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"Holidays often come wrapped in memories and expectations. Mindfulness offers the gift of being present in the moment. Just show up and be interested. At holidays, this means simply being present in the moment with compassion for yourself, and others." Nina Smiley, director of mindfulness programming at Mohonk Mountain House. As you sit down at the holiday table, focus on breathing slowly and deeply. Take in the sights, without judgment. Be aware of the tapestry of sound around you. Smell the aromas wafting through the air. Watch the mind. If it begins telling stories based on memories and expectations, let them go. Return to the senses again and again, replacing stories with simply being present. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Why U.S. Weapons Sold to the Saudis Are Hitting Hospitals in Yemen 'Accidental Discharge' of Firearm Causes Panic at Atlanta Airport Protesters Take to the Streets After Rittenhouse Verdict 'Very Happy With the Verdict,' Rittenhouse's Lawyer Says Two Men Accused of Killing Malcom X are Exonerated | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Robert Ashley's "Improvement (Don Leaves Linda)" isn't the first opera to have its heroine pathetically forsaken in an American desert. Puccini's "Manon Lescaut" starts its final act in one, with the title character "alone, lost, abandoned," as she cries in a majestic outpouring of an aria. The Linda of "Improvement" which was written in the 1980s and is being given a soulfully austere revival at the Kitchen in Chelsea through Feb. 16 doesn't get to vent her feelings quite so extravagantly. For one thing, she's left by Don, her husband, at a distinctly unoperatic locale: a highway turnoff. For another, her voice rarely rises much beyond the soft singsong y speech that's characteristic of Mr. Ashley's mature works. Her most sweeping solo is a kind of monologue; she mulls in a quiet flood of gently rhythmic talk how she has "driven my husband from me by my complacency and my indifference." Read about the pleasures and perils of reviving Robert Ashley. But even if Linda's story never overtly expands far beyond the everyday a coffee, a late night rendezvous in a deli, a letter from her son she reads aloud our 90 minutes with her and the people she comes across take on a lulling, mesmerizing grandeur as episodes and years pass. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
If you haven't been to Dover Street Market recently, you will hardly recognize the space come Saturday, when the fashion emporium reopens for its New Beginning seasonal changeover. In the event space, check out looks from the Comme des Garcons spring "Invisible Clothing" collection, which in Rei Kawakubo's arch way includes enormous sculptural pieces like a tartan dress ( 9,060) that are far from invisible. Get on a first name basis with emerging designers like Sara Lanzi, Alan Crocetti and Cottweiler. And pick up one of the new Comme des Garcons message tees. A personal favorite: "Live Free With Strong Will" ( 310). At 160 Lexington Avenue. Barneys is working with the British Fashion Council on a Madison Avenue window display showcasing 14 London designers. It includes an Erdem floral gown ( 3,405), an Osman puff sleeve sweatshirt ( 555) and tiered tulle skirt ( 440) and an Alice Archer embroidered kimono ( 2,150). The stationer Dempsey Carroll is offering a 35 percent discount on its Bespoke Collection of 100 No. 3 three ply correspondence cards, 100 matching envelopes and one line engraving plate ( 295, originally 450) through the end of the month. At 1049 Lexington Avenue. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
With nearly 70 paintings and a four and a half pound book, the exhibition "Gertrude Abercrombie" reintroduces New York to the lonely, poignant art of an overlooked American Surrealist painter from the Midwest. Abercrombie (1909 77) whose work has not had a solo show here since 1952 was also a jazz devotee, Chicago bohemian and saloniste, and her return represents a herculean effort. Karma, the gallery (and publisher) where the show is on view, often outdoes itself, and has done so again, this time with assistance from the writer and independent curator Dan Nadel. The essays in the book which reproduces many additional paintings take us deep into Abercrombie's life and times. Robert Cozzolino, a curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, writes that "Abercrombie was at the hub of several overlapping cultural circles, and her Chicago was at the center of everything." The circles were literary and musical as well as artistic, and her intimates sometimes called her "Queen of Chicago." Dizzy Gillespie was a close friend, one of many jazz greats who attended and sometimes performed at the weekend parties regularly thrown in the late 1940s and '50s by Abercrombie and her second husband, the music critic Frank Sandiford. The musicians sometimes stayed in Abercrombie's big Victorian in Hyde Park when hotels refused black guests. In another essay, the art historian Susan Weininger details Abercrombie's psychology, shaped by an unloving mother and the daughter's belief in her own homeliness consistent with which, she sometimes wore a tall black witch's hat. Ms. Weininger writes that Abercrombie was "celebrated for her warmth, humor and generous spirit," but also points out that the artist was "well known for her reclusiveness, alcoholism, sarcasm and stinginess." Ms. Weininger quotes a note Abercrombie once wrote to herself: "Surrealism is meant for me because I am a pretty realistic person but don't like all I see." A few months before Abercrombie's death, in 1977, the painter Don Baum staged a retrospective of her work at the Hyde Park Art Center, in the same space where the Chicago Imagists had risen to view a decade earlier. Surrealism is an art of non sequiturs, and several of the Imagists recognized her work as a precedent to their own. One of them, Roger Brown, painted a tribute to her that is reproduced in the Karma book, along with photographs of Abercrombie. We see her with her paintings, her cats and her daughter, Dinah Livingston, born in 1942 during her first marriage. In one image she hugs Gillespie; in others she sits with her work at one of Chicago's sidewalk art fairs, which she loved for the variety of people she met. Abercrombie's paintings fill the spaces at Karma to almost overwhelming effect. They date from 1934, two years after she began to paint, to 1971, when her health began to fail. Her landscapes, interiors, still lifes, portraits and self portraits are usually painted on Masonite and panel, not canvas, always tailored to striking if not flamboyant secondhand frames. The postage stamp size "Compote and Grapes" (1941) has a frame of brown stained wood seven inches across. Grooves in the wood mimic the recession of one point perspective and also a box camera whose aperture is focused on the painted still life. As for her compositions, Abercrombie favored empty stillness whether threatening or gently mournful. Threat is prominent in her more loosely painted earlier efforts, especially in nocturnal landscapes featuring a lone woman walking a path toward a distant horizon or boxy, jail like houses, or across the painting as across a stage. Abercrombie signals her anxieties about motherhood in one of these, "Dinah Enters the Landscape" (1943). Trees are either regimented in small groups, with cloudlike foliage, or solitary and bare, seeming to sway in lament. Backgrounds combining variegated colors brushed together depict skies, fields, seas, floors or walls, creating a vaporous softness and a comforting sense of Abercrombie's presence. In this show's trajectory, Abercrombie largely forsakes more roughly worked surfaces for the crispness of Rene Magritte and a more professional Surrealism. Now empty rooms and small isolated objects like shells, playing jacks, eggs and a wood box cloak alienation in a sense of control and artifice. Especially precise are three paintings of several doors in different colors arranged edge to edge to form a screen. Resembling a Beckettian set design, they actually mimic Chicago construction sites, which at that time were frequently shielded from the public with doors from the old building demolished to make way for the new one. A black cat moves with impunity among the shifting styles so beautifully laid out in this exhibition. Aloof, elusive, uneasy, it may be Abercrombie herself, who is given a new visibility that should be coaxed into an even greater fullness. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
The clip debuted during halftime of the Women's World Cup soccer final, an apt choice for this story of female empowerment. Mulan (the Chinese actress Liu Yifei) is initially told by her parents (Rosalind Chao and Tzi Ma) that a match has been found for her to enter an arranged marriage. But her destiny lies elsewhere, as Mulan trains to become a warrior riding horses, shooting arrows and fighting with swords. Directed by Niki Caro ("The Zookeeper's Wife"), this "Mulan" seems to have a dramatically different tone than its animated predecessor. There are no musical numbers in the trailer, nor is there any sign of the talking dragon, Mushu, who was voiced by Eddie Murphy in the cartoon. The teaser also plays down the idea that Mulan must dress as a man to join the Imperial Army and fight attackers invading China. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Ian Barford can tell when the audience turns against him. It begins with a kiss, and escalates during a breakup scene. By the time he hobbles through a door, desperate to reconcile, "they're just hissing at me, practically throwing things at me," Barford said. The whole audience? "The women," he clarified. "The men are usually pretty quiet." Barford, 53, was chatting about his role as the main character in "Linda Vista" by Tracy Letts, a Broadway play about a toxic man in midlife who may or may not achieve decontamination. He had picked a favorite lunch spot, a pocket size bistro in Chelsea, and crammed his gangling legs under a corner table, hunching his shoulders as he pushed some eggs around a plate, making himself as small as he could, which wasn't very. Graying at the temples, with pouches under his eyes that push his face toward woebegone, he looked handsome, shambolic, exhausted a lion left out in the rain. In "Linda Vista," which Ben Brantley called an "inspired, ruthless take on the classic midlife crisis comedy," he plays Wheeler, a San Diego camera shop employee who has torpedoed his marriage and moved to a down market apartment complex to escape the wreckage. A walking conjugation, Wheeler sleeps, has slept, or is likely to sleep, with every woman in the play, as long as his bum hip holds out. The play, Barford's fourth collaboration with Letts, doesn't work if audiences loathe Wheeler from the get go or if they cheer him on too long. Barford has to perform, with ruthlessness and charm, a high wire act of empathy that allows Wheeler to sway from protagonist to antagonist and maybe back again. "I just try to not shy away from any of it," he said. "I try to just let him be as nasty as he is and also let him be as wounded as he is." He walked a similar tightrope in his other recent Broadway outing, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time." Divorced dads of questionable sympathy seem to be his brand. Barford began acting in the mid '80s at Illinois State, the college that many founding members of the Steppenwolf Theater Company attended. A tennis player his 6 foot 3 height was an advantage until it wasn't with little academic direction, he stumbled into a master class with the legendary acting teacher Uta Hagen. After his scene, she stubbed out her cigarette, kissed him on each cheek and announced, as Barford tells it, "Now this is what I've been talking about!" After graduation, he joined Steppenwolf as an acting apprentice and except for a stint in Los Angeles in the aughts , he has stayed in and around there since, mostly in supporting roles. But when it came to "Linda Vista," Letts recognized that the play would benefit from Barford's unforced charisma and his Everyman quality. (Letts, also 6 foot 3, apparently likes his Everymen tall.) "It felt really right to give Ian the ball and say this is yours," Letts said by telephone as he wheeled his baby son around Battery Park. During rehearsals for the Chicago premiere and a subsequent production in Los Angeles, Wheeler was made to measure, incorporating Barford's gruff, musical cadences, not to mention his bad hip. Letts didn't like how spry he looked, Barford said. "He wanted to degrade me a little more." Letts agreed. "If I had any issue with Ian and the role, it's that he's so hale," he said. But not so hale that an intimacy coordinator didn't have to alter a raunchy sex scene to give that hip some protection. Audiences will sometimes confuse Barford and his role, like the woman who waited at the stage door just to say, "I hated you." But as Dexter Bullard, the play's director, put it, "Ian is so nice. Wheeler is not." Wheeler can't be bothered with civility. "I'm too old to pretend to be something I'm not, and a lot of the things I am are not attractive," he says. But Barford can. The day after our lunch, Letts let me know I'd been mangling Barford's first name. (It's pronounced Yan, not EE an.) Barford never mentioned it. None of his behavior was horrible, he said, "not like, horrible horrible," but he noticed that the sex ultimately made him feel worse. So he went to therapy, he moved back to Chicago, he started dating Shapiro. He figured it out. "He's not Wheeler anymore," Shapiro said, speaking by telephone from their home in Chicago. Characters like Wheeler aren't exactly rare. From Agamemnon and Oedipus on out, the stage is strewn with middle aged men who are the smartest guys in the room except when it comes to self knowledge think of Hamlet, Othello, Faust, Peer Gynt, Arthur Miller's heroes. Women are the collateral damage . If "Linda Vista" has been recalibrated since Chicago the women's parts have thickened, Wheeler's monologues have thinned it still participates, enthusiastically, in this tradition. Is another Broadway play intently focused on male frustrations and anxieties a solution or part of the problem? Is this a story we need? "I think we need all the stories," Letts told me. "I don't think there's any story we don't need." Middle aged men come to the show, he said, "and they are laid low by it. They come out at the end and they are weeping because it speaks to things that are going on in their lives malaise, depression, deep sadness." The play models how toxic masculinity hurts men, too, and how change is possible. Barford doesn't want to tell anyone man, woman, child (well, not his 10 year old twins, who are barred from seeing the show, as is his mother) what to think about the play or how to feel about Wheeler. But he hopes that people will see the character as human, as hurting, as capable of redemption. Barford changed; he thinks Wheeler can, too. Hate him, hiss him, throw a program, but don't give up on him. "The play doesn't abandon the guy," he said. And he won't either. "That's just doing my job," he said. "That's just what's on the page." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
When President Trump announced late on Friday that he would fire the government watchdog who told Congress about the Ukraine whistle blower complaint, which ultimately led to his impeachment, it touched off one of the most acute threats yet to our democracy. But it didn't even make the front page of most papers. That's understandable. Thousands of Americans are dying every day from the terrifying coronavirus pandemic. People are worried about their own safety and that of their families, as well as about their jobs and livelihood. Questions abound about how the crisis got to this point, whether the Trump administration took appropriate steps to address it and what steps are needed to minimize the devastation going forward; there is little bandwidth for anything else. But we can't afford to ignore the anti democratic steps the president is taking while the American people are appropriately preoccupied with this outbreak. If we don't respond to these outrageous abuses now, the damage may be done by the time anyone is the wiser. The worst of the president's latest round of steps to undermine checks and balances came not just in this time of crisis, but on a Friday night, the classic black hole for sweeping problematic actions in Washington under the rug. First, the president announced that he would be firing Michael Atkinson, the inspector general for the intelligence community. Mr. Trump said in a required letter to Congress that he no longer had "the fullest confidence" in Atkinson; there was not even an effort to disguise the fact that what caused the president to lose that confidence was Atkinson following the law and allowing the truth to come out about Mr. Trump's lawless attempt to pressure a foreign power to announce politically helpful investigations. Mr. Atkinson will be fired 30 days after the letter went to Congress, the soonest he can be under law, but the president undercut even that law by putting Mr. Atkinson on immediate administrative leave. Michael Horowitz, the respected inspector general of the Department of Justice and chairman of a council that coordinates inspectors general, went out on a limb to vouch for Mr. Atkinson, praising his integrity and his handling of the Ukraine whistle blower complaint. Mr. Horowitz is right, and his affirmation that the inspector general community "will continue to conduct aggressive, independent oversight" is heartening. But President Trump's further action makes that claim questionable at best. The president compounded the Atkinson announcement on Friday night with his intention to nominate White House lawyer Brian Miller to be special inspector general for pandemic recovery, a key position for oversight of the just passed 2 trillion coronavirus relief package, which is ripe for fraud and corruption without aggressive review. The position demands ironclad independence, particularly with the risk that the president's company, relatives, customers and donors could seek to benefit from the stimulus package. Mr. Miller, who served for nearly 10 years as inspector general at the General Services Administration, but more recently played a role in the White House's response to the impeachment inquiry, is precisely the wrong person to ensure independence. A former senior Senate staff member praised Miller's "loyalty to the administration" in explaining why he'll make a good choice, even though loyalty is the exact opposite of what is needed. The one two punch of Mr. Atkinson and Mr. Miller is, unfortunately, just the tip of the iceberg of the president's dangerous attacks on the independence of inspectors general. Mr. Trump will likely fire additional inspectors general because he and his allies view them as "deep state" operatives who undermine him. Indeed, the president seems to view any independence within the government and certainly any checks on him as intolerable disloyalty; that notion, of course, runs counter to our entire system of checks and balances. Friday night's actions came at the end of a week of scary departures from democratic practices. Reporting indicates that more and more power has gone to the president's son in law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, whose coronavirus "shadow task force" of government allies and private sector connections may run afoul of federal law. Mr. Kushner is meanwhile also reportedly playing a significant role in the Trump re election campaign from the White House, which may also violate federal law. Nepotism and disregard for the law have characterized this administration from day one, but the volume and brazenness of these anti democratic tendencies is increasing. Indeed, earlier Friday, the government changed its description on a federal website of the strategic national stockpile to correspond to Mr. Kushner's description of it as being for the benefit of the federal government, not the states. Also last week, the Navy fired a captain who blew the whistle on the scope of a Covid 19 outbreak on his ship, another example of apparent payback for truthtelling, and the president reportedly wants to have his own signature on stimulus checks to Americans, which may also run afoul of law. All of these autocratic steps come on top of the president's February purges of officials who testified in the impeachment trial and attempts to meddle in the sentencing of friends and allies convicted of crimes. Here's why this matters: times of crisis are when democracies are in the gravest danger of crumbling. We are seeing that play out in the world right now. Hungary, which has watched its hard won post Cold War democratic reforms slipping away for some time, this week saw its Parliament give Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whom Mr. Trump has praised, unlimited authority, effectively turning the country into a dictatorship. Dictators around the world are using the pandemic to tighten their control. We're not there yet. But the president's attempts to rid the government of those who would provide appropriate oversight and accountability for abuses and speak truth to power, to put in place loyalists who will look out for him rather than providing independent checks, and to empower relatives and disregard laws sets us on a dangerous trajectory. Firing inspectors general and replacing them with loyalists is a serious threat to our democracy. The American people must register our outrage; Congress must investigate the firings aggressively and rigorously vet nominees. If we ignore the erosion of checks and balances because we are preoccupied with more immediate concerns, we may find that our democracy when we need the institutions of this country the most is disappearing. Just ask Hungary. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
SEATTLE More than 40 years later, Jeffrey Beers still vividly remembers what it felt like to have Dale Chihuly call up to convene a pre dawn glassblowing session. You felt flattered and inspired, he said, jazzed by Mr. Chihuly's caffeinated freight train of energy and the idea of making art with him while most of the world slept in. "'We're starting at 5. I'll have Egg McMuffins for everybody,'" Mr. Beers said, describing a typical Chihuly invitation and the instant creation of a team of art student acolytes. "There would be eight or 10 of us, ready to go," added Mr. Beers, now 60 and an architect in New York. Mr. Chihuly was never the lonely artist toiling in his garret. Making art in a crowd, with a crowd, was the Chihuly way, according to people who have known and worked with him over the decades. The pattern only deepened with time and success, as he gained global recognition for the prolific output of expressive glass works, sculptures and paintings that bear his name and can sell into the millions of dollars. "The more I worked, the more I sold work, the more people I could hire," Mr. Chihuly said in an interview in his 34,000 square foot studio complex here in Seattle, near where he was born and raised. These are painful days for Dale Chihuly, as he winds down a long career facing a challenge that stabs at the heart of any artist: his originality. Mr. Chihuly emblazoned his signature on the world by working and rethinking the vocabulary of glass as art. Physical challenges and scars compounded the difficulty of that path. He lost vision in an eye in a 1976 car crash that also permanently injured an ankle and a foot. A shoulder injury from a bodysurfing accident made glass blowing, with its heavy weights of pipes and glass, impossible to do. He suffers from bipolar disorder, marked by sweeping swings of elation and depression. And with greater dependence on others, he said, has come greater vulnerability to claims that his work is not his own. "Yeah, I would say it probably made it easier to attack me," he said. "I absolutely need my teams." The Chihulys, in their own countersuit in Federal District Court in Seattle, have dismissed the claim by the former vendor, Michael Moi, as an act of greed and jealousy. They said that Mr. Chihuly's vision still defines and shapes all art that leaves his studio. "He was a handyman," Ms. Chihuly said of Mr. Moi's role in the company, which employs about 100 people in several locations in the Seattle area. Mr. Moi's lawsuit says that exploitation and uncredited work were built into the Chihuly team system, and that the mental swings of working under a bipolar artist manic bouts of energy followed by crashes of depression and paranoia were part of the unpredictable dynamic of how and when work got done, and who did it. Mr. Moi, through his lawyer, declined a request for an interview. "Up and down manic cycles were a constant," the suit says. Certainly, workshops for art, overseen by an artist with a famous name, are nothing new. Painters from Peter Paul Rubens to Rembrandt created elaborate systems of production, as have modern artists like Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol, who famously declared his art to be a factory produced commodity. And legal experts said that claims of inadequate credit by an underling generally have faced a tough road because courts require proof that the person who filed for a work's copyright, Mr. Chihuly in this case, intended to share credit of authorship. "I think no one would have even assumed that Chihuly did all his own work, first of all, because there's too much of it," said Christine Steiner, a lawyer in Los Angeles who represents galleries, artists and museums, but does no work for Chihuly. In both law and art value assessment, she said, works that go out the door of an artist's studio, however they are produced, are generally deemed to be a product of that artist's vision. Because of that, she said she sees little effect on Chihuly art market values no matter what happens in the case. Ms. Zynsky trained at the Rhode Island School of Design in the early '70s, as did Mr. Beers, the architect, when Mr. Chihuly was teaching in the school's famous glass program. She said she decided early in her career that assistants should never become long term employees three years and out became her rule because she feared she might stunt their style and growth or take too much from them in creating her own art. Another artist who has known Mr. Chihuly for many years said he believes Mr. Chihuly is still making "Chihuly art," even if others are constructing and finishing it. "As long as Dale can put it down on paper, right to the very end I think he'll be able to keep going," said Benjamin Moore, a glass artist in Seattle. But Mr. Moore said he has also been saddened by the attacks on his friend, and the decline in Mr. Chihuly's vitality over the last decade. "He was such a whirlwind of energy and excitement and enthusiasm, he was like a magnet, drawing the most talented young people around him just to be in his presence to learn," Mr. Moore said. "But he's a shell of the man that he was it breaks my heart." In the lawsuit, where pretrial motions are underway, Mr. Moi said the level of Mr. Chihuly's disabilities were never disclosed to art buyers or the public and that Chihuly Studio often intimated that Mr. Chihuly's paintings were entirely by his own hand. Other legal cases in recent years involving Mr. Chihuly and his former employees him suing them or vice versa were settled out of court, but those disputes could be dredged up again in depositions or testimony as the case goes forward. "For years Leslie Chihuly and Chihuly Studio have undertaken efforts to hide Dale's struggles with mental health and his inability to work on a daily basis, not to protect him, but to ensure that the cash cow known as 'Chihuly' continued to moo," Mr. Moi's suit says. Mr. Chihuly, who said he now rarely paints for more than an hour or two at a time, perhaps three days a week, was working on a recent morning, surrounded by four assistants. One handed him a brush, then held the paint container at his elbow as he stood over a horizontal glass sheet, partly painted already with specially formulated enamel, composed of ground glass suspended in liquid. "Do you want one over the other, or do you want it side by side?" Mr. Chihuly turned to ask an assistant, Jodie Nelson, referring to the blotched paint dobs that he was about to apply. Ms. Nelson's response was immediate: "I want what you want." Mr. Chihuly then proceeded to paint, in sweeping, fast brush strokes as a Bob Dylan song played in the background. The goal, he said, was to approximate, but not fully duplicate, two other glass painted images that would then be put together, fired and then lit for display, creating an illusion of three dimensions, called "Glass on Glass." The design is still new only displayed for the first time recently at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. During a pause, he gestured to one of the glass layer paintings hanging on back wall. "I rejected that one this morning," he said. "I don't like the way it looks." There's no question Mr. Chihuly has become an institution and created a bridge between decorative and fine arts that some art scholars have compared to Louis Comfort Tiffany. Chihuly Studio creates some 30 site specific pieces a year, ranging in price from 200,000 to millions of dollars, and has done commissions for collectors like Bill Gates and Bill Clinton. Mr. Chihuly's show at the New York Botanical Garden, through Oct. 29, has drawn more than 484,000 visitors since April, making it one of most attended exhibitions in the garden's history. At Chihuly Studio on a recent afternoon, workers were assembling a huge glass chandelier for a university, tinkering with a sculpture scheduled for installation in Union Square Park in New York, and painting flower images on glass in three big warehouselike buildings in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood. Seattle became an art glass capital largely because of Mr. Chihuly, through the Pilchuck Glass School, a nonprofit academy north of the city that he helped found in 1971, and the two museums built around his work or glass art in general. Chihuly Garden and Glass, which opened in Seattle in 2012 next to the Space Needle, is the city's top ranked tourist attraction on TripAdvisor, and has become a cash cow of its own. Admission costs 29, and the gift shops sells everything from Chihuly umbrellas ( 36), to blankets ( 500), to numbered prints of Chihuly paintings (about 3,000). "Second on my list of things to see, after the Space Needle," said Alison Yeardley, a fourth grade teacher from Boston, who was spending three days of her vacation in Seattle and had just left the Chihuly Garden and Museum on a recent morning. Mr. Chihuly said that in looking back over the long arc of his career, he can pretty much pinpoint where his mental state was, in the cycles of up or down. In the mid '90s, for example, he remembers working for weeks with little sleep on a project to build and hang chandeliers over the canals of Venice. But then a couple of months later, working at Waterford Crystal in Ireland, he said, the cycle turned. "I was depressed, but yet I had my team with me and I could continue to work," he said. "I like my work when I'm up," he added. "Van Gogh, you know, he worked when he was depressed as well as when he was up, and I've never been able to figure it out." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
When Hollywood writers began firing their agents en masse this month, their gripes seemed esoteric. They contended that an obscure set of financial arrangements had created conflicts of interest for their agents and squeezed the writers' earnings. But just beneath the surface of the standoff is an issue that affects workers across the economy: the increasingly visible hand of Wall Street. The top talent agencies have evolved into large corporations backed by financiers who have pumped billions of dollars into their businesses. Read more about the fight between Hollywood writers and agents. The relationship between private equity firms and the major talent agencies dates back at least to the last decade but escalated in 2010, when TPG Capital made an initial investment in Creative Artists Agency. That investment grew to 500 million and a majority stake. At the time, the major agencies were already beginning to evolve, concluding that owning media and entertainment assets would be more lucrative than merely representing artists. "Everyone was looking out and saying, 'How do we grow the business?'" said Chris Bevilacqua, who headed Creative Artists' sports media ventures unit in 2008 and 2009. "This agency business is a nice little business, but it's not going to make everyone's dreams come true. If we want to grow, we need to move our model from pure agency commissions and towards ownership." WME and Creative Artists would later use their cash stockpiles to invest in the production of movies and scripted series. The writers say the investments have put the agencies or their parent companies in the position of simultaneously negotiating on behalf of writers and hiring them, a dynamic that could hurt their pay. Last week the Writers Guild of America filed suit against the four major talent agencies, and on Monday it delivered over 7,000 termination letters from its members to agencies. The agencies have said that their content arms are separately run entities, and that they can't lowball writers because they risk losing clients. WME cited what it says are hundreds of letters from clients who are uneasy with the W.G.A.'s stance. Still, the outside investors didn't simply hand the agencies sacks of cash for empire building. In some cases, they also prompted changes in the way the agencies ran their business. There was, for instance, cost cutting including restrictions on who could dine in fancy restaurants and stay in high end hotels, long considered a divine right of agents. After TPG bought into Creative Artists, the agency decreed that all but its most senior agents could no longer stay at the luxurious St. Regis in New York, according to "Powerhouse," a 2016 book about the agency. A senior agency official later said management, not TPG, was behind these initiatives. The fund, which rose to prominence acquiring companies like Continental Airlines and J. Crew and currently manages a 100 billion portfolio that includes stakes in Uber and Airbnb, was also eager to increase the revenue generated by each employee or asset to maximize its return on investment. At a company retreat shortly after TPG bought its initial stake in Creative Artists, a top TPG official held up the discount European airline Ryanair as an example. The official said the airline had sought to allow passengers to fly standing up, one of the Creative Artists agents recalled in "Powerhouse," which would help it pack more people onto each flight. Some Creative Artists agents did try to pack more passengers onto their metaphorical flights, intensifying efforts to find projects for clients and bring in more revenue. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. The problem is that agents operate in a labor intensive business and can scale themselves only so much. "The classic story is that an agent at CAA and all the others would take 200 phone calls a day," said Hal Vogel, a consultant and author of a book on entertainment industry economics, alluding to Hollywood lore. "But you can't go to 1,000, 10,000. Up to a point, you can't stretch it." One potential solution to this tension was "packaging" a decades old practice in which an agency would earn a fee from bundling multiple clients together into a single production. Packaging fees can result in a substantially larger payout than the standard 10 percent commission on a client's earnings. In a packaging deal, the agency typically secures both upfront revenue, through a cut of the fee that the production studio earns, and up to 10 percent of the show's profits in perpetuity, as determined by a somewhat arcane formula. This can add up to many millions of dollars for a successful and well funded show. Some clients have chafed at these arrangements over the years, arguing that they divert profits to agencies when they should flow to a show's creator. But it wasn't until the television boom of the past decade that opportunities to earn packaging fees truly exploded. "The packaging of talent, along with the massive increase in TV content production, has driven most of the growth in the company's TV segment," the credit rating agency Standard Poor's wrote in a 2018 report about Creative Artists. The agencies also collected packaging fees from studios to work with a single, high profile client, like a showrunner or show creator, who was now in greater demand. Because the biggest agencies tended to represent the biggest names, this approach helped them corner the market on packaging revenue. In interviews, current and former agents at large agencies conceded that some in their industry had been too aggressive in seeking packaging fees. But they denied that private equity investments had fueled these practices, pointing out that some large agencies have ruthlessly hunted packaging fees even without outside investors. The agencies say one revenue stream from hit shows has declined in recent years, partly because streaming services like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu don't syndicate shows and sell other rights generating so called back end profits the way traditional studios do. That can reduce the packaging fees that agencies take in from such shows. The Association of Talent Agents, the agencies' industry group, has said that writers benefit from packaging because agencies waive their commission when a client is packaged on a scripted television series. The Writers Guild of America counters that the agencies' packaging revenue still offsets what they give up in waived commissions, and that packaging fees have weakened agencies' incentives to seek higher pay for midlevel and junior writers, which could eat into a show's profits. It cites survey data showing that weekly pay for the typical writer dropped by almost one quarter from 2014 to 2016, even as the rise of streaming services has created more bidders for television projects. WME said an analysis of its own clients showed writer pay rising on average in recent years. And even if private equity firms aren't the only reason agencies chase packaging revenue, the Guild argued in a recent report that the presence of outside investors puts enormous pressure on the top agencies to generate more revenue and profits from existing employees, reinforcing the practice. "We benefit from package fees from the shows when they get resold and resyndicated over and over again," a Silver Lake managing partner, Egon Durban, told The Financial Times in 2014. Whatever the case, the capital fueled expansion of the biggest agencies has increased the suspicions of writers, who worry that agencies now care more about their backers' bottom lines than about the talent they're supposed to represent. "When you see reports that my former agency, WME, is going to go public, that they have all this private equity investment, it's a concern," said Shawn Ryan, a showrunner and writer on such series as "S.W.A.T." and "The Shield." "Managing a writer's career to the best of their ability may not always mean making the maximum dollar in a given moment." The powerful outside investors to whom the agencies now answer often resemble the activist investors that dominate more workaday industries. Rather than upgrade their operations, supermarkets and retailers owned by private equity firms have diverted profits to their owners and made interest payments on the debt these owners piled onto their balance sheets. Many have succumbed to bankruptcy, erasing thousands of jobs along the way. Against this backdrop, many writers say their beef with the agencies transcends their small, rarefied corner of the economy. "It's very easy to read about this dispute from the outside and assume it has nothing to do with your everyday life," said Javier Grillo Marxuach, a writer on "Lost" and a producer on "The Dark Crystal." "But the truth of matter is that this dispute mirrors any number of disputes going on between labor and corporations." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
