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To create, you have to take risks. It's a basic rule of improvisation. But there may be no musician who has resisted safety or stability like Annette Peacock. She's probably the most remarkable and mercurial living singer and composer you've almost certainly never heard. On Friday, beginning a rare New York concert at the First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn, she addressed the crowd. "I was born in Brooklyn haven't been back in a long while," she said, her voice hard and almost whispering. Then she paused, seeming both dramatic and unrehearsed, and deadpanned: "Don't hurt me." Ms. Peacock, 77, put her hands on the grand piano and unloosed a slow drag of notes, no more than two or three at a time, wending her way into the ballad "So Hard It Hurts." Suddenly, the thin, drifting harmonies were sending a flush of anxiety through the room. Why would she think we were going to hurt her? Read our picks for the best jazz of the year. Since the late 1960s, Ms. Peacock has become a pioneer many times over. She was among the first to use an analog synthesizer, and invented a creative method of activating it through her voice. (David Bowie was wowed, and he begged her unsuccessfully to tour with him, she has said.) Before Joni Mitchell changed the folk singing game with "Blue," Ms. Peacock was defining a liberated style of confessional, loosely flowing songs. And from the very beginning of her career she treated musical idioms as if they simply did not exist, back when that was far from common practice. "I'm very comfortable where the freedom is," Ms. Peacock said, speaking from her home in Woodstock, N.Y., two days after the show. "And the freedom isn't a comfortable place to be. I missed the Beats, and I made up my mind that I wasn't going to miss another movement. I wound up moving too fast and being ahead of the movements in the music thing. So that's another problem." There is risk in living ahead of the curve, for sure. But it's in the sound of her music that you hear the most uncertainty: an ethos of openness, of discontent, of danger. It is music in contact with as one of Ms. Peacock's songs has it "a world that's destroying itself." Ms. Peacock began playing piano at 4, and was writing her own music by 5. Her mother was a concert violist, and Ms. Peacock often heard string quartets rehearsing at home. At 19, then an aspiring actress, she married the bassist Gary Peacock, who performed and toured with Albert Ayler, one of the most influential tenor saxophonists on the jazz avant garde. The experience changed Ms. Peacock, and gave her a sense of purpose. "There was a celebration of freedom going on in all the lofts all around New York City," she said. "They had just got themselves liberated from time and chord changes and everything, and everyone was playing all at once. This cacophony I heard it and I just wanted to carve huge chunks out of it, create some space." The pursuit led her to Millbrook, N.Y., where she fell in with Timothy Leary and his followers for a stint. And after her divorce from Mr. Peacock and marriage to the renowned pianist Paul Bley it also led her to Robert Moog, the inventor of the analog synthesizer. Impressed by Mr. Bley's reputation and the couple's ingenuity, Mr. Moog gifted them an early iteration of his instrument. Ms. Peacock rewired it so she could trigger the sounds with her voice, and they lugged it around on tours throughout Europe and the United States, often startling audiences. "You had to actually go into the oscillator and activate it," Ms. Peacock said. "And then the beauty about it is, you can control the attack, the rise, the sustain and the decay time. You actually create the note from the beginning." Mr. Bley recorded a series of albums devoted to her compositions, some of which included her on electronics. Her writing for these records draws on both free improvisation and classic balladry, crafting a natural amalgam and helping to establish the spacious, wintry sound of ECM Records, which would become one of jazz's most influential institutions. "I thought this was a very personal style of writing, and her things had a simplicity, a clarity," ECM's founder, Manfred Eicher, said. "Sometimes I felt she was right at the essence of expression. She definitely developed a new way of writing ballads. The weight and the space and the silence that she evokes." RCA Records released the album "I'm the One," but Ms. Peacock's relationship with the label didn't last. ECM released its only album under Ms. Peacock's sole name, "An Acrobat's Heart," in 2000. The songs on it feel like Tin Pan Alley ballads cut open, made into dark dreams. Her voice is like thick smoke, somewhere between a mutter and a purr. A serendipitous on the street encounter with a music executive in the early 1970s led Ms. Peacock to a deal with RCA, which released "I'm the One," a stew of blistery funk and associative poetry and psychotropic, Captain Beefheart adjacent experimental rock. The contract which RCA signed in the same batch as Mr. Bowie's and Lou Reed's didn't last, and Ms. Peacock moved to Britain in 1973, staying for two decades. While there, she recorded a series of riveting albums, including the scorching "X Dreams" from 1978, and "The Perfect Release" from 1979. Ms. Peacock played around Europe often, with her own bands and with Bill Bruford, the star drummer and bandleader. In the mid 1980s she began releasing records on Ironic, and in 1994, she moved to Woodstock, where she still lives in a small house on a 16 acre plot. While she never broke through to a broad audience, she maintained her commitments. "I don't have a life other than the music," she said of her current existence. "I don't have a relationship, I don't have a social life, I'm not really a consumer. And I improvise my life." At the First Unitarian church, a sold out crowd emerged from the Brooklyn woodwork to celebrate a fringe icon. Alone onstage, Ms. Peacock played music from throughout her career on piano, synthesizer and the occasional drum machine. For the most part these songs were decades old, but much was left open to the flow of chance. Sometimes she supported her wandering voice with a breathy, billowing chord on the synthesizer. Elsewhere she played just the piano, a single note in each hand or a few tolling chords. On "Elect Yourself," she lamented and admonished in a tumble of spoken word: "There's no freedom in society, only tradition," she said. Then later, "The human mind is addicted to pattern." The song ended on a refrain: "Elect yourself/Collect yourself." Well over an hour into her set, Ms. Peacock fiddled with her drum machine, cursed at it, then successfully clicked on a backing beat, complete with canned slap bass and electric guitar. About a minute into the song, she moved her lips away from the microphone, but the words kept coming through the speakers. Her hands lifted off the keyboard, and the sound continued. She slid off the piano bench to the left, turning away coolly from the audience. She got up, and her lanky, trench coat shielded, fur hat covered frame slinked offstage. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Once, a man's suit stood for something and stood for it practically upright. "The structure of a suit back in the '80s, the '70s, the '60s, the '50s, is amazing," said Jean Paul Buthier, a founder of Rue St. Denis, a vintage store that has been a destination on Avenue B in East Village of Manhattan for 25 years. "The fabrics, the weight of them, you can't compare it. Today, there's a sense of clothing being more comfortable. We don't want to suffer for fashion as much as we used to. But we are giving up so much for that comfort." Such sacrifices aren't made in the narrow corridor of Rue St. Denis, where Mr. Buthier, 55, and his partner, Riccardo Bonechi, 59, have been selling pristine vintage and dead stock since the neighborhood was less known for brunch and glassy condos than for drug dealers. "Right on the corner, by the lamppost," Mr. Bonechi said. "They'd sell and then they'd come in the shop. Anything that glittered, they'd say, 'I want that! I want that!'" There is plenty that still glitters, but Rue St. Denis will soon be turning out the lights. On Monday it began a final sale, offering its clothes for up to 75 percent off. Within a few weeks, it will shut its doors. At a goodbye party for friends last week, the store was choked with fans buying up things. Charlotte McKee, a young actress, was considering a Celine esque pantsuit; Bara de Cabrol, a longtime customer (and a daughter of the singer Petula Clark), was browsing with her husband, Roger. "If it's good, I like it, and if it's not good, I don't like it," Ms. de Cabrol said, inspecting her reflection in a puffed out black dress she initially had slipped into backward. "I don't care about a label." The dress turned out to be by Claude Montana. Nearby was Tom Broecker, a costume designer for "Saturday Night Live," arms full. "I'm stockpiling for any possible idea that could ever come my way," he said. Mr. Buthier and Mr. Bonechi, partners in life as well as in vintage, met in London 34 years ago; Mr. Buthier was from outside Paris, Mr. Bonechi from outside Florence. Together they came to New York where, "like good Europeans, we were waiters," Mr. Buthier said. He waited tables at Le Relais, the 1980s power spot on Madison Avenue favored by young socialites and expatriates ("everyone my age and everyone from Europe," Cornelia Guest said recently). They had both been charmed by vintage and shopping at thrift stores as kids "Against my mother's wishes," Mr. Bonechi said and eventually set up a stand at the Columbus Avenue flea market in 1988. That stand became an Amsterdam Avenue store and, eventually, the Avenue B shop: a present proofed, seven day a week refuge from the current moment. In Rue St. Denis, the '90s were no more than a whisper. The millennium was in the far distance. Athleisure never infiltrated here, and designer sneakers held no court. Suits, dresses, coats and even decades old bathing suits hung perfectly preserved, their hems unaltered, their original tags attached. Mr. Buthier oversaw the collection, going on buying trips across America and France and ferrying goods back and forth to a warehouse in Philadelphia where he keeps and catalogs (mostly by memory) 40,000 pieces. Mr. Bonechi ruled the store, sizing up customers with a glance. Though there are famous names here and there, most of the stock is not designer. Mr. Buthier and Mr. Bonechi prefer to leave that business more to specialty shops like Resurrection. Rue St. Denis traffics in the everyday goods of an earlier era, purchased mostly from retired store owners and wholesalers, whose shingles have been taken down but whose stock often sits in attics and shuttered storefronts. (The children of these retired shopkeepers, Mr. Buthier finds, are easier to negotiate with than their parents, who are parting with their legacy.) There are those who still dress like the swans and swains time forgot, but some of Rue St. Denis's most devoted customers are professionals. Fashion designers and their teams are regulars, searching for inspiration. Kris Van Assche, the artistic director of Berluti (and formerly Dior Homme), came for the men's suits, Mr. Bonechi said; a team of designers from Lacoste recently took over the shop for a private appointment. Even more devoted are the costume designers of the film and television industry, where period pieces require period clothes, in pristine condition and often in multiples. "If someone gets killed, you need a double or a triple," said Anna Terrazas, a costume designer who has worked on gritty period dramas like "The Deuce," where fake blood spatter is not unheard of. "Honestly, I don't know how we would have done the show without them," said Katie Irish, a costume designer who worked on several seasons of "The Americans," in a phone interview. "The majority of men's suits you see on 'The Americans' were purchased from Rue St. Denis. We spend a lot of time with the F.B.I. Those suits have to come from somewhere." They may still come from Mr. Buthier and Mr. Bonechi, who will continue working directly with the trade. They are quick to note they are closing the store for a change of pace, not because of rising rents or declining sales . But on Thursday, it was a night for celebration, not sadness. Mr. Bonechi, in an Italian suit from 1972, was showing off a brown suede pair of Gucci boots in their original box, searching for a slim ankled princess who could fit into them. "Everything's Cinderella in here," Mr. Bonechi said with a laugh. "When it fits, it's a Cinderella story." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Lucas Papaelias as Dan and Ella Kennedy Davis as his daughter Julie in "This Flat Earth," directed by Rebecca Taichman, at Playwrights Horizons. The time, it seems, has finally arrived for a certain father daughter talk, the kind of conversation that parents dread. But for Dan, a single dad, and Julie, a very unworldly 13 year old, the subject isn't the awkward Topic A that has fueled so many frantic scenes in sitcoms. It's not the mysteries of sex that are on Julie's mind. What this particular teenager is demanding is that her father explain why school shootings happen and why grown ups can't do anything about them. Julie, it turns out, is a recent survivor of such a tragedy, and she has just learned, by sneaking a peek at a forbidden newspaper, that what happened in her school is not an uncommon event. "Dad, has this happened before?" she asks, the alarm rising in her voice. "How many times?" Portrayed by the young actress Ella Kennedy Davis, Julie is the troubled and troubling center of "This Flat Earth," Lindsey Ferrentino's very sincere and equally ungainly new drama. There is no denying the urgency of this work, which opened on Monday night at Playwrights Horizons, less than two months after the killings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. It seems unlikely that any student of Julie's age would be as naive as she appears to be. Yet something like the hour of reckoning portrayed in this 90 minute, five character play, directed by Rebecca Taichman, is surely happening every day, all over the world. More than ever, coming of age these days means coming to terms with the possibility that sudden, irrational violence may disrupt and extinguish lives that are just beginning. The typical worries of entering adolescence have, it seems, acquired newly terrifying mortal shadows. Born in the late 1980s, the prolific Ms. Ferrentino has already established herself as a dramatist willing to wrestle with overpowering contemporary subjects. Her "Ugly Lies the Bone" (2015) dealt with the effects post traumatic stress disorder on a young American veteran and her family, and this season's "Amy and the Orphans" considers the irreparable effects of the parental abandonment of children with Down syndrome. "This Flat Earth" may be her most daring venture to date. For Ms. Ferrentino winds up venturing far beyond the precincts of everyday naturalism in which her latest play initially seems to be operating. Unfortunately, before we arrive at this moment of out of time revelation, we are stuck in a long and unconvincing slice of life. The ambitious, potentially heart stirring elements are all in place here. Yet they have been assembled with a disjointedness that taxes our belief. And the performances, perhaps inevitably, lack emotional continuity. Set in a shabby apartment building in a New England town (Dane Laffrey did the impressive two story set), "This Flat Earth" begins resonantly in the dead of night, when Julie wakens to cry out, "Are you there?" Her father, Dan (Lucas Papaelias), who works for the local water company, comes in to reassure her that there is nothing to fear in the sounds she hears the wind, the rain, the traffic and, most ominously to Julie's ear, a recording of a Bach cello suite being played upstairs. It gradually emerges that on that very day Julie has attended the reopening ceremony of her public school, where a shooting occurred not long before. (The time frame is kept vague, as are the details of the killing.) The one student who died whom Julie knew was Noelle, a rich girl who played the cello. Julie didn't particularly like Noelle, which makes dealing with what happened all the more complicated. Noelle's grief addled mother, Lisa (Cassie Beck), shows up at Julie's apartment, after Dan agrees to hold on to some boxes belonging to the dead girl. And Julie, it emerges, had earlier bought Noelle's designer discards at a Goodwill store. While Julie and her friend Zander (Ian Saint Germain) hide out in her room, watching horror movies on his laptop and innocently flirting, all escapism is only provisional. It doesn't help that Cloris (Lynda Gravatt), the old woman who lives upstairs, keeps playing that cello record. (The music is performed live by the cellist Christine H. Kim.) Or that, for reasons that have nothing to with the recent tragedy, Julie may soon have to leave her school. The assorted plot elements and themes, which include social and economic resentment, are presented spasmodically. And while it may be Ms. Ferrentino's point that people behave atypically in extreme situations, the disjointed and inconsistent behavior of most of the characters keeps you at a perplexed distance. For starters, could any 13 year old of reasonable intelligence be as out of touch with the world as Julie is? Would she and the savvier Zander really engineer such a strained and hokey scheme to help Julie stay in school? Would the upper middle class Lisa, even in her distress, look to the blue collar Dan for support as she does? Perhaps less wholesale realism might reconcile some of the play's more far fetched contrivances. Ms. Taichman, who won a Tony last year for her inventive direction of Paula Vogel's "Indecent," hasn't found a tone that would smooth over the ostensible disparities here. That's a shame, because Ms. Ferrentino is dealing with profound and essential subjects. That includes how we incorporate the monumental and horrific into the steadily flowing banalities and necessities of daily life. For parents, the most affecting issue may be how adults can never entirely comfort children as they begin to realize that many of life's scariest problems are neither avoidable or fixable. And that when a little girl cries out "Are you there?" in the night, there won't always be someone to answer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Credit...Sarah Blesener for The New York Times This article is part of our latest Learning special report. We're focusing on Generation Z, which is facing challenges from changing curriculums and new technology to financial aid gaps and homelessness. At an event at Brooklyn College's Magner Career Center a few years ago, Marge Magner herself was introduced. "A student came up to me and said, 'You're alive!'" Ms. Magner said, laughing. "'I thought you had to be dead to have your name on a building.'" Ms. Magner, 70, is alive and well as is the center that bears her name. Not only did she contribute the funds to launch it in 2004, she also remains active in helping to promote its mission: to provide advantages to students who often have not had many in their lives. During her career in banking in which she rose to the ranks of chairman and chief executive for Citigroup's Global Consumer Group, and was named to Fortune magazine's list of Most Powerful Women in Business four times Ms. Magner, who graduated from Brooklyn College in 1969, met and worked with many alumni of elite, private universities. She realized that they were not smarter, more capable or harder working than her classmates. What these more privileged universities had, and what Ms. Magner and her peers lacked, was access to an "old boys" network. So she decided to create one. But the approximately 13,000 full time students at Brooklyn College 75 percent of whom depend on some form of financial aid and 45 percent of whom are from families in which neither parent completed college typically do not have that kind of access. "These kids can't ask their parents to help them with job connections," she said. "That's not their world." Certainly Ms. Magner couldn't. She grew up in Crown Heights. Her father was a lieutenant in the New York City Police Department; her mother taught kindergarten. At the time she attended Brooklyn College, "most of the women on campus were going to become teachers." Ms. Magner decided to major in business, but she admitted that at the time she really had no idea what that involved. "To me, a business was the bakery, the butcher and the candy store around the corner," she said. She managed to succeed, but she realizes that the "who you know" factor is as critical to the career success of Generation Z students as it was for previous cohorts. And that's why she tries to recruit her fellow alumni to become involved with current students through the center. "I tell them, 'We're the aunts and uncles, the friends of the family that these kids don't have,'" she said. Such ersatz family members can sometimes help students in ways that real ones cannot. "My parents came from a tiny town in Mexico," said Karina Gomez, a senior who grew up in Sunset Park. "Neither of them went past middle school." When it came time to look for internships and other resume building opportunities, Ms. Gomez said she "felt lost." But meeting with staff and alumni through the Magner Center helped her learn management skills that she used to rise to the presidency of the college's chapter of the Association of Latino Professionals for America. The experience paved the way for her internship with the New York City Department of Finance. "When I was in college, the only thing you went to the career center for was to look at job postings," said Brian Fitzgerald, chief executive officer for the Business Higher Education Forum in Washington. That has changed, and more college career offices now offer an array of services, including one on one mentoring, job shadowing and help identifying internships. "These kinds of services are critical to first gen students," he says, adding that research has shown students who participate in such programs are more likely to complete college. What sets the Brooklyn College model apart is the presence of someone like Ms. Magner. "There are unfortunately too few people like her," Dr. Fitzgerald said. "Most of the people who are very successful in finance and banking come from privileged backgrounds, go to elite institutions and their philanthropy is generally focused on their alma maters. So it only reinforces the advantages." Since its inception, the Magner Center has had an impact: According to an annual survey of recent graduates by the college, the percentage of students who had internships while attending Brooklyn College rose to over 40 percent in 2018, up from 23 percent in 2003 (the year before the center opened). While Ms. Magner continues to contribute stipends for student internships, the college now finances most of the operations of the center. Working with its director, Natalia Guarin Klein and her eight person staff, Ms. Magner has helped mobilize many of her alma mater's successful alumni. Through the center, Brooklyn College graduates who work at organizations like JP Morgan, MSG Networks, Ernst Young, New York City's Human Resources Administration, the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Estee Lauder have provided internship and job opportunities to current students. One who has been both a beneficiary and a mentor is Shikshya Khatiwada. Her parents came to the United States from Nepal, and she grew up in the Midwood section of the borough, where her family moved when she was 15. As a Brooklyn College student in the early 2000s, she felt out of her depth at the prospect of applying for internships and jobs. "I'm an immigrant," she said. "I had no idea how to operate in a world full of graduates of elite universities." She decided to visit what was then the new Magner Center, and was mentored by Ms. Magner, who offered her an internship as a research analyst. Now Ms. Khatiwada is a senior director at the IT consulting company Avanade, and she continues to collaborate with Ms. Magner as an alumni mentor at the center. She also hired a recent Brooklyn College graduate, and in February, organized a Brooklyn College Career Day at Avanade's Manhattan offices (an event that Ms. Magner attended). Ms. Khatiwada said her company already holds such events for more elite private universities. "Now I'm helping to build a similar pipeline to Brooklyn College," she said. "Someone has to say, 'These students are just as good.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
High school students heading back to class this fall have more on their minds than finding homeroom. Many juniors, sophomores and even freshmen are already turning their attention toward picking a college. For most of them, a college tour will play a crucial part of the decision. Most will travel with their parents by car to potential colleges, stringing together campuses on a road trip that can take a week or longer. But new luxury services offer to cut down that time by whisking families on a private jet outfitted with college regalia and staffed with a college admissions counselor. The fees for these services can run up to nearly 60,000, but for the families that choose this route, the benefits can outweigh the cost. Not only are the private trips more efficient than a typical college tour, they can also provide personalized help through the admissions process. A lot of families find campus tours stressful, said Abby Siegel, a New York college entrance consultant. "As a neutral party, I can be extremely helpful," she said. "If it comes out of my mouth, the children will listen, where they might not listen to their parents." College tours are a growing segment for a luxury travel industry that also caters to wealthy college alumni heading to big events. One of the newest tour services will be started after Labor Day by XOJet, a private jet chartering company, which plans to transport students and their families to five college hubs: Atlanta, Boston, Miami, New York and Washington. The service is being offered in a partnership with Mandarin Oriental hotels and Ms. Siegel. The package can top 30,000 per trip, and can even hit six figures if families move among multiple hubs. Aware of the high price tag, XOJet is pitching its bundled service as less expensive than the individual costs of the flight, hotel and counseling. "We can help them maximize their time, see the place, meet the admissions team and get a feel for the environment," said James Henderson, president of commercial operations at XOJet. Clients save time at the airport by parking in front of the terminal, skipping any security lines and walking straight out to the plane. "You can literally be wheels up in 15 minutes," he said. "We saw families checking into our hotels on college tours, and we were serving them on a one off basis," said Jan D. Goessing, executive vice president for the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group in the Americas. "That drove us to connect the dots and say there's a need. We can facilitate and provide a comprehensive one stop shop, so to speak, in regards to college search." An XOJet rival, Magellan Jets, offers a different cost structure. Its college tour package offers 10 hours of flight time, less than the usual increments of 25, 50 and 100 hours its customers must buy for general use. The cost is 57,000, and Magellan works with Top Tier Admissions, a college advisory firm, which will provide an admissions expert for the trip at an additional fee. "This gets them to two to three colleges in a day, and in three to four days, they can look at all these colleges around the country," said Joshua Hebert, the chief executive of Magellan Jets. En route, students will be given briefing books on each college, which include information like the name of the admissions representative covering their high school and tips on whom to meet and where to go on campus. On their return to the plane, Magellan provides notebooks from each college so students can write down their thoughts. The company then binds their notes in a book at the end of the trip. Traveling on private jets is costly, but it may be the most efficient way to tour colleges. It is worth it to people who have more money than free time and no desire to pack into the family car for an interminable drive, said Mr. Henderson. "The college application process is stressful," he said, "and we're focused on helping them maximize their time and get from A to B as quickly as possible." But some experts think the extra coddling could be a detriment to the student applying to school. Students need to present themselves as likable, said Brian Taylor, managing director of Ivy Coach, a New York consulting firm, and college hopping by private jet may not be the best strategy. He suggested that students spend the money instead on preparing early in high school and then honing their college applications. Ms. Siegel said she offered the same services in the package program with XOJet and the Mandarin Oriental that she did to her other clients. She starts with a two hour meeting to review the admissions process and to get to know the student. Before the trip, she focuses on further understanding the student. Looking at the applicant's overall academic performance, she will also advise on which colleges might be more suitable. "I don't want them to visit schools that won't be the right fit," she said. Mimi Doe, a co founder of Top Tier Admissions, which teams up with Magellan, said its objective was to streamline the college admissions process for the private jet clients, the same way it does for families who pay for its individual services, like its 16,000 four day college application boot camp. "We're providing tips on how to make the most of your college visit," Ms. Doe said. More personalized services are available, including the counselors it offers through the partnership with Magellan. The college tour services also provide ad hoc networking. Mr. Hebert of Magellan said that if a student was interested in a particular university, the company would make an introduction to one of its members who is an alumni. "They're always happy to help," he said of the alumni. And a recommendation from alumni wealthy enough to fly privately certainly won't hurt a student's prospects. Some concierge services go beyond the college tour. Once students are admitted, private jet companies can make the moving process equally efficient. Flexjet, which sells fractional jet ownership, will help move students into and out of a college dorm. Megan Wolf, chief operating officer at Flexjet, said the company had recently helped a family move its youngest child into Columbia. "They had a lot of luggage," she said. "And six family members came along." When they landed in New York, after the short flight from Detroit, Flexjet arranged for a moving company to meet them and transport the student's college essentials to the dorm. And Wheels Up, another private jet company, can fly college alumni to Notre Dame or Penn State for football games faster that some people's morning commute. For wealthy families, nothing is too expensive to get their children into the best school. "This seemed natural to us, since we already serve this demographic," Ms. Doe said. "Why not maximize the time they have? How do you make the most of that visit? Cut to the chase." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
He came, he lost, but his rhetoric continues. I am speaking, of course, of Senator Bernie Sanders, who may have ceded the Democratic primary in New York to Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, but who has made a very visible part of the city into the punching bag of the presidential campaign. Put simply: Bankers are having a tough time in the public discourse these days. Mr. Sanders has built a platform on their villainy. Over the weekend, at a block party in Brooklyn, Mrs. Clinton called out "the greed and recklessness of Wall Street," and declared, "I take a back seat to no one in taking them on." Senator Ted Cruz, the Republican candidate who used a hefty loan from his wife's former employer, Goldman Sachs, to finance his 2012 Senate race, has labeled the institution a hotbed of "crony capitalism." And so on. You would think it would be enough to have them whomever this mythic "them" may be don sackcloth and ashes and sneak around in the shadows so no one could identify them by the uniform of their profession. Which, if you accept the premise that we use our wardrobe to signal our allegiance to a group (personal, political or professional), raises the question: What does it mean to look like a banker in the age of Bernie? After all, the last time the financial world was so loudly derided during the recession of 2008 and 2009 there was a knock on effect in the men's wear world, and certain obvious totems of Wall Street style (the broad, structured shoulders; the patterned ties; the Ferragamo shoes) fell out of favor. According to a banker at Goldman Sachs, the idea was to play down any signifiers of employment, lest they invite negative repercussions. Yet this time around, no such camouflage has seemed necessary. That may be, however, less a gesture of defiance, or the result of the fact that Mr. Sanders and Mr. Cruz had pretty poor primary showings in New York (they are still preaching their bad banker gospel, after all, and their competitors are being notably circumspect about their ties to the financial sector), than a reflection of a certain reality: The stereotype of the "banker" that is currently being kicked around no longer exists or doesn't exist in any overarching sense. It may make an easy target, but it's a straw man. The image was created in 1987 by the perfect storm of Tom Wolfe's novel "Bonfire of the Vanities" and Oliver Stone's film "Wall Street," and proved astonishingly durable. And though it has been perpetrated to a certain extent in popular culture, it bears less and less resemblance to actual fact. Indeed, in conversations with several financial professionals, the consistent reaction was "no one dresses that way anymore." Rather, the adjectives most used to describe their clothing were "rumpled" and "understated." It's no accident that in "The Big Short," the Adam McKay film based on Michael Lewis's book about the financial crisis, the bad bankers the ones who created the problem in the first place wear slick suits and ties, and the outsider traders and hedge fund managers the ones who recognized that everything was teetering on a precipice and tried to call foul (and even fraud) wear jeans, shorts, T shirts and jackets (the exception being Ryan Gosling's character, an outlier at Deutsche Bank). The first represent the before; the second, the after. The stereotype style has been eroded by the global financial crisis, sure, but also casual Fridays; the rise of the entrepreneurial class, especially in technology; and the growth of a shadow banking sector the venture capitalists and hedge funds and private equity firms that have their own, less identifiable uniform, much of which can be characterized by what it is not: the banker clothing of yore. It is the difference between the clothing featured in "The Wolf of Wall Street," the 2013 film tale of overblown early 1990s excess, all contrast spread collar shirts, pinstriped suits and paisley ties, and that in the Showtime series "Billions" (Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times is one of the creators), which takes place in the current day and features a corrupt, competitive and charismatic hedge fund chieftain with a gigantic mansion and a wardrobe that consists almost entirely of gray T shirts, jeans and hoodies. "He is aggressively not a suit guy," said Eric Daman, the show's costume designer, who is now prepping for the second season. The hoodies may be cashmere, the jeans Rag Bone, the sneakers limited edition, but to the untutored eye, the character may look like nothing so much as a rogue Facebook employee (and he would not look out of place at a Sanders rally). Which is not an accident. As the tech world has risen in the "global pecking order," in the words of John Studzinski, a partner at the asset management firm Blackstone, its determinedly dress down uniform has infiltrated the world of those who would finance it. The theory being, at least for some, if you can't beat 'em, dress like 'em. Then there is the fleece, now ubiquitous (but not Old Navy fleece, Sun Valley/Herb Allen fleece), which tends to be associated with the private equity world. Indeed, one founder of his namesake private equity firm is famous for wearing a fleece vest every day to work, and referred to it in an interview as his "signifier." It is, he said, the new cashmere, a (slightly) more mature relative of the hoodie. It also, he pointed out, had useful associations with work and a no frills approach to the world, values likewise associated with the Shinola watches, Red Wing boots and bracelets that are now often seen throughout the financial world. Ditto the facial hair. There are exceptions, of course. The hedge fund manager William Ackman, occasionally known as the "George Clooney of banking," is famous for his perfectly tailored suits. (Coincidentally, Mr. Clooney has also made a movie about the financial crisis, "Money Monster," which is to debut in Cannes next month.) Almost everyone I spoke to agreed that financial services guys still look like what you think of when you think of bankers. See, for example, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, and Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and chief executive of Goldman, or see their employees though even they tend to disaggregate their suits when in the office and keep their ties hung on the back of their door. "But that in your face power suit image?" Mr. Studzinski said. "That image is long gone." This election year, however, its ghost lingers on. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Brazil's central bank announced a 60 billion program on Thursday aimed at halting the slide of the Brazilian real, making Brazil the latest emerging economy to seek to prop up its sagging currency. Similar moves have been made by central banks in Indonesia and Turkey. The action highlights growing fears on the part of policy makers in these countries that the recent slide in their currencies poses a serious economic threat given the high levels of dollar denominated debt that their national banks and companies have taken on. As local currencies weaken, dollar debts increase in value and become increasingly difficult to service. The real has lost more than 15 percent of its value against the dollar this year as foreign investors as well as locals have sold their reals for dollars. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
The coronavirus pandemic notwithstanding, the blue bloods are back in the College Football Playoff. Top ranked Alabama will meet No. 4 Notre Dame in a national semifinal, the playoff selection committee announced on Sunday, and No. 2 Clemson will face No. 3 Ohio State in the other gateway to the championship game. Unlike last season, when precise playoff seedings were the only details in doubt after league championships, Notre Dame's fate was uncertain until Sunday afternoon, its postseason prospects dented by a humbling loss to Clemson on Saturday in the Atlantic Coast Conference title game. But after deliberating at a resort near Dallas, the committee chose to keep Notre Dame ranked just high enough to reach a semifinal, igniting fury among fans of No. 5 Texas A M whose only loss this season was to Alabama and lesser known programs, like No. 8 Cincinnati and No. 12 Coastal Carolina, that made it through this autumn's chaos undefeated. Alabama and Clemson have each won two national championships during the four team playoff era, which made its debut in the 2014 season, and Ohio State has captured one. Although Notre Dame has not claimed a national title since the 1988 season, it reached the playoff two years ago. This season's semifinal games are scheduled to be played on Jan. 1, with the championship showdown set for Jan. 11. The Clemson Ohio State game will be contested in New Orleans, while Alabama and Notre Dame will meet in Arlington, Texas. Playoff officials announced on Saturday night that the semifinal originally planned for the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif., would be moved to Texas. The authorities in California had declined to ease public health restrictions to allow players' relatives to attend the game, and two of the most influential figures in college football Coach Dabo Swinney of Clemson and Coach Brian Kelly of Notre Dame had expressed outrage over the notion of keeping a semifinal there. "Add this to the list of ways 2020 has demanded flexibility and last minute accommodation from everyone in college football," Bill Hancock, the College Football Playoff's executive director, said in a statement. "Given all the complexities and difficulties involved, this is the best outcome for everyone concerned." The selection committee's final rankings kept two top conferences, the Big 12 and the Pac 12, out of the playoff for this season, which faced week after week of uncertainty because of the pandemic. And, as usual, no member of a so called Group of Five conference made the playoff, renewing a perpetual point of frustration with the system. Alabama locked in its position at the head of the playoff field when the Crimson Tide won their 11th game and the Southeastern Conference title by outlasting Florida on Saturday. And although Coach Nick Saban, who is pursuing the sixth national championship of his Alabama tenure, is renowned for his defenses, this iteration of Alabama is much more of an offensive wonder. DeVonta Smith had 15 catches on Saturday night, a career high and a record for the SEC title game. He ended with 184 receiving yards. Najee Harris, a senior tailback, rushed for 178 yards and two touchdowns. Mac Jones, Alabama's quarterback, has thrown 32 touchdowns this season and is averaging about 340 passing yards a game. All three are candidates for the Heisman Trophy, college football's most prized individual honor, which will be awarded next month. Clemson, which won a national championship to cap its 2016 and 2018 campaigns, will appear in the playoff for the sixth consecutive season. Many of the players who navigated the Tigers to last season's national title game remain on the roster, including quarterback Trevor Lawrence and running back Travis Etienne, the A.C.C.'s career rushing leader. Clemson (10 1) logged 541 yards on Saturday in Charlotte, N.C., but its defense also showed its strengths, sacking Ian Book, Notre Dame's quarterback, six times. "We're trending in the right direction, we're playing our best football, and our best football is ahead still," Lawrence said over the weekend. "Every game for us is a statement because it's another chance for people to see us play, and we are what we play like," he added. "What we put on tape is who we are." Ohio State (6 0) wheezed to a 22 10 victory over Northwestern in Saturday's Big Ten championship game a contest it reached only because the conference changed its threshold of games played to qualify for the game in Indianapolis and will appear in a semifinal as the most untested team of this playoff field, or any other. (When the Buckeyes met Clemson in a semifinal last season, both teams had won 13 games.) Ohio State had three regular season games canceled this year because of virus issues in the Big Ten, including a matchup at Illinois because of positive tests within Ohio State's football program. It faced skepticism across college football that it had proved itself worthy of a playoff spot. But the committee showed sustained interest in Ohio State anyway. "People can say whatever they want," Ryan Day, Ohio State's coach, said before Sunday's rankings were released. "They have their opinions. I'm not going to talk about other teams because I think we have enough to talk about positively about our program. But I'll say this: If we have an opportunity to play anybody in the country one game, I'm going to take the Ohio State Buckeyes. I feel strongly about this team. We're made of unbelievable character, and they've been through so much." Notre Dame (10 1) is just pleased to still be on the invitation list. Although the Fighting Irish beat Clemson in November when Lawrence was out after testing positive for the virus, their debacle on Saturday fueled questions over whether they were ripe for one of the sport's biggest stages. But Kelly insisted that Notre Dame's earlier victories over Clemson and North Carolina made for a strong resume, an assertion that Barta, the selection committee chairman, essentially embraced on Sunday afternoon. "No single factor" tipped the 13 member panel toward Notre Dame, Barta said, but he acknowledged the university's record against ranked teams this season and said, "When it was all said and done, the committee decided that Notre Dame had earned its way to that fourth spot." Beyond the playoff bracket, the selection committee on Sunday also slotted eight teams into other premier bowl games. The Cotton Bowl, which will be played in Arlington on Dec. 30, is expected to pit No. 6 Oklahoma against No. 7 Florida. On Jan. 1, the Peach Bowl is to host Cincinnati and ninth ranked Georgia in Atlanta. And on Jan. 2, Texas A M and No. 13 North Carolina are to meet in Miami Gardens, Fla., in the Orange Bowl. Later that day, No. 10 Iowa State and No. 25 Oregon are scheduled to play in the Fiesta Bowl in Glendale, Ariz. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
For more personal finance tips, sign up for the Your Money newsletter here. So you're thinking of buying a home, perhaps your very first one. But you wonder whether you might be better off continuing to rent. And you have no idea how to figure out which choice makes more sense for you. Well, join the club. This is a practical decision involving numbers, to be sure. But when we're talking about our primary dwelling, it's also a highly emotional one. Where we live matters, a lot. So this isn't just a financial choice. Here at The New York Times, we've spent a lot of time chewing over the rent versus buy decision, and if you're numerically inclined, the first place to start is with our calculator on the choice. Even the fact of plugging the numbers in, however, taps into feelings. After all, you'll need to tell the tool how much you expect housing prices to rise in the future and what sort of return you might get if you kept your down payment money in stocks or bonds instead of spending it on a house. Our mortgage calculator will be useful here, too. Want to get smarter about personal finance? Sign up for the Your Money newsletter and get our best advice directly in your inbox. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
The doll that the ballet "Coppelia" is named after never comes to life. That the ballet itself is still living, nearly 150 years after its first staging, is largely because of Leo Delibes's vivacious score. New York City Ballet's production, which will be 40 this summer, has further life extending virtues: folk dances theatricalized by Petipa and others, as remembered and restaged by Alexandra Danilova and George Balanchine; a third act of allegorical dances by Balanchine, framed by 24 adorably well trained little girls from the School of American Ballet. But what makes the ballet live or die in performance is its heroine, Swanilda. And when the production returned to the David H. Koch Theater over the weekend, there were two Swanildas to choose from: Megan Fairchild and Tiler Peck. Swanilda has a problem. Her boyfriend, Frantz, has become enamored with the new girl in town. Neither Swanilda nor Frantz knows that the girl is a doll, but once Swanilda learns the secret, she decides to impersonate the toy, and thus fools its maker, Dr. Coppelius, into believing his creation is animate. The fooling, though cruel, is meant to be funny. "Coppelia" is a comedy. Petite, with doll like features, Ms. Fairchild has the perfect physical equipment to play a doll. In other roles, her correctness can seem mechanical, but here, she turns that fault to a virtue, making the jerky doll motions sharp and her storytelling both magnified and high focus. Her Swanilda is ingenuous, but also petulant; when she discovers the secret, she's childishly self satisfied, risking likability in the service of humor. In Act I, before the doll business, Ms. Fairchild shows more amplitude in her upper body and a fuller response to Delibes's stretched phrases than she did in the role five years ago. Swanilda is probably her best part, though there's still room for improvement in the Act III wedding dance. The balances and turns are brilliant, but the music grows larger than she does a deficiency of projection, not size. Ms. Peck's interpretation is in some ways subtler, though that's not necessarily better. Where Ms. Fairchild rejects Frantz in a huff, the flicker of Ms. Peck's half hidden smile shows that she's just toying with him. When Ms. Peck doesn't hear the rattle in the ear of wheat that would mean Frantz loves her, she makes the moment before she runs off in tears sadder by drawing out the sadness in the score. In the Spanish and Scottish dances, Swanilda does as the doll, Ms. Peck is fierier and crisper, which makes it seem that she is getting carried away rather than just trying to avoid Coppelius's creepy advances. But what seems subtle in some places seems merely faint in others. An all purpose blanket of ballerina softness dampens the comedy. And something about the stop and start rhythms of the score, the tense cranking of its clockwork, impedes Ms. Peck's normally thrilling musicality. Her Act III has fullness and flash, yet she, too, could be more exultant. The most realized character is Robert La Fosse's Coppelius. It's a kind of reverse image of his Drosselmeier in "The Nutcracker": the butt of the joke instead of the controlling hand, a would be magus. It's a robustly physical performance. His doddering is like power walking; he shunts his hips to pivot. When uncorking the flask to drug Frantz, he thrusts his pelvis absurdly. These are comic effects, and Mr. La Fosse earns the production's biggest laugh when he also pretends for a moment to be a doll. His timing and emphasis do the trick. But his performance also has pathos. After he's roughed up by Frantz's friends, his power walk is subdued. And his stupid, open mouthed joy as Swanilda deceives him reveals the canker in the farce. Andrew Veyette is an effective Frantz, appropriately doltish up top yet heroic in the legs, carving space and slicing clear shapes through the air. Of the Act III soloists, the standout is Lauren Lovette. Earlier in the ballet, when Coppelius thinks he is bringing his doll to life, he works in segments: eyes, feet, heart. The radiant Ms. Lovette is alive everywhere. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
MY final column of the year gives me a chance to revisit some topics from 2013 to see what has changed or what, as astute readers have pointed out, I didn't include in the first go round. In February I looked at the growing popularity of no contract or prepaid cellphones. Increasingly, I wrote, customers are turning away from the customary contract that locks them in for two years with a specific carrier. In the first quarter of 2013, 28 percent of all United States cellphone customers were buying the phones without a contract, up from 18 percent in 2008. I quoted Sprint as predicting that by 2015, 30 percent of all wireless users would be no contract customers. That number has already been surpassed. According to the Yankee Group, a research and consulting company, in the last quarter of 2013, 35 percent of all cellphone customers did not have contracts. One big reason for the rise is that although all the major carriers offer some type of noncontract plan, in March, T Mobile did away with its standard contracts and went completely no contract. Online and in retail stores, T Mobile offers only its Simple Choice plan, although a two year contract is available at select dealers, said Robin Handaly, a spokeswoman for the carrier. Customers start with a base rate of 50 a month for unlimited talk, text and web, and 500 megabytes of high speed data, she said. A second line can be added for 30 a month, and more for 10 a month. Then there is the matter of the phone. An iPhone 5s, for example, can be bought outright for 648 or over two years for 27 a month. A customer who leaves T Mobile does have to pay off the phone. For the first time since he began his site in 1999, more customers have purchased no contract plans through the site than contract plans, said Mr. Abbott, whose site receives a commission when someone buys a phone or phone plan. AT T quickly followed with a subsidiary, Aio Wireless, which offers just three no contract plans ranging from 40 to 70 a month. For more advice in this fast changing field, my colleague, Thomas J. Fitzgerald, compared no contract phone costs in October. The other two major carriers, Sprint and Verizon, have also expanded their no contract offerings to some extent, and while Verizon, the largest carrier, would not comment on plans, Mr. Abbott and others predicted that 2014 might well become the year when buying a cellphone without a contract would become the norm. The next two items are not so much updates as addenda. In an August column on getting inventions developed and marketed, several readers told me I should have mentioned Quirky. Quirky.com began in 2009 to promote inventions and develop products. People can submit ideas free (unlike in its earlier days, when Quirky charged participants 10 a submission or 100 for a year of unlimited submissions). The site receives a few thousand invention idea submissions a week and the Quirky "community" of about 600,000 members rates what they think are the best ideas. Each Thursday night, the Quirky staff has a meeting which can be watched live online to evaluate the top 12 to 15 ideas, and then picks two or three to go through development. The product is developed online. Members (also known as influencers) can help fine tune the prototype by, for example, suggesting colors, design adjustments, names and logos. Quirky takes care of the patenting and legal issues, prototype production, manufacturing, packaging and marketing. In exchange, Quirky takes 90 percent of gross revenue, with 4 percent going to the inventor and 6 percent going to those who offered substantial contributions, with a formula determining how to weigh the input of the contributors. The company was estimated to be worth 50 million in revenue at the end of 2013, said Tiffany Markofsky, a spokeswoman for Quirky. Quirky products are packaged in a similar way, with a photo and the name of the inventor, and the number of influencers. So far, about 140 products have been commercialized and sold, Ms. Markofsky said. Some have landed on the shelves of major stores like Target, Home Depot and Bed Bath Beyond, and all are sold online at the company's website. This spring the company announced a partnership with General Electric. Jake Zien, 24, who invented Quirky's best selling product, Pivot Power, said he had made about 500,000 in revenue over the last few years. Pivot Power, a flexible power strip that fits every size of plug and adapter, sells for 30. Every inventor has to agree to the terms and conditions on the Quirky site when submitting an invention, which any prospective user would do well to read through carefully. I did search the Internet to see if there were complaints about Quirky.com from irate inventors and found very few most who commented on the experience admitted the feedback could be rough but the process was interesting. Mr. Zien said that even though he might have made more money if he had not gone through Quirky, the difficulty in getting a product developed, produced and marketed might well have meant he would never have succeeded on his own. But he said, "Potential inventors have to realize the odds are against them and calibrate their expectations somewhat." Finally, there is a follow up to a column this month on options for older drivers besides turning in the car keys. As I noted, only Illinois requires a road test for older drivers, although many states do require that a driver over 70 come in to renew a driver's license, rather than do it online or by mail. Several readers suggested that it might be worth looking at how some other countries tackle the problem. For example, in New South Wales in Australia, drivers 85 and older have to take a driving test every two years. Those older drivers, however, can choose not to take a road test and instead receive a modified license. The terms of the modified license are negotiated but typically limit travel, such as allowing only daylight driving or "home to town" trips. Drivers over 75 years old also must submit an annual medical form filled out by a doctor. In Ontario, Canada, when drivers turn 80, they are required to attend a 90 minute interactive group education session with topics including new traffic laws, how aging affects driving and tips for older drivers. They also must take a written test about the rules of the road. Those who have trouble understanding the written test or group discussion are asked to take a road test. Interestingly, a study of Finland, which requires medical reviews starting at age 70, and neighboring Sweden, which licenses drivers for life with no mandated reviews, showed no difference in road safety between the two countries. So, the work continues. Whether it be marketing existing products, inventing new ones or finding innovative ways to address continuing problems, the only certainty of next year is that there will always be more to say. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
