DeAndre Jordan in their primes. Rivers has been an N.B.A. coach for two decades and compiled a regular season record of 943 681. In 2000, his first year as coach, he won the Coach of the Year Award with the Orlando Magic. With the Clippers, Rivers went 356 208, a .631 winning percentage. He led the franchise to its best stretch in its history: six playoff trips in seven seasons, and three postseason series wins. But Rivers also has a dubious distinction: He is the only N.B.A. coach to ever lose three seven game series after leading, 3 1. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Anna Moneymaker, Jeenah Moon, Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times and Erin Schaff/The New York Times Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Anna Moneymaker, Jeenah Moon, Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times and Erin Schaff/The New York Times Credit... Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Anna Moneymaker, Jeenah Moon, Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times and Erin Schaff/The New York Times This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Last year, when Vice President elect Kamala Harris was still running for president, she was asked if her administration's Justice Department would take the extraordinary step of pursuing criminal charges against a former president, Donald Trump. "I believe that they would have no choice and that they should, yes," she responded. There was and still is a choice, of course, but it's a choice that President elect Joe Biden will now have to make, as well as a question that has never been answered in the nation's history: If the president is suspected of having committed a crime, should he be investigated, and potentially prosecuted, after leaving office? Would it even be possible? Here's what people are saying. The power and limits of presidential pardons Mr. Trump has claimed that he has "the absolute right to pardon myself," raising the possibility that he may try to do so before Jan. 20. The Constitution grants the president the authority to grant "reprieves and pardons," though only for federal crimes, and not in cases of impeachment. But beyond those exceptions, the power is famously broad and has occasionally invited accusations of abuse. President George H.W. Bush, for example, pardoned six Reagan administration officials implicated in the Iran contra scandal, while President Bill Clinton pardoned his own half brother for a cocaine conviction, as well as a wealthy financier and Democratic donor who was considered a fugitive for tax evasion. Perhaps with these precedents in mind, President Trump's advisers have recently broached the idea of using the power to shield his children, his son in law and his personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, from potential prosecution. Such pre emptive pardons are unusual, but the Supreme Court ruled in 1866 that the president has the power to issue them. In the most famous example, President Gerald Ford pardoned President Richard Nixon after his resignation, though the practice dates back to George Washington's presidency. Whether President Trump would be able to pre emptively pardon himself, however, is a very different question. "There is no definitive answer because no president has ever tried to pardon himself and then faced prosecution anyway," my colleague Charlie Savage explains. "As a result, there has never been a case that gave the Supreme Court a chance to resolve the question." As Jonathan Mahler details in The Times Magazine, there are numerous potentially criminal acts for which the president could be investigated, including tax evasion and fraud, campaign finance law violations, obstruction of justice, public corruption and bribery. "No ex president has ever been indicted before," Mr. Mahler writes, "but no president has ever left office with so much potential criminal liability." But the risk that Mr. Biden would be perceived as weaponizing the Justice Department for partisan ends is profound, Ruth Marcus argues in The Washington Post. "Anyone who believes it to be simple is not grappling with the implications of taking the unprecedented step of lodging criminal charges against a former president," she writes. "The United States is not a place, chants notwithstanding, where those in power lock up their political enemies. There is a delicate line between the pursuit of justice and indulging the urge for retribution." And because of how broadly presidential powers are interpreted, it would be extremely difficult to prove that any of Mr. Trump's actions in office were actually criminal, according to Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law school. "The Democrats cannot win," he writes in The Times. "An investigation and potential indictment and trial of Mr. Trump would give the circus of the Trumpian presidency a central place in American politics for the next several years, sucking the air out of the Biden administration and feeding into Mr. Trump's politically potent claims to martyrdom." Yet as high as the costs of holding Mr. Trump accountable may be, some think the costs of not doing so would be even higher. "This whole presidency has been about someone who thought he was above the law," Anne Milgram, the former attorney general of New Jersey, told Mr. Mahler. "If he isn't held accountable for possible crimes, then he literally was above the law." For many, the point of a national investigation into Mr. Trump would be much larger than the man himself, a means by which not only to seek justice for past harms but also to prevent future ones from being inflicted. As Adam Serwer has noted in The Atlantic, it was President Barack Obama's decision to "look forward as opposed to looking backwards" on the George W. Bush administration's systematic use of torture that enabled Mr. Trump to appoint Gina Haspel, who oversaw a secret prison where at least one detainee was tortured, to head the C.I.A. in 2018. "There is no reason for powerful people to follow the rules if they know they cannot and will not suffer any consequences for breaking them," Mr. Serwer wrote at the time. "A system in which only the weak are punished is not a two tiered system of justice, but one in which justice cannot be said to meaningfully exist." For that reason, Martin Flaherty, an authority on other nations' struggles with state crimes, told Jane Mayer at The New Yorker that investigating Mr. Trump could have "a salutary effect" for the country. Mr. Biden has promised he would stay out of any prosecutorial decision the Justice Department might make about his predecessor. But Renato Mariotti argues in Politico that an investigation by a special counsel appointed by the attorney general, not Mr. Biden would be the best way to ensure the process's independence. If the president does successfully pardon himself or if Mr. Biden's administration simply decides to "move on," as one adviser said is his preference any criminal investigation of Mr. Trump would be left up to the states. For over a year now, the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., has led the only known such investigation, which concerns a range of potential financial crimes predating Mr. Trump's presidency. (Mr. Trump faces many more civil cases, including the New York attorney general's investigation into his business practices and a defamation suit from E. Jean Carroll, who claims he raped her in the 1990s and harmed her reputation by calling her a liar while in office.) Mr. Vance's investigation has been stalled since last fall, when the president sued to block a subpoena for his tax returns and other records, in a bitter fight that for the second time is expected to be resolved by the Supreme Court. The scope of Mr. Vance's investigation is unknown, but prosecutors have suggested in court papers that they are looking at a range of potential crimes, including tax and insurance fraud and falsification of business records. "He'll never have more protection from Vance than he has right now," Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, told The Times. "And there is very little that even a new administration that wants to let bygones be bygones could do formally to stop him." But prosecuting Mr. Trump under state law poses its own challenges. New York's state courts give defendants far more protections than federal courts, and there are stricter rules about what evidence can be presented to a grand jury. What's more, Mr. Vance has not yet committed to running for re election next year, and the race to replace him is crowded with candidates who have made the president's legal fate into a campaign issue. At the very least, however, state prosecutions would avoid "the specter of a sitting president weaponizing his Justice Department against a political rival," argues Randall Eliason, who teaches white collar criminal law at George Washington University Law School and opposes a federal criminal investigation of Mr. Trump. But by the same token, Mr. Posner says that any convictions for Mr. Trump's pre presidential behavior "will not reflect on his presidency nor hold lessons for future presidents." In the end, Mr. Mahler argues, the dilemma about how to move forward is less about Donald Trump than about the structural problems his presidency laid bare. "Trump may have turned the executive branch into an instrument for his personal gain and deliverance," he writes, "but it was the country's legal and political systems that enabled him to do it." Here's what readers had to say about the last debate: Who should get a coronavirus vaccine first? (Plus, you can find your place in line here.) Paul from Colorado: "My wife and I are in our early 70s and would dearly love to be out and about with the help of a Covid vaccine. But we also know that we have to balance the benefit that comes with retirement with the responsibility to keep ourselves safe by following the recommendations of our health care leaders. "Essential workers, teachers and everyone else who are always in harm's way don't have the luxury of choosing how to respond. They are constantly at risk. We can stand down and await our turn so others can better serve our communities (and us)." Christine from Oregon: "I'm fine with the C.D.C. or state authorities deciding who gets vaccinated for Covid first. My wish is that once the decision is made, it's done and there is no jumping the line. In the early days of the pandemic, when tests were tough to find for normal people who were ill, the wealthy or even entire professional sport teams could always find a test. I suspect that's the way the vaccine will go too." Margaret, an American living in Austria: "I think that the people who work in government, e.g., the president, vice president, cabinet members, etc., should go first and on national TV to show people that the vaccine is safe." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
A once in a century public health crisis is unfolding, and the richest country in the world is struggling to mount an effective response. Hospitals don't have enough gowns or masks to protect doctors and nurses, nor enough intensive care beds to treat the surge of patients. Laboratories don't have the equipment to diagnose cases quickly or in bulk, and state and local health departments across the country don't have the manpower to track the disease's spread. Perhaps worst of all, urgent messages about the importance of social distancing and the need for temporary shutdowns have been muddied by politics. Nearly all of these problems might have been averted by a strong, national public health system, but in America no such system exists. It's a state of affairs that belies the country's long public health tradition. Before the turn of the previous century, when yellow fever, tuberculosis and other plagues ravaged the country's largest cities at regular intervals, public health was generally accepted as a key component of the social contract. Even before scientists identified the microbes that cause such diseases, governments and individuals understood that a combination of leadership, planning and cooperation was needed to keep them at bay. Some of the nation's oldest public health departments in Boston, New York and Baltimore were built on that premise. By pushing infectious disease outbreaks to the margins, those health departments helped usher in what scientists refer to as the epidemiological transition: the remarkable leveling off of preventable deaths among children and working age adults. That leveling off continued in the second half of the 20th century, as new federal laws ensured the protection of food, air and water from contamination, and national campaigns brought the scourges of nicotine addiction and sexually transmitted infections under control. So great was the effect of these public health measures that by the time the century turned again, life expectancy in the United States had risen sharply, from less than 50 years to nearly 80. "Public health is the best bang for our collective buck," Dr. Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told me. "It has consistently saved the most lives for the least amount of money." One would never guess as much today. Across the same century that saw so many public health victories, public health itself fell victim to larger forces. "It was like a great forgetting took place," Wendy Parmet, a public health law scholar at Northeastern University, told me. "As the memory of epidemics faded, individual rights became much more important than collective responsibility." And as medicine grew more sophisticated, health began to be seen as purely a personal matter. Health care spending grew by 52 percent in the past decade, while the budgets of local health departments shrank by as much as 24 percent, according to a 2019 report from the public health nonprofit Trust for America's Health, and the C.D.C.'s budget remained flat. Today, public health claims just 3 cents of every health dollar spent in the country. The results of that imbalance were apparent long before Covid 19 began its march across the globe. Local health departments eliminated more than 50,000 jobs epidemiologists, laboratory technicians, public information specialists between 2008 and 2017. That's nearly 23 percent of their total work force. Crucial programs including ones that provide vaccinations, test for sexually transmitted infections and monitor local food and water supplies have been trimmed or eliminated. As a result, several old public health foes have returned: Measles and syphilis are both resurgent, as is nicotine consumption among teenagers and the contamination of food and water with bacteria and lead. More from "The America We Need" Each of these crises has received its own flurry of outrage, but none of them have been enough to break what experts say is the nation's default public health strategy: neglect, panic, repeat. "We ignore the public health sector unless there's a major catastrophe," said Scott Becker, the head of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. "Then we throw a pile of money at the problem. Then we rescind that money as soon as the crisis abates." Imagine a public health system in which all public health entities used the same cutting edge technology in their laboratories and on their computers. This would include equipment that enables rapid diagnostic tests to be developed and deployed quickly in a crisis; web portals where data on disease spread, hospital capacity and high risk communities can be logged and shared across the country; and user friendly apps that enable private citizens to facilitate the efforts of epidemiologists. The technology to create such a system already exists it only has to be adapted and implemented. That, of course, requires investment. In 2019, a consortium of public health organizations lobbied the federal government for 1 billion to help the nation's public health system modernize its data infrastructure. They were granted 50 million. In the wake of Covid 19, that sum has been increased to 500 million. But much more is needed. There is a 5.4 billion gap between current public health spending and the cost of modernizing public health infrastructure, according to the Trust for America's Health report. However much money is ultimately allotted for this work, it will have to be deployed equitably, in high income and low income communities alike. Health departments everywhere are struggling to contain the Covid 19 pandemic, but that struggle is particularly acute in marginalized communities, where health is already fragile, public health departments are sometimes nonexistent and mistrust of officials tends to run high. Early data from several states indicates that Hispanics and African Americans already account for a disproportionately high number of coronavirus related deaths, a finding that is both unsurprising and unacceptable. A better system would direct federal aid to where it's needed most and would work to eradicate legacies of injustice and abuse that mar the history of public health victories. Of course, none of these changes will help if the underlying system is not grounded in and guided by rigorous, apolitical science. Public health agencies were created precisely because the decisions required to stop a pandemic in its tracks, or protect the nation's food supply, or keep measles at bay were considered too difficult and too important to be swayed by politics. The vision for public health reform is not especially complicated or expensive. But it is bold and it will require boldness from every corner of the country. Politicians will have to incorporate public health into their priorities; they might start by making "Public Health for All" as urgent a rallying cry as any concerning health insurance. Universal access to health care is a human right, but it will not protect us from the next pandemic or clean water crisis, for that matter. Captains of industry will have to commit acts of genuine altruism, because not all of the innovations needed to build a modern public health system will be clearly lucrative. If you're making a fortune out of cornering the market on ventilators, for example, designing a cheaper, easier to make version of your product might sound like bad business. Likewise, developing vaccines and antibiotics may seem like a risky investment compared with the prospect of another million dollar cancer drug. But when the next pandemic threat arrives, millions of lives not to mention the entire global economy may depend on exactly these things. Mind sets will have to change, too. A society that prizes individual liberty above all else is bound to treat health as a private matter. But if Covid 19 has taught us anything, it's that our health and safety depend on collective action. That's what public health is all about. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
CHICAGO Encouraged by reports of job creation and companies announcing plans to move back downtown, developers here have introduced plans for half a dozen new office towers in the Loop central business district. They are the first new buildings to be proposed since the 2008 financial crash and are seen as a hopeful sign that the slump of the last few years is finally ending. Although many of these projects have yet to secure financing and sign up tenants, at least two are set to break ground before the end of the year. John Buck, a Chicago developer, said, "I don't think there's a crying demand for five million square feet of new office space, but there may be room for one or two million square feet." He said that he had a project in the early stages of development but declined to discuss it. William Rogers, leader of the Tenant Representation Group of Jones Lang LaSalle in Chicago, said that for the projects that will be built, "the question is, Who is going to get that first big anchor tenant?" Two of the most interesting projects are River Point and Wolf Point, both to be located at the confluence of the north, south and east branches of the Chicago River in the northwest quadrant of the Loop. River Point will be located on the west bank of the river at Lake Street, while Wolf Point will be on the north bank at Orleans Street. The River Point site has several small buildings and a large parking lot on it. The Wolf Point site is vacant. Both projects also involve the real estate company Hines of Dallas as co developer. Of all the announced projects, River Point is the furthest along, having recently closed on its roughly 400 million financing. In a sign of the uncertainty that still rattles the market here, the exact number of floors and amount of square footage remain unclear. Kevin Shannahan, Hines's chief executive for Midwest operations, said the building would have 45 to 50 stories and 900,000 to 1.1 million square feet of space, depending on the success of leasing efforts. The project, which includes a 1.5 acre public park along the river, will break ground by the end of the year and be finished in early 2016. River Point is being described as the first speculative office building to go up downtown in more than 20 years. Mr. Shannahan, however, said he expected one or more anchor tenants to be in place by the time construction of the tower begins. "It's about supply and demand," he said. "Large contiguous blocks of space are becoming harder to find downtown." He added that "Google, Groupon, Motorola and Microsoft are all in the market right now with very large space requirements." The building is being designed by Pickard Chilton Architects of New Haven, which also designed the last Chicago office tower that Hines built in 2009, 300 North LaSalle. River Point has a dramatic concave glass facade that, according to the chief designer Anthony Markese, is meant to complement the convex facade of its neighbor across the river, 333 West Wacker Drive. (That building, designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, was completed in 1983.) Hines's partner at River Point is Ivanhoe Cambridge, the real estate division of a Canadian pension fund, Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec. One of the 10 largest real estate firms in the world, Ivanhoe is providing 85 percent of the project's financing. Arthur Lloyd, executive vice president of Ivanhoe, said the rate of job growth in Chicago made the city an attractive investment opportunity. Mr. Shannahan, of Hines, estimated that about 10,000 new jobs were announced in 2011, and said, "That's a great record for the downtown." Wolf Point is being developed by Hines, the Kennedy family and the Magellan Development Group of Chicago. The Kennedys have owned the site since the 1940s when the family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy acquired the adjacent Merchandise Mart. (The family sold the Mart as well as the Apparel Center in 1998 to Vornado Realty Trust, where they remain stockholders.) The project is being headed by Christopher Kennedy, a son of Robert F. Kennedy. Mr. Kennedy moved to Chicago in the late 1980s to manage the family's local real estate interests and has since carved out a successful career as a developer. Wolf Point is planned as a billion dollar, three tower residential and office complex that will take a decade to complete. The residential building, which will break ground this fall, will contain about 500 rental apartments aimed at young professionals. The office towers will follow in the next few years. The completed project will have upward of three million square feet in residential and commercial space. The project's architects are Pelli Clark Pelli of New Haven and bKL Architecture of Chicago. Mr. Kennedy said his family planned to continue to own the project. "We have a long hold philosophy and a commitment to the city that we think is one for the ages," he said. "We're very comfortable here." All of the proposed office projects are betting to some degree on Mayor Rahm Emanuel's aggressive efforts to attract new business to the city. In the last few years, companies like United Airlines, Sara Lee and MillerCoors have all announced plans to relocate all or part of their operations to downtown Chicago. Most have also received public incentives like tax increment financing grants. More recently, Google is reported to be close to announcing a lease for about 400,000 square feet of space in the Merchandise Mart. It would be used to house Google's recently acquired Motorola Mobility division. Mr. Buck, the developer, said the trend of companies moving downtown was "something I've dreamed about for 30 years. The rational place for office buildings is at the center of transportation networks, and in Chicago that's the Loop." Robert Wislow, chief executive of U.S. Equities Realty, a large real estate services firm here, said ease of recruitment was a major reason for relocating. "The work force continues to shift to younger people and many of them particularly those in creative fields like marketing and advertising have made the choice to work and live downtown," he said. He added that rents remained somewhat higher downtown but that, "real estate is a very small portion of any company's operating expenses. Payroll is the highest. The cost of real estate pales in comparison to recruiting." Mr. Wislow's firm scored what is considered the leasing coup of the year this spring when it signed United Airlines to a long term lease at the Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower), the country's tallest building. United, which is relocating from a suburban office campus it has occupied for more than 40 years, is taking 16 floors in the tower for a total of about 800,000 square feet. Kate Gebo, vice president for corporate real estate at United, said that management's desire for "culture change" was behind the move. Two factors were especially important in the decision. First was a desire to be closer to the firm's customers and partners. "Boeing is now right down the street from us," she said. It also is a recruiting draw. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Tiler Peck was a twinkling Swanilda in "Coppelia," a classic example of the art of the choreographer Marius Petipa, during New York City Ballet's spring season. New York City Ballet is impressive in a state of limbo. Peter Martins resigned as ballet master in chief at the beginning of the year; since early December, the company's day to day artistic life has been run by a team of four, all under 40. Yet City Ballet still the world's most valuable company for the excellence of its classical modernist repertory is in remarkably good shape. Had Mr. Martins resigned a decade or two earlier, the same could not have been said. Just what happened to make the difference in the years 2008 18? There are multiple answers. Dancers have learned again to step off balance into space and to embody their music rather than merely to follow it; and a number of excellent new ballets have revitalized the company's sense of mission. Another central factor has been the contribution of Andrew Litton, who joined the company as music director in 2015. He may not be an ideal ballet conductor he lacks the instincts of an accompanist, leading sometimes with scant regard to what's happening onstage. Yet, again and again, he has hungrily jumped in to established repertory and made us relisten to music we thought we knew. And, thanks to Mr. Litton and the darkly twinkling, fascinatingly musical Tiler Peck, "Coppelia" brought a classic example of the art of the choreographer Marius Petipa, who is celebrating his bicentennial and is the creator of several peak roles for leading ballerinas. An important part of Petipa's art was the way he constructed solos for these queen bees. One of Petipa's favorite devices can be seen in the third act solo for Swanilda, the heroine of "Coppelia." When the solo's opening melody returns, halfway through and now to teasingly hypnotic effect, Petipa makes his ballerina slowly travel across the stage in a single diagonal. As she repeats the same tiny sequence of steps as if making lace all on point, she subtly plays with her hands and eyes. The real spell comes in how she marries dance to music. With Swanilda, the diagonal is a retreat (downstage right to upstage left); its charm lies in how very little her upper body does and in how that little makes magic. With Ms. Peck and Mr. Litton on Saturday, this was a bewitching Petipa moment. Learn how Swanilda's ebullient, game changing character is shown in her steps. Other ballerinas have also been in full bloom this spring. Maria Kowroski's musicality was at its most multifaceted in her performances of George Balanchine's "Mozartiana": Not only does she play with rhythm now, but she also lets the music's harmonic stresses show in the tension she brings to classical body shapes. Sterling Hyltin, with her laughing eyes and enchanting blend of delicacy and audacity, was another winning Swanilda. Joaquin de Luz, who will give his farewell performance in October, is going out on a high. His Franz in "Coppelia," sunny and brilliant, embodied his characteristic amalgam of panache and polish. When Mr. Martins's successor is finally appointed, Mr. de Luz's departure and the absence of Amar Ramasar (currently in "Carousel") should prompt her or him to address the shortage of blaze amid the company's leading men. There are many fine partners (the Angle brothers, Jared and Tyler, set superlative standards, with the younger Russell Janzen almost as fine), but few heroes. Daniel Ulbricht, always sparky and engaging, keeps gaining subtlety; but Andrew Veyette, another source of virile humor, is showing a few signs of coarseness. The mysterious Anthony Huxley still varies, perplexingly, between being too guarded and being classicism inflamed. Zachary Catazaro, despite his handsome presence, shows only borderline capacity for bravura roles, while Chase Finlay physically as impressive as Mr. Catazaro, technically stronger, but often an awkward partner now comes across as more of a stuffed shirt than when he first emerged 10 years ago. Feminine pulchritude mattered to Balanchine; many of his dancers had the looks of the movie stars or models of their day. Several young women at soloist and corps levels today continue this connection of personal glamour to dance distinction: Unity Phelan and Emilie Gerrity (often paired, as if being usefully encouraged to learn from each other's virtues), Miriam Miller and Ashley Hod. The first three made several debuts of note this spring. Lydia Wellington and Meagan Mann, eye catching beauties too, are being given more opportunities at last, as is the bright, decisive Sara Adams. And Indiana Woodward, piquant, bubbly and brave, has become one of the company's most winning characters: She has only to gain more upper body distinction and facial legibility to deepen her power over the audience. This May, three new ballets were revived, but I find both Lauren Lovette's "Not Our Fate" and Peter Walker's "dance odyssey" too cliche laden to be worth watching a second time. In both cases, a same sex duet is made to look trite too foolishly gushy in "Not Our Fate," too tweely cute in "dance odyssey" (which elsewhere carries on as if same sex meetings were a private aberration). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Earlier this year Massachusetts enacted a law that allowed districts to remove at least half the teachers and the principal at their lowest performing schools. The school turnaround legislation aligned the state with the Obama administration's Race to the Top program incentives and a chance to collect a piece of the 3.4 billion in federal grant money. From Washington this makes abundant good sense, a way to galvanize rapid and substantial change in schools for children who need it most. In practice, on the ground, it is messy for the people most necessary for turning a school around the teachers and not always fair. Often the decisions about which teachers will stay and which will go are made by new principals who may be very good, but don't know the old staff. "We had several good teachers asked to leave," said Heather Gorman, a fourth grade teacher who will be staying at Blackstone Elementary here, where 38 of 50 teachers were removed. "Including my sister who's been a special ed teacher 22 years." And while tenured teachers who were removed all eventually found positions at other Boston schools, it's unsettling. "Very upsetting," said Ms. Gorman. "A lot of nervousness for teachers." Blackstone's new principal, Stephen Zrike, who made the decisions, agrees. "I'd say definitely good teachers were let go," Mr. Zrike said, explaining that a lot of his decisions were driven by particular skills he wanted for teams he was assembling. "I wouldn't doubt a lot will be excellent in other places." And how much to blame are teachers for the abysmal test scores at Orchard Gardens, a kindergarten through eighth grade turnaround school here, that's had six principals since opening seven years ago? The goal of the turnaround legislation is to get the best teachers into the schools with the neediest children, but often, experienced teachers get worn down by waves and waves of change and are reluctant to try again. "You fear being pulled by the latest whim," said Ana Vaisenstein, who has taught in Boston for 12 years. "Sometimes in education, there are so many changes being made at once, the important things get lost," said Courtney Johnson, a five year veteran. Asked about applying to one of the city's 12 turnaround schools, Lisa Goncalves, a first grade teacher with seven years' experience, said, "I'd be hesitant to go alone." And that is the simple idea behind a new program that is being used to staff three of the turnaround schools in Boston: you don't go alone. Rather than have the principal fill the slots one by one, the Boston schools have enlisted the help of a nonprofit organization, Teach Plus, to assemble teams of experienced teachers who will make up a quarter of the staff of each turnaround school come fall. "It's like jump starting a culture at these schools," said Carol R. Johnson, Boston superintendent of schools. "In turnaround schools, you often wind up with a high portion of first and second year teachers, so you need some experience, a team of teachers who are enthusiastic and idealistic." Said Celine Coggins, the chief executive of Teach Plus, which developed the idea and is financed by the Gates Foundation: "I think teachers want to know they're not going into a school alone as a hero." The teams will spend two weeks working together this summer. While teaching a full load, they will serve as team leaders for their grades and specialty areas like English immersion. They will work 210 days versus the normal 185 and get paid 6,000 extra a year. Their credentials are impressive. Ms. Vaisenstein, who will teach English immersion at Blackstone, has been in education 33 years, speaks Spanish and French, understands Portuguese and directed a Head Start program in Boston for five years. Lillian Pinet, an 18 year veteran, is fluent in Spanish and Amharic, an Ethiopian language, and teaches an education course at Boston College. Sylvia Yamamoto, who will teach third grade, is a 20 year veteran who taught English to foreign students at Harvard for years. Mr. Zrike, the principal at Blackstone, said Teach Plus had provided such a strong core of teachers to anchor the school that it helped him recruit other experienced teachers. And it has allowed him to take a chance on three new teachers he can pair with the Teach Plus veterans. The teachers had their reasons for wanting to come to the most challenging schools (at Orchard Gardens, 9 percent of fifth graders scored proficient in reading and math). Tulani Husband Verbeek, a reading specialist with seven years' experience, said she became disillusioned after teaching at a high achieving charter school. "They bragged all their graduates went to college, but they started with 120 freshmen and graduate 25," she said. The Teach Plus team approach, she said, "strikes me as a sincere effort to turn around the public schools." Ms. Pinet, who will be teaching at Orchard Gardens, where more than half the students are Hispanic or nonnative English speakers, came to Boston from Puerto Rico when she was 6, not knowing English. "I can remember being very nervous in reading group," she said. "And my teacher saying take your time, Lillian, you can do it. I felt respected." Ms. Pinet said she wanted to return the favor. The idea for inserting teams of experienced teachers came from teachers. In 2007, Teach Plus created a group of 15 teaching fellows, searching for ideas for turning around schools. The second most important thing they mentioned was a strong principal; the first, a team of effective teachers. "We thought like teachers," said Melanie Allen, a fellow, who's a nine year veteran of Boston schools. "We wanted to be surrounded with a group of equally collaborative and dedicated teachers with open doors. We wanted to create a tipping point that would inspire the school culture." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
Hostels are getting into history. Hostel Fish in Denver opened in June in a 120 year old building that once was an adult bookstore and is now on the National Historic Register (rates from 45 a night for 80 rooms outfitted by local designers). Chad Fish, an owner, said that because the social component of a hostel experience is important, the property also offers ski trips to the nearby Rocky Mountains, pub crawls and other concierge style services. The Society Hotel, a hostel hotel hybrid, opened in early November in the Old Town/Chinatown neighborhood of Portland, Ore. The unreinforced 135 year old Victorian era brick building was renovated with a cast iron facade into a four story property; rates start from 35 a night. Some brands are consciously choosing historic buildings for character and value. In September, Safestay opened a hostel in Holland Park, London, steps away from Hyde Park. Located in Cope Castle, which dates to 1605, the building has entertained guests like the Prince of Wales, King James I and King William III (rates from 23 a night). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
SAN FRANCISCO The ride hailing service Lyft has agreed to alliances with just about anyone working on driverless car technology. Its latest partnership aims to make its autonomous vehicle technology available to any car manufacturer. Lyft said Wednesday that it had reached a deal with Magna International, one of the world's biggest auto suppliers, to jointly develop and manufacture self driving car systems. The companies said they will work together to introduce autonomous vehicles to Lyft's ride hailing network. At the same time, Magna can sell the driverless car technology to any customer including other technology companies. Magna also said it would invest 200 million in Lyft's latest fund raising round, lifting the San Francisco based company's valuation to 11.7 billion. Lyft has opened its ride hailing network to other companies working on self driving cars, including Ford and General Motors, a major Lyft investor, so they can gain real world experience by picking up passengers and collecting data. Uber, Lyft's main rival, has been developing self driving technology mostly on its own. Waymo, a Lyft partner, is slowly introducing its own ride hailing service using autonomous Chrysler Pacifica minivans equipped with Waymo's own hardware and software. The hype over self driving cars has made development of the technology challenging for some traditional automakers. Car companies face huge salaries for top artificial intelligence engineers and limited access to data and key components. The competitive landscape is so charged that it has already given birth to at least one high profile lawsuit. As a result, automakers are confronting a choice: Pay big for a technology start up or risk falling behind. Last year, Ford announced it would invest 1 billion in Argo AI, an artificial intelligence start up focused on developing autonomous vehicle technology. GM acquired Cruise for an estimated 1 billion in cash, stock and incentive packages in 2016, the same year it invested 500 million in Lyft. It also has a major asset for self driving technology a ride hailing network picking up and dropping off passengers 10 million times a week. This provides Lyft with a customer base to introduce and test the vehicles and a way to collect information that can be used to "train" autonomous cars. But Raj Kapoor, Lyft's chief strategy officer, said it would be a few years before truly autonomous vehicles were ready for the road. "I believe this relationship will get us there faster," Mr. Kapoor said. Magna, a Canadian auto parts maker, already supplies a wide range of driver assist technology to its customers, including a system for staying in lanes, automatic emergency braking and rearview cameras. It also builds entire vehicles for customers like Mercedes Benz, BMW and Jaguar a capability that has made the company a potential partner for a new entrant like Apple. Magna has already been working on hardware for self driving cars, including radar and lidar an abbreviation for light detection and ranging that help the vehicles see the world around them. But Magna said the partnership with Lyft would be essential to helping it push further into autonomous vehicles, combining its automotive and manufacturing experience with Lyft's ride network to better understand the many situations that a self driving car will encounter. "The question isn't whether autonomous vehicles are going to happen but how long the transition is," said Swamy Kotagiri, Magna's chief technology officer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
TOMBOY The Surprising History and Future of Girls Who Dare to Be Different By Lisa Selin Davis In "Tomboy," the author Lisa Selin Davis leverages a familiar term to take a comprehensive look at gender performance in girls. As for who counts as a tomboy, Davis includes anyone who is seen (or who sees herself) as moving off the narrow path of conventional femininity. Under Davis's big umbrella we find girls who reject dolls, dresses and sparkles in favor of athletics, sportswear and dirt; those who embrace both the stereotypically girlish and boyish; and some for whom tomboyism is an early expression of what will evolve into a lesbian, trans or gender nonconforming identity. The consideration of gender scripts for girls is a well worn topic. Davis takes the reader in a fresh direction by illuminating the forces behind the shifting regard in which tomboys have been held. We learn that in the late 19th century, thanks to a parade of spirited literary heroines led by Louisa May Alcott's indomitable Jo March, approval of "feisty" girls ran high. Tomboy acceptance sank in the 1950s, when Rosie the Riveter and her daughters were returned to a hyper feminine domestic sphere in order to secure men's place in the work world. Mainstream tomboyism rose again in the 1960s and '70s, as second wave feminists brought up girls of their own. Then it was sidelined by the "commercial gender essentialism" of the 1980s and its drive to create distinct, hand me down thwarting markets: pastels and Care Bears for girls, primary colors and He Men for boys. According to Davis, "as money flowed into the economy and the middle classes surged later in the 20th century, more items were gendered. This served two purposes: to sell twice as much stuff, and to push women back into their places." Given Davis's thoughtful consideration of how money and power have shaped our ever changing view of tomboys, I would have welcomed more from her about the sexual objectification of girls in the media they consume. In recent decades, we have traveled from Jodie Foster's unisex 1970s "Freaky Friday" style to Sporty Spice's 1990s sexy jock to today's ultra curvy Kardashians. I was left wondering if the increasingly sexualized standard for girls could be entirely explained by the levers of money and power that Davis considers sex sells and objectification degrades its object or if she thought there was more to it. Though keeping her focus on girls and women, Davis touches on the fact that the classic male analogue for "tomboy" is "sissy": a term that is always leveled as a slur, and one meant to suggest homosexuality. While tomboys enjoy "sanctuary, a safe passageway over the line," boys risk being policed by their peers if they stray even slightly from macho extremes. Here, Davis may remind us of a fact that is easy to forget: Girls' latitude in the performance of girlhood is a rare example in which the gender deck is stacked in their favor. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Lovers of theater and performance can salute the return of the January festivals Under the Radar, Coil, American Realness, the Exponential Festival, Prototype: Opera/Theater/Now, etc. This year, these celebrations, synchronized with the annual conference of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, sprawl across New York, from the deck of the U.S.S. Intrepid to the galleries of the Brooklyn Museum and to dozens of more traditional spaces. As international art stars display their wares, and hometown heroes angle for touring gigs, there are works that take inspiration from world events and shows that riff on movies real and imagined; pieces that let you sit undisturbed, and ones that demand active involvement. Here are lists of this month's highlights by two critics for The New York Times. If You Want In on the Action In "Top Secret International (State 1)" from Rimini Protokoll, a German company with a longstanding interest in blurring the distinctions between art and life, audiences will meet at the Brooklyn Museum and explore the Egyptian wing while engaged in a mysterious mission. Armed with a smartwatch, a headset and some prompts about international intelligence networks, participants will slink past cat statues and regular museumgoers as they discover and share secrets. (Under the Radar, Wednesday through Jan. 15) Another way to raise your heart rate? Risking death at "Blankland! Boom Bat Gesture" at Vital Joint, a piece inspired by kiddie TV and by gore films. The show features an interactive game, "What Makes You Die?," as well as blood, cream pies and singalongs. (Exponential Festival, Jan. 19 28) The theater group 600 Highwaymen has experimented with forms of audience participation and nontraditional casting for years. Its new piece, "The Fever," pushes that conversation further. Inspired by Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring," the show now explores issues of relationships between the individual and the community. (Under the Radar, Wednesday through Jan. 15) David Lang and Mark Dion's "anatomy theater," at BRIC House, casts the audience as attendees at an 18th century public dissection of the body of a convicted murderess. Since grisly opera might make spectators hungry, they'll be served Brooklyn Brewery beer and sausage, with a vegan option available. (Prototype Festival, Saturday through Jan. 14.) Yara Travieso's dance theater piece "La Medea," also at BRIC House, recalibrates spectators as members of a Greek chorus who are buoyed by a Latin disco pop score while they observe the tragedy. (Coil, Jan. 20 22) If what you're really after is adulation, then make a reservation for Yehuda Duenyas's "CVRTAIN" at 151 Gallery. Audience members step onto a small stage and slip on a virtual reality headset transporting them to an elegant theater, where an audience of thousands will greet them with a passionate ovation. That ovation will change growing more enthusiastic or more disgruntled depending on their responses. (Coil, Tuesday through Jan. 15) The marvelously inventive Chicago collective Manual Cinema returns to New York with "Lula del Ray," at the Public Theater, about a lonely adolescent girl who runs away in the midcentury Southwest. The plot is only a little bit of what matters in a Manual Cinema show; the performers are entrancing merely doing what they do. As in "Ada/Ava" in 2015, it's a two for one experience: While shadow puppeteers and actors perform onstage, the silhouettes they make are projected on a big screen in a handmade looking film. A live band plays the score. (Under the Radar, Wednesday through Jan. 14) Trust is required for "Blind Cinema," Britt Hatzius's tantalizing production from Britain and Belgium: As an audience member, you will be blindfolded throughout, while a child seated behind you describes in a whisper a film that you cannot see. Presented with SVA Theater, where the performances take place, in partnership with East Village Community School, this piece employs techniques of audio description; the 40 minute movie will unspool in the mind's eye. (Coil, Monday through Jan. 12) Nikki Appino and Saori Tsukada's "Club Diamond" is set partly in 1937 in Tokyo, where an artist who makes his living narrating silent films at the end of their era finds his latest professional challenge in an American movie about a Japanese immigrant. A decade later, with his country under American occupation, he performs on the street. Ms. Appino directs both the stage and the film elements of this production at the Public Theater, which has music by Tim Fain. (Under the Radar, Thursday through Monday) The choreographer Ni'Ja Whitson's "A Meditation on Tongues" is a live adaptation of "Tongues Untied," Marlon Riggs's 1989 documentary about gay black men amid the AIDS crisis. An interdisciplinary piece about black and queer masculinity, this production, at the Abrons Arts Center, is a world premiere. (American Realness, Saturday through Monday) The interior hangar deck of the Intrepid Sea, Air Space Museum is the eye catching stage for an even more eye catching show: "Blueprint Specials," a batch of Broadway style Frank Loesser musicals from World War II, commissioned by the Army. Never before seen by the general public, and not staged since 1945, the pieces were made to be put on in the field by soldiers, each with instructions script, music, design, choreography by Jose Limon for creating morale lifting entertainment. Produced by the theater company Waterwell, this 90 minute revival boasts a cast of performers including Laura Osnes and Will Swenson; military veterans; and active duty and Reserve service members. (Under the Radar, Friday through Jan. 11) "The Bitter Game," a solo show by Keith A. Wallace, is a commentary on American race relations: what it is to be black in this country; the fear of being targeted by the police and how that wariness affects behavior; whose lives matter and how much. Mr. Wallace created the piece with Deborah Stein, who directs. It's 55 minutes of poetry and prose, at the Public Theater. (Under the Radar, Friday through Monday) Obsessive fans of J. D. Salinger hole up in his writing bunker in "Holden," a tragicomedy by Anisa George that examines American gun violence and male fantasies of bloodshed. Two characters are named for infamous admirers of Salinger's classic novel of adolescent disaffection, "The Catcher in the Rye": Mark David Chapman and John Hinckley Jr. A third, named Zev, prefers mass murder. A George Co. production presented by the New Ohio Theater, this play isn't part of a festival, but its return to New York, where it ran in 2015, is timed to coincide with the performing arts presenters' conference. (New Ohio Theater, Thursday through Jan. 14) I wish "Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster," Nicola Gunn's delicious looking, kinetic solo show from Australia, had a different title one that used "boom box," maybe, instead of "ghetto blaster." Does that phrase feel as needlessly off putting in Ms. Gunn's country as it does in this one? Crosscultural variables, in fact, are at the heart of this seriocomic philosophical inquiry into peace and discord. So are moral constants. Presented by Performance Space 122 and La MaMa, it proceeds from a simple question: You're in Belgium, and you witness a man throwing stones at a sitting duck. What's the right thing to do? (Coil, Jan. 11 14) If You Want to Catch Up With Downtown Favorites The ingenious playwright Kate Benson had a hit with "A Beautiful Day in November on the Banks of the Greatest of the Great Lakes," in which sportscasters provided color commentary on a family's Thanksgiving meal. She's turning from food to drink in " Porto " at the Bushwick Starr. Directed by Lee Sunday Evans, the show puts us in a neighborhood bar as the arrival of a new face shakes up the regulars. (Exponential Festival, Jan. 11 Feb. 4) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
JOSEPH BUBMAN took six months off his job as a management consultant two years ago to work with a charity in Kenya and Guatemala. It was something he had dreamed of doing and he spent almost a year planning it. "It exceeded my expectations," he said. "I was able to have a unique life experience and it afforded me opportunities I wouldn't have once I returned to my employer. I would absolutely do it again if I could." It may seem unwise, in these economically shaky times, to request time off, even without pay. Some people fear that the mere act of asking will make them look less committed than their colleagues. Or send a signal that they are thinking of leaving their current job. Or hurt their chances for promotion or a raise. While none of that is necessarily so, it's more important than ever to plan how you will approach your employer and to think in terms of a mini sabbatical a month or two to do something you have always dreamed of doing rather than six months to a year. First, find out if your company has a sabbatical program and what kind. According to an overview of employee benefits this year by the Society for Human Resource Management, 5 percent of about 500 companies surveyed offered paid sabbatical programs in 2009. That dropped to 4 percent in 2013. But unpaid sabbatical leave grew to 16 percent from 12 percent during that time period. That reflects a trend that Barbara Pagano, co founder of YourSabbatical, which helps companies and individuals develop sabbatical programs, has observed. "Companies are slowing down the activation" of such programs, she said, while "I see more employees trying to create their own sabbaticals." If your workplace has a program, you are in luck. If not, start researching. First of all, said Pat Katepoo, founder of WorkOptions, which is aimed at helping employees negotiate for flexible work time, you would be wise to not even ask for a sabbatical unless you have been at a place four or five years. "A one or two year employee is not in a strong negotiating position," she said. And make sure you are considered a valuable employee, as well as have some sense of how supportive your boss might be. "How does she react if you say you need to pick up your kid or bring your mother to an appointment?" Ms. Katepoo said. That might indicate how receptive she is to the concept of a mini sabbatical. Six weeks is a good time period to keep in mind for a mini or short term sabbatical because it allows a full month to go overseas or immerse yourself in a program, with one week at either end to get ready and decompress. But don't just shoot off an email to your supervisor asking her to consider the idea. It takes a lot more work than that. "A sabbatical takes a good deal of research," Ms. Pagano said. "I would suggest a year to prepare." Mr. Bubman would agree. He started working for Vantage Partners, a management consulting company, in 2007 and in 2011 took a six month sabbatical doing conflict management work in Guatemala and Kenya with a nonprofit. He laid the groundwork for his proposal early, first by letting it be known he had an interest in international work and "that if I didn't have the opportunity to do it, I wouldn't be around much longer." This might not work for everyone. First of all, Mr. Bubman was in his 20s, without a family or a mortgage, and could afford to be flexible. More important, he said, he worked for a company "with a unique culture where being transparent about long term plans is valued." Nonetheless, he knew just expressing an interest wasn't enough. He tried to be a model employee, even going so far as to volunteer for less glamorous assignments. Once he proposed the sabbatical in March 2010, he agreed not to leave until the following year. Mr. Bubman's sabbatical had some unusual aspects. His company had a relationship with Mercy Corps, the international development charity he worked for during his sabbatical, and it donated money to the nonprofit to help pay his stipend. But he still had to go through a fair amount of negotiations, including whether he would have to pay for his own health benefits while gone (he did) and how long he would promise to stay at his job once he returned (at least six months). In the end, he worked at Vantage Partners a year after coming back from his sabbatical and still consults for it while running Company Connector, a job search site. "Recognize that everything is negotiable," Ms. Katepoo said, who has self published an e book, "How to Get Six Weeks Off to Travel: A Complete Negotiation Guide." But before you even hint about your interest: Draw up a proposal, stating the purpose of your sabbatical in a few sentences (Ms. Katepoo offers wording depending on what kind of sabbatical you are thinking of taking). Describe how this could benefit your employer. Demonstrate how your work will be covered while you are gone. Decide whether or not you will be accessible and how. "The first question will be, How will your work get done?, so be sure the work coverage piece makes a strong case," she said. "It was the first time I've done that in my working life," said Ms. Moyer, who is 61. She used the time to unpack from a recent house move and see friends and family. Although it took a financial toll, she said it was viable because she had recently downsized. "I needed a serious attitude adjustment" before the sabbatical, she said. "I was irritable and wasn't doing as good a job. I've come back re energized now I'm a whirlwind." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Ms. Spector said in a statement, "The Guggenheim is stronger than ever before, and incredibly well positioned to emerge successfully from the challenges presented by 2020." She added that she was "pleased" that the independent investigation had "sought out the facts and confirmed what I have known from the start which is that I did not treat the guest curator of 'Basquiat's "Defacement": The Untold Story' adversely on the basis of race." Ms. LaBouvier wrote on Twitter, "I was never interviewed for the Guggenheim's Basquiat investigation/did not participate. It was not safe to do so a Board member threatened me in May 2019: 'I would not go up against the Guggenheim if I were you,' and did not trust an investigation instigated by said Board." She declined to comment further but confirmed that she was not interviewed for the investigation. The Guggenheim said through a spokeswoman that investigators reached out to Ms. LaBouvier multiple times but that she did not respond to their request for an interview. The museum said the investigators had reviewed more than 15,000 documents and conducted interviews with current and former Guggenheim employees and others affiliated with the institution. The group A Better Guggenheim made up of current and former staff members said in a statement: "The Guggenheim's aversion to transparency extended to this investigation. The investigative approach was not shared with employees, and we are aware of staff who bore witness to the harm museum leadership inflicted on LaBouvier who were not contacted by investigators. It is clear the investigation was not as thorough as this matter required." Ms. Spector has spent most of her career at the Guggenheim, except for a brief stint as deputy director and chief curator of the Brooklyn Museum that concluded in 2017. She explained her return at the time as "realizing that it's an opportunity I didn't want to pass up given the number of years I'd already committed to the Guggenheim." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The red phone looks very official, like in the movies.It's our own line that people can call from the States. I'm the only one who has the number. It really is like the Bat phone. What did you bring to make this institutional space feel personal? Funny photos of friends, books, DVDs. Personal stuff close to us is mostly in this room. It's like we have a little one bedroom apartment. You brought a lot of sneakers. It's a way of keeping my California ness alive. But, also, we're aware that people perceive us as slightly young and wacky. I don't think people look at us and see the TV image of an ambassador. Your time in Spain ends with the Obama presidency.What will you miss most? The thing I never anticipated is how much I'd fall in love with Madrid. It's an incredible walking city. I will start by La Latina, the old part of the city, and walk the several miles it takes to get back to the embassy. I never get sick of it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Scientists across the world are trying to piece together a perplexing puzzle: how exactly coronavirus affects the body, and how it spreads from person to person. In recent months, they have learned that the virus can live on some surfaces for three days and that it can stay suspended in tiny aerosolized droplets for about 30 minutes. The virus has been detected in saliva, urine and feces. Now researchers in China have found that the coronavirus, or bits of it, may linger in semen. But the paper, published Thursday in JAMA Network Open, a peer reviewed open access medical journal, does not prove that the virus can be sexually transmitted. The doctors tested semen from 38 patients at Shangqiu Municipal Hospital in Henan Province in central China. All the subjects, who ranged in age from 15 to 59, had previously tested positive for the coronavirus. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
About 30 percent of heart attacks, strokes and deaths from heart disease can be prevented in people at high risk if they switch to a Mediterranean diet rich in olive oil, nuts, beans, fish, fruits and vegetables, and even drink wine with meals, a large and rigorous new study has found. The findings, published on The New England Journal of Medicine's Web site on Monday, were based on the first major clinical trial to measure the diet's effect on heart risks. The magnitude of the diet's benefits startled experts. The study ended early, after almost five years, because the results were so clear it was considered unethical to continue. The diet helped those following it even though they did not lose weight and most of them were already taking statins, or blood pressure or diabetes drugs to lower their heart disease risk. "Really impressive," said Rachel Johnson, a professor of nutrition at the University of Vermont and a spokeswoman for the American Heart Association. "And the really important thing the coolest thing is that they used very meaningful endpoints. They did not look at risk factors like cholesterol or hypertension or weight. They looked at heart attacks and strokes and death. At the end of the day, that is what really matters." Until now, evidence that the Mediterranean diet reduced the risk of heart disease was weak, based mostly on studies showing that people from Mediterranean countries seemed to have lower rates of heart disease a pattern that could have been attributed to factors other than diet. And some experts had been skeptical that the effect of diet could be detected, if it existed at all, because so many people are already taking powerful drugs to reduce heart disease risk, while other experts hesitated to recommend the diet to people who already had weight problems, since oils and nuts have a lot of calories. Heart disease experts said the study was a triumph because it showed that a diet was powerful in reducing heart disease risk, and it did so using the most rigorous methods. Scientists randomly assigned 7,447 people in Spain who were overweight, were smokers, or had diabetes or other risk factors for heart disease to follow the Mediterranean diet or a low fat one. Low fat diets have not been shown in any rigorous way to be helpful, and they are also very hard for patients to maintain a reality borne out in the new study, said Dr. Steven E. Nissen, chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. "Now along comes this group and does a gigantic study in Spain that says you can eat a nicely balanced diet with fruits and vegetables and olive oil and lower heart disease by 30 percent," he said. "And you can actually enjoy life." The study, by Dr. Ramon Estruch, a professor of medicine at the University of Barcelona, and his colleagues, was long in the planning. The investigators traveled the world, seeking advice on how best to answer the question of whether a diet alone could make a big difference in heart disease risk. They visited the Harvard School of Public Health several times to consult Dr. Frank M. Sacks, a professor of cardiovascular disease prevention there. In the end, they decided to randomly assign subjects at high risk of heart disease to three groups. One would be given a low fat diet and counseled on how to follow it. The other two groups would be counseled to follow a Mediterranean diet. At first the Mediterranean dieters got more intense support. They met regularly with dietitians while members of the low fat group just got an initial visit to train them in how to adhere to the diet, followed by a leaflet each year on the diet. Then the researchers decided to add more intensive counseling for them, too, but they still had difficulty staying with the diet. One group assigned to a Mediterranean diet was given extra virgin olive oil each week and was instructed to use at least 4 four tablespoons a day. The other group got a combination of walnuts, almonds and hazelnuts and was instructed to eat about an ounce of the mix each day. An ounce of walnuts, for example, is about a quarter cup a generous handful. The mainstays of the diet consisted of at least three servings a day of fruits and at least two servings of vegetables. Participants were to eat fish at least three times a week and legumes, which include beans, peas and lentils, at least three times a week. They were to eat white meat instead of red, and, for those accustomed to drinking, to have at least seven glasses of wine a week with meals. They were encouraged to avoid commercially made cookies, cakes and pastries and to limit their consumption of dairy products and processed meats. To assess compliance with the Mediterranean diet, researchers measured levels of a marker in urine of olive oil consumption hydroxytyrosol and a blood marker of nut consumption alpha linolenic acid. The participants stayed with the Mediterranean diet, the investigators reported. But those assigned to a low fat diet did not lower their fat intake very much. So the study wound up comparing the usual modern diet, with its regular consumption of red meat, sodas and commercial baked goods, with a diet that shunned all that. Dr. Estruch said he thought the effect of the Mediterranean diet was due to the entire package, not just the olive oil or nuts. He did not expect, though, to see such a big effect so soon. "This is actually really surprising to us," he said. The researchers were careful to say in their paper that while the diet clearly reduced heart disease for those at high risk for it, more research was needed to establish its benefits for people at low risk. But Dr. Estruch said he expected it would also help people at both high and low risk, and suggested that the best way to use it for protection would be to start in childhood. Not everyone is convinced, though. Dr. Caldwell Blakeman Esselstyn Jr., the author of the best seller "Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease: The Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven, Nutrition Based Cure," who promotes a vegan diet and does not allow olive oil, dismissed the study. His views and those of another promoter of a very low fat diet, Dr. Dean Ornish, president of the nonprofit Preventive Medicine Research Institute, have influenced many to try to become vegan. Former President Bill Clinton, interviewed on CNN, said Dr. Esselstyn's and Dr. Ornish's writings helped convince him that he could reverse his heart disease in that way. Dr. Esselstyn said those in the Mediterranean diet study still had heart attacks and strokes. So, he said, all the study showed was that "the Mediterranean diet and the horrible control diet were able to create disease in people who otherwise did not have it." "This group is to be congratulated for carrying out a study that is nearly impossible to do well," said Dr. Robert H. Eckel, a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado and a past president of the American Heart Association. As for the researchers, they have changed their own diets and are following a Mediterranean one, Dr. Estruch said. "We have all learned," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