We are sitting having complimentary breakfast on the roofdeck of the Sofitel overlooking the Vieux Port de Marseille and bitching . The sun glints off the morning swells and the aluminum masts of the sailboats, which bob like a vast paddling of sleeping ducks along the quay. Below us lies the Palais de Pharo, and, just across the narrow harbor mouth, Fort St. Jean, past which a ferry is lazily steaming out to the Chateau d'If, the island prison from "The Count of Monte Cristo." I'm with Doug, the keyboard player, and Jamie, the drummer. When we're not touring with Tears for Fears we're 50 something Valley dads in polo shirts and Priuses. But right now we've been on the road for four weeks of a seven week European tour and we are over it. On the bus we have been compiling a list of our complaints. These include, stale Ritz crackers, no laundry, not enough movie choices on the bus media player, too hot at gigs and too cold at gigs. Let me back up, this snit has been brewing for a while. When we first arrived in London for rehearsals we were all staying at the Corinthia off Trafalgar Square. The Corinthia passes the primary test for touring musicians; when you walk through the lobby most of the other guests look at you as if you don't belong there. And, we saw Mike Campbell from Fleetwood Mac every day at breakfast, met Stevie Nicks (swoon) leaving the bar, and sat across from David Blaine doing card tricks our last morning. All good, all as it should be. But then, after a one day trip to Manchester, we returned to London and the purse string minders had pulled a New Coke. The A party (that's the Artists), returned to the Corinthia while the B party (Band, that's us) was exiled to the St. Martin's Lane Hotel, a couple of blocks, yet a world, away. It was cheap and disposable in all the ways the Corinthia was elegant and substantial, offering whimsical design in lieu of quality. That night, in our thin walled rooms we texted each other pictures of our respective dead potted plants and began to stew. And then Copenhagen happened. Copenhagen was the first big break in the run. Time to relax, recharge and bank sleep. People had spouses coming in, it was a little mid tour vacation. Or not. The A party, and more irritatingly, both tour managers, were staying at The Nimb. Go on, Google it. Right in the center of Copenhagen, The Nimb is a boutique hotel combining, "Scandinavian design traditions and Moorish aesthetics." All right, I know that sounds a little weird, but trust me, it's pretty swanky. Anyway, while they were there, strolling around town and the hotel adjacent Tivoli Gardens, we were at the AC Bella Sky. The Bella Sky is a pair of conjoined, misshapen blue and white towers in the middle of nowhere between the city and the airport. The rooms are completely devoid of any trace of art or decoration. What minimal furnishings there are, are purely and puritanically functional, as if Ikea had been commissioned to design cells for a Federal Super Max prison. The result is a space most conducive to reflection and self examination, to considering the decisions in your life that have led you here. Bitter Scandinavian winds lash the surrounding barren marshland. In mid July we had to dig out sweaters and jackets to brave the 10 minute walk to the train station where one could theoretically board the automated tram into the city, 20 minutes away. Even the C party, the Crew, were staying in town. And apparently at a pretty nice hotel. This was utter humiliation. While the A party was dining at Noma on moldy asparagus and God knows what other marvels Chef Redzepi summoned , and the crew were downing Danish Hof and aquavit along the harbor, we were in the outer boroughs trying to figure out the trains. The pot of resentment was bubbling in earnest now. Here's the thing, bands on tour tend to devolve into older models of hominid society. Much older. Think hunter gatherers, Crusaders, shrieking Dothraki hordes, or, more reasonably, Dust Bowl circus carnies, traveling town to town, entertaining (and swindling) the rubes. The point is, there is a natural tendency to focus all feelings of community within the tour bubble and to dehumanize the world outside. There is us and there is not us. Continuity is everything. Familiar faces, the reassuring sameness of the backstage rider: Deli platter, cheese plate, one bottle of Woodford and two Malbecs, coconut water, muscle milk (God knows how that even got on there), a case of Fiji, and, crucially, one bag of Double Chocolate Pepperidge Farm Milanos. In every dressing room. Every show. This is reality. Nothing outside the bubble is ever this real. By the end of the tour we will have been gone for 50 days, including rehearsals, playing 26 shows in 41 days, traveling by plane, train, bus and car through England, Germany, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands and Israel. It's the entire 19th century English gentleman's Grand Tour crammed into seven weeks. Under these conditions the delicate fabric of our society can get stretched thin. After Marseille we are all reunited in Nimes. The A party look tan and rested. When they say they have missed us and been a little bored in their Provencal spa retreats, eyes roll but the collective sense of humor is buoyed by the setting. The Arena atNimes is an absolutely breathtaking Roman amphitheater. With the possible exception of Red Rocks in Colorado, it is the most visually extraordinary venue we have ever played. But, the respite is short. Tonight we bus to Lyon after the show. After that show we get back on the bus and overnight all the way across France, to Carhaix in Brittany. After that show we head to Valencia in southernmost Spain. This drive is so long we're supposed to do it in two stages, an all nighter to San Sebastian, a day off there, then overnight again to Valencia, playing a show the night we arrive. It is going to be exhausting, and, we know from experience, unkind to aging spines. The A party will not be joining us on the bus. They have arranged to fly (although, in fairness, their itinerary doesn't look like a lot of fun either). Backstage we all agree, it looks grim. But then Roland has an epiphany. Yeah, we all think, cancel Carhaix. But that's not his solution. He has something better in mind. The literal transmutation of money into time: A Private Jet. Private is magic. Deus ex machina. David Blaine's got nothing on us. This is an improbable escape from an impossible situation. We'll fly day of show to Carhaix, play the show, then get back on the jet and, in an hour and a half, we're in Valencia, where we'll wake up . with an entire day off. Paella on the beach. This changes everything. It's all arranged and just like that everyone's mood shifts. Band of Brothers, all for one and one for all. We got this. After the Nimes show we drive to Lyon, get in at 3:30 in the morning. Yes it's a Sofitel, yes the A party is at the Villa Maia in vieux Lyon but you know what? We don't care. We have a private jet. Lyon is beyond lovely. If you're thinking of going on holiday to France, go to Lyon. It's smaller than Paris and everyone will be speaking French. I'd just been to Paris and it was overrun with tourists, everyone speaking English or Chinese or, really, anything but French. And the food. Lyon is known for its cuisine and with good reason. Every dish we collectively sampled was amazing, from the simplest sandwiches to the filet with obligatory Lyonnaise potatoes to the confit of duck at catering before the show. It is a town that takes its food very seriously, and it shows. The next day, after a leisurely lunch of sandwiches de poulet we are driven to the tiny airport in Bron that services the private jet crowd. It's not what we expect. There's just a bare little space with a counter, like the Alamo car rental office at a run down regional airport. We're a motley group, a little disheveled, everyone in shades, Carina, the background singer, with toddler in tow. A contrastingly well put together family is coming in from the runway at the same time, father with sleek, brushed back long hair and sock less slipons, mom with understated elegant traveling ensemble and twin little girls in white linen dresses. This is what private jet travelers are supposed to look like. There's a single small jet out the window refueling. It's really small. Alarmingly small. The pilot comes in. He's a tall German, relaxed, confident, top of his white uniform unbuttoned. He ascertains that we are in fact his clients and invites us out to the plane which is apparently nearly fueled up. The tone of this world starts to come into focus. It isn't diffident or condescending as it first seemed, rather it's casual, assured. It reminds us of the old Ladies Room skit on SNL. We are guests in a private club. If you are here, you belong. Newbie tip, if you happen to gain entree to the private jet club, nothing gives away your arriviste status quicker than having to open your luggage on the tarmac to get the liquids out. That was us. Private jets fly at around 40,000 feet and their luggage section isn't pressurized. In other words, your little bottle of shampoo is a bomb. It has to come in the cabin. The protocol is the exact opposite of commercial. Going through private security on our post gig flight to Valencia no one blinked as a cardboard box with an open bottle of bourbon and two Malbecs bobbled through the scanner. Flying across France was gorgeous. At 40,000 feet you see the curvature of the earth and yet there were no clouds to obscure the patchwork of Burgundian farms below. No clouds, that is, until Brittany. Suddenly, there was a dense, solid cover, like the potatoes on a shepherds pie or the crisp on a fruit crumble. The flight attendant came out from a consultation with the pilot and said, and I am quoting exactly here, "We're going to try and land but the weather is really bad down there." Wait. What does that even mean? "Try?" Of course, she meant try to land at the intended airport with plan B being a landing at an alternate strip. But in the moment, as pretty fearful fliers (as at least three of us were), this was bad. We were white knuckling the entire way down. It was the scene from the movie "Almost Famous" when the band thinks the plane is going down and everyone confesses their deepest darkest secrets. We descended through clouds, seemingly forever. And then, with almost no warning we saw and touched down on the runway at the same moment. The visibility was zero, cloud sitting on ground. We've all been through dozens of instrument landings flying commercial, all I can say is in private it's a different thing. We played the show in the Carhaix rain and got Mercedes SUVs back to the airport for another quick and painless flight and another SUV. And in the morning we woke up in our hotel in Spain. A couple days later we flew to Tel Aviv (commercial coach, and wow, was that a come down) for a show at the Menora Mivtachim Arena. We all stayed at the same hotel in Israel, the exquisite Setai in Jaffa. All was, at least for the moment, right with the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The sculptor and philanthropist Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney occasionally posed for portraits in unconventional clothing. Around 1911, her artist friend Howard Gardiner Cushing painted her wearing an androgynous ballet costume, with pink pants and a sharply flared jacket. He hung the canvas at her studio in Old Westbury, N.Y., as part of a stairwell mural that measures 125 feet long and also depicts hallucinogenic plants, Persian harems and Mughal palace rooms. In the last year, Mr. Cushing's descendants have spent a few million dollars acquiring the flamboyant artwork and having it removed and restored for public display. Scholars had known little about the mural, which includes images of Whitney, the founder of the museum that bears her name; Mr. Cushing's wife, Ethel; and assorted courtesans, musicians and slaves. Mr. Cushing based the clothing and scenery on Ballets Russes costumes, Japanese prints and Whistler's paintings, among other sources, and the background vegetation includes poppies, oleander and nightshade. Alexandra Cushing Howard, an architectural historian who is a granddaughter of Mr. Cushing, spearheaded the mural removal project and is now contacting museums about possible exhibitions. The canvas series, which is currently in storage, has been turned into 18 framed panels. The imagery, she said, "is so sophisticated and subversive but it's so joyful as well." The studio in Old Westbury was left empty and neglected for decades after Whitney's death in 1942. A year ago, staff members from the Julius Lowy Frame and Restoring Company in New York began painstakingly lifting the Cushing paintings off the walls and rolling them for transport. Lauren Rich, Lowy's senior paintings conservator, said that given the flaking paint in some areas, "what we were dealing with was hanging by a thread." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Anna Kinlock , 17, was at the Brooklyn Museum the other day wearing mid calf black leather platform boots with small silver spikes, buckle straps and five inch heels. Fishnet stockings, a mini gray lace dress and a long black wool cardigan completed the look. Anna identifies as queer and non binary and uses neutral pronouns. Winged black eyeliner was precisely drawn past the corner of their eyelid; layers of silver and gold chains draped around their neck. Anna is passionate about androgynous fashion. They speak about "androgynous ancestors" like the godmother of goth, Siouxsie Sioux; Lydia Lunch; and Peter Murphy, the lead singer of Bauhaus whose look gained cult status in the 1980s. Fishnet stockings and black platform boots used to mean you were a goth chick. But fashion definitions have changed. So have gendered descriptions. (Just try using "chick" without irony to refer to "woman" in the public square.) Mx. Kinlock, an intern at the Brooklyn Museum's gender and sexuality teen program, InterseXtions, was at the museum not long ago to prepare for the programs' sixth annual LGBTQ Teen Night. Last year, they put together a talk on androgyny and queer fashion, inviting Chella Man, an activist, actor and artist, as well as handing out a 'zine filled with pictures of the singers David Bowie and FKA twigs and the self described "gender fluid" actor Ezra Miller. They spoke excitedly about the Bowie exhibit at the museum last year. About the goth and punk movements of the 1980s, and how androgynous fashion has come from a history of people locating themselves outside the mainstream. Despite stares and catcalls on the street, Anna is excited to use clothes as a method of empowerment. "Androgynous fashion isn't only about looking boxy, and flow and looking ambiguous," they said. "The androgynous fashion movement is about expressing yourself without the confines of gender." In the beginning of this decade, gender confines felt fixed. Nonbinary was hardly part of the lexicon. Androgyny was reserved for subcultures and didn't have a place in the teen and tween marketing machine. The early aughts were focused on hyper femininity. Very young models walked the runway. A Vogue Paris 2011 photo shoot featured a 10 year old Thylane Blondeau in heavy makeup, staring at the camera with a come hither look. Peggy Orenstein's book "Cinderella Ate my Daughter," about raising a girl in a culture of Disney and sparkly, was on the New York Times best seller list. Kylie Jenner was on her way to creating a newer, hyper femme version of herself with a little army of Kylies to follow. Articles and psychological reports called for the media to stop oversexualizing and hyperfeminizing young girls. It was time for girls to go back to being tomboys, many adults felt. But was "tomboy" even the right word anymore? The word "nonbinary" became something people asked the internet about around 2014, making a steady upward climb to present day. Gender identity has become an international conversation, especially among teenagers. In 2017, a University of California, Los Angeles study found that 27 percent (796,000) of California youth between the ages of 12 17 believed they were seen by others as gender nonconforming . More teenagers overall are identifying with nontraditional gender labels, according to a March 2018 study published in the journal Pediatrics. Some progressive synagogues and Jewish communities are holding nonbinary mitzvahs. Nonbinary teenagers are choosing non gendered for driver's licenses. "When we're looking at trends that we might see in the community of youth who are identifying as nonbinary, what we really are seeing is a community of people who are just accepting the diversity of gender expression," said Jeremy Wernick, a clinical assistant professor in the department of child and adolescent psychiatry at N.Y.U. Langone. Mr. Wernick's work focuses on gender expansive children and adolescents. "Yes, nonbinary kiddos are sort of leading the way in pushing the boundaries of those binary stereotypes," Mr. Wernick said. "But what they're really doing is modeling for other young people and adults the reality that gender expression can inevitably have an impact on the rest of the world if things are accepted and celebrated." Just because a teenager is painting their nails a certain way or trimming a beard a certain way, he added, doesn't mean they're going to develop any specific type of gender identity. But still, clothes, makeup and hair are manifesting this change. Because if people don't have to exist in a binary, then why should fashion? One photograph that sums up the nonbinary youth movement can be found on the Instagram account of Lachlan Watson, an 18 year old actor who stars in "Chilling Adventures of Sabrina" and who, in the photo wears a John Lennon and Yoko Ono inspired T shirt that reads: "Gender is over. If you want it." Ms. Eilish's stylist, Samantha Burkhart, who also dresses Sia in unisex silhouettes and who dressed Kesha in the suit that she wore to the Grammys in 2018, simply doesn't feel comfortable putting the teenager in a dress or even in women's clothing. "I think it didn't feel like who she was," Ms. Burkhart said. "The gender stereotypes of clothing just didn't seem to encapsulate her." Fashion designers, who have resisted sending men's wear to some of Ms. Burkhart's other female clients, have had no problem sending selections from their men's wear collection to Ms. Eilish. "They see she's the future of things that are going on, and there's something really nice about it," Ms. Burkhart said. For nonbinary teenagers, Ms. Eilish is a revelation. Zai Nixon Reid, 19, a student at the New School, who is female aligned nonbinary and goes by the pronouns they/them, says people often compared their style to Ms. Eilish's androgynous look. "It's definitely why I like her, because everything she wears is really oversized and that's kind of how I wish my closet was," they said. To scroll through Mx. Nixon Reid's Instagram is to see a style that consists of oversize buttoned shirts and chains, but also suits and scarves and fedora hats. Expressing themselves through fashion is something new for Mx. Nixon Reid. It wasn't always easy. Their mother is hyper feminine, so most of their childhood clothes had been traditionally female. "These days, sort of at the end of 2018, I've been able to explore gender through fashion and it's helped me understand my own gender through clothes," they said. The moment now is that mall fixtures like H M carry unisex lines, but gender nonconforming youth are still at high risk for bullying and suicide, in both in cosmopolitan areas and, especially, outside of them. In other words, a goth androgynous person may appear, as the kids say, dope, in Brooklyn, but could easily be a target somewhere else. Deborah Tolman, a psychology professor at the City University of New York whose work focuses on teenage sexuality, thinks this wider spread fashion movement is, for many teenagers, about playing with masculinity and femininity "while maintaining it at the same time." True androgyny, she said, would suggest that the binary goes away. That there is no binary. Dr. Tolman called what is happening now "queering" fashion, because when you "queer" something fashion, whatever you're getting out of those boxes. "And the point of queering things is not to be in those boxes," she said. "Because if you keep your head in the boxes, you can't actually think about this." Many Gen X parents, raised on "Free to Be You and Me," were determined to break gender stereotypes. They dressed their baby daughters in black. They rejected pink. They read books like "My Princess Boy" and "Jacob's New Dress." And yet now they are forced to reckon with having become the finger wagging, clueless adults in DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince's "Parents Just Don't Understand." "Now these kids are teenagers and young adults," said Jo B. Paoletti, an emeritus professor of American studies at the University of Maryland in College Park, who has written extensively on the topic of gender and children's clothing. She first started seeing pushback against the pink blue binary (itself historically arbitrary), in the early aughts, around the time she was researching her book "Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America." " It's been part of a conversation that's been going on their whole lives," she said. That's at least how it feels for Isobel Middleton, 14, who wore a forest green baggy camp sweatshirt, a pair of loose jeans, short hair and glasses the other day her house in Glen Ridge, N. J. She has always had an aversion to Daisy Dukes and cold shoulders. "I just couldn't wear those," she said. Last summer she asked her mother, Rebecca, to get her "man pants" for a summer concert and so she did what any mother would do to please her teenage daughter. She shopped for a pair of pants for her daughter in the men's section. They were a perfect fit. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
In his apology, Mr. Ferguson stood by his criticisms of Keynesianism, but completely repudiated his reasoning last week: "My disagreements with Keynes's economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation. It is simply false to suggest, as I did, that his approach to economic policy was inspired by any aspect of his personal life." That a prominent professor is apologizing for comments about Keynes more than 60 years after his death speaks to his still central role in the debate over the role of government in the economy. Online, Mr. Ferguson's comments became a proxy for that debate. At National Review, the opinion ranged from those who worried that his comments gave the other side an easy argument against austerity, to those like Jonah Goldberg, who wrote that Mr. Ferguson's argument was a common one. Mr. Goldberg listed the many conservative writers who had tied Keynes's views to his childlessness and gay relationships. George Chauncey, a Yale scholar of gays in American history, in an interview emphasized that he was not weighing in on the economic arguments involved, but noted that Mr. Ferguson's comments resembled past attempts to undercut gays in public life. "The idea that homosexuals are so self centered that they pose a threat to the family, to the social order has become a habit of thought" in America, he noted, reaching its peak in the 1950s. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Credit...Craig Blankenhorn/HBO On June 6, 1998, HBO broadcast its first episode of "Sex and the City," introducing the world to Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha four single women who took Manhattan by storm. Much has been written about how the show changed television, particularly in how it depicts female relationships and sexuality. Less remarked upon is how the show spurred a generation of young, ambitious and single women to move to New York to chase their own "Sex and the City" dreams whether that meant finding their Mr. Big, landing a fashion P.R. job or sipping cosmopolitans in Manolo Blahniks while summering in the Hamptons. Were you among those transplants? What made you move to New York? Who did you identify with: Carrie, Samantha, Miranda or Charlotte? How did it turn out? We want to hear your story. Sorry, but we are no longer accepting submissions for this. Here are four stories to get you started. In 2001, Ms. Armstrong was living in a New Jersey suburb with her fiance. "I was watching 'Sex and the City,' and I just went, 'Oh my God, there's a whole thing I didn't do yet," she said. "I can't live in New Jersey and get married now.'" She ditched the fiance and moved into a tiny East Village apartment. She is now a full time writer and lives with her boyfriend of eight years in Stuyvesant Town. Her latest book, "Sex and the City and Us," comes out in June. Ms. Williams was 22, a fresh New York transplant, and an assistant beauty editor at Elle magazine when the show had its premiere. And she was hooked, even if a series starring four white actresses didn't always reflect her experience as an African American woman. "Everybody had the Dior saddle bags," said Ms. Williams, who grew up in Fairfax, Va. "I had two: a baby pink one and, like, a nude camel color." She rose rapidly as a magazine beauty editor and published four novels, most recently "The Perfect Find." Ms. Williams is divorced and lives in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn with her 9 year old daughter. "I wanted to come and be a beauty editor at magazines, and my other dream was to be a novelist," she said. "I came and did both." Ms. Herz was living in a tiny town in West Virginia, writing for alt weeklies, when she a got the call: a job offer to be public relations manager for Wolford, a hosiery brand in Manhattan. Inspired by the show ("the clothes, the cityscape, the brushing with fame," she said), she jumped at the chance. She hated it. "I didn't like the fashion world," she said. "It was too mean for me." She also hated the "transactional" dating scene. By the time the show ended in 2004, she moved back "to the lily pad I was born on," she said. Today, she has three young sons and assists with her husband's business. Her Twitter bio also describes her as an "occasional writer." Ms. Stanis was a tween when the show began, but its depiction of a cosmopolitan glamour and "girlfriend camaraderie" still resonated when she found her mother's VHS copies of the show. Four years ago, Ms. Stanis left the "cornfield town" of Dryden, Mich., to work for a tech company in the Flatiron district. Rather than move into the West Village the setting for much of "Sex and the City," but too expensive for Ms. Stanis she settled into a second floor apartment in Jersey City. Her story continues. She found love with a co worker and recently started Wedding Words, a service to write vows and toasts for tongue tied couples. "That magic of New York, I still feel after being here four years," she said. "I kind of pinch myself, still, to say, 'Wow, I get to live here.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
From the City to the Hamptons In New York, Romy Rodiek and Patrick Pilloni lived in a rented corner one bedroom apartment in the West Village. But they had an escape. They had become familiar with the Hamptons of Long Island, N.Y., through friends, and had rented there themselves, in the dead of winter as well as in the heat of summer. Mr. Pilloni, 46, is a former professional hockey player who is now a hockey agent. Ms. Rodiek, now 41, gave up a job in finance to become an architectural photographer. They decided against buying a city apartment, thinking, she said, "What do I get for X dollars in the city, and for the same amount in the Hamptons?" She also asked herself: "Where do I see myself when I am 60? Do I see myself in a one bedroom apartment?" No. She saw herself in a place with space and greenery, with "a porch where I can sit on a chair with my guy by my side, not in a little apartment saying, 'What show are we going to?' " A year ago, the couple went on the hunt for a house in East Hampton, contemporary in style, with a pool and a garden, for less than 1 million. If they were to move, or return to their homeland of Austria, they could easily rent it out. In East Hampton, "you see many 'for sale' signs," Ms. Rodiek said. "It seems that every other house is on the market." She met Hara Kang, an associate broker at Douglas Elliman Real Estate, when she inquired about a listing. Houses in the couple's price range, however, were either in need of a complete renovation, with problems like puddles in the basement, or endlessly quirky, Ms. Rodiek said. The budget rose. "During that time, there were a lot more reno projects than there were turnkey projects," Mr. Kang said. Ms. Rodiek liked a 1974 four bedroom house on Jasons Lane, nicely redone inside. The asking price was 1.245 million. The couple's offer of 1.08 million was accepted. But after the inspection, the couple returned in the evening and noticed that traffic noise from a major road was audible. "I wanted to not hear any cars unless they are driving to the house," Ms. Rodiek said. They also preferred less shade. "We needed more sun, more brightness on the property," Mr. Pilloni said. But the place is in a groundwater protection district with restrictions on cutting down trees. The couple withdrew their offer. The house recently sold for 1.05 million. Ms. Rodiek loved house hunting, despite the many awkward layouts, and houses that were either too small or too big. "It's like an exploration," she said. She imagined "living in all of those houses, and it's this whole story that starts playing in your head of what your life could be like in this house." Mr. Pilloni's favorite was a 1982 two story, five bedroom house for 1.395 million. Its location on a small bluff on Semaphore Road gave it a water view in winter. The kitchen/dining area was enormous. "You could fit 50 people into this kitchen, just standing and having crackers," Ms. Rodiek said. Then Mr. Kang mentioned another house for 1.29 million, with four bedrooms and three bathrooms, on almost 1.8 acres with a swimming pool. It had been built in 1986, and needed some renovations, "but you could live in it and do nothing to it," Mr. Kang said. The house was bright and airy inside, with high ceilings. "It had a giant '80s black leather sofa in the middle of the living room, and I could imagine what it would look like with our furniture," Ms. Rodiek said. "Even though it was completely dated, it was nice and clean." The location was within biking distance of both beach and village. She immediately knew this was the one. Mr. Pilloni was traveling in Europe. "My love, Romy, is not a very patient person," he said. "She just made an offer by herself." Her offer was slightly below the asking price, but an open house was pending for the following weekend, and someone else offered more. So she raised the offer to 1.305 million, which was accepted. The couple moved in this summer. The former owners left a collection of rakes, shovels and hoses in the garage, "plus a super high ladder so we can change the light bulbs," Ms. Rodiek said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Apple said it expected strong sales in the current holiday quarter news that seemed to confirm Wall Street expectations that people like the iPhones introduced last month. SAN FRANCISCO Apple said on Wednesday that its profit shrank for the fourth consecutive quarter the longest such streak since 2016 but it forecast that better days were ahead. The tech giant said its profit fell 3.1 percent to 13.69 billion in the latest quarter, from 14.13 billion a year ago, largely because of continued declines in iPhone sales. Yet the results beat analysts' expectations and were quickly cheered by investors because of indications that its new iPhone models would be a hit. Apple reported a 9 percent fall in iPhone sales in the quarter, smaller than the declines in other recent quarters. More important, the company said it expected strong sales in the current holiday quarter news that seemed to confirm Wall Street expectations that people like the iPhones introduced last month. Apple also showed signs of recovery in China, a crucial market where the company had struggled for months. After a drop in sales of roughly 20 percent in the region over the previous nine months, Apple said sales there were down 2.4 percent in the last quarter. The results suggested that the issues causing Apple's business to shrink in China and elsewhere in recent months had been resolved or at least temporarily patched. Apple had blamed some of its struggles in China on the country's slowing economy and its trade war with the United States. Luca Maestri, Apple's finance chief, said in an interview on Wednesday that those issues were subsiding. "These trade tensions have not been helpful to the Chinese economy and to our business, and we think that as you've seen from our results, the peak of those tensions were at the beginning of the year," he said. Apple got off to a rocky start this year when it cut revenue forecasts because of slow sales in China, prompting a sharp sell off of its stock. Since then, Apple's financials have improved and its market value has rebounded. Apple shares rose about 2 percent in after hours trading on Wednesday. "The company is still benefiting from low expectations, from when they set the bar really low" in January, said Tom Forte, an analyst at D.A. Davidson. "And since then, they've been telling a different story, which is that they're pivoting to be less dependent on the iPhone." Apple became a 1 trillion company on the back of the iPhone, one of history's most successful products. But as the smartphone market became saturated, Apple increased iPhone prices to keep growing. The strategy worked for a time. But as prices went up, sales of new phones slowed, particularly in markets like China. In recent months, Apple has propped up iPhone sales in places like China with price cuts and financing. Apple's latest iPhones the iPhone 11 family seem to be bucking the trend. The latest quarter represents just nine days of sales of the iPhone 11, but the drop in iPhone sales were lower than in the previous three quarters. "It's obviously a bit early," Mr. Maestri said. "But the initial signs are very positive." Apple's overall revenue increased 1.8 percent to 64 billion in the quarter ending in September. Apple predicted 85.5 billion to 89.5 billion in revenue for the current quarter, compared with 84.3 billion a year prior. Many analysts had increased their estimates for iPhone sales in recent weeks after certain signs, including reports from factories in China, suggested that demand for the new phones was strong. Analysts attributed some of that success to Apple's decisions with the latest phones, including dropping the price of its flagship phone while adding an additional camera lens to its higher end models. Apple has made up for the declines in iPhone sales with growth in other areas, such as wearable devices like the Apple Watch and AirPods, as well as its business of selling apps and other services like music and news. Wearables revenue grew by 54 percent to 6.5 billion and services revenue increased by 18 percent to 12.5 billion in the quarter. Apple is trying to bolster that business with a gaming service introduced last month and a streaming service set to start on Friday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
In "Last Days," a new collection of 11 stories, Miss Oates displays the uncanny ability to penetrate different states of consciousness, which has always been one of her trump cards as a writer. In the past, Miss Oates has been our poet laureate of schizophrenia, of blasted childhoods, of random acts of violence. But in this volume there appears a new Joyce Carol Oates I like even better than the hallucinatory chronicler of madness and violence performed on and by children. Six stories grouped together in this collection under the title "Our Wall" show Miss Oates dealing with the sort of material available to writers traveling around the world in their masks as celebrated personages. In the last story, also called "Our Wall," Miss Oates reaches beyond realism to create, in metaphorical terms, the philosophical underpinnings of all walls. History here transcends itself and becomes poetry: "Come closer, have no fear, long before you were born The Wall was, and forever will The Wall endure." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
A. J. Jacobs, the best selling author and humorist, was hoping to get former President George H. W. Bush on the telephone for a project involving genealogy. There was only one way to accomplish that, he reasoned: nepotism. "I called his chief of staff and explained that I was a long lost cousin," he said. It was not exactly a fib. Mr. Jacobs and the 41st president can be found 21 genealogical steps from each other, through marriage, on interlocking family trees, according to data Mr. Jacobs unearthed on genealogy sites like Geni.com, he said. He used the same "we're cousins" approach with Ludacris (39 steps) and Daniel Radcliffe (29). "It's one of the best icebreakers," Mr. Jacobs, 47, said. "It's the new LinkedIn." Mr. Jacobs's relation to these notables, however tangential, was the precise reason he was reaching out: He was inviting them to participate in the Global Family Reunion, a celebrity dotted, convention size mega reunion he is organizing for June 6 in New York in celebration of his family, and your family in short, everyone's family. The "family of man," it seems, is no longer just an Age of Aquarius era cliche. Research, like a 2002 study published in the journal Science, has shown that humans share 99.9 percent of their DNA. And our family ties to each other are becoming increasingly transparent in the era of mail in DNA testing services like 23andMe that purport to provide detailed data on shared bloodlines, and online genealogy databases that compile family super trees that include millions of people from around the globe. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
From left, Tabatha Gayle, Marcia Berry and Langston Darby in "The Black History Museum... According to the United States of America" a performance installation created and directed by Zoey Martinson at Here Arts Center. The serious, stately race play of old has lately given way to a new genre: the ironic, satirical race play, flirting with discomfort and implicating its audiences. "3/Fifths," "Underground Railroad Game," "Slave Play" and now "The Black History Museum ... According to the United States of America," presented by Here Arts Center and Smoke Mirrors Collaborative, use humor to attack and address microaggressions, aggression aggressions, stereotypes and preconceived notions of race. This elaborately designed show, created and directed by Zoey Martinson, makes an exhibit, a dance, a game, a poem, a skit, an archive and an oral history of blackness. But which elements work, and to what degree, vary, blunting the impact of its most striking accomplishments. Those certainly include the indispensable work of the scenic designer D'Vaughn Agu . Magically transforming Here Arts Center into the eponymous museum, he recreates in compact nooks and crannies throughout the space a cotton field, a barbershop, a memorial to the Obama presidency and a mesmerizing wall punctuated with protruding three dimensional limbs. Not unlike those who dared step into SupremacyLand in the equally immersive "3/Fifths," audiences here must arm themselves with an identity before continuing: They're granted literal "black cards" and informed of the conditions of their blackness by Jasper Sasparilla ( Robert King), a waggish "magical mulatto" escort. A man only called The Descendant (Kareem M. Lucas) serves as a kind of Dickensi an ghost guide, a beacon of black wokeness. The Founding Fathers, played by the black actors Marcia Berry, Langston Darby, Tabatha Gayle, Landon Woodson, and Tori Ann DeNoble, appear as foils representatives of white supremacy in America. (Only half their faces are painted white, to remind us of the slaves our founders owned.) Jefferson and company usher the audience into the museum proper, which leads us from the beginnings of slavery into our time of President Trump. Along the way, "The Black History Museum" engages in a fascinating push pull, between subtle interpretation and outspoken proclamation, earnest installation and interactive playground. A section on the Middle Passage begins with joyous African dance until the performers contort beneath the cracks of invisible whips. In another exhibit, a dancer inside a box festooned with black movie posters puts on whiteface in front of a mirror, preparing for a minstrel performance . These moments, rhapsodic and uncaptioned, are the most affecting, the production's dancers seamlessly incorporated into the action. The dazzlingly emotive Latra Wilson is especially arresting. Other rich nuggets: a showcase, with audio, of real love letters written by slaves; excerpts from a performance art project about black hair and identity; a "closeted history" that finds a television showing footage of Bayard Rustin, literally in a closet. Though audiences are ostensibly welcome to wander some sections at their leisure, they're promptly ushered to the next timed performance, and there isn't enough chance to ruminate on each segment in full. And each also raises a question of curatorial exclusion: Why these topics, and not others? The logic isn't always clear or totally coherent. An interactive exhibit called "The Reconstruction Game" finds humor in the uphill battle for black progress, but overstays its welcome; so does a faux political forum that features slapdash impressions of some American presidents. Lucas makes an energizing Descendant, though the character's poetic speeches occasionally suffer from long windedness. It's an issue of didacticism, mostly. "The Black History Museum" wants to tell and to teach "What did you learn here?" Jasper asks at the end, as though the audience can't be trusted to absorb its lessons. The two hour experience entertains and moves, but only when it doesn't undercut itself by overpreaching. More successful as art project than satire, the show dares to ask after a definition of blackness. Its answer s frequently rise to, though sometimes bend beneath, the challenge. The Black History Museum ... According to the United States of America Through Nov. 24 at HERE Arts Center, Manhattan; 212 647 0202, here.org. Running time: 2 hours. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