David Rickard performing "Exhaust" in the window of the Vanderborght Building in Brussels as part of A Performance Affair. It's the Art Form of the Moment (but It's a Hard Sell) BRUSSELS The man in the respirator mask sits in the window, impassive on his chair, breathing as evenly as he can into the aluminum foil balloon he cradles on his knees . After six hours he has filled more than 20 of them , piling them up behind him like a cloud. "In the end they'll be about 100," said Will Lunn, the director of the London based Copperfield gallery, explaining "Exhaust," a marathon performance piece by the British conceptual artist David Rickard, whom he represents. Over 24 hours, Mr. Rickard turns the air a human being requires for one day into an enormous shimmering sculpture. First seen at the Goethe Institut in London in 2008, this demanding work (the artist isn't allowed to eat or drink, and the carbon dioxide levels in his blood must be regularly checked) was the storefront display at the second annual edition of A Performance Affair, a fair exclusively devoted to the sale of performance art. The four day fair, which finished Sunday, occupied two floors of the Vanderborght Building, an Art Deco former department store, and brought together more than 30 artists hoping to attract the attention of Belgium's famously discerning and risk taking contemporary art collectors. Performance is the medium of the moment in the art world. In May, Lithuania's ecologically aware indoor beach opera, "Sun Sea (Marina)," won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale, making it the second performance in a row to win the top prize for a national pavilion. The previous edition's winner, Anne Imhof, who represented Germany, staged a performance at Tate Modern in London in March. Tate has 17 performances in its collection, with "several more currently in the process of being acquired," said Duncan Holden, the head of the galleries' press and communications department. But while museums have been embracing performance art, the investment minded commercial art world has been slower to get on board. There is one obvious reason. "It's ephemeral," said Will Kerr, a co founder of the nonprofit A Performance Affair. "You see performance all over the place," he said, but in the market it is the "weakest link." "Dealers just use performance as a hook to sell the work of other artists," Mr. Kerr said. "It's seen as entertainment. Take an Instagram pic, then walk away. The model is not mature." Sotheby's, Christie's and Phillips have yet to sell a single live performance artwork, according to the auction houses' press offices. They, and potential buyers of such pieces, understandably ask themselves: What, exactly, is being sold? In an effort to standardize the answer to that question, the A.P.A. fair, in collaboration with Chantal Pontbriand, a Montreal based curator and writer, has drafted a protocol that addresses issues such as a performance's duration, how it can be recreated and what materials are left with the owner once it is over. The organizers hope to devise a protocol that will be widely adopted by artists and galleries. Without a certificate clarifying such practical details and their legal ramifications, performance art will remain a hard sell and re sell. In an interview, Mr. de Goldschmidt recalled that in 2012 he paid about EUR2,500 for a performance by the French artist Philippe Parreno. Mr. Parreno's piece, titled "Transubstantiation" and involving the artist preparing some of his deceased mother's secret recipes, was never activated. Mr. de Goldschmidt asked Phillips if it might auction the performance, but the piece lacked any documents. "There was no duration, no practical details. There were a lot of ambiguities," said Mr. de Goldschmidt, who in the end kept the piec e. In the case of "The Banquet," a new performance by Ariane Loze, a young Brussels based artist, a buyer does at least acquire a set of 12 printed scripts. Available in four European languages, each contains the lines from a 2016 video of an uptight middle class dinner party in which Ms. Loze plays a dozen characters. Bon mots such as "We all have to find a way of defining ourselves" and "Take time to be lonely and enjoy it" can then be woven into a collector's dinner party. The limited edition scripts cost EUR495 per set. Evann Siebens, a Vancouver based former ballet dancer, on the other hand, has created an archive of gestures that references the history of performance art from Allan Kaprow through Gilbert George to Marina Abramovic. For EUR1,000, Ms. Siebens will recreate a gesture photographically and as a performance, which will then be documented on video and preserved on a memory stick in a presentation box. In this case, the buyer gets plenty of material for the money. Without established performance stars like Ms. Abramovic or Tino Sehgal, or an established market, sales were always going to be a rarity. But the Brussels based collector Tobias Arndt said he was interested in buying a version of Ms. Loze's "The Banquet." For collectors, performance is "the next step," Mr. Arndt said. "It has the potential to be an event," he added. "Performance is a direct aesthetic experience, and then you can share it on social media. It's not just about decorating your house with good art. It's also about doing crazy things on Instagram." In the street outside the Vanderborght Building, John Yee, a passing business operations manager from San Francisco, was mesmerized by the sight of Mr. Rickard breathing into his latest foil balloon. It was 9.30 p.m. by that time, and the artist had inflated more than 40 of them. "I don't know if I understand it, but it's cool," Mr. Yee said, adding, "It feels very European." Interest piqued, he then walked into the fair. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The use of "digital fur technology" (touted in a widely mocked behind the scenes featurette that was released one day before the trailer) gives such stars as Taylor Swift, James Corden, Judi Dench and the newcomer Francesca Hayward a surrealistic feline look. While the "Dreamgirls" Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson sounds predictably fantastic belting out "Memory," it remains to be heard if, say, Rebel Wilson will be pitch perfect. Perhaps luckily, for his sake, the veteran D.J., er actor, Idris Elba is not expected to sing much as the villain Macavity. The trailer touts the work of Tom Hooper, who directed the love it or hate it 2012 movie version of the musical "Les Miserables," as well as the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, writer T.S. Eliot (author of "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats," the story's source material) and Andy Blankenbuehler, the choreographer of "Hamilton." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
How to Stop a Home Invasion When the Intruder Has Four Legs A FEW weeks ago, around 3 a.m., we heard some glass knocked over downstairs. In a daze and not wanting to get out of bed I thought it was our cats fooling around. But my older son, who was closer to the action, raced upstairs shouting that a raccoon was sitting on the mantle. It's no mystery how the raccoon got in. We have a cat door leading to our basement, and the cats can go out the garage door during the day. At night, we close the garage door. The raccoon, being nocturnal, must have been sleeping in the basement and then found itself unable to get out of the garage. It opted for another exit through the cat door and into our house. Besides breaking some vases and candles, the raccoon also managed to turn on a burner on our stove. Once we (O.K., my husband) went downstairs and turned on the lights, the creature ran into the basement and eventually outside. But unable to sleep, my husband and I started researching ways to keep raccoons away. Ammonia. Mothballs. Cayenne pepper. Irish Spring soap. Motion detection lights and loud music. But as I later found out from Jim Horton, owner of QualityPro Pest and Wildlife Services in Tarrytown, N.Y., those options, if they work at all, are usually temporary. "Raccoons will just kick the mothballs to the side," he said. And if too much of some those homemade remedies are used like the ammonia or mothballs they can become toxic. Wildlife experts say that how you address the problem depends on the extent of the invasion. If you have one scared animal running through the house, open the doors and hope it runs out, Mr. Horton said, adding that it can also help to close your blinds or curtains so the animal sees the light from the door and goes toward that. Don't try to pick it up. There's a possibility of rabies, and also being attacked by a frightened animal. "The worst thing you can do is chase it," said Tina Toti, an animal lover in New Rochelle, N.Y. She will help anyone friend or stranger remove these types of animals from a house and take them away. She doesn't charge, but asks that a donation be made to a local animal shelter. Ms. Toti has a few tips: "In my experience, skunks have a huge weakness for sweets. Marshmallows or jelly gumdrops do the trick. I have used a very long stick with one of those treats at the end of it and tapped them on the nose and slowly walked them out of the door." Squirrels and raccoons are trickier to get out. The best bet, said Ms. Toti, who told me she was vaccinated against rabies, is to call a professional. The longer the animal is in your house, the more damage it can cause, and the greater the potential that it can leave behind fleas, ticks and mites, she said. And don't even mention feces. If you don't want the animal killed, and there is no reason to unless it is rabid, be sure to inquire what the trapper plans to do with it once it is caught. But once the animal is gone, you need to figure out how it got into your house. My friend Veronica told me how, a few Christmases ago, she heard little nails on her downstairs floor. Like me, she bravely sent her husband down to investigate. Things had been knocked askew, but there was no animal in sight. The next day, though, when they went to decorate the Christmas tree, a squirrel came racing down the branches. And here's some other advice from experts to keep out wayward animals: P Use metal or durable plastic trash containers and secure lids with elastic cords. P Stack firewood on a frame that keeps logs at least two feet above the ground. P Trim branches that extend over your roof. P Check exhaust fan openings, kitchen and bathroom vents and above gutters to see if they're providing an opening for animals. A lone raccoon or squirrel that takes a wrong turn into your living room is one thing. But too often, the problem is a family that's nesting in the attic or eaves. And that's a lot more troublesome. "You need to understand the animal and how it uses the structure, how it can climb and when it is breeding," said John Griffin, director of Humane Wildlife Services, which is part of the Humane Society of the United States. He works in the Washington area. For example, he said, a raccoon can get in holes four inches across or even smaller as long as it can squeeze its head through. And it can cause enormous damage. "I've had people with summer homes, and the raccoons just tore the places apart in the winter," Mr. Horton said. Last year, he said he saw a big increase in flying squirrels perhaps, he said, because of an acorn abundance. Flying squirrels are nocturnal; regular squirrels, the ones we see climbing trees outside, are not. So if you hear scrambling above your head starting around 10 p.m., there's a good bet it's flying squirrels making a home in your attic, he said. If this is happening, bring in a professional who can help figure out where the opening is and ensure that all the animals are evicted. You want to make sure that a mother isn't separated from her babies (squirrel nesting season runs February to May and August to October) because the mother will do anything to get back in. "A lot of damage comes from people who think they've solved the problem," Mr. Griffin said. For instance, if you have a bat invasion, you may think it's resolved if you don't hear them after awhile. But if the weather is getting colder, they might just be hibernating. "You need to know the season and species," he said. Hiring a professional won't be cheap. Mr. Horton said his services might run from 185 to 650, depending on the size of the job. It can get more expensive if he needs to seal up many holes. "I've done bat work that can run in the thousands," he said. "A bat only needs the size of a dime to get into." He traps the animals in cages and relocates them about five miles away. For about 350, Mr. Griffin uses a different method known as evict and exclude. He finds out how the animal is getting in, then puts a one way trap up against the hole. Once the animal is in the trap, it can only go out not back in. He will also make sure to remove any babies or other family members inside. While that may seem expensive, it's cheaper than having the animals as long term guests. As for us, we haven't seen a rogue raccoon around lately. No doubt they've been dissuaded by the fancy new cat door we put in. It can be opened only by a radio frequency signal emitted by tags on the cats' collars. There's only one problem. The new door scares our cats. But that's another column. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Three candidates to become the next director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria are likely to draw harsh scrutiny from the fund's largest donor, the United States. The nominating committee of the fund's board on Monday produced a report naming the three finalists and its rationale for picking them. A copy of the report was made available to The New York Times. While all might have been considered excellent candidates for the job in earlier years, global health officials are worried that their backgrounds could push the Trump administration away from historical commitments to the fund. One candidate, in particular, has used Twitter posts to call Mr. Trump a fascist, saying he has much in common with ISIS for his anti Muslim stance. A spokesman for the Global Fund said on Wednesday that it considered all three candidates "skilled and highly experienced," that none would be asked to withdraw and the election would proceed as scheduled on Feb. 27. The four year term of Dr. Mark Dybul, the current executive director, ends on May 31. A senior United States government official said administration global health officials received the three candidates' names Monday evening and had not yet met to discuss them. The fund, which estimates that it has saved 20 million lives since it was founded in 2002, is well respected. In December, Britain's foreign aid agency gave it top grades on a "value for money" assessment of 38 aid organizations to which it donates. But the fund has long struggled to raise money. It was originally hoped that donors would commit 10 billion a year. Instead, it gets less than 5 billion. The United States has always donated a third of the fund's budget and is by far its greatest source of support. The finalists, selected from a preliminary list of nine, are: Dr. Muhammad Ali Pate, a former health minister of Nigeria; Subhanu Saxena, a drug executive who in August stepped down as chief executive of Cipla, a major Indian pharmaceutical company; and Helen Clark, a former prime minister of New Zealand who ran the United Nations Development Program. Dr. Pate, a former World Bank health specialist, is a visiting scholar at Harvard's Chan School of Public Health. He has held several Nigerian government jobs, including health minister, for which he was praised for improving primary care, training midwives to cut maternal and child mortality, and fighting polio. The nominating committee's report noted misuse of funds at one health agency run by Dr. Pate, but said there was "no suggestion of impropriety on his part" and that anticorruption measures he had put in place were not followed after he left. In July, however, Dr. Pate posted on Twitter a New Yorker article called "Being Honest About Trump," including this summary, "To call the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee a fascist of some variety is simply to use a historical label that fits." In December 2015, Dr. Pate, a Muslim, shared a series of articles on Twitter critical of Mr. Trump's call to ban Muslims.. He shared an article that noted condemnation of Mr. Trump's call by British and French leaders in The Washington Post. Another post, using a headline with a column in Time by Kareem Kareem Abdul Jabbar, the retired basketball star, said "Donald Trump has more in common with ISIS than America." Mr. Saxena is a business executive brought up in Britain. He worked for Citicorp, ran PepsiCo operations in Africa and Russia, and was a longtime executive for Novartis, a pharmaceutical conglomerate with headquarters in Switzerland. He was responsible for increasing production of CoArtem, a malaria drug that is a mainstay of the Global Fund and the President's Malaria Initiative, begun by President George W. Bush's administration. From 2013 to 2016, he was chief executive of Cipla, the Indian drug company that is one of the Global Fund's biggest suppliers. He stepped down in August, citing "family priorities." The report noted that, although he was a businessman, he had worked with governments, regulators and medical charities like Doctors Without Borders. Yet American officials may look askance at the hiring of an executive from a large pharmaceutical company for whom the Global Fund has been a major customer. By 2015, six million Africans were receiving antiretroviral drugs made by Cipla. Ms. Clark was elected to New Zealand's Parliament in 1981 and was prime minister from 1999 to 2008. She became the administrator of the United Nations Development Program in 2009 and was, according to the report, "a reformer, driving much greater organizational efficiency and a major decentralization." The Trump administration has expressed hostility toward United Nations programs. Internal memos obtained by The New York Times show the new administration has considered cutting its support for United Nations' international operations by at least 40 percent. Yet the development program has never been a particular target of American conservatives, who tend to criticize the United Nations cultural organization, population planning agency and peacekeeping operations. Several people familiar with the fund's search for a director expressed dismay over the choices, worrying that each might jeopardize support from the United States, but none would speak for attribution. One described himself as distressed; another worried that the candidates had not been adequately vetted. Seth Faison, a spokesman for the fund, argued that no candidate should withdraw. "Lots of people said things about Trump during the campaign that now are working with him," he said of Dr. Pate. Of Mr. Saxena and Ms. Clark, he said, United Nations connections and business connections were unavoidable in virtually any candidate not from a major donor country. The director does not oversee buying from drug companies, he said, and the fund gives money to many recipients, including 300 million to United Nations Development Program and 800 million to Nigeria. "Anyone who ever worked in any government that got funds from the Global Fund would be off limits, which is not realistic," he said. A director could recuse himself from decisions with potential conflicts, he said, and a different fund representative could approach the United States during the next appeal for donations, which typically occur at three year intervals. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Over the past 12 months, Tere O'Connor's "Bleed" has lived a full life. This bountiful, beautiful, labyrinthine dance had its premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last December, and toured in four states before returning to New York on Thursday for a run at Danspace Project. The chance to see it twice in one year, to get another shot at asking the unanswerable "What is going on here?" is a gift. The culmination of a four part suite, "Bleed" contains the choreographic DNA of three dances created before it, in 2012: "Poem," "Secret Mary" and "Sister." It funnels structures and afterimages from those worlds into a fourth, even fuller world, folding several societies into one. Every member of the 11 person cast (the combined casts of the earlier three works) is equally an agent of what happens here, equally accountable to and for the others. Eleven: an odd number, a prime number and, for a space the size of the St. Mark's Church sanctuary, a big number. Does that somehow explain the intoxicating tension between order and disorder, utopia and tragedy, the multitude of relationships that rush to the surface of "Bleed" and dive back under? The stage is bare, but Michael O'Connor's stealthy lighting and James Baker's capacious score a collage of monastic incantations, industrial chugging and other sonic gems conjure an ever changing sense of place. I saw courtyards, graveyards, forests, marshes, coliseums, city streets. Just as potently, unstably suggestive is the movement itself: ornate, erratic stuff that bristles with competing (or just coexisting) meanings. The same actions, deployed under different circumstances, tell entirely different stories, or invite us to piece one together. In a shifty, hip swaying solo that opens the show, Heather Olson (in one of Walter Dundervill's attractive dresses) comically gasps and falls to the floor, the first of many near deaths and resuscitations. Later she does the same thing, but this time toward Oisin Monaghan, who lies on his back in a rectangle of light reminiscent of a coffin. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Fake news a neologism to describe stories that are just not true, like Pizzagate, and a term now co opted to characterize unfavorable news has given new urgency to the teaching of media literacy. Are Americans less able to assess credibility? Can they discern real news from disinformation? These are some of the questions explores with his Emerson College students. Director of a new graduate program, Civic Media: Art and Practice, Dr. Mihailidis studies the intersection of civic engagement and media literacy the ability to evaluate, analyze and create media. In a paper to be published this spring, Dr. Mihailidis explores the creation and spread of fake news and argues that media literacy as currently conceived may not solve the problem. What led to the proliferation of fake news during the presidential campaign? There were, you could argue, decades of growing polarization and partisanship and a lot of factors for that. But one is the growth of online networks that are self reinforcing: Citizens engage with like minded views more and more, and they feel secure in posting their thoughts and having a lot of reinforcement. This election was very heated, and citizens in these networks felt empowered to participate. That participation became more than simply a self affirmation of things. It became designing and sharing things that they didn't really care were credible. What are the mistakes students make in interpreting the news? Because they're monitoring a lot of content at once, they oftentimes are sharing and repurposing information without taking the time to really think through a story. A lot of times, this is a media literacy problem. Students aren't doing deep inquiry. We see a lot of implicit assumptions being made off headlines, off short videos; they're not diving into who is sharing content. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
A catchphrase winking at an unfounded voter fraud conspiracy in the presidential election trended on Twitter on Tuesday morning as President Trump's allies continued to contest the outcome of the election, which has been called for Joseph R. Biden Jr. The phrase, "Release the Kraken," appeared on Twitter's trending topics list on Tuesday, collecting nearly 100,000 tweets, pushed mostly by conservatives and far right internet personalities. It is a catchphrase from the 1981 movie "The Clash of the Titans," but this time it was used to signal an election fraud conspiracy on social media. The conspiracy stems from a Fox Business Network appearance last Friday by Sidney Powell, a lawyer for the former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn. During an interview with the host Lou Dobbs, Ms. Powell claimed that the president's team had voluminous evidence that it planned to release to overturn election results in key states. "We are talking about hundreds of thousands of votes," Ms. Powell said in the interview. "President Trump won this election in a landslide." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The tranquil graveyard at Trinity Church is tucked into an otherwise bustling commercial corner of Lower Manhattan. Inside its gates, weatherworn headstones some dating from the 1680s stand in the shadows of skyscrapers. Alexander Hamilton, a founding father and the first secretary of the Treasury, has long been one of the cemetery's most famous residents. But in the 212 years since a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr claimed his life, he may never have had the volume of visitors he's had in the last six months. "Hamilton is having a moment," said Anne Petrimoulx, the archivist of Trinity Church. While giving tours, she said, "I used to say, 'You might recognize him from the ten dollar bill.' Now I say, 'You might know him from the musical.'" Since "Hamilton" opened on Broadway in August, fans have been making pilgrimages to the site. On Instagram and Twitter, they post the proof. "Yes, I am such a musical nerd I took a photo of Alexander Hamilton's grave Trinity Church," tweeted Jaclyn Mika of Toronto, a self described "Hamilton" fangirl. At his New Year's Eve concert at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, Jimmy Buffett sang his hits about island life before a backdrop of virtual palm trees and Caribbean waves. But somewhere between "Margaritaville" and "Auld Lang Syne," he paused on a surprisingly pensive note to tell the crowd how he spent the final day of 2015: visiting Hamilton's grave. In a recent phone interview, Mr. Buffett, who is developing a Broadway show of his own, said that while he has long been interested in Hamilton's life, seeing "Hamilton" ignited his passion. "It's moving, it's inspiring, it's funny," he said. "It's the best musical I've ever seen." Days after viewing the grave, he traveled to Nevis, the island where Hamilton grew up, because, "I was still in my Hamilton mood." Hamilton is also popping up in less likely corners. SoulCycle's "Hamilton: A hip hop theme ride," sells out in a flash whenever it's on offer. At Fishs Eddy, a popular dishware store, there has been a run on the Dueling Shots Gift Box. It contains two shot glasses with pictures of Hamilton and Burr. But there is something unique about the grave's significance to a show that is in large part about the meaning of legacy and remembrance. Maybe it's that it gets a mention in the final number. Or that visiting seems to answer the urgent questions raised in that song: "When you're gone, who remembers your name? Who keeps your flame? Who tells your story?" "People have thought, watching the musical: 'Wow, I never paid this guy any mind, but he was extraordinary. I want to get close,'" said Rand Scholet, president of the Alexander Hamilton Awareness Society, which holds memorials at the grave site every July and January, on the anniversaries of Hamilton's birth and death. "You can't get much closer than where he's been laid to rest. For years, huge numbers of people have visited Washington's Mount Vernon, Jefferson's Monticello. Now Hamilton is getting his due." Ann Napolitano, a Brooklyn based novelist, brought her two sons, ages 6 and 8, to the grave after she saw the show and the whole family started listening to the soundtrack on a daily basis. "'Hamilton' throws doors open in your mind and heart," she said. "It inspires more than any piece of art in recent memory. Visiting Hamilton's grave as a family felt like walking through one of those open doors." "I got a question about Hercules Mulligan a few months ago," she said. "No one had ever asked about Hercules Mulligan before." For the first time, visitors have started leaving stones and flowers on the graves of both Hamilton and his wife, Eliza. "There are just as many left on Eliza's grave as there are on Alexander's," Ms. Petrimoulx said. "Maybe even more." Eliza Hamilton died in 1854 at the age of 97. Her grave, a plain white marble slab at the foot of a far grander monument to her husband, bears the words "Daughter of" and "Widow of." Little more was known about her until "Hamilton" (and the Ron Chernow biography on which it is based) brought her accomplishments to light. She founded the first private orphanage in New York City and advocated for the construction of the Washington Monument, among other things. Now she has a fan base all her own. The same can be said for her sister, Angelica Schuyler Church, whose romantic feelings for Hamilton provide one of the musical's most bittersweet plotlines. Founding fathers aside, Lin Manuel Miranda, the creator of "Hamilton," has said that he considers her the show's smartest character. "The hot question in the gift shop is where exactly Angelica is buried," Ms. Petrimoulx said. (Her remains are in a vault that bears only the name Livingston, her relatives by marriage.) "When I was a kid, I dreamed of being Evita. Now I dream of being Angelica," said Carmen Lamar, an actress and the Junior School director at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater in Manhattan. After falling in love with the soundtrack, Ms. Lamar and her husband started entering the lottery for 10 same day "Hamilton" tickets, taking turns waiting outside the Richard Rodgers Theater on 46th Street. They tried 27 times without success. On a Thursday in January, Ms. Lamar happened to pass the Trinity churchyard. "I thought, 'Oh my gosh, he's in there,'" she said. "I saw another stone nearby and wondered, 'Is that Angelica?'" She went inside the gates to investigate. "I was in awe. To be in his presence," she said. "What this musical has done for his story. If he only knew." Ms. Lamar took pictures and texted them to her husband, who was waiting in line for the lottery. She jokingly wrote, "Should I ask Alex for tickets?" An hour later, her husband reported that they had won a pair of front row seats. "Hamilton" is sold out through November. For those unable to get tickets, a trip to the grave may be the next best thing. That was the case for Alan Bone, a teacher from Omaha who visited New York with his wife in November. They were shut out of the show but still went to Trinity Church. "I didn't want to pass up the opportunity to visit the site," he said. While paying their respects, Mr. and Ms. Bone encountered the actor Ben Stiller and his daughter, there for the same reason. Mr. Bone offered to take a picture of the Stillers in front of Hamilton's grave. Then Mr. Stiller's daughter snapped a shot of the two men, which Mr. Bone later posted online. Though Eliza Hamilton was a dedicated parishioner at Trinity Church, it is not known whether her husband regularly attended services. But from his deathbed, Hamilton sent for the Rt. Reverend Benjamin Moore, rector of Trinity, bishop of New York and president of Columbia College. Reverend Moore at first refused to give him Communion. The church strongly opposed dueling, and he did not want to be seen as condoning the act. But when Hamilton pleaded a second time, Reverend Moore agreed, provided that if he lived, Hamilton would "employ all your influence in society to discountenance this barbarous custom." (Hamilton's son Phillip had died in a duel three years earlier. He was buried in or near the churchyard, but the exact location of his remains is a mystery. It's likely that he was denied a marker because of the nature of his death.) Hamilton died on July 12, 1804. Two days later, his body was prepared at the home of Angelica and her husband, John B. Church, and then paraded to his grave. Thousands lined the streets to say goodbye. On a recent Sunday afternoon, a small crowd had gathered. They took pictures and placed white roses on the grave, ceasing all conversation to read Hamilton's epitaph: The Patriot of incorruptible integrity. The soldier of approved valour. The statesman of consummate wisdom. Whose talents and virtues will be admired Long after this marble shall have mouldered into dust. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Three weeks ago, a spring breaker in Miami became a symbol of Gen Z denialism when he spoke to CBS News and said that coronavirus wasn't going to get in the way of his partying. Outrage was swift, but one person who felt a touch of recognition was Peter Staley, one of the country's most respected AIDS activists. Mr. Staley, 59, remembers what it was to be young and dumb. In the summer of 1983, shortly after graduating from college, Mr. Staley moved to New York City and began inching his way out of the closet. In the East Village, hanging out at places like Boy Bar, he heard in "this abstract rumor mill way" of a plague that was killing gay men. "My first instinct was like that kid on the beach," Mr. Staley said. "There was this whole thing of, 'I'm hearing it's only happening to the older gays and the ones who slept with hundreds of guys.' It was so easy to shrug off." That summer, Mr. Staley got infected. Over the next two decades, lovers and close friends died. When I spoke to Mr. Staley in late March, he cautioned against drawing a false equivalence between H.I.V. and the new coronavirus, which in his estimation are more dissimilar than they are alike. H.I.V., he pointed out, was harder to transmit than the coronavirus, slower to wreak havoc on those infected as AIDS, and (until anti retrovirals went to market in 1996, some 15 years after the disease began seeping into public consciousness) far more likely to be deadly than Covid 19. Moreover, the disastrous inaction of the federal government to AIDS for more than half a decade was largely the result of bigotry toward those most commonly infected: namely, gay men and IV drug users. Still, Mr. Staley said, "there is no denying that for me and for other long term survivors of the AIDS crisis I know, Covid 19 is stirring up a lot. To the extent that all of us from those years have some version of PTSD, all of that is flooding back." The biggest similarity, in his view, has been "politicians not immediately deferring to expert scientific opinion. That, on very different deadlines, has been just as deadly, helping to drive this pandemic as effectively as during the early years of the AIDS crisis." And although matinee idols, right wing politicians and pink haired divas are publicly disclosing their Covid 19 diagnoses, it has been clear to a number of AIDS activists that despite what Madonna or Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo might say, Covid 19 is no equalizer. "Pandemics never hit fairly," said David France, 60, the director of the 2012 Oscar nominated documentary "How to Survive a Plague." "While we now have what appears on its face to be a more democratic plague that isn't confined mostly to a despised population, it has still been most heavily concentrated in the major urban areas, which is blue America, in neighborhoods that are filled with people who are not rich and are often black or brown." Covid 19's disproportionate ability to kill the poor, the uninsured and the elderly has also played into disheartening arguments against reacting aggressively. That has enraged a number of H.I.V. survivors who have reached senior citizenship. "During AIDS, I was disposable because I'm a faggot. Now I'm disposable because I'm a fogie," said Cleve Jones, 65, who got into activism during the 1970s as a protege of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California. And there are other reasons for a feeling of deja vu. In 1984, a 44 year old Dr. Anthony Fauci oversaw the government's response to the AIDS crisis as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Today, a 79 year old Dr. Fauci is the director of NIAID overseeing the coronavirus response. And throughout, his calm demeanor and attempt to float above politics has been a source of heated debate among AIDS activists. One of the organization's biggest goals was speeding up access to experimental drugs, and the efforts of its members to accomplish this included marches on Washington and chaining themselves to the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange in an effort to bring down the price of the AIDS drug AZT. A number of Act Up's members had helped get the drug to market before it had been fully tested for toxicity. The argument made was that with people dying, there was no time for placebo studies and bureaucracy. Many came to regret this haste. "Later, we learned it could be effective in combination with other drugs, but a huge number of the people who took it as recommended during the Reagan years died," Mr. Jones said. "I was handed AZT and told to take 12 pills," said the writer Hal Rubenstein. "I said, 'You're handing me poison, it's going to kill me before the disease.'" He regards the decision to turn it down as the thing that saved his life. That was part of why Mr. Rubenstein, Mr. Jones and Mr. Staley have all been horrified to see President Trump repeatedly tout the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid 19, since the disease resolves naturally in the vast majority of cases and more research is needed on hydroxychloroquine's efficacy in coronavirus patients. Another difficult thing about the coronavirus for AIDS activists has been the difficulty of assembling publicly to protest the United States health care system. "Act Up," said Mr. Sawyer, 66, "was young virile men dressed in Doc Martens, fitted jeans and black leather jackets who were marching in the streets, taking over buildings, spray painting sidewalks and disrupting government. It was sexy and empowering putting boots on the streets and standing up to people in power. That gave people hope, something to belong to, and a way to rally around and channel anger and grief." Ms. Northrop, who is 71, said: "Now we're in a situation where we are practically forbidden from having physical contact with anyone, and that's a heartbreaker. There's a legitimate reason for it, but it's a real tragedy." Rise and Resist, an anti Trump group with many members also in Act Up, has been staging six feet apart demonstrations about government inaction around the coronavirus. Clad in apocalyptic "Blade Runner" meets "Rhythm Nation" gear, they have held up signs that said, "Trump Lies, People Die," not unlike the "Silence Death" tag phrase of Act Up. That's why he got a mask weeks before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made it a recommendation for the general public. It's also why he never believed six feet apart is a sufficient amount of social distance. "Safe distance is going home and locking the door. That's the truth," he said. But Mr. Rubenstein didn't waste time taking actions that seem panicky and pointless, like buying up the nearest supermarket's entire toilet paper supply. "I mean, how stupid can people be?" he said. And Richard Berkowitz, another AIDS activist, made it through March with his mood largely intact. "Honestly," Mr. Berkowitz, 64, said, "my first reaction when I heard about coronavirus was, 'Wow! Lucky me. I actually managed to survive one pandemic to be here for another one.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
They played video. They brought graphics. They cited Alexander Hamilton so many times, they may owe royalties to Lin Manuel Miranda. The Democratic House impeachment managers, unfolding their case against President Donald J. Trump, were conducting a TV trial without many of the staples of legal drama, particularly witnesses on the stand. Instead, they relied on multimedia, impassioned speeches and repetition, repetition, repetition all in a presentation of 24 hours over three days. If the O.J. Simpson trial was a long running daytime soap, this was democracy in binge mode. The trial of Mr. Trump, as the TV pundits reminded us before, during and after, was an unusual one, in that much of the jury was assumed to already have a verdict in mind. This meant a different dynamic from the usual televised trial, in which the prosecution is speaking to the jury first and the viewing audience second, if at all. Instead, Representative Adam B. Schiff of California and his team were effectively speaking to the court of public opinion home viewers who might bring pressure to bear on certain swing senators, or turn against them at the ballot box though they had to do so by at least arguing as if the outcome were not a foregone conclusion. So there was the case, and then there was the case about the case. If the Republican majority was going to acquit the president, and if it was going to voting against calling witnesses and subpoenaing documents that might weaken his defense, the Democrats would make sure that the viewing audience knew it. Their arguments often focused on what the audience wasn't seeing and hearing, because the White House refused it. Wednesday night, Mr. Schiff made a refrain of referencing evidence a diplomatic cable, a statement attributed to the former national security adviser, John R. Bolton and turning it into a question to the Senate. Wouldn't you like to read them? Wouldn't you like to hear them? "They're yours for the asking," he said. What the three days asked of viewers, largely, was patience. The constitutional stakes were as high as they come. But the dynamics were staid, thanks to Senate rules that limited TV coverage to two cemented in place camera vantages that gave the broadcast all the visual verve of a security camera tape. The managers' most effective tool, both to break out of the visual monotony and substitute for live witnesses, was file video, which they used to string together the words of Mr. Trump and his staff into a kind of cinema verite documentary of the often right out in the open scandal. There was Mr. Trump at a news conference with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia in Helsinki, dismissing his own intelligence agencies' findings on Russian hacking. There was his personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, regaling Fox News hosts about his Ukraine exploits. There was Senator John McCain, a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, summoned Friday as a posthumous witness. Certain greatest hits went into heavy rotation. The acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, seemed to say "get over it" onscreen as often as his boss said "You're fired" on "The Apprentice." The senators were a captive audience, though some ducked out, unseen by the stationary cameras. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina vanished before managers played a video of him, prosecuting the Clinton impeachment trial in 1999, in which he contradicted arguments he's made to defend President Trump. (Mr. Graham did make himself available to cameras between sessions, as did the Democratic presidential candidates kept off the trail in Iowa by Senate duty.) If any senators weren't keen on their duty, a good chunk of their constituents were willing to volunteer. Eleven million viewers watched the trial's first day hardly Super Bowl numbers but more than watched the Clinton trial, though the numbers declined the next day. And the three major broadcast networks aired more of the trial during the daytime than in 1999, though they left the evening portion to cable news. In a way, the Democrats programmed their presentation the way a cable news channel does. They recycled through their arguments and video clips during the daytime, for a home audience watching snippets here and there. Then in prime time, they brought out their centerpiece programming, delivered by Mr. Schiff. (This was around where Fox News usually cut away, preferring its own prime time hosts.) At the end of Friday's session, he stepped back from the specifics of the abuse and obstruction cases to argue "moral courage" and putting country over party. The tone wasn't entirely solemn. On Thursday evening, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York told a story about a friend who'd just asked him if he'd heard about "the latest outrage." Mr. Jeffries assumed this referred to Mr. Trump. Actually, his friend said, "Someone voted against Derek Jeter on his Hall of Fame ballot." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
LONDON Now that Prime Minister Boris Johnson has become the first head of government to test positive for coronavirus, he will have to change the way he operates as he seeks to lead his country through the crisis. Other leaders it is inevitable he will not be the last to have to self isolate and "work from home" will be interested to see how he adapts to what will be a very strange working environment for someone used to a steady flow of meetings, able to summon advisers into his presence at will. However, it is also a good opportunity to take stock of his crisis management style, including the way he communicates to the public. Mr. Johnson has shown in his rise that he can be a very effective communicator. But the style deliberately bumbling and disheveled; fond of jokes; disregarding facts and details in favor of bluster does not lend itself to a crisis as grave as this. As someone who has known Mr. Johnson for several decades, and never hidden my view that he is not fit to be prime minister, I do not imagine he will listen to any advice I give. But I am nonetheless offering it, that he should use his isolation to develop a new way of communicating: more fact, more detail; less rhetoric, less bluster; cut the homilies and rambles; fewer snappy one liners; more empathy for the dead and dying, and those caring for them; more explanation of decision making; more linking of new policy announcements to previous ones, and to data; use of graphics and film to explain; and, please, comb your hair! This is not a trivial point. In times of crisis, people look to leaders for confidence and strength. If you look disorganized, people fear that you are disorganized. The role of a leader in a crisis is to devise and execute but also narrate the strategy. It is to take the public into your confidence about why you are making the decisions you are making. Mr. Johnson has long wished to be seen as a modern day version of Winston Churchill. But at the moment, I suggest the prime minister should look for inspiration on the other side of the Atlantic, not to the American president, but to Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York. Mr. Cuomo's father and predecessor, Mario, is credited with one of the most famous quotations about politics ever made: "We campaign in poetry, but we govern in prose." His son's briefings are a master class in prose. First, tone and mood. Mr. Cuomo does not hide how serious things are far from it but he is calm, composed, polite and authoritative throughout. Second, hard fact, and detail. The TV screen is split, on one side his face, on the other a presentation that he is clicking through, setting out with simple clear graphics the many facts of the crisis: Deaths. Cases. Testing. Capacity of the health system. Masks. Ventilators. Mr. Cuomo gives detailed area by area breakdowns of figures, points out trends, tries to explain them. Third, empathy. He intersperses the factual presentation with regular sincere thanks to groups and individuals, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the immunologist who serves on the White House coronavirus task force who has become known the world over for his pained facial expressions as he stands behind President Trump at briefings. Fourth, thinking ahead. Mr. Cuomo was the first leader I saw openly to put concerns about mental health at the heart of his strategy, and he announced the plan for a network of online psychologists and psychiatrists to help New Yorkers. He showed empathy and humor, spelling out how lonely many people were already, even before mandated self isolation. It was hard, he said, for families forced to spend day and night together, and noted that as for himself, "I'm even getting annoyed with the dog." Fifth, inspiration. This is vital in a leader it is inspiring to watch Mr. Cuomo. You feel part of his narrative. You feel the hurdles are enormous, but confident they can be overcome, as with his reminders that society will continue to function, the world will still be here once the crisis is done. I have felt none of that sense of a shared voyage when watching Mr. Trump or Mr. Johnson. Sixth, just the right amount of poetry amid the prose. Twenty five minutes or so of hard fact and prosaic explanation, then a little bit of poetry for the end about the acts of kindness and compassion by which we will be judged; about how life will go on, but things will be different; about how the crisis, as well as being a challenge to all of us, leaders and citizens alike, is also an opportunity to show what kind of people we were. Mr. Johnson still has time to improve his communications. I know he is busy. I know he is facing enormous responsibility and making huge decisions that affect all of our lives, and now doing so in new and difficult circumstances of self isolation. But I really do recommend that he take half an hour to watch a Cuomo briefing, and five minutes to watch a Trump one, with the president's racism, petulance and narcissism on naked display. Then, when planning his own, and when he is out there in front of the country, all alone down the line from 10 Downing Street, Mr. Johnson should try to operate by this mantra: "More like Cuomo, less like Trump." Alastair Campbell, an author and consultant strategist, was chief spokesman for and strategist to Prime Minister Tony Blair from 1994 to 2003. 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 |