In 2000, a company called Pegasus Apparel Group was founded with private equity money and a big idea: Buy a group of fashion brands based in the United States and create a homegrown version of the major European luxury conglomerates. It snapped up Miguel Adrover, a darling of New York Fashion Week, plus Daryl K, Pamela Dennis, Judith Leiber and Angela Amiri. But one year later, it had sold most of them and renamed itself the Leiber Group. So much for that. In 2012, Liz Claiborne Inc., the holding company for Juicy Couture, Lucky Brand jeans and Kate Spade, renamed itself Fifth Pacific to telegraph its transformation into a lifestyle brand group that would leverage its coastal American identity into global markets a la big European luxury groups. By the end of 2013 it had sold both Juicy and Lucky. And in 2014 it renamed itself again: Kate Spade Co. So much for that. Every few years, it seems, another American company decides to try to mimic the success of the major European conglomerates, LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton (owner of more than 50 brands, including Givenchy, Fendi and Marc Jacobs, and of one of the largest market capitalizations in France), Kering (Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Saint Laurent, Stella McCartney) and Richemont (Cartier, Van Cleef Arpels, Chloe). And then it doesn't work. But because, it seems, hope springs eternal, this week another business put its hat in the ring: Coach, snapping up the aforementioned Kate Spade for 2.4 billion and creating its own stable of American brands, including Stuart Weitzman, purchased in 2015. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Ed Benguiat, a celebrated graphic designer known for his expertise in typefaces including the one you see at the top of the print and web editions of this newspaper started his design career in a not so celebrated post at a movie magazine publisher. "My job was to be a cleavage retoucher," he recalled in a video interview with the Type Directors Club. "My job was to take it out take the cleavage out, remove it." It was the years after World War II, an era of the restrictive Hays Code in the movies. "I was very good with an airbrush and buying doilies in the 5 and 10," he said, strategically placed doilies being key to the cleavage removal process. Mr. Benguiat went on to more sophisticated work. He became one of the go to designers of the second half of the last century, especially in matters of typography. His hand was behind more than 600 typefaces, several of which bear his name (which is pronounced ben GAT). The Telegraph of Britain, in a 2016 article about him prompted by the striking use of one of his fonts (ITC Benguiat) in the title sequence of the hit Netflix series "Stranger Things," called him "one of the type industry's greats." Mr. Benguiat was an important figure in the design world for a number of reasons. According to his citation in the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, where he was inducted in 2000, he helped establish the International Typeface Corporation, the first independent licensing company for type designers, and became its vice president. He also taught for almost 50 years at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. But it was his painstaking work designing new typefaces and modifying existing ones that made him a revered figure in the business, and that reached the public eye, although the public rarely knew his role. He designed logotypes for companies including Ford and AT T and for Esquire, Look, McCall's and other publications. His typefaces were seen in movies including "Super Fly" (1972) and "Planet of the Apes" (1968). "At three feet high, the serif of a face like Bodoni is going to be two inches thick," he told Macworld in 2001, referring to a popular typeface. "Someone has to fix it. I get called to do that." One such "fixer" assignment, in 1967, was for The New York Times. Louis Silverstein, the paper's promotion art director at the time, was given the task of revisiting the nameplate, which had been tweaked over the previous century but remained a distinctive calling card. Mr. Silverstein tweaked it anew. "To strengthen the logo, I redrew it," he wrote later, "making the thicks thicker and the thins thinner." "I drew the new logo on tracing paper," he added, "and hired Ed Benguiat to do the actual ink drawing. Ed was perhaps the most accomplished letterer in the country." One result of that redesign was the disappearance of the period that for decades had come after the word "Times" in the logo. (Some readers mourned its loss. "No tittle in your title?" one wrote.) In the Macworld interview, Mr. Benguiat recalled the Times logo assignment this way: "Lou Silverstein was the art director. His thought was, 'Change it.' My thought was, 'OK, we'll change it but if we change it, nobody will recognize it.' So all I did was take it and fix it." Ephram Edward Benguiat was born on Oct. 27, 1927, in Brooklyn. His mother, Rose (Nahum) Benguiat, was a driver for the Red Cross, and his father, Jack, was design director at Bloomingdale's; Mr. Benguiat often spoke of his childhood fascination with his father's pens and paintbrushes. Some articles about Mr. Benguiat over the years said that one of his first efforts at tweaking type was when he forged a birth certificate to make himself appear old enough to join the Army during World War II, but in a 2017 talk at the Type Directors Club, he corrected that; it was his father who did the forging, he said. It was good enough to get him into the Army Air Forces, and during the war he was stationed in Italy, serving first as a radio operator on a bomber and then doing photo reconnaissance. Mr. Benguiat had been playing the drums since his father bought him a drum set at age 10, and under the name Eddie (or sometimes E.D.) Benart, he played with various jazz ensembles, including those of Woody Herman and Stan Kenton. But the work lost its allure. "One day I went to the musician's union to pay dues and I saw all these old people who were playing bar mitzvahs and Greek weddings," he said. "It occurred to me that one day that's going to be me, so I decided to become an illustrator." An establishment near one of the clubs where he played beckoned. "There was a sign on Fifth Avenue; it said, 'Draw me,'" he said in the 2017 talk. "So I went upstairs and I registered." It was the Workshop School of Advertising Art, where he studied layout, design, typography and calligraphy. The cleavage covering job, he said, developed into something more by happenstance. "The lettering man was gone, and something was missing," he recalled. "I said, 'I can do it,' and I did it, and that's what started the ball rolling." Eventually he had enough skills to be hired, in 1953, by Esquire magazine, and in 1962 he joined Photo Lettering Inc., a typesetting company, as typographic design director. He developed some 400 typefaces there. In 1971 he joined the newly established International Typeface, making a quick impact there by retooling the typeface Souvenir. His revised version became immensely popular. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Televisions broadcasting the Google DeepMind Challenge Match between Google's artificial intelligence program, AlphaGo, a predecessor of AlphaZero, and South Korean professional Go player, Lee Sedol, in an electronics store in Seoul in 2016. The computer won the match. In early December, researchers at DeepMind, the artificial intelligence company owned by Google's parent corporation, Alphabet Inc., filed a dispatch from the frontiers of chess. A year earlier, on Dec. 5, 2017, the team had stunned the chess world with its announcement of AlphaZero, a machine learning algorithm that had mastered not only chess but shogi, or Japanese chess, and Go. The algorithm started with no knowledge of the games beyond their basic rules. It then played against itself millions of times and learned from its mistakes. In a matter of hours, the algorithm became the best player, human or computer, the world has ever seen. The details of AlphaZero's achievements and inner workings have now been formally peer reviewed and published in the journal Science this month. The new paper addresses several serious criticisms of the original claim. (Among other things, it was hard to tell whether AlphaZero was playing its chosen opponent, a computational beast named Stockfish, with total fairness.) Consider those concerns dispelled. AlphaZero has not grown stronger in the past twelve months, but the evidence of its superiority has. It clearly displays a breed of intellect that humans have not seen before, and that we will be mulling over for a long time to come. Computer chess has come a long way over the past twenty years. In 1997, I.B.M.'s chess playing program, Deep Blue, managed to beat the reigning human world champion, Garry Kasparov, in a six game match. In retrospect, there was little mystery in this achievement. Deep Blue could evaluate 200 million positions per second. It never got tired, never blundered in a calculation and never forgot what it had been thinking a moment earlier. For better and worse, it played like a machine, brutally and materialistically. It could out compute Mr. Kasparov, but it couldn't outthink him. In Game 1 of their match, Deep Blue greedily accepted Mr. Kasparov's sacrifice of a rook for a bishop, but lost the game 16 moves later. The current generation of the world's strongest chess programs, such as Stockfish and Komodo, still play in this inhuman style. They like to capture the opponent's pieces. They defend like iron. But although they are far stronger than any human player, these chess "engines" have no real understanding of the game. They have to be tutored in the basic principles of chess. These principles, which have been refined over decades of human grandmaster experience, are programmed into the engines as complex evaluation functions that indicate what to seek in a position and what to avoid: how much to value king safety, piece activity, pawn structure, control of the center, and more, and how to balance the trade offs among them. Today's chess engines, innately oblivious to these principles, come across as brutes: tremendously fast and strong, but utterly lacking insight. All of that has changed with the rise of machine learning. By playing against itself and updating its neural network as it learned from experience, AlphaZero discovered the principles of chess on its own and quickly became the best player ever. Not only could it have easily defeated all the strongest human masters it didn't even bother to try it crushed Stockfish, the reigning computer world champion of chess. In a hundred game match against a truly formidable engine, AlphaZero scored twenty eight wins and seventy two draws. It didn't lose a single game. Most unnerving was that AlphaZero seemed to express insight. It played like no computer ever has, intuitively and beautifully, with a romantic, attacking style. It played gambits and took risks. In some games it paralyzed Stockfish and toyed with it. While conducting its attack in Game 10, AlphaZero retreated its queen back into the corner of the board on its own side, far from Stockfish's king, not normally where an attacking queen should be placed. When AlphaZero was first unveiled, some observers complained that Stockfish had been lobotomized by not giving it access to its book of memorized openings. This time around, even with its book, it got crushed again. And when AlphaZero handicapped itself by giving Stockfish ten times more time to think, it still destroyed the brute. Tellingly, AlphaZero won by thinking smarter, not faster; it examined only 60 thousand positions a second, compared to 60 million for Stockfish. It was wiser, knowing what to think about and what to ignore. By discovering the principles of chess on its own, AlphaZero developed a style of play that "reflects the truth" about the game rather than "the priorities and prejudices of programmers," Mr. Kasparov wrote in a commentary accompanying the Science article. The question now is whether machine learning can help humans discover similar truths about the things we really care about: the great unsolved problems of science and medicine, such as cancer and consciousness; the riddles of the immune system, the mysteries of the genome. The early signs are encouraging. Last August, two articles in Nature Medicine explored how machine learning could be applied to medical diagnosis. In one, researchers at DeepMind teamed up with clinicians at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London to develop a deep learning algorithm that could classify a wide range of retinal pathologies as accurately as human experts can. (Ophthalmology suffers from a severe shortage of experts who can interpret the millions of diagnostic eye scans performed each year; artificially intelligent assistants could help enormously.) The other article concerned a machine learning algorithm that decides whether a CT scan of an emergency room patient shows signs of a stroke, an intracranial hemorrhage or other critical neurological event. For stroke victims, every minute matters; the longer treatment is delayed, the worse the outcome tends to be. (Neurologists have a grim saying: "Time is brain.") The new algorithm flagged these and other critical events with an accuracy comparable to human experts but it did so 150 times faster. A faster diagnostician could allow the most urgent cases to be triaged sooner, with review by a human radiologist. What is frustrating about machine learning, however, is that the algorithms can't articulate what they're thinking. We don't know why they work, so we don't know if they can be trusted. AlphaZero gives every appearance of having discovered some important principles about chess, but it can't share that understanding with us. Not yet, at least. As human beings, we want more than answers. We want insight. This is going to be a source of tension in our interactions with computers from now on. In fact, in mathematics, it's been happening for years already. Consider the longstanding math problem called the four color map theorem. It proposes that, under certain reasonable constraints, any map of contiguous countries can always be colored with just four colors such that no two neighboring countries are colored the same. Although the four color theorem was proved in 1977 with the help of a computer, no human could check all the steps in the argument. Since then, the proof has been validated and simplified, but there are still parts of it that entail brute force computation, of the kind employed by AlphaZero's chess playing computer ancestors. This development annoyed many mathematicians. They didn't need to be reassured that the four color theorem was true; they already believed it. They wanted to understand why it was true, and this proof didn't help. But envisage a day, perhaps in the not too distant future, when AlphaZero has evolved into a more general problem solving algorithm; call it AlphaInfinity. Like its ancestor, it would have supreme insight: it could come up with beautiful proofs, as elegant as the chess games that AlphaZero played against Stockfish. And each proof would reveal why a theorem was true; AlphaInfinity wouldn't merely bludgeon you into accepting it with some ugly, difficult argument. For human mathematicians and scientists, this day would mark the dawn of a new era of insight. But it may not last. As machines become ever faster, and humans stay put with their neurons running at sluggish millisecond time scales, another day will follow when we can no longer keep up. The dawn of human insight may quickly turn to dusk. Suppose that deeper patterns exist to be discovered in the ways genes are regulated or cancer progresses; in the orchestration of the immune system; in the dance of subatomic particles. And suppose that these patterns can be predicted, but only by an intelligence far superior to ours. If AlphaInfinity could identify and understand them, it would seem to us like an oracle. We would sit at its feet and listen intently. We would not understand why the oracle was always right, but we could check its calculations and predictions against experiments and observations, and confirm its revelations. Science, that signal human endeavor, would reduce our role to that of spectators, gaping in wonder and confusion. Maybe eventually our lack of insight would no longer bother us. After all, AlphaInfinity could cure all our diseases, solve all our scientific problems and make all our other intellectual trains run on time. We did pretty well without much insight for the first 300,000 years or so of our existence as Homo sapiens. And we'll have no shortage of memory: we will recall with pride the golden era of human insight, this glorious interlude, a few thousand years long, between our uncomprehending past and our incomprehensible future. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Rome's cobbled, snaking alleyways lend themselves to mystery, and today's best places to raise a glass in the Eternal City are fittingly clandestine, with entrance gained by a knock, a phone call or a membership card. At the back of a vintage furnished trattoria near the Pantheon, stumble through a creaky armoire and you're deposited in a dimly lit brick den, where an empty suit of knight's armor spookily stands guard. This would be Club Derriere (Vicolo delle Coppelle 59; 39 393 566 1077), an atmospheric bar that revels in its air of mystery, and one of the many Roman speakeasies that are persuading locals to trade in their wineglasses for highballs in these cocktail slinging spots. At Club Derriere, bartenders in ties and vests serve a changing list of a dozen original cocktails from behind the glass encased counter. This season's opera themed menu includes Le Nozze di Sigaro, a nod to "The Marriage of Figaro" composed of a cigar infused rum tincture with chocolate and aged angostura bark bitters. In Rome, cocktail culture is a fairly recent arrival. Italy is a country of wine and beer drinkers; just a decade or two ago, mixed drinks were the unique purview of hotel bars and nightclubs. Today, with about a dozen speakeasies, from dives to high class boites, locals are warming to imported ideas about elaborate cocktail recipes and the charms of Prohibition era misbehaving. "It's not so much that we're inspired by Prohibition," said Gian Paolo Di Pierro, the passionate bar manager at Club Derriere, who publishes drink manuals in his off time. "It's more that we needed a way to create a separate reality where Italians would accept something different and learn to drink cocktails. We've created this place as a sort of parlor room to set a properly cultured tone," he said, pointing to a stately, half stocked bookcase that slides back to reveal a hidden bathroom. "A lot of our books get stolen, though," he lamented. Some of Rome's speakeasies barely make an effort to disguise themselves. At Spirito (Via Fanfulla da Lodi 53; 39 327 298 3900; club spirito.com), in the out of the way but animated neighborhood of Pigneto, the warm glow of the rooftop deck beckons street level pedestrians, and the bar counter is visible through a peephole in the sandwich shop that fronts it. Inside, cocktails are dispatched from a custom made blackjack and roulette table, where gamblers can trade in winning chips for drinks mixed with Kaffir lime oil or bacon infused whiskey. Entrance is gained by picking up the receiver of a vintage pay phone, as is the case at an upscale Testaccio hangout, the Corner. And why else would a pay phone be around these days? Housed in a 19th century villa, the Corner (Viale Aventino 121; 39 06 4559 7350; thecornerrome.com) is an 11 room boutique hotel, restaurant, bistro and British inspired speakeasy paired with a terrace bar, where cocktails are served from a rainbow colored stained glass gazebo. It reopened last summer with Marco Martini, a young Michelin starred chef, heading the new effort. His top notch small plates are paired with gastronomically ambitious cocktails toasted peanuts, popcorn infused rye, and Italian touches like artichoke infused gin and a fresh tomato Bloody Mary grace the drinks menu. Other spots are truly Italian incarnations of the speakeasy's rogue spirit, operating as social clubs to avoid the suffocating bureaucracy and taxes applied to ordinary bars, with a 5 euro ( 5.50) membership card to get you in the door. Except for the godfather bar to the scene, the stiff necked Jerry Thomas (Vicolo Cellini 30; 39 06 9684 5937; thejerrythomasproject.it), these speakeasies boast a rules free approach to night life, where smoking is allowed, naturally, as are dogs, live music and tippling into the wee hours. For a groomed aesthetic near the Colosseum, look for a striped barber's pole and a tidy antique barbershop. The amiable and hirsute owner, Joy Napolitano, holds twice monthly events there to trim beards and hair, but the nightly action is downstairs in the intimately appointed brick cellar of the (clippers free) Barber Shop (Via Iside 2/4/6; 39 389 508 6037), a vaulted cavern with deep blue walls, wood paneling, cozy piles of Persian carpets and late night hours. "It's a hidden bar, but with an open spirit we make you good cocktails and you're free to do whatever you want," Mr. Napolitano said, stirring a fragrant drink tinged with patchouli and ylang ylang. Close by in San Lorenzo, a working class neighborhood with a youthful edge, a knock on the door at Blackmarket (Via dei Sardi 50; 39 346 948 2573; blackmarketartgallery.it) reveals a wood beamed bar with a pitched roof and saloon vibe. On a breezy Thursday, a local rock band had just finished its set. It may have been late. It may have been morning already. But the newsboy capped bartender poured another Manhattan, this one inflected with saffron, and the time it hardly mattered in a place like this. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The telephone calls from reporters and television producers are more sporadic now. But Lonn Reisman still hears from people who want to know more about Dennis Rodman, and that has been the case again thanks to "The Last Dance," ESPN's 10 part documentary series on Michael Jordan's final season with the Chicago Bulls. Two more episodes aired on Sunday night, and Rodman Jordan's teammate for three championship seasons had a star turn in all his multicolored glory. For a sports starved audience, the series has offered a reminder of Rodman's basketball genius: part rebounding savant, part defensive menace, part provocateur. "I give a lot of credit to Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen and Phil Jackson, especially, because Phil was a psychologist," Reisman said in a telephone interview. "But what Dennis brought to that team was glue. He played his role as hard as anyone could possibly play it." Reisman, 65, is the vice president for intercollegiate athletics at Tarleton State in Stephenville, Texas. In 30 seasons as the men's basketball coach before he was succeeded by his son in 2018, he won 654 games. But Reisman also understands something else about his legacy: that it will always be tied to Rodman. Dennis Rodman, during his years at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. In 1982, Reisman was an assistant coach at Southeastern Oklahoma State, an N.A.I.A. program in Durant, Okla., when he heard about a lanky forward who was demolishing opponents for Cooke County College, a two year school in Gainesville, Texas, that is now called North Central Texas College. Reisman made the drive south to take in a practice, and that was when he saw Rodman for the first time. "Oh, we probably can't get this guy," Reisman recalled telling himself. "But you always dream about it. He was raw but very athletic and he had a motor that I had not seen." A few weeks later, Reisman returned to Cooke County to watch Rodman play in a game or at least that was the plan. Rodman was nowhere to be found. Reisman was informed that Rodman had left school and returned home to Dallas. The problem for Reisman was that school officials, citing privacy issues, declined to give him Rodman's phone number. "So I kept calling the school," Reisman said, "and finally, one day, I got a student on the phone. I said: 'I really need to talk to this young man. We're trying to give him a scholarship, and I think it would be beneficial for his life.' And she gave me his phone number. When you're young and you're a recruiter, persistence is the No. 1 thing you need." Reisman reached Rodman's mother, Shirley, who invited him to Dallas. But when Reisman showed up at their apartment, Rodman refused to leave his bedroom. Reisman kept knocking and waiting, knocking and waiting. It must have become evident to Rodman that this guy was not going to leave him alone. "He opened the door, and I don't know what it was, but we just had an instant connection," Reisman said. "You have that with some recruits." That same afternoon, Reisman left to head back to Southeastern Oklahoma State with Rodman riding shotgun. They wound up playing H O R S E in the school gymnasium, Reisman said, then sat together in the bleachers for a quiet conversation. Reisman told Rodman that he had a tremendous amount of talent. "Do you really think so?" Reisman recalled Rodman asking him. Reisman soon persuaded Rodman to stick around. After cluttering the box score in his first game, Rodman told Reisman that he hoped he had not disappointed him. "I hope you disappoint me every night," Reisman recalled telling him. And when Reisman broke the news to Rodman that he had been named an N.A.I.A. all American after his sophomore season the first of three straight selections Rodman was taken aback: What was an all American? Reisman had to explain that it meant he was one of the top players in the country. In the N.B.A., Rodman could be maddening, distracting and exhausting for opponents and teammates alike. The ESPN documentary touched on the notorious midseason vacation that Rodman took to Las Vegas, where he appeared to indulge in all the various excesses that befitted his playboy lifestyle while the Bulls plodded along without him. But then he returned miraculously in tiptop shape, according to Jordan. It was as if Rodman's Sin City sabbatical had never happened. It was another feat in a career full of them. But it also served as an example of how Rodman's eccentric personality often overshadowed his greatness as a player. And his greatness was the result of an approach that ran counter to the popular narrative that he helped stoke: He worked incredibly hard. He was a blue collar welder who merely dressed as if he had tickets to Comic Con. When Rodman was playing for the Detroit Pistons, Reisman introduced himself to Chuck Daly, the team's coach. "Lonn," Reisman recalled Daly telling him, "this guy is as fast as a Ferrari and he never runs out of gas." Coaches would tell Reisman about Rodman playing 40 minutes and then riding an exercise bike for an hour after the win. But Rodman was no basketball playing robot. He was altogether human, which was part of his appeal. He would make mistakes. He would cry. So much feeling always seemed to be simmering at the surface. Even in retirement, Rodman has been uniquely unconventional and no stranger to controversy. Reisman himself referenced some of the things that Rodman had done "politically," an oblique nod to Rodman's friendship with Kim Jong un, the North Korean leader. Rodman made several trips to North Korea in recent years, selling them as a way of building diplomacy. When reports surfaced last week that Kim was ailing, Rodman told TMZ that he was praying for him. Reisman has kept in touch with Rodman, though he can be tough to track down. But Rodman always struck Reisman as someone who cared: about people, about his friends. When Rodman was enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2011, Reisman was the first person he thanked. "It brought tears to my eyes," Reisman said, "that he hadn't forgotten about me." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Senator Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday called on Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, to resign from the board of Pfizer, saying his decision to join one of the country's leading pharmaceutical companies "smacks of corruption." Ms. Warren, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, said in a public letter to Dr. Gottlieb that the revolving door between government and industry "makes the American people rightly cynical and distrustful about whether high level Trump administration officials are working for them, or for their future corporate employers." Pfizer is one of the nation's largest drug makers, with blockbuster products like Lipitor and billions of dollars in sales dependent on F.D.A. decisions. In announcing Dr. Gottlieb's election to its board less than three months after he left the agency Pfizer said: "Scott's expertise in health care, public policy and the industry will be an asset to our company and enable our shareholders to continue to benefit from a board representing a balance of experience, competencies and perspectives." What Pfizer didn't say was that Dr. Gottlieb brings with him credibility on public health issues that would be exceedingly valuable at a time when the pharmaceutical industry is under fire from all sides for escalating drug prices. Senator Warren pointed out that Dr. Gottlieb's compensation for the Pfizer board membership was worth more than 300,000 in cash and stock. "This will certainly be a lucrative move for you," she wrote. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. Federal ethics rules permit former senior officials, such as Dr. Gottlieb, to join corporate boards, but there is a one year cooling off period before they are allowed to lobby or otherwise represent any third party before the agency, which in this case includes not only the F.D.A. but the Health and Human Services Department. Asked to respond to the criticism, Dr. Gottlieb said only, "While I was at F.D.A., I had a productive relationship with Senator Warren, working together to advance shared public health goals. I respect the senator, and I will respond to her letter promptly, directly, and privately." In addition to taking a board seat at Pfizer, Dr. Gottlieb has resumed his previous job as a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. He is also a special partner in New Enterprise Associates, the venture capital firm where he worked before landing the F.D.A. job. At that time, he had investments in 20 health care companies that the agency regulates, all of which he sold. Senator Warren has previously criticized Pfizer for what she described as reneging on a promise not to raise prices on many prescription drugs, and Tuesday voiced disappointment with Dr. Gottlieb's decision to join the company's board. "I ask that you reconsider this decision," she wrote. "Unlike other administration officials who dedicated themselves to rolling back public health and consumer regulations, you often used your tenure to strengthen protections for Americans: for example, you worked to reduce rates of youth tobacco use, and took steps to increase the FDA's transparency." Senator Warren noted that Dr. Gottlieb is the second high level Trump administration official to join the board of a corporation with interests related to their work in the administration. She also took issue with John F. Kelly, the former Secretary of Homeland Security and White House chief of staff. "John Kelly helped lead the Trump administration's 'zero tolerance' immigration policy that led to forcibly separating thousands of migrant children from their parents," she said Tuesday. "Shortly after leaving government, General Kelly joined the board of Caliburn, Inc., the parent company of Comprehensive Health Services, which runs the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children in Florida." The revolving door between government and industry is common, despite frequent admonishments from ethicists. The F.D.A. is no exception. Former commissioners and top agency officials have taken jobs at businesses and law firms that represented industries the agency regulated. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Q. On Twitter for Android, how do you make one of those multiple part tweets? Do you have to write them as you go? A. The lengthy Twitter "thread" is a connected string of posts, usually made to elaborate more fully on a topic and beyond the 280 characters now allowed in a single tweet. If you feel the urge to create a thread on a particular subject, you can compose all the posts in the series before you share it with the world. To create a thread using the Android (or iOS) Twitter app, start a new post as you normally would by tapping the quill shaped Compose icon. Write the first message in your planned thread and then tap the small plus ( ) icon in the bottom right corner of the composition window to create a window for the next post. Write that next tweet in the thread and repeat the process until you have made your point or otherwise finished sharing your thoughts. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
From left, Lina Beckmann, Samuel Weiss and Sandra Gerling as Cordelia, Regan and Edmund in "King Lear" at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. MUNICH As befits the world's most famous playwright, William Shakespeare has had his work translated into over 100 languages, including Klingon. But long before he was the international superstar we know today, he was adored by the Germans with a fervor that led August Wilhelm Schlegel, the poet and critic who masterfully translated his complete works in the early 19th century, to claim him as "ganz unser" "entirely ours." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, this country's most revered writer, compared his experience of discovering Shakespeare at age 22 to "a blind man given the gift of sight by some miraculous healing touch." Roughly a century later, in 1864, the world's first Shakespeare Society was founded in the city of Weimar. It survived the Cold War divide and is still going strong, with roughly 2,000 members. In 2010, Shakespeare's Globe in London held a season of events to acknowledge Germany's special relationship with the playwright. (He is performed more frequently here than in his native land, the theater said.) So far this season, the highest profile Shakespeare production here has been a new "King Lear" that reopened the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg in October, after the theater underwent a major renovation. Karin Beier, the company's artistic director since 2013, set the action inside a huge white cube that is tilted toward the audience. Working from a new modern language translation by Rainer Iwersen, she also streamlined some of the action and whittled down the large cast of players to 10 speaking roles. Her most radical idea, however, was to invert the genders of the three most unsavory characters, with Lear's daughters Goneril and Regan played by men and Gloucester's illegitimate son, Edmund, played by a woman, as if to make the point that evil is not binary. The actors Carlo Ljubek (Goneril), Samuel Weiss (Regan) and Sandra Gerling (Edmund) are all wonderfully invested in their villainy, but the cross dressing daughters lend the production a campy edge. Especially in the opening scene, when they compete in flattery for Lear's affection, it's difficult to understand why Ms. Beier chose this particular register. Alongside her flamboyantly fawning sisters, Lina Beckmann's Cordelia is not merely subdued but strangely colorless and stolid. The cast's only woman apart from Ms. Gerling, she also appears as the Fool, a role that allows her to show more dramatic range, although mumbling through the role comically wide eyed, with her squeezebox in tow she is more dope than jester as she follows the mad king around the mostly bare but dramatically lit stage. The Lear is Edgar Selge, whom Ms. Beier also directed in a one man adaptation of the controversial Michel Houellebecq novel "Submission" that has toured Germany and was adapted for television. Mr. Selge, who is not so very far from the king's age of "fourscore and upward," moves across the stage with a sort of hulking but sunken grandeur. Physically, it's a no holds barred performance, featuring ample nudity, a hosing down and several eggs cracked against the septuagenarian's skull. Psychologically, however, the portrayal is less convincing, as Mr. Selge doesn't quite find a way out of the king's madness after his reunion with Cordelia. To be fair, the blame seems to also lie with Ms. Beier, whose insistence on highlighting the play's chaos, arbitrary cruelty and nihilism makes for an intense production that often feels scattershot. Ms. Beier's most significant addition is an epilogue spoken by Edgar (the limber Jan Peter Kampwirth, who spends much of the evening naked and coated in white paint), addressed to the children of tomorrow. When "Lear" was performed in the 18th and 19th centuries, a certain degree of moralizing was required to convince audiences of the virtues of such a dark play. But it's difficult to understand why Ms. Beier felt the need to provide some up to date moralizing of her own at the end of three long hours. About 400 miles away in Munich, an angst ridden prince dithers and equivocates over the course of five acts. As he mopes around the palace, he burns with murderous rage against the king and is tormented by lust for his mother. Sound familiar? This is the plot of Friedrich Schiller's youthful play "Don Karlos": In terms of Shakespeare worship, Schiller rivaled his friend Goethe. Even though he took his subject matter from a 17th century French historical novel, Schiller turned to "Hamlet" for structure and psychology. At the Residenztheater, Martin Kusej has staged Schiller's historical tragedy virtually uncut. Dark as night and running late into it, the minimally furnished, starkly lit production provides its many theatrical jolts thanks to a large and committed cast. On an empty, rotating stage, the splendor of a 17th century Spanish court is suggested by a sleek crystal chandelier, while the brutality of the Inquisition is hinted at by a hole in the floor through which characters periodically disappear. Away from courtly protocol and beyond the Inquisition's reach lie intrigue filled chambers that Annette Murschetz, the stage designer, represents as a soundproof recording studio outfitted with blue pyramids of acoustic foam. Despite "Hamlet's" length and complexity, Shakespeare ensured that the melancholy Dane remained the play's central figure. Schiller tipped the balance away from his title character in favor of the Marquis von Posa, the Spanish Infante's boon companion. Franz Patzold, a brilliant young actor with a strikingly textured voice, is spellbinding as the idealistic Posa, a character who trumpets Schiller's Enlightenment ideals. With the intense and smoldering Mr. Patzold in the role, our attention is never less than riveted. So much so that Mr. Kusej's production quickly loses steam in the final half hour, after Posa's murder. Among the other cast members, the royal couple of Thomas Loibl's venomous and haunted Philipp II and Lilith Hassle's nobly suffering Elisabeth von Valois are the best. Nils Strunk is a serviceable Karlos, although his dramatic range here is pretty much limited to desperation and wild anger. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
HarperCollins has signed a deal with Amazon to sell its books, much like the contracts the online bookseller has reached with other publishers. Relations between Amazon and the New York publishers, always rather fraught, worsened last year when the bookseller and the publisher Hachette had a multimonth conflict over the price of e books. Amazon discouraged sales of Hachette books to pressure the publisher, and Hachette's writers and their allies took to the barricades. The impasse was broken when Amazon signed a contract with Simon Schuster in October and then used the same terms to broker peace with Hachette. A deal with another major house, Macmillan, promptly followed. All the agreements allow the publishers to set their own e book prices, a major point of contention, but give them financial encouragement to price cheaply. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
CATCHING UP Peter Magistro is the founder of a company that owns and manages affordable apartment buildings in the Bronx. He said that with time, misperceptions of the Bronx from the '60s and '70s have begun to dissipate. AS the founder and president of the Bronx Pro Group, a family run, neighborhood based company in Morris Park that builds, renovates and manages low and moderate income housing in the Bronx, Peter Magistro, 63, has seen the borough struggle and come back to life. A Bronx native and longtime resident who now lives on the Upper West Side, he has an intimate knowledge of local housing trends. He knows where the Bronx has been and where it's headed. Q Tell us about your background. A My grandparents came from Italy, and I grew up in a two room walk up in the Westchester Square section. I majored in economics at Fordham and have a master's in finance. I spent 12 years at Citibank, working mostly in financial control and real estate. Q How did you get into the real estate business? A In 1973, when I was 24, I bought my first building with my dad, an old six family apartment house north of Fordham Road for 60,000, as an investment. I kept buying residential buildings in the Bronx. In 1998 I got a chance to renovate 185 units of housing in the Bronx. Since then I've built or renovated over 1,300 apartments, everything from town houses to high rise apartment buildings. We also manage 1,800 apartments in 64 buildings. Thanks to a variety of government programs, including tax credits and capital funds, we can provide quality housing at affordable rents. We mostly offer family sized apartments that rent for an average of under 1,000 a month. Q Who lives in your buildings? A Mostly working families with a wide range of incomes. A typical family of four renting a two bedroom apartment could earn from 44,000 to 86,000 a year. Q Let's say you're a student, or retired or have a young family, and you want to move to the Bronx. What neighborhoods should you think about? A The West Bronx has a lot of attractions. Subway service is excellent, the buildings are solid in a way they don't build anymore, and there's a retail strip along Fordham Road. To the north are a number of affluent bedroom communities, like Riverdale and Pelham Manor. And there are emerging areas in the South Bronx that offer good transportation, including High Bridge, which includes Yankee Stadium, and Melrose, which includes the Hub. Q What are the pluses and minuses of living in the Bronx these days? A The main plus is that you can find an affordable, family sized apartment in a well constructed building. Bronx apartments are roomy, and the buildings have good bones. Many neighborhoods have great subway service, and there's plenty of shopping. The Bronx also has remarkable attractions like the Bronx Zoo, the New York Botanical Garden, Wave Hill, terrific parks where you can play golf or picnic, beaches and our very own Bronx Riviera Orchard Beach and City Island. You can have one of the best Italian meals in New York on Arthur Avenue, our Little Italy. But some amenities need to catch up. We don't have enough of the large Manhattan style supermarkets or chain stores. There could be more bank branches and more specialty coffee shops. Certain areas are in a two fare subway zone and may require a car. The social needs are a challenge, as they are citywide. In our developments, we're addressing this challenge through community facilities that provide after school programs, day care facilities and senior centers. Q Who's moving to the Bronx these days? A Newcomers include people who are coming to the West Bronx from Washington Heights, where they're getting priced out. People from Manhattan and Brooklyn have applied to live in our moderate income buildings. We also see applicants from New Jersey who work in the city and want an easier commute. Q Many New Yorkers don't know much about the Bronx, but in their opinion, it's a violent place. What's your answer to them? A What's different since the '70s, when that attitude developed, is that now people want to live here. They're not running away from the Bronx; some are even running to the Bronx. I think today's Bronx is very much like the Bronx that I experienced growing up, essentially a melting pot of people who settle here to make a better life for themselves and their families. That's what defines the Bronx. Maybe there's not a Starbucks on every corner, but there is a rich variety of people and experiences. Q Will the Bronx ever shake its negative portrait in Tom Wolfe's novel "The Bonfire of the Vanities"? A Who sees it that way? I don't think anyone does anymore, unless they're not informed. And the proof is in the pudding, because when we market a new development, we receive thousands of applications from all parts of the city. It shows that with attention and investment, perceptions shift over time. Q If you could fix one thing about the Bronx, what would it be? A It would be to eradicate any lingering reputation of the Bronx made famous in the '60s and '70s and that was further dramatized by movies. In recent years, the Bronx has made substantial progress through investments made under the mayor's new housing marketplace plan, which has created safe and secure housing for people. Misperceptions about the Bronx have delayed us from reaching our full potential. But time really does heal all wounds, and people eventually forget. The Lower East Side, Harlem and certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn experienced similar devastation and notoriety, and they have succeeded in changing. The Bronx is a diamond in the rough, being discovered. Q Gentrification often seems to start after artists colonize a neighborhood. Is that happening in the Bronx? A Not much, which is a shame. For a while there was an opportunity in the South Bronx, but the economic downturn crushed that. Eventually, however, artists will cross the river. And if we invest in housing that addresses their needs, it could help attract them. I believe the potential is there. Look at SoHo and TriBeCa. Look at what they were and what they've become. Q What's been the impact of buildings in the Bronx by star architects like Rafael Vinoly, who designed the Bronx Hall of Justice on 161st Street, just off the Grand Concourse, and Arquitectonica, responsible for the expansion of the Bronx Museum of the Arts? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The Fox News host Tucker Carlson has lost advertisers after saying on the air last week that allowing certain immigrants into the United States "makes our own country poorer and dirtier and more divided." By Tuesday, 11 companies including IHOP and TD Ameritrade said they would stop advertising on his prime time show, "Tucker Carlson Tonight." Mr. Carlson made the comments at the start of his Thursday program, during which he discussed the arrival of Central American immigrants in Tijuana, Mexico. In those opening remarks, he mocked those who believe "we have a moral obligation to accept the world's poor." His rhetoric prompted Pacific Life Insurance to say on Friday that it would not advertise on the show in the coming weeks, adding, "As a company, we strongly disagree with Mr. Carlson's statements." On Monday's program, Mr. Carlson reiterated his remarks and accused liberal opponents of trying to silence him by calling for an advertiser boycott. By Tuesday, more companies including NerdWallet, Minted and Ancestry.com had announced that they would not advertise on his show. The job search site Indeed.com removed its ads from the program in October, calling it "highly polarizing," and Mr. Carlson's recent comments reinforced the company's decision to cut ties with the host. "The advertising dollars that we spend absolutely fund the programming that is on the air, and that is a factor," Paul D'Arcy, Indeed's senior vice president for marketing, said in an interview. "We have to advertise on a wide variety of programming, and where we draw the line is on programming that violates a set of standards that we have." A Fox News spokeswoman said the network would not lose revenue, because commercials for the companies will simply air on other Fox News shows. Smile Direct Club is another company that has moved away from "Tucker Carlson Tonight," but a spokeswoman said it had decided to cease advertising on all political opinion shows. Several other advertisers, including Bayer, Mitsubishi Motors North America and Farmers Insurance, said they would not change their spending. Mr. Carlson is not the first Fox News host to face an advertiser backlash. In March, a group of companies pulled their ads from Laura Ingraham's show after she taunted a survivor of the high school shooting in Parkland, Fla. She subsequently apologized. 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. Last year, more than 50 brands stopped advertising on "The O'Reilly Factor" after The New York Times reported on settlements that its host, Bill O'Reilly, had made with women who had accused him of sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior. That contributed to his ouster; Mr. Carlson now holds down Mr. O'Reilly's old time slot. Just over a year ago, several brands said they would stop advertising on the show hosted by Sean Hannity, the highest rated Fox News host, after comments he made about Roy S. Moore, who was then Alabama's Republican candidate for Senate. The companies later backed away from those statements, and "Hannity" was relatively unaffected. Those leading calls for a boycott of Mr. Carlson's show included the filmmaker Judd Apatow and the Twitter account Sleeping Giants, which was created to notify brands if they were appearing on Breitbart News, the hard edge, nationalist news site. Fox News said in a statement that Mr. Carlson was the focus of "agenda driven intimidation efforts" and that he was "being threatened via Twitter by far left activist groups with deeply political motives." It added, "While we do not advocate boycotts, these same groups never target other broadcasters and operate under a grossly hypocritical double standard given their intolerance to all opposing points of view." Several advertisers said they would continue advertising on the program while appearing to distance themselves from Mr. Carlson's remarks. Farmers Insurance said that its advertising decisions "should not be construed to be an endorsement of any kind as to a show's content or the individuals appearing on the show." Mitsubishi Motors North America said that its ad placements were "determined based on demographics and psychographics, not politics." Mr. Carlson has long made derisive comments about immigration and diversity. At the start of the year, he questioned whether diversity was divisive. In August and September, he claimed that immigration was destroying a thriving middle class in California and accused illegal immigrants of producing "a huge amount of litter." In public statements, the companies that have left the show said their values did not align with the host's comments. In confirming its decision to stop running ads on the show, IHOP said, "At our core, we stand for welcoming folks from all backgrounds and beliefs into our restaurants." And Pacific Life said in a statement last week, "Our customer base and our work force reflect the diversity of our great nation, something we take great pride in." Kara Alaimo, who teaches public relations at Hofstra University, said that Mr. Carlson's comments presented a problem for companies, which cannot afford to be associated with "hateful or inaccurate information." "Consumers generally understand that brands that appeal to Americans across the political spectrum certainly like Bayer may advertise on a whole range of platforms," Ms. Alaimo said. "But I think that there are exceptions when a brand, with its dollars, supports an organization or an individual who is truly outside the mainstream." Bayer did not respond to requests for comment, but it told The Hollywood Reporter that the views expressed on opinion programs "are solely those of the network, and do not necessarily reflect those of Bayer." While Mr. Carlson condemned what he saw as an attack on free speech on Monday, some of his advertisers saw the matter differently. "As a business, it is not our intention to become political advocates, nor do we want to limit free speech," Steve Chesterman, a spokesman for Pacific Life, said in an email on Tuesday. "Rather, our goal is to drive our advertising spend to create the most consistently positive reflection of our brand." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Review: 'Central Park' Is the Show We Need Right Now None New York City needs its parks in any summer, but never more than now. Shared spaces of play, sun, respite and peace (and yes, conflict and judgment) are reminders in a time of distancing that we are all in this together. Likewise, "Central Park" is the show we need right now, even if its makers couldn't have anticipated how and why. It arrives Friday on Apple TV Plus, and it's as well timed as the Mister Softee truck on a 95 degree scorcher. This weird, warm, joyful animated sitcom about a park manager and his family, living in Manhattan's teeming, landscaped backyard, would be a cool treat at any time. In pandemic season, it's more: a fun, full throated tribute to public space and the people (and dogs and rats) who share it. "Central Park" is created by Loren Bouchard and Nora Smith of "Bob's Burgers," along with Josh Gad, and it shares several elements with that stalwart Fox sitcom above all, a fondness for eccentric obsessives with small scale big dreams. Owen Tillerman (Leslie Odom Jr.) loves the park the way his forebear Bob loves hamburgers, with a consuming, dorky dad passion not always shared by the tulip trampling masses. Central Park is his life he even lives there, in a ramshackle "castle" that may have once been a storage shed, with his wife, Paige (Kathryn Hahn), a reporter with "the No. 1 most left on the subway paper in the city," and his kids, Molly (Kristen Bell) and Cole (Tituss Burgess). It's a theoretically idyllic life, made a little less so by the everyday stresses of work and budgets, and the fellow citizens who use the park as a gym, a dance floor and occasionally a restroom. The whole urban sweep, majestic greenery and grand architecture seen from above, jeers and hot dog water up close, is laid out in the opening song, which Oh, did I mention that "Central Park" is a full on musical, and a legitimately good one? Where "Bob's" sprinkles its episodes with brief, gamely sung ditties, "Central Park" features several numbers per half hour, most of them from the staff composers, Kate Anderson, Elyssa Samsel and Brent Knopf. (Other songwriters include Sara Bareilles, of "Waitress," who contributes a showstopper to the second episode.) Beyond the cast's musical pedigree including Odom and Daveed Diggs of "Hamilton," as well as Bell and her "Frozen" co star Gad, who plays an overeager busker narrator the clever, replay worthy songs drive the narrative. The centerpiece of the pilot, "Own It," gives each Tillerman a personal nerd anthem while also introducing the series' villain, Bitsy Brandenham (Stanley Tucci), a hotel magnate who wants to privatize the park. Fans of "Bob's" will notice some DNA in common, from its love of a good scatological joke to the character types. There is a bit of Tina Belcher in Molly, who draws superhero comics starring herself (her imagined superpower, being able to rewind time, represents the universal teen wish to do over awkward moments) and moons over a secret crush. There is a good deal of Gene Belcher in Cole, who develops his own crush on Bitsy's pampered dog. But "Central Park" has a scope and scale of its own. Visually, it's a polished uptown cousin to the down the shore "Bob's." Narratively, it builds a serial plot around Bitsy's supervillain scheme, along with episodic stories like one about Owen's fear of public speaking. ("Guess it's something I could work on/Like that guy helped Colin Firth on.") Setting up the long game slows down the first episode, but the series builds in the four episodes screened for critics, powered by goofy, good hearted humor. It has ideas and ideals, but it wears them lightly and keeps the messages to a minimum. The Tillermans, for instance, are a biracial family, but at least early on this goes unmentioned, unlike in recent comedies like "mixed ish" and "Florida Girls." (The voice casting is cross racial and cross gender, with Bell playing the biracial Molly and Diggs playing Bitsy's put upon henchwoman, Helen.) Mostly the promise of "Central Park" is in its celebration of the public commons and civic services. (In the fourth episode, Owen duets with a waste transfer station manager about their respective duties.) This is one more TV show that has new resonance in the pandemic era, but for once that relevance is delightful, not depressing. "Central Park" makes its setting a stand in for urban life all the jostling out and aboutness that stay at home orders have temporarily suppressed its chaos and its messy democracy. You can, like Owen, beautify it and heroically clean up the trash. But you can never totally control it, because then it would stop being what it is. You can't tame the city. We can only own it, together. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Sumner M. Redstone confirmed on Tuesday the appointment of two new members to his irrevocable trust, which will control the future of his companies, as well as new directors to National Amusements, the private theater chain company through which he controls his 40 billion media empire. The individuals have close ties to his daughter, Shari Redstone, and have been characterized by Viacom executives as evidence of her manipulation of her father, who is 92 and in poor health. Named to the trust, which will control his companies after he dies or is declared not competent, are Thaddeus Jankowski, the general counsel of National Amusements, and Jill Krutick, a former media executive. Ms. Krutick was also named to the board of National Amusements, along with Ms. Redstone's daughter, Kimberlee Ostheimer. "This is my trust and my decision,'' Mr. Redstone said in a statement, through a spokesman. "I have picked those who are loyal to me and removed those who are not." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
A special visitor showed up several days ago at 930 East 50th Street, a former synagogue now known in Chicago and beyond as the headquarters of Rainbow/Push, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson's civil rights organization. Over two days, Saturday and Monday, the visitor, the "Empire" actor Jussie Smollett, spoke with high school students who were thinking about college. He hawked civil rights gear at the upstairs bookstore. He gave tips to the social media, television production and marketing staffs. He promised to keep in touch. The staff was "grateful for the opportunity to work with such a talented and humble personality," Mr. Jackson wrote in a letter. For Mr. Smollett, the visit may have been an opportunity as well. In explaining their decision to drop all charges on Tuesday against Mr. Smollett, who had been accused of faking a hate crime attack, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office noted that Mr. Smollett had no history of violent crime or other felonies, his agreement to forfeit his 10,000 bond payment and his "volunteer service in the community." A timeline of events of the Smollett case. The statement raised several questions, including whether the community service was part of a deal to end the case (a prosecutor said it was; Smollett's lawyers said there had been no quid pro quo). It also left many wondering: just what service had Smollett done? A batch of letters and memos from various organizations, released by the state's attorney's office, provided some answers. They mentioned performances that Mr. Smollett, who is also a singer, had done at the national conference of the Kennedy Forum, an organization run by the former congressman Patrick J. Kennedy that focuses on mental health; appearances at the Catalyst Circle Rock School, a predominantly black charter school in Chicago; and work with the City Lights Orchestra, the Boys Girls Club, and the Black AIDS Institute, whose chief executive wrote that he had "never worked with anyone who was more willing than Jussie to spend his talent, time and money to help other people." And on Saturday, as his legal team was finalizing talks with prosecutors about dropping the case, Mr. Smollett turned up at Rainbow/Push. According to Mr. Jackson's letter, Mr. Smollett spent several hours with students who wanted to join the organization's annual tour of historically black colleges. He spoke with them about the importance of discipline and a good attitude, and answered questions about the music and film industries. Read more on the case: A bizarre narrative with Chicago as the backdrop. At the store, which sells books, clothing and memorabilia about civil rights, he spent time "encouraging visitors to purchase Push gear" and offered tips on how the store could market its products to a younger demographic, Mr. Jackson wrote. Mr. Smollett gave advice on production techniques and social media outreach to the staff that creates a weekly broadcast on the Impact television network, and he gave additional advice to the Rainbow/Push membership team. He said he was interested in a long term relationship with Rainbow/Push, including building a choir for the broadcast. "He has been of tremendous value to our staff and our work," Mr. Jackson wrote. Mr. Smollett, who is black and gay, had been accused of falsifying a hate crime to get attention in a bid for a higher salary from "Empire." Mr. Smollett maintains his innocence, saying he had not planned the attack that he reported to the police on Jan. 29. Prosecutors said their decision did not exonerate him, but that the circumstances of the case, as well as the 10,000 payment and the community service, justified the dropping of the charges. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose police department spent many hours on the case, called the decision a "whitewash of justice," and other critics seized on their belief that prosecutors had let Mr. Smollett off with just two days of service. "You let him work off 'community service' with a couple of days doing odd jobs at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition," wrote John Kass, a Chicago Tribune columnist, adding that he hoped that Mr. Smollett had "sold a few Jesse Jackson action figures." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
It may be possible, scientists say, to save many thousands of newborns in poor countries by giving them a simple probiotic a strain of bacteria originally scooped out of the diaper of a healthy baby. A large clinical trial in rural India has found that babies fed a special strain of Lactobacillus bacteria for just one week were 40 percent less likely to develop sepsis, a life threatening bloodstream infection. Sepsis kills 600,000 newborns a year, many of them in India and neighboring countries. The treatment was so successful that an oversight panel stopped the trial early because it would have been unethical to keep giving a placebo to half the babies in the study. Moreover, the babies fed the probiotic which costs only 1 also had fewer pneumonias, fewer bouts of diarrhea, fewer ear infections and even fewer infections of the umbilical cord stump. The results, researchers said, suggest that carefully chosen probiotics could also help prevent stunting, which afflicts 160 million of the world's children. The condition is caused by chronic malnutrition and diarrhea, and persists even when children get enough food. Experts believe they lack the bacteria needed to absorb nutrients. The study "is an absolute game changer," said Dr. Tobias R. Kollmann, a pediatric immunologist at the University of British Columbia who was not involved in the research. "There's nothing we have like this in our armamentarium to prevent infections in newborns. Also, there's how cheap it is, its ease of use it's oral and its independence of pharmaceutical companies and their patent issues." Generally, probiotic supplements are intended to colonize the gut with beneficial bacteria to prevent harmful strains from gaining hold. Scientists are unsure how the test formulation works, but they believe it may strengthen the gut wall to prevent leaking of harmful bacteria into the blood and also activate immune cells in the lymphoid tissues lining the gut, which migrate to distant organs to attack infections there. The journal Nature published the study last week; an accompanying commentary by Daniel J. Tancredi, a health statistician at the University of California, Davis, called the results "astonishing." The study's lead author, however, cautioned that he did not consider all probiotics beneficial, or even safe. Mixtures like those sold in health food stores "are completely nonsense," said the author, Dr. Pinaki Panigrahi, a pediatrician at the University of Nebraska Medical Center's Child Health Research Institute. Probiotics must be as exactly matched to the illness for which they are prescribed as antibiotics are, Dr. Panigrahi said. Taking an inappropriate probiotic would be like taking cold medicine for tuberculosis, he said, just because both affect the respiratory tract. : "If you mix three or four or five, that's your funeral." Giving the wrong bacteria to a sick baby could be deadly, so his team spent over a decade testing 280 different strains, looking for one that clung to the gut, never entered the bloodstream and could outgrow harmful bacteria. Some samples came from Indian yogurts or health food shops, but their ability to colonize the gut was "almost zero," he said. The winner was sample No. ATCC 202195 of Lactobacillus plantarum from a healthy 11 month old Maryland child. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
After their cruise ship was hijacked by Palestinians in October 1985, Marilyn Klinghoffer struggled to care for her sickly husband, Leon. One of the hijackers, Bassam al Ashker, put a blanket over him, a gesture of kindness. But afterward another hijacker, Youssef Magid al Molqi, shot Klinghoffer twice and ordered that his body and wheelchair be thrown into the sea. In "An Innocent Bystander: The Killing of Leon Klinghoffer," Julie Salamon describes these moments in an effort to tell the human side of a harrowing tale. The hijackers tried fruitlessly to negotiate the release of dozens of Palestinians who were being held in Israeli prisons and after killing Klinghoffer fled the ship. His death, and the hijacking on the high seas, Salamon writes, helped to "alert the public to the threat of terrorism, which still seemed remote to Americans in the days before 9/11." Behind every act of terrorism are ordinary people those who are the victims, those who are the perpetrators and those who watch from the sidelines and Salamon's goal is straightforward: to present all of the actors, the Klinghoffers, the hijackers, White House aides and others, as real life husbands, wives, sons and daughters, instead of symbols or stock characters in a political drama. Her book is organized in chronological fashion, tracing the lives of these individuals before, during and after the hijacking, and is based on her interviews with key players, government documents and other sources. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Mr. Giorno, in an interview at his airy loft on the Bowery, was more humble than Mr. Rondinone while speaking about the sweep of this exhibition, which includes five decades worth of art. "Every person can look back on their life and see a great opera," he said. Still, his home which actually comprises three lofts on different levels of a landmark 1885 building near the New Museum has in many ways been as central to the New York art scene as Mr. Giorno's career. This is where Rothko painted, Burroughs lived, and Warhol shot "Sleep." Artwork on the walls includes a photograph by Nan Goldin and a painting by Haring. The bed where "Sleep" was filmed is still there in 1998 Mr. Huyghe filmed Mr. Giorno on it in "Sleep Talking," which will be on view in "I John Giorno" as are many of Burroughs's belongings, such as the typewriter with which he wrote the 1981 novel "Cities of the Red Night." Parts of Mr. Giorno's home, like his Tibetan Buddhist shrine and a cast bronze reproduction of his massive fireplace by Mr. Rondinone, will also be on view in "I John Giorno," which was first staged in 2015 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Wood is typically thought of as stiff and rigid, but some wood, in the race upward to access the best sunlight, twists. Lianas, or woody vines, are concentrated in tropical forests; they possess a narrow stem that lets them climb to the top of the canopy, more than 100 feet above the ground, as quickly as possible by twisting their way around tree trunks. Basking in the sun at the top, these vines flower, fruit and lay out new leaves as they photosynthesize. But the number of lianas is increasing in tropical forests relative to trees, and their overabundance can hamper a forest's ability to store carbon, so botanists are eager to learn as much about these plants as they can. "We understand a lot about their ecology, but we don't understand how these diverse and strange wood forms evolved," said Joyce Chery, a botanist at Cornell, and the lead author of a study published earlier this year in the journal Current Biology. In early 2017, as a graduate student, Dr. Chery visited the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, where she collected cross section samples of various species of Paullinia, a lineage of liana. Those samples are now part of the herbaria at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Panama. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Will.i.am Moves Wearables Off the Wrist With the Help of Kendall Jenner and Apple Wearable technology is finally beginning to go beyond the wrist. "Why should you have to take off your earphones when you finish listening to something and put them back in a box or bag, instead of just wearing them around your neck like jewelry?" That was Will.i.am, the musician/TV personality/entrepreneur, co founder of the Black Eyed Peas, and founder of i.am , a wearable technology company with a focus on youth education, during an interview by telephone while traveling by car from Manchester, England, to London. It is the kind of question that, when voiced (especially by a coach of "The Voice UK"), seems enormously obvious, but, apparently, has not occurred to any of us to ask. And it clearly reflects some of the issues in bridging the gulf between fashion and technology: It's not the products that are the problem, but figuring out what the products should be and what we want our stuff to do. The question did occur, however, to Will.i.am, whose full name is William Adams. So he created an answer. Called i.am BUTTONS, it is a pair of Bluetooth headphones backed by magnetic metallic discs that, when in the ears, look like a cross between ear plugs and giant studs in the shape of old vinyl records. When not in use, the discs connect via the magnets to form a necklace of sorts. "You know, we all love buying shoes to match our outfits and bags to match our outfits, but for some reason we don't expect our technology to match our outfits," Will.i.am said. "Why not? Why should we just accept that? What I want to do is change that." He's not the only one who thinks it's a good idea. Originally made as accessories to his first i.am product, a bangle/smartwatch called Puls, he was test driving the Buttons one day when he ran into Angela Ahrendts, senior vice president of retail at Apple. "What's that?" she said, pointing to the earphones around his neck. He told her, and she told him that he should sell them as products in their own right. In Apple stores. (Will.i.am has a history with Apple, being involved in the company's first foray into original television he is a mentor on the reality series "Planet of the Apps" as well as "The 411 with Mary J. Blige," a show that streams on Apple Music). So he will: Buttons are being produced in four colors that match the iPhone 7, and are to go on sale in Apple stores beginning on Wednesday; additional shades will be available on the i.am website and through stores such as Max Field for the holidays. The Buttons also work with Android products, have a battery life of six to eight hours, and are priced at a luxury level: 229.95, with a percentage of sales going to benefit the i.am.angel Foundation, which focuses on teaching inner city youth about technology and core subjects. Aesthetically speaking, though, you might think of Buttons as the anti AirPod, Apple's wireless earphones that, when introduced in September, were compared to tampons and "ear cigarettes." So it will be interesting to see how Buttons are received. To me, they seem like most first run products: a great idea, but the reality could use some tweaking. The discs, after all, are the most attractive, fashion y part of the product, but they are also where the magnets reside, so when worn as a necklace they are inside what is effectively the pendant, and the ear piece is what sticks out. As a result, instead of looking like a medallion, which would be a cool addition to an outfit, giving it a 1970s edge, it looks kind of like a little rubber angel. Or a pair of earphones worn around the neck. Still, my guess is that things may evolve: Will.i.am has enlisted a host of major fashion names in his cause. Kendall Jenner and Naomi Campbell joined the company as partners and ambassadors, and model the new product in its campaign. "Kendall represents the new millennial face of fashion, and Naomi is the queen of fashion," Will.i.am said, explaining why he asked them to get involved. Also adding fashion heft and taste is Andre Leon Talley, who has joined as style and fashion director. And Kering, the parent company of Yves Saint Laurent and Gucci, is an investor. Together, they are gearing up for a series of introductions of connected fashion technology products in the next year that will include Button bomber jackets, with connected collars, and Button chokers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The actress and writer Lena Dunham said in an essay published on Wednesday that she had a hysterectomy last fall at age 31 after living for many years with endometriosis, a painful medical condition affecting pelvic tissue. In the essay, in the March issue of Vogue, Ms. Dunham chronicled her decade long struggle with the disease, her efforts to manage it without surgery and the choice she made to have her uterus removed after the pain left her "delirious." "With pain like this, I will never be able to be anyone's mother," she wrote. "Even if I could get pregnant, there's nothing I can offer." But the difficulty of making that decision was compounded by the reluctance of her medical providers to perform the procedure on a woman her age, she said. "They don't contemplate this request lightly, doctors," she wrote. "Medical malpractice suits are real, and women are attached to their uteruses (for me, an almost blind, delusional loyalty, like I'd have to a bad boyfriend)." Because of the nature of the procedure, Ms. Dunham said her doctor required "evidence he's operating on someone resolved enough to give consent and never take it back." That meant she had to sit through consultations with two different therapists, one of whom was recommended by her doctor, while she managed extreme chronic pain, she said. The National Women's Health Network says hysterectomies are the second most performed procedure in the United States for women of reproductive age, though doctors are reluctant to perform them on women as young as Ms. Dunham. According to the organization, it is "incredibly unlikely that a doctor will perform a hysterectomy on women ages 18 35 unless it is absolutely necessary for their well being and no other options will suffice." The procedure can be performed on younger women in response to maladies like uterine fibroids, cancer or endometriosis, a condition in which the tissue that normally lines the inside of the uterus grows on the outside of it, sometimes on organs like the bladder or the bowel, according to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The National Women's Health Network said the reluctance of doctors to perform the procedure on younger women stems from "possible physical and emotional risks." Those include a "rather low" risk of surgical complications like hemorrhaging or infection as well as longer term risks including increased likelihood of stroke, heart attack, early onset menopause and urinary issues, the group said. Holly Brockwell, a British technology writer, said she had tried several times to obtain a hysterectomy in Britain from age 26 to 29 but her efforts were stymied by doctors who expressed disbelief in her decision that she did not want to bear children. On more than one occasion, she said, doctors called her "selfish." "When they've talked about the fulfilment that children bring, I've explained that I already have a longer list of things I want to do than I could possibly achieve in a lifetime," she wrote in an essay for The Guardian. "When they've told me I'll feel differently when I find 'the one,' I've explained that my 'one' wouldn't want kids either." Ms. Dunham said in Vogue that she does want children. She described her lifelong dreams of motherhood and the period of "mourning" during which she confronted the reality that a hysterectomy would make her unable to carry a child. But she said doctors believed the operation, which did not remove her ovaries, may not have rendered her infertile. "Your brain, unaware that the rest of the apparatus has gone, in theory keeps firing up your eggs every month," she wrote. "Adoption is a thrilling truth I'll pursue with all my might. But I wanted that stomach. I wanted to know what nine months of complete togetherness could feel like." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Frank Lyko, a biologist at the German Cancer Research Center, studies the six inch long marbled crayfish. Finding specimens is easy: Dr. Lyko can buy the crayfish at pet stores in Germany, or he can head with colleagues to a nearby lake. Wait till dark, switch on head lamps, and wander into the shallows. The marbled crayfish will emerge from hiding and begin swarming around your ankles. "It's extremely impressive," said Dr. Lyko. "Three of us once caught 150 animals within one hour, just with our hands." Over the past five years, Dr. Lyko and his colleagues have sequenced the genomes of marbled crayfish. In a study published on Monday, the researchers demonstrate that the marble crayfish, while common, is one of the most remarkable species known to science. Before about 25 years ago, the species simply did not exist. A single drastic mutation in a single crayfish produced the marbled crayfish in an instant. The mutation made it possible for the creature to clone itself, and now it has spread across much of Europe and gained a toehold on other continents. In Madagascar, where it arrived about 2007, it now numbers in the millions and threatens native crayfish. "We may never have caught the genome of a species so soon after it became a species," said Zen Faulkes, a biologist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, who was not involved in the new study. The marbled crayfish became popular among German aquarium hobbyists in the late 1990s. The earliest report of the creature comes from a hobbyist who told Dr. Lyko he bought what were described to him as "Texas crayfish" in 1995. The hobbyist whom Dr. Lyko declined to identify was struck by the large size of the crayfish and its enormous batches of eggs. A single marbled crayfish can produce hundreds of eggs at a time. Soon the hobbyist was giving away the crayfish to his friends. And not long afterward, so called marmorkrebs were showing up in pet stores in Germany and beyond. As marmorkrebs became more popular, owners grew increasingly puzzled. The crayfish seemed to be laying eggs without mating. The progeny were all female, and each one grew up ready to reproduce. In 2003, scientists confirmed that the marbled crayfish were indeed making clones of themselves. They sequenced small bits of DNA from the animals, which bore a striking similarity to a group of crayfish species called Procambarus, native to North America and Central America. Ten years later, Dr. Lyko and his colleagues set out to determine the entire genome of the marbled crayfish. By then, it was no longer just an aquarium oddity. For nearly two decades, marbled crayfish have been multiplying like Tribbles on the legendary "Star Trek" episode. "People would start out with a single animal, and a year later they would have a couple hundred," said Dr. Lyko. Many owners apparently drove to nearby lakes and dumped their marmorkrebs. And it turned out that the marbled crayfish didn't need to be pampered to thrive. Marmorkrebs established growing populations in the wild, sometimes walking hundreds of yards to reach new lakes and streams. Feral populations started turning up in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia and Ukraine in Europe, and later in Japan and Madagascar. Sequencing the genome of this animal was not easy: No one had sequenced the genome of a crayfish. In fact, no one had ever sequenced any close relative of crayfish. READ: Somehow, This Fish Fathered a Near Clone of Itself Dr. Lyko and his colleagues struggled for years to piece together fragments of DNA into a single map of its genome. Once they succeeded, they sequenced the genomes of 15 other specimens, including marbled crayfish living in German lakes and those belonging to other species. The rich genetic detail gave the scientists a much clearer look at the freakish origins of the marbled crayfish. It apparently evolved from a species known as the slough crayfish, Procambarus fallax, which lives only in the tributaries of the Satilla River in Florida and Georgia. The scientists concluded that the new species got its start when two slough crayfish mated. One of them had a mutation in a sex cell whether it was an egg or sperm, the scientists can't tell. Normal sex cells contain a single copy of each chromosome. But the mutant crayfish sex cell had two. Somehow the two sex cells fused and produced a female crayfish embryo with three copies of each chromosome instead of the normal two. Somehow, too, the new crayfish didn't suffer any deformities as a result of all that extra DNA. It grew and thrived. But instead of reproducing sexually, the first marbled crayfish was able to induce her own eggs to start dividing into embryos. The offspring, all females, inherited identical copies of her three sets of chromosomes. They were clones. Now that their chromosomes were mismatched with those of slough crayfish, they could no longer produce viable offspring. Male slough crayfish will readily mate with the marbled crayfish, but they never father any of the offspring. In December, Dr. Lyko and his colleagues officially declared the marbled crayfish to be a species of its own, which they named Procambarus virginalis. The scientists can't say for sure where the species began. There are no wild populations of marble crayfish in the United States, so it's conceivable that the new species arose in a German aquarium. READ: A Gene Mystery: How Are Rats With No Y Chromosome Born Male? All the marbled crayfish Dr. Lyko's team studied were almost genetically identical to one another. Yet that single genome has allowed the clones to thrive in all manner of habitats from abandoned coal fields in Germany to rice paddies in Madagascar. In their new study, published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, the researchers show that the marbled crayfish has spread across Madagascar at an astonishing pace, across an area the size of Indiana in about a decade. Thanks to the young age of the species, marbled crayfish could shed light on one of the big mysteries about the animal kingdom: why so many animals have sex. Only about 1 in 10,000 species comprise cloning females. Many studies suggest that sex free species are rare because they don't last long. In one such study, Abraham E. Tucker of Southern Arkansas University and his colleagues studied 11 asexual species of water fleas, a tiny kind of invertebrate. Their DNA indicates that the species only evolved about 1,250 years ago. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The Basketball Hall of Fame induction for an exceptionally illustrious class, including the late Kobe Bryant, will be postponed from August to next spring because of the coronavirus pandemic, Jerry Colangelo, the chairman of the Hall of Fame's board of governors, said Wednesday. No announcement will be official until the board of governors convenes on June 10, Colangelo said. "But that's what I expect will be the outcome," he said in a telephone interview. Read more on why the NBA is planning on going to Disney World. Bryant, who died at 41 in a helicopter crash on Jan. 26, was voted into the Hall in April, as were his N.B.A. contemporaries Tim Duncan and Kevin Garnett and the 10 time W.N.B.A. All Star Tamika Catchings. The enshrinement weekend was originally scheduled for Aug. 28 to 30, and Colangelo had proposed Oct. 10 to 12 as an alternative in case fears over the pandemic lingered. But Colangelo said it had become clear to him that neither weekend would be feasible. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
"I know there are questions about whether Uber has any 'big, bold' bets left," the Uber chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, said in an email to company employees that was viewed by The New York Times. "I understand that question, but I think it misses the big, bold bets right in front of us: to become the undisputed global leaders in both Mobility and Delivery." The company declined to comment further. The deal is also an indication that the air taxi industry, which has been buoyed by enormous hype and investment over the last several years, is consolidating around a smaller group of companies. Investments are being funneled to a select group of players, said Asad Hussain, an analyst with Pitchbook, a research firm that tracks financial activity. In 2020, nearly a billion dollars have been invested in this kind of "air mobility" company, according to Pitchbook. With the new investment from Uber, Joby Aviation, based in Santa Cruz, Calif., has raised over 820 million. The company is trying to build an air taxi service that provides an alternative to overly crowded roadways in large urban areas. It hopes to start a service in at least one city by 2023. But first, government regulators must approve the use of its aircraft, which is a cross between a plane and helicopter that takes off vertically. When the service begins, it will dovetail with Uber's ride hailing service, said the Joby executive chairman, Paul Sciarra. In other words, each company will offer an app that will let customers hail rides through the other. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The Royal Opera House in London announced on Friday that the opera star Placido Domingo had withdrawn from his upcoming performances there this summer. It was his latest European engagement to be called off since an American opera union's investigation found last week that Mr. Domingo had engaged in "inappropriate activity" with women. The company said that Mr. Domingo's withdrawal from a production of Verdi's "Don Carlo" there in July had been "mutually decided." "We would like to confirm that we have received no claims of misconduct against Maestro Domingo during his time at the Royal Opera House and are sympathetic of his reasons for stepping down," said a statement emailed by Ben Oliver, a spokesman for the Royal Opera. "Placido is an outstanding singer and artist and we are hugely grateful for his support and commitment over many decades." The announcement came a week after the union representing many American opera performers, the American Guild of Musical Artists, released the results of an investigation which found that Mr. Domingo had "engaged in inappropriate activity, ranging from flirtation to sexual advances, in and outside of the workplace." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Full reviews of recent classical performances: nytimes.com/classical. A searchable guide to these and other performances is at nytimes.com/events. Lauren Bakst and Yuri Masnyj (Friday and Thursday) As part of the Drawing Center's multidisciplinary exhibition "Name It by Trying to Name It: Open Sessions 2014 15," Ms. Bakst, a dancer and choreographer, joins forces with Mr. Masnyj, a visual artist. In "Single Occupancy," they throw open the definition of "portraiture," using objects, a monitor and the human body to explore presence through absence. (Performances repeat on Aug. 20 and 21.) Friday at 2 and 3 p.m., Thursday at 7 p.m., Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, SoHo, 212 219 2166, drawingcenter.org. (Siobhan Burke) Ballet Festival (through Aug. 16) This festival of small and venturesome ballet troupes continues with the Ashley Bouder Project (Saturday and Sunday). Ms. Bouder, a New York City Ballet principal, has assembled an evening of works by Adriana Pierce of Miami City Ballet; Andrea Schermoly, formerly of Nederlands Dans Theater; and Joshua Beamish, whose own troupe performed earlier in the festival. On Tuesday and Wednesday, Philadelphia's BalletX offers Matthew Neenan's full length "Sunset, o639 Hours," and Thursday brings a program of new and revived works by Emery LeCrone, featuring dancers from City Ballet and American Ballet Theater. Friday, Saturday and Thursday at 8 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., Tuesday and Wednesday at 7:30 p.m., Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, Chelsea, 212 242 0800, joyce.org. (Burke) Boffo Fire Island Performance Festival (Friday through Sunday) The nonprofit arts organization Boffo, which presents art of various kinds in public and repurposed spaces, will host its inaugural Performance Festival on Fire Island, with site specific works inspired by the island's people and places. Participants include Jen Rosenblit and Enrico D. Wey, with their collaborative "Waxing and waning and small tokens" (Friday at 7 p.m.); Colin Self, whose guided walk, "Docking," explores the nature of arriving and departing (Saturday at 10 a.m., Sunday at 11 a.m.); and Vanessa Anspaugh, with "A men," a seaside reflection on the performance of masculinity (Sunday at 2 p.m.) At various locations, Fire Island Pines, boffoperformancefestival.eventbrite.com. (Burke) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