WINTER GARDEN, Fla. On the wall of a classroom that is home to the West Orange High School TikTok club, large loopy words are scrawled across a whiteboard: "Wanna be TikTok famous? Join TikTok club." It's working. "There's a lot of TikTok famous kids at our school," said Amanda DiCastro, who is 14 and a freshman. "Probably 20 people have gotten famous off random things." The school is on a quiet palm tree lined street in a town just outside Orlando. A hallway by the principal's office is busy with blue plaques honoring the school's A.P. Scholars. Its choir director, Jeffery Redding, won the 2019 Grammy Music Educator Award. Amanda was referring to a different kind of stardom: on TikTok, a social media app where users post short funny videos, usually set to music, that is enjoying a surge in popularity among teenagers around the world and has been downloaded 1.4 billion times, according to SensorTower. None TikTok Teens and K Pop Stans Say They Sunk Trump Rally The embrace of the app at this school is mirrored on scattered campuses across the United States, where students are forming TikTok clubs to dance, sing and perform skits for the app essentially drama clubs for the digital age, but with the potential to reach huge audiences. And unlike other social media networks, TikTok is winning over some educators, like Michael Callahan, a teacher at West Orange, who had never heard of TikTok before the students told him about it. He is an adviser to the school's club and said he loves how the app brings students from different friend groups together. "You see a lot more teamwork and camaraderie," he said, "and less I don't want to say bullying but focus on individuals." In many of the videos on the app, which are 15 seconds to a minute long, school hallways, classrooms and courtyards serve as a recurrent backdrop. And if kids aren't filming themselves at school, they're making jokes about school. One popular meme on the app mocks the class of 2023 (freshmen this year) for being cringey and trying too hard. "TikTok is such a theatrical platform," said Blake Cadwell, the general manager of Day One agency, a marketing firm in Los Angeles that works on Chipotle's TikTok account. "You're trying to build your cast for whatever you're doing, and high school is a natural environment where you're with lots of people, so you can do these skits or challenges." (A big part of TikTok culture, challenges are videos users create that riff on an of the moment meme.) Several students at West Orange have seen their videos shoot to the top of the popular "For You" page of the app. In the spring, the school's valedictorian went viral for a Minecraft video; another student got more than three million views for a parody of the film "Mean Girls." Ireland McTague, a 15 year old sophomore at St. Agnes Academy in Texas, said she spends about 16 hours a week on the app, creating or consuming videos. Manny Alexander, 16, a high schooler in New York, said he would diagnose himself as a TikTok addict. "Not that it's interrupted my life," he said, "but my life does revolve a bit around it." TikTok's addictiveness can be traced, in part, to its use of artificial intelligence to anticipate what users want and fill their feeds with it. That technology is so effective that the app's owner, Bytedance (a Chinese tech conglomerate), last year introduced anti addiction measures in Douyin, the Chinese version, to help both users and the parents who may be worried about them. The West Orange club meets every other Monday after school. It was founded in September by Kate Sandoval, a 17 year old senior. Mr. Callahan, the adviser, makes sure the students come up with an agenda for each meeting and don't just sit around goofing off on their phones. Kate pulled up a series of TikToks on a large screen. The students sipped Capri Suns and snacked on Cheetos as they watched. The first TikTok featured a teenager, whose face was obscured by the image of a giant crying baby's face, dancing to "Teach Me How to Dougie" in the aisle of a sporting goods store. The second showed a skit between two boys, in which one jokes about falling for the other after he slides past him to exit a bus seat. (This is a popular meme for boys; the punch line is a song lyric: "Oh no, I think I'm catching feelings.") The challenge for the week was to riff on these videos. The winner would receive a Chick fil A gift card. In the hallway, pairs of girls propped their phones against the wall and attempted to mimic the "Teach Me How to Dougie" dance step by step. Inside the classroom, three boys and two girls prepared skits about catching feelings for each other. Amy Sommers and her TikTok partner, Kaylani Heisler, a 16 year old senior, danced until they began sweating. "This is hard work!" Kaylani said between steps. 'If It's on the Internet, It's Not Private' Creating TikToks in class isn't exactly encouraged, but teachers at many schools say they view TikTok culture as a net positive. Others, like Emma Peden, a Spanish teacher at Fox Creek High School in South Carolina, are more hesitant. "Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat all those interfaces can feed bullying," she said. "I think kids can be recording things that they shouldn't." One encouraging sign is that videos about topics that high schoolers are all studying sometimes generate thousands of views and become memes in themselves. Kate Sandoval said she has made TikToks for her role in student government, and Mr. Callahan, the adviser, is mulling how he can use the app to teach students about government and social studies. "We're thinking this is possibly the new Schoolhouse Rock," he said. "There's a lot more than just funny videos," Kaylani Heisler said. "I see countless ways to take notes, get organized. I see chemistry study aids." Students occasionally involve their teachers in TikTok stunts, and many educators have set up their own accounts. Sarah Jacobs, a physics teacher at San Jose High School in California, said some of her students made TikToks explaining Newton's Laws for extra credit last year. St. Agnes Academy in Texas has begun releasing musical clips every Tuesday during its morning broadcast. "Students make a TikTok to the sound, then the next Tuesday they post the one that they like the most," said Ireland McTague, the sophomore there. Whitesboro High School in New York incorporated TikTok memes like VSCO girls slang for a subculture involving a lifestyle of scrunchies, Hydroflasks and environmentalism into homecoming week theme. Some schools block access to TikTok, along with all other social media apps, via the school's Wi Fi systems. At West Orange, Mr. Callahan and other educators take steps to educate students on their digital footprint. Students are instructed to think twice before posting anything online. Outside the room where the TikTok club meets, paper speech bubbles hang with messages: "Google yourself"; "If it's on the internet, it's not private"; "They loved your G.P.A.; then they saw your tweets." Harper Kelly, a 17 year old senior at Milford High School in Ohio, said, of her school TikTok club, "The last TikTok Tuesday, the room was split in half, one half of the room was watching TikToks, the other half was people doing dances and making them." The TikTok club at Fruita Monument High School in Colorado has its own TikTok account, TikTokClubbbb, an early club that appears to have spawned others. Dennis Allen, a 17 year old senior and club member, posted a TikTok, on which one respondent, Sophie Furdek, wrote: "I started TikTok club at my school." The TikTok club at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City was founded just weeks ago but has already attracted big interest: 70 students registered to join at the school's recent club fair. As the West Orange High School TikTok club wrapped up Monday afternoon, Kate Sandoval and her friends cleared snacks from the room and discussed future TikTok ideas. They had already posted a group dance to the WestOrangeTikToks handle. Before they left, they shared one of their ideas: "Should we make a TikTok about being in The New York Times?" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
What does a dance company do when its sole choreographer and leader, a figure as charismatic and intense as Pina Bausch, dies, leaving her dancers without a clear path forward? This was the situation faced by Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch in the summer of 2009, when Bausch succumbed to cancer, just days after her diagnosis. The dancers, on tour in Poland, made the decision to perform that night, and the next, and then another week, another year. Eight years and three artistic directors later, they're still at it. For the next two weeks, they will be at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, performing a double bill of archetypal Bausch's works from the 1970s, "Cafe Muller" (1978) and "The Rite of Spring" (1975). These were included in the company's first season at the Brooklyn Academy, their introduction to the New York audience, back in 1984. Over the course of those years since 2009, the company's future has become more clear. Crucially, there appears to be an undiminished appetite for Bausch's emotionally driven style of tanztheater (or dance theater), a blend of dreamlike imagery with dramatic situations and bursts of strenuous, even punishing movement. (Performances tend to sell out weeks in advance.) Read our critic on the impact of Wim Wenders's movie "Pina." Part of that future is a product of continuity. There aren't many dance troupes whose performers range in age from their 20s to 60s, but that is the situation in the company today. Many veterans are still there to pass on the knowledge embedded in their bodies and memories. But a new generation has begun to fill the company's ranks: Fifteen of its 36 dancers never knew Pina, as she is universally known. And, for the first time, a director has been brought in from outside the Bausch fold. Adolphe Binder, a former director of the GoteborgsOperans Danskompani and the Berlin Ballet, took the reins earlier this year. Ms. Binder has plans not only to keep the Bausch repertory alive "It is the company's DNA," she said but also to expand it with new works tailor made for the dancers by outside choreographers. On the eve of the company's visit to Brooklyn, I spoke with three dancers, from three distinct phases of the company's 44 year history. All three spoke via Skype from Wuppertal, Germany. Nazareth Panadero, 62, has been with the company since 1979. She joined, she said, out of curiosity. She had started as a ballet student in Spain, then moved to Paris, where she discovered the contemporary and experimental dance scene. There, she saw Bausch's company perform "Blaubart" (1977). She found that she wanted to discover "the woman hidden behind this work." She joined the company, unsure that she would stay, and has remained, with one short hiatus, until today. "It's not something you see in other companies to have dancers who stay for so many years," said the Madrid born Ms. Panadero, in gravelly voice familiar from Bausch's works. "But Pina was interested in seeing us grow old. She wanted to see what a dancer with experience has to give after 40 and 50." At the Brooklyn Academy, she will appear in a role she has performed for over 30 years: a nervous looking woman in "Cafe Muller," mincing around a chair strewn room in high heels, looking as lost as if she'd misplaced her keys. At one point she tries, ineffectually, to help a couple trapped in a violent struggle. "She keeps her emotions locked in," Ms. Panadero said, "so she lives a little bit through the lives of others. She worries about them and projects herself through them." It's a typical Bauschian question: Who are we in relation to others? For Ms. Panadero, quitting after Bausch's death was not an option. "When she died, our yearning for the work and our desire for it to stay alive was so strong that it drove us to go on," she said. "Performing her pieces made us feel as if Pina were alive, still with us. So, we went on." Tsai Chin Yu, 37, joined the company a year before Bausch's death, though she had been a guest for two years while still a student at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Wuppertal. She had come to the school from Taiwan specifically to be close to the company, after becoming captivated by a video of "The Rite of Spring," a 35 minute piece of unflappable intensity, performed on an dirt covered stage. "That image just took me," Ms. Yu recalled, "and I told myself, I want to do this piece." "Rite" ended up being the first piece she performed with the company, and it is the one in which she will appear in Brooklyn. She dances the role of a woman selected for immolation by a tribe of half dressed, terrified, sometimes violent humans. In the final minutes she launches into a harrowing dance of death, filled with thrashing, convulsive movements. How does she maintain that intensity? "There's this struggle inside," she said. "You want to do it, but you don't want to do it, because you know you're going to die." After each performance she has to go back to the hotel, try to eat and have a massage, "otherwise the back muscles will be destroyed." The Brooklyn Academy performances will be an important milestone for Breanna O'Mara: On Sept. 19 and 20, Ms. O'Mara, 28, will be performing Bausch's role in "Cafe Muller," a spectral figure who stumbles across the stage, eyes closed, in a state of acute, suspended sorrow. This will be the first time the role has been performed by someone with no personal connection to Bausch. Ms. O'Mara learned the role from Helena Pikon, a French dancer who joined the company in 1978 and is still performing. (Ms. Pikon dances the role in the other Brooklyn dates.) Ms. O'Mara, a tall, redheaded dancer who graduated from Juilliard in 2011, is from a Detroit suburb, "just a public school kid who went to a local dance studio," she said. When she arrived in New York, she had never heard of Pina Bausch or Tanztheater. Her moment of discovery came at a performance of "Bamboo Blues" in 2008 at the Brooklyn Academy. "I didn't know you could do that in performance," she recalled, "I felt, this is theater, and these are humans. They were people onstage being themselves moving, making jokes, screaming. And I understood what they were doing." When Ms. O'Mara graduated from Juilliard, the company's future seemed uncertain. But she moved to Germany anyway and spent two years at the Staatstheater Kassel before auditioning for Bausch's company. She joined 2014. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
WASHINGTON Sit in the audience at Ford's Theater, where "Jefferson's Garden" is playing, and you have a clear view of the scene of a crime. There it is, directly above the right side of the stage the presidential box where Abraham Lincoln was shot. Stand on the steps outside the Folger Theater, as you go into "The Way of the World," and you'll spy the Supreme Court on the next block, with the dome of the Capitol rising beyond. Cross the Potomac River into Arlington, where Signature Theater is doing "4,380 Nights," and you'll spot the vast Pentagon, hunkered low to the ground. Such is the lay of the land in the company town that is Washington, where the Women's Voices Theater Festival fits in perfectly: steeped in history, consumed with politics and deeply engaged in the cultural wrestling match over the shape that the future will take. Devoted to plays by women, the festival is an excellent place to consider what the American theater needs to look like, gender parity and all. Mmm, I wouldn't be so sure. Rene, dear, have you looked at the news? The aim of the first festival, in 2015, was to seed the male dominated theatrical canon with a profusion of new works by female authors. With two dozen plays, this second incarnation (officially running through Feb. 15, though many of the shows will continue after that) is smaller and less fixed on world premieres, with plays already tested Off Broadway, like Danai Gurira's "Familiar" and Sarah DeLappe's "The Wolves," on the roster. But it still makes a political statement by its very presence not quite Time's Up, the message of the Hollywood campaign, but that the clock is ticking, and the goal posts are not where they used to be. History, though, is approximately where we left it. "There's Monticello," the man behind me at Ford's Theater breathed as a handsome suite of French windows arrived onstage in "Jefferson's Garden," Timberlake Wertenbaker's sprawling, keen eyed, early American tale, with an interracial love story at its center and some bitterness, too. That romance, which doesn't go the way you might think, is between fictional characters, but Thomas Jefferson (Michael Halling) is here, too brainy, compromised, intensely selfish. Caught in his web even after they taste freedom abroad are Sally Hemings (Kathryn Tkel) and her lovely, defiant brother James (the excellent Michael Kevin Darnall). Flecked with comedy and soothed with song, it's a beautiful, ultimately mournful play about where the United States went wrong on race, on gender way back at the start. The tightness of Nataki Garrett's pared down production comes and goes, but the nine member ensemble is uncommonly winning, and their colorful costumes of crumpled Tyvek (by Ivania Stack) make them look like 3 D paper dolls. At Signature, an orange jumpsuited figure is onstage as the audience enters for "4,380 Nights," Annalisa Dias's deeply felt drama about imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay. The man is Malik (Ahmad Kamal, sympathetic and funny), an innocent Algerian held captive there for years on end, as he insists on his innocence. It's the sequel to "Queens Girl in the World," Ms. Jennings's solo piece in the 2015 festival, and it follows the same semi autobiographical heroine, a black New York City teenager now reluctantly moving to Nigeria with her parents in 1965. Peopled with more than a dozen characters from around the globe, it poses an acting challenge that the show's star, Erika Rose, met with impressive nimbleness. Watching "Sovereignty," the lawyer playwright Mary Kathryn Nagle's Cherokee Nation legal drama at Arena Stage, I found myself thinking about the way Ms. Nagle talks. As I learned when I interviewed her last month, she can be entertainingly animated even when speaking about some dry, obscure fact. This is not the way of ordinary mortals, though, and the play's more explanatory dialogue can sound stilted in the mouths of her actors. The temperature of Molly Smith's production wavers from charmingly warm (Andrew Roa, as a new grandfather, is comically endearing, and kudos for using baby dolls with fabulous stand up hair) to chillier than intended. With its historical and contemporary plot lines, the play tells important stories of cultural and domestic violence, but the characters leave us wanting to know them better. Style, not substance, is the priority in "The Way of the World" at the Folger, a romp adapted from William Congreve's Restoration comedy, updated to now and relocated to the Hamptons. Directed by Ms. Rebeck, it's a production to bask in partly for the sleek, chic design (set by Alexander Dodge, lighting by Donald Holder), but foremost for the chance to see Ms. Nielsen let loose in a starring role as a shallow, pampered soul who has long overseen her niece's 600 million trust. Ashley Austin Morris is also hilarious as a waitress, a recurring commentator on the habits of the obscenely rich. Ms. Nielsen plays a grasping buffoon who lusts after much younger men a setup that ordinarily, in our entertainment, calls for outright degradation of the woman. Not here, though. Comic humiliation? Absolutely. But there's a crucial tonal difference: no meanness in it. Ms. Rebeck and the brilliant Linda Cho (who also did the costumes for "Sovereignty") are good to their star. Which turns out to be a lot more fun. Brief digression: Last fall, at Shakespeare's Globe in London, I saw a subversive confection of a musical called "Romantics Anonymous" that just about wrecked me. Adapted, from the French film of the same name, by Emma Rice, the Globe's soon to depart artistic director, it's about a tradition bucking heroine too timid to stand up for her own genius, whose colleagues bow and scrape before an inscrutable man fool they've been told is a savant. During the scene where the heroine, reflexively overlooked, watches a man be congratulated for her sublimely innovative achievement, I put my head in my hands. It is so easy to be invisible, or inaudible, simply by virtue of being female. And this is the thing: that so many women's stories, for so many years, have gotten overlooked, or drowned out or shouted down, while men's stories have been enshrined in tradition. In the theater, telling and retelling the same tales is part of the culture. There are good reasons to revisit the canon, searching for fresh resonances each time. But there are bad reasons, too, like being so tuned in to male voices and experiences that others fail to register as valid or worthwhile. Gender parity for playwrights, a goal that the Women's Voices festival is helping to push forward, would almost by default improve our understanding of the world, deepening our knowledge of what it is to be human. In the gift shop at Ford's Theater, there's a T shirt emblazoned with a famously democratic phrase. "Created equal," it says, a proud allusion to the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence before it. Equal treatment, though, is something the American experiment has always struggled with. So has the American theater. In Washington, that most political of cities, the festival is trying to do something about that. Let's hope it keeps coming back, with sustained focus and tenacious commitment, until it isn't needed anymore. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Diseases are political, and they necessitate political action no one should try to suggest otherwise. Unchecked, they toss legions out of work and kill millions, ravaging the most vulnerable the hardest. The calamity that is Covid 19 demands an equal or greater political force led by governments. It must be met with a powerful, multilevel, transnational, coordinated array of responses. Officials in Washington, Beijing and beyond should stride cautiously, however. Avoid infusing the politics needed to quell Covid 19 with tactics designed to serve partisan interests. Your power should be focused on caring for others and marshaling resources for disease prevention not on deflecting blame, shoring up approval ratings, settling scores or demonizing people because of ethnicity or nationality. In the best of times, sidestepping self serving impulses is hard. It's even harder in an age of containment. We are told daily to secure our self, family and homeland. But, of course, diseases know no borders; supply chains are internationally embedded; and crisis management necessitates intergovernmental collaboration and data sharing among scientists. Leaders should deploy their political capital wisely against Covid 19 for another reason. Relationships can take years to nurture and seconds to destroy, especially when a tweet circulates globally in an instant, a lesson we teach our students regularly. There is no place today for politicians to endanger bilateral ties by spreading conspiracies or insulting language about virological origins. Now is the time, instead, for rebuilding global public health alliances, such as the World Health Organization, renewing scientific exchanges and communicating respectfully across borders. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
The Jets did the seemingly unthinkable on Sunday. They won. In perhaps the biggest upset of the season, the formerly winless Jets (1 13) knocked off the Los Angeles Rams (9 5) in convincing fashion, building a 17 point lead in the third quarter and then holding off the Rams' high powered offense to win their first game of the season, 23 20, in Inglewood, Calif. The Jets' victory, their first since the final week of last season, came after a tumultuous 2020 campaign that has seen the team juggle quarterbacks, fire their defensive coordinator and fend off calls for Coach Adam Gase to be sent packing. Amid all the misery, including the league's worst offense, Jets fans took solace in the possibility that a winless season could secure the first pick in the N.F.L. draft next spring. Now that is in doubt. In beating the Rams, the Jets fell behind in the race for the top pick in next year's draft, something that will leave their win starved fans with mixed feelings. The Jacksonville Jaguars, who lost to the Baltimore Ravens by 26 points on Sunday and are also 1 13, would hold the tiebreaker in the draft over the Jets if the teams end the season with the same record. It is a nightmare scenario for Jets fans who have tried to find a silver lining in all the losing. Given their knack for blowing winnable games, the Jets' victory on Sunday was as improbable as any this season. The Rams, who are battling the Seattle Seahawks for the N.F.C. West crown, were 17 point favorites playing on their home field. The Jets were blown out by the Seahawks last week in Seattle, and had to crisscross the country this week. At least on paper, they should have been exhausted. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
IT was sometime in the mid 1980s, Carol Peligian recalls, that she told her broker not to telephone her until she'd found her an apartment among the run down, sparsely populated commercial blocks of Fifth Avenue between 14th and 23rd Streets. The broker's response was succinct: "You're out of your mind." Ms. Peligian's husband, Robert Boghosian, was scarcely more enthusiastic. But Ms. Peligian, an artist, recognized New York as a great shape shifting organism; she felt that the decidedly unglamorous area below Madison Square Park might have a future to match its richly textured past. At the time, that stretch of Fifth Avenue was "like a canyon: it was abandoned, it was vast and boarded up," she said. "But it had a faded old beauty just waiting to be cared for a little bit." In 1987, the couple paid 320,000 for a 1,700 square foot loft in the Folio House, a neo Renaissance style co op building on 18th Street. The unit had soaring ceilings and windows and original maple floors that still bore the stress marks from years as a book bindery. "It was love at first sight," she said, "a coup de foudre." Today, even as the area has gentrified to the point that she laments the "malling of Lower Fifth," Ms. Peligian's affection is undiminished. Looking north from her street, you see the Empire State Building; looking south, you see the Washington Arch, with One World Trade Center beyond. "The magical thing," she said, "is that you still have this incredible feeling when you walk out the door in the Flatiron, right out on Fifth, that everything is possible." There is plenty in the neighborhood to buttress her opinion. As destination restaurants like Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill and Danny Meyer's Gramercy Tavern opened in the Flatiron in the 1990s, joining the City Bakery and shops like that of the British designer Paul Smith, the district became increasingly desirable. A wave of residential conversions of commercial and industrial lofts, along with new residential construction, added more than 1,000 housing units to the 19 blocks of the Flatiron between 2000 and 2010, according to census data; the increase amounted to almost 25 percent. The population also swelled by nearly a quarter, to 8,527. Many of these new arrivals are families. "It's not the Chelsea crowd," said Herve Senequier, an executive vice president of Prudential Douglas Elliman, who lives in the area. "Just by the nature of the size of the apartments, the majority of which are large, they are geared more toward families." Two recent arrivals are Alison Graham and Ted Beaton, managing consultants for I.B.M., who relocated from Australia last year. To establish a nest for themselves and the baby they were planning for, the couple paid 1.6 million for a two bedroom loft in the Cammeyer at Sixth Avenue and 20th Street, a newly converted neo Renaissance style condominium built in 1892 for A. J. Cammeyer Company, a shoe retailer. Their 1,189 square foot loft is within walking distance of their jobs on Madison Square, but the area also strongly appealed to them because of its "ton of resources for mums and babies," said Ms. Graham, who takes her infant son, Cooper, to City Treehouse, one of several play centers nearby. "It's so family friendly compared to when I lived here in the late '90s," she added. There are plenty of diversions for adults, as well. "We walk down to the West Village and we're there in nine minutes," Ms. Graham said. "We're at the High Line all the time. We go to Chelsea Market and Madison Square Park. We ride our bikes out to Brooklyn on the Brooklyn Bridge. We feel like we're in the center of the universe." The boundaries of the Flatiron can be a subject of disagreement, but the district generally runs from the Avenue of the Americas to Park Avenue South between 14th and 23rd Streets, excluding the blocks adjacent to Union Square. Still, as often happens when a neighborhood becomes popular, some see its borders as expanded. The Flatiron 23rd Street Partnership, the six year old business improvement district that keeps streets clean and maintains two public plazas created on Broadway in 2008, places the northern boundary in the upper 20s, an area some call NoMad, or North of Madison Square Park. The Flatiron District takes its name, of course, from the iron shaped 1903 skyscraper, originally called the Fuller Building, whose proud prow surges northward at the intersection of Broadway and Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street. But the neighborhood owes its distinctive sense of place at least as much to the rows of grand edifices in the Ladies' Mile Historic District, designated by the city in 1989, which encompasses the bulk of the Flatiron neighborhood. Broadway from Union to Madison Square was lined in the last third of the 19th century with fashionable shops catering to the "carriage trade." Many of these showy architectural confections survive, restored in recent years and given a contemporary twist by of the moment shops that have inhabited their august buildings, hermit crab style. On 20th Street, the Brooks Brothers Flatiron Shop, a concept store aimed at college students and young professionals, opened in November in the mansard roofed palace of the former Lord Taylor. Across the street, Beecher's Handmade Cheese has taken up residence within the majestic Romanesque Revival arches of the Goelet Building, designed by Stanford White. "It's much more posh on Broadway than it's been," said Mara Flash Blum, a senior vice president of Sotheby's International Realty, who lives in the area. "Several buildings were scaffolded for restoration at the same time, and now it's like the unveiling of the Ladies' Mile, and it's quite breathtaking." On Sixth Avenue, the colossal shopping emporiums of the late 19th century, known then as Fashion Row, are again thronged with shoppers. A renaissance initiated by Bed Bath Beyond has more recently been joined by Trader Joe's and the Container Store. The cast iron fronted O'Neill Building, long scalped of its eye catching twin domes, has been restored and converted to condos. "In the mid '80s our neighborhood was a lady who's just been let go, and then people said, 'Oh, she's pretty,' and they dressed her up," said Ms. Peligian, the artist. "And sometimes with the small boutiques they do a good job and she's beautiful, and sometimes with the big chains they overdress her, but she's still beautiful. A queen's a queen." The Flatiron is a destination for foodies. Popular restaurants include Rosa Mexicano and Jean Georges Vongerichten's locavore haven ABC Kitchen, inside the ABC Carpet Home department store. Eataly, on the north side of 23rd, exerts a nearly planetary pull on Italian food lovers. Condos typically run 1,500 to 1,700 a square foot, Ms. Blum said, and "a deal would be 1,200 to 1,300." For a buyer "with price concerns who doesn't need a doorman," co ops offer a relative value, said Mr. Senequier of Elliman. "A co op will cost 850 to 1,100 a square foot, more if it's a penthouse." He added that units had been taking about 113 days to sell, as they had five months earlier. A search on Streeteasy.com showed 83 apartments for sale. One project aimed at families is the Story House, at 36 East 22nd. Once home to Frederick Warne Company, the publisher of Beatrix Potter, the building has been converted by the Zucker Organization into eight full floor condos ranging from 3.25 million, for a two bedroom, to 4.5 million for the three bedroom penthouse. Laurie Zucker, a partner, said four units had sold since August, all close to asking price. And then there's One Madison Park, on 23rd, a slender 50 story glass exclamation point transformed into a high profile question mark when its construction and sales were halted by financial problems and lawsuits. One of the hottest buildings in Manhattan in 2008, the project is now working its way through the bankruptcy process, which is expected to be complete in May. The Related Companies, the developer behind the Time Warner Center, co owns the debt in a partnership with the HFZ Capital Group. The partnership expects to complete construction and provide the building with new resources, and sales could begin again in early fall. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Credit...Gaia Squarci for The New York Times HOLYOKE, Mass. The sword fight between Hamlet and Laertes needed to feel real, dicey, dangerous. But m aybe not this dangerous. At Wistariahurst a historic house museum here a small playing area and slippery parquet floors made even a blunted weapon a menace. "Watch yourself," Daniel Light said as he teasingly slid a dagger through an onlooker's legs. Jordan Mann, who plays Hamlet, spritzed some hair spray on the bottom of her shoes to make them stickier. "Take it a little bit slower," she advised. "Fast words. Slow footwork." Elsinore had arrived here about an hour earlier, with Ms. Mann, Mr. Light and four fellow actors rattling up in a Ford Expedition and a dusty Econoline, carting curtains and cables into a high ceilinged gallery. Every year since 1982 , Shakespeare Company has sent young performers on the road from early winter through late spring, for four months of Dunkin' Donuts breakfasts, motel showers, flubbed lines, forgotten props, missed turnoffs, standing ovations and the chance to live with Shakespeare's words a lot like the traveling players of 400 years ago would have. They perform a play somewhere new, and usually less treacherous, nearly every day. Earlier this month, I spent a few days with the 2019 troupe Dara Brown, Caitlin Kraft, Nick Nudler and Kirsten Peacock were the others as they tramped through four states, delivering their 90 minute "Hamlet." By the time I joined them late one Tuesday night, in an otherwise deserted motel abutting a golf resort in western Vermont, they had played a private school in Connecticut the day before and a Vermont public school gym that afternoon. On Wednesday, they were at Vermont's Long Trail School. On Thursday, after a night at Shakespeare Company housing in Lenox, Mass., they went to Wistariahurst, performing for an audience of mostly teen mothers, then drove four hours south, with stops for gas and Popsicles, staying overnight at a Crowne Plaza in Saddle Brook, N.J. "This is where everyone in Saddle Brook has their prom," Mr. Nudler announced as he pulled the van into the parking lot. At 5:20 a.m. they drove into New York City for a morning performance for high school students at Trevor Day School on the Upper East Side . They took audience questions, ate a quick cafeteria lunch, dismantled the set with preternatural efficiency. By noon they had packed every last ripped tarp and bloodstained poet shirt into the vehicles for the three hour drive back to Lenox. This was VanLife, Elizabethan style. Shakespeare Company has always had strong education programs, the tour among them. About 100 actors audition for it every year, heading to Lenox to deliver two contrasting Shakespeare monologues and answer a few questions. Every year the tour prepares a comedy and a tragedy (this year "Hamlet" alternates with "The Taming of the Shrew"). The directors of each play Tom Jaeger and Kelly Galvin this year not only have to figure out how to cast 30 or 40 roles with just six actors, but also divine who will work together best once the tour is up and running. Almost anyone can appear polite and friendly during a 15 or 20 minute audition. But who can manage it after weeks of little sleep and a punishing lack of privacy? "You want to pick people that are mature," Kevin G. Coleman, Shakespeare Company's director of education said, when I called him a few days before joining. "Because the tour is profoundly stressful." The tour pays around 500 per week, plus free housing, travel expenses and a per diem for nights on the road. There are no personal days, no paid vacations, no health care, though most of the actors are young enough to be enrolled on their parents' plans and others qualify for Medicaid. And there's a chiropractor in Lenox, I was told, who will see you for 20. The cast convenes in December and rehearses for three weeks before a furlough for the Christmas holidays. In January, after several more weeks of rehearsal, the tour begins, sometimes with a few false starts. This year, on the first day, the Expedition's brakes were on the fritz. So the actors piled into Ms. Kraft's own car for the drive to Watertown, Conn. They made it. During the early weeks it can be hard to remember all the costumes and props and characters. Ms. Mann, who along with Hamlet portrays five characters in "Shrew," recalled being backstage during that show and having to hiss at a cast member: "Who am I?" The whole cast still talks about the time they forgot the laptop that runs the sound cues and a volleyball decorated to look like the "Shrew" character Bianca. (When you have six actors and at least twice as many characters, you get creative.) Besides acting, everyone has extra jobs. Ms. Kraft is the road manager and looks after the sets. Mr. Nudler is the vehicle manager and oversees the lighting. Ms. Brown is the travel agent and liaises with each school. (Schools pay Shakespeare Company 2,300 for a performance; for other venues the fee can go as high as 3,500. Financial aid is available.) Then they "check in," a Shakespeare Company practice in which each person expresses how he or she is feeling. An emotional safety valve, it helps to keep things civil. (What else keeps them from killing one another on the road? "State laws," Mr. Light, who often plays villains, said.) The actors separate for individual warm ups. They quickly restage the play for the space some stages are wide, some are narrow, some are raked, some are flat, once they had to dodge a half built set for "Cabaret" and rehearse the fight scenes. This all takes about an hour and a half. Sometimes there's a further break for lunch in the school's cafeteria, sometimes they eat after. How are the cafeteria meals? Usually pretty good. "There are schools we go to where it's a five star buffet," Ms. Peacock said back in the van one afternoon. Students boo. They doze. They giggle. At Wistariahurst several took cellphone videos of the death scene. "I like the audiences when they're fully reacting," Ms. Kraft, who was on her second tour and specializes in clowns and queens, said the day before. "I'm not a movie screen." I exchanged a few emails with Siobhan Keenan, a literature professor at De Montfort University in Leicester, England, and the author of "Travelling Players in Shakespeare's England," the classic of the field. She wrote that the tour "sounds great fun and perhaps not entirely different from what life was like for traveling players back in Shakespeare's time!" Even the van has an analogue, in the horse drawn wagon that players, like the ones who visit Elsinore in "Hamlet," would have used to carry costumes and props. Traveling players were usually young members of established companies. They weren't paid especially well; there are records of actors selling costumes to buy food. Performance locations varied, as did accommodations. Renaissance players could be beaten or jailed under a 1572 act targeting "rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars." That's not a real danger today, though a teacher did once catch Ms. Mann loitering with a dagger in her belt outside an auditorium (she had an entrance through the audience) and nearly took her to the principal's office. Still, Renaissance players didn't insist on a talkback after each show, a mix of actors' prompts and audience questions. (The actors can tell which schools have taught "Hamlet" when a teen asks "Where's Fortinbras?") And traveling Elizabethan troupes didn't lead workshops on the text, an optional add on. The educational component isn't why most of the young actors , some just out of college, others newly released from M.F.A. programs or Shakespeare Company's own acting intensive, join the tour . They join because they want a job or to hone their craft or to see what it feels like to do a show 30 or 40 times instead of playing it over one weekend or because, as Mr. Nudler, who plays kings and knaves, said at dinner one night, "I had always kind of fantasized about this idea of acting on the road." But the talkbacks and workshops are often why they return. Ms. Peacock, a British American actress and the troupe's leading lady, was back for a second season. "Last year's tour was just such a rewarding experience," she said. "Being able to take Shakespeare into schools and see the impact that it can have on young people, the conversations that they have." At Long Trail School I watched as a dozen middle school and high school students, in bare feet and Birkenstocks, took ownership of Shakespeare's verse. One three person group reset some Act I lines in what seemed to be a dentist's office (a robot was involved). Another group relocated the "Get thee to a nunnery" scene to an after party at a mermaid prom. "Don't stop mermaiding!" one of the students, Timur Langford, urged his colleagues. At Wistariahurst, the actors led a 45 minute workshop for students at the Care Center, an alternative education program for young mothers and women resuming an interrupted education. I stood with some of the women and their teachers as they worked this same scene. "Sounds like a breakup," one young woman observed. "She got friendzoned," another added. They came to Hamlet's line, "I never gave you aught." "That's like the baby daddy saying he doesn't want the baby," a third said, delivering Ophelia's line "You know right well you did," as a snappy comeback. After the workshop, Pearl Manus, a student at the Care Center's chapter of Bard Microcollege, talked to me about "Hamlet." "Even though it's a very old play there are still the same issues in contemporary life," she said. "You don't feel so alone." She turned to Ms. Peacock, whom she'd seen as Desdemona in "Othello" last year. "I thought about how you died in two plays and you got slapped in two plays," she said. "I was stronger. I didn't cry this time around." For the last performance of the week, at Trevor Day School, I watched from backstage, tiptoeing from one wing to the other while Claudius scrolled through his phone and Horatio quickly became Polonius and Ophelia undid her hair for the mad scene and Gertrude grabbed the skulls she needed for the gravedigger and Laertes checked the prop swords and Hamlet stripped down for the fight scene. The actors had performed the play almost 30 times by now and they had an ease with it, often lip syncing each other's lines backstage or breaking into aggressive dance moves before they had to scurry away for an entrance. I was a theater major in college and did some acting for a year or two after, and in the backstage jostle I remembered, acutely, why I'd loved it the adrenaline, the manic camaraderie, the phenomenon of having so many eyes and ears trained just on you, the confidence that you could take strange words and make them brilliantly alive. I also remembered why I'm grateful not to do it anymore, for a lot of those same reasons. I also thought about something Mr. Coleman, the education director had said: how if you're an actor on the tour, you're falling in love with Shakespeare, yes, but "you're falling in love with yourself. You're discovering what you can do." Which should go a long way toward making up for those early mornings and highway miles and terrible loneliness, even within the group. "Shakespeare allows you to grow and discover at every performance," Ms. Mann said. Ms. Brown, the troupe's youngest member, who plays little sisters and sidekicks, said, "It has taught me a lot about myself." Over dinner, at the Saddle Brook Crowne Plaza, I asked the actors if they would do the tour again. "I'm too tired to answer that question right now," Ms. Kraft said. Ms. Brown, who has been reading books about loneliness and now hates hotels, was the last to answer. "I totally would," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