Vaping Products That Look Like Juice Boxes and Candy Are Target of Crackdown Federal authorities said on Tuesday they were issuing 13 warning letters to companies that sell vaping products like liquid nicotine in packaging that may appeal to children, including products that resemble juice boxes and candy. The joint action by the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission is the latest step by the federal government to crack down on the vaping industry, particularly on devices that are popular with teenagers. Last week, F.D.A. officials said they had started an undercover sting operation targeting retailers that sell the popular Juul products to minors and had asked the maker, Juul Labs, to turn over documents related to marketing practices and health research. The action on Tuesday, against a group of manufacturers, distributors and retailers, focused on products that the agencies said were aimed at underage users or could be accidentally ingested by children. The products, sold through multiple online retailers, have names like One Mad Hit Juice Box, sold by NEwhere Inc., and Vape Heads Sour Smurf Sauce, sold by Lifted Liquids, which look like Warheads candy. One product, the Twirly Pop, sold by Omnia E Liquid, also came with a real lollipop, federal officials said. Some of the companies also sold products to minors. Federal officials said even if the products were not sold to minors, a child could be mistakenly poisoned because the packaging so closely resembled food and candy. "The images are alarming, and it's easy to see how a child could confuse these e liquid products for something they believe they've consumed before," Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the F.D.A. commissioner, said in a telephone call with reporters on Tuesday. Child poisonings from ingesting liquid nicotine have recently increased. Such poisonings can be deadly and can cause seizures, comas and respiratory arrest. There is no evidence the products under scrutiny this week caused any child deaths, officials said. Nevertheless, "it takes a very small amount of these e liquids, in some cases less than half a teaspoon, to be at the low end of what could be a fatal effect for a kid, and even less than that to make them very, very sick," said Mitch Zeller, the director of the F.D.A.'s Center for Tobacco Products. Some of the products even smelled like the food they were imitating, said Maureen K. Ohlhausen, the acting chairwoman of the F.T.C. The apple juice product came in a cardboard box, with the corners sealed and folded over just like the shelf stable boxes sold in supermarkets, according to the warning letter. It also smelled like apple juice, even without opening the package. "These companies are marketing their e liquids in a manner that the product particularly appealing to young children," she said. Nick Warrender, the owner of Lifted Liquids, said he removed the Vape Heads product from his inventory and redesigned the packaging about six months ago to address officials' concerns over marketing such products. "It was something we already saw as a problem," he said. He said that the products were never marketed to children, but were designed to appeal to adults' nostalgia. "Our goal is complete compliance with the F.D.A. and the F.T.C.," he said, but added that he also wanted to create products that will be attractive to consumers. "Our goal is also to provide products that are going to give adult smokers the ability to get away from cigarettes and also something they are going to enjoy." Mr. Warrender said his products are sold in childproof packaging and that any online sales go through a rigorous vetting system. Jameson Rodgers, vice president of business development at NEwhere, Inc., said the company stopped manufacturing and shipping the apple juice product months ago, after deciding in early 2017 that it was "a way to be proactively responsible." Mr. Rodgers said that it was possible some retailers were continuing to sell remaining inventory of the product even though his company had stopped making or shipping it. Other companies could not be reached immediately for comment. F.D.A. officials said all of the companies sent warning letters on Tuesday had recently sold the products. Last summer, Dr. Gottlieb issued a reprieve to manufacturers of electronic cigarettes by delaying regulations that could have removed many of their products from the market, while at the same time announcing an initiative that will push tobacco cigarette makers to reduce the levels of nicotine in their products. Dr. Gottlieb said the action on Tuesday, as well as the crackdown last week on the Juul products, were part of a longer term campaign aimed at reducing the use of vaping products by minors. While he said there is value in encouraging the development of alternatives that could lure smokers away from harmful cigarettes, public health officials needed to be vigilant about not addicting a new generation of young people to vaping products. "These are just the initial steps in what is going to be a sustained campaign," Dr. Gottlieb said. "There are bad actors out there." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The competition to give cord cutters a less expensive replacement for cable that satisfies live television needs increased on Wednesday as Hulu entered the crowded field. Hulu, the streaming video company, announced that Hulu Live would join products like DirecTV Now, Sling TV, PlayStation Vue and YouTube TV in trying to appeal to people who want live television but do not want to pay more than 100 a month for large cable bundles. The services offer smaller bundles of channels and allow viewers to watch live television outside the home on mobile devices. Because the video is delivered over the internet, consumers do not need to buy bulky hardware. But choosing a service can be overwhelming. Each lacks channels or features that some viewers consider essential. Here are questions to ask when considering the services: How many screens do I need? If you live alone, this may not be a concern. But for families with more than one child, or for apartment dwellers with roommates, being able to watch on only two screens at once may not cut it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Now Lives In a three bedroom apartment in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Claim to Fame Ms. Bellizzi is a stylist and costume designer who worked on the film "Good Time," transforming Robert Pattinson into Connie Nikas, who plays a con artist. She read the script, she said, and was intrigued by the chance to turn "this pretty boy" into a greasy haired scammer. She teamed up with Mordechai Rubinstein, a street style photographer and blogger, to take photos of New Yorkers as inspiration for the looks. Big Break In 2015, a couple of years after graduating from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and producing shoots for Vice, she landed a job as a costume designer on the indie film "As You Are." It was about teenage skateboarders in the early '90s, and Ms. Bellizzi spent weeks sifting through old Thrasher magazines, tracking down labels like Airwalk and researching events like Kurt Cobain's death that would have had an impact on the characters. "I'd never seen another costume designer work, so I had to kind of figure out a system that works for me," she said. Latest Project Ms. Bellizzi worked on two of the latest Jay Z music videos, one of which was directed by Joshua and Ben Safdie, the brothers who directed "Good Time." It was a childhood dream of Ms. Bellizzi's to work on a hip hop video, and she has vivid memories of watching Lil' Kim, Foxy Brown, Missy Elliott and Method Man on TV. "You're a kid, and you're like, 'God, I want to do that,'" she said. Next Thing "I want to do the next 'Matrix,'" said Ms. Bellizzi, who hopes to work on more films where style is a strategic element in the storytelling. Some of her favorites are the original "Blade Runner" and "Casino." While filming "Good Time," Josh Safdie told her to think about creating a character that someone would want to be as a Halloween costume. "That has always stuck with me," she said. In our overly commercialized world, creating looks can be costly and time consuming, but learning how and where to source items makes it easier and more affordable. Here are some of the tricks Ms. Bellizzi has honed along the way. 1. More is more Coco Chanel advised: "Always remove one thing before you leave the house." For Ms. Bellizzi, this does not apply. "I think more is better," she said. For her, no look is complete without layers of silver jewelry, including nameplate necklaces, chains of varying thickness and chokers with hanging dice, which she makes herself. She finds most of her jewelry and clothes at swap meets, learning from an early age in California that you can find unique pieces on a budget. 2. Do your research When Ms. Bellizzi starts a project, she puts in weeks of research, which is helpful if you're trying to recreate a look from the past. She scours old books, photographs, magazines and even catalogs like Sears and Delia's for inspiration. She uses her alumni pass to get into the F.I.T. library, which has a collection of Vogue magazines dating back to the '50s. 3. Recreate a look on a dime Once you've done your research and have reference points for a look or pieces you want to find, you can begin shopping at thrift stores and searching the web. "I'm an eBay head," Ms. Bellizzi said. "I get into deep holes." Chances are, if you want something, there is someone who bought it and is sick of it. Also, you can compare and contrast prices on sites like eBay, even bidding for a better deal. 4. Offer people some It is not uncommon for Ms. Bellizzi to offer people 40 for something they're wearing. "I ask mechanics if I can buy their shirts because they look so good," said Ms. Beliizzi, a self described uniform enthusiast. "There is one with navy and red stripes. It's beautiful, and I can't find that colorway anywhere else. 5. Stick with what works And speaking of uniforms, when Ms. Bellizzi finds something she likes, she sticks with it. For example, she has Dickies pants in at least 10 different colors. "I have all the colorways," she said. "I can get obsessive." She also has more than 100 pairs of hoops. 6. Mix it up Ms. Bellizzi never likes to look too matchy matchy and never wants to be associated with one style. "I always like to be a little punk," she said. "I always like to be a little 'hood. I always like to be a little fancy. If there's too much of one element, I have to take something away." Bonus tip: It's O.K. to splurge on one good thing. For Ms. Bellizzi, it was her Prada fanny pack. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Did you always know you would return to fashion, or did you consider leaving altogether? I needed some time for myself, to have some distance and time to reflect. I was part of this system that was so fast, and produced so much, but gave no time to breathe. It was essential for me to open up to the world beyond fashion for my creativity, so I did these photographic projects that took me away, even to Africa, but fashion is my metier, and my passion. Is the new collection going to be a surprise? It is not a relaunch. I am calling it an "Edition." It is my most signature silhouettes, my essence, like the building blocks of my style. So there is my Smoking, which is based on a 2014 piece; my Perfecto, from my 10th collection. I kept all my archives when I closed my brand. Because it is such an intimate collection, I decided to invite everyone into my home for the show. By keeping it small I also keep my quality of life, which I think is expressed in my work. Only 15 styles. I am doing it alone, out of my house, with external collaborators and ateliers. And I am so happy. I had 25 years of working in a big house. I learned a lot. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
United States citizens wishing to visit or travel to the majority of the European Union nations after January 2021 will have to register online and pay a small fee as part of a new security system intended to screen visa free travelers. Starting on Jan. 1, 2021, American citizens will have to register online, through the new European Travel Information and Authorization System, to enter any of the 26 Schengen area countries, plus four countries currently in the process of joining the area, regardless of the duration of their visit or the number of coun tries visited. The European Council adopted the policy in September 2018. American citizens traveling to these 26 countries for stays of less than 90 days do not require visas or travel authorization. E.T.I.A.S. registration is not a visa, according to the European Union. Americans will not be required to visit a consulate to file any kind of application, fingerprinting is not required, and less information will be asked than is expected of visa applicants. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Ms. Weiss is an Opinion staff writer and editor, and the author of " How to Fight Anti Semitism ." A pedestrian in front of a mural in Great Neck, N.Y. The area may suffer the country's next big cluster of infections. My friend begged his parents not to go to the shiva. The person who had died was from a prominent family in their Long Island community, and he knew that during the traditional seven days of mourning hundreds of people would be passing through the synagogue where the shiva was being held. This was last week, when President Trump was still insisting that the coronavirus "will go away" and that "a lot of good things are going to happen." It was when some people believed it. The couple said they'd just pop by for a bit. Within 48 hours, they learned that another person at the shiva had tested positive for the coronavirus. My friend is tearing his hair out. You could see this as a story about the chasm between millennials and boomers, about what happens when a generation for whom uncertainty is the norm runs headlong into one that has known mostly stability. While our parents insisted this strange new disease was no worse than the flu, we didn't have a hard time imagining Steven Soderbergh's "Contagion" unfolding in real life. Great Neck is home to one of the largest Persian Jewish communities in the United States. It is a community for whom the concept of "social distancing" is about as kosher as a double bacon cheeseburger. "Picture Larry David," Dan Ahdoot, a comedian who grew up in the community, told me. "Persian Jews are the diametrical opposite of that." He continued, "This is not a community that shakes hands. Anything less than a tight hug and a double kiss is considered antisocial. For us, social distancing is a wedding that only has 400 people." In part that's because of the nature of Judaism. Dependence is something of a dirty word in a secular American culture that glorifies self reliance, but Judaism is built on interconnectedness. Nearly everything we do requires gathering a community. It's also because these particular Jews come from a region where warmth and hospitality are fundamental. "Jews especially Jews from the Middle East we are into socializing and getting together," said Great Neck's mayor, Pedram Bral, a gynecologist who immigrated from Iran in 1985. And finally, it's because they have relied on each other out of necessity. Like the mayor, many of the community's founders were forced to flee Iran following the revolution in 1979. In the broader American Jewish community, Persians are famous for their joyous celebrations, their warmth and their social cohesion. But the very qualities that we admire and that they rightly pride themselves on looking out for one another, showing up to every wedding and funeral, inviting the whole town to a bar or bat mitzvah are exactly the things that put them at increased risk of spreading the coronavirus. As of Tuesday, some 215 people on Long Island had tested positive for Covid 19. But many in the area believe that number does very little to capture what's coming: Great Neck may suffer the country's next big cluster of infections. Rabbi Jeffrey Kobrin, the head of North Shore Hebrew Academy, a modern Orthodox school in Great Neck, described it as a "great wave" that "feels like it's about to hit." He has a sense of what that could look like because two of his daughters have already experienced it: They are students at SAR Academy, another modern Orthodox school in Riverdale, in the Bronx. That school became the first Jewish day school in the country to shut down over the coronavirus, way back on March 3. The situation in New Rochelle to say nothing of the Hasidic communities in Brooklyn, where as of Tuesday some yeshivas still remained open is a case study in how religious communities are particularly vulnerable, especially religious communities that send their children to parochial schools and gather three times a day for communal prayer. Dr. Steven Shayani, a cardiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who was raised in Great Neck, thinks that his hometown is going to be hit hard in part because the village and its surrounding region have "double, maybe even triple" the number of synagogues as New Rochelle. "When I realized that 10 days ago," he told me, "I got on the phone and called every local official. If New Rochelle has that many cases, imagine what Great Neck will be." What he learned, talking to health and school officials, was that "there is nobody in charge." The "chain of command is broken in New York state," he said. So instead of relying on officials, Dr. Shayani took the initiative to warn the community himself, reaching out and asking his contacts to practice rigorous social distancing. But he knows his influence is limited: "I'm one doctor sending texts and emails." Mayor Bral has told all Great Neck citizens to stop gathering together, including to worship. Crucially, his order went into effect before the Sabbath, a time when families typically get together in synagogues and for meals. Rabbis followed his lead and urged their congregants to stay home. Yosef Bitton, the rabbi of the United Mashadi Jewish Community in Great Neck, wrote in a note to his community, "This is a very special Shabbat for me because this Sunday is the anniversary of my father." Every year on the anniversary of his father's death Rabbi Bitton says Kaddish, the mourner's prayer. "But I know as a rabbi," he wrote, "that protecting your life and avoiding the risk of someone else's life, is more important than saying Kaddish." Still, after Shabbat ended, rumors spread of people holding services in homes and synagogue parking lots. Mayor Bral took to Facebook to admonish them: "Stern warning for those individuals who held services in their home for Shabbat, you have put many people's lives in danger. Don't be selfish!" When I asked the mayor why he thought some residents didn't abide by the rules, he said people will always do "stupid things." But others say it's also a reflection of cultural values. "We have a concept that runs directly counter to what this virus requires 'taarof,' which is a kind of politeness or etiquette that is so over the top it can hurt you," Mr. Ahdoot, the comedian, said. Another factor is historical the sense that the coronavirus crisis pales in comparison to what earlier generations of Jews have lived through. "Think about the Black Plague," Rabbi Bitton said. During that pandemic, Jews were accused of poisoning the drinking wells, even though the virus was transmitted by rats who had come to Europe on ships from Crimea. "The Europeans killed tens of thousands of Jews," Rabbi Bitton said, adding, "from a historical perspective, this is something very benign." That sentiment was echoed by Rabbi Kobrin. "My wife's grandmother was in the Budapest ghetto worrying about the Nazis coming to take them away," he said. "That was much scarier than this." One doesn't need to go that far back: Before Iran's Jewish community fled the ayatollahs, some of its leaders were publicly executed, accused of spying for Israel and America. Still, the fear of what's about to come runs deep. And it's painful that the community's strength is now its weakness. "Being an Iranian Jew, we are very blessed to be close with our families," Debbie Kerendian, a mother in the community, said. "We love to celebrate, we love to gather. In a public health crisis, that's something that works against us." This is why the ultimate Jewish value to choose life must supersede everything else. "We have a concept called 'pikuach nefesh,' saving lives," Rabbi Kobrin said. "That's more important than shabbat; that's more important than communal gatherings; it's more important than saying kaddish for departed loved ones or having weddings or bar mitzvahs. Even though those things are really, really important." In the end, the point of community is to protect one another, especially those who are marginalized or lonely or overlooked. Like the virus, communal connection will have to mutate in Great Neck, and in every other city and town, as FaceTime replaces face time. At least for the time being. If Jewish history has a theme, it is resilience the ability to renew and revive community during our darkest hours. Now, as ever, the people poised to show us the way forward are those who have been most connected all along. 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 |
Cutting the financial cord with adult children can be hard to do. Just ask Virginia Illiano, a substitute teacher who lives in Brooklyn. After her daughter graduated from an expensive private college, Ms. Illiano thought her days of paying big bills for her daughter were over. She was wrong. Her daughter, who is in her 20s, was not able to find a good paying job and ended up moving in with her mother. That was just the beginning. Ms. Illiano co signed for a leased car, repaid some of her daughter's credit card debt and even paid for her nails, vacations and some clothes. "My teacher benefits are awesome, but she won't have any of that," said Ms. Illiano, 55, who is divorced. And that's just fine with Ms. Illiano. "I told my daughter to go for her dream," she said, explaining that she wanted her "to have her financial legs." Ms. Illiano's financial leg up for her daughter, however, has a downside. She is dipping into her own retirement funds, which means she is now looking at a couple of difficult choices: working longer or selling her home, which is already being used as collateral for her daughter's student loan. More older parents are facing challenges like Ms. Illiano's. They are helping their adult children by dishing out loans or cash gifts, or paying bills. But this largess sometimes blows a big hole in their finances, even jeopardizing their retirement. As a result, some older adults are going back to work, reducing their own living expenses or even declaring bankruptcy. While rigorous data is difficult to obtain, several reports suggest that the problems associated with supporting adult children are growing. At the same time, many baby boomers are far short of holding enough in their retirement accounts to support themselves into old age. "Some adult children aren't making enough money," said Netiva Heard, a certified debt counselor at MNH Credit Solutions in Chicago. "So parents are taking over certain bills like credit cards, cellphones and rent." Parents, of course, want the best for their children from the moment they are born and are used to doing everything they can to help them. Continuing that support into adulthood has spread, experts say, largely because the economy of the last decade has fallen short in generating good job opportunities for their millennial children. "But the last thing you want is for your kids to end up taking care of you financially," Ms. Heard said. "And, anyway, kids can learn from their own money struggles." Baby boomers face increasing retirement challenges of their own as traditional defined benefit pensions have been widely replaced by riskier 401(k) plans and the like, which require disciplined savings. Many have not done the comprehensive financial planning needed to factor in the greater chance that they will live longer, or accumulated enough in savings and investments to cover future health expenses. "So they're not looking at the long term effects of shelling out 5,000 or so per year to adult kids," said Jamie Hopkins, associate professor of taxation at the American College of Financial Services in Bryn Mawr, Pa. "That money could be funding an I.R.A. contribution." There are clear warning signs, experts said, that parents may be giving their adult children too much money. These include taking loans from 401(k) accounts, failing to make full retirement account contributions or draining savings. Locast, a nonprofit streaming service for local TV, is shutting down Capital One's chief executive was fined after being called a 'repeat offender.' Take Jacquelyn McClellan, 74, who lives in Orange City, Fla. In what admittedly is an extreme case, Ms. McClellan, a retired program analyst for the federal government, began paying for various expenses for her grandchildren after her son said he could not afford them. She paid for dancing school, parochial school, trips to Disneyland, all with the help of money from her pension. These payments ended up tipping Ms. McClellan into bankruptcy in 2011. Since then, Ms. McClellan has sharply dialed back her own lifestyle. She can't go on vacation cruises and has only minimal savings. Still, Ms. McClellan felt a sense of duty to help out her grandchildren. "I didn't want them to have a bad life," she said, adding that they are now flourishing. Giving some financial help can be a much needed balm for family members. The problem is, many parents approaching or already in retirement do not know where they stand financially and how much they can afford to give without undermining their own security. Giving gifts of money to chronically needy adult children can become expensive very quickly. To solve a money squeeze, avoid giving away inheritances early, said Eric J. Schaefer, a certified financial planner at Evermay Wealth Management in Arlington, Va. Adult children often only end up coming back for more money, he explained. Supporting more extravagant expenses like a fancy car or country club memberships should be cut off altogether, Mr. Schaefer recommended. One time loans, or gifts, that are used to pay for unexpected emergencies like medical expenses require little thought for parents who can afford them. But going back to the money trough time and time again is dangerous. "Look at kids and ask, 'What is the money for?'" said Robert J. Semrad in Chicago, the senior partner at DebtStoppers, a bankruptcy law firm. "Is this a solution to the problem or just a Band Aid? Many times money given as a Band Aid merely delays the inevitable." Avoid co signing loans for cars or homes, Mr. Semrad said, since a parent's own credit can be jeopardized. "Banks can go after co signers," he said. "And having assets makes you more susceptible." Properly drafted loans by parents to their children can teach the children valuable financial lessons, though. The keys, experts said, are to give the loans set terms and to establish a regular repayment schedule. Peter Lazaroff, a financial adviser at Plancorp in Missouri, recommends loans that include interest rates. The loan then works just like a bond, he added, and the parent gets back principal and interest. The child should also sign a contract, which can be drafted by a lawyer. A loan that is not paid back can be deducted from an inheritance. Kathleen Gurney, who runs the Financial Psychology Corporation in Florida, encouraged parents to structure a loan as if a son or daughter were a business partner. The contract should include loan terms, length and consequences for nonpayment. "Loaning money works well," she said, "if the process is objective and well planned." Ms. Gurney has seen many cases in which older parents helped their adult children, only to end up in dire financial straits themselves. One couple she counseled had to return to work part time in a restaurant because they had decided to support their divorced son's wife and children. "These financial decisions can affect your health and marriage," she said. "And some people even slip into depression because they must continue to work." Experts also caution against giving a loan to an adult child who clearly cannot repay it. Family loans, they point out, are common, but being paid back is less so. Instead of cash, parents can offer their children networking help in looking for a job and provide other forms of support. But when gifts or loans are involved, the most important thing is to be honest with yourself and your children. "Tough love," said Mr. Hopkins at the American College, "requires parents to plan what they give their children. So you must have a process in place." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
SAN FRANCISCO When Mark Zuckerberg introduced an online tool called Facebook Connect in 2008, he hailed it as a kind of digital passport to the rest of the internet. In just a few clicks, users would be able to log in to other apps and sites with their Facebook passwords. The tool was adopted by thousands of other firms, from mom and pop publishing companies to high profile tech outfits like Airbnb and Uber. Now those outfits could have been exposed to the consequences of an attack on Facebook's computer systems. On Friday, the company said the account entry keys of at least 50 million Facebook users had been stolen in the largest hack in the company's 14 year history. But the impact could be significantly bigger since those stolen credentials could have been used to gain access to so many other sites. Companies that allow customers to log in with Facebook Connect are scrambling to figure out whether their own user accounts have been compromised. The hack and its fallout underscore the lengths to which Facebook has cemented itself as the identity of the internet, and what happens when the security systems of one company trusted by so many fail. "Just the sheer fact that this exists will magnify the scale of any hack," said Jason Polakis, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In Europe, where tough new data privacy regulations went into effect in May, the authorities are preparing an investigation of the Facebook breach. Ireland's Data Protection Commission, which is responsible for overseeing Facebook in the region, said it was gathering information and establishing the scope of its inquiry. Tinder, the dating app, has found no evidence that accounts have been breached, based on the "limited information Facebook has provided," Justine Sacco, a spokeswoman for Tinder and its parent company, the Match Group, said in a statement. Tinder, as well as other Match Group apps, rely on Facebook Connect as a method of logging in. Ms. Sacco added that Facebook could do more to help by providing a specific list of users hit by the attack. Over the past decade, Facebook has sold outside companies on Facebook Connect with a simple proposition: Connect to our platform, and we'll make it faster and easier for people to use your apps. The Connect tool was about achieving ubiquity. Users would be more apt to sign up for new apps and sites if doing so was easier, Facebook argued. It also brought an added measure of security, since users wouldn't need to create and remember new passwords every time they signed up for a new app. But in July 2017, that measure of security fell short. By exploiting three software bugs, attackers forged "access tokens," digital keys used to gain entry to a user's account. From there, the hackers were able to do anything users could do on their own Facebook accounts, including logging in to third party apps. In a blog post on Tuesday evening, Facebook said a continuing investigation of the close to 50 million accounts that were compromised "has so far found no evidence that the attackers accessed any apps using Facebook Login." But there are still questions about an additional 40 million Facebook accounts that may have been affected. Facebook forced those 40 million users to log out and reauthenticate their credentials. It was unclear whether these accounts used Facebook to connect to outside apps. Citing "an abundance of caution," Facebook said it was building a tool to help outside developers identify users who were affected in the hack by pinpointing potentially compromised accounts on their services. In a conference call with reporters on Friday, Facebook said it had not assessed the scope of the breach, nor did the company discover who was responsible for the attack. The Facebook breach is reminiscent of a catastrophic attack on Yahoo that was disclosed in 2016. Yahoo said attackers had gotten access to the company's code and used it to forge 32 million access tokens like those stolen from Facebook. Hackers often target large databases of credentials, which can provide access to other accounts if users created the same password for multiple sites or have logged in to third party accounts with their Facebook account. Since Friday, Facebook has held calls with developers at other companies to explain steps they can take to assess the damage at their own organizations. The security team at Uber, the ride hailing giant, is logging some users out of their accounts to be cautious, said Melanie Ensign, a spokeswoman for Uber. It is asking them to log back in a preventive measure that would invalidate older, stolen access tokens. Uber has reviewed its login data from the past year and hasn't found any indications that Facebook credentials were used improperly. "But we still have to go through the investigation," Ms. Ensign said. "For those that are most at risk, we have logged them out, so they'll have to log back in to the account." Facebook faces fallout from regulators both at home and abroad. On Friday, Senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, both Democrats, used the occasion to renew their calls for legislation reining in large tech companies. The European Union's probe will be an early test of its new data protection law, the General Data Protection Regulation. The law allows Facebook to be fined up to 4 percent of its global revenue, though many consider such an outcome unlikely. "G.D.P.R. was designed to address the big tech giants, who are enormous, have huge resources and do very complicated things with personal data," said James Castro Edwards, the head of the data protection practice at the London law firm Wedlake Bell. "This is the sort of battle that G.D.P.R. was drafted to be used in." As Facebook's power has grown, some outside companies have become wary of relying on it too much. While Tinder originally relied exclusively on the Facebook login for several years, the dating company last year introduced a way for people to create new accounts without using Facebook. Since then, fewer than 25 percent of new users sign up for Tinder using Facebook Connect. Similarly, Netflix stopped allowing users to connect using their Facebook accounts three years ago, and new customers must create user names and passwords when they sign up. But for the thousands of other companies that rely on Facebook to serve customers, it is unclear whether or not they will know the extent of the damage. "So many websites support Facebook login, and it was vulnerable for so long that it's hard to give an idea of the scope of this attack," Mr. Polakis said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
How Much Watching Time Do You Have This Weekend? None Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, our TV critic Margaret Lyons offers hyper specific viewing recommendations in our Watching newsletter, aimed at your needs, desires and tastes. Read her latest picks below, and sign up for the Watching newsletter here. This Weekend I Have ... a Half Hour, and My Kids Miss the Outdoors 'Hilda' When to watch: Now, on Netflix. This sweet, whimsical cartoon follows Hilda and her mom as they move from a woodsy locale to the city of Trolberg. It's a big adjustment, especially because Hilda has a special connection to unusual wildlife, but she finds plenty of enchanting creatures in urban living, too. "Hilda" is darling, and its distinctive use of color elevates its storytelling in beautiful ways. If you've ever felt strongly that a particular rock is a "good rock," watch this. 'Pointless' When to watch: Now, on BritBox. You don't only need right answers on the game show "Pointless," you also need obscure answers, like a backward "Family Feud." The questions can get tough in a good way, although because this is a British show, some of the categories are nearly impossible for Americans. I find the player chit chat segments to be excruciating and always fast forward them, but the gameplay is interesting and different, and Richard Osman is always fun as the in house sage. If you believe the best kind of correct is technically correct, or if you were bored by the recent college tournament on "Jeopardy!," watch this. ... Several Hours, and I Miss Sports (and the '90s) From left, the former N.B.A. commissioner David Stern presenting the 1993 championship trophy to the Chicago Bulls, including Coach Phil Jackson, Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. 'The Last Dance' When to watch: Sunday at 9 p.m., on ESPN. For those of us who have resorted to watching raindrops race each other down a window pane, this 10 part documentary about Michael Jordan and the 1990s Chicago Bulls arrives not a moment too soon. It's hard to make a Michael Jordan documentary without its turning into the Chris Farley show remember that? that was awesome but "Last Dance" tries to avoid straight hagiography. There's great archival material, including never released behind the scenes footage shot during the 1997 98 season, and some frank conversations from the present day; every segment is compelling, even if individual episodes don't all gel. Two episodes air each Sunday for the next five weeks. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
In a ruling with potentially sweeping consequences for the so called gig economy, the California Supreme Court on Monday made it much more difficult for companies to classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees. The decision could eventually require companies like Uber, many of which are based in California, to follow minimum wage and overtime laws and to pay workers' compensation and unemployment insurance and payroll taxes, potentially upending their business models. Industry executives have estimated that classifying drivers and other gig workers as employees tends to cost 20 to 30 percent more than classifying them as contractors. It also brings benefits that can offset these costs, though, like the ability to control schedules and the manner of work. "It's a massive thing definitely a game changer that will force everyone to take a fresh look at the whole issue," said Richard Meneghello, a co chairman of the gig economy practice group at the management side law firm Fisher Phillips. The court essentially scrapped the existing test for determining employee status, which was used to assess the degree of control over the worker. That test hinged on roughly 10 factors, like the amount of supervision and whether the worker could be fired without cause. In its place, the court erected a much simpler "ABC" test that is applied in Massachusetts and New Jersey. Under that test, the worker is considered an employee if he or she performs a job that is part of the "usual course" of the company's business. By way of an example, the court said a plumber hired by a store to fix a bathroom leak would not reasonably be considered an employee of that store. But seamstresses sewing at home using materials provided by a clothing manufacturer would probably be considered employees. In addition, a company must show that it does not control and direct the worker, and that the worker is truly an independent business operator, not just classified that way unilaterally. While companies like Uber have had some success arguing that they don't exert sufficient control over drivers to be considered employers, it would be hard to assert that drivers are performing a task that isn't a standard feature of their business. In a recent case involving the restaurant ordering and delivery service GrubHub, for example, a California judge found that food delivery was a regular part of the company's business in Los Angeles, where the plaintiff worked, potentially satisfying the ABC test. But she ruled in favor of the company, concluding that it did not exert sufficient control over the worker to be considered an employer. Shannon Liss Riordan, the attorney for the plaintiff in that case, said she would seek reconsideration in light of the new ruling. GrubHub said in a statement that it was aware of Monday's ruling but could not comment because of the appeals process in the case, other than to say it "will continue to ensure delivery partners can take advantage of the flexibility they value from working with our company." The case on which the court ruled Monday was brought by delivery drivers at a company called Dynamex, who had been considered employees before 2004, when the company changed the relationship to a contracting arrangement. Were the courts to find that workers at companies like GrubHub and Uber, as now constituted, were employees rather than contractors, the companies could respond in several ways. They could simply make their workers employees rather than contactors. Alternatively, ride hailing companies like Uber might choose to rein in their operations, providing a more limited platform in which drivers and passengers can negotiate prices and the terms of the service. Even if Uber and the like are eventually forced to change their business model, however, that moment could be far off. Uber drivers typically sign an arbitration agreement stating that any disputes must be brought individually and outside the court system. While the United States Supreme Court recently heard a challenge to such agreements, it is widely expected to uphold them. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Where do royals go once they've passed the baton to new heads of state in Buckingham Palace? Brooklyn, apparently. Claire Foy and Matt Smith, who played Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip on Netflix's "The Crown" before a new cast took over for Season 3, will appear opposite each other once again in March this time, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In Duncan Macmillan's "Lungs," they portray a couple who debate the merits of having a child as the world seems to inch closer and closer to doomsday. The New York production will have a limited run, from March 25 to April 19. The two character show, which had its debut in 2011, earned positive notices for its actors during a sold out engagement this fall at the Old Vic in London. "The pair lend shape and dimension to a work that might seem piecemeal in lesser hands," according to the New York Times review. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
An aspiring ballerina starts out bright and shiny, a vessel of faith and devotion. But little by little, as disappointments mount and personal tragedies overwhelm, faith and fortitude can crumble. That glow can fade. It's hard for any dancer. What happens when that dancer is Black? Aesha Ash, who grew up in Rochester, N.Y., attended the esteemed School of American Ballet, the academy of New York City Ballet, and had a leading role in its annual Workshop Performances. Then she took the natural next step: She joined City Ballet, in 1996. Back then, the ballet world was less concerned with diversity than it is now. "I wasn't just dancing for myself, and I wasn't just dancing to rise through the ranks and be seen by a director to promote me," Ms. Ash, 42, said in a recent interview. "It was so much bigger than that. I was trying to battle stereotypes and biases on that stage every single night. And I succeeded in some and I failed in others." Now she finds herself in a position to continue that mission not only for herself but for generations to come. Starting in September, pandemic or not, she will become the first Black female member of the permanent faculty in the School of American Ballet's 86 year history. Jonathan Stafford, the artistic director of City Ballet and the school, said that the institution had relied too long on a system that Balanchine put in place: having students from the school and City Ballet return as teachers. But there were few Black alumni, and, until recently, they weren't being invited to teach. That's what Mr. Stafford wants to change. "We can't just rely on that system that put a lot of barriers in place to anyone of color joining the faculty," he said. "We're not going to be fully an equitable institution if we don't have people of color in leadership roles." Ms. Ash takes her role as a mentor seriously. "I hope that as a teacher I can help shape and form dancers," she said, "and just remind them that if you don't get the company of your choice, if you don't get into this career, that it's not the end all be all. There are really so many other beautiful ways to participate." All the same, being the first has its pressures. "I am scared to death," she said with a laugh. "It is a lot to carry, and it wasn't this quick and easy yes. I have a family, I have a life." The school began talking to Ms. Ash about the position in spring 2019, but she didn't accept until January; for one thing, it meant moving, with her husband and two children, to New York from San Jose, Calif. But Mr. Stafford and Kay Mazzo, the school's chairman of faculty, were eager to have her come. "Immediately everybody could tell she was a very strong teacher, but more than that, she was this incredible presence in the room that the students we got great feedback felt empowered by," Mr. Stafford said. "They saw the care and empathy she brought to the rooms, which hasn't always existed in ballet studios since the beginning of time." In many ways, Ms. Ash has come full circle. Her story is one of a dancer who lost her spark, and found it again. "When I left City Ballet, I left the whole reason I was fighting so hard to be something in the ballet world behind," she said. "And so the drive in me had died." While in the company, Ms. Ash was a glamorous presence who danced with strength and a luxurious musicality. But she had started ballet after first studying jazz, tap and lyrical dance she had Broadway ambitions and won competitions and she said it felt like she was always playing catch up with her technique. "I felt like I started way late," she said. "And then being a minority, where you already feel like you have to work twice as hard." Slights and comments whether veiled or not about her race added up over the years. While her fellow apprentices at City Ballet were given stage makeup, she was given only some lipstick. When "Swan Lake" was set on the company, the person who staged it, Ms. Ash said, "gathered everyone together and gave the last final notes and the pep talk and said, 'Now I don't want to see any tan bodies on that stage.'" And there were comments on ballet blogs, including one that compared her to Lil' Kim and another that suggested her Black body was distracting. "That is not talking about missing a turn or being overweight or that your hair is out of place," she said. "That's talking to who you are. That chips away at your identity and your self worth as a young adolescent coming into yourself, away from your home and away from your culture." In 2003, after her father died, Ms. Ash, still a member of the corps de ballet, decided it was time to leave the company. (Her sister had died of pancreatic cancer while she was at the school.) The company did not encourage her to stay, and she said she had little fight left in her. "I was at the point where I was very tired," she said. "That was one loss too many for me at that point, and I started just questioning everything. What is it all for?" A friend was going to help her get a job as a waitress. But Ramon Flowers, a dancer who visited her backstage one night, intervened. When she told him about becoming a waitress, Ms. Ash said, "He just looked at me and he was like, 'No you are not, darling.'" After dancing with Bejart for a couple years, she joined Alonzo King's company, Lines, in San Francisco, and then Christopher Wheeldon's now defunct group, Morphoses. "I gained so much by not being focused on trying to be seen and rise through the ranks," Ms. Ash said. "I gained so much by sitting back and observing and watching other dancers and seeing how they work. But as a dancer, she felt she was just going through the motions. When she finally stopped, in 2009, she poured her energy into full time motherhood. "Not a lot of dancers do that," she said. "They dance through their pregnancies, they find ways to do Pilates, and I was like, nope. I'm done. I was really hurt by the dance world." But Ms. Ash wasn't really done with ballet. She saw how it could serve a greater purpose: dismantling stereotypes that exist for women of color. In 2011, she created the Swan Dreams Project, which uses ballet and photography as a way to combat the objectification of Black women and stereotypes. She began on the streets of Rochester being photographed in full ballerina regalia with young children. "She has this incredible understanding of how the body works," Mr. Stafford said. "She talked about how dancers use their core muscles to help them execute steps at a higher level with more energy, more attack those are such the trademarks of the Balanchine aesthetics." It's all part of what Ms. Ash referred to as her movement playground. "If I ever were to go back to dance, I would be so much better than I ever was because of all this information," she said. "It's so much deeper than the turn, the pirouette, the leg, the jump. And then having taken my world experience of having traveled, experiencing other cultures and customs and bringing that into artistry and movement and what that then gives the world." This, she said, is what she tries to pass on to students. (As of now, the school's plan is to open on Sept. 14, with both Zoom classes and in person training.) "I want them to gain this as early as possible and not wait till it's too late, like me." But those trials have given her a heightened sensitivity for students who become demoralized. "I can see self doubt creep in a mile away," she said. "I have this hyper awareness of that student who's shy in the corner and just needs someone to pull them out. That excites me. I can be there for that little Aesha in that classroom." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
David Chase in his Upper East Side apartment. "I didn't think that 'The Sopranos' would chart any kind of new course," he said. "All I wanted to do is just get as close to cinema as I could." "'Remember when' is the lowest form of conversation," Tony Soprano once told his mob cohorts in "The Sopranos." If David Chase, Tony's creator, doesn't totally agree with that assessment "It was a friend of mine in high school who said that," he said that doesn't mean he's particularly fond of nostalgic reminiscence. "It's a cheap thing. It drives me crazy," he said last week. "I thought revisiting the show would be more pleasurable, but it turns out I've forgotten a lot more than I thought I would." Alas, it's unavoidable this month. Thursday is the 20th anniversary of the premiere of "The Sopranos" on HBO, a moment that, as much as anything, signaled the beginning of TV's still flourishing era of ambitious storytelling and artistic credibility. "The Sopranos" was originally conceived as a film, right? Yeah. I planned to have Robert De Niro as, well he didn't have a name, and Anne Bancroft as his mother. But I was signing with a new agency and they said mob comedies were dead, so I should forget about that. As it turned out, they had missed their mark. You've talked about how your mother and your relationship with her inspired certainly the early part of "The Sopranos." But what were some of the other ingredients? When the show first hit the air, I really overdid it in the press about my childhood. I said I was always depressed and this and that, because I wanted to sell the idea of Tony and depression. Actually, my mother was pretty crazy. But I had a wonderful childhood in many ways. I was really cared for. I was ranging all over the place in this apartment complex that we lived in, just discovering everything. I had good friends. How much of that found its way into the show? One thing that did was this attraction to nature. The bear. The woods. The ducks. Because even in Clifton, N.J., there was a lot of wildlife around then. There isn't very much anymore. The film I always mention, that informed what I was trying to do, is "Saps at Sea," a Laurel and Hardy thing. Why did you want to do a mob show, specifically? I was Italian American, and I wanted to see Italian Americans portrayed. Now these people would say, "You didn't portray Italians as they are. All Italians are not gangsters." That was true for the show, too. Dr. Melfi Lorraine Bracco wasn't a gangster. Other people they ran into were not gangsters. But the main characters were. Watch: the actor Edie Falco and the creator David Chase recall their memories of "The Sopranos." How did James Gandolfini shape Tony in ways that you perhaps did not anticipate? The first day we were shooting, there was a scene in which Christopher told Tony that he was going to write a movie script and go to Hollywood. And in the dialogue, Tony said, "What are you, crazy?" and he gives him a love tap. That's what I pictured. And we came to do it, and Jim pulled him out of his chair, shook him by the collar and was like "Are you expletive crazy?" And I thought: That's Tony Soprano. He just felt like a real gangster. I thought about that all the time and I think that's what life is like. You prepare and prepare for things. "I am going to take charge of something. I'm going to avoid all that." And it comes from some other side you never see it. That's a lifelike thing, and that's what we were trying to do. Was there an early moment or episode when you had a breakthrough? I think "College" broke through something for me, the fifth episode of the first season. When Tony took his daughter on a college tour and brutally killed a former mobster turned snitch along the way . Some of the best episodes were ones where he was out of his element, or someone was out of their element. "Pine Barrens." They were like little movies, which is what I was always trying to do: A little movie every week. I wasn't fond of the idea of doing continuing stories. I don't know. I thought about "Dallas" I didn't want to do that. But I let myself be convinced to do them and it turned out to be a really good idea. These are the 20 best dramas to emerge since "The Sopranos." Were there any episodes you wish you could do over? The show when they went to Italy. That really wasn't our element. We really didn't know what we were talking about, so I didn't like it as much. What about the maligned episode about the Columbus Day Parade protest? I don't regret it, because I had so much vitriol piled up inside me that I didn't care whether people liked it or not. I know everybody hates it. Laughs. He used to call me a vampire. Then he started calling all the writers vampires, because we used to take the real lives of the cast and put it in the show. Like Tony Sirico was germophobic, so we gave that to Paulie. We talked about dreams earlier. Do you ever dream about "The Sopranos"? No, I dream about Jim Gandolfini. I really don't remember them that well and I never analyzed them. Maybe he is Tony Soprano in some of them. He's angry in a lot of them. Laughs. What do you think "The Sopranos" did that television hasn't done before? Long pause. I think "The Sopranos" showed humans more as humans than what had come before it. I mean, on network television those are human beings, certainly. But I think more people could feel like "Tony Soprano is more like me than a doctor, or a cop, or a judge." Since "The Sopranos," TV has become perhaps the most creatively fertile and ambitious pop culture medium. Do you take any satisfaction from the fact that you were one of the architects of that? If you say so. But yeah, I take satisfaction that I had some effect on the way things changed. I did want to change things. There is an Elvis Costello song where he says, "I want to bite the hand that feeds me; I want to bite that hand so badly." That's the way I always felt about working at the networks, and I think I bit it. I don't think so. You couldn't help but be surprised beyond surprised at the response. It was a pleasurable sensation that people were talking about it, that it made an impression on people. It made a lot of people angry. Sometimes I couldn't believe it was that important to people. With the 20th anniversary coming, are you ready for another round of "Is Tony dead or not?" I've got to say I'm just bored with it. I also feel like, Jesus, there were 86 episodes and you're fixated on that? Can't we talk about something else? You did an interview with the Directors Guild of America in 2015 that extensively broke down the final sequence. Was that an attempt to just put the whole thing to bed? Might have been. I really don't recall my reasons. I was trying to provide a context. Is it frustrating that even after that, many people don't seem to want to take you at your word? It's frustrating. It makes me use bad words. But it's not surprising, you know? And I don't have any statistics to prove it, but I think it's become more accepted as time has gone on. I think the point isn't whether or not Tony was killed. It's the uncertainty that's the point, and the way the scene's crazy tension makes us aware of the passage of time and how choices shape the brief bit of life we get. Most people can't control when or how they die, but the choices are ours. Is that totally off base? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Kane Brown has arrived as a country star, landing his first No. 1 album on the Billboard chart. "Experiment" (Zone 4/RCA Nashville), the singer and songwriter's second LP, had an impressive debut week, earning 124,000 album equivalent units, according to Nielsen Music, including 105,000 in sales and 21 million streams, a healthy total for a country release in a rap dominated digital market. Brown's album marks only the third country release to top the all genre Billboard 200 this year, following Carrie Underwood and Jason Aldean. (Each of the three was boosted by a deal that packaged the album with tickets to see the artist in concert. Four country albums hit No. 1 last year.) Imagine Dragons reached No. 2 with its latest album, "Origins" (Kidinakorner/Polydor/Interscope), totaling 91,000 units (61,000 in sales and 35 million streams). Those returns were a decline from the band's previous album, "Evolve," which also reached No. 2 last year, but debuted with 146,000 units. The top streaming album of the week was the rapper singer Trippie Redd's "A Love Letter to You 3" (10k Projects), a continuation of his commercial mixtape series, which had 109 million track streams and just 11,000 in sales for a total of 84,000 units by the industry's math, also including track downloads in addition to physical and digital copies. The album marks Trippie Redd's fourth charting release, and his highest showing so far. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