There were a lot of ways "Lovecraft Country" could have gone wrong, but timing didn't turn out to be one of them. It's a good moment to get attention for a scary monster series that rejuvenates the horror genre by making the heroes Black and putting America's racist history at the center of the story. HBO, where the 10 episode season of "Lovecraft Country" premieres on Sunday, offered something similar last year with "Watchmen." But the new series, based on a novel by Matt Ruff and developed for television by Misha Green ("Underground"), is different in a couple of key ways. Race was one theme among many in "Watchmen"; in "Lovecraft Country," it informs every scene and relationship. "Lovecraft" fully integrates a noxious real life history into its fantastical narrative and reminds us how little some things have changed in the six decades since the story's setting. But its goal appears to be to scare us into having fun, something it achieves about half the time in the five episodes made available in advance. That's not to diminish the impressively seamless job Green has done in wielding the cultural metaphors. (She's credited as a writer on all 10 episodes, the first three solo.) "Lovecraft" is a quest story: Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors), once a shy, scholarly child and now an embittered Korean War veteran, sets off across 1950s Jim Crow America to find his missing father, learn about his dead mother and perhaps exorcise some of his own demons. He's accompanied by various Chicago based friends and family, including the intrepid, politically active Leti (Jurnee Smollett) and his Uncle George (Courtney B. Vance), publisher of a "Green Book" like guide for Black travelers and an aficionado of pulp fiction. Their initial journey takes them to eastern Massachusetts, the Lovecraft country of the title, and to a town called Ardham one letter away from Arkham, the fictional scene of some of the ghastly H.P. Lovecraft tales that inspired Ruff's novel. There they run into murderous white cops, a secret society and terrifying vampiric slug monsters that burrow into the ground in an endearingly meek way when frightened. Within that Saturday matinee framework, Green consistently, and not too heavy handedly, finds ways to link the horrors the characters face with the everyday horrors of Black life. It's something that's been done before, going back at least to the original "Night of the Living Dead," but perhaps not this thoroughly and inventively. Sometimes the links are literal, as in the idea of poor Blacks being used as subjects for scientific experimentation. But others are more ingrained in the story's fabric, like the way in which the supernatural illusions the white antagonists inflict on the Black characters constitute a form of gaslighting, making them doubt that the attacks on them are real, or making them think that they're self inflicted. A standard horror movie device, the magic spell that transforms a character's appearance, has a different resonance when a Black character is made white and is suddenly treated by both races as if she were a human being. In an episode built around Leti's attempt to integrate a neighborhood on Chicago's North Side, the violent reaction of the white residents is in counterpoint to, and eventually intertwined with, the violent reactions of the ghosts who haunt the house she buys. Throughout, the abuses perpetrated by everyday whites technically non monsters take on an extra malevolence; the occultists, obsessed with eternal life, have at least an understandable motivation. Most of this material works as both allegory and action, and particularly in its first few episodes, directed by Yann Demange ("White Boy Rick") and Daniel Sackheim, "Lovecraft Country" gets the blend right. The characters and story are engaging, and the production has a dreamy but vivid feel that hints at Lovecraft's mesmeric quality while avoiding his florid excesses. (The racism and misogyny that scar Lovecraft's writings are briefly mentioned.) And it's amusing how the love of lowdown pulp is embedded in the story: The expertise that Atticus, George and others have in Lovecraft, Dumas and Edgar Rice Burroughs gives them a tactical advantage in their battles with the monsters. The energy and freedom of pulp serves as both our way into the story and as a means for the Black characters to create an alternate, improved mythology for themselves. "Lovecraft Country" doesn't maintain its early momentum, however the third and fourth episodes don't have the same allusive pleasures, and the stylistic cues shift to a Spielbergian action adventure mode that no one involved appears to have much affinity for. The narrative also starts to wander, with questions piling up and a seemingly important chunk of the story, located in South Korea, remaining offscreen perhaps a warning sign of distracting flashbacks to come. The actors compensate to some extent for the drift, particularly Vance as the peaceable George and the formidable Wunmi Mosaku as Ruby, Leti's no nonsense sister, who aspires to a salesclerk's job at Marshall Field. (It's Ruby's second choice after a singing career, and the Nigerian born, British raised Mosaku is both powerful and credible belting out "I Want a Tall Skinny Papa" and "Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby.") Smollett is excellent, too, and adds some needed touches of humor as the feisty Leti, while Majors is charismatic but a little opaque as Atticus, perhaps because so much about the character is being held back. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Groundwork Is Laid for Opioids Settlement That Would Touch Every Corner of U.S. None Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times Every city, town and county in the United States could receive a payout in a settlement with the largest makers, distributors and retailers of prescription opioids, if a judge approves an innovative proposal made Friday in an Ohio federal court by lawyers for hundreds of local governments. The plan, which legal experts describe as "novel" and "unorthodox," could potentially expand the number of municipalities and counties eligible for compensation in the federal litigation from 1,650 to about 24,500 and open the way for a comprehensive national opioid settlement with the pharmaceutical industry. "We have an epidemic caused by pills that have wheels, and different areas of the country get targeted at different points in time," said Joe Rice, one of the lead lawyers, explaining a major obstacle to settlement in the rapidly accumulating cases. "So if you solve the problem in New York City, it doesn't get addressed in Albany. And everyone recognizes this is a national issue." The goal behind this proposal is to sweeten the incentive for the defendants to negotiate a settlement in earnest, something they have largely resisted. If all municipalities are included in a settlement, the reasoning goes, these companies would not have to fear future lawsuits from local governments. In the last year and a half, court cases against the pharmaceutical industry have continued to pile up, mostly brought by small governments seeking compensation for the costs they have incurred for providing medical and emergency services to people struggling with addiction as well as adequate law enforcement and other expenses. For the sake of expedience, a vast majority of those cases 1,967 to date have been collected in one federal court, in what is known as a multi district litigation. The new proposal must be approved by Judge Dan Aaron Polster, the federal judge in Cleveland who is presiding over the litigation. Judge Polster has long said that his goal is a comprehensive settlement that offers meaningful solutions, both immediate and long term, to the damage wrought by opioids. A spokesman for Purdue Pharma, an opioid manufacturer, said in response to the proposal: "The company is committed to working with all parties toward a resolution that helps bring needed solutions to communities and states to address this public health crisis. We continue to work collaboratively within the MDL process outlined by Judge Polster," referring to the acronym for the multi district litigation. Other companies could not immediately be reached. Johnson Johnson, which manufactures opioids, did not respond to requests for comment. What makes resolution of the litigation particularly urgent is that the harm from opioids, including overdose deaths, is still continuing as the cases move through the court process. But the legal challenges are daunting. The benefit for municipal plaintiffs is straightforward. There is no certainty that they could recover anything on their own. Here, the funds to abate the deadly crisis would be guaranteed and delivered more swiftly than if the municipalities pursued their own cases. To determine what each municipality would receive, the lead plaintiffs' lawyers have created an interactive map that will immediately show each participant their expected share of any proposed settlement. The lawyers created the map using federal data pinpointing distribution of prescriptions as well as opioid overdoses and deaths nationwide. The map is anticipated to be made public if Judge Polster approves the new proposal. A hearing is scheduled for later this month. "I think this plan is a really clever way to get a handle on the opioid settlement negotiations," said Howard Erichson, who teaches complex litigation at Fordham Law School and has been an outspoken critic of other large scale agreements. The plan would create a "negotiation class" consisting of every municipality in the country. If a local government does not opt out up front, it is presumed to have opted in. Even as negotiations are underway, plaintiffs would be free to keep pressing their cases to trial, traditionally understood to be a necessary stick to prod everyone to the table. The first trial in the federal litigation is relatively imminent, now set for late October. According to the proposal, all plaintiffs would vote on any settlement offer. To be accepted, 75 percent of the voters would have to approve. If that supermajority were reached, the agreement would be binding on all participating localities. Even so, any settlement would still need judicial approval. What distinguishes this structure and makes it novel is that, typically, a settlement is offered to members in a class action suit only after it is agreed upon by the lawyers. Members of the class action can then vote to accept it or litigate on their own. This plan gives participants more upfront voice and opportunity for scrutiny, Mr. Erichson noted. "What's brilliant and beautiful about this plan is that it provides an extra layer of protection against unfair settlement," he said. Some legal observers expressed reservations about the plan, because even if it were successful, it would not cover lawsuits by the states themselves. "There's still an 800 pound gorilla waiting outside the state attorneys general," said Elizabeth Burch, a law professor at the University of Georgia who has closely followed the litigation. The state cases, such as the current trial in Oklahoma against Johnson Johnson, are not in the proposal because they are not in federal court. The plan also doesn't invite potential plaintiffs from among other types already in the federal litigation, such as tribes, unions and hospitals, as well as babies born with neonatal abstinence syndrome. But the municipal cases do represent the bulk before Judge Polster. Samuel Issacharoff, who as a legal adviser to the lead plaintiff lawyers was an architect of the proposal, said it builds on models from asbestos trust settlements and, more recently, the National Football League's fund for retired players with concussion injuries, a case in which he was involved. Mr. Issacharoff noted that in this litigation, the plaintiffs are not individuals but governmental entities. He dismissed comparisons to the Big Tobacco settlement: That was not the result of a class action but a consortium of state attorneys general. "This is the most elaborate and direct form of class member participation that has ever been tried," said Mr. Issacharoff, who teaches complex litigation at New York University School of Law. Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
As in many large countries, most of the popular stereotypes about Brazil unravel with the slightest tug. A nation of sunny beaches and exquisite tans on svelte bods? Sure, and chilly mountain towns and linebackers in the German enclaves in the south, as well. Dysfunctional politics? In the extreme, but what is functional politics nowadays, anyway? Yet, in one area the homogeneity holds: the nation's drink. If you said anything other than cachaca and the caipirinha, you're thinking of the wrong place. Across an area the size of the contiguous United States, there are thousands of cachaca stills, many unlicensed, that produce hundreds of millions of liters of the spirit annually. What is clear is that the vast majority of it is consumed in Brazil and is a cheap variety, lacking in complex flavor, akin to fuel ethanol, and typically drunk neat or as a part of the caipirinha cocktail, said Felipe Jannuzzi, the co founder of Mapa da Cachaca, which is an amalgam of sorts of sociology, guide and advocacy for high quality cachaca. But in Sao Paulo, the Brazilian metropolis that has always bucked some of the cliches about the nation (there are no beaches, for one), a few bars and bartenders are working to elevate cachaca as a connoisseur worthy drink and as a key component of the city's nascent cocktail culture. On a recent visit, I decided to stop in at a few of these to see how such cachaca was being used. To get a sense of the wide variety of cachacas available, Mr. Jannuzzi and I took a seat at Emporio Sagarana, a bar in the Vila Romana neighborhood (there's also a second location in hip Vila Madalena) that is styled as a traditional boteco of the state of Minas Gerais, a stronghold of cachaca production. Instead of a typical selection of just a few cachacas, Emporio Sagarana sports a menu of dozens, many with tasting notes. It also begins with a manifesto of what is good cachaca, which Mr. Jannuzzi helped write. While Emporio Sagarana serves a few pre bottled cocktails, it is mainly a cachaca and beer place. As we sipped from shot glasses of Serra Limpa, one of the first organic cachacas, and another from Fascinacao, Mr. Jannuzzi explained that cachaca comes in two main varieties: industrial and artisanal. Both are made from fresh sugar cane juice (unlike most rums, which are made from molasses), but the former is made on large column stills; the latter, the only type connoisseurs consider worthy to drink, is made on a smaller scale using pot stills. Like rum, cachaca is sold both unaged and aged. Unlike rum, however, cachaca producers don't limit their aging to just oak instead they may use barrels made from any of a couple dozen different Brazilian woods. Moreover, a small avant garde of producers has recently started highlighting different varieties of sugar cane as well as releasing vintage cachacas, Mr. Jannuzzi said. All of this gives the handful of bartenders working seriously with cachaca in craft cocktails in Sao Paulo a wide gamut of flavors to experiment with and the ability to create cocktails highlighting an individual bottle, he said. "They are making cocktails thinking of the brands, they use only one cachaca. I really like that. A cocktail custom made for one brand of cachaca," he said. When I visited the bar Guarita in the Pinheiros neighborhood, the bartenders Jean Ponce and David Barreiro said that they often choose a cachaca for a cocktail based on the wood the cachaca was aged in. Amburana wood aged cachacas, for example, work well in classic cocktails and with vermouth, while white cachacas and those with the almond and anise notes that come from balsamo wood pair well with lime. "Balsamo wood is the future of cachaca," Jean Ponce said via Greg Caisley, the bar's owner and chef (Mr. Caisley, an Australian expat, served as translator for my conversation). "It is a very complex wood, it is a wood that speaks, it has minerals, herbs, citrus, it is perfect for cocktails." "You'll understand when you taste it," Mr. Ponce added, whipping me up a caipirinha made with Canarinha, a balsamo wood aged cachaca from Salinas, a city in the state of Minas Gerais and a stronghold of cachaca production. The Canarinha added more complexity than a typical caipirinha with unaged cachaca, as well as some bitterness; overall, it was a drier and, perhaps, a less beach friendly concoction. While many of the cachaca cocktails I had in Sao Paulo that weren't caipirinhas were riffs on common whiskey cocktails, often with lots of vermouth, at Guarita Mr. Ponce often creates cocktails that show the spirit's lighter side. One, made with cachaca, tonic water and simple syrup, also included turmeric and Rangpur lime and was garnished with the herb rue, known in Brazil as arruda a nod, popular among the city's bartenders, to the country's incredible botanical richness. In Sao Paulo, I also had cocktails made with the leaves of the pitanga tree, tonka beans (known as cumaru), and the bulbous yellow orange fruit of the cashew tree, called caju. I also encountered at least three different lime varieties in frequent use, which made decoding which particular variety was in which particular cocktail, maddening. For reference: the standard issue green Persian lime is the limao tahiti, the Rangpur lime goes either by limao capeta or limao cravo, while a limao galego is a key lime. Overall, bartenders say they are eager to craft cocktails that are distinctly Brazilian. However, there are some challenges that are inherent to working with cachaca. One is that beyond the caipirinha and another cocktail, recently resurgent, called a Rabo de Galo (meaning Tail of the Rooster, or cocktail) that is made from cachaca, vermouth and a bitter, Brazil lacks an indigenous cocktail culture, said Spencer Amereno Jr., the head bartender at Frank Bar in the Maksoud Plaza hotel. "We are creating a way to mix cachaca," he said of the city's ascendant class of craft bartenders. "It is hard because there is no tradition of mixing cachaca in cocktails, unlike in the U.S., which, for example, has had the book 'How to Mix Drinks' since 1862." At Frank Bar, Mr. Amereno said he turns to classic cocktails to think of how to use cachaca best. However, that doesn't mean he's merely recreating the classics with the native spirit. "I don't use the simple thinking: I'll substitute cachaca for bourbon. I like to put tradition in typical Brazilian cocktails," he said. "We have a number of Brazilian customers who think cachaca is harsh and they don't like it. I try to surprise them and put value in cocktails with cachaca," he said. Nonetheless, it takes only a quick glance at the menus of many cocktail bars, where drinks made from gin and whiskey vastly outnumber those made from cachaca, to understand how far the native spirit has to go before it reaches the prominence of its globalized brethren. That doesn't mean you have to shun cachaca in its more traditional iteration of the caipirinha. Far from a relic of a less sophisticated era or an embarrassing marker of an out of touch bar and an uninventive bartender, when done properly the caipirinha can capture the qualities the city's top bartenders are striving for, being both distinctly Brazilian and a showcase of skill. It was a point made clearly when, on my last full day in Sao Paulo, I found myself 45 minutes from the city center at the restaurant Mocoto, a haven of Northeastern Brazilian cuisine that is so celebrated that it not only spawned more recommendations than any other place in my travels around the city, but also has inspired an haute cuisine spinoff called Esquina Mocoto. The original remains humble, and when I walked up to the bar with Marcello Gaya, the Leblon brand ambassador, I had the option of ordering various caipirinhas made from an assortment of the fresh fruit that makes Brazil a produce lover's paradise. At Mr. Gaya's suggestion, I went with a caipirinha tres limoes, or a three lime caipirinha, which includes as citrus the Persian lime, the Rangpur lime and lemon (or limao siciliano) and was one of the first caipirinha variations to make it big, Mr. Gaya said. When it arrived, it was exquisite hitting a perfect balance of booze, acid and sweetness achieved by only the best daiquiris (both drinks rely on the same tricky balance of flavors and like the daiquiri, the caipirinha is often served too sweet). "That's their knowledge, the muddling, they have different fruit every day, some days this is sweeter," Mr. Gaya said holding up a Rangpur lime, "some days more acidic, so you have to know what you are doing." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Yes, it's August, in all its fire and fetor, and maybe you'd rather be at the beach. But new productions opening in New York this month offer consolation and stimulation (and essential air conditioning) to those staying in the city. They include sharp minded considerations of matters political, from Suzan Lori Parks and the multifarious Michael Moore; an anthology of Broadway musical hits from a master of the genre, Harold Prince; and New York premieres from the empathetic Simon Stephens and the caustic Bruce Norris. THE TERMS OF MY SURRENDER Michael Moore, who predicted the victory of our incumbent president, makes his Broadway debut to assess the consequences of that prophecy fulfilled in these not so United States. This polymathic documentary filmmaker ("Fahrenheit 9/11," "Sicko") and author ("Dude, Where's My Country?") is turning the Belasco Theater into a one man bully pulpit for his distinctive gospel of All American dissent. This being New York City, he may be mostly preaching to the choir. But Mr. Moore tends to tripwire his own sermons in ways guaranteed to provoke thought, laughter and red blooded rage. Michael Mayer ("Spring Awakening," "Hedwig and the Angry Inch") directs. PRINCE OF BROADWAY A colossus of the musical theater since the 1950s, Harold Prince returns to the Times Square neighborhood, where his name is a byword for both innovation and razzle dazzle. This animated scrapbook of a Tony Award laden career features numbers from the Olympian classics on which Mr. Prince served as a producer or director: "West Side Story," "Fiddler on the Roof," "Cabaret," "Follies" and "Sweeney Todd," for starters. As might be expected, Mr. Prince has assembled a caviar team for this Manhattan Theater Club production, including the choreographer Susan Stroman, who co directed with Mr. Prince, and, as musical supervisor and arranger, the composer Jason Robert Brown. A PARALLELOGRAM Who knows what evil and festering discontent and bad faith lurks in the hearts of men and women? Bruce Norris does. He's the corrosive dramatist who has regularly peered (and poked) under the rocks of American hypocrisy with plays like "The Pain and the Itch" and the Pulitzer Prize winning "Clybourne Park," which riffed without hope but with great wit and inventiveness on the watershed Lorraine Hansberry play, "A Raisin in the Sun." His "A Parallelogram," directed by Michael Greif ("Dear Evan Hansen") for Second Stage, follows one woman's dialogue between her present and future selves. A bright tomorrow is unlikely to be in the forecast. The cast includes Celia Keenan Bolger, Anita Gillette and Stephen Kunken. THE RED LETTER PLAYS In the late 20th century, the peerlessly intrepid dramatist Suzan Lori Parks revisited Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter," that great 19th century novel of Puritan guilt, to consider the stigmas with which African American women have been branded. Ms. Parker has an expansive and thrillingly original imagination, and her riposte to "The Scarlet Letter" required two plays, both featuring a central character named for Hawthorne's ill used Hester: "In the Blood" and "A," whose full title includes an unprintable epithet. Now the Signature Theater Company is reviving these works in tandem, with new productions directed by Sarah Benson ("In the Blood") and Jo Bonney ("A"). You are sure to be reminded that no one writes American history or rewrites its cultural cliches like Ms. Parks, who won a Pulitzer Prize for "Topdog/Underdog." ON THE SHORE OF THE WIDE WORLD The British playwright Simon Stephens has become one of the theater's most poignant chroniclers of everyday lives in upheaval. Best known for his Tony winning adaptation of Mark Haddon's "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time," Mr. Stephens has also written a series of quieter, diamond faceted dramas in which static existences are shaken and stirred into new forms, including the smashing two character "Heisenberg," seen on Broadway last season with Mary Louise Parker and Denis Arndt. Now the Atlantic Theater Company, which gave us a fine production of Mr. Stephens's "Harper Regan" in 2012, presents the New York premiere of his "On the Shore of the Wide World," a delicately drawn map of roads not taken by three generations of a family in Mr. Stephens's native Stockport, England. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
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