LOS ANGELES By now, it's clear from a number of investigations that women's gymnastics in the United States has been tarnished by administrators who overvalued winning and coaches who did not know where the line existed between developing gymnasts and abusing them. And yet while much of the gymnastics world has been spinning out of control, rocked by sensational courtroom testimony and other revelations, there has been a seeming oasis tucked into the campus of U.C.L.A. Many outside the sport learned that last month when Katelyn Ohashi stunned millions of YouTube viewers with her strength, sassiness and thrilling tumbling. To those in the know, there was little surprise that Ohashi, once not far from an Olympic berth, rediscovered her joy of gymnastics at U.C.L.A., under a coach who cannot do a single pull up. Valorie Kondos Field, known as Miss Val to basically everyone, is the first to admit she is not a perfect coach. She is her own sort of taskmaster, and she has a number of rules for her student athletes. No chewing gum. No hair ties on the wrists. But she has long presented an alternative to the often joyless training environment that has become associated with the elite levels of the sport. In Kondos Field's gymnastics program, there is more talk about what the young women want to do after gymnastics rather than why they did or did not make an Olympic team. To teach gymnasts to speak up and defend a point of view, Kondos Field arranges for debates about topics, such as, "Should U.C.L.A. become a nudist campus?" The routines become a vehicle for self expression, which is how you end up with Ohashi moonwalking her way through a floor exercise. "I know what it's like to have to go through puberty in a leotard," said Kondos Field, a former professional ballerina who had little experience in gymnastics instruction when she joined the program nearly four decades ago. "I know what it's like to have disordered eating. I know what it's like to have to go out there by yourself." Kondos Field's presence has special import right now, and not simply because another routine by a U.C.L.A. gymnast became an internet sensation. She is retiring at the end of the season. In 2014, Kondos Field learned she had breast cancer . She let her gymnasts feel the tumor in her breast because she wanted to help them understand that a setback was not an end. During chemotherapy, she worked on reframing her circumstances and considered what else she could accomplish. She is now considered cancer free. In her office, guests are encouraged to get comfortable on a worn, mustard yellow couch that once belonged to Kondos Field's hero, the U.C.L.A. basketball coach John Wooden. The guests tell her what is going on in their lives as she sits in Wooden's old captain's chair. The word "gymnastics" may not even come up. That is fine. Margzetta Frazier, a U.C.L.A. freshman and recent member of the United States national team, said Kondos Field and her staff were the only prospective collegiate coaches who spoke to her about life after gymnastics when she was being recruited. "They didn't bring up the Olympics," she said. "They were like, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?'" And where her gymnasts go, she will go, too, if necessary. At least eight gymnasts who were abused by Dr. Lawrence G. Nassar, the former U.S.A. Gymnastics team doctor, later competed or worked for the U.C.L.A. team. Two of them, Madison Kocian and Kyla Ross the only women to have won Olympic gold, world championship gold and N.C.A.A. titles shared their stories on national television in August, with Kondos Field by their side. Like any coach, Kondos Field may have her detractors, though they are not that easy to find. She and other N.C.A.A. gymnastics coaches adhere to methods that may be standard operational procedure in their sport and other college sports, too but might strike outsiders as overbearing. She monitors what the gymnasts eat for breakfast and how much they sleep. Those who break too many rules may be suspended from the team. After the 2016 season, she railed against her team's conditioning. "I am not degrading you," she recalled telling the gymnasts. "One reason why we're not scoring higher is we're not able to do better gymnastics because of our physical fitness." They won a national championship two years later. Ohashi, who as a young teenager suffered from an eating disorder and was compared to "a bird that was too fat to lift itself off the ground," called Kondos Field "my mentor, my mom, my sister, my best friend.'' "She's literally everything to me,'' she added. The team, like its counterparts at many other universities, participates in a grueling 14 meet schedule. Its scores are sometimes a point of contention. Some contend the U.C.L.A. gymnasts get a "leotard bonus" a higher mark simply because of the program's status and its seven national championships since 1997. Others argue that Kondos Field's intricate choreography can blind the judges to flaws. Still, U.C.L.A. executes some of the most difficult and artistic gymnastics in the N.C.A.A. Kondos Field, 59, was never a competitive gymnast. In a recent Instagram post, she hung from a set of chalky uneven bars, her feet cautiously tapping a mat as her Pilates instructor tried to encourage her to use her lat muscles when attempting that elusive pull up. Knowing where she needs help, Kondos Field relies on her assistants, including the Olympic gold medalist Jordyn Wieber, to refine her athletes' technical skills. Kondos Field grew up in Sacramento and first set foot in a gym in 1976. The instructor did not need a dance instructor, but he hired her to play piano for the floor exercises. "I couldn't keep my big mouth shut as I'm playing,'' she said. "I'm telling them: 'Point your feet! Get your legs straight! Get your head up!''' U.C.L.A. eventually hired her as a choreographer in 1982. After the 1990 season, the senior associate athletic director, Judith Holland, dismissed the coach and decided that Kondos Field was the best person to take on the job and reinvent the gymnastics program, which had yet to win a national championship. "I remember laughing out loud and saying, 'You know I don't know the first thing about gymnastics,'" Kondos Field recalled. "That came after I was catatonic for about 30 seconds." At first, she became a stereotype of a coach, acting as if she were always right. She continually demanded more from her athletes, but the team floundered and she planned to resign. Then she happened upon some of Wooden's teachings. His words resonated, just as they do with nearly every coach who works at U.C.L.A., where, nearly a decade after he died, he remains the Wizard of Westwood. "Success is a peace of mind, which is a direct result of self satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming," Wooden once wrote. That mind set became the ruling principle of Kondos Field's program. Its effect is easy to detect. "I'm willing to go out of my comfort zone," said Gracie Kramer, who joined the team as a walk on. Kocian, the Olympic gold medalist, agrees that happens. "I had always followed that elite mind set of this is what you're doing, you don't have much of a say," she said. But Kondos Field does not want it to be that way. And she has developed a cult following among gymnastics fans. At a meet last month against Arizona State, they looped a concourse, waiting for Kondos Field to sign copies of her book, "Life Is Short, Don't Wait to Dance." Some own "Miss Val" PopSockets. One Twitter user even made a version of "The Last Supper," with Kondos Field as Jesus and gymnasts as disciples. The last meets are approaching, too, the last opportunities for Kondos Field, usually in inches high heels, to lead the student section in mimicking the most memorable movements on the floor. "I'm not retiring because I don't like my job or I'm bored," she said as she rattled off her goals: speaking engagements, promoting her book, maybe creating a Broadway musical. "But ever since I got cancer, I realized that we all have an expiration date. I just don't know when mine is." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
At last, proof positive: Kim is a much better liar than Jimmy. We know because as the pair try to win over a skeptical looking, handgun packing, fish tank tapping Lalo, it is Kim who proves a far more convincing, far nimbler fabricator. Lalo mentions the bullet holes he found in Jimmy's car which turn out to be the biggest holes in Jimmy's story and Kim instantly has a simple and plausible explanation. They are no doubt the work of New Mexico's legion of yahoos, she says, who will shoot at anything made of metal. Kim also serves as a character witness, telling Lalo that Jimmy is a man of integrity. The kind who doesn't lie, she lies. Our favorite con man, it seems, has married a far more talented con woman. She doesn't merely persuade Lalo. She admonishes him. For not having a better criminal enterprise, for not hiring more trustworthy minions. "No offense," she says, "but you need to get your house in order." It's a nonviolent, psychologically fraught ending to an episode that is low on action and very interior. If the tale told here has a chewy center, it is the speech Mike gives to Jimmy about the ways that people choose a road, often based on a small decision, and then find it impossible to exit that road. This is a pretty fatalistic vision of life, and one to which Mike sincerely subscribes. With good reason. When he tried leaving his own road a few episodes ago, he wound up a depressed drunk with a death wish. Is Jimmy every bit as chained to his fate? Probably. By accepting a bag of cash in exchange for serving as Lalo's mule, and by mentioning this mission to Kim, he has cast his lot with the Mexican cartel in a way that can't be uncast. Nacho, certainly, is stuck on his road. Mike's efforts to convince Fring to remove the gun he is pointing at times literally at the head of Nacho's father comes to naught. Mike argues that Nacho delivered Lalo, as promised, and is due a chit. Fring is unmoved. He likens Nacho to a dog that bites all of his owners. For viewers, who know Nacho as both a criminal and a human with a soft spot for his father and for compulsive women, this seems unduly harsh. But all that Fring knows about the man is that he tried to kill his previous drug lord boss, Hector Salamanca. Lalo, on the other hand, doesn't worry much about his own fate. He makes bail, gets released and nears the Mexican border when it occurs to him that he should double check Jimmy's desert escape story. Why he didn't think of this before he arrived at the water well/meeting spot is unclear, and this actually gets to one of the more interesting conundrums for the writers of "Better Call Saul." How smart, capable and menacing should Lalo be? It's no fun if he's dim or merely intelligent, right? What made the contest between Gus and Walter White so compelling in "Breaking Bad" is that each was trying to outsmart the other, and both were surpassingly devious. Their schemes and counter schemes made them ideal enemies. So far, I'm not sure that the writers have invested Lalo with enough malignant gifts to serve as a Gus worthy foil. He is charming, he is murderous, and he certainly can jump from high places and land on his feet (Into a ravine in this episode; out of the ceiling of a Travelwire last season.) But he's always a step behind Gus. He was snowed about the meth superlab. He was manipulated into prison and later manipulated out of prison. This week, he jumped bail, just as Gus planned, and appears to be lamming it to Mexico, just as Gus planned. (Well, he was headed in that direction when last seen.) And as Kim snookered him in that living room showdown, Mike had the cross hairs of a rifle pointed at Lalo's chest. The point is that Lalo might need more game. As a fan of the show, and a fan of suspense, I kind of wish that Gus's organization was now genuinely imperiled. It seems the worst Lalo can do, at present, is compel Gus to blow up his own restaurants. Which is bad. But there's one episode left in this season. From which cliff are we currently hanging? Kim's death appears off the table, at least for the time being. I sort of expected that by now Lalo would pose an existential threat to Gus Inc., and we would all be wondering if he was about to sic the Feds on the guy, or preparing to murder Gus, as counterproductive to the cartel's interests as that might be. We still don't know whether Lalo will be back for Season 6., though it seems likely given Jimmy's brief reference to him in Season 2 of "Breaking Bad." My wish: that he gets back to Mexico and then returns next year, with reinforcements and new ways to cause havoc. A lot more havoc. None In addition to saving Jimmy's life, Kim changes career paths in this episode. She's had enough of the tedium of regulatory work on behalf of a growing regional bank, and she would like to become a public defender. This irks Jimmy, who is as he has been at other moments focused on the money. She's undaunted. None The woman has range. She even knows what kind of soaking bath cures a guy desiccated in the desert. None So, Juan Bolsa was behind the attempted hijacking of Lalo's 7 million in bail cash. At least, that is what Gus has concluded after talking to the elegant, even tempered senor. The question is, why? Here's why, according to Gus: "He was trying to protect his business by protecting our business." All right, hive mind, let's buy a vowel and solve this puzzle. My guess is that Bolsa wants to scuttle the bail deal on the theory that keeping Lalo behind bars is good for Fring's drug enterprise, and thus good for Bolsa's. It's a fair assumption. As far as Bolsa knows, Lalo has been nabbed by the police and is going to wind up, like his cousin Tuco, neutralized behind bars. Bolsa doesn't know that Lalo was causing huge problems for Fring while in jail. He certainly doesn't know that Fring has a double agent in the cartel, and that Fring torched his own restaurant. Finally, Bolsa doesn't know that Fring orchestrated Lalo's release. So Bolsa hired some gangsters to steal the cartel's own money, hoping to keep Lalo in the Big House. For Fring, what's the end game here? Remember, he said that anything that happens to Lalo on this side of the border is his responsibility. So his plan is surely to let Lalo escape to Mexico and then kill him there, without raising any suspicions. None Lalo is in a hurry to get home, unaware that home for him is now one of the most dangerous places on earth. What are you hoping to see in the finale? Share in the comments section. And remember, if anyone asks if you pushed your car into a ditch, the wrong answer perhaps the worst answer is "I don't think so." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Whether to induce labor for babies at or beyond full term is a difficult decision. Waiting to give b irth after 41 weeks' gestation may slightly increase the risk that the baby will die before or shortly after birth. But there are also risks in inducing labor, including lowering the baby's heart rate and an increased likelihood of infection for both mother and baby. Now a review in the Cochrane Library of 30 randomized trials involving more than 12,000 women with normal pregnancies in the United States and 13 other countries has found that induction at or beyond 41 weeks of gestation is safer than waiting. The analysis found that compared with waiting for labor to begin, induction was associated with fewer perinatal deaths, stillbirths and cesarean sections. The incidence of perineal trauma, postpartum bleeding or the need to admit babies to a neonatal intensive care unit was the same whether a woman was induced or not, and the amount of time mothers had to stay in the hospital did not differ between groups. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
RAMBO (2008) 6 p.m. on AMC. In a recent article in The New York Times, Wesley Morris wrote about box office figures from a weekend in May 1985. That weekend, "Rambo: First Blood Part II" had just come out and, Morris wrote, a "smooth, rippling and outrageously oily" Sylvester Stallone tightened his grip on the American psyche as the super soldier John Rambo. In 1988, "Rambo III" came out, then Stallone shelved the character for two decades. A reborn Rambo grizzled, yes, but still oily after all those years appears in this ultraviolent follow up, which features jungle warfare, venomous snakes and lines like, "Live for nothing, or die for something." SUMMER RUSH 10 p.m. on Food Network. A pinch of family conflict and a dash of competition are on order in this cooking reality show, which shows three restaurants in the Adirondacks competing for customers during crucial summer months. The catch? Each eatery is run by members of the same family. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
That New 'Mean Girls' Teacher Has Homework to Do It was Jennifer Simard's first day of work. Propping her elbows on a railing behind the audience in the back of the August Wilson Theater, she peered through binoculars, purchased just hours before so she could get a really close up look at what was happening on stage during this Tuesday night performance of "Mean Girls." She squinted. What equation was the calculus teacher writing? Where did she put her marker? How did she then weave through the students during a dance number? That teacher, Ms. Norbury, was one of three drastically different roles Ms. Simard would soon inhabit. She had quite a bit of catching up to do as she embarked on one of the unheralded journeys in theater joining the established ensemble of a Broadway musical well after it opens. "It's my job to enter into this well oiled machine as seamlessly as possible, almost like a ghost," she explained. Where her fellow cast members had months to master their parts, Ms. Simard had exactly two weeks to learn the staging for characters previously played by Kerry Butler. (The others: the mothers of queen bee Regina George and nice girl Cady Heron.) That included only one full rehearsal with the whole cast called a "put in" that comes at the end of the process. A perpetually sunny 48, Ms. Simard didn't seem especially fazed; after all, her Broadway debut in 2007 was as a replacement in "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee." She allowed a reporter to follow her during key moments including an expert comedic consultation as she got ready to face the Plastics, culminating in her first performance on Tuesday night. "It's not a lot of time," she said. "You can't really play and find the beats you need as an actor with your script in your hand for very long." On Aug. 28, her first official day, she was fitted for 10 costumes, and started vocal rehearsals. For an actor, joining a show, rather than originating a character, means your creative choices are narrowed. There's less to discover when you're plugged in to an existing machine. To John MacInnis, the associate choreographer of "Mean Girls," who would be working with Ms. Simard, that limitation can be a blessing. "I personally think getting thrown into a show is a lot easier than going through the whole process from the beginning because everyone is concentrating on you," he said. "You're the main focus." For Ms. Simard, the most essential task was simple: watching the show as often as possible. Rehearsal time is limited, so it's key for performers to learn as much about blocking, choreography, how cast members navigate the stage space and other minutiae through visual osmosis. During days, Ms. Simard worked on scenes and choreography mostly in a rehearsal room away from the theater. There was also a day built in for photography. On Sept. 6, Ms. Simard was at the August Wilson with other actors and members of the creative team, including Mr. MacInnis. This is typical, especially for a musical with its many moving parts; new cast members are trained by key deputies, not the creative leaders. To rehearse blocking without the whole cast present that would be a costly commitment, given union rules performers have to memorize a virtual grid, with zero at the center of the stage. Ms. Simard's transitions included moving a desk on and off the stage at the end of one dance heavy musical number. If she was in the wrong spot a colleague could get hurt. She looked tentative as she ran through her dance moves on stage. But with each run through she seemed to be soaking it in. Becca Petersen, the assistant dance captain, is responsible for knowing every dance move for every cast member. She and Mr. MacInnis guided Ms. Simard through "Do This Thing" and "I See Stars," the final two big production numbers. "Do This Thing" ends with Kyle Selig, who plays Cady's love interest, essentially belly flopping directly in front of Ms. Simard. After one pass, she asked Mr. MacInnis if her spacing was correct: "I just want to make sure he has room to get around me." "There's a lot of traffic,'' she explained afterward. "You have to make sure you're not hurting anybody. Safety first, you know?" Getting notes from the source Ms. Simard was the only performer in costume at the put in on Sept. 7. It was four days before show time and, along with everything else, she needed to rehearse her 10 costume changes in real time. As a gesture of good will, she ordered a box of soft pretzels for the entire cast. She was a bundle of jittery energy, her nervousness not helped by the fact that Tina Fey, who wrote the book for the show and played Ms. Norbury in the 2004 film, was there to watch. Cast members not in Ms. Simard's scenes frequently burst into applause when she came on stage or executed a successful number. Casey Hushion, the associate director, occasionally strolled up to the stage to adjust Ms. Simard's spacing. Ms. Fey had some notes. One of Ms. Simard's characters, Mrs. George, absolutely wants to be part of the Plastics, the shallow, popular and occasionally cruel trio of high school girls at the center of the show. But Ms. Fey reminded the actress that she wants to be a good mother, too. In 2016, Ms. Simard was nominated for a Tony Award playing a gambling addicted nun in the spoofy musical "Disaster!" Her big number had her virtually making out with a slot machine. She's not afraid of physical comedy. And Ms. Fey's notes included a bit of encouragement. She particularly liked how Ms. Simard was clutching Mrs. George's puppet dog in one of her scenes. "Maybe,'' Ms. Simard reported, thinking out loud, "it's going to lick my neck in the end?" Referring to her first scene as Mrs. Heron, Mr. Nicholaw suggested that she "warm her up a little bit." But mostly he was full of praise. "You have the best musical theater face ever," he said. He ended the rehearsal by punctuating his encouragement: "You're going to be so clap good clap tonight clap ." Minutes before going on stage, Ms. Simard was in the wings as fellow cast members hugged her and wished her good luck. "I feel ready," she said, staring intently at the stage. Bernadette Peters her former "Hello, Dolly" colleague was in the audience to see her. And backstage, the crew had laid out boxes of Tic Tacs that were specially labeled "I'm a Pusher," a reference to one of Ms. Simard's lines. There was one early hiccup. As Ms. Norbury, that equation writing calculus teacher, Ms. Simard skipped a few lines, throwing off the timing of an entrance for Erika Henningsen, as Cady. In her dressing room right just afterward Ms. Simard took the blame. "It makes for a funny story later," she said. Speaking of which, she also had a triumph: Her approach to Mrs. George's first scene with the puppet dog earned her exit applause as she walked offstage. She would remember to keep it in. It was time to leave the theater and go to bed. After all, she had two shows the next day. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Though it is Ms. Varda's first Oscar nomination, she has been a mainstay of film coverage in The New York Times for six decades. Her earliest appearance in the Times was in 1958, in a list of winners from the Brussels International Film Festival screening in New York. Ms. Varda was profiled in 1966 and has appeared regularly in the Times since. Here are some highlights from The Times's coverage of her career. 1966: 'Pure, complete cinema that is my passion.' An excerpt from Howard Thompson's profile of Ms. Varda from 1966. Bob Greene for The New York Times After the release of her film "Le Bonheur," which won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, Ms. Varda was interviewed by the film writer Howard Thompson. Ms. Varda called herself "the feminine New Wave," and Mr. Thompson noted that she was "one of the few female writer directors in the world." The director Alain Resnais, who edited Ms. Varda's first film, "La Pointe Courte," credited her with "heralding all the gathering forces of the oncoming New Wave." 1977: 'Do you know any intelligent women? Why aren't they ever in films?' Ms. Varda discussed gender imbalance in movies. "Is there such a thing as a woman's film, of special interest to women? We have to see, they haven't had any choice," she said. Ms. Varda wanted to portray female relationships on film. "There are always stories about virile male friendships, Brando and Nicholson, Newman and Redford and so on, but not about friendship between women. The women are always motherly or tarty." Flora Lewis talks to Ms. Varda in 1986 for the release of "Vagabond." Ms. Varda's film "Vagabond" won the Golden Lion at the 1985 Venice Film Festival, making her the second female director to receive the prize. Annette Insdorf noted that the film had "little in common with the Parisian farces, American blockbusters and urban thrillers that dominated the French box office." Ms. Varda said she wanted to "make a film about the real France not Parisian intellectuals the France that is completely ignored in contemporary cinema." The film's star, Sandrine Bonnaire, had become "one of the most sought after screen artists in her country." Ms. Varda said she sold Ms. Bonnaire on the film by telling her that the character would be "alone, dirty and rebellious, and she dies of the cold. Miss Bonnaire was delighted." 1997: 'I think I was a feminist before being born.' The Museum of Modern Art screened all of Ms. Varda's films in a retrospective of her work in 1997. When Mel Gussow spoke to Ms. Varda about the tribute, she said, "At least it doesn't say posthume." The story describes her point of view on the art of filmmaking, including her case for the auteur theory. "Auteurs are much attacked nowadays because people say they are selfish and narcissistic, that they don't want to listen to anybody. It's true and so what?" Ms. Varda spoke to Leslie Camhi in 2001 about her inspiration for the film "The Gleaners and I," which focused on people who live off the garbage thrown out by others. Ms. Varda told Ms. Camhi the film was "about an ill society, that does a poor job of sharing its bounty but the very people who are living through that difficulty point the finger and teach us about it." Ms. Camhi tied "The Gleaners and I" to the socially conscious themes of Ms. Varda's other work and detailed her legacy, including how Ms. Varda, then 72, was crowned "the ancestor of the New Wave" at the age of 30. "I'm like those old painters who don't bother to make sketches or ask permissions. They don't give explanations. They just go ahead and do it," Ms. Varda said, reflecting on "Gleaners," which she also produced. 2009: 'I am the queen of the margins. But the films are loved.' The Times co chief film critic A. O. Scott spoke to Ms. Varda about her documentary "The Beaches of Agnes." The film "is a cinematic memoir in two senses," Mr. Scott wrote. "An autobiography rendered in carefully chosen, meaning rich images and the account of a life lived in, through and for cinema." "I am the queen of the margins, but the films are loved. The films are remembered," Ms. Varda said of her career. "And this is my aim to be loved as a filmmaker because I want to share emotions, to share the pleasure of being a filmmaker." Ms. Varda's Oscar nominated "Faces Places" was a Times Critic's Pick, and both chief film critics, Manohla Dargis and Mr. Scott, named it one of the best films of the year. "Contemplating some of the sorrows in her own past and the precariousness of the European present, she keeps gloom at bay with her resilient faith in the power of art to conserve and expand human dignity," Mr. Scott said. "Every second of this movie proves her right." Ms. Dargis takes it a step further. "Ms. Varda is often described as one of the greatest female directors alive, which is true. She is also one of the greatest." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Nur's rise to prominence resembles a Horn of Africa version of the Horatio Alger story. Born in 1954 in a nomadic camp in the Ogaden, a desolate region in what is now Ethiopia, Nur wound up homeless and starving alongside his four siblings and mother after his father perished during a drought. A well to do aunt in Mogadishu took custody of the children, but Nur wound up in an overcrowded state orphanage, "a military style concrete barracks" crammed with castoffs and misfits. There he earned a reputation as a brawler even losing part of his ear in a fight and a rebel. A teacher designated him "Tarzan" after finding him hiding half naked in a tree during an unannounced dorm inspection. Harding vividly describes prewar Mogadishu, a city permeated by an Italian flavor long after these colonizers pulled out in 1960. "People would surface from their siestas at about 5 p.m., stroll along the seafront, eat some stew with flatbread made from maize flour at a local restaurant, and then stand at the counter at a cafe for a macchiato," he writes. "After that it was time to catch a film. The cinemas would be open from around 6 each evening, and for one Somali shilling you could stay until midnight." (In one memorable scene, Harding takes an excursion through one of the city's ruined theaters, a place much like those where Nur and his friends would watch Fellini films and Italian dubbed American movies like "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.") In 1969, the army's commander in chief, Gen. Mohammed Siad Barre, seized power in a coup, the first step in Somalia's disintegration. At first, the dictator devoted himself to the country's development. Nur by then a star on a state run basketball team and a prominent figure in Mogadishu had met his future wife, a beautiful and brassy young woman named Shamis, during a successful literacy drive led by the young urban elite. But Siad Barre soon turned the country into a police state, awakened clan rivalries and assassinated political opponents. A 1988 bombing raid on the northern town of Hargeisa, a stronghold of the rival Isaaq clan, opened the door to civil war, famine, anarchy, the Ethiopian invasion, the rise of Islamist radicals and Mogadishu's descent from offbeat tourist destination into Hobbesian hellhole. By the time of Somalia's transformation into a failed state, Nur and his family were living abroad first in Saudi Arabia, then in a council flat in the Belsize Park neighborhood of London. Harding skillfully evokes the bifurcated existence of the diaspora community, seeking to build new lives yet drawn back psychologically to their homeland and shadowed by its conflicts. Nur studied for a business degree and organized the Somali Speakers Association, a group providing guidance to newly arrived Somalis. His children assimilated easily into British society, but Nur, who belongs to a branch of the clan that chased Siad Barre out of Mogadishu, found that many Somali expatriates clung fiercely to their clan identities. As al Shabaab recruited new members around the world, MI5, Britain's domestic security agency, interrogated Nur's oldest son, mistakenly suspecting him of having radical sympathies. Harding struggled mightily to get inside Nur's head, but his quarry remained elusive. Nur lied about the circumstances of his birth telling Harding that he was born in Mogadishu's "Martino hospital, Room 18" rather than in the bush and evaded other questions about his humble childhood. Nur, Harding writes, conveys the "sense of a slate being scrubbed clean, a fresh start, a man choosing not quite to reinvent himself, but to grasp the opportunity to control his own story." His persistent obfuscations obliged Harding to piece together his subject's life from former classmates, a brother teaching at a college in Indiana, even a South Africa based Somali whose nomadic childhood resembled Nur's. At times, these investigative excursions give the book a meandering quality, as do the narrative's frequent geographic and chronological leaps from Queen's Crescent in London to the Indianapolis suburbs to the front lines in Mogadishu. Harding also glosses over the complexities of Somalia's meltdown in the 1990s, paying scant attention to the rise of the warlords, the American misadventure and the apocalyptic destruction of Mogadishu by competing factions. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
New York City is home to thousands of fledgling companies, and the region regularly ranks second to the Bay Area in attracting venture capital, the lifeblood of the start up economy. Euan Robertson started his job with New York City's economic development team at an ominous moment. It was Monday, Sept. 15, 2008, the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and ignited the financial crisis. Mr. Robertson made his way through City Hall's sprawling open office to a conference table, where he huddled with top advisers to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. "No one knew what was going to happen or how bad it would be," Mr. Robertson recalled. "But everyone agreed we'd better come up with a plan." The plan that emerged called for developing tech start ups and tech workers in New York. The goal, Mr. Robertson said, was to "build a talent engine" that would help make the city a magnet for coders and companies. A decade later, there is ample evidence that the city is well on its way to achieving that goal. Amazon's sudden decision last week to abandon its plan to build a big campus in Queens, in the face of protests from some local politicians and community activists, is a setback but not one that reverses tech's climb in the city. Amazon already employs 5,000 workers in New York, and the city's talent pool was the main reason, the company said, that it selected New York in November. In December, Google announced a major expansion that could double its New York work force to 14,000 over the next decade, without the rich government incentives that proved a lightning rod for the Amazon deal. Today, the city is home to thousands of fledgling companies, and the New York region regularly ranks second to the Bay Area in attracting venture capital, the lifeblood of the start up economy. The city's tech sector has become a wellspring of jobs paying more than 150,000 on average, a major part of the local economy. The story of tech's ascent in New York stretches back nearly two decades. It was a bumpy path, with progress both by design and serendipity. DoubleClick, a survivor of the dot com crash and a digital advertising pioneer, and Google, which made an early bet on the city, played key roles. And the Bloomberg administration also made smart policy moves. New York's confidential proposal to Amazon, code named Project Clancy, which is filled with detailed data on the city work force and labor market, points to the change. Amazon asked, for example, which companies had the most job openings in machine learning, a fundamental artificial intelligence skill. The top four, according to the proposal, were JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and KPMG. Tied for fifth place were Amazon and Google. Read more: For the labor movement, tech giants present a quandary. Skilled tech workers now flock to New York from everywhere. But the homegrown talent engine that city officials sought to jump start a decade ago is also revving up. The new Cornell Tech graduate school campus on Roosevelt Island, a product of the city's development plan, has 300 students, with expansion plans for a student population of 2,000 over the next two decades. And new courses, buildings and research institutes are underway at Columbia, New York University and the City University of New York. And they are being lured by urban amenities museums, theater, opera, dance, jazz clubs, art galleries, bars and restaurants that offer a clear alternative to life in suburban Silicon Valley. In the late summer of 2000, Timothy Armstrong, at 29, qualified as an internet veteran. Mr. Armstrong helped create or became a senior manager at a string of ventures, and had a solid track record in internet sales and marketing when he met with Omid Kordestani, head of sales at Google. The company was looking to expand, and Mr. Kordestani arranged a meeting between Mr. Armstrong and its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in Silicon Valley. The thinking at Google, Mr. Armstrong recalled, was little more than that the company wanted a big advertising business, and New York was where the ad money was. He signed a one page contract with no guarantees. "The idea was, if it doesn't work out, no harm, no foul," Mr. Armstrong said. He became Google's first employee in New York, working from his apartment on West 86th Street. The company was not yet two years old, the internet boom had crested, and ad agencies and consumer product companies were skeptical about the start up's offering text ads linked to search results. Mr. Armstrong wanted to buy a fax machine to handle ad orders and billing. Mr. Page and Mr. Brin told him they wanted to see the orders before approving the purchase. "That's how unsure people were about internet advertising," Mr. Armstrong recalled. But the orders gradually picked up, becoming the cornerstone of the company's booming business. An expansion of Google's work force in New York followed. In 2003, Craig Nevill Manning, a Google computer scientist, wanted to set up an engineering and research outpost in New York. The company's leaders didn't have high hopes, assuming all the best software engineers were in Silicon Valley. But they told him he could go ahead if he could find "Google worthy" talent in New York and he did, hiring 25 people in the first year. Corinna Cortes, a researcher at Bell Labs, was one of the early recruits. She joined Google to begin building a research arm in New York. Ms. Cortes lived in the West Village, had two young children and welcomed the opportunity to work on leading edge computer science at Google and keep her city life. She enjoys theater and opera in Lincoln Center, restaurants in Greenwich Village and Soho and running trails along the Hudson River and in Central Park. She has completed the New York City Marathon 14 times and bikes to work. "There was no chance I would go to Mountain View," said Ms. Cortes, who now leads about 200 scientists for Google Research in New York. "I wasn't going to live in the suburbs." By 2006, Google, at that point a darling of Silicon Valley, was settling into the city in a big way, moving into a blocklong Art Deco building in Chelsea. It needed the space, as Google would steadily enlarge its New York work force, to 7,000 today, more than half of them technical staff. In December, the company announced it would spend 1 billion on more office space in downtown Manhattan. DoubleClick, once again, was a trailblazer as it became a training ground for New York entrepreneurs. The most prominent is Kevin Ryan, a former chief executive of DoubleClick. He became a founder of six companies, including two e commerce companies, the Gilt Groupe and Zola; an online business news site, Business Insider; and a database company, MongoDB. Mr. Ryan, the son of a manager at Caterpillar, was raised in the Midwest and in Europe, when his father was posted abroad. He majored in economics at Yale, got his M.B.A. at Insead in France, worked on Wall Street and helped develop the Dilbert website in 1995, as a manager at E. W. Scripps, a media company. The next year, Mr. Ryan jumped into the emerging internet industry, joining DoubleClick as one of the company's first dozen or so employees, initially as chief financial officer and later rising to chief executive. He left DoubleClick in 2005, two years before Google bought it. "I came to New York because it was an international city," Mr. Ryan said. "I stayed because I thought it was going to be a tech city as well." The latter took a while. Tech investors often suggested he would be better off starting businesses in Silicon Valley, especially when he and two other DoubleClick alumni, Dwight Merriman and Eliot Horowitz, founded MongoDB in 2008. MongoDB, a database maker, grew slowly at first, but it has proved to be a commercial and financial success. Its stock is trading around 100 a share, up from its initial price of 24 when it went public in October 2017. It is now worth more than 5 billion. Embracing failure as a learning laboratory is another feature of dynamic start up economies. Mr. Ryan saw that up close with the Gilt Groupe. Gilt, an e commerce site that offered luxury goods in online flash sales, raised a lot of money, grew quickly and then fell. In 2016, Gilt was sold to Hudson's Bay, parent company of Saks Fifth Avenue, for 250 million, less than the venture funding Gilt raised. When Maria Samuel graduated from Georgia Institute of Technology with a degree in industrial and systems engineering, she was recruited by Apple and Google. She had been coding since the ninth grade and had worked in seven programming languages. As an intern at NASA in Houston, she worked with a team planning Mars missions. But Ms. Samuel accepted an offer from Goldman Sachs, joining the investment bank in 2015. A product manager, she works with a team to develop software for market analysis, client communication and trading. She views financial markets as a window into industries, markets and behavior. "Every day, I'm constantly learning," she said. After the financial crisis, graduates with computing skills shunned Wall Street for Silicon Valley. But that is no longer the case, as the finance industry is attracting young talent and seasoned technologists. Last year, for example, JPMorgan Chase lured Apoorv Saxena, a senior A.I. product manager at Google, to lead the bank's A.I. product development, and Manuela Veloso from Carnegie Mellon University to head an A.I. research team. For Ms. Samuel, 25, the job was appealing, but so was the locale. New York is where many of her friends have come to start their careers. And Ms. Samuel, who sang in a choir and an a cappella group in college, describes herself as a "big Broadway geek." For most recent graduates, the financial meltdown a decade ago is a distant memory. Today, it is not Wall Street but the big tech companies, like Facebook and Google, that are under fire. Their business models, based on gathering consumer data and targeted ads, have put them at the center of global concerns about privacy and false news. That is a recruiting opportunity these days for R. Martin Chavez, a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, who is also a computer scientist with a Ph.D. from Stanford. At recruiting events, his pitch is to say Google and Facebook have done "amazing things" and quickly add: "If you want to work on advertising, that's where you should go. If you want to use math and software to solve hard problems for governments, corporations and other institutions, you should come to Goldman Sachs." As the New York tech sector grows, policymakers and executives hope to broaden its reach beyond Manhattan and the affluent portions of Brooklyn. Fred Wilson, an investor and venture capitalist in New York for more than three decades, saw a warning sign in the protests in Long Island City, Queens, over the news that Amazon had planned to move in. "That's partly from a sense that it's not going to help them, and only drive up their costs," Mr. Wilson said of the community. "To really be a success in New York, the benefits of the tech sector have to extend to every borough and every neighborhood." Deborah Estrin was the first non Cornell computer scientist to join the Cornell Tech faculty in 2012. Ms. Estrin was at the University of California, Los Angeles, and not looking to move. But she read the Cornell Tech proposal, and its emphasis on applied technology resonated. Ms. Estrin says that New York's advantage is its concentration of people in other industries working on problems that require technology to solve. "If you're doing pure tech a superfast chip or advanced systems software Silicon Valley is still the place to be," she said. "But when it comes to everything else, New York really has a chance to be the place to be." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