PITTSBURGH When Uber picked this former Rust Belt town as the inaugural city for its driverless car experiment, Pittsburgh played the consummate host. "You can either put up red tape or roll out the red carpet," Bill Peduto, the mayor of Pittsburgh, said in September. "If you want to be a 21st century laboratory for technology, you put out the carpet." Nine months later, Pittsburgh residents and officials say Uber has not lived up to its end of the bargain. Among Uber's perceived transgressions: The company began charging for driverless rides that were initially pitched as free. It also withdrew support from Pittsburgh's application for a 50 million federal grant to revamp transportation. And it has not created the jobs it proposed in a struggling neighborhood that houses its autonomous car testing track. Blame is being pointed in many directions. While Mr. Peduto had trumpeted his relationship with Uber's chief executive, Travis Kalanick, he didn't get any commitments in writing about what the company would provide for Pittsburgh. That became an issue in Pittsburgh's Democratic mayoral primary this month, with Mr. Peduto's challengers criticizing his relationship with Uber and one calling the company a "stain" on the city. (Mr. Peduto won the primary.) "This was an opportunity missed," said Michael Lamb, Pittsburgh's city controller, who has called on Uber to share the traffic data gathered by its autonomous vehicles. The deteriorating relationship between Pittsburgh and Uber offers a cautionary tale, especially as other cities consider rolling out driverless car trials from Uber, Alphabet's Waymo and others. Towns like Tempe, Ariz., have already emulated Pittsburgh and set themselves up as test areas for self driving vehicles. Many municipalities see the experiments as an opportunity to remake their urban transportation systems and create a new tech economy. Yet Pittsburgh shows the clash of private versus public interests that can result. The lessons are college course level "101," said Linda Bailey, the executive director of the National Association of City Transportation Officials. Uber said it was open to a deal with Pittsburgh but had yet to see a draft of proposed commitments the city is seeking from the company. Uber said it planned to share some data collected by its autonomous vehicles with the city this year, though Pittsburgh officials say the data Uber shares with other cities is insufficient. The company, which still has allies in Pennsylvania's state and county government, said it had created 675 jobs in the greater Pittsburgh area and had helped local organizations like a women's shelter, among other moves. "Uber is proud to have put Pittsburgh on the self driving map, an effort that included creating hundreds of tech jobs and investing hundreds of millions of dollars," the company said in a statement. "We hope to continue to have a positive presence in Pittsburgh by supporting the local economy and community." Pittsburgh's frustrations with Uber are encapsulated in the Hazelwood neighborhood along the Monongahela River, where the company opened a driverless vehicle testing track last year. From the second floor of the neighboring Center of Life church, the track is in full view. Sky blue Volvo S.U.V.s with large revolving lidar devices on their roofs navigate around shipping containers and stoplights. The area is enclosed by a chain link fence wrapped in a black tarp. When Uber picked the site in 2016, a company representative told community leaders that it wanted to hire from the neighborhood. Tim Smith, a pastor at the Center of Life church and the head of a neighborhood group, said he had given Uber a list of job candidates, including a mapping engineer and technicians. Since then, Mr. Smith said, he has been told that applicants should go through Uber's general jobs site. None have been hired. Uber has benefited Pittsburgh in some ways. The company has raised Pittsburgh's profile, and its Advanced Technologies Center there, which Uber opened for driverless research in 2015, has revived the former steel mill neighborhood known as the Strip District. Yet city officials and residents are reconsidering even those benefits, especially as Uber has recently grappled with several controversies. Those include a Justice Department criminal investigation into Uber's use of a software tool to deceive law enforcement. Some Pittsburghers also objected to Mr. Kalanick's being a member of the Trump administration's business advisory council this year. In January, Pittsburghers for Public Transit, a nonprofit representing bus drivers and riders, organized a DeleteUber social media campaign and a street demonstration against the company's decision to continue airport service when taxi drivers had halted rides to protest the Trump administration's travel ban. Molly Nichols, executive director of the group, said Uber had called to ask her to cancel the protest, which ultimately went ahead. "The warning signs about Uber's questionable business practices were all over the place, and the mayor should have recognized that and worked harder to create a partnership that was more equitable," Ms. Nichols said. She added that there might be longer term problems from autonomous vehicles, including automation's effect on Uber's 4,000 drivers in the city. Parking fees also make up about 15 percent of Pittsburgh's revenue, and the city has not said how those funds would be replaced if fewer people owned and parked cars and used driverless services instead, she said. Mr. Peduto, a third generation Pittsburgher, has perhaps had the most noticeable change of heart. Mr. Kalanick first approached Mr. Peduto in 2015 with plans to start driverless trials in Pittsburgh. At the time, Mr. Kalanick had hired away more than three dozen researchers and robotics experts from the city's Carnegie Mellon University, upsetting some faculty and officials. Mr. Peduto defended Uber and said he shared Mr. Kalanick's vision. The two exchanged texts frequently. In September, Mr. Peduto became the first passenger to hail a driverless car and posted a photo of himself grinning in the back seat of an Uber car. "It was inspiring, and we knew in Tempe, the innovation center of Arizona, we wanted to have that kind of partnership," said Mark Mitchell, the mayor of Tempe, where Uber began testing driverless cars last fall. But hidden from the public was Mr. Peduto's simmering frustration with Uber. In early 2016, Uber had indicated it would support Pittsburgh's application for a federal grant to redo local transportation, according to Mr. Peduto. He asked Uber to commit private funds to enhance the proposal. Uber said that the request had come too late and that the desired amount 25 million was too much. Pittsburgh didn't win the federal competition. In January, Mr. Peduto was also surprised to get billed for a ride home in an Uber autonomous vehicle. "Travis Kalanick had told me the rides would be free and a service for the public," he said. Uber said it had always intended to charge for driverless rides. Still, there are signs that Uber is trying to improve some relations. The company said it had agreed to work with Hazelwood residents on an art installation along the black chain link fence surrounding the test track. This month, Uber officials also invited Mr. Smith, the church pastor in Hazelwood, to discuss job training for young adults. Mr. Peduto, who has stopped texting Mr. Kalanick, said Uber and other self driving car companies remained crucial to Pittsburgh's ability to break from its steel industry past. He said he was now talking to Ford, which is investing 1 billion in a Pittsburgh based driverless technology company, Argo AI, about signing commitments on data sharing and work force development. Ford declined to comment. "When it came to what Uber and what Travis Kalanick wanted, Pittsburgh delivered," Mr. Peduto said. "But when it came to our vision of how this industry could enhance people, planet and place, that message fell on deaf ears." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The corner of Houston Street and the Bowery has been home to murals by some of the world's most renowned street artists, from Keith Haring to Os Gemeos to JR. The latest titan of street art to take over the giant canvas? Banksy. The anonymous British artist's 70 foot long mural was unveiled on Thursday, and it protests the imprisonment of the Turkish Kurdish artist and journalist Zehra Dogan, who was sentenced last March for painting the destruction of a predominantly Kurdish town, with Turkey's flag flying over rubble. "I really feel for her. I've painted things much more worthy of a custodial sentence," Banksy said in a statement to the New York Times. Banksy's sparse mural mostly consists of black hash marks, which visually represent jail cell bars and count the number of days that Ms. Dogan has spent in prison. (A similar array of hash marks also recently appeared in another protest art piece "Parkland 17," which counts the number of Americans killed by guns daily.) A rendering of Ms. Dogan herself peers out of one of the cells, with her left hand gripping a bar that doubles as a pencil. "Free Zehra Dogan" is written in the bottom right corner. She still has 18 months left to serve, and remains unaware of the mural, according to a news release. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
HBO Max kicked off Wednesday with an abundance of noisy hit Warner Bros. movies (like "Wonder Woman" and the entire Harry Potter franchise) and heralded television shows ("Game of Thrones," "Friends"). Yet tucked inside the platform's 10,000 hours of programming is a jewel of a film catalog from the Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli, which has garnered both accolades and critical reverence in its 35 year history but whose work has remained elusive to the many streaming services that have come calling over the years. Founded in 1985 by the filmmakers Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata and Toshio Suzuki, Studio Ghibli has made 21 animated features, earned five Oscar nominations and one statuette for Miyazaki's 2002 "Spirited Away," Japan's highest grossing film. The studio and its celebrity director, Miyazaki, have long been subjects of cult adoration. Collectors have hunted down DVD releases for decades. The Studio Ghibli Museum has been a prominent tourist attraction in Mitaka, Japan, since opening in 2001, and the three year old Studio Ghibli Fest, held annually in theaters across the United States by its North American distributor, GKids, and Fathom Events, sells out instantly. (The museum is currently closed because of the pandemic, and plans are still in the works for a 2020 edition of the festival.) Yet, despite the adoration, Studio Ghibli has never been able to cross over into the mass market. Now, these elusive titles will all be housed in one place, prominently displayed next to HBO Max's better known properties, in a move that could transform Studio Ghibli from bespoke manufacturer of beautiful hand drawn animation into the mass market mainstream. "Ghibli films have been seen by a wide range of audiences worldwide," said Suzuki, the architect behind the creation of the studio. "However, in the States, it wasn't really working as we had expected. People would come to the theaters to watch Ghibli films on the East Coast and West Coast, but in the Midwest region, it was hard to get people in the theaters. We thought this would be a great opportunity." The GKids president, David Jesteadt, had been urging Studio Ghibli to go digital for years, only to be repeatedly shut down by the three founders. Digital was antithetical to Studio Ghibli's philosophy of care and mindfulness. "There is a strong emphasis on presentation and less focus on finances in terms of trying to maximize revenue like other film companies," Jesteadt said. Plus, he added, there was little need. "Ghibli's catalog is so legendary in its own right that the home video sales have really been fantastic for 20 years," he said. "Even as the rest of the industry was looking at declines and finding ways to offset revenue with different streams, they weren't experiencing that same impact." For one, Studio Ghibli has undergone a transformation in the past few years. Miyazaki announced his retirement in 2013 after finishing the Oscar nominated "The Wind Rises" and soon after closed the studio. Five years later, Takahata died and the remaining founders began discussing how to preserve Studio Ghibli's legacy. Miyazaki's son Goro began work on Studio Ghibli's first computer animation project, a still untitled film centered on a young girl, a character Suzuki called "the wisest person on Earth." That work prompted the elder Miyazaki to begin plotting his own return to moviemaking with the hand drawn "How Do You Live?," which follows a 15 year old boy's journey of spiritual growth following the death of his father. "The boy, the protagonist, is very similar to Hayao Miyazaki," Suzuki said. "The film reflects on Miyazaki contemplating how he's lived his life up until now." The remaining founders were also influenced by a number of artists who were eschewing theatrical distribution for the ubiquity of streaming. Suzuki pointed specifically to Woody Allen and what had been a lucrative deal with Amazon. (Amazon severed its relationship with Allen in June 2018 after allegations resurfaced that he sexually abused his daughter, accusations he has denied.) Suzuki recalled that what Allen "said was very interesting." "He said there should be numerous outlets for films," Suzuki explained, "not just movie theaters but packaging and also streaming. There should be multiple outlets. And I thought, 'Well, that makes sense.'" All this new thinking was timed perfectly for the start of HBO Max. Impressed by both the HBO pedigree and the curated approach to content by WarnerMedia, the parent company of HBO and HBO Max, the two parties were quickly able to seal a deal. "It was a serendipitous moment," said Kevin Reilly, chief content officer of HBO Max, who admitted to being surprised by the rapturous response to the deal. "I knew it was revered," Reilly said of the news that the Ghibli films would be streaming, but he also noted that the announcement signaled to industry insiders "what we were reaching for, what kind of things we wanted to bring into the fold." He added, "When we were closing the 'South Park' deal, Trey Parker and Matt Stone said, 'Hey man, that really meant something to us when you brought in Ghibli.'" Reilly said that he had seen the library's effect on his own household. Quarantined with his three sons ages 21, 21 and 16 he gave them access to the beta version of HBO Max in the weeks leading up to launch. Where have they gone first? Studio Ghibli. "It's been a Studio Ghibli film festival over here," he said with a laugh. "Of all the things they could watch on HBO Max, these big, loafy men are sitting on the couch watching these beautiful, sweet animated stories. That's the magic of these films." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
The Biggest Trend in Fashion May Be Getting Rid of Your Fashion Forget fringe and feathers; forget saying no to fur. It is possible that the biggest trend in fashion is about to become getting rid of all of your ... fashion. Next week Cameron Silver the founder of the Los Angeles vintage store Decades, famous male peacock, fashion director of H by Halston and its QVC face will use his store and website, decadesinc.com, to sell off 400 pieces of his own wardrobe collected over the last 35 years. Soon after that, another 100 to 200 pieces will be offered on grailed.com. This follows the wardrobe auction in February of 30 pieces from the closet/apartment of the street style star Anna Dello Russo at Christie's, along with the sale of 150 additional pieces on Net a Porter. And that followed the 2008 sale by Daphne Guinness of approximately 1,000 pieces of Chanel, Versace, Valentino and Saint Laurent (among other names) at Kerry Taylor Auctions. Yet while it is a legitimate question, a more relevant one may be: After decades in which fast fashion gave rise to accessible luxury and spurred an accelerated seasonal cycle that in turn spurred a binge of accumulation, be it shirtdresses or sneakers, Supreme or Hermes, are we finally reaching a tipping point? "I hope so," said Mr. Silver, who had a wardrobe of "thousands" of pieces scattered between his homes in Los Angeles, New York and Pennsylvania, including, he said, "50 man furs in storage in L.A., and I don't even wear fur. It's what I spent money on instead of buying a house in Malibu." "Owning Decades was like opening a weird Pandora's box for me," Mr. Silver said. "I was obsessed with clothes growing up, but it was the store that made me a collector. I looked for pieces that represented a season, or told the story of the time we were living in. But then it took over my life." It was the joint chronological landmarks of the store turning 21 and a looming 50th birthday (Mr. Silver turns 49 later this month) that served as motivation, he said, "to liberate myself from all these possessions." Many of the sellers cited personal, emotional reasons for divesting themselves of their clothes: Ms. Guinness sold hers in part as a reaction to the end of her marriage to Spyros Niarchos; Ms. Della Russo did so after the deaths of her mentors Manuela Pavesi and Franca Sozzani, and the beginning of a new relationship. And many, though not all, attached the proceeds of the sale (or at least a portion) to a charity, almost as a form of penance for the indulgence. But just as the clothes themselves often reflect specific moments in time Mr. Silver noted that his wardrobe is "an opportunity to see how we got to this men's wear focused moment," with pieces from designers like Paco Rabanne, Stephen Sprouse, Issey Miyake, Haider Ackermann and Alexander McQueen the sell offs themselves may tell us something specific about our particular moment. They are not, for example, part of the same continuum really as the sales by celebrities like Liza Minnelli and Jane Fonda, which have also become something of a thing but which relate more to Hollywood mythology than fashion (or, say, the recent Russell Crowe divorce auction, which was mostly about the value of his own celebrity, and buying a piece of it). Instead, the sales by Mr. Silver and his ilk seem more purely related to the current consumer culture. They are products of the way in which visual consumption and the need to fill the digital void with More Crazy Outfits! and Even Wilder Looks! have begun to drive actual consumption to unsustainable levels. Not in the ecological sense, though that is part of it, but in the psychological sense. It's a peculiarly contemporary vicious cycle: If your personal brand and your professional brand are increasingly interchangeable, and part of that brand is dressing in a seriously eye catching way, and that kind of dressing then causes photographers to seek you out and take pictures, that in turn creates pressure to dress more crazily and change more often and get more stuff, which gets more pictures and so on and so on ad infinitum. "The expectation that whenever I showed up, I would wear something that turned heads or dropped jaws was really strong," Mr. Silver said. "Every Met Gala had to be a bigger fashion moment, which in turn encouraged me to be extra social and go out like crazy. It was like performance art, but at a certain point I felt like my wardrobe took over my authenticity." This phenomenon is what has led on a smaller level to the explosion of the resale market, and sites like Vestiaire Collective, the RealReal and (on a more accessible level) ThredUp, where fashionistas sell their seasonal splurges to make room in their closets and help finance the next ones. On a bigger level, it has created the sell off situation. "But now 'vintage' means anything more than three seasons old, and even less sometimes," Ms. Steele wrote. "There is no incentive for collectors waiting until their clothes have 'aged' into fashion history, especially when the latest fashions are on display in museums. And it's certainly true that people (and heirs) increasingly seek to monetize fashion collections." Besides, Mr. Silver said, "not every museum wants everything." Indeed, before he decided to sell off his clothes, he donated a number of pieces to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for "Reigning Men," a show on men's wear that opened in April 2016. And it's not like he won't have anything left. There are still 300 pairs of shoes, he said, "and suits in 50 shades of gray from pretty much every designer you can name," since gray suits have become his new uniform. But, Mr. Silver said, "it feels great to be free from the pressure to figure out who's the hottest new designer or what's the most important new silhouette." It's a monster of our own creation. But there seems to be a growing (and welcome) consensus that it's time to cut off its head. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Of course, dancing is to be expected in a Broadway musical called "The Prom." But the happiest surprise is what an unpretentious delight that dancing is. In "The Prom," directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw, two musical theater actors from New York want to prove to the world that they're not narcissists. Joined by a Juilliard graduate whose career is on the wane and a jaded chorus girl she has quit "Chicago" after 20 years because the producers won't give her a shot at playing Roxie Hart they end up in Indiana, where a school has announced it will cancel the prom instead of allowing a gay student to attend with her girlfriend. But there's another lead character of sorts in "The Prom": the ensemble. While the movement of the main players, the New York gang, is rooted in musical theater, the young dancers the teenagers in the town are grounded, more pedestrian. Their steps, performed mainly in sneakers, are rooted in hip hop. "The Prom" emphasizes those contrasting dance styles. "It's traditional versus new, and that is the two sides," Mr. Nicholaw said in an interview. "The musical comedy side and the more realistic side of things." Dance is the conduit for bridging the two worlds. By the end, the forms build and blend, finding just as the characters do a way to get along. All the while, the lessons of dance are embedded in the story. When Emma, the gay protagonist, needs to be convinced to protest on national television, Angie, the chorus girl played with grit and sincerity by the veteran Broadway dancer Angie Schworer tells her: "Look, kid. Not everybody gets a chance to step out of the chorus. You got to do it for all us people who used to be called 'gypsies.'" Mr. Nicholaw, 56, whose credits include "Mean Girls" and "The Book of Mormon," knows a thing or two about that. He spent years working as a dancer on Broadway. "I waited tables in every restaurant," he said. "I did a few regional things here and there, but not that much and then the strangest thing happened: I started losing my hair, and then I got so much work." As a character actor who could dance, he appeared in eight Broadway productions in all but one, as a member of the original cast. For Mary Antonini, an ensemble performer in "The Prom," that matters. "He did what we do," she said. "Dancers can sometimes get a bad rap for being really intelligent in their bodies and not in their minds. He doesn't believe in that stereotype. The way that he treats us is as equals, because he knows how hard the work is. All of the parts of me as an artist are used, and that is so fulfilling." The resulting choreography in "The Prom" is so explosive that Ms. Antonini said it must start, for the dancers, from a deep, internal place. "This show doesn't have fireworks or pyro," she said. "The dance is enough, the rhythm is enough. The dance is the thing." Read our critics on the best dance moments of 2018. Mr. Nicholaw needs his dancers to possess more than good technique, although that is there, too. "You want to make sure that all of the energy is coming out of their fingertips," he said, "so they're dancing with everything they have." And they do. Recently, Mr. Nicholaw talked about the purifying power of "The Prom," what turned the show around and the energy of dance. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. Do you find the spirit of the dancing in "The Prom" cathartic? Yes, and I just love that everyone is dancing together at the end and that the song is called "It's Time to Dance." In every way. Do you know what I mean? The world has gotten so serious. It's time to dance. It's time to let loose. It's time to be on a dance floor together. That's it. When it feels right, you're going to move. You don't really see those kids dance until three quarters of the way through Act I, and it keeps building to the finish. So there's more dancing and more dancing and more dancing until it just gets huge at the end. Not to be corny, but isn't it also about showing how different styles can live side by side? Correct. That's what it's all about: the styles, the people. Musical theater people learning a different way and the people from the town learning a different way and finding a place where they all connect. This show particularly moved me. I started working on "Prom" seven years ago. It was before I worked on "Mean Girls." No one wanted to leave it. We wrote for everyone's personalities and around everyone's strengths. Angie is playing an aging dancer named Angie. How does the finale, "It's Time to Dance," fit with that aspirational quality? I wanted it to feel like everybody can dance together, which is why the entrances are so important. The moment when the kids all come in to the dance gets me every time. You see a straight couple and a straight couple, and then two guys. And then another straight couple and two girls, and it's the normality and wide eyed joy of just looking at a simple thing like a prom that I think is so delightful. Did the show change much over time? It was a hard tone to find. We did a lab four or five years ago and people didn't love it that much. The tone of it was too musical comedy. I realized it needed to be a little bit more in a play box with the musical theater people invading it. That's kind of what turned the show around. How did you verse yourself in hip hop movement? It was a little daunting at first. My way in was the percussiveness of it. I started as a tap dancer, so I got into it by thinking about the rhythms of things and what I would do if I were tapping. A little less traditional tap, but that's kind of how I got into it. It was just thinking about rhythms and then putting feet and arms to it. What do you prize most in your dancers? Sharpness and containment. That's always really important to me: that you can feel the energy in their line, in their bodies as they're moving and that it's not flailing. When you spread energy, you don't really see what the dance is. It's like a powerful, strong energy that's being contained within your body and limbs, but it also makes you more watchable. I'm so based on energy and the energy of dance. And how does that work in "The Prom"? It's just a joyful expression, and we all need that, don't we? To be able to do it in a theater is really cool. To watch something really joyful and to see the energy bouncing off the stage and infusing the audience with a little of that? It's awesome. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The Hachette Book Group has reached an agreement to buy the Perseus Books Group's publishing business, 18 months after its previous attempt to acquire the company fell through. The new agreement, which was announced on Tuesday, comes six months after Perseus, a large independent publisher, began looking for a buyer again after the first deal with Hachette collapsed. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition will strengthen Hachette's position in a publishing landscape where the biggest companies often dominate. It is the latest in a wave of consolidations that has swept the industry in recent years, including the 2013 merger of Penguin and Random House, which created a publishing behemoth with about 250 imprints, and the News Corporation's acquisition of the romance publisher Harlequin for 415 million in 2014. By buying Perseus's publishing program, Hachette will fulfill the long term goal of its parent company, Hachette Livre, which is owned by the French media conglomerate Lagardere, to expand its publishing footprint in the United States. In recent years, Hachette has acquired Black Dog Leventhal Publishers and Hyperion's adult books list. The Perseus deal is Hachette's largest acquisition to date. For Hachette, which publishes about 1,200 books a year through imprints like Grand Central and Little, Brown, the addition of nine imprints from Perseus will help fill out and balance its publishing program in areas like nonfiction and travel. Hachette has cultivated a stable of best selling authors, including James Patterson, Michael Connelly and Donna Tartt, and like most of the big five publishing houses, it remains in many ways dependent on blockbuster hits to drive revenue. Perseus, on the other hand, has built its business on reliable backlist sales of perennial best sellers it has 6,000 backlist titles and niche nonfiction titles that appeal to specific audiences. Its imprints, which publish around 500 books a year, will give Hachette a stronger toehold in the nonfiction market and add to its overall market share. Last year, Perseus's publishing program generated nearly 100 million in revenue, through imprints like Basic Books, Avalon Travel, Da Capo, Nation Books and PublicAffairs. "It's a great publishing program with a lot of diversity within it, and we're very happy to have all this excellence to add to what we already bring forth," Michael Pietsch, the chief executive of the Hachette Book Group, said in an interview. "Every publisher likes the idea of selling books for every kind of reader, and the Perseus lists are rich in areas where Hachette books in some cases doesn't publish at all, like travel, and in other cases where we'd like to publish more, like public affairs, health and wellness, pop culture, illustrated books." Adding heft will probably help Hachette in a cutthroat media landscape where publishers are increasingly being squeezed by major retailers like Amazon and Barnes Noble. It will also make the company less dependent on best sellers. "It expands our overall profile and gives us more areas of publishing," Mr. Pietsch said. The acquisition could be a sign of more consolidation to come as the top five publishing houses compete for market share in a shrinking retail environment. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. "They all want more volume, and Perseus is one of the largest trophies out there," said Mike Shatzkin, the founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which analyzes the book industry. "If you take the long view, I'd be so bold as to say we'll have two big trade publishers 10 years from now, and no more." Hachette's earlier attempt to buy Perseus faltered because of the complexity of the arrangement, which included a sale of Perseus's books distribution business to the Ingram Content Group, a major book printer and distributor. Perseus's distribution arm, which is separate from its publishing division, distributes books for about 600 independent publishers and brings in 300 million annually to Perseus. David Steinberger, the chief executive of the Perseus Books Group, said he would leave the company after the sale of the distribution services was complete. When Hachette first tried to acquire Perseus in June 2014, it agreed to buy the entire company, then sell the distribution business to Ingram. At the time, Hachette was engulfed in a brutal fight with Amazon over e book pricing, and the retailer had removed the buy button from some Hachette titles and delayed shipping on others. The deal between Hachette and Perseus collapsed less than two months later. Last fall, Perseus's board decided to explore a sale again. It hired an investment banking firm, Greenhill Company, to advise it. The board decided to solicit offers for the entire company, but also to entertain bids from buyers who wanted just the publishing or distribution arm. About a half dozen serious offers came in, and Hachette immediately expressed interest in the publishing program. Perseus is also close to signing a deal on its distribution services, said David Steinberger, the president and chief executive of the Perseus Books Group. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Automakers routinely try to create new segments, hoping an unusual vehicle will find a fresh set of customers. But with the 2015 Chevrolet Colorado, General Motors is aiming at an old segment that's been largely abandoned and forgotten: the midsize pickup. And G.M. is betting there are buyers who want the utility of a pickup in a somewhat smaller package than the full size Chevy Silverado. It is a disruptive move, threatening the friendly complacency that has lately characterized the segment, inhabited of late by only two elderly, genteel competitors: the Toyota Tacoma and Nissan Frontier. The Tacoma and Frontier were new for the 2005 model year, and there hasn't been much incentive to modernize since in 2011 Ford stopped building the Ranger and Chrysler discontinued the Dakota. "Here we are, crashing their party," said Brad Schreiber, the engineer responsible for the ride and handling of the new Colorado and its sibling, the GMC Canyon. The last generation Colorado, a disappointing vehicle with such a poor structure that the pickup bed waggled, was developed largely by Isuzu. Introduced as a 2004 model, it was discontinued after the 2012 model year and is only now being replaced. The 2015 model is available as either an extended cab or crew cab with either 5 foot 2 or 6 foot 2 bed lengths. Engine choices are a 200 horsepower 2.5 liter 4 cylinder or a 3.6 liter V6 rated at 305 horsepower. A 6 speed manual is available on the least expensive models; everything else gets a 6 speed automatic. There are rear wheel and 4 wheel drive models. But the 4 wheel drive is a part time system designed for use only on slippery surfaces. The least expensive "Base" model has an extended cab, the shorter bed, rear wheel drive and the 6 speed manual transmission. It is 20,995 including the 875 shipping charge. Consumers seeking a less plain but fiscally conservative approach can choose the LT trim. With an extended cab, the longer bed, rear wheel drive, the 4 cylinder engine and 6 speed automatic, the price is 26,045. Four wheel drive adds 4,050, which means that for 30,095 the Colorado buyer still gets a 4 cylinder engine. The V6 costs 1,235 more. I tested a Crew Cab LT with the long bed, 4 wheel drive, V6 and automatic transmission, for a starting price of 33,260. Options included heated seats, 18 inch wheels, leather interior, upgraded stereo, remote start, navigation system, lane departure alerts and collision warning as well as a fully automatic locking rear differential. The total came to 38,870. That may seem like a big window sticker for a midsize pickup. But it is easy to miss how expensive full size pickups have become. A comparably equipped Chevy Silverado V6 can easily cost 7,000 more. In addition to price, there is quite a difference in size. The largest Colorado is the Crew Cab with the long bed and an overall length of 224.9 inches nearly 15 inches shorter than a comparable Silverado. All Colorados are 5.7 inches narrower than the Silverado. So, unlike a full size pickup, the Colorado feels tidy, maneuverable and piece of cake easy to place in its lane. It is also eager, by truck standards, to head into a turn. The steering has a nice weight, and when the Colorado is going straight there is none of the truckish on center looseness that can undermine driver confidence. Indeed, the Colorado can be aimed through a turn, and it follows directions without any fiddling corrections. The feel of the brake pedal is so good it would be appropriate in a sport sedan. The Colorado is based on new underpinnings, including an independent front suspension and solid rear axle. "Everything from the suspension to frame to body structure is new," said Mr. Schreiber, the ride and handling engineer. The engines and transmissions are borrowed from elsewhere in the G.M. family. The automatic transmission was a disappointment. It was often slow to react, as if trying to figure out what it was supposed to do. At times, it wasn't clear why it shifted gears; occasionally, a shift was harsh. When a quick response was needed, the V6 didn't help much partly because its peak torque 269 pound feet wasn't reached until 4,000 r.p.m. But once the correct gear was selected after the automatic's pause for deliberation the engine dealt adequately, if noisily, with the truck's 4,450 pounds of bulk. The fuel economy for the tested version isn't great. The government rating is 17 miles per gallon in the city and 24 m.p.g. on the highway. A Silverado with a 5.3 liter V8, 4 wheel drive and 6 speed automatic is rated only 1 m.p.g. lower in town and 2 lower on the highway. The 4 cylinder doesn't provide much improvement. A Colorado with 4 wheel drive and 6 speed automatic is rated at 19 m.p.g. city and 25 highway. Next year, G.M. will offer a 2.8 liter 4 cylinder turbocharged diesel rated at 181 horsepower with 369 pound feet of torque at an accessible 2,000 r.p.m. The automaker has not offered fuel economy estimates for that engine. For the tested truck, General Motors rates the payload , which is the maximum recommended weight of passengers and cargo, at 1,520 pounds. That's only 190 pounds less than a 4 wheel drive Silverado Crew Cab with a 5.3 liter V8, 6 foot 6 bed and 4 wheel drive. The Colorado I tested was rated to tow 7,000 pounds because it was equipped with the optional 250 trailering package, which also requires the locking rear differential for an additional 325. The standard rating is 3,500 pounds. Whether carrying or towing, pickups are all about practicality, and that emphasis continues with the Colorado's interior. There are plenty of trays and storage bins, and G.M. has embraced the simplicity of the knob for some controls. But there are also hard plastic surfaces one would not expect in a truck that costs almost 39,000. Also, even in the Crew Cab, a 6 foot adult seated in back is likely to be cramped. One nice feature is a standard backup camera even on the least expensive model. While flawed by the transmission and so so fuel economy, the Colorado, and the identical performing Canyon, offer satisfying handling, relative affordability as well as adequate towing and cargo capacity. And it appears there are plenty of people who still like midsize pickups: About 8.3 million are still registered in the United States, according to an analysis by Experian Automotive. About 528,000 of those are the old Colorado, suggesting that the previous version was less than a sales success. "That truck was less than what we hoped it would be," said Mr. Schreiber, the engineer. "I think we want to put the previous generation behind us and distance ourselves from that truck." Indeed, G.M. has put light years between the old and new Colorados. The latest truck should be a bombshell in the midsize pickup segment. Some of those shock waves are already embarrassing a full size competitor, the all new 2015 Ford F 150. Last week, Motor Trend magazine picked the Colorado as its Truck of the Year, an honor that many in the industry had expected to go to the aluminum body F 150, which Ford has been promoting as a breakthrough model. The editors at Motor Trend praised the Colorado for features including versatility, handling, fuel economy and value. But Chevrolet shouldn't get too cocky; the midsize game isn't over, and it may just be starting to get interesting. Toyota will introduce a new Tacoma next month at the Detroit auto show. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Tax Changes Are Coming Next Year, but You Can Plan for Them Now The Senate and House may spend most of the month ironing out the differences in their tax bills. Or they may be delayed by other legislation and not enact a new tax code until the new year. Either way, high earning taxpayers cannot afford to wait and see what happens; they need to act this month before certain opportunities go away. And betting on a delay in a final vote is not wise planning: Accountants predict that the new code will take effect on Jan. 1 even if it has to be made retroactive at some point next year. The two tax bills have differences for sure the most obvious being the Senate's seven tax brackets to the House's four. They also have more nuanced discrepancies, like how they treat mortgage interest deductions and small businesses whose owners pay their company's taxes on their own returns. But even if accountants have not perfected the Excel formulas that will allow them to make exact comparisons, they are already talking to their wealthier clients, particularly those in high tax states, about what they should do now before deductions go away or are decreased. For some high earners, lower tax rates could be offset by the end of deductions they have counted on for decades, namely those for state and local taxes, and reduced deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes. But the higher standard deduction at least 24,000 per couple, up from 13,000 and the absence or limitation of these other deductions could also lessen the tax benefits of charitable deductions. A more arcane provision in the Senate bill regarding blocks of stocks bought at different times could make the benefits of harvesting tax losses, a staple of basic financial planning, harder to accomplish. "The loss of some of the deductions will go a long way toward tax simplification but not necessarily toward tax savings," said Timothy M. Steffen, director of advanced planning at Baird, a wealth management firm. "It's going to be easier to figure out how much more you're going to have to pay." For those who would like to take advantage of tax benefits now, here are strategies they can follow. Both the House and Senate bills allow for 10,000 in real estate tax deductions, which is high enough for taxpayers in many states. Nine counties in the United States with populations of 100,000 or more, however, have an average real estate tax that exceeds that amount, according to an analysis by Attom Data Solutions. No. 1 is Westchester County, outside New York City, at 16,500 a year. The other eight are in New Jersey, New York, Northern California and southern Connecticut. There are 32 additional counties in Illinois, Virginia and Massachusetts where the average property tax is 7,000 or more, meaning people who own larger homes in those areas will feel the bite. Most municipalities set property tax rates in the middle of the year. Homeowners either pay them as part of their mortgage or directly to their town semiannually. If the latter is the case, advisers say to pay the installment due in early 2018 now. And if the taxes are paid as part of the mortgage payment, they advise checking with the bank to make sure the tax is paid this month and not in January. Advisers suggest paying state taxes early, to the extent that is possible, by making an estimated tax payment for what is owed this year. This is something that affects more people, because 41 states tax earned income. Joseph J. Perry, the tax and business services leader at Marcum, a national accounting firm, said his firm was exploring a novel strategy for clients to prepay New York State tax for the first, second and third quarters of 2018. He said it appeared to be allowed under a mechanism in the state tax code. But early payment strategies work only if you do not qualify for the alternative minimum tax. Once taxpayers set off the A.M.T., their income is taxed at 28 percent, but they lose these deductions. High earners with savvy accountants could, however, work the math to accelerate income while qualifying for the A.M.T. this year to pay less in taxes than they might next year, Mr. Perry said. "If you're at a higher rate next year, you're not going to have that state deduction to bring you down," he said. Therefore, if high earners could receive a bonus this month instead of early next year, they could potentially have that money taxed at the lower rate. (Like all tax strategies, though, this requires running various calculations with an accountant.) Calculating the tax value of charitable donations is a little trickier. The wealthiest will still get a benefit under certain circumstances. For example, if a married couple had a 1 million mortgage with a 4 percent interest rate, it could deduct 40,000 for its mortgage interest plus 10,000 for real estate taxes under the Senate version of the tax bill. This would give the couple 50,000 in deductions, which is above the standard deduction of 24,000, allowing them to claim charitable donations as a deduction. Under the House proposal, which caps the mortgage that can be used for the deduction at 500,000, they would have 20,000 in mortgage interest and 10,000 for real estate taxes. At 30,000 in deductions, their charitable gifts would still count. But if that same couple rents instead of owns, it would not have those other deductions to get above the standard amount. So any benefit it gets today from itemizing charitable deductions would be subsumed under the standard deduction. If the tax math works and given that the income tax rates are likely to be higher this year than next year people who can make large charitable deductions this year are likely to get more benefit. Those who do not want to give outright to a charity can make a donation to a donor advised fund. In doing so, they get the deduction this year but can make the grants to charities later. The Senate bill has a seemingly arcane provision that addresses the adequate identification rule, which has to do with selling blocks of stock. As the rule stands, people who bought blocks of stock at different times can choose which blocks to sell or give away for tax purposes. Under the proposed changes, an investor would have to sell the oldest stock first under the premise of first in first out, said Gary M. DuBoff, principal in the tax and accounting department at MBAF, an accounting firm. The shares with the highest embedded taxes are the ones that people usually donate to charity, but Mr. DuBoff pointed out that this change would have an effect on tax loss harvesting, a strategy in which an investor sells stocks that have performed poorly to take a capital loss. This still works if someone is selling the entire position, but not if the investor wants to sell more recently purchased blocks, which may have gone down in value while earlier blocks are still up, Mr. DuBoff said. So this is a good time to make sure your adviser is harvesting losses on blocks within large stock holdings, particularly if earlier blocks have appreciated. There are risks to acting now without full information. In 2012, Congress and President Barack Obama were locked in a tense debate over tax rates as the United States inched toward what was called the fiscal cliff meaning that after Dec. 31, taxes would rise automatically if an agreement was not reached. As the year was nearing an end, a swath of wealthy taxpayers rushed to make taxable gifts, thinking that Mr. Obama would reduce what had been a generous estate and gift tax exemption of 5 million a person. Instead, the opposite happened. Mr. Obama and the House speaker, John Boehner, reached an agreement to make that exemption permanent and index it to inflation. That exemption essentially eliminated the estate tax for all but a few Americans, but it was bad news for some people who had made irrevocable gifts solely for tax purposes. Their money was gone before it had to be. Planners say the risk this year is lower, and they predict that any changes to the bills are going to be on the margins. "People aren't going to get blindsided here," said Jay Messing, senior director of planning for Wells Fargo Private Bank. "Most itemized deductions are going away. If there's a change and it didn't make sense to donate this year, maybe you just gave money to your favorite charity a little early." It's smart to act now on some strategies, but others should wait until 2018. Thinking through those will be the focus of next week's column. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'ASSASSINS' at New York City Center (performances July 12 15). With political tensions running high, it might be a bad time to revive this Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman musical from 1990 about the wretches and loons and fanatics who have tried to murder American presidents. Or it might be a very good one. At Encores!, the director Anne Kauffman's carnivalesque cast includes Alex Brightman, Shuler Hensley, Ethan Lipton, Erin Markey and Steven Pasquale. 212 581 1212, nycitycenter.org EAST TO EDINBURGH at 59E59 Theaters (performances start on July 11). Each year 59E59 Theaters opens its Upper East Side doors to companies preparing shows for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This summer's lineup includes a comedy about Adam's apocryphal first wife; an absurdist look at office life; a portrait of Vincent van Gogh; a piece about people with extraordinary memories; and a one man version of "Apocalypse Now." 212 279 4200, 59e59.org LINCOLN CENTER FESTIVAL (performances start on July 10). This internationally focused festival racks up artistic frequent flier miles by the thousands. This summer, its theater offerings include a French circus company; an English approach to experimental psychology; and timely works exploring personal and political conflict in the Middle East, including an adaptation of David Grossman's "To the End of the Land" and a story about a middle class Syrian family that was inspired by real events. lincolncenter.org/lc festival 'A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM' at the Delacorte Theater (previews start on July 11; opens on July 31). The course of true love never did run smooth, but it doesn't usually get so bumpy that it includes magical flowers, squabbling fairies and lusty donkeys. After the protest plagued "Julius Caesar," Lear deBessonet soothes Shakespeare in the Park with this comedy starring Phylicia Rashad as Titania and Kristine Nielsen as Puck. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org NEW YORK MUSICAL FESTIVAL (performances start on July 10). Not every show can be the next "Next to Normal" or " title of show ," but some of them can, and you can catch them at this summer festival, just as you once could their forebears. This season's lineup includes tuners devoted to topics such as the Berlin Wall, motherhood, the Freedom Riders and Matthew McConaughey. nymf.org 'A PARALLELOGRAM' at the Tony Kiser Theater (previews start on July 11; opens on August 2). Most people's lives don't come equipped with buttons for rewind, fast forward or pause, but that's the soft sci fi that drives this play from Bruce Norris ("Clybourne Park"). Celia Keenan Bolger plays a woman in her 30s suddenly confronted with what seems to be her future self. Michael Greif directs a cast for Second Stage Theater that includes Anita Gillette and Stephen Kunken. 212 246 4422, 2st.com 'PIPELINE' at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater (in previews; opens on July 10). The playwright Dominique Morisseau channels explorations of race, class and privilege into vital conflicts between characters. In this new play, Karen Pittman ("Disgraced") stars as a woman whose son faces expulsion from his prestigious private school. Lileana Blain Cruz directs. 212 239 6200, lct.org PTP/NYC at Atlantic Stage 2 (performances start on July 11). That bright days call for dark plays has been the driving ethos of the Potomac Theater Project, which brings a couple of thrillingly bleak plays to New York each summer. This year, Richard Romagnoli directs Howard Barker's "Pity in History," originally a teleplay, about the English Civil War. Then Cheryl Faraone lightens the mood a little with Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia," a poignant, time hopping meditation on genius and history. 866 811 4111, potomactheatreproject.org 'COST OF LIVING' at Stage I at New York City Center (closes on July 16). Martyna Majok's drama about two disabled adults and their caregivers finishes its run. Jesse Green described Jo Bonney's production, which stars Katy Sullivan and Gregg Mozgala, as "immensely haunting," writing that in its stories, "the biggest handicaps are the universal ones: fear and disconnection." 212 581 1212, manhattantheatreclub.com 'FULFILLMENT CENTER' at Stage II at New York City Center (closes on July 16). A shipping crew struggles to order their own lives in Abe Koogler's New Mexico set drama, starring Deirdre O'Connell. Ben Brantley described Daniel Aukin's production of this "quietly shattering new play" as "steeped in a luminous and illuminating empathy that feels both uncommon and essential right now." 212 581 1212, manhattantheatreclub.com 'OSLO' at the Vivian Beaumont Theater (closes on July 16). J. T. Rogers's fact based drama about the Oslo peace accords, which last month picked up the Tony Award for best new play, has negotiated the end of its run. Ben Brantley described the play, directed by Bartlett Sher and starring Jennifer Ehle and Jefferson Mays, as a work as "expansive and ambitious as any in recent Broadway history." 212 239 6200, lct.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Once upon a time, during fashion weeks far, far away, Marc Jacobs was a famous abuser of other people's time. His shows routinely started an hour or more late. People complained, but they stayed. His ability to put a finger to the wind and transform the prevailing mood into cloth was that convincing. Then, in 2007, a show began almost two hours after schedule. The audience rebelled, many walked out, and the next season, chastened, Mr. Jacobs became the poster child for promptness. Two rows of plexiglass chairs flanked a long, plexi covered wood runway. On them, Mr. Jacobs's guests were arrayed like pearls on a string, expectant. Thirty minutes passed. Then an hour. People began to fidget. "I heard someone saw them bringing in some sewing machines," said one. There were rumors Anna Wintour had left. Fake news! She was back. There was speculation that something was wrong. (There have been whispers about the health of the business for a while now.) There were conspiracy theories that Mr. Jacobs was delaying his first looks to get back at Rihanna, who had decided to unveil her answer to Victoria's Secret, the Savage x Fenty lingerie show, after his show, even though he had claimed the honor of officially closing fashion week long ago. Someone said they were starting in 10. No, 20. Someone else passed around seeds to snack on. A meditation on getting dressed, in the most traditional sense of the word doing yourself up to face the day (or night) in a sparking, bulletproof carapace of beauty it was like a tour through the twisty, feathered corridors of Mr. Jacobs's memory room, each souvenir candy colored and blown up to Instagram visible proportions. Whatever had been happening backstage while everyone was waiting for the show to go on, Mr. Jacobs had clearly been busy doing something. Blouson satin trousers were tied at the waist with a giant satin rosette (rosettes were everywhere), ends streaming down one side, under a thin knit finished at the wrist and neck with exploding layers of Pierrot ruffles or paired with broad shouldered mock Chanel boucle tweeds. A tartan drop waist dress with sleeves as big as most torsos was multitiered and puffed out like a balloon. Flounced metallic lace evening numbers were topped by a mountain of frills. There was chiffon and sequins and lame, gloves and bags and sparkly tights and Grace Kelly scarves. (There was also Lee Radziwill and Barbra Streisand in the 60s hair, much of it dyed in faded Easter egg colors to match the clothes.) There were sling back shoes with exaggerated, almost witchy, pointed toes. There were little veiled Ascot hats. There was longing for a lovelier time. Hidden among all the muchness were plenty of things you could actually wear: skinny ribbed knits, swingy single breasted coats, simple yoked skirts. But it was overwhelmed by what used to be defined as capital F Fashion. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
They make quite a picture, the two of them: he tall and tousle haired, she tiny and acrobatic. When he stretches out on the floor, she somersaults up the length of him, and it is the most romantic thing this besotted pair of newlyweds, the delight of their private world. "You're beautiful," she told him on their wedding day. "I want to waste the rest of my life with you." She is Bella Rosenfeld Chagall, he is the artist Marc Chagall, and in Emma Rice's enchanting revival of Daniel Jamieson's "The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk," the story of their decades long marriage feels like one of Chagall's vivid paintings conjured in 3 D, given the power to talk and sing and dance. This chamber play's exquisite Bella (Audrey Brisson) and Marc (Marc Antolin) don't actually fly, not the way they do in Chagall's canvases floating over rooftops or through rooms, love making them immune to gravity. But they do arc and tumble like those figures (choreography is by Etta Murfitt and Rice), and their faces are as greasepaint white as they are in "Birthday," his famous work from 1915, the year they wed. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Super Bowl LIII was a low scoring game, and the trailers that debuted during the telecast kept their running times down as well. The ad for the Dwayne Johnson Jason Statham "Fast Furious" spinoff, "Hobbs Shaw," was a one minute version of the three minute trailer that was released online Friday, and most of the other clips ran 30 seconds or half that, in the case of teasers for "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark." Here's this year's lineup. How the Patriots' won their sixth Super Bowl. A review of Maroon 5's halftime show. "Captain Marvel" (March 8): The latest ad for the superheroine vehicle starts like a gender switch reboot of "Top Gun," as Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) and a fellow female Air Force pilot (Lashana Lynch) bond over their mutual need for speed. The commercial introduces a new catchphrase "higher, further, faster" and lives up to it with a lightning quick montage that sets pulses racing. "Avengers: Endgame" (April 26): "Where do we go, now that they're gone?" reads a sign in this spot. Of course, the Avengers aren't all gone, even though many of them disintegrated at the end of "Infinity War" last year. We get glimpses of some survivors, like Ant Man (Paul Rudd), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Rocket Raccoon (voiced by Bradley Cooper). "Some people move on," says Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), a.k.a. Captain America, "but not us." Marvel fans won't either, after this stirring teaser. "Toy Story 4" (June 21): Forget Julian Edelman Jordan Peele was this year's Super Bowl M.V.P. He appeared in an ad for his forthcoming CBS All Access remake of "The Twilight Zone," rolled out another spot for his sophomore directorial effort, "Us," and rejoined his old sketch show pal Keegan Michael Key to voice one of the stuffed animals who torment Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) in this amusing trailer for Pixar's sequel. Does Peele ever sleep? "Us" (March 22): After terrifying Christmas Day viewers with the first trailer for his follow up to "Get Out," Peele scored more scares with the second clip. The focus is on Lupita Nyong'o as a mother whose family of four faces deadly doppelgangers while on a beach vacation from hell. There's not a lot of new footage here, but the spot does debut a clever tagline: "Watch yourself." Indeed. "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" (August): This quartet of 15 second mini trailers is so dark and brief that it's hard to tell what the hell's going on, much less if it's scary. The ads also promise that this adaptation of the best selling young adult books is "from Guillermo del Toro," but the mastermind behind "The Shape of Water" only produced this movie he didn't direct it (that would be Andre Ovredal). Boo! "Wonder Park" (March 15): "This is beginning to feel like a terrible turn of events for us all," says John Oliver, perhaps all too aptly voicing a porcupine in this confusingly frenetic trailer for a cartoon about a young girl whose imaginary amusement park comes to life. Is riding on a fish carousel really a common fantasy among children? And what exactly are "chimpanzombies"? The flying moneys from "The Wizard of Oz" were creepy enough, thanks. "Alita: Battle Angel" (Feb. 14): Rosa Salazar plays the title role in this James Cameron produced sci fi drama, but the latest spot emphasizes Mahershala Ali favored to win his second Oscar soon, for "Green Book" as the film's villain. In case you're waiting to catch it on video, the ad declares, "Some things must be seen on the big screen" and this is the "must see 3D cinematic event of the year." Sorry, but this desperate Hail Mary pass of a trailer smells of flop sweat. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Scientists have developed an inexpensive blood test to predict a pregnant woman's due date and possibly identify women who are at risk of giving birth prematurely. The research, which is still preliminary and involved small numbers of women, was led by a prominent pioneer in the field of genetic blood testing, Stephen Quake at Stanford University, who said the test could eventually provide a low cost method of gauging the gestational age of a developing fetus. The test, which detects changes in RNA circulating in a pregnant woman's blood, estimated due dates within two weeks in nearly half the cases, making it as accurate as the current, more expensive method, ultrasound, and more accurate than guesses based on a woman's last menstrual period. Using a similar analysis of RNA in blood from eight women who delivered prematurely, the researchers were able to correctly classify six of their pregnancies as preterm. If much larger studies achieve comparable results, the test could become a tool to help prevent unnecessary induction of labor or Cesarean deliveries, and could possibly help save babies would have died because they were born too early. 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. Premature birth is the leading cause of newborn death in the United States. And 15 million babies a year are born prematurely around the world. "I think it's really a very exciting study that suggests an approach that may have a lot of potential for predicting preterm delivery," said Dr. Louis Muglia, director of the Center for Prevention of Preterm Birth at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center at the University of Cincinnati. "It can certainly help you understand where the baby is in maturity," he said, which could aid doctors in gauging when to deliver babies of women who go into unexpected early labor. In the study, published Thursday in the journal Science, the team, which was co led by Dr. Mads Melbye, who runs the Statens Serum Institute in Denmark, analyzed the blood of 31 Danish women taken every week throughout their pregnancies, which were all full term. The researchers studied genes linked to the placenta, the maternal immune system and the fetal liver, and found nine of those genes produce RNA signals that change distinctly as pregnancy progresses. "RNA is what's happening in the cells at any given moment," said Dr. Quake, who is also co president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, which funded the study, along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and others. "We had this idea that we could make a molecular clock to see how these things change over time and it should allow you to measure gestational age and see where things are in pregnancy." Dr. Quake, who invented the first noninvasive prenatal blood test for Down syndrome, said the relevant genes for gestational age were in the placenta, and the test's predictions were most reliable in the second and third trimester. The researchers then applied the test to two groups of women at risk for preterm birth patients at the University of Pennsylvania who had premature contractions and patients at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who had delivered prematurely in a previous pregnancy. The gestational age blood test did not do a great job of predicting which women would deliver prematurely, suggesting those particular genes "may not account for the various outlier physiological events that may lead to preterm birth," the study said. But in analyzing the blood of some of the women who delivered prematurely, the team identified seven other genes, mostly from the women, with RNA signals that seemed to characterize preterm birth. Dr. Quake said the team is developing plans for a large clinical trial in the general population. Dr. Diana Bianchi, director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and an expert in prenatal genetic testing, said a trial should involve as much diversity as possible. She noted that the genes relevant for estimating gestational age were identified using healthy Caucasian Danish women with full term pregnancies. The women in the preterm birth analysis were African American, and they represented only two of many potential risk categories for premature delivery, which can also be caused by infection, inflammation, maternal stress and other factors, she said. "The strength of the study is showing there are molecular milestones that are achieved by the fetus and by the placenta," she said. And while the blood test is unlikely to replace ultrasound, which provides other important information, "I think it will add another dimension to identifying high risk pregnancies." To Dr. Edith Cheng, a professor of maternal fetal medicine and medical genetics at the University of Washington, the study's real significance is that it "cracked the door a little bit into potentially finding out how a fetus talks to the mother, what makes a pregnancy go." It is almost as though the molecular message being sent by RNA "is a little bus that travels back and forth and is letting Mom know what's going on," Dr. Cheng said. "I bet you they're going to find that the mother's going to respond. There's a conversation going on. That's what's cool." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Not long after Attorney General William P. Barr said on Tuesday that the Justice Department had found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the election last month, the pro Trump media world began circulating a falsehood about him. In this telling, Mr. Barr had been part of a plot by a secret cabal of elites against President Trump all along. The most prominent right wing personality who spread the baseless narrative was the Fox Business host Lou Dobbs. In his nightly show monologue on Tuesday, Mr. Dobbs said that Mr. Barr must be "either a liar or a fool or both" and suggested that he was "perhaps compromised." Mr. Dobbs added that Mr. Barr "appeared to join in with the radical Dems and the deep state and the resistance." Mr. Dobbs's unfounded accusation inspired dozens of Facebook posts and more than 14,000 likes and shares on the social network, as well as hundreds of posts on Twitter, over the past 24 hours, according to a New York Times analysis. Many of President Trump's most fervent supporters reacted virulently to Mr. Barr's comments on Tuesday because they dealt a blow to Mr. Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the election. The comments were also jarring to some conservatives because Mr. Barr had been a longtime Trump loyalist. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Children received medical treatment after being injured in a Taliban bomb blast in Afghanistan last fall. President Trump's special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, is determined to secure a deal that need only survive until the fall election. Last Saturday, the United States and the Taliban started a weeklong partial truce that, if it holds, could lead to the signing of a peace pact by the end of the month. To many, that could mean America's more than 18 year war in Afghanistan might finally be drawing to a close. But this is a dangerously misguided belief. In the final two years of my C.I.A. career, I was chief of counterterrorism for South and Southwest Asia, which includes Afghanistan and Pakistan. I am also a father who spent many sleepless nights worrying about my son during his two tours in Afghanistan with the Marine Corps. No one wants peace more than me. But I don't share the optimism of those extolling the promise of this seven day "reduction in violence." I do not even believe that we have come to "the end of the beginning," as Winston Churchill put it. Rather, the obstacles to peace are so profound and so numerous that the chances of a meaningful peace deal being signed, much less honored, strike me as vanishingly small. To start with, the Taliban leadership has no incentive to embrace a deal that in any way requires concessions on their part, for one major reason: They believe they are winning. The Taliban has successfully challenged the government for control of rural areas, and by doing so, the roads necessary to resupply major urban areas. And while the government in Kabul can claim support from a greater percentage of the overall population mainly people in the major cities the Taliban continues to extend the territory over which it rules. At the same time, the government of President Ashraf Ghani is facing a major political crisis over a contested election in which both he and his main political rival, Abdullah Abdullah, have claimed victory. (Mr. Abdullah has threatened to form a parallel government if he is not installed as president.) Moreover, the Trump administration seems intent on drawing down American forces to 8,000 troops, from 14,000, regardless of whether the Taliban takes any reciprocal action. Why, then, would the Taliban agree to anything that might hinder what they see as their inevitable march to power? Time and momentum are on their side. The insurgency's leaders also face considerable internal resistance to signing a meaningful peace deal. The United States will insist that the Taliban enter negotiations with the American backed government in Kabul and allow a residual force of American troops to remain inside Afghanistan to attack Islamic State and Al Qaeda forces. But it is hard to imagine the Taliban leadership successfully convincing its fighters and most ardent supporters to accept those provisions, after years of deriding the government as "illegitimate American stooges" and of demanding that all foreign forces leave Afghan soil. Taliban leaders know that accepting any of those concessions could jeopardize their tenuous control of the movement, potentially snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Just negotiating with the Taliban is a treacherous proposition, given how diverse, decentralized and factionalized the group is. Afghanistan has historically been controlled by regional warlords with no enduring loyalty to any particular ideology, leader or cause. Even today, such regional strongmen continue to defy central authority, be it that of the Kabul government or the Taliban. The Taliban itself is no different. Predominantly Pashtun, it comprises various geographic and tribal constituencies, and its leadership struggles to maintain cohesion among those groups. At the top of the Taliban hierarchy is Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada. A hard line religious scholar from the Taliban's southern base of support in Kandahar, he was long a senior figure within the group's Islamic courts. He leads by virtue of religious credentials and connections rather than military credentials, and is known as a consensus builder unlikely to take risks. One of his deputies is Mullah Muhammad Yaqoub, the son of deceased Taliban founder Mullah Muhammad Omar. Now 30 years old, Mullah Yaqoub ostensibly leads the Taliban's Quetta based shura, or council, overseeing Taliban activities in the country's more predominantly Pashtun south and west. But he lacks battlefield experience and his bloodline provides little guarantee that his father's loyal followers will consistently support him. The Taliban leader with the most battlefield credibility is another deputy, Sirajuddin Haqqani, leader of the shadowy Haqqani network that controls the Taliban's Peshawar based shura, with operations in northern, eastern and central Afghanistan. Separated by mountains from the southern Pashtuns as well as Afghanistan's northern Tajiks and Uzbeks, the Haqqani network's manpower, financial resources and battlefield skills, particularly suicide bombings and kidnapping operations learned through cooperation with Al Qaeda, have been crucial to Taliban success. It is telling that Mr. Haqqani was the author of a Times Op Ed last week asserting that the Taliban was prepared to accept a peace accord. The Haqqani network is the Taliban's most independent and militarily effective fighting force. In having the reclusive Mr. Haqqani be author of the piece, the Taliban leadership might have been trying to send a message of unity to both the West and to Taliban commanders in the field. Even so, there's another impediment to securing a real peace deal: Members of the Taliban's Qatar based negotiating team are largely disconnected from and disrespected by the Taliban's senior leadership. The lead negotiator, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, is a career Taliban politician, not a warrior, who was replaced as deputy Taliban foreign minister in the late 1990s after his own falling out with Taliban leadership. The team's ostensible chief is Mullah Omar's former deputy, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who was wasting away in a Pakistani prison until the United States pushed for his release in late 2018, probably because he has long supported negotiations. So what is really driving these peace talks? The answer seems to be President Trump, who has promised to end America's involvement in Afghanistan and made the release of American hostages a priority. The president's special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, a Trump loyalist, is determined to secure a deal that need only survive until the fall election. Mr. Khalilzad, who appears to be interested in becoming secretary of state in a second Trump term, pressured President Ashraf Ghani last November to release Anas Haqqani, Sirajuddin Haqqani's younger brother, along with two other prominent Haqqani network officials, in exchange for two Westerners held by the group. The exchange was viewed as a crucial first step toward revitalizing the negotiations. But in a bad omen for the impending deal, a cease fire in Zabul province that was promised as part of the prisoner exchange never materialized. All of this means that the Taliban will have little to lose from signing a deal that they can walk away from, and much to gain when the United States draws down its forces. Significantly, among the American troops that will depart are those who train the most effective government fighters, the Afghan special operations forces. Those commandos have had an outsize impact in relieving besieged Afghan cities. Neutralizing them is a key goal of Taliban and Haqqani field commanders. I am not arguing that the United States should keep troops in Afghanistan forever. But there are better ways to seek a true, lasting peace such as by treating Afghanistan as the fractured nation it is and negotiating separate deals with regional Taliban leaders and warlords. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The fashion world's endless game of musical chairs doesn't stop even for a pandemic. On Friday, Givenchy announced that Clare Waight Keller, the brand's first female artistic director and a designer who rose to global fame as the creator of Meghan Markle's wedding dress, was leaving the house after only three years. A successor has not yet been named. "As the first woman to be the artistic director of this legendary maison, I feel honored to have been given the opportunity to cherish its legacy and bring it new life," Ms. Waight Keller said in a statement, paying tribute to "the unsung heroes and heroines behind the scenes, for their contribution from product to communications and retail, and every global team member, partner and supplier in between." The news completes a shift in the executive suite at Givenchy, which is owned by LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the world's largest luxury goods company by sales. On March 6, Renaud de Lesquen was named chief executive, replacing Philippe Fortunato. Mr. de Lesquen started his tenure April 1. The fall 2020 collection that was shown at Paris Fashion Week in March will be Ms. Waight Keller's final one for the house, the company statement said. Despite all of the discussion about how the coronavirus pandemic could cause a readjustment in the fashion world, changing the pace of the industry and its values, it has apparently not yet affected the ever faster turnover of names at the top. Ms. Waight Keller's appointment in March 2017 was heralded as a new direction for the brand that Audrey Hepburn helped build. A highly organized Brit, who had spent six years at Chloe before joining Givenchy, she was seen as a calming presence after 12 years under the former creative director Riccardo Tisci. He had brought new energy and attention to the brand but was a volatile figure, given his provocative embrace of the Kardashian clan and his combination of gothic romanticism and street style. At Givenchy, Ms. Waight Keller united the men's and women's collections, reintroduced couture and courted a celebrity clientele that included Gal Gadot and Chadwick Boseman, both of whom wore her clothes to the Oscars (in 2020 and 2019 respectively). When the Duchess of Sussex chose Ms. Waight Keller to create her wedding dress for her marriage to Prince Harry in May 2018 a simple design with a wide boat neck, long sleeves and a sweeping train that was almost universally praised it seemed the ultimate confirmation that her star was in the ascent. In the statement, Sidney Toledano, chief executive of the LVMH Fashion Group, said that under Ms. Waight Keller's "creative leadership, and in great collaboration with its ateliers and teams, the Maison reconnected with the founding values of Hubert de Givenchy and his innate sense of elegance." Great commercial ambition powered her creative endeavors. When Ms. Waight Keller joined Givenchy in 2017, the brand had revenues believed to be approaching 600 million euros ( 715 million) annually. But Bernard Arnault, the chairman of LVMH, saw bigger potential in a pairing of Givenchy's heritage with Ms. Waight Keller's appointment. At the time, he said, "I think it will grow very fast in the next two years." He also said that he thought the house had the potential to reach the size of Dior, which is a member of the billion euro club. That did not come to pass. LVMH's annual reports do not break out the performance of brands in the Fashion Group (a collection of its smaller fashion names), so the results of Ms. Waight Keller's tenure have not been made publicly available. But her vision of Givenchy never appeared to gain the mainstream popularity that Mr. Tisci achieved, or reach the sales momentum desired by LVMH executives. Her collections could also seem erratic. Though her couture telegraphed a rigorous elegance that bridged heritage and modernity, combining latex and lace, sequins and tailoring, she struggled to give her ready to wear a signature, veering from upcycled denim to floaty boho deluxe dresses to, most recently, graphic '90s looks with power shoulders. Critical brand introductions for the house in the accessibly priced category sneakers and sweatshirts were met with lukewarm reception when compared to rival houses like Dior or Gucci, owned by Kering, despite expensive celebrity partnerships with the likes of Ariana Grande. And Ms. Waight Keller never created that most crucial weapon in any brand's arsenal, the It bag. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Many a superhero origin story involves exposure to a volatile substance something dangerous, radioactive, caustic that can be powerful if mastered, ruinous if uncontrolled. In HBO's "Watchmen," beginning Sunday, that fissile storytelling material is history: specifically, America's legacy of white supremacy. The first episode begins with the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Okla., in which white mobs rampaged in the prosperous "Black Wall Street," massacring African Americans in the street and strafing them from above with airplanes. A small boy's parents pack him onto a car that's fleeing the mayhem, like Kal El being sent from Krypton. But there is no Superman flying to the rescue. With that opening, Damon Lindelof ("Lost," "The Leftovers") reframes the universe that the writer Alan Moore and the artist Dave Gibbons created in the 1980s comics series. Where Moore wrote an alternative history of Cold War America a pre apocalyptic dystopia in which masked vigilantes have been outlawed Lindelof reaches back and forward in time to root his caped crusaders story in a brutal American tragedy. The choice invests this breathtaking spectacle with urgency. "Watchmen" is a first class entertainment out of the box, immediately creating a sad and wondrous retro futuristic world. It takes longer, though, to get a handle on the complicated and all too real material it uses as its nuclear fuel. In 2019, Robert Redford (yes, that one) has been president nearly three decades, succeeding Richard Nixon, who's now on Mt. Rushmore. Redford's liberal administration has instituted reparations, or "Redfordations," as disgruntled racists call them. The police hide their faces in superhero garb or yellow masks to shield their identities from white power terrorists, who favor the inkblot mask of Rorschach, the reactionary nihilist of the original "Watchmen." (In real life, the character has been mistaken for a hero by Senator Ted Cruz among others.) These villains are like the ultimate misguided fanboys, their splotchy masks a kind of meme trolling made concrete. HBO's "Watchmen" isn't a remake; Moore has disavowed it, as he did the 2009 film. (The first episode, interestingly, involves an all black production of "Oklahoma!" another pop culture landmark lately reinterpreted in a new production.) The series expresses both reverence for its source and some anxiety of influence; it presents the back story of the original superheroes through a farcical, Ryan Murphy esque show within a show, "American Hero Story." But "Watchmen" takes place in a world where all the graphic novel's events happened. The omnipotent Dr. Manhattan the sole superpowered being in this world won the war in Vietnam, which is now the 51st state; the Cold War ended after the messianic villain Adrian Veidt detonated a psychic giant squid in Manhattan, killing millions but uniting the world against a fictitious alien threat. "Watchmen" explains much of that history eventually, but at first Lindelof dumps newbies into this strange ocean like so many squidlings. It may not matter, though, because it moves with such brio, carried by Regina King's confident star performance as Angela Abar, a Tulsa policewoman who moonlights as Sister Night, in a supercool ninja nun long coat and cowl. The racist terror attacks pull in her police colleagues, including Chief Judd Crawford (Don Johnson, chewing the role like a fat cheekful of terbacky) and Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson, his head ensheathed in what looks like a reflective party balloon). It eventually pulls in a Vietnamese trillionaire ( Hong Chau ); Laurie Blake ( Jean Smart ), a figure from the original comics now working for the F.B.I.; and a mysterious elderly man in a wheelchair ( Louis Gossett Jr.). But back to those masked men and women. It's unsettling, at minimum, to see police as the progressive foes of racists when today's headlines are full of white on black shootings by officers. "Watchmen" doesn't delve much into how this alternative world could have become so reverse polarized, other than the election of what sounds like a P.C. administration out of an alt right persecution fantasy. The show's image of the Redford era (guns are heavily regulated, even for the police) doesn't seem like a political statement so much as a device, a means of script flipping. "Watchmen" works hard to hammer home that racism is bad, but doesn't look deeply into how it works. Its early hours substitute for this by tossing out a lot of explosive signifiers hoods and nooses, alongside the franchise's trademark watches and smiley faces. You could read anything into this Rorschach. It's as if Lindelof, who dared the wrath of the internet with the "Lost" finale and pushed his adaptation of "The Leftovers" into surreal transcendence, wasn't content merely with the risk of disappointing a landmark comic's fervid fan base he had to throw in America's stain of racism as well. He's a free solo climber of pop entertainment, unsatisfied unless he's staring down the possibility of a thousand foot plummet. Is his "Watchmen" thrilling? Abundantly. Funny? Riotously. Inventive and surprising? Like a magician with a thousand hats and rabbits. (Try to resist the action set piece in the pilot, directed by Nicole Kassell , involving flying machines and a firefight in a cattle field.) Lindelof's superpowers get put to full use here: the disorienting cold open, the clever and poignant twist, the pop culture hyperliteracy. His world is like a superhero "Leftovers," in which characters are left to muddle ahead after staggering events. (Dr. Manhattan has decamped to Mars, meaning, essentially, that people know that God is real and that he no longer cares.) Some of the most delightful moments are the droll, creepy interludes with the dotty Veidt (Jeremy Irons), isolated on a country estate where he experiments with and on his retainers. (The show's publicity has cheekily treated his identity as a spoiler. It is not.) Two thirds into the nine episode season, I still don't know how he fits in this new story. Nor do I care. His scenes do something more important, which is to convince you that this is a mystifying world you want to spend time in. In the first five episodes, "Watchmen" feels more loose and comfortable the farther it gets from the racial history marker it sets down in its opening minutes. It doesn't deeply reckon with the implications of the Tulsa massacre until the sixth, written by Lindelof and Cord Jefferson. But that hour (the last screened for critics) is a wallop, synthesizing past and alt present in a stylistic tour de force. It reframes the mythology and symbolism of Moore's "Watchmen" unsettlingly but not, I think, flippantly into racial commentary, in such a way that you might think that the original story was intended to grow into this all along. I'm still not sure Lindelof is wholly in control of the subject. But he earns the chance to show that he has a thought through long game, that he's working with something more than magic dust and good intentions. "Watchmen" is a big, audacious swing. It asks, Which is more outlandish and dystopian: an America in which the Tulsa atrocity is being paid for and fought over nearly a century later? Or the one we live in, where it is barely remembered and taught? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Terrence Mann as Jerry Springer in "Jerry Springer The Opera," which closes April 1. When the New Group extended the musical's run, Matt McGrath replaced Mr. Mann, who had to fulfill a previous obligation. Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater. 'ANGELS IN AMERICA' at the Neil Simon Theater (in previews; opens on March 25). The great work begins. Again. The National Theater's production of Tony Kushner's "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes" arrives on Broadway, starring Andrew Garfield, Lee Pace, Denise Gough and Nathan Lane as the crooked lawyer Roy Cohn. Reviewing the two part work in London, Ben Brantley wrote that the director Marianne Elliott's production confirms the play's place "in the pantheon of dramas that stretch toward the heavens." 877 250 2929, angelsbroadway.com 'LOBBY HERO' at the Hayes Theater (in previews; opens on March 26). Second Stage inaugurates its new Broadway home with a couple of security guards and a couple of cops. Kenneth Lonergan's 2001 play, set in the foyer of an apartment building, is a melancholy comedy of divided loyalties and overlapping moral predicaments. Trip Cullman's production stars Michael Cera, Chris Evans, Brian Tyree Henry and Bel Powley. 212 239 6200, 2st.com 'MLIMA'S TALE' at the Public Theater (previews start on March 27; opens on April 15). A trunk show like no other, Lynn Nottage's new play follows Mlima, a Kenyan elephant caught up in the ivory market. Under the direction of Jo Bonney, Sahr Ngaujah ("Fela!") plays our thick skinned hero, joined by Ito Aghayere, Jojo Gonzalez and Kevin Mambo in a variety of roles. 212 967 7555, publictheater.org 'PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE GIRL' at the Doxsee (previews start on March 29; opens on April 2). Perhaps this Target Margin show, the first in its Sunset Park space, won't run for 1,001 nights, but it does have some stories to tell. Directed by David Herskovits, it stars Caitlin Nasema Cassidy, Deepali Gupta, Anthony Vaughn Merchant, Samy el Noury and Lori Vega in a riff on "Arabian Nights." 866 811 4111, targetmargin.org 'ROCKTOPIA' at the Broadway Theater (in previews; opens on March 27). A steroidal iPod Shuffle arrives onstage in this celebration of classical and contemporary music, created by Rob Evan and Randall Craig Fleischer. An orchestra, a rock band and a bevy of vocalists fill the Broadway stage, offering an eclectic mix of stadium acts and classical composers such as Mozart, Styx, Heart and Rachmaninoff. 212 239 6200, rocktopia.com 'SUMMER: THE DONNA SUMMER MUSICAL' at the Lunt Fontanne Theater (previews start on March 28; opens on April 23). Do you feel love? The director Des McAnuff trades Jersey boys for a Massachusetts girl in this musical with a book by him, Robert Cary and Colman Domingo. LaChanze, Ariana DeBose and Storm Lever perform the chanteuse at different moments in her career: Diva Donna, Disco Donna and Duckling Donna. thedonnasummermusical.com 'SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE' at Here (previews start on March 29; opens on April 4). The performers in Basil Twist's puppetry fantasia won't sign autographs, probably because they are wet feathers. Mr. Twist, a master puppeteer, revives this symbolist theater work, in which he dunks various inanimate objects into an enormous aquarium, conjuring wonder and strong emotions from the interplay of light, texture and color. Reviewing the original production 20 years ago, Ben Brantley called it "true magic." 866 811 4111, here.org 'TRAVESTIES' at the American Airlines Theater (previews start on March 29; opens on April 24). If you stopped into a Zurich cafe for rosti in 1917, you might have run into James Joyce. Or Vladmir Lenin. Or Tristan Tzara. In Tom Stoppard's wildly erudite historical comedy, great men dash in and out of a Wildean romp loosely based on historical coincidence. When Patrick Marber's production, starring Tom Hollander, ran in London, Matt Wolf praised its "mind bending splendor." 212 719 1300, roundabouttheatre.org 'THE WINTER'S TALE' at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center (in previews; opens on March 25). Is it too soon for a story about a political leader who wreaks domestic havoc because of his paranoia and megalomania? Well, Shakespeare's play is four centuries old, and it's being revived by Theater for a New Audience. Under Arin Arbus's direction, Anatol Yusef will play the blinkered king with Kelley Curran as his queen. 866 811 4111, tfana.org 'YERMA' at the Park Avenue Armory (previews start on March 23; opens on March 27). Federico Garcia Lorca's tragedy of a childless woman in rural Spain receives a modern retelling via the Australian writer and director Simon Stone. The luminous Billie Piper plays Her, a successful journalist unstrung by infertility. Reviewing the production in London, Ben Brantley called it a "merciless and mesmerizing updating." 212 933 5812, armoryonpark.org 'THE AMATEURS' at the Vineyard (closes on March 29). A postmodern comedy about making art in premodern times of plague, Jordan Harrison's play gives its final performances. Jesse Green described this piece, about a troupe of itinerant actors crisscrossing Europe, as a "slightly eggheaded and strangely moving medieval backstager." 212 353 0303, vineyardtheatre.org 'ATHENA' at Jack (closes on March 24). A fierce and lovely comedy about two teenage fencers, Gracie Gardner's play lays down its swords. In Emma Miller's appealing and stealthily moving production, Abby Awe and Julia Greer play girls who train together for the Junior Olympics and for life, too. jackny.org 'AT HOME AT THE ZOO' at the Signature Theater (closes on March 25). An armchair and a park bench are safer places now that Edward Albee's twinned one acts, "Homelife" and "The Zoo Story," are closing. Jesse Green described the production, directed by Lila Neugebauer, as an improvement on the diptych's 2007 debut: "much freer and funnier and thus more powerful." 212 244 7529, signaturetheatre.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
The American economy turned in a better performance last quarter than first thought, expanding at a 2.1 percent rate, the government said on Tuesday. Nearly all of the improvement was because of revised data on inventories, which showed businesses restocking shelves at a faster pace than the government first estimated. The improvement in inventory levels was offset by a slight downward revision in consumer spending last quarter. Although well below the 3.9 percent pace of growth recorded in the spring, the economy's advance was better than the initial 1.5 percent rate for the third quarter that the Commerce Department reported late last month. Wall Street economists had been expecting the upward revision for gross domestic product, which is the second of three estimates for growth that the government will release. The final set of numbers will come out on Dec. 22. For all of 2015, the rate of economic growth is expected to be about 2.5 percent, not much different from the 2.4 percent rate in 2014. The tepid pace prompted Jan Hatzius, chief economist at Goldman Sachs, to call this the "tortoise recovery" in a recent note to clients. But that sobriquet does not mean the economy has been uniformly lackluster. "While this expansion may go uncelebrated, growth in fact has been good enough to achieve a great deal of cumulative progress in the labor market," he added. "We now expect that the U.S. economy will reach full employment within the next 12 months the 'tortoise recovery' looks to be approaching the finishing line." "The inventory revision was even bigger than we expected," said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial in Chicago. One mildly downbeat note on Tuesday was an unexpected drop in consumer sentiment this month, with the Conference Board reporting that its index for consumer confidence fell to 90.4 from 99.1 in October. Despite a strong advance in hiring last month, consumers expressed more caution about the job market and future economic conditions in the most recent survey. Consumer attitudes in the United States should rebound. "U.S. consumers are cash rich and increasingly secure in their jobs," said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. "Confidence won't remain at the soft November level." Nothing in the latest data is expected to derail plans by Federal Reserve policy makers to raise their benchmark interest rate at their meeting next month. The Fed's key lever for influencing the economy has been stuck at close to zero since December 2008. 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. With the unemployment rate falling to 5 percent in October and employers bolstering payrolls by 271,000, Fed officials are likely to conclude when they meet next month that the economy is strong enough to handle the first increase in interest rates in nearly a decade. Since the October jobs report, several Fed officials have signaled they see a rate increase coming very soon. On Saturday, the president of the San Francisco Fed, John Williams, echoed that view. "The data, I think, have been overall encouraging, especially on the labor market," he said. "If that continues to happen, there's a strong case to be made in December to raise rates." Of the 20 cities surveyed in the index, prices were up in 19 in September; the Detroit area was unchanged. On a yearly basis, home prices in 20 cities in the Case Shiller index are up 5.5 percent. Some cities, especially tech hot spots, are posting even larger gains. Home prices in San Francisco are up 11.2 percent over the last 12 months, and Portland registered a 10.1 percent jump. Most economists expect the pace of interest rate increases by the Fed to be gradual and predict steady gains to continue for the housing market in the next 12 months, especially if the recent uptick in wages gathers strength and the stock market remains buoyant. As the unemployment rate has fallen, there are signs that wages are finally beginning to pick up as well. That should help overall economic growth next year, especially if consumers who did not see gains earlier in the recovery finally have more disposable income. While still relatively modest, the pace of growth last quarter was in some ways better than the numbers might suggest. Revised down to 3 percent from 3.2 percent in the initial estimate for the third quarter, consumer spending remained healthy, with an especially strong performance from the auto sector. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Re "Science Under Assault at Medicare and Medicaid," by Peter B. Bach (Op Ed, Dec. 2): Everything we do at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services serves one goal: to dismantle a status quo that thwarts innovative, high quality health care. Seniors wait years for Medicare access to technologies approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Our proposed rule will give seniors immediate access to safe devices while still incentivizing innovators to gather data supporting permanent coverage. Likewise, we've fought the special interests that have long dictated the prices Americans pay for drugs. Medicare financially rewards providers who prescribe the highest cost drugs, often at seniors' expense. We are fixing this. And for many states, work incentives offer a pathway to sustainable coverage for adults on Medicaid. Supporters of the status quo often cite a flawed study to support their predetermined beliefs, ignoring that it was based on one state's early experience with a program operational for only a few months. Innovative ideas to lift Americans from poverty deserve to be fully evaluated. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Late Night Can't Get Enough of World Leaders Laughing at Trump Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. With Allies Like These ... On Tuesday, a video of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada laughing about President Trump with other world leaders at a NATO meeting in London surfaced. In the video, Trudeau could be heard telling leaders of France, Britain and the Netherlands that Trump was late to arrive because of the lengthy news conferences that he sometimes holds before photo ops. At one point, Trudeau says, "You just watch his team's jaws drop to the floor." "That video is amazing for two reasons. One, it is crazy that we were able to hear a private conversation between major world leaders. Like did they not know this was happening? And, two, that when world leaders get together, they're gossipy bitches just like the rest of us." TREVOR NOAH "Yeah, it turns out NATO is so catty, they should get Andy Cohen to host it." TREVOR NOAH "And now the bombing of Canada begins. This is absolutely unacceptable." JIMMY KIMMEL "How dare they laugh at our ridiculous president? That is our job!" JIMMY KIMMEL "And this is what they are saying in public. Like I would love to see what goes down in that group text chain." JAMES CORDEN "Here's how you know when you are really disliked: when you get a Canadian to talk smack about you." JAMES CORDEN On Wednesday, Trump referred to Trudeau as "two faced," and returned to America earlier than planned, canceling a news conference. "To be fair, Trump's not wrong. Justin Trudeau is two faced he's got a white one and a brown one." TREVOR NOAH "Yeah, it's like Trump was at a sleepover and all the other kids turned on him, you know, and now he's just there like, 'Mom, I know it's a day early, but can you come pick me up from NATO?'" TREVOR NOAH "Mr. President, you shouldn't be in a place where people are going to laugh at you behind your back. You get on Air Force One and you fly straight back home, where we promise that we will laugh at you to your face." TREVOR NOAH "He was like, 'Take me back to where I'm respected' and then flew home to where he's being impeached." JIMMY FALLON "Trump is like, 'If you are going to trash somebody, do it like a man. You know, at 3 a.m. on Twitter.'" JAMES CORDEN "The impeachment hearings in Washington have now moved over to the judiciary committee where today they heard testimony from four constitutional legal scholars, or as Donald Trump calls them, 'nerds.'" JAMES CORDEN "They said his actions were worse than any president ever. Basically, they rolled up the Constitution and spanked him with it." JIMMY KIMMEL "Yes, the founders agreed the presidential punishment should be impeachment, after rejecting Ben Franklin's original suggestion: a spanking machine of French whores." STEPHEN COLBERT "This is the part of the story that will be too boring to put in the movie, but there's a lot of speculation in this committee about what the founding fathers would do if they were here to see this. And to me, the answer is obvious: They would vomit. They'd be throwing up in their wigs. But if the founding fathers were here now, they'd be like, 'Take that orange ape and throw him in the harbor with the tea!'" JIMMY KIMMEL On "Conan" on Wednesday, Kristin Chenoweth shared her favorite pastime: harmonizing with alarms and other annoying noises. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
, who has kept a relatively low public profile since losing the presidential election two months ago, on Sunday showed up at the final performance of the Broadway revival of "The Color Purple," reveling in the story of a beleaguered woman who triumphs over the oppressive men in her life (and, along the way, discovers a love for colorful pants). Mrs. Clinton, accompanied by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and their daughter, Chelsea, received several ovations from the sold out audience as she arrived, and then another round of applause when she was acknowledged by the cast after the show. "There's a lot of really awesome famous and notable people here today," the actress Patrice Covington, who gave the farewell speech on behalf of the cast after the show, said to the audience. "I'm not going to call all of them out I know you already know them," she said, before pausing, looking in Mrs. Clinton's direction, and waving at her mischievously. At that, the audience erupted into a new, loud round of applause. The reaction was substantially warmer than the scattered booing and clapping that greeted the arrival of Vice President elect Mike Pence when he attended "Hamilton," just one block north, on Nov. 18. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Every Virus a Person Has Had Can Be Seen in a Drop of Blood, Researchers Find Using less than a drop of blood, a new test can reveal nearly every virus a person has ever been exposed to, scientists reported on Thursday. The test, which is still experimental, can be performed for as little as 25 and could become an important research tool for tracking patterns of disease in various populations, helping scientists compare the old and the young, or people in different parts of the world. It could also be used to try to find out whether viruses, or the body's immune response to them, contribute to chronic diseases and cancer, the researchers said. "I'm sure there'll be lots of applications we haven't even dreamed of," said Stephen J. Elledge, the senior author of the report, published in the journal Science, and a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital. "That's what happens when you invent technology you can't imagine what people will do with it," Dr. Elledge said. "They're so clever." The test can detect past exposure to more than 1,000 strains of viruses from 206 species pretty much the entire human "virome," meaning all the viruses known to infect people. The test works by detecting antibodies, highly specific proteins that the immune system has made in response to viruses. Tried out in 569 people in the United States, South Africa, Thailand and Peru, the blood test found that most had been exposed to about 10 species of virus mostly the usual suspects, like those causing colds, flu, gastrointestinal illness and other common ailments. But a few subjects had evidence of exposure to as many as 25 species, something Dr. Elledge said the researchers had yet to explain. There were some differences in patterns of exposure from continent to continent. In general, people outside the United States had higher rates of virus exposure. The reason is not known, but the researchers said it might be due to "differences in population density, cultural practices, sanitation or genetic susceptibility." Scientists not associated with the work said it had vast potential. "This will be a treasure trove for communicable disease epidemiology," said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University. "It will be like the introduction of the electron microscope. It will allow us to have more resolution at a micro level." One possibility, Dr. Schaffner said, would be to deploy the test in large populations to find out the ages at which children are exposed to various illnesses in order to help determine the best timing for vaccinations. Another idea, he said, would be to test collections of frozen blood samples government laboratories and some universities store them from previous studies to learn about historical patterns of disease. Adolfo Garcia Sastre, a professor of microbiology and medicine and co director of the Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, called the new technology "really amazing" and said it was the first method to produce "big data" about viral exposures. By showing the full repertoire of antibodies that a person has produced against viruses, the test may shed light on many illnesses, he said. "A lot of diseases could be affected by the type of antibodies a person has, elicited by infectious agents," Dr. Garcia Sastre said. The most obvious candidates are autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis and Type 1 diabetes. Researchers have long suspected that viruses may contribute to such ailments, by provoking the immune system to produce antibodies that mistake a person's own cells for viruses and attack them. But no such viruses or antibodies have ever been identified. To look for them, scientists had to pick suspect viruses and test for them, essentially one by one. The new test, Dr. Garcia Sastre said, "in an unbiased way, allows you to look at the whole repertoire." The technology could help answer questions about cancer, he said, such as why the same disease progresses faster in some patients than in others, and why chemotherapy works better in some people. Antibodies may play a role, he said. The initial study had some surprises, Dr. Elledge said. One was "that the immune response is so similar from person to person." Different people made very similar antibodies that targeted the same region on a virus, he explained. Another surprise came from people infected with H.I.V. Dr. Elledge expected their immune responses to other viruses to be diminished. "Instead, they have exaggerated responses to almost every virus," he said. The researchers do not know why. Dr. Elledge said he had his own blood tested, and so did other researchers, out of curiosity. "All the scientists wanted to know," he said. "I think everybody did." The test has some limitations. It can miss certain very small viruses or past infections to which the immune response has dwindled. But newer versions of the test may be more sensitive, Dr. Elledge said. "While not perfect, we think this method represents a very large step forward toward the goal of comprehensive analysis of viral infections," he said. The research was paid for by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Elledge said Brigham and Women's Hospital has applied for a patent on the test, which has been named VirScan. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