TROY, Mich. As automakers rush to catch up to Silicon Valley in the race to create the superintelligent, self driving cars of the future, one old line parts manufacturer is hoping to win by switching sides. Delphi Automotive has a corporate background that is as greasy and grimy as the steering gears it once produced. It began as the parts arm of General Motors, and years ago operated dozens of unionized plants that churned out the type of mechanical auto components that put venture capitalists to sleep: air conditioners, brakes, heaters and radios. Its complicated corporate history includes years of downsizing and a long, messy reorganization in bankruptcy court. But with new technologies turning automobiles into supercomputers on wheels, Delphi is trying to reinvent itself. Over the last several years, it has shed almost all of its old operations, and begun acquiring and investing in high tech businesses that in many ways are more like Intel than G.M. Cars produced today include dozens of computer chips along with cameras, radar, millions of lines of software and wireless communications links. Future vehicles will have all that and more, said Kevin P. Clark, Delphi's chief executive. Delphi, he added, hopes to be the supplier of networking components like wiring, software and intelligent connectors that link all those complex systems and enable them to work together under the hood. "It's the intelligent architecture that allows all the advanced safety systems, all the autonomous driving software, all the infotainment software to operate effectively," Mr. Clark said. To borrow a parallel from Silicon Valley, Delphi is hoping to become the Cisco of the self driving car. Cisco is the tech giant that provides routers and switches that form the backbone of the internet. Mike Ramsey, an analyst at Gartner who tracks the development of connected and self driving cars, said Delphi is attempting the most extensive transformation by an old line automotive company that he has run across. "They are the standard bearer for this," he said. Its success is by no means assured. Technology shifts quickly, and the company has far more experience in the slower paced, low risk approach of the traditional auto industry, where innovations are engineered and tested for years before they are introduced. And Delphi's investments in start ups may not pan out. Delphi hopes to create a new business that can gather vast amounts of data from vehicles about how and where they go, how they're driven and how they're running. The company then envisions selling insights drawn from the data trove to automakers, insurance companies and possibly even advertisers. A driver who frequently drives to Starbucks locations, for example, could be targeted with Starbucks coupons via email or text. Someone whose data shows a pattern of gentle driving could be offered lower insurance rates, said David Ploucha, the president and co founder of Control Tec, a start up Delphi acquired for 124 million as part of this data business strategy. It's a business model unlike anything the auto industry has ever seen. It's similar to what Google does by targeting ads to users based on terms they have searched, or how Facebook tailors ads and news posts based on what a member has "liked" on the social networking site. "The idea is to influence how people spend money in relation to their vehicle," Mr. Ploucha said. Mr. Clark said he was convinced such data services will evolve into a multibillion dollar industry, though it may be years before this vision is confirmed. The boldness of Delphi's plan underscores how dramatic technological changes are loosening the dominant role traditional carmakers have in the auto industry, while opening opportunities for new players. Already, Tesla has jumped ahead in battery powered cars, and in distributing software updates to its cars over the air, the same way iPhones receive new operating systems. Both Tesla and Google are ahead of many, if not most, automakers in self driving technology. Uber, the ride hailing company, is trying to press ahead in autonomous cars, too. Danny Shapiro, a senior executive at Nvidia, a chip maker that provides some of the powerful processors used by Tesla, Audi and many other automakers, said he would not be surprised to see some reordering of the auto industry in the next five to 10 years. "I do believe there will be a rise and fall for some players," he said. Tesla, thanks to its rising stock, recently passed both Ford and G.M. in terms of market value. Mr. Clark, the Delphi chief executive, hopes his company will be one of the rising stars. For most of the last 20 years, it has been in a slow decline. Delphi was created to take over all the parts businesses G.M. no longer wanted in house. It was spun off as a stand alone company in 1999. Six years later, it filed for bankruptcy, slammed by high labor costs and the razor thin margins of making low tech commodity parts. Its Chapter 11 reorganization lasted four years, and resulted in plant closings and the elimination of tens of thousands of factory jobs. The company's steering systems business was sold to a Chinese investor. The remaining company kept operations in automotive electronics and engine technologies such as fuel injectors and diesel components. Over the last few years, as autonomous driving technology began developing rapidly, Mr. Clark saw an opportunity to take Delphi in a new direction. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
More than two years after losing his morning show job because of his appearance in the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape, Billy Bush will return to television in the fall, Warner Bros. announced on Wednesday. He will anchor an entertainment news show called "ExtraExtra," which is distributed by Warner Bros. and will air on a number of local Fox stations beginning in September. In the final sprint of the 2016 presidential campaign, The Washington Post released a recording from 2005 in which President Trump, then the Republican nominee, could be heard making vulgar comments about groping women while Mr. Bush laughed and goaded him on. Mr. Bush was recording an "Access Hollywood" segment with Mr. Trump on the set of "Days of Our Lives," where Mr. Trump was making a cameo. Mr. Bush, 47, was widely criticized for his role in the tape and quickly lost his job as one of the 9 a.m. hosts of NBC's "Today" just months after he joined the show. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
"Fred took a likin' to Alison." It was a mnemonic device a high school biology teacher taught me to remember that a fungus plus an alga made a lichen, and I never forgot it. That phrase now seems to come with qualifications. In a study published Thursday in Science, scientists found that another fungus, called basidiomycete yeast, may be a third symbiotic partner in many lichens. The findings are very surprising, said Francois Lutzoni, a professor of biology and a lichen expert at Duke University who was not involved in the study. "They add another layer of complexity to lichen symbiosis." Lichens come in various sizes, shapes and color, but you can commonly find them as leafy tufts or crusty patches adorning bark and rocks. The prevailing definition of a lichen is that it arises from a symbiosis between a fungus and a photosynthesizing alga or bacteria. The alga or bacteria provides food through photosynthesis. In return, the fungus provides protective structures, which also gather moisture, nutrients and an anchor to the environment. It is one of the oldest and most successful symbioses in nature, said Toby Spribille, a lichen expert at the University of Graz in Austria, and the lead author of the new paper. "When people say they study lichens, it is like saying they study vertebrates," he said. "That is how diverse and evolutionarily deep lichens are." The story of how Dr. Spribille and his colleagues discovered previously undetected yeasts in lichens began in Montana, with a different mystery. Dr. Spribille was curious about two species of lichens that are known to consist of the same fungus and alga, but appear wildly different. One of the lichens produces a substance, called vulpinic acid, that causes it to appear yellow. The other lichen is dark brown. He brought the riddle to John McCutcheon, a professor of biology at the University of Montana, who uses genetic sequencing to study symbiosis. They gathered lichens and looked for genetic differences in the symbiotic fungus and alga known to be shared by both species. Confirming previous studies, they found no significant variations. They expanded their search. Instead of studying only one fungus and one alga, they looked for genetic differences in all fungi between the two lichen species. That's when they found that the yellow lichen with vulpinic acid had a much higher number of genes belonging to a basidiomycete yeast. These findings now yielded a more interesting question than the original one: How prevalent is the association between basidiomycete yeasts and lichens? Once again, the researchers expanded their scope. They screened other species of lichens, and found that different species carried genetically distinct basidiomycete yeasts. Furthermore, when they took one species in Montana and compared it with the same species in Europe, they found that the basidiomycete also stayed the same suggesting that the species of yeast was highly specific to the species of lichen, rather than just being a product of the lichen's environment. In the end, the scientists found that basidiomycete yeasts were a ubiquitous feature, present in lichens on six continents. "It was a backyard experiment that turned global," Dr. McCutcheon said. The next task for the researchers is understanding whether basidiomycete yeasts play a role in building the lichens' structure. Elucidating the functions of these yeasts might bring scientists closer to synthesizing lichens in the lab, a feat that would allow researchers to study lichens without having to collect them from the field. Ultimately, this study also goes beyond lichens and illustrates how multifaceted symbiosis can be, Dr. Lutzoni, of Duke University, said. "Many people have looked at these lichens, and no one predicted this," he said. "The symbiotic world is an integral part of the natural world, and it is incredibly complex and interesting. The more we study it, the harder it becomes to define." Maybe, in the near future, high school students will learn that "Fred had a wingman who helped him woo Alison. Kudos to Bob." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
On a scale that ranges from "coolly rational" on the left to "totally berserk" on the right, Aston Martin's newly updated Rapide S four door sports car is way over to starboard just short of monster trucks and jet powered dragsters. There's lunacy in each atom of its structure and overwrought emotion in every revolution of the crankshaft in its 550 horsepower 5.9 liter V 12. It's a 200,000 and change car that demands to be taken on its own crazy terms. And if you can manage that, it can be wonderful. To oversimplify only slightly, the rear wheel drive Rapide is a version of the DB9 sports car with a wheelbase that's been stretched 9.8 inches more than long enough to shove in a pair of rear doors. In fact, at 117.7 inches, the Rapide's wheelbase is 4.5 inches longer than that of the midsize Mercedes Benz E Class sedan and 2.7 inches longer than that of Porsche's Panamera four door. First shown in concept form in 2006, the Rapide entered production in 2010. The 2014 Rapide S, on sale now, is the first significant update since then. The basic structure made of aluminum forgings, castings and extrusions that have been glued and riveted together is Aston's VH platform, which also underpins the DB9, Vantage and Vanquish. To balance the weight of the V 12 up front, the 6 speed transmission is mounted between the rear wheels. Each of the four wheels is independently suspended on its own set of double wishbones. Those wheels are huge: 20 inches in diameter covered in 245/35 ZR20 Bridgestone tires in front and 295/30 ZR20 rubbed in the rear. The body that covers the structure is the Rapide's greatest asset. This is a ridiculously sleek car; the shape doesn't merely cut through the air but slices it into fillets. It's so perfectly and provocatively proportioned that at first sight the rear doors are easily overlooked. Compared with the Rapide, the Panamera looks like a sausage. But there was something generic in the appearance of the original Rapide; the nose was too bland and ordinary. So the Rapide S gets a new front end with a revised hood, sparkly LED headlamps and an open face aluminum grille that looks more substantial and ferocious than before. And the rear deck now concludes in a ducktail spoiler. Over all, the Rapide S seems more serious and mechanical than before. It's no longer a rolling sculpture, it's now a muscular beast. To meet European pedestrian protection regulations, Aston has moved the engine down by three quarters of an inch. That's about the only thing that's down about the engine, though. Thanks to revised cylinder heads and a few electronic tweaks, output has swollen from the original's 470 horsepower. But it's the quality of that power that distinguishes the Aston from German hot rods like the 560 horsepower BMW M5, the 550 horse Mercedes Benz E63 AMG or Porsche's top of the line 550 horse Panamera Turbo S. And the engine loves to romp at those elevated speeds. As the engine builds speed it sends out a thrilling tenor trill that the driver can feel as a vibration at the base of the skull. Making an upshift with the paddles behind the steering wheel feels like directing a choir to drop an octave. Such a move is so aurally satisfying that for a moment the horrifying mileage ratings 13 m.p.g. in the city and 19 on the highway seem almost reasonable. But leaving the transmission to shift itself in automatic mode makes the car feel relatively lazy. This is a powertrain that needs its master's spur to stay engaged. The steering is a touch heavy, but the rack itself is quick and communicative, and that helps the big car feel smaller than it is. At the limits of adhesion the Rapide S will push its nose through a corner. But if this Aston is going quick enough to test those limits, it's either on a racetrack or fleeing a crime scene. Car and Driver measured the Rapide S, which weighs 4,410 pounds, ripping to 60 miles per hour in just 4.7 seconds and blitzing the quarter mile in 13.1 seconds at 111 m.p.h. There are quicker four doors the all wheel drive Panamera Turbo S runs to 60 m.p.h. in 3.3 seconds but none that perform such feats more flamboyantly. But that melodrama severely compromises other aspects of the Rapide S. All four doors swing up as they open to ensure that every entry and exit is an event, but actually lowering in under the low roof takes care, and hauling the doors back down to close them would be easier with a rope and a grappling hook. Looking forward from the driver's seat, the roof is so low that it's hard to see overhead traffic signals, and the pillars are so thick that a Hummer can hide behind them. But that's still better than the rearward view that, if it were any more restricted, would be nonexistent. Cargo room is negligible under the hatchback. The cockpit can feel claustrophobic with all four occupants in narrow seats fitted between a center tunnel and thick side sills. It's a beautifully crafted and decorated space, all covered in carbon fiber and beautifully stitched leather, but it's not a sumptuous luxury environment. This is, instead, a distinctive, eccentric and theatrical four door sports car. It should be appreciated as such. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
When the trustees of Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art voted this week to start charging for an undergraduate degree, it ended the institution's lengthy reign as the most famous tuition free private college in America. But it was never the only such place. While most colleges grapple with the growing burden of student debt, a few outliers across the country and even New York State offer a college education for the one price that looks good in any economy: nothing. To qualify for Cooper Union's largess, applicants had to prove themselves on the highest tier of the highest tier of academic or artistic achievement. That might strike some New Yorkers as easy compared with the requirements at some of the other free colleges. One requires students to work on a ranch, milking cows and harvesting alfalfa. Another requires them to build a container ship. And the national service academies, of course, require years of service in support of a robust national defense. Applicants whose interests lead toward engineering specifically, naval architecture and marine engineering have a free alternative to Cooper Union's engineering school that is just a few stops away on the Long Island Rail Road. The Webb Institute, in Glen Cove, accepts just 26 students a year. Admissions ratios are not even relevant, as only about 100 people a year have high enough scores and grades to qualify for the privilege of applying. Students work two months a year in related industries, design a container ship and complete a thesis. Hard work, but the results are hard to beat: Robert C. Olsen Jr., the school's outgoing president, says the institute can boast 100 percent job placement. Room and board and other fees come to a little over 12,000 a year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
The Chinese player, seeded 27th and headed for the fourth round of the Australian Open, has spent months building up her strength and confidence. MELBOURNE, Australia Wang Qiang says she lost so quickly to Serena Williams in the United States Open quarterfinals last year that it hardly left a mark: 6 1, 6 0, 44 minutes. "A really tough match, you'll always remember," Wang said in an interview with The New York Times on Friday. "That one was easy I think I didn't play two balls in a row, so for me it's easy to forget it." She will always remember the rematch, however: The 27th seeded Wang beat eighth seeded Williams 6 4, 6 7(2), 7 5 on Friday in the third round of the Australian Open, hanging tough for two hours and 41 minutes with the 23 time Grand Slam champion who had overwhelmed her five months earlier. "To be honest, I didn't think I can win this match," Wang admitted. "Because last time it was love and one, and who knows what tennis I will play?" Wang, 28, had struggled to believe that she belonged in the top echelon of the sport she has played professionally for roughly a dozen years, even after reaching a career high ranking of No. 12 last year. "When she was talking about the girls two spots in front of her, she was talking like they were not from the same world," said Thomas Drouet, Wang's coach. "I'm sure she believes now, 'Yes, I am one of them.'" Wang's sights are now set on the ultimate prizes in tennis. She dreams of becoming the second Chinese woman to win a Grand Slam title, following Li Na, who won the 2011 French Open and the 2014 Australian Open. Li's trailblazing led the WTA to invest heavily in expanding the tour throughout China, which has allowed Wang to aim for big goals close to home. Wang is based in Shenzhen, site of the WTA year end championships for the tour's top eight for the next nine years, which awards over 4 million to the champion. "Every player, they want to be top 10 and play finals and it's really big money," she said. Nicknamed "Q," Wang already earns plenty in endorsements in China, where she has been known more for her bubbly personality and photogenic appearance than for her prowess on the court. She has speculated that officials with China's tennis federation were first drawn to her because she was pretty, then realized she was actually pretty good at tennis, too. She was plenty good on Friday against Williams. Drouet said the key was Wang's ability to forget what had happened just months before in New York. "There she put a lot of pressure on playing Serena, on playing on Arthur Ashe for the first time," Drouet said. "So, mentally, we tried to work on that aspect of the match. She has to stay herself. She has to stay Q, with her personality and her style of game, and play like any other match." Staying true to her style of game meant being aggressive, which she had been unable to do in New York, hitting zero winners. On Friday afternoon in Rod Laver Arena, bolstered by increased strength, she hit 25 winners. That prevented Williams from easily overpowering her. "We worked really hard in the off season," Wang said. "We did a lot in the gym, so I have more power now. I have confidence, so much more confidence than last year." Drouet, who now also directs her physical training, said he emphasized adding upper body strength after seeing her get knocked around by Williams in New York. "I said, 'You see, to challenge these girls you need more power,'" Drouet said. And while Drouet believes steadiness will always be the foundation of Wang's game, he has pressed her to be less passive compared with last season. "She couldn't win big tournaments waiting for the other one to miss," Drouet said. "She's almost doubled her winners per match." Wang's reward for beating Williams is being the clear favorite in her fourth round match Sunday against 78th ranked Ons Jabeur of Tunisia, against whom she is 2 0. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Yves Chauvin, who shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for deciphering a "green chemistry" reaction now used to make pharmaceuticals and plastics more efficiently while generating less hazardous waste, died on Tuesday in Tours, France. He was 84. "France loses a great chemist and a model for many researchers," the website of the French presidency announced. Mr. Chauvin was the first to explain chemical reactions involving petroleum compounds in which two molecules swap groups of atoms. The reactions, called metathesis (pronounced meh TATH eh sis), which means "changing places," break and then re form strong "double bonds" between carbon atoms. That process generally requires high temperatures and immense pressures; metathesis, however, takes place under relatively mild conditions, is often quicker than conventional processes, consumes less energy and produces less waste advantages for chemical companies and for the environment. For years, chemists were unable to explain how the bonds were being rearranged. The key, Mr. Chauvin figured out in 1971, is a metal carbon catalyst. The catalyst pairs with a molecular fragment, like two dancers with all four hands clasped together. Letting go of one pair of hands, they reach for a second pair of molecular pieces to form a ring of four. The ring then breaks apart, with the catalyst carrying away a new molecular piece and leaving its original partner behind. That rearranges the carbon bonds. The others who shared the Nobel Robert H. Grubbs of the California Institute of Technology and Richard R. Schrock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took Mr. Chauvin's findings, developed new catalysts and showed how the paradigm could be applied to a wide range of organic compounds. The phone call from Stockholm in October 2005 took Mr. Chauvin by surprise. "For me, it was unexpected, because my contribution is not very important in my opinion," he said that day. "My research opened the way, but the main part of the research has been made by Schrock and Grubbs." He was born to French parents his father was an electrical engineer on Oct. 10, 1930, in Menin, Belgium, near the border with France, and grew up with four brothers and sisters amid the upheaval of World War II. "The war taught me to eat what there was," Mr. Chauvin wrote in his Nobel Prize biography. "I am still not a fussy eater, although I do enjoy good food." He confessed that he was not a brilliant student, even in chemistry. "I chose chemistry rather by chance," he wrote, "because I firmly believed (and still do) that you can become passionately involved in your work, whatever it is." Mr. Chauvin graduated from the Lyon School of Industrial Chemistry in 1954. Military service and other circumstances prevented him from pursuing a doctoral degree, which he said he regretted. "I had no training in research as such and as a consequence I am in a sense self taught," he wrote in his Nobel Prize lecture. He worked in industry for a few years before quitting, frustrated by an inability to pursue new ideas. "My motto is more, 'If you want to find something new, look for something new!' " Mr. Chauvin wrote. "There is a certain amount of risk in this attitude, as even the slightest failure tends to be resounding, but you are so happy when you succeed that it is worth taking the risk." He found the freedom to choose his research when he joined the French Petroleum Institute in 1960, and it led to his breakthrough on metathesis. "Like all sciences, chemistry is marked by magic moments," Mr. Chauvin wrote. "For someone fortunate enough to live such a moment, it is an instant of intense emotion: an immense field of investigation suddenly opens up before you." He became the institute's research director in 1991 and retired in 1995. He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 2005. His survivors include two sons, Frederic and Remi, a chemist; and grandchildren. In his biographical essay, Mr. Chauvin recounted fond memories of looking out of his bedroom window, over the family's large garden, and watching barges ply the Lys River, where it separates France from Belgium, towed by horses or men. His parents were from the Tours region, he said, descending "from long established families in the little village of Beaumont la Ronce." "I used to spend my holidays there in my grandparents' large family house, with my numerous cousins," he wrote. "When I die, I am going to be buried in the village cemetery." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Sotheby's said that the evidence that it is fake is "unequivocal," because it found a modern synthetic pigment throughout the paint layer. "The painting was with the experts Mr. Weiss had instructed for a four month period and was subject to extensive testing by them," Sotheby's said on Tuesday. "Mr. Weiss later suggested that additional tests be conducted by a new group of conservators, but Sotheby's concluded that none of these further tests would change its conclusion." Last month, the auction house filed a similar suit in United States District Court in New York against the Luxembourg art collector and businessman Lionel de Saint Donat Pourrieres, who consigned a painting of St. Jerome that Sotheby's sold at auction in 2012, which was attributed to the circle of the Italian Renaissance painter Parmigianino. Sotheby's also subsequently announced that scientific analysis determined it was a forgery because it contained the modern synthetic pigment phthalocyanine green, first used in paints nearly four centuries after Parmigianino died. The sale price of the circle of Parmigianino work was 842,500, and Sotheby's is demanding that Mr. de Saint Donat Pourrieres return the 672,000 profit he earned from the sale of the work, in keeping with the presale contract. He has so far refused to do so, saying that he is unconvinced by the scientific data provided by James Martin, who conducted the analysis for Sotheby's. "Nobody thought even once that it was a fake, nobody, nobody," Mr. de Saint Donat Pourrieres said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. "The best experts in the world have seen this painting over many years and nobody during that whole period thought it was a fake. Now, only Mr. Martin says that it's a fake. Only him, nobody else. And all the other experts in the world are forgotten?" Mr. Martin said that he took 21 paint samples from many different areas of the paint layer and found the 20th century pigment throughout the work, including in areas of the painting that were never restored. "It's a bit like taking the pulse of a corpse 21 times," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Omega 3 supplements may help reduce anxiety symptoms, a review of studies has concluded. The analysis, in JAMA Network Open, concluded that people with clinically diagnosed anxiety disorders who took large doses of the supplement up to 2,000 milligrams a day benefited most. Researchers used data from 16 studies that compared omega 3 fatty acid supplements with placebo and three that did not use a placebo. Over all, omega 3 supplements were associated with significant relief from anxiety symptoms, but some groups benefited more than others. Omega 3 supplements did not ease anxiety levels in those without a clinical diagnosis of an anxiety disorder, on in adolescents under 18. And they were more strongly associated with reduced symptoms when the balance of two types of fatty acids in the supplement, EPA and DHA, was less than 60 percent EPA. The senior author, Dr. Yutaka Matsuoka, chief of health care research at the National Cancer Center in Japan, said that supplements may not be necessary. "Eating fatty fish that includes EPA and DHA is more natural. I recommend mackerel, Pacific saury, sardines, tuna or salmon." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
HONG KONG China on Wednesday moved to pump more cash into its financial system, suggesting that Beijing remained concerned about faltering growth despite signs that the world's second largest economy was stabilizing. China's central bank, the People's Bank of China, announced that it would inject about 115 billion into the economy by freeing up banks to lend more money. The move comes after a similar action in September. The change, announced on the New Year's Day holiday, is likely to focus renewed attention on the health of the Chinese economy, a major driver of global growth. The move is relatively modest given the vast size of the Chinese economy, but the timing suggests that the country's leaders are on high alert for new evidence of a slowdown. It follows a recent meeting of the country's top economic planners and comes just weeks before Beijing releases closely watched estimates of year end growth. China's leaders are contending with the country's slowest pace of growth in nearly three decades. The country's slowdown has sent ripples through the global economy. Germany narrowly avoided a recession last fall, and its manufacturing sector has slumped in part because of reduced demand from China. Other European countries have also seen growth slow and their industrial sectors contract. China's struggles have spread to much of the rest of Asia, where it is the dominant economy, and also to Africa and Latin America, which have become increasingly reliant on Chinese investment. Australia, which has experienced a prolonged boom driven by Chinese demand for its natural resources, is now seeing its growth streak threatened. American manufacturers, too, have struggled in the face of cooling global demand, which has exacerbated the falloff in trade brought on by President Trump's various trade disputes. That could have political implications: The slowdown has been particularly acute in Midwestern swing states, which depend heavily on manufacturing and agriculture. Other major central banks have also taken steps to shore up their economies. A few months ago, the European Central Bank announced its own stimulus package, totaling 20 billion euros per month, or nearly 25 billion at current exchange rates. In the United States, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates three times last year to prevent the manufacturing slowdown from spreading to the rest of the economy. Dozens of other central banks around the world have taken similar steps. Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, said in March that there had been "a synchronized slowdown in economic activity around the globe" that was having an effect in the United States. China's latest stimulus effort comes in the form of a cut to the so called reserve requirement ratio, the amount of money that commercial banks are required to stash away for a rainy day. The cut, which was expected by many economists and will take effect Monday, will effectively allow banks to lend an additional 800 billion yuan, or about 115 billion. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
The Russian state oil company, Rosneft, intends to sign a major contract to supply China with more than 60 billion of crude oil, a deal that could signal a small shift away from Western Europe toward Asia. Russia has been gradually opening its oil spigot to China in recent years. While the overall volume of Russia's oil output has remained level, the country has decreased sales to recession plagued Europe. "Without any exaggeration a large scale contract has been prepared by Rosneft," said President Vladimir V. Putin said after a meeting on Thursday with China's vice premier, Zhang Gaoli. Supplies to China are expected to reach "volumes of hundreds of millions of tons of oil, in total worth more than 60 billion" Mr. Putin said, though he provided no further details about the hefty contract. Even a modest shift could have a significant effect on Europe, raising prices across the region. Russia is now the largest oil producer in the world, pumping about 10 million barrels a day, slightly more than Saudi Arabia. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
Another member of the Sackler pharmaceutical family has sold off a Manhattan property. Mortimer D.A. Sackler closed on the sale of a sprawling townhouse at 8 East 75th Street for 38 million the priciest transaction in New York City in January, in an otherwise quiet month. The buyer was the hedge fund titan Israel Englander. In December, David A. Sackler, a cousin, sold his apartment, with storage, at 200 East 66th Street, a.k.a. Manhattan House, for nearly 6.1 million. Both men, along with other family members, have served on the board of Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin, the prescription painkiller widely seen as igniting the opioid crisis. The company filed for bankruptcy protection in September amid mounting federal and state lawsuits. Downtown, Julie Wainwright, the founder and chief executive of the RealReal, a popular luxury consignment marketplace, closed on an apartment at the Woolworth Tower Residences. Violaine Etienne, a film producer and longtime partner of Steve Golin, a producer of the Oscar winning "Spotlight" who died last April, sold her SoHo loft. And Timothy Haynes and Kevin Roberts, interior designers, bought a West Village condominium. On the Upper West Side, there were co op sales by the estate of Janet Jeppson Asimov, a writer and psychoanalyst and the wife of the prolific science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, as well as the opera singer Renee Fleming. A few more apartments also closed at the new 15 Hudson Yards, including a penthouse picked up by Eli Lomita and Alice Sim, racehorse owners in Canada. Mortimer D.A. Sackler bought his Upper East Side townhouse in 2004 for 15.5 million. He sold the building, which carries around 16,643 in monthly property taxes, in an off market deal. The five story house, with around 11,600 square feet of space, sits in the Upper East Side Historic District, near Fifth Avenue and Central Park. It was erected in 1872 and redesigned in a Beaux Arts style in 1899. The new owner, Mr. Englander, known as Izzy, is the billionaire founder of Millennium Management. He has long been active in New York real estate, and in 2014, paid 71.3 million for a corner duplex at 740 Park Avenue, setting a co op record at the time. The 3,282 square foot home contains five bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms, and has stunning river and city views, according to the listing with Sotheby's International Realty. (Oh, and there's a 13 by 10 foot walk in closet in the master suite, which means plenty of room to stow a few designer bags and accessories, perhaps sold through the RealReal.) Ms. Etienne's loft at 115 Spring Street, an 1878 co op in the heart of SoHo, sold for 6 million. The buyer was Alexandra Chemla, the founder and chief executive of ArtBinder, a digital platform for galleries, collectors and artists. The full floor apartment has more than 3,000 square feet, with three bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms, and it comes with a separate storage room. Although fully renovated, the loft retains much of its 19th century industrial aesthetic, with soaring ceilings, oversized double glazed windows, hardwood floors and columns, according to the Compass listing. Ms. Etienne is a founding partner of Serial Pictures, a film production company whose work includes music videos for various artists, including Lady Gaga, Madonna and Zayn Malik. In 2014, she shared in a Grammy Award for best music film for a concert film of Paul McCartney. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER at the David H. Koch Theater (June 13, 7:30 p.m., through June 17). Alvin Ailey's brief spring season at Lincoln Center features three thematic programs. "Celebrate Women" (on Wednesday and June 16) includes work by the former artistic director Judith Jamison, the acclaimed dance maker Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Jessica Lang with her first piece for the company. "Ailey, Then and Now" (on June 15 and 17) pairs Talley Beatty's 1982 disco romp "Stack Up" with two works by Robert Battle, the current artistic director. "Musical Icons" (June 16 17) comprises pieces set to John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald and David Byrne. The Ailey staple "Revelations" closes each program, and June 14 has been set aside for a special gala performance with its own eclectic lineup. 212 496 0600, davidhkochtheater.com AMERICAN BALLET THEATER at the Metropolitan Opera (through July 7). The artist in residence Alexei Ratmansky has made a mission of carefully remastering ballet classics from days past. His latest reconstruction is "Harlequinade," starring the familiar Italian commedia dell'arte characters Harlequin and Columbine, based on Marius Petipa's original version from 1900. You have three more chances to see it this weekend. Then the company heads to Verona, where star crossed lovers defy their families to Prokofiev's great score in Kenneth MacMillan's "Romeo and Juliet." Over the next week, various pairings of Ballet Theater principals assume the title roles. 212 362 6000, metopera.org BOSTON BALLET at David Geffen Hall (June 8, 8 p.m.). Boston Ballet comes to town on Friday for a one night only rendezvous with the New York Philharmonic. The occasion is the conclusion of Esa Pekka Salonen's tenure as the composer in residence, and as part of it, the Boston Ballet will bring to life Mr. Salonen's works "Nyx" and "Lachen Verlernt" under the title "Obsidian Tear." The choreography is by the ubiquitous British choreographer Wayne McGregor, known for his relentless intensity. The program will also include Mr. Salonen's "Foreign Bodies," accompanied with video by Tal Rosner, and a violin concerto by Daniel Bjarnason. 212 875 5656, nyphil.org | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
Raymond Leppard, a conductor who resuscitated moribund 17th century operas in helping to nurture a major revival of interest in Baroque music, and who went on to a wider career as a guest conductor of major orchestras and the longtime music director of the Indianapolis Symphony, died on Tuesday in Indianapolis . He was 92. The symphony confirmed his death in a statement. After making his mark with early music, the British born Mr. Leppard chafed at being pigeonholed and sought to recast himself as a versatile conductor of concert works and operas from across the centuries . A prolific recording artist, he made more than 200 records, many of them with the English Chamber Orchestra, which he conducted starting in the early 1960s. Mr. Leppard (pronounced LEPP ard) was a composer as well. He wrote the scores for the movies "Lord of the Flies" (1963) and "Alfred the Great" (1969), and he arranged and conducted the score for "The Hotel New Hampshire" (1984). He was part of a generation of musicians who, aided by the burgeoning recording industry, helped revive Baroque music in concert halls after World War II. That group included Nikolaus Harnoncourt of Austria and Neville Marriner of Britain. He began his work reconstructing lesser known, and sometimes forgotten, works from the earliest years of opera in the frescoed halls of the Marciana Library in Venice. Those 16th century newfangled mixtures of music, drama, dance and scenery were works of emotional intensity that chronicled the loves and adventures of gods, other mythological figures and Roman emperors. But they had been written down in skeletal form, often with just vocal and bass lines. Performers of the time were expected to improvise and adapt them to whatever conditions they found themselves in. In the 1950s, performances of these works including those composed by the founder of Italian opera, Claudio Monteverdi, and the other early masters were not common, and when they were mounted they were often boring. "I needed to find the life in something other people thought was dead," he told The Washington Post in 1974. At the library, he stumbled on manuscripts by Francesco Cavalli, a bright light of the generation after Monteverdi , in the mid 17th century, whose works were little known. He reconstructed Cavalli's "La Calisto" and "L'Ormindo," and introduced, to acclaim, his versions into opera houses, especially at the Glyndebourne Festival in England. His editions of other Monteverdi operas followed. "Through his own imaginative interpretation of how the orchestra parts should be played, he has made the score sound at once old and new," Raymond Ericson of The New York Times wrote of Mr. Leppard's "Ormindo" recording. His versions were full blooded, with lush strings and reasonably large orchestras and, purists alleged. vulgarizing distortions. These critics included early music enthusiasts who championed the use of period instruments and performing practices that created a leaner, more percussive sound. Their goal was to recreate performances heard by the original audiences. His job, Mr. Leppard believed, was to do whatever it took to bring a work alive, theatrically and musically, by understanding the cultural world in which it was created, and to convey the composer's intent. "No halfhearted attempt hampered by academic restraint will do: Performing these works again is like a love affair," he wrote in the liner notes to a recording of "Calisto." Mr. Leppard eventually acknowledged that his approach had come to seem old fashioned as the authenticity movement grew. "Pupils of mine were playing in the newly 'authentic' way, and I felt it was their turn they should get on with it," he told The Times of London in 1997. He left England for the United States in 1976, motivated by his distaste for the imbroglio in Britain over performance practice, as well as a desire to broaden his repertory and build his reputation and displeasure with Britain's political direction: He said he did not approve of the socialism and union power that were on the rise at the time. (He became an American citizen in 2003.) He was first offered the music director's job in Indianapolis in 1982. "Absolutely not" was his response, he said in a 1987 interview with The Chicago Tribune. "Why, I considered Indianapolis death on wheels!" He did not think much of the orchestra's quality, either. Even his agent objected, thinking he should wait for a more important orchestra to offer him a job. But he was won over. The players seemed willing to work, the orchestra's finances were healthy, and the acquisition of an old movie palace that was refurbished into an excellent concert hall did the trick. He also cited the "moderation" of the Midwestern character. "I thought to myself, 'Well, it might work, something really might happen here,'" he said. During Mr. Leppard's tenure in Indianapolis, from 1987 to 2001, the orchestra's quality rose. It became one of the few to pay musicians for a 52 week season, produced eight recordings, increased its budget and endowment, and went on two European tours. "Leppard has steered the orchestra to new heights, both in the concert hall and on disc," Duncan Hadfield wrote in the British newspaper The Independent in 1997. "A tight and highly professional unit, Indianapolis customarily produces an ample and rugged sound, held firmly together by a pristine ensemble." Mr. Leppard made numerous guest appearances with other orchestras, including the Boston Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic and Pittsburgh Symphony. He conducted at the major opera houses of London, Paris, Hamburg, Geneva, Stockholm and elsewhere and led a production of Britten's "Billy Budd" at the Metropolitan Opera in the 1978 79 season. But he never went on to a more prominent music directorship . He lived out the remaining decades with his husband, John Bloom, on an estate in Indianapolis, appearing with the symphony as its conductor laureate and with other orchestras as a guest. Mr. Bloom is his only immediate survivor. Raymond John Leppard was born on Aug. 11, 1927, in London and grew up in Bath. His father, Albert, was an engineer, and his mother, Bertha (Beck) Leppard , was a homemaker. He took up the piano at 5 and stuck with music despite his parents' wish for him to become a doctor. He attended Trinity College, Cambridge University ; studied harpsichord and viola; led various musical groups; and, at Trinity, discovered his fascination with early and Baroque music. After graduating in 1952, he spent time in the Royal Air Force. He then moved to London to conduct. In 1958, he returned to Trinity as a lecturer. It was there that he began his academic interest in the roots of opera. His breakthrough came with a 1962 production at Glyndebourne of his "Poppea." It "woke many up to the glories of mid 17th century Venetian opera," Tim Carter wrote in the journal Early Music in 1990. Mr. Leppard served as principal guest conductor of the St. Louis Symphony from 1984 to 1990. From 1972 to 1980 he was principal conductor of the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra in Manchester , a tenure that allowed him to work through large swaths of 19th century repertory and some 20th century works. He had little use for contemporary music (needlessly complex or dull, he said), disdained serial technique and sniffed at the 1970s revival of Gustav Mahler's sprawling, emotionally overflowing symphonies, although he did profess at one point to have gone through his own Mahler period. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Memers Have a New Campaign Aimed at Getting Trump Out of Office Meme 2020, the collective of social media influencers and content creators that posted sponsored content in support of Michael Bloomberg's Democratic presidential primary run, is back with a new campaign aimed at preventing the re election of President Donald Trump. For the campaign, the group, which released its first round of election memes in February, has partnered with the Lincoln Project, a political action committee formed by Republicans who oppose Mr. Trump, and Rhyme Combinator, a viral media company that promotes artistic and progressive causes. The tech entrepreneur Reid Hoffman is sponsoring Meme 2020's efforts. This new meme campaign is primarily focused on vote by mail registration, which Mr. Trump has repeatedly falsely stated would lead to a "rigged" election. This week, it has begun rolling out across dozens of popular Instagram meme pages. One of the memes, which is aimed at registering voters in Florida, a swing state, shows a mail in ballot application for the state on a phone screen. At the top of the screen, an incoming text from a contact named "F.B.I. Agent" reads: "You know Joe Exotic isn't on the ballot, right?" Another features an application for a New York State mail in ballot and another incoming text from a supposed F.B.I. agent. "This is the most productive you've been in four months. Keep it up," the text reads. Mick Purzycki, the founder and C.E.O. of Meme 2020, said that the group and its partners employed data scientists and statisticians to conduct months of testing on hundreds of meme formats. "We found that memes that were intended to be explicitly anti Trump weren't as persuasive as those that weren't so explicit," Mr. Purzycki said. "People have become so good at identifying when the voice of the meme feels like it's coming from the left, and it forces the right to entrench. Memes that are cloaked in a way to slightly make fun of the left first, then lean into a hard critique of Trump, end up moving both moderates and Republicans in the intended direction." The group will be introducing more memes this summer and through the fall. It has also taken steps to register an official political action committee, MemeAmerica, for raising money to support candidates who "understand the unique challenges facing millennials and Gen Z," said Ryan Patrick Kelley, the chief of staff for Meme 2020. Bernie Sanders's supporters produced a steady stream of memes to elevate his campaign's message. It is unusual, though, to see such methods employed in support of the Democratic establishment. "Too many political campaigns are scared to do something as different as Meme 2020," said Sarah Lenti, the executive director of the Lincoln Project. "But in order to be heard over the loudest president in the history of our country, you can't be afraid to be creative and must be willing to meet voters where they are." Beau Lewis, the founder of Rhyme Combinator, is producing animated rap battles that engage with political issues, which will be posted on YouTube. Mr. Lewis said that he hopes "this unlikely content that finds its power in humor and lowering people's guard to accept information can be a counter to the TV attack ads that divide people." For memes to persuade, however, they must be seen as authentic. After Meme 2020's initial Bloomberg campaign, several memers who took part faced public criticism. Josh Ostrovsky, a memer known online as the Fat Jew, said he was asked to participate in the Bloomberg campaign in February but declined, citing the programs and policies Mr. Bloomberg supported as the mayor of New York City, including "the subjugation of minorities through stop and frisk" and "his hardline anti marijuana stance." Mr. Purzycki said the group is keeping the first round of memes broad partly to gauge influencers' "willingness to participate in any type of political campaign." Tank Sinatra, a memer with more than 2.6 million followers on Instagram, said: "The biggest thing I learned from the Bloomberg campaign is people stay mad for a very short amount of time. If people get upset about it I'm not that worried because I know how quickly they move on to something else." Some Meme 2020 content, however, attacks Mr. Trump directly. One meme that is running as a paid Instagram video advertisement features a tweet from Mr. Trump in which he refers to supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement as "THUGS." The tweet is juxtaposed above a video of an older Black woman with a walker peacefully marching, which Meme 2020 sourced. "This frequent inaccurate and divisive rhetoric is exactly what compelled us to get involved in this election," said Mr. Purzycki. Adam the Creator, another memer, said that his goal was to "awaken people without villainizing anyone." "I don't consider Trump the worst person in the world, I'm not a hater," he said. "The sides shouldn't be defined as the left and right. They should be defined as what's right and wrong, what's better for the people and what's harmful. It seems like it's shaking out that Trump is more harmful, and we want this era to end." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Ladies in dresses and gentlemen in suits. Gilded cornices and crystal chandeliers. The clinking of silverware and the din of laughter. On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Astor Court, the soaring dining room at the St. Regis New York, was humming, just as it did a century ago. Almost. Afternoon tea, traditionally a small, sociable meal between lunch and dinner, has been a hallmark of the East 55th Street hotel since it opened in 1904. But now the spread is contemporary: The Dali Tea ( 85 per person), which made its debut in March, includes a ceramic palette instead of a three tiered silver tray, and finger bites take their cues from the Surrealist master Salvador Dali, who lived at the St. Regis for extended periods starting in the 1930s. There is a miniature version of "The Persistence of Memory," his famous "melting clocks" painting rendered entirely in chocolate. A lobster and mango sandwich nods to the "Lobster Telephone" sculpture; a lemon poppy seed madeleine, the "Still Life With Two Lemons" oil painting. Atop each table, iPhones rest, with Instagram at the ready. The St. Regis and other upscale hotels around the world have only recently started to "blow the dust off their afternoon tea tradition," said Bruce Richardson, a Kentucky based tea expert who designs teas for museums and fashion brands around the world. He said The Berkeley, a boutique hotel in London, led the charge when it launched its Pret a Portea, which changes seasonally, based on runway fashion collections, in 2006. "Boutique hotels want to set themselves apart and be trendier because their clientele is a little hipper. They're trying to stand out from the crowd," said Mr. Richardson, who also owns Elmwood Inn Fine Teas, a wholesale and retail operation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
likes to keep his titles a bit abstract, suggesting a mood or even an ethical choice, but conveying nothing about a book's characters or setting or plot. His first novel, "A Life Apart," published in 2010, could be about almost anything; in practice it begins with an Indian student at Oxford and then moves in on the London sex trade. His 2014 novel, "The Lives of Others," shares its name with an earlier Oscar winning German film, but those words fit beautifully onto its complex story of political and familial turmoil in Bengal. Both books have a 19th century plenitude of detail, but it's the 19th century of Zola rather than Dickens. They're works of rub your nose in it naturalism, unforgiving and emotionally draining, books that make you squirm, and think. That's especially true of his latest novel, "A State of Freedom." Except this title is less open ended than it seems, and in using it Mukherjee has something very specific in mind: He has his eye on one crucial literary predecessor. V. S. Naipaul's "In a Free State" won the Booker Prize in 1971, just a few years after it was established to recognize the year's best fiction from Britain and its former colonies. The award has had a better record than most: Many of its winners have stood the test of time and their tally includes remarkably few embarrassments. But "In a Free State" stands out, even in a list that includes "Disgrace" and "Possession," "Midnight's Children" and "Wolf Hall." It is dark and bitter and grand, and its prose mixes despair with a sense of majesty. Naipaul divides the book into five sections, each about people in motion from one continent to another, and frames its different narratives with a prologue and an epilogue whose cadences match his own autobiographical writing. No character reappears from one part to the next, but the book is unified by its sense of freedom as a disruptive force, as though its people were unmoored in something other than a physical sense. Calcutta born and London based, Mukherjee has twice been a finalist for the now renamed Man Booker Prize, and this new novel stands as an echo of Naipaul's great work. The first of its five semi independent sections concerns an expatriate Indian academic, a man bent on showing the Moghul remains of northern India to his American son: the Taj Mahal over lunch and then an hour's drive to the abandoned 16th century capital of Fatehpur Sikri. He's a worried father, concerned that he "might have imposed too much on a 6 year old," but he drags the boy along just the same, and grows irritated at his inattentiveness. He's also horrified at their driver's breakneck pace and dismayed by the beggars and touts, for whom his guidebook marks him as prey. America has made him soft; he's lost "the easy Indian ability to bark at people considered as servants." In other hands this might be comic, but Mukherjee begins on a foreboding note, and so as we read we wait for something to happen, something bad. On the way back from Fatehpur Sikri the car passes a fox faced man with "a mustache that seemed alive," leading a trained bear along the roadside. While Mukherjee's unhappy professor will vanish from the book, the bear's owner, Lakshman, reappears in its third section, as though the novelist had decided to imagine a life for a man glimpsed from the window of a moving car. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week's most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once a week blast of our pop music coverage. Gerard Way featuring Judith Hill, 'Here Comes the End' Someone had to equate the pandemic's stay home guidelines with house arrest, then link the phrase to a house beat. That would be Sofi Tukker, a New York duo that has been doing daily D.J. livestreams, abetted on this track by the English production duo Gorgon City. "This won't last forever/Treat your sadness with a smile," Sophie Hawley Weld sings as the beat thumps, the keyboards bounce and the drumbeats ratchet up. "We can't have what's next till we hang inside for a while." The new video, released as cases surge in the United States, compiles fans dancing as they isolate at home. PARELES In the 10 (!) years since her era defining "Teenage Dream," fortuitous timing has not exactly been one of Katy Perry's superpowers. Her 2017 album "Witness" became a pop punchline not so much because it was a sonic disaster (there are some good songs buried in there; I will die on this hill if I have to!) but because its too earnest promise of "purposeful pop" felt like a tone deaf offering in the chaos of the Trump era. Some crises are just too big to be solved with a three minute pop song a fact that's only more apparent in 2020, a year into which Perry has chosen to release an album called, of all things, "Smile." Those who rolled their eyes at the bombastic agenda of "Witness" will find plenty to say about the image of Katy Perry donning a literal clown suit in the midst of a global catastrophe. But anyone willing to take the title track on the surface level will find its brassy grooves and uplifting chorus to be something of a return to form for Perry, if yet another instance of unfortunate timing. LINDSAY ZOLADZ Ever since the cherub faced, Florida based artist Dominic Fike signed a deal with Columbia on the strength of a few demos he recorded while on house arrest in late 2017, his rise to superstardom has felt like an inevitability. It was an open question what his debut album might sound like, though, since the 24 year old Fike can toggle nimbly between laid back, barefoot singer songwriter jams and the sort of verbose, cartoonish hip hop that's led to collaborations with the alt rap collective Brockhampton. "Politics Violence" the second single from his forthcoming full length debut, "What Could Possibly Go Wrong," out July 31 splits the difference between those two modes, fusing a lackadaisically catchy, radio ready hook and an extended outro of Fike's chatty, charismatic bars. ZOLADZ So morose is James Blake that not even an apparently psychedelic experience a "lucid dream" with a "trip down the hills, strawberry fields" can break through his slow piano chorded alienation. Yet "Are You Even Real?" brings a lush surrealism to his gloom, as echoes come and go and strings materialize, rise and vanish. There's someone else too "She runs her hands through my imagination" or is she a hallucination? PARELES Kehlani has been releasing a series of "quarantine style" music videos in support of her second album, "It Was Good Until It Wasn't," which came out in May. She directed the fifth one, for the standout "Bad News," herself under the well chosen name Hyphy Williams. The song is an impassioned plea for her man to turn his back on street life and make a happy home with her: "Don't wanna get no call with no bad news, I know all the stories from your tattoos." That the video finds Kehlani as a bride without a groom, though praying, smoking, sipping from a flask lends the tale an ominous air. ZOLADZ Gerald Clayton has almost total command at the piano, but he doesn't bear down on it. His playing tends to swirl, almost mistlike, with sprinkled melodic phrases, flickering harmonies and rolling arpeggios implying a groove rather than stating it. On his new album, "Happening: Live at the Village Vanguard," the elusive elegance of Clayton's piano sits at the center of a quintet with its own hard momentum. You can virtually hear the crowd's attention as the group twists and surges through an 11 minute rendition of Clayton's "Patience Patients," the sweeping beauty of the saxophone harmonies set off by the restless charge of Marcus Gilmore's drums and Joe Sanders's bass. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO Asher Gamedze is a young drummer quickly rising on the Cape Town scene, but he's more than that too: a poet, bandleader, composer, visual artist. Listeners in the United States might have been introduced to him last year, when he featured on Angel Bat Dawid's acclaimed debut album, but the release of his own first LP, "Dialectic Soul," takes a measure of the startling depth and range of his evolving concept not unlike that of Bat Dawid. Hear it on "Interregnum," with Nono Nkoane reading a Gamedze poem that's as surreal as it is starkly evocative while his drums tangle with Thembinkosi Mavimbela's bass and a babble of trumpet and saxophone, making a collective utterance that's both hypnotizing and foreboding. RUSSONELLO | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
About four hours into a spacewalk on Tuesday, Russian astronauts pulled out a knife and began cutting into a spacecraft docked at the International Space Station. Soon they began slashing with vigor through the outer insulation, with flurries of debris flying into space. Other times, they used what looked like hedge shears to cut first through the insulation that was the spacecraft's outer layer, and then into an aluminum micrometeoroid shield beneath that. "Don't forget to be careful," Russian flight controllers in Moscow repeatedly warned the astronauts, protected from the vacuum of space by nothing but a spacesuit. "And don't forget about the sharp edges. That's our main concern." Finally, the astronauts, Oleg Kononenko and Sergey Prokopyev, found what they were looking for: a tiny, sealed hole in the spacecraft's hull. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
People with depression are at increased risk for dementia, researchers report, and the risk may persist for decades. Using the Swedish National Patient Register, scientists identified 119,386 people over 50 with depression and matched them with an equal number of people without that diagnosis. Dementia developed in 5.7 percent of those with depression, compared to only 2.6 percent of those without depression, over an average follow up of more than 10 years. Those with depression were more than 15 times as likely to develop dementia in the first six months after their depression diagnosis as their peers who were not depressed. That rate decreased rapidly but was still evident after 20 years. The researchers also studied 25,322 sibling pairs older than 50 in which one sibling had depression and the other did not. A sibling with a depression diagnosis was more than 20 times as likely as his brother or sister without depression to be diagnosed with dementia in the first six months after the diagnosis. Again, the risk declined over time, but persisted for more than 20 years. The study is in PLOS Medicine. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
Public schoolteachers and other education workers in Connecticut should soon have an easier time figuring out how much they are paying for their retirement investments. These costs should not be a mystery, yet they are often difficult to find and even more challenging to understand, particularly for employees in public schools. These workers are commonly sold expensive and complex investments inside their 403(b) plans, which are retirement accounts offered to educators, nonprofit employees and many hospital workers. Most of these plans leave employees more vulnerable because they are more lightly regulated than their better known counterparts, 401(k) accounts. A bill passed by the Connecticut Legislature tries to improve this situation by requiring all 403(b) retirement plan providers to disclose fees and compensation to state and municipal workers. The legislation, which unanimously passed in the state Senate last week, is headed to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy for his signature. The bill was written by Matthew Lesser a Connecticut state representative who leads the House banking committee after he read a series of articles published in The New York Times that documented the problems in 403(b) plans. The legislation which will take effect in 2019, but could be changed to 2018 as language in the bill is completed would require companies that operate 403(b) plans to disclose the charges and returns (after subtracting fees) for each investment offered. It would also require plan administrators to disclose fees paid to any person "who for compensation provides investment advice." A spokeswoman for Kevin Lembo, the Connecticut state comptroller, said his office was analyzing ways to make those plans more readily available. "I am hopeful that we can encourage more opportunities for municipalities, particularly school districts, to partner with the state," Mr. Lembo said in a statement, "including through both the 457 and 403(b) plans." Joshua B. Gottfried, a financial planner in Connecticut who works with many teachers, has said he often tells them to avoid the 403(b) altogether, given the dismal lineup of available investments and the high fees. He said the state run plan is a better option. "Compared to many of the products we see in local districts, it does provide a better platform by offering teachers the benefits of low cost funds and diversification," Mr. Gottfried said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
The author, most recently, of the novel "An Orchestra of Minorities" is "hardly turned off by considerations of genre. ... I have found even manuals of how to hunt wild birds in West Africa fascinating." What's the last great book you read? "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." It was suggested by a student of mine who wanted to reverse the student professor relationship by stipulating that I read a particular book. Needless to say I obliged, and now thank her for it. Jean Dominique Bauby's extremely affecting memoir of being damaged by a stroke is as beautiful as it is disturbing. Yet what makes the craft worthwhile is how, through extremely mitigated prose and skillful curating, it manages never to become sentimental. It is an achievement. What classic novel did you recently read for the first time? I think it may now be called a classic, since he recently won the Nobel Prize: Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day." It is one of those books you can safely call "quiet" or "deceptive simplicity." You begin reading Mr. Stevens's eccentric account of the fall of the British tradition of the "great" butler only to find yourself slowly drawn into something larger, something achingly sinister. It is as if Ishiguro creates a controlled quicksand into which the reader slowly falls and falls until submerged. What do you read when you're working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing? It really depends. While working on "An Orchestra of Minorities," I read a few books on Igbo cosmology simply to augment my knowledge of the cosmology and better recreate it in my fiction. But I sometimes find myself rereading works by great writers whose prose I envy. A slim census would include Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, Alan Paton, Arundhati Roy and Elizabeth Bowen, among others. 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. What I don't read while working on a book is any book that remotely resembles what I'm working on. I had to read George Saunders's "Lincoln in the Bardo," for instance, for a class I was teaching, and halfway through I wished I hadn't included it in the list because the transient state of spirits and the liminality of some of the characters marginally resembles my new book. What's the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently? There are many, but the one I remember quite often is that revenge is not justice. This wisdom is from "Cry, the Beloved Country," by Alan Paton. It is basic human instinct to want to unsheathe the sword once things have swung in our favor, now that the world can hear us, see us and pay attention to us. It is instinctive that we mount the hill and attempt to stomp on those who have oppressed us. It is common for us to say: For so long you made us feel this way, now we must make you taste what it's like. This is what Paton's character Msimangu foreseeing an eventual end to the heinous crime against humanity, apartheid means when he says: "I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating." What moves you most in a work of literature? Language. When a sentence jumps all of the rhetorical hurdles that life and our saturated minds place along the way to reach sublimity, I become moved to near tears. Consider this paragraph from Arundhati Roy's novel "The God of Small Things": "Being with Chacko made Margaret Kochamma feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined." I call this audacious prose, and celebrate it enthusiastically. Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid? My people say that a poor maid does not reject the embrace of a wealthy prince because of bad breath. I'm hardly turned off by considerations of genre or type. So I have found even manuals of how to hunt wild birds in West Africa fascinating. That said, if one returns to a well again and again and finds only bad tasting water, it is difficult to keep returning there. This is why I tend to avoid works of fiction in which plot isn't a function of character but the reverse, in which a set of events is orchestrated and characters are thrown in as fillers. I have this sense of the Dan Brown books especially. So I tend to avoid "upmarket crime thrillers." Although, a few pages in, I'm liking "My Sister, the Serial Killer," by Oyinkan Braithwaite. How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or simultaneously? Morning or night? All of the above. But I do prefer reading books during the day in paper form, and at night, for some reason, I have gotten hooked on my tablet. How do you organize your books? My work space is disorderly. I have books on the floor, even though my original intent was to designate one shelf for purchased books and a separate shelf for books sent to me by publishers to endorse. I find everything mixed up, with copies of The New York Times poking out between stacks of galleys and issues of The Virginia Quarterly Review. What's the best book you've ever received as a gift? Khaled Hosseini's "A Thousand Splendid Suns." In 2008, I went from North Cyprus (where I was in college) to Mersin, Turkey, to spend the summer with a friend's family, and they gave me a copy of the book. I found myself tearing into the riveting tale for the better part of the vacation. What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most? The books that stick with me include "The Palm Wine Drinkard," by Amos Tutuola; "Hamlet," "Macbeth" and "Romeo and Juliet," by William Shakespeare; "The Concubine," by Elechi Amadi; "Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale," by D. O. Fagunwa; and the beloved Nigerian children's book "The Sugar Girl," by Kola Onadipe, a novel about a poor girl who, through suffering and resilience, becomes very successful in society. It's a book I wish had a more international appeal. Read 's essay about how he came to love reading. What's the last book you recommended to a member of your family? If you could require the American president to read one book, what would it be? And the president of Nigeria? I doubt if the United States president is a "yuuuge" fan of fiction, so I'll not go there. Instead I'll recommend Barack Obama's "Dreams of My Father." Should Trump choose to read it, not only would he develop a deeper appreciation of Obama, he would find himself reading great prose from a great writer (I often joke that Obama became president because Americans were smitten by his prose). With the Nigerian president, I expect there will be no luck with fiction either. So I'll recommend Chinua Achebe's "The Trouble With Nigeria." First published as a kind of pamphlet, the book is easy to read, and should not be much of a challenge to Buhari, who as I hear has been struggling with the English language lately. You're organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite? Writers one admires aren't often the best to share tables with, I'd think! I wish I had met Nigeria's Chinua Achebe, and still imagine the conversations we would have had. John Milton, the great mind and one of the greatest writers ever to live. I would want to sit by him at the table and inquire into how "Paradise Lost" was composed. Luckily, there is a writer alive whom I'd love to sit down with anytime! That would be Jennifer Clement, the author of the National Book Award longlisted "Gun Love." She is a remarkable writer and a great, warm person. Whom would you want to write your life story? What do you plan to read next? "The Waves," by Virginia Woolf. I have been meaning to finally read the one book of Woolf's that I hear is just as great as the all conquering "Mrs. Dalloway." I have it on my desk right now. But I also want to finish "The Bible of Dirty Jokes," by Eileen Pollack, who I think might be one of America's most overlooked writers. And I hope to read the last part of "Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems," by Kwame Dawes. It is the last of his books in my collection of about five that I've yet to finish. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
's wise and compassionate new novel, "An American Marriage," tells us a story we think we know. Roy, a young black man, is tried and wrongly convicted of rape while his wife, Celestial, waits for his return. But Jones's story isn't the one we are expecting, a courtroom drama or an examination of the prison industrial complex; instead, it is a clear vision of the quiet devastation of a family. The novel focuses on the failed hopes of romantic love, disapproving in laws, flawed families of origin, and the question of life with or without children that all married couples must negotiate. It is beautifully written, with many allusions to black music and culture including the everyday poetry of the African American community that begs to be heard. Celestial and Roy in love, educated, middle class members of the post integration African American generation are decidedly upwardly mobile and unconcerned about issues of racial uplift and representation, though they have been chaptered and versed by their parents in the language of oppression. With Roy's career "on the come up," as he describes it, and Celestial building a portfolio as an artist, they see a trajectory to become black rich, maybe even white rich. But after only 18 months of marriage, Roy is sentenced to 12 years in prison. The horror of this story lies in its banality: An innocent man, happily married, who does all the right things to succeed, is nonetheless sidelined to a concrete cell. The unfairness of the years stolen from this couple because of someone else's mistake, the great cosmic error that derails Roy's life, is the novel's slow burn. Much of this story is told through the letters that Roy and Celestial write each other during and after his incarceration. Jones recreates the couple's grief, despair and anger until they finally work their way to acceptance. This is complicated emotional territory navigated with succinctness and precision, making what isn't said as haunting as the letters themselves. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
SAN FRANCISCO Facebook is planning to enact new measures to make it more difficult for election misinformation to spread virally across its platform, two people with knowledge of the matter said Thursday, as the outcome of the presidential race remained uncertain. Facebook plans to add more "friction" such as an additional click or two before people can share posts and other content, said the people, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The company will also demote content on the News Feed if it contains election related misinformation, making it less visible, and limit the distribution of election related Facebook Live streams, the people said. The measures, which could be rolled out as soon as Thursday, are a response to heightened strife and social discord on Facebook after the election on Tuesday, these people said. They said there had been more activity by users and Facebook groups to coordinate potentially violent actions over issues such as voter fraud. President Trump has falsely claimed on social media and in remarks from the White House over the past few days that the election was being "stolen" from him, even while a final result remained unclear. The changes would be some of the most significant steps taken by Facebook, which has in the past tried to make sharing information as easy as possible so that it can increase engagement on its site. The moves would most likely be temporary, said the people with knowledge of them, and were designed to cool down angry Americans who are clashing on the network. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Pennsylvania State University has withdrawn recognition of a fraternity chapter whose members used a secret Facebook page to post images of drugs, under age drinking, hazing and nude, unconscious women. The punishment of the Kappa Delta Rho chapter on the University Park campus, where more than half of the school's undergraduates take courses, will last for three years. Damon Sims, vice president for student affairs at Penn State, said late Tuesday that officials had decided on the punishment after an investigation by the university found "a persistent series of deeply troubling activities within the fraternity," including sexual harassment of several women, hazing that included boxing matches, and the sale and use of drugs. Not all of the chapter's members were equally culpable, Mr. Sims said, and many were only observers. "Even so," he said, "the sum of the organizational misbehaviors is far more than the university can tolerate from a student organization that seeks its imprimatur." Officials learned of the Facebook page in January when a former fraternity member went to the police to report possible misconduct. Penn State said its investigation had found that members hazed pledges, forcing them to run errands and clean the fraternity house. Pledges were also forced to hold their bodies in a rigid horizontal position using only their arms in a move called planking, but with a painful twist bottle caps were placed underneath their elbows. In addition, pledges were required to make stories with pornographic images and "a sex position of the day." Members regularly posted embarrassing photographs of women in "extremely compromising" positions and used demeaning language to describe them, the university said. Two women, both students, were subjected to persistent harassment. Officials said they were degraded through multiple postings on the organization's private website over an extended period. "The investigative report makes clear that some members of the K.D.R. chapter promoted a culture of harassing behavior and degradation of women," Mr. Sims said. Mr. Sims announced the university's decision in a letter to the vice presidents of the Interfraternity Council, a body that governs Greek letter organizations at Penn State but is separate from the university. The council recommended that Kappa Delta Rho be allowed to keep its designation as a campus organization, so long as it agreed to measures to "change the culture" of the fraternity. Those measures included a comprehensive education program for new members, and participation in sensitivity training on sexual assaults and bystander intervention training. University officials typically defer to the council on matters related to recognition, but felt compelled to make a stronger response in this case. "We cannot both sustain recognition for this group, even if various stipulations are imposed in exchange for that allowance, and still make the case that such behaviors fall well short of our community's expectations," Mr. Sims said. The decision was not made lightly, he said. The university's action in this case "should not be seen as a retreat" from its commitment to student involvement in institutional decisions, he added. The national executive director of Kappa Delta Rho, Joseph Rosenberg, said that the fraternity had reviewed the report and that any members involved could face expulsion. He noted that the report did not accuse any fraternity members of sexual assault, and said, "We respect the university's decision and look forward to working with the university." The fraternity has made several changes, including increasing education for members on issues of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and alcohol and drug abuse. Mr. Rosenberg said it had also arranged to join a consortium of organizations that maintain a hotline for reporting hazing. The fraternity "is an organization characterized by devotion to respect for others," he said. "As our Penn State chapter proceeds as a part of the university community, we will continue to require that each of our members honors that principle in all respects at all times." The fraternity can ask Penn State to recolonize the chapter after three years, a university spokeswoman said, according to The Associated Press. That would prompt a review, and the university could set conditions on restarting it, she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