LOS ANGELES Hollywood product placement deals are often wince worthy. But the reason is usually not because of events beyond a studio's control. This week, 20th Century Fox has found itself in the awkward position of publicly linking arms with the Jeep Grand Cherokee, even as that sport utility vehicle brand received negative attention after the death of the actor Anton Yelchin. Fox and Jeep have an extensive marketing and product placement deal for "Independence Day: Resurgence," which arrives in theaters this week. Early Sunday morning, a 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee rolled backward down a steep driveway in Los Angeles and killed Mr. Yelchin, known for playing Chekov in Paramount's recent "Star Trek" movies. The cause of the accident is still under investigation, but the model owned by Mr. Yelchin had been recalled by Fiat Chrysler for a gearshift issue that has sometimes resulted in dangerous rollaways. On Monday night, Jeep sponsored a premiere of "Independence Day: Resurgence" at the TCL Chinese Theater here. A white Grand Cherokee, albeit a newer model than the one owned by Mr. Yelchin, was parked on the red carpet. Stars like Vivica A. Fox were asked to pose in front of it. "This is a movie we knew we could have fun with," Scott Brown, a Fiat Chrysler spokesman, said in a promotional interview with USA Today from the event. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Psychological distress may increase your chances of dying from cancer. Researchers interviewed 163,363 adults in England and Scotland using well validated questionnaires on general and mental health. They followed the population in 16 studies conducted between 1994 and 2008. After controlling for age, smoking, physical activity and other factors, they found that compared with those with the lowest scores on depression and anxiety, those with the highest had higher rates of cancer death. In instances of colorectal and prostate cancer, they found a "dose response" effect: the greater the distress, the greater the likelihood of death from those cancers. People might have had undiagnosed cancer at the start of the study, which would affect their mood, so the researchers accounted for this possibility by doing an analysis that excluded study members who died of cancer in the first five years. The results were largely the same. The study, in BMJ, is observational so cannot determine cause and effect, and it depended in part on self reports. "The extent to which these associations could be causal," the authors write, "requires further testing with alternative study designs." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Why do medical devices sound so terrible? A group of clinicians, psychologists, musicians and designers are developing signals that are less startling and more informative . Listen here. In 2012, Yoko Sen was in an emergency room, tethered to a machine bleating relentlessly in her ear. She was "freaked out," she said, and felt helpless. When a nurse returned to the room, Ms. Sen asked if it was O.K. the device was screaming. "Yeah, this thing just beeps," she recalled the nurse saying. Ms. Sen, an electronic musician, was stunned. How could something "so loud and so jarring" be considered normal? "The fear of not knowing amplified the feeling of anxiety," she said. And how, she wondered, could clinicians withstand the clangor? As she lay there, she said, a cardiac monitor rang out in a tone close to the musical note of C, clashing with a distant device wailing in a high pitched F sharp, creating what's called the devil's interval, a dissonance so chilling that medieval churches forbade it. Hospitals today can be sonic hellscape s, which studies have shown regularly exceed levels set by the World Health Organization: droning IV pumps, ding donging nurse call buttons, voices crackling on loudspeakers , ringing telephones, beeping elevators, buzzing ID scanners, clattering carts, coughing, screaming, vomiting. Then there are the alarms. A single patient might trigger hundreds each day, challenging caregivers to figure out which machine is beeping, and what is wrong with the patient, if anything. (Studies have shown that as many as 99 percent of alarms are false.) The proliferation of pinging and bleeping can contribute to patient delirium and staff burnout. And because caregivers know that many devices are crying wolf, they might be less responsive or apathetic, a potentially fatal safety issue known as alarm fatigue. From 2005 to 2008, more than 500 patients in the United States had adverse outcomes, mostly death, because an alarm was ignored, or a device was silenced or mismanaged in some way, according to the Food and Drug Administration, which tracks adverse events involving medical devices. "You don't need to have alarms scream at you ," said Judy Edworthy, a professor of applied psychology at the University of Plymouth, in Britain. But, she said, "people take a lot of convincing" that alarms don't need to be so startling. For device manufacturers, sound is often an afterthought in the design, Dr. Edworthy said, and they are worried about being sued if a machine had failed to cry out. So, without an enforceable, universal standard, alarms have run riot. They are also using sounds based on an outdated set of international safety standards, which have, paradoxically, perpetuated the din. Dr. Edworthy, who has been called the godmother of alarms, is leading a passionate group of specialists, including Ms. Sen, who now works with device manufacturers and hospitals to incorporate the needs of patients and clinicians, and Elif Ozcan , who leads the Critical Alarms Lab at the Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands. Together, this group is developing tones that replace the anodyne blare of the current alarms with signals that mimic electronic dance music or a heartbeat. They are working to make alarms quieter, combining audible alarms with visual cues like interactive screens that look like paintings, and working to develop a new standard that is likely to go into effect early next year. An international standard that perpetuates the din Deep in the rule book for safety and performance of medical devices is IEC 60601 1 8, which sets the standards for medical device alarm sounds. The particulars of the code were hashed out over many years by a joint working group, assembled by the International Electrotechnical Commission, a nonprofit based in Switzerland that publishes guidelines for electronic and technical equipment used by hospitals. Among other specifications, the standard sets forth tones for six critical functions: cardiovascular, drug administration, ventilation, oxygen, temperature and artificial perfusion (the flow of blood and oxygen), also known as "the six ways people die." At one point, the popular melody "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" was floated as a possible signal for cardiac problems, but ultimately, it did not make the cut. "The songs are not supposed to be the Billboard top 100," said Dr. Frank Block Jr., an anesthesiologist and musician, who was on the committee that passed the 2006 standard that is still largely in place. Among the tones that were approved was a tune reminiscent of the old NBC chime, meant to mimic rising and falling lungs, Dr. Block said. But each ditty has the same rhythm and the same number of pulses, making them difficult to tell apart and difficult to learn. And they were never tested. Dr. Block later issued a public apology on behalf of the committee for approving the sounds. "We did the best we could," he said recently, "but the sounds were basically terrible." Now, Dr. Edworthy is spearheading the creation of a "revolutionary" set of tones, Dr. Block said. Audio technology has changed drastically since the eight tones were created, said Dr. Edworthy, who has created sonic alerts for nuclear plants and train systems. "We've amassed a load of data demonstrating that these sounds work very well," said Dr. Edworthy, who is collaborating with other researchers, including Dr. Joseph Schlesinger, an associate professor at Vanderbilt University, to test how quickly clinicians are able to learn and respond to the sounds, how easily they can be identified, and how loud they need to be. She has presented her findings to the current committee, which has been described as a "United Nations of medical sound," and includes representatives from medical device companies and from countries with differing philosophical and cultural perspectives on alarms. "You're asking people to make changes that are going to cost millions of dollars, and some just don't want to," she added. That said, the strength of the standard varies between countries, which can adopt all, parts or none of the written guidelines. In the United States, Dr. Block said, the Food and Drug Administration usually follows the standards, but it may add further requirements. The device would not replace a "code blue," Dr. Ozcan said, but it could potentially reduce the number of beeps, as caregivers would be alerted that a patient was veering into a danger zone before an alarm is triggered. The challenge, said Dr. Ozcan, is balancing the needs of patients and clinicians, who would have to learn and integrate new devices into their work flow. Dr. Ozcan said she was hopeful that the research done at her lab could be applied in other settings, such as air traffic control rooms, or would be relevant for research on how sound influences health in general, especially in work environments. "We owe it to the community and health care," she said. Yoko Sen has since recovered from her illness, but the bleating monitors are still "the soundtrack of my life," she said. Through her start up Sen Sound based in Washington, she has collaborated with medical device engineers to create new tones for home heart monitors, and with interior designers to build a so called tranquillity room, where clinicians can relax, making them less likely to slam doors or talk loudly. During a person's last moments, her eyes might be closed, his nose covered by a ventilator, her food ingested by tube. Unless someone is holding her hand, she might feel nothing. "For patients who die in the I.C.U., that sound of the alarm might be last sound they hear," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Evolution can come in many forms. Physical. Emotional. Mental. Societal. Saru brings it all in the latest episode "Star Trek: Discovery," a self contained, efficient and compelling chapter of an uneven season. It's not a coincidence that once again, Doug Jones is at the center of several of the show's best scenes. In "The Sounds of Thunder," Saru is compassionate, angry, confident, defiant and reflective. What he is not: fearful, because he has survived vahar'ai. And Jones rises to the occasion. Much as Brent Spiner did with Data's quest to become more human on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," he shows us that evolution comes with bumps. We learn that the red signals have appeared over Kaminar, the home planet of the Kelpiens and the Ba'ul. The Ba'ul have, essentially, maintained control over Saru's people for many years because the Kelpiens used to be the predator species, and the Ba'ul fear that an evolved Kelpien is a malicious one. The Discovery goes to investigate, and Saru visibly and uncharacteristically shows anger at Pike for amenably communicating with the Ba'ul and not initially sending him to the planet. (There is also an amusingly passive aggressive moment early in the episode when Saru forgets to get up from the captain's chair when Pike enters the bridge.) Saru goes to the planet and reunites with Siranna (excellent work here by Hannah Spear), who is both overjoyed to see her brother and fearful, as Kelpiens typically are, that Saru's presence will upset the Great Balance. Saru, of course, knows the Great Balance is a fraud and a ploy to keep Kelpiens subjugated. But Siranna knows nothing of the outside world and thought Saru had been dead all these years. Eventually, Saru beams over to a Ba'ul ship, where he is once again on death's door. He hulks up and becomes Super Saru, then breaks out of his chains to save a suddenly imperiled Siranna; meanwhile, the entirety of the Kelpien race goes through vahar'ai to lose their fears. What I am a little unclear about: Are the Ba'ul a bunch of people? Are they the, uh, blob type thing we see threatening Saru, which looks like Venom from "Spider Man"? Of course, the evolution of the Kelpiens is problematic for the Ba'ul, so they try to pull off a bit of genocide for self preservation. It doesn't work. The biggest plot twist of the episode comes when the Red Angel shows up to do ... something. The big reveal is that the Red Angel, whatever or whoever it is, might be a benevolent force. One thing is for sure, as the Discovery finds out. These sightings aren't random. Spock, Burnham and now Saru have come into contact with it. In all three situations, the Red Angel has been used to save lives. Even still, the Federation believes it is a dangerous force, whatever it is, as Tyler from Section 31 makes clear at the end of the episode. The episode worked for me. It was ambitious and tightly written, and it showcased a character that has been deserving of the spotlight. We're six episodes in, and we still don't have any idea what's going on with Spock. Even though I really enjoyed this episode, we are pretty far off track from the mystery that was introduced in the first two episodes two of the best of the series so far. Trouble in paradise for Culber and Stamets? Culber seems to blanch a bit when Stamets touches him early in the episode. Captain Pike is, by far, the most tolerant and patient captain we've seen at the center of a "Star Trek" series. He consistently listens to his subordinates, is an advocate for his crew and doesn't make rash decisions. You can see why he eventually (at least according to traditional Trek canon) becomes an admiral. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
ST. LOUIS Color is powerful. It can stop traffic, sell a product, make art sing. It's also political. The color of your skin can lock you into a history; end your life. It did so in the case of Michael Brown, the unarmed African American killed by police bullets in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson three years ago this week. Racially, the city has been on the alert since. Tensions surfaced last September in protests against the Contemporary Art Museum here around a show of work by a white artist, Kelley Walker, that included images of black bodies smeared with chocolate and rainbow colored toothpaste. A large group exhibition this summer called "Blue Black" at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, mere steps from the contemporary museum, is entirely about color, and might have seemed ripe for controversy. Yet, as far as I know, it has not caused a stir. This is not because it lacks self consciously political art. The curator is the African American artist Glenn Ligon, whose work of the last 30 years has been grounded in black history. That history is everywhere here. But so are other histories. Roughly half the 70 pieces are by artists who don't self identify as African American; much of the work, across ethnic and generational lines, is abstract. The result is a show that isn't reductively "racial" but includes race on a spectrum of meanings that runs from polemical to personal and poetic. Yet, culturally as well as chromatically, race is where things start in the opening gallery. A terra cotta bust by Simone Leigh, its gray beige head topped by an Afro composed of blue porcelain cowrie shells, is a homage to a specific person: the choreographer Katherine Dunham, who incorporated African styles in modern American dance and opened a performing arts school in East St. Louis in the 1960s. A 2015 Kerry James Marshall painting of a vigilant looking black policeman seated on the hood of a white squad car looks like a taken from life figure, and one radiating mixed messages of aggression and protection. The image has a particularly complex resonance not just in the context of St. Louis, where police violence led to Black Lives Matter's becoming a national activist movement, but also in light of President Trump's recent urging that police get physically tougher when making arrests. The show's title, "Blue Black," comes from another abstract work: a two panel vertical wall sculpture, half black, half blue, by Ellsworth Kelly that the Pulitzer Arts Foundation owns. When Mr. Ligon saw it on his first visit there, its title brought a song to mind: Fats Waller's 1929 "(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue." And the song came with literary associations. The unnamed protagonist of Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel, "Invisible Man," hears it one night as he dreams a troubling dream about racial identity, about "the blackness of Blackness." The Kelly piece, 28 feet tall and permanently installed in the foundation's atrium, comes with no known political subtext, but Mr. Ligon adds one by installing near it a text sculpture of his own, which spells out in white neon tubing "blues," "blood" and "bruise." All three words are from a historical source: a 1964 description by a Harlem man of the injuries he suffered at the hands of the police when he was wrongly jailed. At the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Mr. Ligon's piece is positioned so that, from some angles, you view the Kelly piece through it. Much of the show operates on this strategy of connecting through proximity different kinds of layering and revealing. In a downstairs gallery, a 1967 abstract painting by Richard Pousette Dart, a haze of blue and yellow daubs, reflects that artist's cosmological interests. It hangs beside Ross Bleckner's 1993 "Galaxy," in which an irregular grid of glowing lights was conceived as a memorial to friends who died of AIDS. Derek Jarman's indelibly elegiac film "Blue," from the same year, is visually just a field of unbroken and unchanging azure. After Jarman started working on it, he learned he had AIDS and gradually lost his sight. The blue screen became an image of blindness; the spoken soundtrack, lifted from his journals, a chronicle of dying. By the look of it, Mr. Kim's picture is about as abstract as abstraction can get. So is "Blue Serge" by Jennie C. Jones, which combines an acoustic panel and a canvas painted with blue and black lines to suggest a connection between Modernist painting and improvisational jazz (examples of which you can hear in a self service Blue Black Library). David Hammons forges links, too, but different ones, between art and street in his 2014 piece "The New Black," which consists of a blue gestural painting covered up, and canceled out, by an overlay of black industrial tarp. Mr. Hammons is a touchstone figure for Mr. Ligon, and for many other artists interested in making work that can accommodate political readings without being confined to them. And there has been no more effective example of this versatility than the 2002 installation "Concerto in Black and Blue." For this piece, Mr. Hammons simply turned out the lights in a large New York gallery, handed out small blue LED flashlights, and let visitors find their way. Tentatively inching forward, everyone shared the same darkness; in the glow of the little torches, everyone shared a color: blue. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
LA FLOR (2019) Stream on Mubi. When stateside audiences had the opportunity to see this movie from the Argentine filmmaker Mariano Llinas in theaters last year, they may have been nervous to take the plunge: It's more than 13 hours long. But viewers looking for something to dig into while housebound will surely find at least one piece that resonates with them in the film, which is divided into six genre jumping sections. The movie stars four women Elisa Carricajo, Valeria Correa, Pilar Gamboa and Laura Paredes who juggle a handful of roles. It is both "an example of rampant serialism and a commentary on the phenomenon," A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times, though he added that the film "is perhaps more fun to think about than to sit through, though there are some exquisitely beautiful sequences." AMERICAN INJUSTICE: THE FIGHT FOR POLICE REFORM 11 p.m. on BET. Soledad O'Brien will discuss police reform with politicians, activists and members of law enforcement. Her interviewees include the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi; the Congressional Black Caucus leader, Karen Bass; the N.A.A.C.P. president and chief executive, Derrick Johnson; and the Charlottesville, Va., police chief, RaShall M. Brackney. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
"I don't get it," President Trump is reported to have said in 2017 while standing at Arlington National Cemetery. "What was in it for them?" Taken out of its vile context, the president's question doesn't have an immediately obvious answer, and the reflexive barrage of veteran worship that came in response didn't shed much light. As with similar past flare ups, this one was quickly extinguished with the mass incantation that America's troops "defend our freedom." It's nice to know people think that, but in the five years I spent in the U.S. military, I never met anyone who seriously thought that's what they were doing. Soldiers who talk that way are usually in basic training, or making up for a lack of combat experience, like the civilian who overcompensates for never serving by lighting Colin Kaepernick jerseys on fire. Truth to tell, very little of a soldier's time is spent guarding the "American way of life," as the Soldier's Creed has it, and motivations tend to be fairly straightforward. Shooting an anti tank missile at a Toyota Hilux, lighting up a fuel tank with a 50 caliber machine gun, getting blisters and dysentery and going to sleep cold and hungry in a dirt hole these are all part of a rich personal and fraternal experience that doesn't necessarily require any higher source of inspiration. In 2014, I joined one of the military's most lethal career fields, the Army's bomb squad. I wanted the adventure and glory of Special Operations, but knew I wouldn't make a good "doorkicker," which left helicopters and bomb disposal. I'd seen the "Hurt Locker" recently, and the decision was a quick one. (According to the medical community, the rational part of one's brain doesn't fully develop until age 25.) In the end, I got most of what I thought I wanted: adventure, camaraderie, swag. But glory, alas, lay just out of reach. I deployed to five countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, but I never fought a great battle, never defused a suicide vest with my bare hands, never liberated a village whose name I could lend to my memoirs. It's a curious agony, not being shot at. Without such scars, one fears being seen strictly within military circles, of course as a loser or sucker. Fresh from that experience, I've been thinking about a better answer to Mr. Trump's question. What was in it for me? It is never desirable to put troops in harm's way, but remember to enlist is to expect just that. Many soldiers actually get upset when something goes badly wrong and they miss it. A soldier in my platoon hadn't skipped a combat patrol for over two months, during which he saw no action. One morning he came down with the norovirus and spent the day vomiting. When the patrol left that night, he stayed behind. The team proceeded to engage in a protracted firefight, complete with explosive belts, exploding trucks and enemy bodies. I'd never known him to sulk, but for the rest of the deployment he was nearly catatonic, struggling to conceal the depths of his melancholy. About a thousand kilometers away, on a small base, I shared his misery. We sometimes saw nearby ballistic missile fire and would get alerts on our phones and computers instructing us to seek shelter from incoming projectiles, which we took as our signal to run outside and capture the attack on Snapchat. But the missiles were consistently inaccurate, and the air defense systems were frustratingly competent. If being a hero is hard, and defending your way of life is not really part of the job, what makes a good soldier? Some big things, but mostly small ones. There are the true warriors, the Audie Murphys and John McCains. They belong to a rare caste I don't pretend to understand. Suffice it to say the soldier you thanked at the airport probably wasn't one of them. A good soldier loves her job, and spends her free time becoming world class. She guides younger soldiers through the byzantine promotion system, and protects them from the bureaucratic predations of higher headquarters. She has an eye for destructive behavior. She is obsessed with training her soldiers, but takes no credit for their success. She puts the mission first, but she also makes sure no one misses a graduation, an anniversary, a soccer game that doesn't need to be missed. None of that gets you eternal glory. It just repays your soldiers' trust, which they have no choice but to give you. But the soldier you thanked at the airport may not be much like her, either. Soldiers are like schoolteachers. Some relatively small number are exceptional, the best America has to offer. Some small percentage are toxic, capable of ruining lives and entire organizations. And a large portion sit somewhere in the middle, meeting whatever standard has been set to keep the machine running, serving their country, earning their pay, and working toward their pension, along with a few wild stories to regale friends and family. Soldiers are like teachers in another way: It's hard to screw up so badly that you lose your job. Everyone in the military knows this (and knows someone who should've been kicked out but wasn't), which is why many service members regard the arbitrary gratitude of sycophantic strangers with a mix of appreciation and ridicule. They know these are just the trappings of America's post draft bargain. Under the terms of this deal, less than half a percent of Americans serve in the active duty military, and everyone else agrees to revere them. When I first enlisted, I was surprised how many of the people in my life suddenly had stories about how they once almost joined the military, too. If it wasn't for this asthma medication or that knee surgery or an ailing relative, my progressive California suburb apparently would've been overrun with military recruits. None of them took the idea seriously enough to discover that the military has had enlistment waivers for such things. But I got the point. Even people who didn't want or have to serve still seem strangely self conscious when faced with those who chose to, or had no choice. When asked why I did it, I usually prattle on about patriotism and giving back. That's part of it, too. But I still don't have a frank, pithy answer, because when I think back, I don't really know. I don't know why anyone does it, other than that it's a good job with a slightly higher risk reward ratio. There are certainly other jobs to choose from, even if glory is what you're after. It is a trying and amusing life. Within a few weeks of taking over a platoon, a newly minted lieutenant nursing martial fantasies will quickly find herself occupied instead with a parade of eccentric melodramas: one soldier's former spouse demanding disciplinary action under Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for giving her chlamydia; an angry call from the president's Secret Service detail accusing a soldier of helping himself to a morning buffet without wearing pants. Even in the heat of the fight, she may find herself less the protagonist of an epic than the bewildered witness to a series of bizarre spectacles: a soldier testing out a new generation armored vehicle by intentionally driving it over an I.E.D.; a soldier trying to locate a buried vat of white phosphorus by kicking the ground and lighting his foot on fire. There are the long nights and early mornings, the compressed discs and fractured hips, the last second missions and ambiguous orders, the cutting edge technology and shortages of food, the labyrinthine bureaucracy and paperwork. There are the waits, delays, postponements, setbacks, extensions, reversals, retractions and cancellations, the myriad spouses and children cowed by experience into anticipation of disappointment. I take my hat off to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who make the military a life's work. I didn't do in five years what many of them have done in an afternoon, and to the military they will give the remainder of their youth, if not, in the end, their lives. As for me, I'm finished. I left last year, and for whatever reason, I hadn't thought about it much since. But back in September, when I saw reports of Mr. Trump's comments at Arlington, certain memories resurfaced. I got out the pictures, the videos, the passports, the patches, the uniforms. My old helmet, my old bag of tools. It was an odd sensation. I felt as though I was never a soldier, so much as I played one once. Would that have been different if I'd been shot? If I'd liberated a village? If I could point to a great cause and say, "I fought for that." In a word, if I found meaning? It's only at the end, when you think less of the battles you fought than the places you saw and the people you loved, that you realize there was meaning all along, and that's what was in it for you. Jeremy Stern ( JeremySternLA) was an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Army from 2014 to 2019. He was chief of staff at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin from 2019 to 2020 and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. 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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The recently concluded FX mini series "Fosse/Verdon" threw the private and public worlds of the choreographer Bob Fosse and his collaborator and third wife, Gwen Verdon, back into the spotlight. Yet one of their most enduring works has been a Broadway staple for 23 years, so much a part of the local entertainment furniture that it's easy to take it for granted: the 1996 revival of the 1975 musical "Chicago," originally directed and choreographed by Fosse, and in which Verdon starred as the vaudevillian murderess Roxie Hart. Donna Marie Asbury, 56, has been with the revival almost from the beginning: She joined the first national tour in December 1997 and the Broadway company in March 1999. On Monday, she gave her last performance as June, one of the Cook County Jail tenants. At the curtain call, the producer Fran Weissler, reading a letter from the director Walter Bobbie, said, "You made putting on fishnets look like a class act." Afterward, the cast presented her with a chicken shaped cake that alluded to the circumstances of June's crime she was carving the poultry when her husband "ran into my knife." Ms. Asbury who also understudied Velma Kelly (Roxie's prison pal) and the warden Mama Morton made her Broadway debut at 11 in the Angela Lansbury revival of "Gypsy" in 1974. Other credits include the original production of Stephen Sondheim's cult flop "Merrily We Roll Along" and Eva Peron in a 1990s tour of "Evita." Her next step will be a solo concert at Feinstein's/54 Below on June 19, in which she'll retrace her career up to her stint in "Chicago" a two decade long engagement that almost completely overlapped with the life of her daughter, Jacqueline, now 23. The young woman is planning to be a writer or director. "She doesn't want to wear a vinyl bra like her mother, which is really good," Ms. Asbury said, laughing, during a chat in the empty Ambassador Theater. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation. Had you done Fosse before joining "Chicago"? Never. I have actually always thought of myself as a singer first, but how lucky that this style came very easily to me. I love doing it and it looks good on my body, thank God. People think it's easy because you're not leaping and this and that, but it's very precise. What did you think of the TV series? Wasn't Michelle Williams brilliant as Verdon ? I thought her dancing was fine they made her look very good. I didn't gasp: She held her own. I was so impressed by her. One issue the series raised was the diverging impact of aging on men's and women's careers. Was that a factor in your decision to leave? I wanted to leave on my terms and I wanted to leave feeling good about what I was still doing on the stage. And honestly, the cast members keep getting younger and younger. They hired this 23 year old boy and I could be his mother. To a certain extent you know you can feel good and you look good, but I stopped doing promotional things because I didn't want to stand next to 23 , 25 , 27 year olds. I didn't feel as good without the costume and the wig and the makeup. I thought, "If people saw this, they'd be like, 'Why are you in that show?'" It does play with your mind, especially as an older woman in the business an older woman in general. But I don't think there's any other show out there where you can start in your 30s and still do it, and probably do it better, in your 50s. With this show, you need life under your belt, challenges to bring an edge to the piece. What have you learned doing the show so long? Gratitude just being grateful for making a living doing what I absolutely love. I've never had any side jobs, it's just been theater. I've been here with so many celebrities in and out, huge people, and you see that the hustle never stops: They're always planning the next thing or what will keep them in the news on social media. It can wear you down. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
In September 2012, Reckitt Benckiser, calling it "a moral obligation," announced that it would withdraw its Suboxone tablets from the market in six months because of "increasing concerns with pediatric exposure." It effectively asked the F.D.A. to block generic tablets for the same reason, citing a company financed study that indicated the film was far safer. The F.D.A. disagreed and approved generic Suboxone tablets early this year. Since then, Reckitt's Suboxone journey has become bumpier. It is battling antitrust lawsuits by a dozen drug wholesalers and insurers who say the company "schemed" to extend its monopoly, overcharging them and, more broadly, the health care system. In July, Reckitt Benckiser's stock suffered its biggest one day loss in two years after CVS Caremark announced that it would drop the film from its preferred drug list in favor of tablets. And there is a new brand on the shelves, too: Zubsolv, which its manufacturer, Orexo, says has "higher bioavailability, faster dissolve time and smaller tablet size with a new menthol taste." Orexo's United States medical director is Dr. Gitlow, the addiction medical society president. In the third quarter of this year, Reckitt Benckiser's net revenues from Suboxone declined 14 percent from the same period last year, which the company attributes to its discontinuation of the tablets. The company recently announced that it was "reviewing all options" for its pharmaceutical unit, which includes the possibility that it will sell, bringing its profitable foray into the drug business to a close. Dr. Robert L. DuPont, the first director of the national drug abuse institute, said he marveled at the cutthroat business competition when "you couldn't get pharma companies to even think about addiction treatment before this 1.5 billion drug got their attention." At a recent meeting of the addiction medicine society, "the buprenorphine sessions were all packed with doctors who wanted to get in on the gold rush," he said. "It seems to me like they are repeating the experience of pain doctors in terms of reckless disregard of the nonmedical use of the drug." The system could well be at a turning point, with more drug options, lower prices and expanded insurance coverage under the new health care law and an "addiction equity" mandate. In addition, with a recent regulation change, for profit addiction companies that run methadone clinics are expanding their buprenorphine programs, which have no patient limits, and some state governments are pressing federally funded health centers to increase nonprofit buprenorphine treatment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Where a concert takes place can be as crucial to its success as the quality of the performance itself. So a shift of locale for a Mostly Mozart Festival concert at Lincoln Center last month proved something of a revelation, especially at a time when the center is grappling with confusion over its summer offerings. For a traditional program of Mendelssohn and Mozart, the festival orchestra abandoned David Geffen Hall, the space it typically uses, for Alice Tully Hall. Hearing a chamber orchestra in Tully, a 1,086 seat hall built for chamber ensembles, made perfect sense. If Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony, which ended the program, had been played at Geffen, it would have been hard for it to stand out: Just another summer of Mostly Mozart, another "Jupiter." But at Tully, with Thomas Dausgaard conducting, the performance leapt off the stage. The first half of the concert also benefited. The superb Swiss pianist Francesco Piemontesi was the soloist in an elegant performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 27, a soft spoken piece that tends be swallowed in Geffen size halls. At Tully, the music's wistful lyricism and rippling grace came through beautifully. Why hasn't Tully been the hall of choice for Mostly Mozart from the start? Geffen, of course, has a lot more seats (over 2,700). Most festival orchestra programs, though, don't come close to selling out the place, while this program at Tully played to a packed and enthusiastic house. This matters more now than ever, as Lincoln Center struggles with what to do during the summer months. For years, it offered overlapping festivals that competed for audiences and donors: Mostly Mozart, known mostly for traditional concerts; and the Lincoln Center Festival, with theater, dance and spectacle. This summer the expensive Lincoln Center Festival was dropped. And Mostly Mozart, which in recent years has already included more elaborate projects and contemporary music, added a few theater and dance events of the kind that characterized the Lincoln Center Festival; the overall number of programs, though, has been significantly reduced. This summer's festival started with ambitious stagings of Leonard Bernstein's "Mass" and Haydn's "The Creation." The adventurous International Contemporary Ensemble is once again in residence, though with only two programs this time. Still, with the Lincoln Center Festival gone, it's not quite clear what Mostly Mozart stands for. Take the concert that Louis Langree conducted at Geffen a few days after Mr. Dausgaard's at Tully. The program, billed as "Americans in Paris," stretched the theme considerably to include Mozart's Adagio and Rondo in C Minor for Glass Harmonica, Flute, Oboe, Viola and Cello. The Paris and American connections? Well, Benjamin Franklin, the first American ambassador to France, was a pioneer of the glass harmonica. And Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 17 in G was superbly performed with Emanuel Ax as soloist. But how does it fit in? It was fun to hear a piece for glass harmonica played by two fine exponents of this unusual instrument, Friedrich Heinrich Kern and Philipp Marguerre. But these artists were showcased much more effectively later that evening on one of the festival's popular "Little Night Music" programs at the Kaplan Penthouse. In this wonderfully intimate space (which seats around 190 people at small cocktail tables) the wonders of the modern glass harmonica, with the players rubbing wet fingers on the rims of glass like tubes, came through affectingly. And what a pleasure to be so close to Mr. Ax during his scintillating performance of a quirky, overlooked Mozart piece, the Piano Sonata in F (K. 533). There was a similar contrast between a vaguely defined orchestral concert at Geffen and a riveting Kaplan Penthouse event earlier this week. The orchestra's program included a perfectly fine performance of Brahms's Second Symphony, and the star violinist Joshua Bell brought his trademark plush sound and Romantic temperament to Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1. (If you missed it, you can catch him playing this chestnut, one of his well trod favorites, in December at Carnegie Hall with the New York String Orchestra.) But later that night at the Kaplan Penthouse, Daniel Lozakovich, a 17 year old violinist whose career is taking off (including a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon), made his New York debut. He began with a dark toned, probing and dramatic account of Bach's monumental Chaconne for solo violin. In this informal space, the performance seemed epic. The brilliant young pianist George Li joined Mr. Lozakovich for an animated account of Mozart's Violin Sonata in B flat (K. 378), and had Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 6 in F, a jocular early work, to himself. (Mr. Lozakovich will play a Mozart concerto with the festival orchestra on Aug. 7 and 8.) Mostly Mozart has some thinking to do. Two years ago my colleague Zachary Woolfe called upon Lincoln Center to bring its myriad summer festivals under one umbrella with a cogent program and an embracing name: he suggested Lincoln Center Summer. That imperative seems more urgent than ever. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
AT one time a primarily industrial area that turned derelict at nightfall, the area north of 34th Street and west of Eighth Avenue, which is included in the city's Hudson Yards redevelopment plan, is already transforming into a comfortable residential neighborhood with a slightly downtown feel. One block in particular, 39th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, is taking on a decidedly high end gloss. In the last few years, several hotels have opened, including the Element New York Times Square West. The well reviewed Italian trattoria Mercato also opened, followed by an upscale Irish pub and the boutique chocolatier Kee's Chocolates. Now a 199 unit luxury rental building called Crystal Green has begun leasing, with monthly rents starting at 3,000 for a studio apartment, 3,525 for a one bedroom, and 4,625 for a two bedroom. "Four years ago there was really nothing here," said Nancy Albertson, the director of leasing for Crystal Green. "There was an adult entertainment store on the corner one of those open 24 hours a day with the blinking lights which is thankfully gone now." She said a similar establishment on the corner of 37th Street and Eighth Avenue had been reborn as a Cohen's Fashion Optical. Julie Oh, who rented a one bedroom apartment in Midtown West almost two years ago, says she has owned her own fashion business and worked in the area for three decades. She describes the neighborhood, which is also part of the garment district, as having been completely transformed in recent years. "I wasn't comfortable walking through the streets in the evening," Ms. Oh said, "because I felt it was dangerous with the drug dealers and prostitution. There were a lot of Dumpsters, and it smelled really bad. But now, it's like night and day." While hotel guests were obviously a catalyst for the transformation, retailers moving to the area now are hoping to tap into its burgeoning residential market, said Scott Galin, a principal of Handler Real Estate Organization, which owns 315 West 39th Street, where the new Irish pub Tir Na Nog and Kee's Chocolates have opened. "They're really looking across the street and west to the high end residential customers," Mr. Galin said. Bill Harnett, an owner of Tir Na Nog, said he became familiar with the area while operating a pub nearby. Four years ago, he would not have considered it as a site for a pub. "I probably wouldn't have gone near the place," said Mr. Harnett. His pub, with its architectural pieces and ornate furniture from Irish churches and castles, along with stained glass windows, rich textiles and carved dark wood, has a markedly haute ambience. "But now with all the new construction, I said, 'You know what, I'm going to take a chance on this, and I think it's going to pay off.' " "That building was the fastest building to lease of our last seven buildings," Ms. Albertson said. "The response was pretty amazing." Other rental buildings in the neighborhood include the pioneering Hudson Crossing, a 15 story red brick building with 259 units at 400 West 37th, which opened in 2003, and the 30 story Townsend, with 207 apartments at 350 West 37th, which opened in 2010. Hudson Crossing is owned by Equity Residential, one of the country's largest publicly traded apartment owners. Equity Residential also recently bought Mantena, a high end building at 431 West 37th Street with 97 apartments on 12 floors, which has one bedrooms renting just under 4,000 a month, said Clifford Finn, the president for new development marketing of the brokerage Citi Habitats. In coming months Brooklyn Fare, the upmarket grocer with a Michelin three star restaurant in its Downtown Brooklyn location, will be adding another branch in Mantena, which opened in the spring and has fewer than a dozen apartments remaining, he said. Many of the residents moving into the area come from Chelsea seeking lower rents for new apartments, Mr. Finn said. On average, a studio in a doorman building in the area would rent for about 2,413 a month, a one bedroom for about 3,397, and a two bedroom for about 4,625, according to data from the Corcoran Group. "A lot of people like to think of it as North Chelsea, or NoChe," Mr. Finn said. "Certain more established neighborhoods, like Chelsea, have gotten very expensive for people who want new development type products, so they've migrated up to this area of the West 30s, which was basically the last frontier of new development in Manhattan, where you had all these potential building sites concentrated in one area." Work has begun again on a 12 story condo hotel project formerly called Galerie at 515 Ninth Avenue, at 39th Street, which stalled in the global financial crisis of 2008; it will be completed in November 2013, according to the Web site of its construction manager, New Line Structures. In most emerging neighborhoods, property developers test the waters with rental projects, and the fact that developers are now putting in condos is significant, Mr. Finn said. "Prior to Galerie," he said, "the only real larger scale condo development was up on 42nd Street, or you had to go south to the high 20s. Once you approached Chelsea, there were a few that popped up, but they were very small and nondescript." Besides the new rental apartments, the mixed use loft buildings favored by the garment makers are also attracting buyers, said Paul Gavriani, a senior vice president of Corcoran. "There are all these great loft spaces that in some cases mirror or are better than lofts you'd find in TriBeCa or SoHo, but they're closer to a part of the city that has tremendous vitality," he said. "So here's this downtown loft district that's sort of wedged into Midtown, where you have fantastic transportation options." Mr. Gavriani said that some apartment hunters start their search in Hell's Kitchen, as the area north of 42nd Street is called, but end up renting a block or two south of 42nd Street, where prices are lower. "A few years ago," he said, "there was very little in the neighborhood, so it was a hard sell to say you could live there and have a life like every other New Yorker. But now, I'd say 42nd and Ninth Avenue has become a hub for that neighborhood, and you can say it's really not that far from everything." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The scene was similar to one that plays out thousands of times a year in gyms and auditoriums around the country: a college fair. The folding tables, the school banners, the admissions officers with a student representative or two, and the brochures and tchotchkes laid out. The only thing that might have made this one appear out of the ordinary was the preponderance of handouts with rainbow designs, and the fact that the fair was being held at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in Greenwich Village. This college fair, and several like it around the country, was devoted to recruiting gay students. "Actually going out and recruiting a gay student that's a very new thing for colleges," says Shane L. Windmeyer, the co founder of Campus Pride, a national organization that promotes safe college environments for gay students and sponsored the event. While Ivy League schools are often represented, the fairs also attract lesser known institutions like Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. Scott A. McIntyre, associate director of admissions there, says that his university attends some 500 fairs each year, and that including one for gay students made sense. "The more I can help my institution be open to diversity of all different kinds," he says, "it's just going to make us a stronger university, and it's going to make our student body be more robust." All this is good news for the young gay applicant. Of course, being gay does not lend an advantage, and the embrace is not universal inside admissions offices, and out. While much of the stigma of homosexuality may have eased over the years, harassment and even violence are still real concerns around campus Matthew Shepard, after all, was an undergraduate. Students are looking for colleges where they will feel comfortable and safe, Mr. Windmeyer says. Also, he says, "straight students who have gay family members want to find a campus that is welcoming," so, for example, two moms can show up for parents weekend without a ripple. "They don't want to pick a college that's not going to be accepting of people they love." Although many young people say they do not feel the anguish about coming out that has burdened past generations, the fact is that adolescence is a time of strong pressures to conform, and being different in any way can cause intense inner turmoil. Life's conflicts can make for compelling narratives the stuff of memorable college essays. And students are working the story of their sexuality into their admissions essays. "Students are finding out that not only are they not being discriminated against for revealing their orientation in their applications, it may be an extra," says Rachel Pepper, a co author of "The Gay and Lesbian Guide to College Life." As with all essays, the value is in what you actually say. Being spurred to found an organization or join one could show the positive attitude and leadership abilities that colleges look for, Ms. Pepper says. "Students who are out in high school and are comfortable enough to put this in their essay are probably leaders." Another reason for a student to be up front about sexual orientation: scholarships and other financial help have emerged from such groups as the Point Foundation, the League Foundation at AT T, and Colage (Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere). The University of Pennsylvania made waves this year when the online publication Inside Higher Ed reported on the university's new outreach policy: applicants whose essay identifies them as gay are put in touch with gay students and organizations on campus. Eric J. Furda, the dean of admissions, told the publication that it was doing for gay applicants what it has long done for other groups. "We are speaking to students on the areas they are most interested in," he says. To some admissions officials, Penn was taking risks with students' privacy. S. Caroline Kerr, the senior assistant director of admissions at Dartmouth, says that sending gay themed information to students can be delicate. "A lot of them aren't out to their parents or might have only come out to some friends," she says. "We're more concerned about how we approach them with information than I perhaps am with different students. If someone talks about involvement with the gay student alliance in their essay, I'm not adding them to the list." But Dartmouth is, for the second year, sending information about gay life and organizations to students who specifically request it on forms asking about their interests. Ms. Kerr says that "I have gotten some raised eyebrows" from alumni, who have been surprised to find that there are special recruiting efforts for gay students and have asked, "Do you mean to tell me you are admitting someone based on this?" She counters: "That is not the case. You're not admitting anyone based on a single aspect of their candidacy." The University of Southern California, too, reaches out to applicants who identify themselves as gay or transgender. Prospective students can have a "Rainbow Floor Overnight Experience" a night on the gay floor of a residence hall and a day visiting their host's classes and student organizations. Derek Pooley, an admissions counselor at the State University of New York at Potsdam, manned a booth at the New York college fair this past fall. "The first person I had come up to me was a drag queen," he says. "I thought that was fantastic." He says, though, that not many in attendance expressed a strong interest in Potsdam, perhaps because it doesn't have a reputation as a gay haven. Mr. Pooley, who is gay and graduated from there last year, let a lot of people know "I had a great experience; not once did I ever feel uncomfortable there." Ms. Pepper has served as program coordinator for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies at Yale, which is known for its curriculum on gay issues. She says that while some institutions, including Yale, get reputations as a gay school, "you don't want to just take any school on its reputation." Campus Pride's Web site serves as a virtual college fair for gay friendly colleges, and provides a sense of the activities and services geared to various interests. Its "campus climate index" ranks colleges based on programs and policies, including identifying those with strong ones to protect gay students say, explicitly including them in their declarations against discrimination. Another clue to an institution's commitment: whether staff members serve as advisers to gay student groups, and what accommodations are made. Transgender students, Ms. Pepper says, would want to know if the health center provides hormone shots as part of the health plan. The Princeton Review, which surveys 122,000 students on a variety of topics for its "Best 371 Colleges: 2010 Edition," has come out with a ranking of colleges where the gay community is "most accepted." (New York University was No. 1.) That approach, however, drew criticism from Mr. Windmeyer: asking the overall population whether gays are accepted on campus "Oh, gay people, I love 'em!" he mocks "is not the way to assess how gay students feel." Campus Pride is working on its own survey, which Mr. Windmeyer says he hopes to publish in September. Mr. McIntyre, the admissions officer from Indianapolis, says that a welcoming environment is only part of what makes a campus right for a prospective gay student. "It's important that when students are looking for colleges, it's not, 'What's the best college I can get into?' but 'What's the best fit for me?,'" he says. Mr. McIntyre represented his university at a Campus Pride fair earlier this year at the University of Southern California. He took his 17 year old son, Anderson, who had come out to him two years ago. Mr. McIntyre says he saw the trip as an opportunity for his son to explore campuses' attitudes and acceptance. But Anderson was not so much impressed by whether a college was gay friendly as its focus on his areas of interest. "That's great," he told his father, "but do they have photography?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
This is a fresh take on the American road story, filled with people and ideas we rarely get to see onstage. And if, from the start, it's clear where the ride is headed through encounters and adventures to accommodation and rapprochement Ms. Hudes still makes room for a surprise conclusion that widens the perspective and encompasses great loss. Let's just say the trip doesn't end in Los Angeles. But along the way, "Miss You Like Hell" too often falls short of its own ambitions. In its eagerness to spotlight the women's present day lives, it leaves Beatriz's back story seriously underdeveloped. We never learn what she does to get by she may be an artist or a welder or both or what really happened with Olivia's father. That he doesn't appear seems fair enough, but that he is vilified in absentia opens up questions the text isn't prepared to answer. At other times it answers questions that didn't need to be asked. Though some of the women's adventures are pertinent to the theme for an undocumented immigrant, a minor traffic stop quite naturally becomes an existential problem too much time is turned over to diversions apparently meant to be distracting or, worse, heartwarming. So in Skokie, Ill., mother and daughter meet a retired gay couple (Michael Mulheren and David Patrick Kelly) who are partway through their project of getting married in all 50 states. Neither the show nor the actors seem comfortable with this cute, inorganic story line. And a side trip to Yellowstone National Park, where one of Olivia's blog followers is a junior ranger, is the kind of scene that is justified only by the authors' needs, not by the characters'. It's probably no coincidence that the musical numbers arising from these detours fall flat. Ms. McKeown, a folk rock artist who borrows liberally from many genres, has produced a full AM FM spectrum of contextual styles, but for the most part they lack the structural underpinnings that let musical theater songs do the heavy work asked of them. The lyrics are too often wet and purple, with mushy off rhymes that are particularly problematic in up tempo numbers (like the gay couple's "My Bell's Been Rung") that need the snap of precision. Ms. Rubin Vega, with her rough charisma, and Ms. Jimenez, with her youthful loveliness and blue sky voice, generally make you forget all that. I'm a bit surprised, though, that a production directed by Lear deBessonet requires such forgetting. Ms. deBessonet, the creator of the marvelous Public Works series and the director of a bubbly production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Delacorte last summer, is usually expert at keeping tonal balance. Here she leans into rather than minimizes a tone that is often thick and even mawkish, a problem exacerbated by a physical production (by the set designer Riccardo Hernandez) that feels harshly minimal and until a powerful, on the nose gesture at the end too vague. It may be that "Miss You Like Hell," which evolved from Ms. Hudes's 2009 drama "26 Miles" and had its premiere as a musical at the La Jolla Playhouse in 2016, just needs more time. Certainly events have caught up with (and in some ways outrun) its tear jerking story, which is pre emptively set in 2014, before the Trump presidency. But you can't set the audience in 2014; when an officer wearing an ICE uniform appears onstage, everyone knows what nightmare is coming. Of course, part of Ms. Hudes's plan is to make us understand that people like Beatriz whose lives have been spent, as one smart lyric has it, looking over their shoulders always did. The rest of us are just catching up. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
"And can I just say, I'm very impressed that so many government officials are willing to come out against Facebook, especially when you consider how much Facebook knows about them." TREVOR NOAH "So the F.T.C. is saying that Facebook must be broken up. To be clear, Facebook has not been broken up yet, but it has changed its status to 'It's complicated.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "What's amazing to me is that, even though America is so divided right now, almost every state agrees that something needs to be done about big tech. And, look, whatever the merits of this particular lawsuit, the fact that it was brought at all should be a warning for Facebook, because if what you're doing is so egregious that you're bringing California and Mississippi together, you done expletive up." TREVOR NOAH "Of course, if Facebook does break up, it faces the daunting task of going through and manually untagging all the photos of it together." STEPHEN COLBERT "So Facebook could be in real trouble, which seems crazy, since they look so happy in all those pics they post. Their life is definitely way better than mine." STEPHEN COLBERT | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Last week, FX announced that it had picked up "Trust," a new limited series from Danny Boyle, the acclaimed director of "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Steve Jobs." The 10 episode season will be about the kidnapping of the oil fortune heir John Paul Getty III. This is just the latest limited series in the FX lineup. The cable channel is now showing "American Crime Story," about the O. J. Simpson trial, and it broadcasts other anthologies like "American Horror Story" and "Fargo," which change characters, story lines and settings from season to season (the next season of "American Crime Story" will be about Hurricane Katrina). On ABC, the anthology show "American Crime" completed its second season on Wednesday night, and Fox already announced that it would bring back its anthology series "Scream Queens" for a second season. I recently spoke with FX's chief executive, John Landgraf, and Ryan Murphy, an executive producer of "American Crime Story," "American Horror Story" and "Scream Queens," about why they think this form of television works and why we're going to see many more limited series. It was a time when the television business model dictated that producers needed to create 22 episodes a year. If the series had few continuing story lines, all the better, since that meant it would repeat better. And to get a series to syndication, it had to reach at least 100 episodes. "What you were saying to artists was: Come up with the best show you can, given those requirements," Mr. Landgraf said. "And that basically eliminated the potential existence of virtually every great show that's been made since 'The Sopranos.' " "The Sopranos" had its premiere in 1999, and the golden age of television started in earnest. The show's story lines were dark and developed over numerous episodes, and the series spawned a new type of business model for television. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. "But then that becomes its own orthodoxy," Mr. Landgraf said. "Now, we make serialized shows. They have to be 13 episodes or 10 episodes a season. And if you don't have at least five seasons, we can't sell them. Six seasons is better. So now instead of making 22 episodes and 100 episodes, we're trying to make 91 episodes over seven years. And, by the way, it should be dark, it should be serialized, it should have an antihero. Now you're telling artists: Write the best show you can given these restrictions." After Mr. Murphy pitched "American Horror Story" several years ago, Mr. Landgraf had a revelation. "The innovation isn't the 13 episode, seven year show," Mr. Landgraf said. "The innovation is fit the business model to the artist, not the artist to the business model." Mr. Murphy said that making contained, 10 episode seasons with different casts has significantly expanded the talent available to him. John Travolta stars on this season of "American Crime Story," and Mr. Murphy got him to sign on because it wasn't an exhaustive commitment. "You're never going to get Jessica Lange or John Travolta or Kathy Bates to sign on the dotted line to give you seven years of their life doing the same character," he said. "I don't think that they're interested in that. By doing these one year talent deals, you're allowing talent that wasn't interested in television before to become part of it. Like Matthew McConaughey on 'True Detective.' " It Works Better in the Peak TV Era There were 412 scripted series in all television last year, a record breaker. This year, there might be even more. The number of shows and the nickname for it, "peak TV" set off a monthslong conversation in the industry about whether there was simply too much television. Mr. Murphy says these types of series provide an antidote to that. "There is so much content out there and, for me, I don't know that I have the time that I used to have to dedicate myself to slavish viewing of a seven year show," he said. "What I like about this is it's 10 or 12 episodes and you're off to another story. This story has a beginning, middle and end, and this form of storytelling more and more reflects the world we're living in. We live in an A.D.D. world." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
It's a new season with new hotel openings. Although fall usually sees a glut of splashy properties making their debut, that's not the story line this year, according to the hotel specialist Bobby Zur, who owns Travel Artistry, a consultancy in Franklin Lakes, N.J. "It's not uncommon for hotels to delay their openings, but the holdups are especially pronounced this fall for a number of reasons including the U.S. elections, European volatility and concerns over Zika," he said. Delays aside, there are a number of notable accommodations that travelers will be able to check into before the end of 2016. Here are seven, chosen with the assistance of industry experts. Set in Tel Aviv's vibrant Magen David Square, the 40 room Poli House is near the Mediterranean beachfront and has contemporary interiors created by the designer Karim Rashid and a rooftop pool with city views. Because most hotels in Tel Aviv are larger chains, the Poli is a welcome change and will draw in younger travelers, said Leah Smith, the president of the Denver travel consultancy Tafari Travel. Rates from 185 a night, including breakfast. At 22 acres, this 77 villa property is a retreat with a "water amphitheater," a spa, a nature center and a dive center. Stacy Small, the founder of the Los Angeles based consultancy Elite Travel International, said that travelers tend to have an instant level of comfort with the St. Regis name so the property should have no problem attracting loyalists. Prices from 1,770 a night, including breakfast. Four Seasons Hotel New York Downtown, New York The 189 room Four Seasons, set in part of a new 82 story Robert A.M. Stern designed skyscraper in Lower Manhattan, will attract both business and leisure travelers: "The Four Seasons is near a lot of businesses, but the downtown area has really developed as a destination, and the hotel has plenty to draw in vacationers," Ms. Smith said. Property highlights include the steakhouse Cut by Wolfgang Puck, the chef's first restaurant in Manhattan; a seven treatment room spa; and a 75 foot long lap pool. Prices from 599 a night. Set in a striking 18th century building in Barcelona's Gothic Quarter, this 57 room property has Gothic architecture and an aesthetic that blends modern and rustic. Amenities include an Italian restaurant, a rooftop with city and sea views and a spa. "Soho House does a great job with accommodations and has a big following," Ms. Smith said. Prices from 220 euros a night (about 250). This hotel, in San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter, is the debut of Pendry, the luxury brand from Montage Hotels Resorts. The airy property has 317 loft like rooms, a rooftop pool, a spa and six restaurants and entertainment venues. Mr. Zur of Travel Artistry predicted that Pendry would appeal to millennials. "The hotel has a great design sense, and you get the Montage level of service at a more affordable price tag," he said. Prices from 495 a night. Charleston has lacked a luxury hotel, according to Ms. Small, but that scenario may have changed with the opening of the Dewberry, overlooking the city's historic Marion Square. The property has 155 rooms, each with eclectic furniture; there's also a spa and a Southern restaurant, Henrietta's Brasserie, that has been open since June and is already a local favorite. Prices from 325 a night. The Thai hospitality brand Akaryn brings much needed upscale accommodations to the capital city of Laos, Ms. Smith said. "The landscape and culture in Laos are stunning and still haven't been discovered by tourists compared with other parts of Southeast Asia such as Vietnam, but this hotel will certainly be a lure," she said. The 32 suite resort has a prime position near attractions like the Haw Phra Kaew Temple; there is also a large spa, six food and beverage outlets and an outdoor infinity pool. Prices from 345 a night. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Bad Bunny released "X 100PRE" just before Christmas, putting an exclamation point at the end of a year that, even without it, very much belonged to him. He'd already been one of the most versatile and busy collaborators in the increasingly fluid space where Latin trap flirts with reggaeton, and also Latin pop, bachata and hip hop. And thanks to his appearance on Cardi B's "I Like It," for a time the No. 1 song in the country, he leapfrogged his way into becoming one of the most recognizable voices in pop music. At this show, he pivoted among his many styles: brawny rapping on "Caro," conversational calm on "Otra Noche en Miami," swinging melody on "Diles," his first single, released in 2016. Sometimes, on record, Bad Bunny's singing seems like a byproduct of his rapping. But onstage, on songs like "Solo De Mi," he was comfortable leaning into the full tenderness of his voice. And in the context of this performance, it was also clear how direct, and almost cloying, his Drake collaboration "Mia" is a song designed for smooth absorption that never pushes the edges of Bad Bunny's gifts. Midway through the show, he was joined by the Puerto Rican reggaeton star Arcangel for a couple of songs, including "Tu No Vive Asi." (Arcangel was arrested on Thursday in Las Vegas on a misdemeanor domestic battery charge; his appearance here was a surprise.) The Dominican American rapper Tali Goya also appeared for one song. But the more crucial pairing came toward the end of the night, when Bad Bunny was performing "La Romana." The song starts out as a trap boomer with bachata overtones but shifts gears into something more pulsing and urgent. That's when El Alfa, the titan of Dominican dembow, shows up. At this show, he ran onstage in a jacket covered in flames made of sequins, rapping in the rat tat tat style that he's been honing since the early 2010s and which he showcased so effectively on last year's bruiser of an album, "El Hombre." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The American Dance Festival, six weeks of performances and classes in Durham, N.C., wrapped up in July. But this summer, the festival has had a New York coda of sorts, presenting two artists from its 82nd season at the Joyce Theater: Tatiana Baganova and her company Provincial Dances Theater, from Yekaterinburg, Russia, and the Cuban American choreographer Rosie Herrera, whose troupe is based in Miami. Each choreographer brought a double bill; Ms. Baganova's began on Monday and Ms. Herrera's on Thursday. The two share a theatrical sensibility and an interest in juxtaposing disparate, sometimes fantastical vignettes, as if telling stories out of order. But while both programs seemed to aim for a surreal effect, neither proved particularly transporting. Ms. Baganova's "Maple Garden," created for the American Dance Festival's International Choreographers program in 1999, opens with the sound of hooting birdsong and a woman suspended in midair, a lantern in hand. Perhaps she has just leapt from the spiky branches of the barren tree beside her. Ms. Baganova layers more whimsical images on top of this: A dancer shambles through with a huge butterfly net; another prunes the tree; a man tousles his partner's hair, then pulls strings out from her clothes as she cackles like a windup doll. With their white face paint and red lips and, for the women, bustled skirts that bounce as they walk, these could be characters out of a strange folk tale. The echoing birdsong returns every so often, alternating with rhythmically ripe music by the Belgian band Die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung and the Moscow Art Trio. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
BEACH SESSIONS DANCE SERIES at Rockaway Beach (Aug. 19, 6 p.m.). Sand and waves provide the backdrop for this free summer series, which returns with a pair of new works. "At Night" is a duet created in darkness by Jodi Melnick and Jon Kinzel, two mesmerizing movers allowing their solo dance practices to intersect. Also on the program is "Fun Young God," created by an anonymous choreographer, in which Pierre Guilbault and Cori Kresge replicate the movements of rock and pop stars including Mick Jagger and Beyonce, meshing those demeanors with their own to comment on celebrity, youth and faith. beachsessionsdanceseries.com BROOKLYN TOURING OUTFIT at JACK (Aug. 22 25, 8 p.m.). Last year the dancer Pepper Fajans and his nonagenarian colleague, the dance archivist David Vaughan, joined forces to create "Co. Venture," a thoughtful exploration of their friendship integrating storytelling, movement and puppetry. With his latest project, "Co. Incident," Mr. Fajans applies a similar format to his relationships with other friends and fellow performers, including Ilona Bito, Maiko Kikuchi and Annie Young. Tailored to the idiosyncratic performance space that is JACK, the work features lighting by Serena Wong, projections by Alex Romania and sound by Joseph Wolfslau. jackny.org THE CURRENT SESSIONS at the Wild Project (Aug. 18 19, 8 p.m.; Aug. 20, 7 p.m.). Founded and organized by the producer Alexis Convento, this series returns to its East Village home under the heading "Volume VII: On Resistance," featuring three programs "Rescue," "Refuse" and "Restrict" with three artists on each. Coming from a range of cultural and choreographic vantage points, participants convene around the theme of the body's potential to challenge systems of oppression. The lineup includes Elena Rose Light (Friday), Jonathan Gonzalez (Saturday) and Dalel Bacre's arteNomada (Sunday). 866 811 4111, thecurrentsessions.com | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The bad news for Alex Jones, the notorious internet conspiracy theorist, keeps coming. Late Friday, Apple removed his Infowars app from its App Store, eliminating one of the final avenues for Mr. Jones to reach a mainstream audience. An Apple spokeswoman said it was removed under company policies that prohibit apps from including content that is "offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust or in exceptionally poor taste." She declined to say whether any specific content in the app led to its removal. Read more about the reckoning, in court and public opinion, that threatens Mr. Jones's lucrative business. Apple had removed Mr. Jones's show from its podcast service on Aug. 5, leading Facebook, YouTube and other tech companies to also eliminate Mr. Jones and his Infowars site from their services. Those moves have cut off Mr. Jones from a wider audience; social media was his primary channel for finding new viewers. After those removals, downloads of the Infowars mobile app spiked, and Mr. Jones has recently been directing his followers to find his show through Infowars' website and app. Apple's move does not affect iPhone users who had already downloaded the Infowars app, but it limits any more users from downloading it. The app is still available on smartphones that run Google's Android software, which backs roughly 80 percent of the world's smartphones. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Q. I received one (and only one) warning from a friend that she had gotten a "this might be of interest" email from me and said I was hacked. Nobody else I have asked got it. Is there a way to verify I have been hacked before I go through the trouble of changing my primary email address? A. If only one friend received such a message and you can still log into your email account, it's more likely a spammer is "spoofing" (forging) your address and has not fully hacked in to take control of the account. Spoofing is a popular way to evade junk mail filters and get you to open the message and possibly click on a fraudulent or malware loaded link. The forged address also lets the perpetrator avoid bounce back messages to a traceable account. Unfortunately, there's not a lot you can do about a remote spammer's sticking your address in an email "From" field. Your information may have even been collected from the contact list of the person who reported the suspicious message, if that person's computer is infected with malware. Spammers can also grab working email addresses from public posts you've made online, as well as from mailing lists or web pages. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
A week before her wedding, Megan Janko was in a hotel room in Folsom, Calif., poring over the guest list. She would have rather been at home in her farmhouse, two hours away, which she shared with her fiance, Joey Best; her 12 year old son, Vincent Harris; and Mr. Best's 11 year old son, Henry. But the Camp Fire in their hometown Paradise, Calif., burned that farmhouse to the ground. Instead of finding a little prewedding tranquillity at the hotel, what Ms. Janko, 31, found at the overbooked Larkspur Landing was a small space to sleep beside Mr. Best, 37, on a foldout sofa. Sharing the room's double bed were Mr. Best's parents, Joseph and Katherine Best, whose house was also lost to the fire in Paradise. Vincent was on a narrow cot; Henry moved in with his mother temporarily in a different California city. The rest of the room was occupied by Joseph and Katherine Best's two rat terriers, Mr. Best and Ms. Janko's two bearded dragon lizards and their pair of finches. The lizards took up residence in the bathtub, the finches, in their cage, on the crowded bathroom counter. Ms. Janko and Mr. Best's own dog, Luke, a German shepherd, had to be dropped at a shelter to avoid eviction from the hotel. He doesn't get along with the other dogs. Just after the fire drove Ms. Janko, Mr. Best and their children from their home, they found a hotel in Roseville, a little closer to Paradise. But after a few days, they had to repack their few belongings, one of them a marriage license. "Previous bookings and things," Ms. Janko explained about the move. Ms. Janko and Mr. Best met in 2010 in Paradise at Kreative Beginnings, a child care center Katherine Best opened in 2007. Ms. Janko was applying for a job as a teacher. Mr. Best, a teacher and the school's bus driver, sat in on the interview alongside his mother, the director. "There was interest right away," said Mr. Best, and not only the professional kind. But Ms. Janko, who landed the job, was still in a committed relationship with Vincent's father. "We would sit by the pool together, and I would be talking about my issues with my son's dad, and he would tell me about his breakup with his son's mom," she said. Just after school dismissal one day in February 2012, they were cleaning up a classroom when she leaned over and kissed him. "It was totally out of character for me," she said. Mr. Best felt the thrill of possibility he knew something romantic had been brewing but he held back. He was still recovering from the breakup he had gotten used to discussing with Ms. Janko poolside. "I knew I needed someone who was really going to care about me," he said. Before they had a chance to figure out if she was the one, Ms. Janko was laid off by his mother at the child care center. "Joey has the biggest heart, and he's kind of old fashioned, which I love," Ms. Janko said. "I can be 100 percent myself around him." They nurtured their relationship first through social media, then via phone calls and finally with visits neither wanted to end. Within months, she said, "I decided, I just want to be with this person all the time." In 2014, Ms. Janko and Vincent moved into the three bedroom Paradise farmhouse with Mr. Best and Henry. Two years later, she was rehired by Kreative Beginnings. The boys, who have known each other since their own preschool days, have become like brothers. "It's a typical blended family, where one minute they're fighting and the next minute they're best friends," Ms. Janko said. Though they were home most nights watching movies, she and Mr. Best are alternative music fans and regular concertgoers. Mr. Best plays guitar in a four piece local outfit, Of the Grey, that covers some of their favorite bands, Nine Inch Nails, Tool and Primus. On the evening of Dec. 9, 2017, Mr. Best was playing with Of the Grey at Lost on Main, a Chico nightclub. Ms. Janko wondered why so many of their Kreative Beginnings co workers were in the audience. "It was this great turnout of everyone we worked with, including his parents and his sister," she said. Sarah Khalil, Mr. Best's younger sister, was Kreative Beginnings' office manager. "Joey had tricked me, but I didn't catch on." Ms. Janko, as usual, was holding a guitar pick for Mr. Best. "He has this special pick, and when he needs to use it he motions for me to come up to the stage and give it to him," she said. When he motioned to her that evening, the band paused. "I ran up there with it, and he started saying all this crazy stuff and then he was down on one knee." In one hand, he held his guitar. In the other, a diamond solitaire ring. Though she couldn't make out everything he said through the club's noise, she does recall the words, "Will you marry me?" "I love the idea of him proposing that way, but at the moment, to be honest, I was mortified," Ms. Janko said. That didn't stop her from whispering a tearful yes. By early spring, Ms. Janko and Mr. Best had settled on a wedding date, Nov. 24, 2018, and the place, the Honey Run Covered Bridge, a 132 year old wooden structure that connected Paradise to Chico. The mood of the wedding had been dreamed up by Ms. Janko long before. "I wanted a rustic wedding with votives in Mason jars, baby's breath, and blush and burgundy colors for November," she said. "We both love fall." Ms. Janko, Mr. Best and his parents found each other on safer ground within hours in a Costco parking lot in Chico. Ms. Khalil, her husband, Nader Khalil, and their eight month old daughter, Iris, arrived a little later. Ms. Khalil had been among the first notified on Nov. 8 that her Paradise house was burning. Before 7:30 a.m., she had already returned home from her desk at Kreative Beginnings to make sure her husband and daughter had evacuated. As word of the fire's increasing fury spread, she went home again for baby supplies. Before she left school that second time, a shy inquiry was made by her future sister in law. "I was worried I was going to seem insensitive if I asked her to grab the dress," Ms. Janko said. She was quickly reassured: "It's on my list," Ms. Khalil told her. On Nov. 24, Ms. Janko zipped into that dress and married Mr. Best at the Creekside Rose Garden, the site the couple initially chose for their reception. The historic Honey Run Covered Bridge didn't survive the fire. Neither did Kreative Beginnings or any of the Best family houses. "There are angels walking around among us," said Mr. Best, in a navy tweed suit with a burgundy tie. His groomsmen his father, Henry, Vincent, and Justin Hurd, an old friend wore gray suits with burgundy ties. All the suits had been ordered from overseas before the fire, their delivery rerouted by Mr. Best after he lost his home. Just before sunset, Ms. Janko walked down an aisle lined with white roses with her father to the tune of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." Her mother, Rhonda Eisenhut of Princeton, Minn., watched from a seat near the altar, a wood topped gazebo adorned with ivory pillars. Four bridal attendants, including Ms. Khalil, wore burgundy floor length dresses and held blush bouquets. Armando Rey, Mr. Best's uncle and the wedding officiant through the Universal Life Church, started the half hour ceremony with a prayer for those displaced by the Camp Fire. "Lord, only you can make miracles happen, and we're asking for one," he said. Mr. Best and Ms. Janko are not yet sure where they and their boys will settle. A fund raising site on Facebook has been created for the family. But "I know somehow we'll be O.K., that we're not going to end up on the streets," Ms. Janko said. For the moment, she was grateful to see her friends and family members out of harm's way and enjoying themselves under mostly blue skies. "For us, this is one day to forget the situation we're in and celebrate," Ms. Janko said. "We have to remember there's still joy in this world." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The sexual harassment scandal that engulfed Fox News last year and led to the ouster of its chairman, Roger Ailes, continued to batter the network on Monday, as a new lawsuit described unwanted sexual advances by Mr. Ailes and two major advertisers pulled their spots from the show of its top rated host, Bill O'Reilly. Mercedes Benz and Hyundai said they were withdrawing their ads from Mr. O'Reilly's prime time show, "The O'Reilly Factor," after The New York Times published an investigation this weekend that found five women who made allegations of sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior against him. Those five women received settlements totaling about 13 million, The Times reported. Together, the developments portray a network buffeted by allegations on multiple fronts, even as it draws record ratings with programming supportive of President Trump. Staff members remain anxious, some said on Monday, over questions about its workplace culture and its priorities. If more advertisers abandon Mr. O'Reilly's show, it will be a blow to Fox News, which provides billions of dollars in revenue each year to its parent company, 21st Century Fox. Mr. O'Reilly has long been the pugnacious face of a prime time lineup that sets the tone for conservative commentary. His show attracts almost four million viewers a night, and from 2014 through 2016 it generated more than 446 million in advertising revenue, according to the research firm Kantar Media. "Given the importance of women in every aspect of our business, we don't feel this is a good environment in which to advertise our products right now," Donna Boland, the manager of corporate communications for Mercedes Benz, wrote in an email. Mercedes Benz has spent an estimated 1.9 million in ads on "The O'Reilly Factor" in the last year, according to iSpot.tv, the TV ad analytics firm. Hyundai cited "the recent and disturbing allegations" in announcing that it was removing its ads from Mr. O'Reilly's show. "We had upcoming advertising spots on the show, but are reallocating them," Hyundai said in an emailed statement. "As a company, we seek to partner with companies and programming that share our values of inclusion and diversity," the statement said. "We will continue to monitor and evaluate the situation as we plan future advertising decisions." Julie Roginsky has appeared on the Fox News show, "The Five." Despite Mr. O'Reilly's history of settlements and the series of allegations against him, the company has extended his contract, which was set to expire this year, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. O'Reilly makes about 18 million per year. When the company extended the contract, it knew of multiple settlements that had been reached with women who had complained about his behavior. The company says it has discussed the issue with Mr. O'Reilly. It believes his new contract gives it more leverage over him regarding his behavior, according to two people familiar with the matter. Mr. O'Reilly has said that the allegations are without merit. He did not address the controversy on his show Monday night. Earlier on Monday, Julie Roginsky, a current Fox News contributor, filed a lawsuit against Mr. Ailes, Fox News and Bill Shine, the network's co president, asserting that she faced retaliation for rebuffing Mr. Ailes's sexual advances and for refusing to disparage Gretchen Carlson, the former Fox News host who sued Mr. Ailes last summer. And a former regular guest on Mr. O'Reilly's program, Wendy Walsh, who had recounted her allegations against him to The Times, held a news conference with her lawyer to discuss those claims and to call for an independent inquiry into sexual harassment at the network. Also, the United States attorney's office in Manhattan is investigating Fox News, including how it structured settlements. Retail earnings and Black Friday: the week in business. Elizabeth Holmes will resume her testimony in her fraud trial. On Monday, Fox News moved to contain the fallout from the weekend's developments, urging its employees in an internal memo to report inappropriate behavior to the human resources department or other network executives. "Particularly in light of some of the accounts published over the last few days, I wanted to re emphasize the message we have been conveying at our training sessions for several months," said Kevin Lord, the network's new head of human resources, who was hired in the aftermath of the Ailes scandal. Irena Briganti, a Fox News spokeswoman, declined to comment on advertising decisions, Ms. Roginsky's lawsuit or Ms. Walsh's news conference. Ms. Walsh, speaking in Los Angeles, repeated the account she provided to The Times. She said that Mr. O'Reilly did not follow through on a verbal offer to make her a contributor to his show after she declined an invitation to go to his hotel suite after a 2013 dinner in Los Angeles that was arranged by his secretary. She has not received a settlement and said she does not want any money. She did not report her complaints to Fox News at the time, she said, because she did not want to jeopardize her career prospects. Ms. Walsh is recounting her experiences publicly despite receiving a warning on Saturday from Mr. O'Reilly's lawyer, Fredric S. Newman, demanding that she retract the statements she made to The Times. The letter, obtained by The Times, said that her assertions were "patently false and highly defamatory" and said to "cease and desist all defamation of Mr. O'Reilly's character." "Your segment was a failure," Mr. Newman wrote. "That is established as matter of undisputable fact in the minute by minute analysis of your segment, which showed that the segment was unsuccessful." Fox News's troubles continued when Ms. Roginsky filed her suit in New York State Supreme Court. The suit echoes the complaints that other women have made about Mr. Ailes and the culture at the network, where women have said they faced harassment and feared reporting it. Ms. Roginsky's lawyer is Nancy Erika Smith, the same lawyer who represented Ms. Carlson, who received a 20 million settlement after leaving the network. Ms. Roginsky, who has been a paid contributor on Fox News since 2011, stated in her complaint that Mr. Ailes made sexist comments and unwanted sexual advances toward her during one on one meetings in his office, including requiring that she "bend down to kiss him hello" when he sat in a low armchair and telling her that they would get into "so much trouble" if he took her "out for a drink." Mr. Ailes also would tell her that she should "engage in sexual relationships with 'older, married, conservative men,'" the suit stated. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
TAG Heuer has designs on soccer. After signing on as the official timekeeper of Major League Soccer in the United States, the German Bundesliga and the Chinese Football Association Super League, the high end watch brand announced its sponsorship on Tuesday of the English Premier League, the richest and most watched national soccer competition, which includes many of the sport's most popular clubs, like Manchester United and Arsenal. The three year partnership makes explicit TAG's intention to capitalize on and dominate the most powerful sports field in the world, which draws fans of all socioeconomic backgrounds. Starting next season, the boards held up by the fourth official (the man on the sidelines who signals substitutions and extra time) will be shaped like the watch face of a TAG Heuer Carrera, and referees will receive specially designed smartwatches that "will meet (officials') timing and training needs." "This partnership will be our biggest sponsorship in sport ever, with reach that will go beyond the scope of our other timekeeping collaborations," said Rob Diver, managing director of TAG Heuer UK, adding that for the time being, it would maintain its partnerships in other sports like Formula 1 motor racing. "To be honest, I can't believe we haven't done this sooner." The Premier League is in the final weeks of a sponsorship agreement of 40 million pounds, or 58 million, per season title with Barclays bank. But it recently changed its business model, abandoning a single lead sponsor in favor of around half a dozen major partners. Although neither TAG nor the league disclosed the exact value of the deal, it is estimated to be around 7.3 million. Other brands to sign up include Barclays, Nike and the video game giant Electronic Arts making TAG Heuer the only luxury player. Luxury watch brands and the world of sports have long been bedfellows, so the news of this latest marketing marriage is unlikely to surprise many. Still, it is notable, for a few reasons. First, TAG decided to associate itself with a league, rather than a particular individual or team. There have been scandals in the private lives of big name players in the Premier League like Wayne Rooney and Ryan Giggs, and TAG was among the first brands to cut ties with the tennis player Maria Sharapova in March after she acknowledged failing a drug test, so the brand's shift from explicit or individual endorsements is noteworthy. "When you work at a brand, it is your responsibility to maintain the integrity of that investment," Mr. Driver said. "Your job is to protect it and hand it on to the next generation." Second, given that the brand is in the middle of one of the most challenging trading environments for the Swiss watch industry, the decision to embark on such an expensive foray into relatively new marketing territory might raise some eyebrows. But watches and jewelry proved a bright spot in the most recent set of earnings results provided by the owner of TAG, LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, this month. Revenue grew 7 percent during the quarter, and TAG Heuer was highlighted for its particularly strong performance. "Unlike some of our competitors,TAG Heuer is not a brand that is hugely influenced by the ebbs and flows of the tourist market," " Mr. Driver said. "Our focus tends to be local customers within regional markets, so we don't make these kinds of decisions depending on the fluctuations of the macroeconomic climate. We are interested in areas that have long term value, in good times and bad." In attendance at the announcement in London was Claudio Ranieri, manager of the Leicester City club. This small underdog team, whose players cost less than a third of many richer and more glamorous rivals, is poised to win the league. As it has proved this season, soccer still is a game where there can be plenty of surprises. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The year is 1884 and Enola Holmes is on a mission to find her mother, escape her brothers and live life on her own terms. It's a tall order for the teenage sister of Sherlock Holmes, whose age and gender make her battle an uphill one. But her will won't be broken, and in the Netflix film "Enola Holmes," directed by Harry Bradbeer, our title character proves this to anyone in doubt. After Enola (Millie Bobby Brown of "Stranger Things") discovers on the morning of her 16th birthday that her mother (Helena Bonham Carter) has disappeared, she reluctantly finds herself under the care of her brothers Mycroft (Sam Claflin) and Sherlock (Henry Cavill). Mycroft wants to send Enola to finishing school, but Enola, who has been raised by her mother to be independent, refuses to have her identity defined by domesticity. Motivated by a set of clues left by her mother, Enola escapes to London. On her way to the city, she crosses paths with Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge), a young lord also on the run from a suffocating fate. The pair form a predictable (but no less tender) bond. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
New York Theater Ballet may be small, but its repertory is mighty. For the latest installment of the Legends Visionaries series, Diana Byer, the artistic director, dusted off some of the company's amiable works by an array of accomplished choreographers. Leading off the program at the 92nd Street Y on Saturday was Pam Tanowitz's "Short Memory," created for the company in 2013 and set to music by Lou Harrison and Henry Cowell. "Short Memory" was the evening's freshest offering, notably the section set to Mr. Harrison's "Reel." The music's lively warmth made Ms. Tanowitz's stringent steps playful, imbuing her rhythmic footwork with a pulse in which eccentricities heels landing forcibly on the floor, crossings with flexed feet were integrated into the dancers' bodies. It helped that the music was live. The pianist Michael Scales, joined by the violinist Pauline Kim Harris, played from the back of the stage. (The only low point was when the dancer Steven Melendez led Ms. Harris, with a lugubrious air, to her spot.) In her work, where shapes are absolute and precision is everything, Ms. Tanowitz provides the dancers with some much needed rigor. A balcony scene from "Romeo and Juliet," by Sallie Wilson, followed, which was so perfunctory it made you wonder: Why include it? The dancers, Elena Zahlmann and Choong Hoon Lee, were more aloof than passionate. In "A Rugged Flourish," from 2011, the British choreographer Richard Alston found inspiration in Aaron Copland's "Piano Variations." In this ballet for seven, a young man encounters a group of green clad nymphs. In his opening solo, Mr. Melendez, with serene virility, stretched a leg behind and pressed the floor with a hand repeating the pose at different angles as if marking his territory. The nymphs crossed briskly in jumps that tickled the stage, and one of them, Rie Ogura, emerged for a pas de deux with Mr. Melendez. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
I FOUND MY WAY to Wallace Stegner by accident. Really through three identical accidents, lightning strikes that I'm only now beginning to suspect were signs. Given Stegner's lifelong fascination with the American West, a landscape simile seems appropriate. His writing, which includes memoir, history, biography and reportage as well as more than a dozen works of fiction, is like a vast prairie, its fertile valleys and desert patches shadowed by three mighty peaks. I stumbled on them in reverse order. Sometime in the late 1990s I pulled "Crossing to Safety" (1987), his affectionate, elegiac chronicle of the decades long friendship between two literary couples, from the jumbled shelf of a vacation rental cottage during a spell of gloomy summer weather. The same thing happened with the sprawling, multigenerational "Angle of Repose" (1971) in a different cabin a decade later, and with Stegner's career making, semi autobiographical fifth novel, "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" (1943), earlier this year. It was waiting for me in a temporary apartment in a faraway city. This is how it seems to be with Stegner now. You can usually find a copy or two of at least one of those books in a decent bookstore, but there is no Library of America collection of his writing (an honor recently bestowed on two of his former students, Robert Stone and Wendell Berry). His oeuvre occupies impressive shelf space in university libraries, but his name, though still attached to the creative writing fellowship program he established at Stanford after World War II, is hardly a fixture on college syllabuses or in the pages of scholarly journals. Stegner's books abide in an undervisited stretch of the American canon, like a national park you might drive past on the way to a theme park or ski resort. "The dean of Western writers" is the epithet most often attached to that name, but it's a description that obscures as much as it reveals, and that corrals a large and protean imagination into a parochial, regional identity. Stegner's books abide in an undervisited stretch of the American canon, like a national park you might drive past on the way to a theme park or ski resort. If you do visit, you find a topography that looks familiar at first glance as if from an old postcard but becomes stranger and more deeply shadowed the longer you stay. A tale of frontier adventure turns out to be the portrait of a marriage; a story of courtship and marriage evolves into a tableau of social and technological transformation; a nostalgic rumination on friendship slides toward generational tragedy. "Western" inevitably carries genre overtones cowboys and Indians, outlaws and railroad bosses, Zane Grey and Clint Eastwood as well as political implications. But Stegner trafficked neither in the tall tales of popular culture nor in the mythologies of Manifest Destiny, and was a lifelong and outspoken critic of the ways the West, as an abstract notion and a living environment, had been distorted, misunderstood and abused. Stegner was critical of the individualistic ethos of the West in all its manifestations: romantic, entrepreneurial and countercultural. Sometimes that makes him sound like a left wing critic of capitalism, sometimes like the deepest kind of conservative. His commitments to ecology, family and community against the forces of modern economic development leave him jarringly and thrillingly resistant to the ideological pigeonholing that has become our dominant form of cultural analysis. Monogamy, with its crags and chasms, is the most salient and imposing feature in his imaginative landscape. Stegner's settings range from academia and the literary world to mining camps and boomtowns, but his most consistent subject is marriage, represented in a mode more epic than romantic. Monogamy, with its crags and chasms, is the most salient and imposing feature in his imaginative landscape, the human undertaking around which all the others are organized. Marriages in his books are not always harmonious spouses quarrel, separate and sometimes stray but they always endure. In most of these books, certain elements repeat geographical dislocation, thwarted ambition, financial uncertainty, the death of a child. Time is marked by the milestones of family life, rather than the signposted public happenings that festoon historical and self consciously topical novels. Wars and presidential administrations pass almost without mention, perhaps because, even in the post frontier West, local matters of settlement and subsistence were likely to feel more pressing. More than that, political and even artistic concerns could seem abstract and insubstantial compared with the warmth and gravity of human relationships. In "Crossing to Safety," Stegner (in the persona of Larry Morgan) turns this feeling into something close to a principle: "We weren't indifferent. We lived in our times, which were hard times. We had our interests, which were mainly literary and intellectual and only occasionally, inescapably, political. But what memory brings back from there is not politics, or the meagerness of living on 150 a month, or even the writing I was doing, but the details of friendship parties, picnics, walks, midnight conversations, glimpses from the occasional unencumbered hours. Amicitia lasts better than res publica, and at least as well as ars poetica." Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start. None Learn what you should be reading this fall: Our collection of reviews on books coming out this season includes biographies, novels, memoirs and more. See what's new in October: Among this month's new titles are novels by Jonathan Franzen, a history of Black cinema and a biography by Katie Couric. Nominate a book: The New York Times Book Review has just turned 125. That got us wondering: What is the best book that was published during that time? Listen to our podcast: Featuring conversations with leading figures in the literary world, from Colson Whitehead to Leila Slimani, the Book Review Podcast helps you delve deeper into your favorite books. "Crossing to Safety" is one of the few great novels I can think of that take the adult friendship of two couples as their main concern, without spinning a melodramatic or comic web of jealousy or sexual intrigue. But the book is more than a fictionalized tribute to Wallace and Mary Stegner's enduring amicitia with Philip and Margaret Gray (renamed Sid and Charity Lang). It finds in that relationship an embodiment of the central ethical and aesthetic ideal in Stegner's work a vision of community. The picture of empty streets and stricken households of neighbors reluctant to open their doors, of public buildings hastily converted into morgues and wards makes for eerie reading now. It was nothing he took for granted. The bonds of affection that hold families and societies together are always fragile and embattled, always threatened by natural circumstances and the perversity of human will. Sometimes those forces converge, as in the 1918 influenza pandemic, which occupies around 60 pages (out of nearly 600) in "The Big Rock Candy Mountain." "On both coasts," Stegner writes, "the hospitals were jammed, the Army camps were crowded with sick soldiers, whole inland parts of the country were virtually isolated." This news, and then the flu itself, reach the town in Saskatchewan where Bo and Elsa Mason are living with their young sons, Chet and Bruce. Bo, who has recently given up farming for bootlegging (one of the many impetuous changes of plan he inflicts on his family), sees opportunity where others see catastrophe. A congenitally restless guy, he finds himself "disgusted, vaguely grouchy, irrationally sore at the farmers who sat around Anderson's all day and couldn't think of anything to do but tell bear stories about the flu." One of the stories is that whiskey is an effective medicine, but the town is dry, so Bo, heedless of expert advice and by nature resistant to any attempt to tell him what to do, hatches a plan to cross the border into Montana and bring back a few cases. He undertakes a thrilling, harrowing journey, driving in a blizzard on dubious roads through locked down villages and desolate farmsteads. It's an exciting ride a tour de force of precise, suspenseful prose and also an appalling study in selfishness and irresponsibility. Chasing after a big score, Bo spreads the virus across a wide swath of territory before coming home and falling sick, along with Elsa and Bruce. Bo, a rambunctious avatar of the unconfined, can do spirit of the West, is a mortal danger to everyone around him. The picture of empty streets and stricken households of neighbors reluctant to open their doors, of public buildings hastily converted into morgues and wards makes for eerie reading now. So does the portrait of Bo Mason, a man who thinks he can outwit biology and who places money over family safety or civic obligation. "That quarantine's nothing but a word," he says, and he goes about his business with blustery confidence in his own immunity to bad weather and financial miscalculation as well as infection. Elsa is anxious, disgusted and ashamed, but she can't stop him, and also can't help rooting for him. The reader might have the same mixed feelings. Bo Mason, who turns up again in a cluster of short stories published in the 1950s, and then in "Recapitulation" (1979), a slender sequel to "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," is Stegner's greatest creation. And vice versa, to the extent that Bo is George Stegner. "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" is the story of Wallace Stegner's childhood, during which he bounced around various Western spots including Seattle, Salt Lake City and Montana as well as Eastend, Saskatchewan propelled by his parents' rocky union and his father's seismic restlessness. Bo is the bad guy in these stories, a habitual braggart and a serial failure destined for a fate more tawdry than tragic, but like many literary villains he also has a vividness, an energy that makes him a source of intense fascination. The Mason marriage also suggests an allegory of the West itself, which Stegner saw as perpetually and fatally rived between a destructive, antisocial individualism and a too often stymied longing for stability and community. It takes almost no research and even less interpretive acumen to identify Bruce Mason, Bo's sensitive second son, as Wallace's alter ego. Unlike his athletic, easygoing older brother, Chet, Bruce is a worrier and a dreamer, the object of constant paternal bullying that sometimes erupts into outright brutality. Bruce is morally and emotionally aligned with his mother, Elsa, whose loyalty to Bo is the core mystery and the deep tragedy of the Mason family. Elsa, who runs away from her pious, hypocritical Norwegian father at the age of 18, takes up with Bo, the manager of a pool hall in a rough timber town, out of a mixture of rebelliousness, innocence and lust. Throughout their marriage her desire to settle down to a respectable way of living clashes with his antic pursuit of a ticket to the good life, however shady or disreputable the terms might be. Liquor, gambling, dubious mining schemes he never stops pulling the lever, and never hits the jackpot. The tension between Elsa and Bo, who live apart at times but never quit or betray each other, feels as real and specific as the devotion that binds the Morgans in "Crossing to Safety." But the Mason marriage also suggests an allegory of the West itself, which Stegner saw as perpetually and fatally rived between a destructive, antisocial individualism and a too often stymied longing for stability and community. Bo Mason incarnates a mythical or, more exactly, a myth mongering type of Westerner that Stegner often blamed for the region's troubles. His rootlessness is a version of the "boomer" attitude that Stegner summarized, in an interview, as "Rush in and trickle out. Get in, get rich, get out. It's always been a treasure hunt and never a settlement." At each end of the 1940s, both before and after "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," Stegner published books mainly set in Utah, where he had lived during his high school and college years. "Mormon Country," part of a W.P.A. ish series of nonfiction books on "American Folkways" edited by Erskine Caldwell, is an affectionate, not uncritical picture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, whose history and way of life Stegner had observed, with fascination and occasional envy, as the son of a gentile Salt Lake City liquor salesman. "The Preacher and the Slave" (later retitled "Joe Hill") is a fictionalized account of the Industrial Workers of the World and their bloody battle with Western mining companies in the years before World War I. Neither the Mormons nor the Wobblies fit comfortably in narratives of Western development dominated by cowboys, railroad men, ranchers and other boomer archetypes. They are outliers in that heroic story, even as they seem to occupy opposite sides of the American political ledger. The I.W.W., to the extent that it is remembered at all, belongs to the annals of the homegrown left, while the Mormon Church, a far more enduring institution, has become nearly synonymous with American conservatism. It's Stegner's ability to perceive that common thread, and to hear the counter individualist strains in other Western voices, that makes him hard to classify. But to Stegner, in the years between the end of the Depression and the first peak of the Cold War, the gulf didn't seem so wide. A word that recurs in the pages of "Mormon Country" dealing with the social organization of Mormon towns and wards is "solidarity," which is also the theme of the I.W.W. anthem and a keyword in the lexicon of labor radicalism. That shared value of communal participation and collective identity is what defines the Wobblies and the Latter day Saints as dissident formations in the landscape of the West. It's Stegner's ability to perceive that common thread, and to hear the counter individualist strains in other Western voices, that makes him hard to classify. His nonfiction writing on the West including the memoir "Wolf Willow," the essay collection "The Sound of Mountain Water" and a biography of the Utah bred historian and critic Bernard DeVoto bespeaks a passionate, lifelong environmentalism, a legacy that continues in the work of at least two of his erstwhile students, Wendell Berry and Edward Abbey. But Stegner's contempt for the kind of boomer represented by Bo Mason reappeared as intolerance of another kind toward the baby boom hippies whose selfish hedonism soured his mood in the 1960s and after. "All the Little Live Things" features a counterculture villain who brings intellectual pretension, bad hygiene and free love into the peaceful California valley where Joe and Ruth Allston are trying to tend their garden. Later, in "The Spectator Bird," Stegner will indulge Joe in a tirade about "the age of infidelity, when casual coupling and wife swapping and therapeutic prostitution are accepted forms of violence as normal as mugging and murder." Joe's distaste for this age, in which "whinnyings and slobberings" and outre sexual practices are celebrated "in every novel you pick up," reflects Stegner's disaffection with the literary culture of the time. As Mark McGurl explains it in "The Program Era," his critical history of "postwar fiction and the rise of creative writing," Stegner saw his ethic of "integrity" and group participation (modeled in the writing workshops he taught) displaced by an aesthetic of openness and "liberation." Stegner himself became an avatar of the literary establishment. The daily New York Times reviewed "Angle of Repose" favorably, but the Sunday Book Review ran two columns attacking it, one by William DuBois condemning it as "too well made" and therefore irredeemably middlebrow, the other by John Leonard, after the novel won a Pulitzer Prize, decrying the jury's preference for a "comfortable, tame, toothless and affectionate" book over more challenging candidates. He can't be enlisted as a partisan in the culture wars, but he isn't a pacifist either. He's more like a one man battlefield, whose dreams of peace the "repose" and "safety" promised in those titles express the longings of a tectonically divided civilization. The irony of The New York Times waving the anti establishment flag is mirrored by Stegner's sense of himself a prizewinning author with a Ph.D. in English, a professor at an elite university as an aggrieved outsider. This paradox is integral to his character, and his acute sense of it is one of the reasons he's worth reading now, when we spend so much time mapping the fault lines between privilege and resentment and fighting over who is part of the elite and who is entitled to victim status. He can't be enlisted as a partisan in the culture wars, but he isn't a pacifist either. He's more like a one man battlefield, whose dreams of peace the "repose" and "safety" promised in those titles express the longings of a tectonically divided civilization. In an essay called "Born a Square," Stegner imagines a young Western writer discovering himself to be at odds with both the dominant literary mores and the background that should provide material. "The world he most feels and he feels it even while he repudiates it offers him only frontier heroics or the smugness of middle class provincialism," while other regional, ethnic and social identities seem to provide richer subject matter to his peers. "Why," Stegner wonders, haven't Westerners "been able to find in their own time, place and tradition the characters, situations, problems, quarrels, threats and injustices out of which literature is made?" This question has been answered, since Stegner's death, both in tribute and in opposition to his example. His anti mythological stance has been picked up, and sometimes turned against him, by writers attuned to histories and identities that his writing left out. In 1996 Elizabeth Cook Lynn published a collection of essays bluntly titled "Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner," which pointed out the absence in his books of any serious engagement with the Indigenous history of the region. Any half awake reader will notice that while Indians, Mexicans, African Americans and Asian immigrants are not entirely missing from his fiction, they are at best marginal presences, sometimes servile, sometimes comical, but more features of the landscape than fully human actors within it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Australia Just Had a Bad Flu Season. That May Be a Warning for the U.S . Australia had an unusually early and fairly severe flu season this year. Since that may foretell a serious outbreak on its way in the United States, public health experts now are urging Americans to get their flu shots as soon as possible. "It's too early to tell for sure, because sometimes Australia is predictive and sometimes it's not," said Dr. Daniel B. Jernigan, director of the influenza division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "But the best move is to get the vaccine right now." The number of cases of flu in this country is still quite low, according to the weekly C.D.C. FluView released Friday . But as the weather cools, it is expected to ramp up. In 2017, Australia suffered its worst outbreak in the 20 years since modern surveillance techniques were adopted. The 2017 2018 flu season in the United States, which followed six months later as winter came to the Northern Hemisphere, was one of the worst in modern American memory, with an estimated 79,000 dead. This year's Australian outbreak began in April, two months earlier than usual, and persisted into October. Alarming early reports said the number of deaths might surpass those in 2017, but that did not quite happen. (The country did have more positive flu tests than ever before, but that was in part because far more tests were performed.) Nonetheless, there were more flu related deaths than usual, while hospitalization rates and nursing home outbreaks "were at moderate to high levels," said Ian Barr, deputy director of World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Reference and Research on Influenza in Melbourne. Direct comparisons of mortality rates are difficult, because Australia counts only deaths in which a hospital declares influenza the cause; there were 662 this year, and 745 in 2017. Not only is the United States population 13 times bigger, but the C.D.C. aware that flu triggers even more deaths from pneumonia, sepsis, heart attack and other illnesses looks at the increased death rates from many illnesses in bad flu years, and calculates how many were probably due to influenza. Mr. Azar said vaccination "is an important public health issue for the entire Trump administration" and noted that Mr. Trump had just signed an executive order directing his department to pursue modernization of flu vaccine production. Most flu vaccines are still grown in fertilized eggs and that process, he said, consumes 900,000 eggs a day and takes more than six months. On Monday , the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases announced that it was forming a consortium of research centers to pursue better methods. Australia's current flu season was dominated by the H3N2 strain, as was the 2017 season in both countries. H3N2, which emerged for the first time in the 1968 "Hong Kong flu" pandemic, tends to cause more hospitalization and deaths than other strains. H3N2 may also dominate in the United States this year, Dr. Jernigan said, but it is too early to be sure. In some years, he said, different strains appear in various Southern Hemisphere countries, including New Zealand, Chile and South Africa. At the news conference, Dr. Patricia N. Whitley Williams, the foundation's president elect, described standing in an intensive care unit last winter with the mother of a 9 month old child with severe flu who was sedated and on a ventilator for seven days. "This mother did not believe in vaccinating, because she felt that the flu vaccine was not effective and she was concerned about vaccine safety," Dr. Whitley Williams said. "She looked at me and said, 'You mean I could have prevented this?'