The new, lighter 2014 Acura MDX can still be had with the heralded Super Handling All Wheel Drive system, only now it's optional. In this installment of Driven, Tom Voelk drives a front drive model. EASTON, N.H. Honda made significant improvements, including better fuel economy, when it redesigned the Acura MDX for 2014. In part, the advances are a result of the new model's shift in strategy dispensing with the fantasy of an MDX borne family fording streams and boldly clambering over rough terrain transforming it into a reality show. "Virtually no one buys an MDX for any sort of off roading," Jan Moore, senior product planner for Acura S.U.V.'s, said. This is not shocking news, and sales are unlikely to suffer because the vehicle has less ground clearance and can't tackle off road ascents and descents as well as its predecessor, for which off road prowess was never a strong point anyway. Reality is served in other ways, too: for the first time, the MDX is available in a front wheel drive version. Earlier models came with standard all wheel drive, a feature that buyers in Sun Belt states were not always eager to pay for. The front drive 2014 model saves them 2,000 compared with the all wheel drive model. That means the least expensive MDX is now a front drive version, priced at 43,185 for a well equipped model with features including leather upholstery. The most expensive, amenity laden all wheel drive model starts at 57,400. The MDX I tested had all wheel drive and the Technology package. Its window sticker came to 49,460 with features including a navigation system, upgraded stereo, lane departure warning, collision warning, blind spot detection and rain sensing wipers. The MDX is the first vehicle to be built on Honda's latest global light truck platform, which will eventually underpin new versions of Honda's Pilot utility vehicle and Odyssey minivan. From the outside, though, it is unlikely that anyone but MDX cognoscenti will be able to tell just how much is new. Close observers might note the new LED headlights, and a few minutes with a tape measure would provide further clues. The 2014 model, at 193.6 inches long, has grown two inches, and the wheelbase has increased by 2.8 inches. As one would expect in an Acura, the interior has an upscale look, the better to compete with vehicles like the Audi Q7, BMW X5, Buick Enclave and Mercedes Benz M Class. More noticeable are the controls for the heating, cooling and sound systems, now easier to find and use. There are far fewer buttons, and intuition usually replaces the owner's manual. Voice commands reduce the need to look at a touch screen. Because reading text messages while moving is considered to be antisocial, if not death defying, all MDXs have a feature that can link to a smartphone to read incoming text messages aloud through the audio system. There are six preset factory messages available for response, offering short replies like "yes" or "no" as well as a cautious "talk to you later, I'm driving." The second row of seats slides fore and aft 5.9 inches. That's a new feature that lets legroom adjust to the needs of the occupants du jour. But for the second row occupants to have the same amount of legroom as last year, that row must be pushed all the way to the rear. Doing so means the third row has 2.5 inches less legroom than before, a significant loss. Ms. Moore, the product planner, says the loss of third row legroom is not a big deal because owners say that row is not used for everyday seating. Indeed, the seat cushions are short and close to the floor, making it best suited for the usual occupants children. Passengers banished to the back row will find entry is simple, though, because the second row flips forward easily. Acura says the "foot entry" opening to reach the third row is now 4.5 inches wider, which it classifies as a child friendly feature. Acura describes the MDX as having luxurious seven passenger seating, but depending on ages and physical dimensions the seven may be cozy if not cramped. The luxury ideal would be four occupants, allowing plenty of legroom (even for four adults) and 45 cubic feet of cargo space, slightly more than last year. Since its introduction as a 2001 model, the MDX has been marketed to drivers who want a large, practical vehicle that is still entertaining to drive. Indeed, on a weaving mountain road like Route 118 in the White Mountains near Warren, N.H., the 2014 MDX showed that was a realistic goal. Body lean is nicely controlled, even when pushing hard through the turns. Considering its size, the MDX changes direction quickly, aided by a steering whose ratio has been revised to react 9 percent more quickly. Also pitching in is a feature that Honda calls Agile Handling Assist, which briefly applies braking to a wheel on the inside of a turn to sharpen cornering. The solidity of the MDX's body on a rough surface a benefit of a significant increase in the use of high strength steel is also impressive. The suspension suppresses the big league whacks, but there is some moderate jostling, a price the passengers pay for the driver's fun. The assist level of the new electrically assisted power steering can be selected from a choice of three settings, which also adjust throttle response, the all wheel drive system and the interior noise control. The first setting is called Comfort, possibly because Loosey Goosey was too long. Next, the Normal setting adds some weight, but still feels too light. Moving to the Sport setting adds more weight yet, but there is still a disconcerting lack of feeling, or road feedback, through the steering. "People have very strong feelings about steering. We wanted to give them three clear choices," said Mark Pafumi, an engineer at Honda's research and development center in Ohio. More successful is the new 3.5 liter V 6 engine that replaces the 3.7 liter engine. While smaller, it is more sophisticated, with direct fuel injection and the ability to shut off three of its six cylinders under light loads. It comes with a carry over 6 speed automatic. The 3.5 liter is rated at 290 horsepower and 267 pound feet of torque. That compares with 300 horsepower and 270 pound feet of torque for the 2013 model. That loss might appear to be a setback, except that the 2014 model, weighing roughly 4,270 pounds for my test vehicle, was about 280 pounds lighter than the 2013 model a huge reduction. Working with the quick thinking automatic, the 3.5 liter provides more than adequate acceleration: zero to 60 m.p.h. in 6.4 seconds, according to Car and Driver. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Driving any car in the rush hour traffic that coats Los Angeles roads like a viscous layer of hair gel is a chore. You could have the fastest, fanciest, most cool looking car in the world, and you'd still be sitting in the same motoring morass as someone perched behind the wheel of a dented '92 Toyota Corolla. What could possibly make that situation better? If the 2015 Audi A3 E Tron, a plug in hybrid that Audi showed off at the Los Angeles Auto Show, has anything to say about it, the answer is batteries. The A3 E Tron's electric motor handles the around town stuff, while its turbocharged 1.4 liter gasoline engine takes care of heavy acceleration and longer distance travel. I drove one during rush hour, so there wasn't much opportunity to put the car through its paces. But that experience gave valuable insight into what it would be like to drive one in a crowded metropolitan area. Sitting at red lights of which there were many the engine shut down and the car was quiet. Under normal acceleration, the electric motor, which is sandwiched between the engine and transmission, moved the car silently. During those brief moments when I saw the road open up ahead and was able to put more pressure on the accelerator pedal, the electric motor twisted the wheels quickly through the low end, leaving the top end of the r.p.m. range to the high revving turbo gasoline engine. When I floored it, the gas engine kicked in, too, and the A3 E Tron took off pretty quickly for such a small car. In a couple of instances, the car jerked a little when switching from electric motor to gasoline engine power or vice versa. But for the most part, the only indication that anything was happening was the light buzz the 1.4 liter engine emits at higher r.p.m. Along with boost mode, the A3 E Tron has other driving modes, including electric, glide when the brakes are recovering energy for the battery pack and hybrid hold, a selectable mode designed to preserve battery charge for later use. In all electric mode, the E Tron will reach a top speed of 81 miles per hour. Audi says the car's 8.8 kilowatt hour battery pack provides 31 miles of pure electric range and the gasoline engine more than 550 miles of additional range. The automaker claims a zero to 62 mile per hour time of 7.6 seconds, which is believable, and fuel economy numbers topping 150 miles per gallon. That figure bears further real world exploration. Being that this small hybrid wagon was an Audi, it didn't surprise me that it handled well as I wove in and out of traffic. Its looks didn't surprise me either. Audi tends to build pretty cars, and the A3 E Tron is no exception. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Who gets to be part of the gang? Who gets pushed out? Celine, Comme des Garcons and Balmain offer different answers. PARIS The weekend began in the gilded salons of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a grand mid 19th century building on the banks of the Seine where the foundation of the European Union was laid and where Friday night Diane von Furstenberg received the honor of the Chevalier de Legion d'Honneur from Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, in recognition of Ms. von Furstenberg's services to women and to the refurbishment of the Statue of Liberty. Symbol of freedom, tolerance, welcome, you know. It ended on the peeling stage of the Bouffes du Nord theater, as Kanye West and 120 gospel singers brought Mr. West's Sunday Service to the 10th Arrondissement, and a whole lot of jaded fashion folk to their feet, shouting and clapping in unison. (Mr. West is also going to have a Yeezy presentation Monday evening.) This is Mr. Slimane's world. He has been building it with great calculation, one sartorial brick at a time, ever since he arrived at the house (first the dresses, then the culottes, then the jeans). Finally, he put it all together. It is a world full of merch: bags, sunglasses, skinny silk scarves to fling around the neck, what retailers refer to as "items" (even the perfume got a show credit). It is steeped in attitude: bourgeois alienation and cosseted rebellion. It has its own ready made strength and allure (literally ready made: most of these clothes have been made before, decades ago). And it is as easy to identify and as restrictive as a size 0. All that velvet called to mind not just clothes, but the ropes that exist outside the clubs where Mr. Slimane's citizens play. There is no room in Mr. Slimane's Celine for the older models and the models of different sizes that have begun to infiltrate other shows. These boys and girls even the ones wearing clothes that are essentially ageless have the gangly, bony limbs of sour faced baby giraffes. Even then, the jeans were so tight, my seatmate leaned over and said, "These are making my testicles hurt." Mr. Slimane is committed to the Celine image and he has constructed it with a built in "keep out" sign for those who don't fit, in all meanings of that word. Sure, you can take it apart and wear a piece here, a piece there, but Groucho Marx aside, why pretend to be part of a club that won't have you? Does anyone really need that? He has been on a quest for belonging his whole life and it shapes his fashion often in ways that are unwieldy and unflattering, but that also symbolize access to a previously closed world. He we may not have been able to enter it back in the day. But now everyone can play dress up with its codes! Like out of my way buster shoulder pads, scarf print miniskirts in a horse and chain motif, and Krystle Carrington blazers with giant diamante buttons that turn the body into an upside down isosceles triangle. Like gleaming bronze and caramel silk suiting swagged across the hips, and big pleated pants, and dresses with their own built in capes, a la 1980s t Caesars Palace superwoman. Still what stood out among all the visual bluster were some gracefully molded draped leather breast plates and Helena Christensen and Esther Canadas, models of the 1990s, among a group of older women on the runway. As Haider Ackermann said after a show of intensely rigorous serenity via tailoring (he's a designer who can cut and drape a jacket so it seems as calming and caressing as a breeze), "It's about standing straight, and a fight to be present." In black, gray and white; neon yellow, apple green and deep sky blue; whatever, well, suits. In case you didn't get it, there were also lines from Dorothy Parker one his of favorite writers, Mr. Ackermann said backstage as Timothee Chalamet hugged him and listed all the looks he wanted to "steal" sewn into the belts and sleeves of some jackets: "If you do not like me so, to hell, my love, with you;" "I shall stay the way I am because I do not give a damn." Don't apologize for who you are, these clothes read: elevate it, in all its singular glory. Instead, now there is the designer as welcoming host, like Joseph Altuzarra, who in the most sophisticated and fully realized collection he has made in seasons offered a peek into his own family history with soignee 1940s suiting, all portrait necklines and narrow skirts, waists caught by the thinnest of chains, inspired by treasures found in his grandmother's trunk and grounded by feather tufted bedroom slippers. Like Nadege Vanhee Cybulski at Hermes, with her egoless clothes in sumptuous materials that whisper only to the person who wears them. (You have to strain so much to hear, sometimes you wish they would announce themselves just a wee bit louder.) There were head braces with mantilla like veils suspended over the face, and stuffed constructions that looked like misshapen airplane pillows around the neck and waist. Sometimes the clothes looked like movable tents and seed pods; sometimes they looked like wedding dresses. What was going on? Ms. Kawakubo wouldn't say. Duh. She never does. Her clothes often make no sense as clothes. They follow no rules except their own. They are not meant to be worn to a club, or out to dinner. They are meant to make you examine your own assumptions. To force you to open your mind, and invite in possibilities you had never considered. That's the point: Decide for yourself. Hello, Liberty. Nice to see you. Sing it loud. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Satellite Collective is an admirably cooperative endeavor and a peculiar one. Its program at BAM Fisher on Thursday included a poetic monologue, a stop motion film and three dance pieces, with and without video accompaniment. Everything had live musical accompaniment, and there were standalone musical selections, too. Seven composers, three choreographers, one filmmaker, two writers, one lighting designer and three costume designers contributed, with some of those people wearing multiple hats. Even for a sampler, that's a lot of creative voices. But the peculiar part isn't the numbers or the mixing of media and disciplines. It's the clash of mutually repellent sensibilities. Some of the selections fell into the category of thoughtful competence, well constructed pieces that appeal without challenging or surprising much. Most of Thursday's music was of this sort, like the opening cello solo, "Water," composed and played by David Moss. So was the opening dance, "Individuate," choreographed by the New York City Ballet corps member Devin Alberda. In it, Michaela Mann posed strikingly on the floor in a golden unitard like a Far Eastern goddess, her slow quick motions acquiring urgency from Nick Jaina's guitar distortions but not developing much. And then there was the inscrutably arty stuff. Lora Robertson's stop motion film "Edie Leaves Twice," with its humble props, was a bit like a Joseph Cornell box come to life, and more beguiling if you didn't try to match the action to the program synopsis. "A Pair of Ideal Landscapes," a collaboration between Ms. Robertson and the choreographer Esme Boyce, musing about time, was simply baffling. Ms. Boyce and Christopher Ralph suggested a relationship in turmoil with anguished partnering in front of film images of faces, wrists and another dancer (Kit McDaniel) enveloped in an enormous skirt. Richie Greene's score, an odd combination of chirruping in Latin and deep electronic bass, added intrigue without clarity. Finally, there was the incredible obviousness of the concluding work, "Walls Are Here to Fall." In this piece, choreographed by Manuel Vignoulle and twice as long as anything else on the program, four dancers in white turtlenecks expressed the difficulty of human connection with ingeniously entangled limbs and nuzzling. Then each dancer, isolated in a box of light, yelled at the others and struggled to escape through bad mime. One, left alone onstage, could have been auditioning for the role of Tarzan imprisoned. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. MASS MoCA, the vast, multibuilding museum of contemporary art here, is a weird and wonderful place. For one, the dominance of brick walls, wood floors, big windows and frequent columns of its repurposed 19th century factory buildings is the apotheosis of SoHo, whose small industry loft spaces were taken over by commercial art galleries in the 1970s. But more personally: Wandering MASS MoCA's wide corridors and spacious galleries can feel like revisiting your old high school when classes aren't in session. The stillness is eerie, the empty spaces luxuriant and seemingly all yours. A big difference is that while your old high school inevitably seems smaller than remembered, MASS MoCA almost always feels mind bogglingly large. Especially now, having just expanded its gallery space to 250,000 square feet. But, conveniently, it does this while closing a circle: For the first time, you can start your peregrinations from the entrance, meander along at least one route through its clutch of buildings and return to where you started without backtracking. His light centered environments have never been seen in such number; there are nine, with at least one from each decade of Mr. Turrell's career. Happily, his most recent work is among his best, an elliptical mandala of colored light that resembles a dematerialized version of the vacuum formed plastic wall pieces that Craig Kauffman, Mr. Turrell's fellow light and spacer, started making in the 1960s. Don't bother with strict math, but Building 6 is the latest of more than a dozen structures MASS MoCA has repurposed for art in this imposing compound of handsome buildings that form the heart of North Adams. Its rehabilitation makes it one of the country's largest noncollecting museums of contemporary art. Nearly all buildings devote most of their space to display or event spaces. The exceptions are two structures that were part of the initial conversion, which opened in 1999 and primarily house two theaters; the lobby; a gift shop; and Kidspace for children, a self contained floor generously stocked with art materials. The idea of using the empty factory complex for cultural purposes occurred to the mayor of North Adams, John Barrett III, in conversation with Thomas Krens, a former director of the Williams College Museum of Art, who was looking for space for long term displays to show large artworks by major artists. But Mr. Krens left in 1988 to become director of the Guggenheim in New York, and the project fell to Joseph C. Thompson, Mr. Krens's colleague at Williams, who became MASS MoCA's founding director and has been there since, shepherding his institution through thin and not so thin. MASS MoCA is Mr. Thompson's life's work, and it may be as exceptional for its mission as its size. An apt point of comparison is with Dia:Beacon, which the Dia Art Foundation opened in Beacon, N.Y., in 2003 in a lavishly skylighted building of nearly 300,000 square feet built by the Nabisco Company in 1929. Dia:Beacon was created by the foundation's director, Michael Govan, another Krens protege (who now heads the Los Angeles County Museum of Art), and it fulfills the Krens model: It is intended for long term displays of the foundation's deep collection of works by a coterie of mostly male Minimalists and Conceptualists. Although this narrowness of approach has started to loosen under the foundation's new director, Jessica Morgan, it is still a place for the highly informed. Dia:Beacon basically preaches to the converted, if not to the devout. MASS MoCA is the anti Dia. Its mission seems to be to appeal to everyone, both the entry level art lover and the sophisticated one. Nearly every visitor can usually find something to like, perhaps to love, and probably something to dislike, too. In a time when populism is suspect in many quarters, MASS MoCA gives it a good name. It is a place where it is possible to progress from novice to art enthusiast. This is usually considered the task of museums that have encyclopedic collections. But MASS MoCA, under Mr. Thompson, has managed it, out of principle or necessity. The show with the widest appeal may be the three large installation pieces in "Until" by the Chicagoan Nick Cave in Building 5 an open, column free football field size space that remains MASS MoCA's grandest. Mr. Cave has pushed beyond his well known over the top assemblage like "Soundsuits," and branched out emphatically. "Kinetic Spinner Forest" is a veritable rain forest of 12,000 eye dazzling spinners suspended from 1,500 thin cables. "Crystal Cloudscape" nestles a large garden of good and evil, especially racial evil, in an enormous hanging chandelier (and visited by ladder), and "Beaded Cliff Wall" is a cavern made of beaded netting. The shows in Building 4 range from the rough and tumble "In the Abstract," where 11 artists explore abstract art's potential for political expression, to the refinement of Elizabeth King's obsessively made, sometimes animatronic half size figures and limbs; from Steffani Jemison's often arcane explorations of the connections among writing, autonomy and race (including an excellent sound piece), to the accessible Conceptualism of Tanja Hollander's "Are You Really My Friend?," a project for which she traveled widely to photograph all of her Facebook friends. MASS MoCA has a similar breadth regarding other arts, from performance art to the popular music events it holds nearly every weekend, indoors and out. (In 2010, it built a concert field that accommodates 10,000 people.) The band Wilco has a biennial one week residency, and there's an annual bluegrass festival, FreshGrass, in September. In fact MASS MoCA may be better known regionally for its music than for its art. Mr. Thompson's single best idea was to modify the Krens model: mixing in long term exhibitions of extended loans with the mostly 10 month long shows it had started out with. This move was made in spectacular fashion in 2008. That was when it opened the refurbished Building 7 with a 25 year exhibition of 105 in situ wall drawings by Sol LeWitt, an influential Minimalist Conceptualist who doesn't figure as prominently in the Dia power grid as others. It remains one of the jewels in Mass MoCA's crown. Building 6 expands upon the LeWitt template. The Turrell show, on view for 25 years, is a triumph. The shows devoted to Ms. Holzer's and Ms. Anderson's work, which have 15 year terms, will be periodically changed and updated by the artists, which is good, because they can stand improvement. Still, Ms. Holzer's way with language, morality and history alternately poetic and withering, and expressed in incised stone benches or on silk screen paintings of redacted government documents concerning the dark side of recent wars has a renewed and tragic force in the current political climate. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
MY METEORITE Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing By Harry Dodge The concept of empathy as an engine for generating solidarity can seem lackluster. As an ideal, empathy requires us to flatten and overlook difference in order to forge bonds, and these days we have to ask ourselves: What kind of love is it that depends on an absence of difference? In his new memoir, "My Meteorite," the multidisciplinary artist Harry Dodge, who came to many readers' attention as the partner with whom Maggie Nelson built a life in "The Argonauts," insists that more complex kinds of love are possible. "I try not to allocate care, my sympathies, via a logics of sameness," he writes in a sort of mission statement. "I wonder if a shift toward the word sympathy (from empathy) would generate a foregrounding of the idea of difference as we figure out how to keep growing practices of love?" Dodge, who began his art career in San Francisco in the early 1990s, operates on the axiom that "Love is a verb, not something you point at; it's something you do." "My Meteorite" gives that notion formal expression. Loosely organized around three narrative strands the discovery of his birth mother in 2003, the death of his adoptive father in 2017 and his purchase of a meteorite on the internet the book finds Dodge traversing his life with the aid of a plethora of artistic, pop culture and literary allusions, imagining what it looks like to create "solidarity in diversity," as he puts it. What would become possible if we thought about love as something whose reach extends to entities that are not like us perhaps not even human? Dodge's is a world where a man might have sex with the tailpipe of his car, where the libidinal dimension of an attraction to objects might yield a new understanding of what, exactly, it means to love. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Maybe you are an altruist looking for a way to help fight the coronavirus. Maybe you are hoping to be among the first to try an experimental vaccine. Or maybe you are just bored or could use a few hundred dollars. Whatever your reasons, scientists, bioethicists and current volunteers say participating in a vaccine trial can be meaningful. And without hundreds of thousands of volunteers, there will be no vaccine for anyone. But you may be surprised by the commitment and risks that a trial entails. Here's what you need to know. A number of sites maintain lists of coronavirus vaccine trials. The Covid 19 Prevention Network site, created by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, helps connect volunteers to Phase 3 studies. Right now, for example, Moderna is looking to enroll around 30,000 volunteers. ClinicalTrials.gov also lists Covid 19 vaccine studies at different phases and COVID Dash, a portal managed by a group of doctors, clinical trial professionals and students who want to encourage people to volunteer, features studies across the world. What do these different phases mean? There are three primary phases of a vaccine trial. A Phase 1 trial is focused on safety. If you participate, you are likely to be among the first human beings to try the vaccine. Researchers will want to track whether it affects you negatively, such as making you feverish or dizzy. Typically they will monitor you and a few dozen other subjects closely after each dose, and then check in periodically for about a year. At the time you receive the vaccine, the developer won't know if it prevents Covid 19. And even if it does, there's little chance you'll get the right amount. Still, Phase 1 trials are appealing to some volunteers because clinicians can sometimes assure all subjects that they'll get the experimental vaccine, not an inactive placebo. Phase 2 is bigger and typically involves a few hundred people. At this point, researchers are still watching for side effects, but they are also examining whether their vaccine is generating an immune response, said Dr. Larry Corey, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the leader of the Covid 19 Prevention Network. If you think about a vaccine developer's desired immune response like a bar that a pole vaulter needs to clear to move to the next round, "you want to see that you got over the bar," he said. To extend the metaphor, the pole vaulter won't know if clearing that bar was enough to win, he said. Just because a vaccine has generated an immune response, doesn't mean it was sufficient to protect anyone, he said. Only a Phase 3 trial allows researchers to study if their vaccine works. They do this by enrolling tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of volunteers, giving one half of the group to two thirds of them the vaccine, and giving the rest a placebo or an alternative treatment. They do not expose anyone to the coronavirus, but they try to enroll a large enough group in locations with enough cases that they can bank on some people getting infected in the normal course of their lives. They then evaluate whether the vaccine reduced the frequency of acquiring the infection and lessened the severity of the disease in the test group, Dr. Corey said. How do I increase my chance of early access to an experimental vaccine? There's no guarantee that you'll actually be protected from the coronavirus at any phase of a vaccine trial, no matter how hyped the product has been. By a Phase 3 trial, of course, there's more to suggest that it works than a Phase 1 trial. But you might not get the vaccine at all. It might be an inactive placebo or an alternative intervention. Who should get a booster shot? It depends, Dr. Scott Gottlieb says. Researchers have to give these to some subjects to create a control group, said Nir Eyal, the director of the Center for Population Level Bioethics at the Rutgers School of Public Health. "Otherwise what do you compare the results to?" Dr. Eyal asked. During the Ebola outbreak, there was a push to try to run efficacy trials without a control group, he said. But eventually most researchers came around to the idea that, without a control group, a study would tell them "basically nothing" because as with the coronavirus its "spread is mercurial, and very different in different areas at different times." How much will I get paid? It could be a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. It varies by the trial. "What you are doing is providing compensation for time and trouble," said Dr. Daniel Hoft, director of the Saint Louis University Center for Vaccine Development. Organizers try to avoid creating a financial incentive. So even if they could pay much more, they don't. "If the money seems extraordinarily attractive to you, think again," Arthur L. Caplan, a bioethicist, said. "You don't want to let compensation blind you to the need to pay attention to the risks." If my health is harmed because of a trial, who pays for my care? Let's say that you are adversely affected by an experimental vaccine. You might assume that the vaccine developer will cover your health care costs. But typically they commit only to reimbursing your insurance company, Dr. Caplan said. "Insurance companies will rarely pay anything if you are hurt in an experiment," he said. So ask a lot of questions first. "If I get injured what happens?" is among those he recommends. Dr. Corey added that in some cases, the institute running the trials or the U.S. government's pandemic relief fund, known as the Public Readiness and Preparedness Act, might cover those costs. What if I'm willing to be infected with the coronavirus to speed up the science? Across the world, a lively debate is underway about that. This type of vaccine research is called a "challenge trial," which entails giving volunteers a vaccine then deliberately exposing them to the virus to see if they end up infected. The approach is controversial because Covid 19 has no cure and can be fatal. But it is also tantalizing because it promises to dramatically speed up research. In mid July, scientists at Oxford University announced that they would soon begin recruiting volunteers for such a trial. In the United States, a handful of vaccine developers have cautiously signaled they are open to a similar path eventually. Dr. Eyal believes that the most ethical way to conduct these trials is to focus on young, healthy volunteers who meet criteria that suggest they'd be unlikely to develop a severe case of Covid 19. There are no guarantees, however, which is why some experts are adamantly opposed to challenge trials. But if you are not deterred, and want to help advance the science, the site 1 Day Sooner invites people to sign up for future challenge trials. As of last week, the site ticker showed that more than 32,000 people from 140 countries were ready to volunteer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Cosmic dust containing elements like iron, carbon or oxygen plays an important role in the formation of planets and stars. But early galaxies consisted only of gas, and the dust appeared later. Where the dust came from has long been a mystery. After years of searching, astronomers have observed cosmic dust that appears to have survived the hot aftermath of a supernova. The finding was reported in the journal Science. "When a supernova explodes, it forms a bunch of dust" said Ryan Lau, an astronomer at Cornell University and lead author of the new study. "But dust is pretty fragile material. So the question is, who's to say the dust survives this extremely hot, violent environment? And if it does, how much?" Using infrared images from an observatory aboard a Boeing 747, Dr. Lau and his colleagues located a supernova remnant near the center of the Milky Way with substantial amounts of cosmic dust. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
A relatively dry El Nino winter, a warm spring that melted snow earlier and years of policies that left forests ripe for burning have contributed to the destructive wildfire that forced the evacuation of Fort McMurray in Alberta, scientists say. Global warming may have played a role, too, although experts cautioned that it was impossible to link an individual event like this one directly to climate change. But there is little doubt that global warming has affected the frequency and intensity of fires, and lengthened the fire season in Alberta, as it has elsewhere in North America. "The warmer it is, the more fire there is," said Mike Flannigan, a wildland fire expert at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. In Alberta, he said, the fire season now begins March 1, a month earlier than in the past. Around Fort McMurray, the number of heat wave days, when temperatures are at least nine degrees Fahrenheit above normal, has tripled since 1950, said Stefan Kienzle, a hydrologist at the University of Lethbridge in southern Alberta. Hotter temperatures dry out the underbrush and ground litter that can fuel a fire. "Fuel moisture is really the key to the fire business," Dr. Flannigan said. "That's why temperature is so important." Warm temperatures in the region this spring made the fuel situation worse, by melting snow earlier. An earlier melt means that sunlight hits the forest floor sooner, so the underbrush has more time to dry and becomes easier to ignite, said David Martell, a forestry professor at the University of Toronto. "If the snow disappears quicker, then that whole volatile situation comes quicker and lasts a little longer," he said. Like much of the northwestern United States and Canada, Alberta was drier than normal this winter, although perhaps not as dry as might have been expected given the intensity of El Nino, said Anthony Barnston, the chief forecaster at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University. In Alberta, though, what may have had a greater impact were drier conditions from late summer into fall last year, a period when the region normally gets a lot of rainfall, Dr. Barnston said. That meant the province was already experiencing a water deficit when El Nino related dryness set in. Some experts also say that fire suppression policies have helped make fires in Canada more destructive. Like many forest agencies in the United States, those in Canada long had policies to fight every fire, no matter how small they were or how little they threatened people. That approach increases the amount of fuel available so that out of control fires can become hugely destructive. Within the past decade, though, some Canadian agencies have adopted different policies, monitoring fires case by case and letting smaller ones burn, which spares larger trees but consumes much of the fuel. That can leave a mosaic of thinned out patches that can help halt the spread of larger fires. "There is an intent to try to let fire play its natural role in particular areas where it's safe to do so," said Peter Fuglem, former director of the wildfire program for the British Columbia Forest Service. "But it's a difficult policy decision on when and where to let fires burn." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values . It is separate from the newsroom. As the coronavirus crisis wreaks havoc on the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans, state and local governments are struggling to meet the needs of their people. In New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic, the devastation is particularly acute and promises to grind on indefinitely. Mayor Bill de Blasio confronts unfamiliar and difficult budget decisions. He has not met the moment. After presiding over years of prosperity, the mayor now finds himself facing a city in critical condition, with unemployment soaring and tax revenues plummeting. His budget office has projected a shortfall of 9 billion through June of next year. (The city's 2021 fiscal year starts on the first of next month.) No one imagines that this will be the final tally. The hole will grow deeper, made worse by possible funding losses from the state, which is facing its own multibillion dollar shortfall. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has already warned that more than 8 billion in aid cuts to localities will be necessary. Like many state and local leaders, Mr. de Blasio's best hope for help is the federal government. He and other New York officials are asking for Congress to provide direct aid to hard hit budgets. The governor has said the state needs an additional 60 billion in unrestricted funding. To avoid exacerbating the economic damage, in New York and beyond, Congress needs to step up. But progress on any such package will be slow. The Republican led Senate is resistant to additional relief spending, and the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has voiced particular distaste for providing unrestricted aid to states and municipalities. He has said his chamber will not even consider another round of relief until late June. So it remains unclear when, or if, Washington will get around to helping New York. Assuming it does, the funding is unlikely to be sufficient to the need. Looking for other ways to fill the gap, Mr. de Blasio has pulled out a tactic that has some people flashing back a few decades: Borrow. A lot. The mayor wants the city to take on 7 billion in debt to cover operating expenses. Borrowing for regular operating expenses (as opposed to capital investments) is a move rarely used and one requiring approval from the state, a vestige of the fiscal meltdown of the 1970s, when New York sank so deeply into debt that it came within a heartbeat of insolvency. The mayor is framing his request as a desperate measure for desperate times. "We're going to be in a horrible budget situation for years, so this borrowing capacity is to give us a fallback, no matter what happens up ahead," he said at a news conference late last month. Mr. de Blasio is right that New York cannot count on the federal government to save the day. But his impulse to plunge the city into bottomless debt is shortsighted. The city comptroller, Scott Stringer, has estimated that payments on the 7 billion Mr. de Blasio seeks would total 11 billion over the next two decades or 12.5 billion over three decades. Before yoking New Yorkers with even a fraction of this burden, the mayor needs to get serious about belt tightening. "Borrowing should be a measure of last resort," Corey Johnson, the speaker of the City Council, told The Times. "What the mayor has done is extraordinarily irresponsible. He has not gone through the hard process of identifying cuts." The mayor's 89.3 billion budget proposal put forward in mid April includes modest spending reductions, but they are by no means exhaustive and in some cases are focused in precisely the wrong direction. "The two year, 2.7 billion savings program totals less than 2 percent of the budget and relies primarily on underspending, spending delays and re estimates instead of program efficiencies," Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan, nonprofit budget watchdog group, observed when the plan was unveiled. Watchdogs and city officials alike some of whom, like Mr. Stringer and Mr. Johnson, are hoping to succeed Mr. de Blasio as mayor in next year's election agree that there are more, and fairer, savings to be found. Most broadly, members of the City Council have criticized the mayor's proposed budget "PEG," or Program to Eliminate the Gap, a cost saving exercise that requires agencies to identify savings in their budgets. Such reviews are meant to be conducted regularly with an eye toward rooting out waste. Mr. de Blasio has never been a fan, preferring instead to solicit voluntary cuts. This is only the second time his administration has put forward a P.E.G., and the result is both inadequate and inequitable. As an example, the mayor would slash the Department of Youth and Community Development's budget by 32 percent while trimming less than half a percent from the Police Department. In a May 29 letter to the mayor, City Council members, who will vote on the budget this month, told him to go back to every agency not already marked for significant cuts and instruct them "to identify cuts of at least 5 to 7 percent of their budgets." They asked him to return with the agencies' proposed savings by Monday. Of course, some departments are riper than others for reductions. In a recent tweet, Brad Lander, a City Council member, pledged not to vote for any budget that did not "meaningfully cut the N.Y.P.D." He is not wrong. Crime is at historic lows, but the New York Police Department remains an out of control behemoth, with some 36,000 uniformed officers and a budget of just under 6 billion. From 2014 to 2019, department spending rose 22 percent; overtime alone increased by over 150 million. The Police Department accounts for more than 6 percent of the city's overall budget. For the police, a cut of 5 to 7 percent could probably be a floor rather than a ceiling. Because of growing concern over the behavior of police officers during the current protests, the political climate is seen as more amenable, or at least more resigned, to cuts than usual. Police reform advocates have been pushing for 1 billion in reductions, something Mr. de Blasio has so far resisted. Their call was amplified this week in an open letter sent to the mayor by more than 230 of his former and current staffers, lamenting his failure to rein in the department's excesses both budgetary and otherwise. On Thursday, Mr. Stringer sent the mayor a plan to reduce police spending by slightly more than 1 billion over the next four years. It calls for cutting uniformed head count through attrition, reducing uniformed overtime by 5 percent and reducing Other Than Personnel Services (read: not salaries) by 4 percent. It is, if nothing else, a starting point for debate. Moving over to the Department of Education, Mr. de Blasio has proposed slicing 100 million from the Fair Student Funding program, which gives principals unrestricted funds to apply to student needs as they see fit. A better, fatter target is the department's rich consulting contracts and bloated bureaucracy. From fiscal year 2014 to 2019, spending on outside contractors grew by 382 million, according to numbers from the comptroller's office. During that same period, the department also added 1,700 nonschool based staff (think: education administrators, supervisors and so on), at a cost of 250 million. Costs for "central administration" and "school support organization" (district and borough offices) grew 234 million, according to numbers by the Independent Budget Office. A good deal of cutting could be done without directly affecting classrooms. No administration wants to tinker with benefits for city workers. But if the fiscal crisis is serious enough to consider assuming billions in debt, it is serious enough to ask the unions to come back to the negotiating table. Among the issues to discuss: the city's exceedingly generous health care benefits. The Citizens Budget Commission has long called for changes that would help get these long term obligations under control. Now is the time to explore every option. Deeper into the weeds, the city could realize an estimated annual savings of 29 million by switching from licensed software to open source software. It could also save money and improve efficiency by consolidating and rationalizing building inspections, which are currently handled by multiple agencies. And the list goes on. Some of the cuts would be politically tougher than others, especially for a mayor so hesitant to displease unions in general and the police unions in particular. But by doing the painful work of cutting, Mr. de Blasio will in addition to doing his job signal his seriousness of purpose to the very state and federal lawmakers he is begging for help. This is no empty gesture. Even with tough cuts, the city is likely to wind up needing to borrow. And so far, Mr. Cuomo has seemed disinclined to grant the mayor's request. "Borrowing for operating expenses is fiscally questionable," he said at a briefing late last month. Mr. de Blasio has noted that the city was granted borrowing authority in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, during the first Bloomberg administration. "We're dealing with something as horrible as 9/11 in every sense, humanly and otherwise," the mayor said at his May 26 news conference. Whatever his faults, Michael Bloomberg was not one to shy away from tough budget decisions, pursuing austerity measures with occasionally too much verve. Mr. de Blasio, by contrast, is not known for his fiscal discipline, and his proposed course does nothing to inspire confidence. To the contrary, the 7 billion request feels like yet more proof that the mayor has lost interest in leading the city. It is the product of someone not worried about New York's future so much as his own political present. But just because he is leaving office in a year and a half does not mean he should burden the city with crushing debt as a parting gift. After everything New Yorkers have suffered, Mr. de Blasio owes them better than that. 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 |