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Elliot Martin, center, flanked by the director Jose Quintero and the actress Ingrid Bergman in a 1967 meeting to discuss a production of Eugene O'Neill's "More Stately Mansions." Elliot Martin, who transformed himself from a teenage radio cowboy and Broadway chorus boy into one of the pre eminent producers of the American theater, died on May 21 at his home in Norwalk, Conn. He was 93. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Linda Martin Giannini. Mr. Martin delivered several acclaimed versions of Eugene O'Neill plays to Broadway, including "A Moon for the Misbegotten" in 1974, starring Jason Robards and Colleen Dewhurst and directed by Jose Quintero. Clive Barnes of The New York Times called it "a landmark production that people are going to talk about for many years." Ms. Dewhurst won a Tony Award that year for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play, and the producers, Mr. Martin, Lester Osterman and Richard Horner, were cited in a special award for an outstanding dramatic revival of an American classic. Mr. Martin presented the play twice more: in 2000 with Gabriel Byrne and Cherry Jones, and in 2007 with Kevin Spacey and Eve Best. He produced other revivals, Off Broadway shows, national tours and summer stock; cultivated new playwrights; and served as the first director of the Center Theater Group of the Los Angeles Music Center. He often said, though, that the pinnacle of his career was being the production stage manager in 1956 of the original Broadway production of O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night," one of a dozen Broadway shows he stage managed after abandoning a brief acting and singing stint in his 20s. "Scene by scene," Brooks Atkinson wrote in The Times about "Long Day's Journey," "the tragedy moves along with a remorseless beat that becomes hypnotic as though this were life lived on the brink of oblivion." Mr. Martin also developed a knack for discovering new talent and for redeeming scripts that fellow producers had rejected as impending flops. One was "Cradle and All," by Sumner Arthur Long. Mr. Martin enlisted the director George Abbott, recruited Maureen O'Sullivan and the character actor Paul Ford to star and previewed the play out of town under the name "Never Too Late." After it opened on Broadway in 1962, "Never Too Late" ran 1,007 performances for nearly three years. As a largely independent producer, Mr. Martin also nurtured new playwrights, including David Mamet he presented the original Broadway production of Mr. Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross" Tom Stoppard, August Wilson, Beth Henley, Lanford Wilson, Mark Medoff and William Nicholson. The lights on Broadway theater marquees were dimmed in his memory for one minute on Friday night before curtain time. Elliot Edwards Martin was born on Feb. 25, 1924, in Denver to Will H. Martin, a life insurance salesman, and the former Alma Harvey. He spent summers working as a cowboy. His outgoing personality, patrician good looks, singing voice and gift for the guitar persuaded a local radio station to give him his own program when he was 17. In 1943, Mr. Martin enrolled in the University of Denver, where he studied under Dr. Campton Bell, who founded the university's School of Theater and held court in a dingy classroom in the university chapel's basement. When World War II ended, but before Mr. Martin had graduated (he later received an honorary degree), Dr. Bell urged him to indulge his passion for the theater promptly. He headed to New York and was cast in the original London production of "Oklahoma," where he met and later married the singer Marjorie Cuesta Austin, who also became his casting director. She died in 2014. In addition to their daughter, he is survived by a son, Richard; a sister, Lois Dunbar; three grandsons, and a great granddaughter. When Mr. Martin returned to New York from London in 1949, he was cast in dual parts, as a prospector and a neighbor, in "Texas Li'l Darlin'"(lyrics by Johnny Mercer), his only Broadway credit as a performer. After that musical closed in 1950, he and Ms. Austin joined a national tour of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Allegro" and shortly after shifted to production. "I decided to be on the other side of the footlights and got the background a young person couldn't get today," he once recalled. Mr. Martin started stage managing for the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut during summers and on Broadway during the theater season. In 1967, Dorothy Chandler, the arts benefactor, recruited him to join the music center in Los Angeles to manage the Ahmanson and Forum Theaters. He directed the theater group there for three seasons and opened the Ahmanson with the American premiere of O'Neill's "More Stately Mansions," starring Ingrid Bergman and Ms. Dewhurst and directed by Mr. Quintero. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
East End Avenue is not the kind of thoroughfare that casual visitors to New York are likely to stumble across while searching for restaurants, theaters or clubs. They'd have to be looking for it. The neighorhood that it anchors, hugging the edge of the Upper East Side like fuzz on a peach, runs only 13 blocks or so. Most of its transsecting east west streets end in cul de sacs, giving the area an almost gated feel: cars are not likely to pass through on their way to somewhere else. But there is a way in which that obscurity heightens East End's appeal. If you can endure the five long block slog from the Lexington Avenue subway on East 86th, you'll be rewarded: the street leads into lush Carl Schurz Park, merging into its shaded bluestone lined path. From there, a climb of a few steps delivers a front seat view of the boat, barge and tug parade that is the East River. In recent years, families have surged into the area, which is home to several schools, and which Monica Weinberg, a resident who has three children, describes as "the suburbia of the Upper East Side." Dr. Weinberg, an internist, and her husband, Andrew, moved to East End in 2009 from a three bedroom nearby in Yorkville. She declined to say what they paid for the four bedroom they bought at 170 East End, a then new 20 story condominium overlooking the park and the river. But units of that size were selling for up to 9 million, according to data from Streeteasy.com and other reports, which also show them trading for less today. What concerns the Weinbergs and many of their neighbors is the potential for erosion of quality of life and property values if the city goes through with a 240 million plan to build a 10 story garbage transfer station on a pier at East 91st Street. The target opening date for the station, which has federal permits, is in 2015. But the city, pointing out that Manhattan does not have a waste management station, argues that every borough needs to be responsible for its own refuse, and that the station is a key element of a 2006 plan to reduce the number of trucks carrying garbage through city streets to poorer areas, where current stations tend to be. Opponents citing diesel exhaust pollution as one of their concerns have sued repeatedly to stop the station, so far without success. The issue has even injected itself into the mayoral race; most candidates are against it, which gives foes hope that the new mayor will pull the plug on the plan. A factor in the decision may be the plant's possible vulnerability in the face of another major storm. Hurricane Sandy last year flooded parts of 200 East End, some of whose residents camped out in the lobby of Heleen Brody's co op, No. 180. In 1996, her four bedroom cost "well under 1 million," said Ms. Brody, who works in finance. Similar units in the postwar building list at about 2 million today. "We like the remoteness of the place," she said. "We've always slept with the windows open so we can hear the birds." The effect of garbage trucks on such nightly rituals remains an open question. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
A recurring event is the Harp Festival of Moons, harp concerts planned for each of the 13 full moons of the year, with most held in locations of significance to either Yeats's life or poetry. The musical series celebrates dual aspects of Yeats: the poet (who referenced the moon often in his verse) and, in his later years, the senator who chaired the committee that chose the harp as a symbol for the Irish Free State coin. An Oct. 27 concert will be held at Thoor Ballylee, Yeats's summer home in the 1920s, in County Galway; a Dec. 25 concert is planned at Drumcliffe Churchyard, site of Yeats's grave, in County Sligo. One particularly resonant concert was held at Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane, a leading gallery for modern and contemporary art, named for the Impressionist art collector whose desire for a permanent municipal art gallery in the early 20th century inspired six of Yeats's poems. During the lunchtime recital in early April, the harpist Kathleen Loughnane, accompanied by Cormac Cannon on uilleann pipes, performed traditional Irish music for a crowd surrounded by paintings by Renoir, Degas and Pissarro, from Sir Lane's original collection. The National Library of Ireland, where Yeats was a frequent visitor (he credited a longtime librarian with helping him with his early poetry), dedicated his birth month, June, with events that included readings and a lecture by Roy Foster, a Yeats biographer. But the National Library's main tribute is its exhibition, "The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats," now in its 10th year. Part of a collection donated by the Yeats family that comprises more than 2,000 items, it includes the world's largest archive of the poet's manuscripts, and artifacts like the poet's last pair of glasses and his Nobel Prize medal. To celebrate Yeats2015, free public tours of the exhibit are scheduled monthly until October. Along with an evening of performances by poets, writers and actors including the Irish novelist John Banville on Sept. 12, the National Concert Hall will devote Sept. 13 and 14 to music as varied as classical to rock, with musicians including the Irish singer songwriters Cathal Coughlan and Adrian Crowley incorporating Yeats's poetry into song. The pianist composer Thomas Bartlett of the Irish folk rock group the Gloaming serves as the event's musical director, and Paul Muldoon, the Pulitzer Prize winning Irish poet and poetry editor of The New Yorker, as its literary adviser. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Over the past few decades, the veteran choreographer and improviser Ishmael Houston Jones has become something of a godfather to Downtown dance. He is always on the lookout for new talent; beyond that, he is a guide, showing a younger generation how to grasp the bigger picture of the art form. This fall, Mr. Houston Jones, 65, along with Will Rawls, a 37 year old choreographer, performer and writer, will oversee Platform 2016: "Lost and Found" at Danspace Project. More dance this fall: a season of Indian mythology and ballets by women, and Vail comes to New York Platform, a multiweek series initiated by Danspace's executive director and chief curator, Judy Hussie Taylor, addresses a theme or an artist in performances, talks and whatever other events a curator dreams up. This edition, the 11th, will focus on the impact of AIDS on generations of dance artists. What traces remain of these vanished artists? The ambitious and serious "Lost and Found," running Oct. 13 Nov. 19, features more than 28 events, including a zine project, film screenings, readings and, fittingly, a vigil. Mr. Houston Jones conceived of "Lost and Found" after reading a pamphlet of collected writings by the choreographer John Bernd, who died of complications of AIDS at 35 in 1988. Mr. Bernd explored AIDS and gay sexuality directly in his dances. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The dispute between Verizon and some of the most popular and prominent TV networks escalated on Wednesday when Disney said that the new, slimmer FiOS cable offering violated agreements with all of its cable networks. FiOS introduced a less expensive cable package, called FiOS Custom TV, on Sunday that gives customers a base package of 35 channels, then allows them to choose two out of seven category specific packages, like sports (ESPN, Fox Sports 1) or pop culture (Comedy Central, MTV). The package costs 55 a month, a discount from the average household cable bill of 90, according to the research firm SNL Kagan. Several media companies were caught off guard, and ESPN quickly came out against the new offering. Now Disney, the network's parent company, has criticized it as well. "The issue here is that Verizon made unilateral decisions on how to offer ABC Family, Disney Channels, ESPN and ESPN2 that are in violation of our existing agreements," Disney said on Wednesday. The company's channels are spread throughout several tiers on the FiOS plan, with ESPN in sports, ABC Family in the pop culture plan and the Disney Channel and Disney Junior in the children's category. A spokesman for Fox Networks, which has cable holdings that include FX and Fox Sports 1, said, "We reject Verizon's view that it can pursue the new packaging scheme it announced yet still comply with our agreements." And Cameron Blanchard, an NBCUniversal spokeswoman, said that the Verizon deal "does not comply" with agreements with its cable holdings, which include Bravo, USA and MSNBC. The dispute is happening as a growing number of consumers are choosing to cut the cord forgoing conventional TV altogether and instead relying on streaming services like Netflix or HBO Now that cost less. The changing landscape of the television industry has prompted companies to adjust and slimmed down offerings like Verizon's have long been anticipated. "The days of the 500 channel universe are over," Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, said at a corporate conference last month. "The days of the 150 channel universe in the home, while not necessarily over, are changing rapidly. There's going to be people who are going to be slicing it and dicing it in different ways." 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. And, so far, Verizon has showed no signs of backing down from its new plan. In a conference call with investors this week, Verizon's chief financial officer, Fran Shammo, said he believed that the cable package complied with existing contracts. "Look, this is a product that the consumer wants," he said. "It's all about consumer choice." An advertisement for the new cable package on Verizon's website features a young man with a tattooed arm holding a remote control, with the slogan: "Pay for the type of channels you love. Stop paying for the ones you don't." Verizon reaches a little more than five million homes, which means it represents a little less than 6 percent of households that subscribe to paid TV service in the United States, according to SNL Kagan. In the FiOS offering, customers can subscribe to additional tiers for 10 a month. That was one reason that Anthony DiClemente, a media analyst at Nomura, was skeptical that customers would wind up spending only 55 a month. "The pricing is not as attractive as it may seem," he said. "If you look at the details of this plan, the savings don't really justify the benefits to the consumer." Craig Moffett, an analyst at MoffettNathanson, said he thought the new package most likely violated existing contracts. "I'm sure Verizon will win in the court of public opinion but whatever halo comes from that won't last long and it probably won't be terribly material," he said. Mr. Moffett said that the move was surprising since Verizon was also planning to start a mobile first TV service this year. It has previously said it wants to begin with about two dozen channels. "Why do something so flagrantly provocative at a time when you're going to depend on these suppliers for the wireless business?" he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Two hallmarks of American economic policy under President Trump are a reflexive aversion for regulation and go it alone nationalism. But in technology policy, that stance is changing. In September, the Trump administration abandoned its hands off approach and began working closely with the 36 nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to create international guidelines for the design and use of artificial intelligence. The administration has also started to discuss a new law to protect privacy in the digital age, seeking consensus domestically and common ground internationally. It has fielded more than 200 public comment filings from advocacy groups, corporations and individuals. "There is a real desire in the United States to see leadership at the federal level," said David Redl, a senior Commerce Department official helping to guide the administration's privacy effort. On both issues, the administration has "moved from indifference to engagement," said Julie Brill, a former commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, who now helps oversee regulatory affairs for Microsoft. "It certainly has been welcome." The shift is a pragmatic recognition that regulations that will affect the nation's tech industry and its citizens are coming, and that if federal officials want a say in them, they must participate. China which is not a member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has gone its own way, using personal data and artificial intelligence as tools of a government backed surveillance state. If the United States were another digital island, experts warn, there would be a real danger of a fragmented global marketplace. Privacy can be seen as the first step toward regulating artificial intelligence more broadly. Vast volumes of data, often personal information, are the fuel of modern A.I. systems. Several American states, led by California, have passed or proposed privacy laws, threatening to fragment the marketplace in the United States, too. They are following Europe, where a sweeping privacy law took effect in May, harnessing the popular backlash against American tech giants like Facebook and Google. "Europe is saying, 'We're in charge,' defining the global rules in the next iteration of the digital economy," said Daniel Weitzner, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was a policy adviser in the Obama administration. The new European privacy law, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, lets people request their data online, restricts how businesses obtain and handle information, and opens a door to class action style lawsuits and huge fines. Just how strict or effective enforcement will be remains to be seen. But other nations are adopting similar rules, and tech companies are retooling their data handling software to comply. Last year, Europe and Japan agreed to allow personal data to flow freely between the two economies, since Japan's rules were deemed the equivalent of Europe's. Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. Mounir Mahjoubi, the French secretary of state for digital affairs, pointed to the European Japanese pact as the "first impact worldwide" of the European standard. But the goal, Mr. Redl said, is a federal law that will "harmonize" data privacy rules in the United States and mesh enough with the European standard to avoid a more splintered marketplace. One sign of the administration's more cosmopolitan approach to technology policy was a small, private forum on "industries of the future" at the White House in early December. Most of the guests were tech company leaders, including Sundar Pichai of Google, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Ginni Rometty of IBM. At that session, White House technology advisers discussed the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's artificial intelligence guidelines and the importance of shaping the outcome. That impressed the tech executives as a newfound embrace of international engagement, according to a person briefed on the meeting, who would speak only anonymously. The White House confirmed that its side had brought up the organization's guidelines at the meeting. In February, President Trump signed an executive order on artificial intelligence that called for not only more investment but also regulation to "foster public trust in A.I. systems." In a statement last week, Michael Kratsios, deputy assistant to the president for technology policy, said, "We're focused on promoting an international environment that supports A.I. research and development and ensures the technology is developed in a manner aligned with our nation's core civil liberties and freedoms." The administration's emphatic cooperation on artificial intelligence guidelines contrasts with an earlier arms length wariness of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In 2017, for example, the administration, given its nationalist trade agenda, insisted that the term "free trade" not appear in a ministerial statement, according to two people involved in drafting the language, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity. Their guidelines are "soft law" suggestions, not requirements. But the Paris based organization has a track record of influencing global policy. The most recent, eight page draft lays out rights and responsibilities. Those responsible, it says, include any individual or organization that makes or operates A.I. technology and these "A.I. actors" should do systematic risk assessments of "privacy, digital security, safety and bias." People affected by an A.I. generated prediction or recommendation, it says, should have the right to challenge the outcome "based on plain and easy to understand information" on how an automated decision was made. The draft recommendations call for global A.I. standards that are "trustworthy" and allow for data to flow fairly freely across borders so that it is "interoperable." The latter is a vital point for the American side. National laws and approaches will differ, they say, but they should not hobble the global data economy. No one is entirely satisfied in the collective, give and take of developing guidelines. Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit digital rights research and advocacy group, is one of the expert advisers. He is a champion of more forceful guidelines like a prohibition on Chinese style scoring of individuals based on their personal information and online behavior. But Mr. Rotenberg described the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's effort as "the right synthesis to pursue," combining "economic development and a fundamental human right to privacy." The guidelines, he said, should be "a very important policy framework." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Four years ago Stella Abrera danced the lead in "Giselle" for the first time at American Ballet Theater. For her farewell performance with the company, on June 13, she will take on the role again at the Metropolitan Opera House. Her retirement, after 24 years with the company, was announced on Monday. "It feels like a good time, like the right thing," Ms. Abrera said in an interview about her decision to retire. "Giselle" is particularly meaningful to her. When she danced the lead in 2015, she was stepping in for an injured Polina Semionova. It happened to be the company's alumni night. "About 200 ex A.B.T. dancers were in the audience, so they all very much knew what was up," she said. "I had to put all the fears aside and get on that stage and do what I had been dreaming of doing my whole life." In his review for The Times, Alastair Macaulay commended Ms. Abrera's performance. "Some of her dancing was luminous, and all of it was stylish and heartfelt," he wrote. Her work in Act II received special praise: "She made it clear that dance was a spiritual act." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
The Daily Mail reported that the streaming television service was developing new interactive technology allowing viewers to direct the plots of certain television shows, Choose Your Own Adventure style. The company later told me that the experiment was focused on children's programming, more as a developmental learning tool than as some new twist on the modern media sphere's rush to give you exactly what you want when you want it. No matter how far the experiment goes, Netflix is again in step with the national zeitgeist. After all, there are algorithms for streaming music services like Spotify, for Facebook's news feed and for Netflix's own program menu, working to deliver just what you like while filtering out whatever might turn you off and send you away the sorts of data driven honey traps that are all the talk at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival going on here through this week. So why not extend the idea to the plots of your favorite shows? The Mail even went so far as to envision viewers of the British historical drama "The Crown" making it so that Princess Margaret gets to marry her sister's equerry, Peter Townsend. Of course, as Princess Margaret knew all too painfully, history saw no such union. But that's no big deal anymore at least if you consider the way people are being primed to shape the arc of the narratives on their highly personalized electronic screens to suit their own tastes, even if it means banishing inconvenient facts. As Dan Wagner, the Obama campaign data wiz and current Civis Analytics chief executive, put it when I bumped into him here during the weekend, "You used to be a consumer of reality, and now you're a designer of reality." Understanding how that is playing out more broadly will help explain why you and your aunt's new boyfriend can see the same events unfold in Washington and have utterly different ideas about what just happened. Allow me to direct you to the real world, Choose Your Own Adventure news media misadventure of the past week, which I'll call "POTUS45, Episode 6: The Presidential Wiretap That (A) Was, (B) Wasn't, (C) Was Because He's a Russian Agent and Oh, Sister, Is He in Trouble." It started with President Trump's Twitter posts accusing former President Barack Obama of having wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower. Game on. If you were inclined to believe that Mr. Obama did what Mr. Trump said he did indeed, if you wanted to believe it you probably would have tuned into "Fox Friends" that Sunday morning for Adventure A. You would have seen PolitiFact's point by point rebuttal of the same argument and, finally, a week later, reports about how evidence for Mr. Trump's charge still had yet to surface. Or, lastly, were you an Adventure C kind of person? If so, you couldn't get enough about how Mr. Trump's wiretap allegation and the Russian connections could lead to his impeachment (MSNBC, The Independent, Maxine Waters), and your Facebook feed probably included the learnprogress.org headline "The F.B.I. Is Now Officially CRIMINALLY Investigating Donald J. Trump." (Nothing in the posting it links to shows evidence for any such thing.) As Mr. Stephanopoulos told me when we spoke by phone over the weekend, the trend may have been heading this way for a while you don't need an algorithmic feed to turn on Fox News or to catch Rush Limbaugh. But in the era of the curated digital news stream, the choose your news phenomenon has "ended up in a whole new place," Mr. Stephanopoulos said. It's easy to overdo it, he noted, given that no specially tailored plotline can fully tune out the contradicting details of another one. "Filters do have to contend with each other in some way, too," he said. Really, arguments between adherents of the different adventure plots are the stuff of cable news programming, with each narrative vying for supremacy in debates that too often become arguments over established facts that should be indisputable. Because, after all, one of the plots we're talking about here is of the sort that democracy depends on that would be Adventure B, the one based on established facts that exist in the real world and the others are of the sort that threatens to undermine any shared sense of truth while driving us into our corners. At South by Southwest here, a lot of words have been spilled on what to do about it, and just how urgently this multidimensional view of reality needs to be addressed and how to do so. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
After a difficult period of exile in the United States that lasted much of the 1940s, Bertolt Brecht was ready to work with kindred spirits again. And in the composer Paul Dessau, he recognized a fellow burr under the saddle. Describing a 1949 production of his play "Mother Courage and Her Children" in East Berlin, Brecht wrote that Dessau's settings of its songs were "not meant to be particularly easy," adding that the music "left something to be supplied by the audience; in the act of listening they had to link the voices with the melody." This amounted to high praise from a playwright known for his theory of the "alienation effect" in the theater. And as Brecht's troupe, the Berliner Ensemble, blossomed in the years that followed, he drew Dessau into more projects. Yet he was also versatile. In the decades before his work with Brecht, Dessau served as an assistant under the conductor Otto Klemperer. He wrote music for the German edition of an early cartoon by Walt Disney and composed scores for the so called mountain films of Arnold Fanck. Such wide ranging experience may have contributed to Dessau's self assurance, even when working with a controlling artist like Brecht. When working on "Mother Courage" for the Berliner Ensemble, for example, Dessau followed the playwright's instructions to repurpose a familiar French melody for Mother Courage's theme song, but also alternated time signatures from one bar to the next to create loping momentum. The pianist Steffen Schleiermacher, the ensemble's artistic director, said in an email interview that in preparing that saxophone piano suite, the group had conceived of the first movement's piano part as "a relentless machine, almost like a fast techno beat with clear accentuation on the counts." The saxophone, he added, "is practically on a breathless escape from these beats but it actually plays a relatively simple melody, however tilted and bent." The album also offers even lesser known works, such as "Jewish Dance" (1940), for piano and violin, which rides an intriguing line between harmonic peculiarity and jovial effervescence. "The piano voice in 'Jewish Dance' often seems to imitate a drum set," Mr. Schleiermacher wrote. "Dessau likes to use narrow intervals here, especially in the bass range. This makes the exact pitch almost unrecognizable, and the result is a rather noisy sound. On the other hand, I have the impression in many places that Dessau actually thought rather tonally and then, in order to make the sound a bit sharper, added dissonant intervals at the end of the composition process." Brecht had occasional doubts about Dessau's modernist inclinations. And the obstinate idiosyncrasies of his music were at times judged even more harshly. In 1951, East German authorities initially sought to block the Brecht Dessau opera "The Condemnation of Lucullus" because of its "predominance of destructive, caustic dissonances and mechanical percussive noise." But the work became a surprise success with its early audiences. Brecht's text for "The Condemnation of Lucullus" was based on a radio play of his in which the Roman general heads to the underworld to plead his case for entry to Elysium. (It doesn't go well.) In addition to Brecht's typical didacticism, there is a haunting passage for a fishwife whose son died in one of Lucullus's campaigns. She has come to the underworld in search of her son, and discovers that the fallen soldiers "have forgotten their names / Which only served to line them up in the army / And are no longer needed here. And / their mothers / They do not wish to meet again / Because they let them go to the bloody war." (A searing recording is available on Berlin Classics.) Dessau's spare scoring for this moment is a delicate depiction of resignation, though one that still hits with true operatic intensity. Some of the textures here seem not far removed from the Largo movement of Dessau's much earlier, rarely heard Concertino for violin, flute, clarinet and horn which opens Ensemble Avantgarde's album. Mr. Schleiermacher, comparing his group's recording of the Largo with the scene from "Lucullus," said that "there is indeed a certain similarity," adding that both contain "echoes of liturgical recitative chants, almost psalmody." The specificity with which Dessau responded to such varied sources is something that the baritone Dietrich Henschel also identifies, and prizes, in the composer's works. "He asks the singer to be aware of the text," Mr. Henschel said in a phone interview from Berlin. Mr. Henschel was featured prominently on a 2000 album of Dessau's lieder on the Orfeo label, on which he performs the composer's settings of poetry by Brecht, as well as by Francois Villon, Langston Hughes and Pablo Neruda. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The sitcom "One Day at a Time," about a multigenerational Cuban American household, has had a complicated plotline of its own. When Netflix canceled the show last year after three seasons, it was rescued by a cable network, at least in part because of the outcry from its small but passionate fan base. But a year later, the show has come to the end of the road: Its creators announced this week that the series wouldn't be coming back, dealing a blow to the representation of Latino families and L.G.B.T.Q. people on television. "It's officially over," Gloria Calderon Kellett, one of the show's creators, said on Twitter on Tuesday, adding that there would be no new episodes. "But there will always be 46 episodes that we got to make that live FOREVER." The series debuted in 2017 on Netflix, where it ran for three seasons. The streaming giant received significant backlash on social media when it canceled the show, and TV critics lamented the decision. On Twitter, fans enraged by the 2019 cancellation told Netflix that by abandoning shows like "One Day at a Time," the platform was suggesting that Latinos' stories weren't important, regardless of views. The series, which was adapted from a classic Norman Lear sitcom of the same name, follows a multigenerational Cuban American family including a newly divorced mother, her children and their grandmother, all living under one roof. The day that Ms. Calderon Kellett, who is Cuban American, and Mike Royce, her co creator, found out Netflix didn't want a fourth season, executives at Sony Pictures Television, the show's producer, vowed to get "this show on somewhere." Pop TV, a ViacomCBS owned cable channel perhaps best known for "Schitt's Creek," decided to take the show in 2019, but it did not renew for another season next year. Because of the pandemic, only part of the fourth season was produced. With the news that the long shot effort to find the show a new network was unsuccessful, dedicated fans of the show were let down again. Jose Eduardo Villalobos Graillet, who teaches Spanish at the University of Toronto, said he saw himself and his Latino culture in the family. "It was like seeing myself reflected," Mr. Villalobos Graillet, 35, said. As a gay Mexican immigrant, he said he especially appreciated seeing the discourse when one of the show's young characters, Elena Alvarez, came out to her family. Latinos are the largest ethnic minority group in the United States, accounting for more than 18 percent of the population. But according to a 2016 report from the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, only 5.8 percent of speaking or named character TV and film roles were played by Latinos. "To me, it's a huge loss," Jason Ruiz, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame, said of the show. "There's been such a desert of Latino representations in English on TV." Family sitcoms are an important medium on TV, Professor Ruiz said. Even including English language shows like "Jane the Virgin" that portrayed Latino families but were based on telenovelas, Spanish soap operas, depictions of Latino families on mainstream English language television are comparatively scarce, he said. "One Day at a Time" was traditional, he said, taking place mostly inside the Alvarez family's living room. Its characters also went through the same challenges that many other families go through. "What they were trying to do is cultivate a mainstream audience in a really bold way," he said. "The more mainstream you are, the most palatable you had to be." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Credit...Alex Welsh for The New York Times LOS ANGELES Bob Newhart didn't invent stand up comedy, but more than any performer he can lay claim to giving birth to the modern industry of the comedy special. His still funny 1960 album, "The Button Down Mind of Bob Newhart," was arguably the first blockbuster special, selling more than one million copies, hitting No. 1 on the charts and winning the Grammy for best album, beating out Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole. Since that breakout debut, he has starred in sitcoms and movies, hosted talk shows and even gave the eulogy for Krusty the Clown on "The Simpsons." But Newhart still identifies as a stand up comic, and he returned to the stage this year for multiple dates west of the Mississippi. He turns 90 this week and Newhart, sitting on a couch at his home in Los Angeles, seemed physically slighter but still deployed his distinctive stammer with precision as he looked back at his six decades in comedy and forward to what lies ahead. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation: What brings you back to stand up? What I've learned is: I love the danger. This thing I thought I hated all my life, that's why I was doing it. If the show is at 8, and it's 6, what will I be doing? Pacing. After 60 years, still pacing. I like that feeling. Do you feel 90 years old? My mind doesn't. I can't turn it off. The other day, there was a story about a pilot getting arrested for being drunk in the cockpit. I immediately thought: What if he had made it past security, wound up flying the plane and said to the passengers in a slurred voice : "Welcome to Delta. Welcome to a flight from Los Angeles to, um, to, um, I have it written down here somewhere, it's the mountains and then there's some more mountains and then we're on the other side of that." Has your sense of humor changed since you started? Something very sick makes me laugh. My wife says to me, "If people ever found out what you find humorous, they'd stop showing up." I said to her: "That's our little secret. Newhart's 1960 album was arguably the first blockbuster comedy special. You have a low key, clean act, but in the early days, you were sometimes lumped in with Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl as a "sick comic." Well, it was true. In one of my routines, I was dealing with one of the most revered presidents in American history, Abraham Lincoln. I didn't present him as stupid, but packaged, focus grouped. On the pilot of the Amazon show "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," her husband does that routine, where an ad man advises Lincoln on the telephone. Did you see it? He stole my act and he was terrible! Oh my God, I watched it. I think it's a wonderful show. You still do the Lincoln bit. Do you ever get tired of performing it? Richard Lewis once said to me, "I get tired of repeating the material. It's a real problem." I said: "Richard, we're out there to entertain them, not ourselves." You did so many brilliant comic bits with the telephone. The comic Shelley Berman famously said that you stole the idea of the telephone from his act. Did that bug you? It bugged me a little because it wasn't true. The phone has been a comedy prop for long time. Mike Nichols and Elaine May used it. One of the earliest recordings ever made by Edison involved a telephone that the comic George Jessel used to do. You started as a double act, with Ed Gallagher. Did that inform your use of the telephone? What happens with a phone conversation is the audience is doing the work. They supply the unheard portion. It's the same as the two man comedy team. When you starred in "The Bob Newhart Show," in the 1970s, is it true that producers asked you to cut down on your stammer? Yes, for the pilot. I told them: "This stammer got me a home in Beverly Hills." On your 1980s sitcom "Newhart," you had one of the most famous finales in TV history, waking up to discover the entire show was a dream. Some people felt cheated. They devoted eight years of their life and it turns out none of them existed. You and Ginny have been married for 56 years. Incredible in this town. It is and it isn't. Among comedians it's not unusual. Buddy Hackett, Jack Benny, George Burns, Alan King, they all had long marriages. That's why I think laughter is the secret to longevity of relationships. If you can laugh you can get through it. You were good friends with Johnny Carson and a frequent guest on "The Tonight Show." He was so smooth onscreen. What was he like off? He could be a bad drunk. One time, he was trying to give up smoking, and we were out to dinner at the old Palm restaurant with "The Tonight Show" producer Freddie de Cordova and Ginny. And Ginny said: "I thought you were going to give up cigarettes." and Johnny snapped at her. Totally uncalled for. He stormed out. Years later, I did an interview where someone asked if I see Johnny. I said "Not as much as I used to." So I get a call from him saying. "Why don't we get together?" I said I didn't want to get into the whole Palm situation. He had no recollection of it at all. But, boy was he good on that show. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Facebook put on an upbeat presentation to advertisers on Tuesday, the same day the clothing chain Eddie Bauer, the film distributor Magnolia Pictures and the Ben Jerry's ice cream brand announced that they would stop advertising on the platform through July. Those companies joined Patagonia, the North Face, REI and others in a growing boycott that has targeted Facebook's content moderation practices. In a short video, part of a weeklong showcase for digital companies hoping to attract advertising dollars, Facebook displayed posts that companies like Delta Air Lines and Calvin Klein ran during the coronavirus pandemic. The prerecorded presentation did not specifically address the boycott. While several large companies have pulled away from Facebook, smaller businesses that make up the bulk of its eight million advertisers have been considering their options. Jason Dille, who oversees media planning for 20 clients at the ad agency Chemistry, said many of them had considered putting a halt to buying ads on Facebook but that the pandemic had complicated their plans. "Some of my clients are just starting to come back," Mr. Dille said. "If they don't create sales and get business to turn around, they're going to go under." He added: "Facebook is a double edged sword. You don't want to support it, but you have to use it in order to reach a large audience." The backlash intensified late last month, as a flurry of misinformation appeared on Facebook amid worldwide protests against racism and police brutality. The company declined to take action against posts from President Trump the same ones that Twitter flagged as misleading or glorifying violence. In recent days, Facebook removed ads from Mr. Trump's re election campaign that featured a red triangular symbol used by the Nazis during World War II. The company also announced that it would gradually allow users to opt out of seeing political ads. On Sunday, it acknowledged in a blog post that its enforcement of content rules "isn't perfect." "It feels like we've come to an inflection point," said Stephan Loerke, the chief executive of the World Federation of Advertisers, a trade group. "There's a growing awareness that this isn't a brand safety issue anymore it's a societal safety issue." Facebook executives have tried to limit the damage. In an email sent to some of its largest advertising clients last week, obtained by The New York Times, the company said it had taken steps to mitigate the effects of potentially harmful speech on the site. "There are competing pressures every day when managing a platform," the memo said. "Our focus is to act on what is most important: removing hate speech and content that harms communities while using our platform for efforts like providing authoritative voting information and registering people to vote." Carolyn Everson, Facebook's vice president for global marketing solutions, said in a statement that the company was in discussions with advertisers and civil rights groups "about how, together, we can be a force for good." "We deeply respect any brand's decision, and remain focused on the important work of removing hate speech and providing critical voting information," she said in the statement. Most companies that have turned away from Facebook are not shutting down their Facebook accounts. They expect to return to buying ads on the platform after July. "It almost feels a little hypocritical to me," said Barry Lowenthal, the chief executive of the Media Kitchen agency. "How do you justify going back?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
With that precedent set, Cora, who was hired by the Red Sox before the 2018 season and immediately led them to the World Series title, could face the same fate from his Red Sox bosses after their case is fully investigated in the coming weeks. M.L.B. is now investigating whether the Red Sox also illegally used technology to steal signs, and whether Cora was involved again. The league said it would refrain from issuing a penalty to Cora until that investigation was complete. While nothing has been decided, two people familiar with both investigations who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter said that Cora's conduct would earn him a suspension at least as long as Hinch's. And if Crane felt compelled to fire Hinch and Luhnow for not stopping the illegal activity, the Red Sox owner John Henry could feel pressure to do the same to Cora, who was an active participant in 2017 and was a central architect of that entire caper. The Red Sox declined to comment on the matter on Tuesday, and Cora, who is highly regarded by the Red Sox from his two years as manager, did not respond to requests for comment. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. In the primary Astros scheme, video equipment was used to decipher the catcher's signs, and that information was then relayed to batters by various methods most often someone banging on a nearby trash can with a bat; the number of hits on the trash can indicated what pitch was coming. "Cora was involved in developing both the banging scheme and utilizing the replay review room to decode and transmit signs," the report said. "Cora participated in both schemes, and through his active participation, implicitly condoned the players' conduct." M.L.B. also stripped Houston of four future draft picks and fined the team 5 million. If M.L.B. discovers that the Red Sox were engaged in similar behavior in 2018, then Boston could lose draft picks and face a heavy fine, too. The commissioner's office announced its separate investigation into the Red Sox this month after an article in The Athletic, citing anonymous sources connected to the club, accused Boston of illegally using the replay video room next to the dugout to decipher signs. Luhnow, in a statement issued on Monday through his law firm, blamed his underlings for the Astros' cheating, particularly Cora, noting that the "video decoding of signs originated and was executed by lower level employees working with the bench coach." Beltran's situation is different. M.L.B. said in its statement that it would have been impractical to punish the players, because they were not in official leadership roles at the time. Players were assured immunity in return for their cooperation, and it is believed Beltran was forthright with investigators. But Beltran was the only player named in the report because he played a central role, along with Cora, in initiating the scheme. The M.L.B. report also noted that virtually all of the position players were involved in sign stealing and that many had migrated to different teams, making it even more cumbersome to issue suspensions that would hurt those teams and not the Astros. Therefore Beltran, even though he is a manager now, might slip through unscathed. That is, unless the Mets decide to impose punishment of their own based on the precedent set by the Astros with Hinch. That pressure could mount depending on Cora's fate. In November, Beltran stated in an article in The New York Post that he had not been involved. That has now been contradicted by M.L.B.'s findings. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
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