In December, Ami Levy and her husband, Jason, left frigid Washington, D.C., for a two week vacation in Argentina. Once there, they headed north to the Brazilian border for a couple of days, lured by Igauzu Falls. She recalls the excitement when their phones' GPS indicated they finally were in Brazil, and the awe inspiring walls of water, some more than 24 stories tall. And, she remembers, everywhere there were mosquitoes, leaving bites on her thigh. Back home the first week of January, Ms. Levy learned she was four weeks pregnant. Her first pregnancy had ended in miscarriage in September, so it was with some hesitation that she left for another trip, this time to Puerto Rico for a rendezvous with her aunt and sister. As soon as she arrived, local news broadcasts began warning pregnant women about the dangers of infection with the Zika virus, carried by mosquitoes and suspected of causing devastating birth defects in infants born to infected women. She booked the first available flight home. "I was on the beach for a few hours and didn't put on any bug spray," said Ms. Levy, a 35 year old psychotherapist. "I had two bites when I got home Sunday." "I think I would have been more panicky if I hadn't told myself I needed to keep it together for my baby." The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that nine pregnant women were known to have become infected while traveling. Yet many more are coping with the possibility of exposure, reaching out to their doctors for blood tests and ultrasounds, obsessing on news coverage and trying to manage their worry. The C.D.C. recommends that pregnant women receive blood tests two to 12 weeks after travel to an affected area to detect whether they may have been infected with the Zika virus. Those who may have been exposed are urged to consider having extra ultrasounds to look for birth defects in the developing fetus. Nothing is guaranteed; the antibody test has its limits. Ultrasounds often do not detect fetal microcephaly, the disease causing misshapen heads and brain damage that has been linked to infection with the virus. According to the C.D.C., the scans are most accurate at the end of the second trimester or early in the third. "The risk is small, but the effects are tragic," said Craig Forest, 37, an associate professor of bioengineering at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. They chose that destination because of all the countries in the region, it seemed to offer the safest environment for a pregnant woman. After 10 days of rain forest hikes and lazy sunsets on the beach, Ms. Forest was covered with insect bites. Back home in January, the couple began hearing news reports about the Zika virus. Costa Rica was not mentioned. "I'm looking at the list and thinking, 'That's all of Costa Rica's neighbors; we dodged a bullet on that one,' " Mr. Forest said. On Feb. 1, Costa Rica was added to the list of countries in which Zika is circulating. The virus had been in the country since at least December. Ms. Forest's doctor did not order a blood test for the infection, because she had not had any symptoms. Her most recent ultrasound appeared normal, and the couple say they will ask for another at the cutoff time for an abortion. They have lain in bed at night discussing the possibility, something that would have been unthinkable a couple of months ago. They know the risks are remote first that she might have been bitten by an infected mosquito, and second that the infection might lead to a birth defect. "As analytically minded people, we're trying to calculate the odds," said Ms. Forest, who is also an engineer. But when they try to figure the likelihood of a birth defect related to the Zika virus, all they can come up with is "not zero." There is nothing to do but wait. "I actually tried to stop reading the news," Ms. Forest said. Even when a pregnant woman is found to have been infected, tests of blood or amniotic fluid cannot definitively tell if the fetus was affected, said Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, an expert in infectious diseases at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, who is working to develop a more reliable alternative. Microcephaly seems to be a relatively rare complication. But it's also possible that the virus may cause "more subtle damage that we can't yet appreciate," Dr. Lipkin said. In late February, just after Ami Levy first heard her baby's heartbeat in the doctor's office, her Zika antibody test results came back negative. "For the first time in weeks, I felt like I could breathe," she said. She had spent an anxious month worrying that she had put her baby in danger, though she knew the guilt to be illogical. Even now, Ms. Levy says she is nagged by the knowledge that the tests are not foolproof. She plans to ask for an extra ultrasound when she is further along. She's taking no chances, even tiny ones. At her doctor's suggestion, she canceled a coming trip to Florida because the local health authorities had declared a public health emergency in Miami Dade County. "I see those pictures, and I feel connected to those mothers in Brazil," she said. "This is a really horrible situation." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Tina Fey in "30 Rock," one of several TV series that had episodes taken out of circulation this summer because of offensive content. Unsurprisingly, studios, streamers and showrunners are reluctant to give any oxygen to controversies regarding their content. Netflix, Hulu, BritBox, Adult Swim and Comedy Central all declined to comment for this article, as did several creators of affected series, such as Tina Fey, Trey Parker and Noel Fielding. Amazon Studios, BBC Studios and NBCUniversal did not respond to multiple requests for comment. While this summer has seen a flurry of removals, withdrawing controversial episodes from distribution is nothing new, noted Ron Simon, the senior curator at the Paley Center for Media. Simon, who started his career working with studio archives, cited episodes of "The Twilight Zone" ("The Encounter" in 1964) and "Seinfeld" ("The Puerto Rican Day" in 1998), both of which were withheld from syndication by their respective networks over complaints that they were racist. ("The Puerto Rican Day" returned to syndication four years later; "The Encounter," about an escalating racial conflict between a white and Japanese man, was not rerun on television until 2016.) Dan Wingate, a filmmaker and former technical specialist in film and television preservation at Sony Pictures Entertainment, says that so called "takedown" requests were standard, if uncommon, practice during his time at the studio. The reasons for them varied, he said, but their source did not: "It always comes through legal." What has changed is the mechanics of removal. In predigital days, taking an episode out of circulation meant cutting it from the syndicated rerun schedule and, behind the scenes, removing the physical tape masters and "servicing files" from their designated inventories and labeling them "out of service." Episodes or films were then funneled to climate controlled vaults and, in the case of companies like Sony, the Library of Congress's National Audiovisual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Va. Nowadays, with most shows entirely shot and stored digitally, pulling one of them "is just to take the digital file down," Simon said. An episode or potentially an entire series can be ordered down, fully removed from streaming and access restricted in less than 24 hours. Cross experienced this firsthand when he learned in June that an episode of "W/ Bob and David," the 2015 sketch comedy series he created with his longtime collaborator Bob Odenkirk, was being pulled. In a sketch called "Know Your Rights" from the episode, Cross plays Gilvin Daughtry, a citizens' rights vlogger who desperately dons blackface to try to provoke a Black police officer, played by Keegan Michael Key, into arresting him. Daughtry is then pepper sprayed and tased by a white cop played by Jay Johnston, another writer on the series. In certain cases, takedowns are executed voluntarily. Fey and Robert Carlock, the creators of "30 Rock," as well as Bill Lawrence of "Scrubs," requested that episodes of their series featuring blackface be removed from streaming services. NBC, ABC and their various partners complied. Other times, however, the process is more complex. Cross said his episode's removal, for example, set off a series of contentious discussions involving his manager, Odenkirk and Netflix executives. He and Odenkirk also tweeted about the episode's withdrawal, prompting a phone call from Ted Sarandos, the company's chief content officer (since promoted to co chief executive), who was "very, very respectful" of "the frustration that we would be feeling as artists who put this thing out there with no ill intent," Cross said. "It was the adult thing to do, and guess what we did?" he said. "We had an actual dialogue and a conversation about it we didn't scream at each other in 240 characters." Netflix paid the creators a flat fee for their work on the series, Cross said. The episode's disappearance therefore won't impact any potential residuals he might have received at a traditional broadcaster, as happened to stars of "The Cosby Show" when that series was removed from syndication in 2014. Regardless, he insists that if there is a way to help get the episode back up, "I would. I know Bob feels the same way." That networks and streamers can now pull problematic episodes with such speed concerns those charged with maintaining television's historical record. Jane Klain, who has worked to recover and save lost footage as the Paley Center's research manager, notes that permanently displacing shows, whether for social or financial reasons, threatens to purge "treasures" from the historical record. Before syndication (and later streaming) proved the value in saving old television, she said, "the networks were very lax" about preserving footage. In the current environment, Klain understands why a company "may want to pull an episode because it's uncomfortable to show, or it's wrong or improper." But she argues that it is the network or streamer's responsibility to preserve it until they decide how and when to "put it into a good context" regardless of the content. In a much discussed recent example, HBO Max attached videos to "Gone With the Wind" that give context to the film's romanticized vision of the slavery era South. Disney also added warnings about racist depictions in "Dumbo" and "Peter Pan," which are available on the Disney streaming service. (The chief executive Bob Iger has said that the 1946 film "Song of the South" will never appear on the platform, though.) "You say, in as diplomatic and anodyne a way as you can: 'The following sketch contains a scene that might be upsetting to some people. A character dons blackface. Skip ahead if you don't want to see it,'" he said. The Paley Center has long warned users of its archive about potentially offensive imagery. "We've done that in the past with certain attitudes from shows of the '50s," Simon said. "We will just put an advisory that the perspectives are not ours today." Two media companies that recently pulled episodes are considering such measures, said two executives who requested anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the issue. What is never acceptable, Klain said, is to try to rewrite history by doing away with or destroying a show or film permanently, even if "after the fact, somebody was accused of something." "It was still made!" she said. Pulled episodes and movies generally aren't destroyed, but remain sequestered in proprietary digital storage platforms, with internal access indefinitely limited to trained asset managers. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
Come Pride Month, few are prouder, or louder, than the people of New York's theater community. This year, with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, stories of struggle and salvation are on offer, alongside frothier fare celebrating and representing the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and its allies . Here we consider some of what's onstage now. A tireless Larry Owens plays a theater usher named Usher in Michael R. Jackson's dizzying musical , which wrestles with blackness, queerness and black queerness with gleeful abandon. Beyonce, Tyler Perry and "The Lion King" are involved. Stephen Brackett directed, and Raja Feather Kelly choreographed, this "self portrait in an endless hall of mirrors that dares to forbid closure, escape or redemption to the artistically thwarted being at its center," Ben Brantley wrote in his review for The New York Times. Through July 28 at Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Family ties, in particular the bond between two brothers one an Anglican pastor, the other a closeted gay man are tested by conflicting loyalties in this work by the English playwright Chris Urch. The play, in previews now and opening July 15, was inspired by a 2010 incident in which a newspaper in Kampala, Uganda, outed local gay men and incited homophobic violence. Through Aug. 25 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Lincoln Center Theater; lct.org. On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of his birth, Walt Whitman stands accused of multitudes of sins, including racism, nationalism, sexism and "poetic man spreading." With the audience in the jury box (and armed with a giant red cancel button), Whitman and other disgraced luminaries face judgment, in a musical mock trial by the Bearded Ladies Cabaret company. Through June 29 at Ellen Stewart Theater, 66 East Fourth Street, Manhattan; lamama.org. As part of New York City Opera's annual Pride Initiative whose past installments have offered productions of "Angels in America" and the United States premiere of "Brokeback Mountain" a new opera by Iain Bell and Mark Campbell tells the story of the events at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village on June 28, 1969. Liz Bouk will play what the company has called the first transgender role specially created for a transgender performer in an opera. June 21 28 at Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Broadway at 60th Street, Manhattan; nycopera.com. 'We're Only Alive for a Short Amount of Time' In soul baring spoken word and song, the consummate monologuist David Cale traces the scars of his deeply dysfunctional upbringing in Luton, England portraying and confronting his own family members along the way and shares his incredible true story of survival. This new piece is currently in previews, and is scheduled to open on June 27. Through July 14 at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street, Manhattan; publictheater.org. This multihued and multi textured patchwork of stories and songs honors the lives of people who have died of AIDS related causes and acknowledges those left behind. Proceeds of the special community led professional presentation of the piece, inspired by the AIDS Memorial Quilt, will benefit the Callen Lorde Community Health Center and Frontline AIDS. June 21 23 at Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South, Manhattan; quiltmusical.org. 'Julio Down by the Schoolyard' A new play by J. Julian Christopher tackles the importance of regaining pride, even in the wake of tragedy. It explores the aftermath of the 1990 murder of Julio Rivera, a 29 year old gay man, in Queens, and how the hate crime galvanized the Jackson Heights gay community to seek change and claim its identity. June 27 29 at 500 West 52nd Street, Manhattan; intartheatre.org. The fifth annual festival presents music, drama, poetry and comedy by queer artists, plus its first short film festival with work by local filmmakers on June 24. Among the works is "Dear Diary," a series of dramatic readings of several queer comedians' childhood journals. Laughter inevitable. Discomfort guaranteed. Various dates at the Kraine Theater, 85 East Fourth Street, Manhattan; horsetrade.info. The Gay Fellowship at Blessed Sacrament Church presents a staged reading of Terrence McNally's Tony Award winning play, about eight gay friends vacationing in upstate New York, to benefit the anti bullying organization the Tyler Clementi Foundation. June 23 at Theater 71, 152 West 71st Street, Manhattan; abingdontheatre.org. The glittering jukebox musical charts Cherilyn Sarkisian's rise from backup singer to global phenomenon (and queer icon), with three Chers including Stephanie J. Block for the price of one, and costumes designed by Bob Mackie. Open run at Neil Simon Theater; thechershowbroadway.com. In this exuberant musical comedy, directed by Casey Nicholaw ("The Book of Mormon," "Something Rotten"), four actors seeking positive publicity head to rural Indiana, where a teenager has been barred from bringing her girlfriend to the high school dance. Through Aug. 11 at the Longacre Theater; theprommusical.com. The boys are still belting out tunes in their birthday suits in the accurately titled long running musical revue. Theater Row Theaters, 410 West 42nd Street, Manhattan; nakedboyssinging.com. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Goodwill of San Francisco has too many employees to qualify for the Small Business Administration's forgivable loans, but its income has ground to a standstill as the coronavirus closes stores and chokes off the clothing donations that make up its inventory. William Rogers, the Goodwill chapter's chief executive, has been forced to furlough most of his 600 employees, many of them formerly incarcerated or recently homeless, and it is unclear when the nonprofit will have the business to bring them back. At the Tuscany Suites in Las Vegas, a privately owned hotel and casino that employs more than 700 people, revenues disappeared overnight as Nevada closed up shop for social distancing. The company laid off more than 600 of its employees, said Grayson McNees, the general manager, who is now focused on cutting costs. Both organizations are slipping through the cracks, highlighting a glaring omission in the government's economic response to the pandemic. The government's small business loans, which can be forgiven if employers hang onto their workers, are only available to companies with up to 500 employees. Congress has left it to the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve to help midsize businesses those with roughly more than 500 employees and fewer than 10,000. But the Fed's recently announced program will offer those companies only cheap bank loans that cannot be forgiven potentially saddling them with debt loads that would make a post crisis rebound more painful. Payments on the debt will be waived for a year, but borrowers will need to return the principal eventually. Those who cannot pay the money back quickly would owe interest on the four year loan. That may be an unattractive prospect for many businesses facing uncertain futures, limiting program use. "We're keeping control of our costs to weather the storm," Mr. McNees said, explaining that the company operated with low debt and is avoiding piling on more. The end result is that, in contrast to small businesses where forgivable loans incentivize rehiring, Tuscany Suites employees will be left jobless for now, and it is unclear how long that will last. "We're not expecting to bring them all back in May," Mr. McNees said of the casino employees. "We're planning on running at a lower capacity I think travel plans will run lower for quite some time." Relying on the Fed to help midsize companies weather the coronavirus was never going to be a perfect solution. The central bank can help healthy businesses gain access to credit through its emergency lending powers, but it cannot simply give them cash to help them survive. The Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, warned lawmakers of as much when they were designing the coronavirus relief package, and has reiterated since that the central bank has no ability to hand out money. "I would stress that these are lending powers, not spending powers," he said in a public appearance in April. Yet Congress made the Fed the United States' primary solution for thousands of companies. Lawmakers gave the Treasury Department 454 billion to support Fed lending programs in the late March coronavirus relief package, specifying that economic policymakers should use some of that money to set up a lending program for midsize businesses, which, while big, are often still too small to raise money by selling stocks or bonds. The Fed announced the details of that "Main Street" lending program on April 9, earmarking 75 billion to support up to 600 billion in bank loans for those companies. No start date has been given, though officials have indicated that the program could be up and running within a few weeks. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Companies in need of cash may be unable or unwilling to tap the Fed's facility, leaving a giant section of corporate America vulnerable and with little help. About 19,000 American companies have 500 to 10,000 employees, and they employ 30.3 million workers, Census Bureau data shows. Even if the San Francisco Goodwill branch is eligible for the Fed program once it gets up and running the initial program design is not well suited for lending to nonprofits, though the Fed may tweak that taking a Main Street loan would be a difficult business choice. The business is largely self funded, using the money it makes on resold clothing and goods to pay its associates, hard to employ people for whom the program serves as job training. Borrowing money would leave it with debt that it might struggle to pay back. "It puts us in a precarious situation," Mr. Rogers said. The company is relying on savings and donations that will run out within four to six months, he estimates. "Really, fundamentally, we need help." If the coronavirus recession is as deep and painful, and the recovery as slow, as economists increasingly worry, some Fed officials are concerned that the limited safety net for midsize companies could have dangerous implications. Companies could fold, overwhelming bankruptcy courts. Others might scale back drastically, leaving waves of people unemployed. The Fed has little experience supporting companies directly, but its emergency lending programs which it can use in times of crisis and has been rolling out since mid March are fairly well suited to helping the biggest ones. By pledging to buy higher rated corporate bonds in late March, the central bank has already provided a backstop that makes investors comfortable lending to corporations. Big companies make regular use of debt, have strategies for handling their leverage and have ways to restructure without going out of business if times get tough. The middle market is harder for the Fed to effectively support. Because many smaller companies do not issue bonds or stocks, there is nothing for the Fed to buy directly. It is instead working through banks to make loans. That structure will put some of the most vulnerable companies at a disadvantage. Banks have to retain a 5 percent slice, based on the program's current design, which has been open to comment. The idea is that by forcing banks to have skin in the game, the Fed will protect itself against piling more debt on risky, potentially soon to be insolvent companies. That will automatically preclude the shakiest companies. Those with an alternative might avoid taking the loans if they do not know what the future holds. "I've talked to a number of midsize businesses in our district who say a loan is not that helpful," said Neel Kashkari, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, adding that the best the Fed can do is design the program to be as useful as possible, given that it is not a handout. "The Fed is just very limited because we are a lender, not a grant maker." There has been some interest in the program: The Fed has received about 2,000 comments on its initial idea. The design could still change or be clarified, and that might determine whether companies use it. Right now, for instance, the Fed says businesses must make "reasonable efforts" to retain employees. That is intentionally vague, but if companies believe it means they cannot furlough workers, it could dissuade takeup. The government is offering more generous unemployment benefits, so few shuttered companies would want to pile on debt to cover payroll for workers who might actually earn bigger paychecks by filing for unemployment. Goodwill of San Francisco paid its employees for their first month off, but the cash it used to do that has run dry. The workers are now turning to unemployment insurance, which the government has made more generous through July 31. The question is what will happen to the nonprofit, and its employment levels, in the longer run. Mr. Rogers is continuing to cover health care and is hoping to bring everyone back. His success will matter hugely for people like Natalie Jaspar, who first applied at Goodwill last year after her life sentence was commuted. "Where do I go if I'm a convicted murderer, and I've been in prison for 21 years?" said Ms. Jaspar. She got the job, and said it had allowed her to build skills. "People like me who are formerly incarcerated, we need support, and acceptance, and a sense of belonging. That is what Goodwill has meant to me." Ms. Jaspar has just applied for unemployment insurance, and said that if she did not qualify for enough of a benefit and Goodwill was not open again by June, she may need to look for new work. She is about to lose her transitional housing, and rents are expensive in the Bay Area. "I may become homeless here," she said. But she believes that the store will be back in action by then. "We're ready to roll, whenever we're given the OK to return to work." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Clockwise from top left, Francois Mori/Associated Press; Shawn Brackbill for The New York Times; Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images; Landon Nordeman for The New York Times; Emily Berl for The New York Times; Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times Clockwise from top left, Francois Mori/Associated Press; Shawn Brackbill for The New York Times; Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images; Landon Nordeman for The New York Times; Emily Berl for The New York Times; Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times Credit... Clockwise from top left, Francois Mori/Associated Press; Shawn Brackbill for The New York Times; Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images; Landon Nordeman for The New York Times; Emily Berl for The New York Times; Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times And thus do the fashion week frolics or follies, depending on your point of view begin: in the wake of the U.S. Open, in the shadow of the Emmys and amid the turmoil of midterm elections in which more women are running for office than ever before. The status quo is shifting, along with the relevant dress codes. This will be the undercurrent of the season, even in Europe, as Britain hurtles toward Brexit. Designers can't ignore it (or they ignore it at their peril). What will they give these potential power women to wear? It's a complicated question. I, for one, am looking forward to the answer. As for what else to anticipate as the circus makes its way from New York to London, Milan and Paris, read on. There will be two mega designer debuts First up in London will be Riccardo Tisci, onetime Givenchy darling, favorite of Kardashian Jenners everywhere, who returns to the catwalk with men's and women's wear after a year and a half away, this time to reimagine Burberry after the departure of Christopher Bailey. Mr. Tisci has been taking steps to increase his guest Briton cred, announcing a collaboration with Vivienne Westwood; releasing a capsule of "B Classics" he did not design, but curated; working with Peter Saville, Britain's most venerated graphic designer, on a retro looking new logo. But the proof will be on the catwalk. Marco Gobbetti, the Burberry chief executive, has declared plans to take the brand further into luxury territory, and the delivery cycle is shifting from the seasonal model to smaller monthly drops. So for those carried away with excitement at what they see, some of what's on the runway will be available to buy immediately. What's the second one? The only other show for which breath is so bated and one with the same amount of money and pressure riding on its success is Celine, where Hedi Slimane is returning to the fashion fold (and the arms of the luxury giant LVMH) after saying farewell to Saint Laurent in 2016 and taking time to find his bliss as a photographer in Los Angeles. He gave YSL, owned by Kering, the LVMH rival, a head to toe makeover in his three years there. Expectations are that he will do the same with Celine, where he is also introducing men's wear. He has already begun, by reinventing kind of the logo, reviving a 1960s era look and dropping the accent over the E. So far only a single bag has been spotted, on the arm of Lady Gaga, an FoH (friend of Hedi), and it was a structured black leather number with a Mies van der Rohe edge and some discreet gold hardware. Whether that direction will help women who loved the just conceptual enough minimalist aesthetic of the former Celine designer Phoebe Philo overcome their fears that Mr. Slimane, with his affinity for strung out indie musicians, will upend their go to brand remains to be seen. Get ready to read the tea leaves of the respective front rows, because who gets what celeb where is going to be telling. Get ready for a big birthday bash and two smaller ones Fashion loves an anniversary, especially when it has the word "golden" in front of it. Ralph Lauren (the brand, that is) is turning 50, and sparing no expense to do it. In 2008, Mr. Lauren held a blowout show and black tie candlelit dinner for 400 in the Conservatory Gardens in Central Park to celebrate his 40th year in business. Victoria Beckham is leaving New York to return to her London home base for her label's 10th birthday. She has a new chief executive (Paolo Riva, formerly of Diane von Furstenberg) and new backers, so a new phase may be in the works. Also heading back to London from New York: Jenny Packham, a favorite of Kate Middleton's, for her 30th. It's unlikely the duchess will be at the show, but given that the queen made a surprise appearance at Richard Quinn last season, you never know. The return of prodigal sons and daughters More returns, although not for any specific reasons. After experimenting with time in Paris during the couture, the next gen trendsetters Proenza Schouler and Rodarte are coming back to New York, much to the relief of those who have been foretelling a future of designer flight. (Yes, mea culpa.) Finally, Bottega Veneta is sitting out this season so that the Daniel Lee, its new designer, can get ready for his bow in February. Ditto Nina Ricci, which just named Rushemy Botter and Lisi Herrebrugh as its new creative team. Soon enough, they'll be the ones to watch. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Lace up your Balenciaga kicks. The marathon begins now. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
WASHINGTON Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s presidential campaign has unified the Democratic Party around a shared goal of ousting President Trump from office. But as the campaign nears an end, a deep split between progressives and moderate Democrats on trade policy is once again spilling out into the open. As the Biden transition team begins gearing up to select the people who might staff the administration, the progressive wing of the party is pushing for appointees with deep ties to labor unions and congressional Democrats. And they are battling against appointees that they say would seek to restore a "status quo" on trade, including those with ties to corporate lobbyists, trade associations and Washington think tanks that advocate more typical trade deals. The split is falling along familiar lines between moderates who see trade agreements as key to American peace and prosperity and left wing Democrats, who blame trade deals for hurting American workers in favor of corporate interests. The division has dogged the Democratic Party for years. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama joined with moderate Republicans to try to lock in new trade pacts to the chagrin of labor unions and many congressional Democrats. For Mr. Obama, that split spilled into a fight over the Trans Pacific Partnership, a multicountry trade pact that became so politically toxic that Hillary Clinton disavowed it during her 2016 presidential campaign. The rift helped speed the election of President Trump, who won over some blue collar workers disaffected with the Democratic Party's trade record by espousing a populist worldview and vowing to rewrite "job killing" trade pacts like the North American Free Trade Agreement. The balance of power between progressives and moderates in trade policy will be "a huge issue for the Democrats," said Simon Lester, an expert in trade policy at the Cato Institute. "During the campaign, you can kind of gloss over it, you can make statements in vague ways, but at a certain point you have to make decisions about personnel and about policy," Mr. Lester said. Mr. Biden has bridged these divisions so far in the campaign by focusing on criticizing Mr. Trump for his costly and erratic trade policy, which he says has alienated allies like Canada and Europe and failed to convince China to make significant economic reforms. Mr. Biden has emphasized broad principles that most Democrats agree on, like working with allies and investing at home to make American businesses more competitive, and he has declined to provide specifics on other policies that might divide his supporters. In the Oct. 22 debate, Mr. Biden criticized Mr. Trump for embracing "thugs" in North Korea, China and Russia, and he said the president "pokes his finger in the eye of all of our friends, all of our allies." Mr. Biden has papered over other difficult divisions within the Democratic Party by declining to state a position. Mr. Biden has released more extensive plans for expanding Buy American programs and proposed tax penalties for companies that send jobs overseas. But on other policy choices, his campaign has been vague. That includes declining to say whether a Biden White House would keep the tariffs Mr. Trump imposed on 360 billion worth of Chinese goods, whether it would proceed with bans on Chinese social media sites like TikTok or WeChat or how it would resolve a standoff that has crippled the World Trade Organization. It's unclear if a Biden administration would ultimately move to rejoin the Trans Pacific Partnership, or continue existing trade talks with the United Kingdom and Kenya. Mr. Biden's advisers tend to be more unified on China, but there is still a split, people familiar with the conversations say. Some see China as a challenge, but still believe in trying to integrate the country into the global system and work with the Chinese on issues like climate change and nuclear proliferation. Others see a clash between the two systems as more inevitable, and say China's increasingly authoritarian behavior is likely to preclude much cooperation. Democrats are unified around some issues like using new provisions in the revised North American trade agreement to push for labor reforms in Mexico, and updating trade rules to include commitments on climate change. And many Democrats support reforms at the W.T.O. that would pressure China to change its trade practices. The path of Mr. Biden's trade policy will depend largely on personnel decisions, including who become the Treasury secretary, the United States trade representative and commerce secretary. One of the most widely mentioned candidates for Treasury secretary is Lael Brainard, an economist and member of the Federal Reserve's board who served as under secretary for international affairs at the Treasury during the Obama administration. But some congressional Democrats have pointed to Ms. Brainard's reluctance to label countries like China as currency manipulators when she was at the Treasury, and instead are pushing for Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Fed governor and Treasury official whom they see as more aligned with their views. For the U.S. trade representative, progressive politicians and trade experts are pushing candidates including Katherine Tai, the chief trade counsel at the House Ways and Means Committee; Michael Wessel, a member of the U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission; and Tom Perriello, a former congressman from Virginia who is now executive director of Open Society U. S., a philanthropic group, according to people familiar with the conversations. In a sign of the challenges facing Mr. Biden, those same voices have objected to more mainstream candidates they say could return trade policy to a previous status quo, like Fred Hochberg, the former head of the U.S. Export Import Bank or Miriam Sapiro, a trade negotiator for the Obama administration who is now at a public relations firm. The commerce secretary, a position sometimes doled out to wealthy political donors, is also an area where progressives hope to make staffing inroads. The Commerce Department has become increasingly powerful under the Trump administration as it pursued trade cases against other nations, accusing foreign governments of unfairly subsidizing goods sold by American competitors. The department has also levied tariffs on foreign metal and is responsible for imposing sanctions against Chinese companies, including placing several big firms like Huawei on an entity list that prevents them from buying American technology and other components. Among the names being floated for role of commerce secretary is Rohit Chopra, a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission and an ally of Senator Elizabeth Warren who has pushed the trade commission to crack down on companies that falsely claim their products are American made. Some non trade roles will also play a part in shaping policy, particularly with regard to China. Top officials in the Departments of State and Defense, as well as the National Security Council, could have outsize influence over the direction of relations with China given the growing concerns among both Democrats and Republicans about Beijing's economic, military and technology ambitions. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
THE YEARS By Translated by Alison L. Strayer 232 pp. 19.95 Seven Stories Press This is an autobiography unlike any you have ever read; you might call it a collective autobiography. James Merrill used to mock the egotistic memoirs of the day by calling them "ME moirs." Ernaux's is a "WE moir," the group memory of her generation (she was born in 1940). As someone also born in 1940, but in the United States, not France, I found her memories both familiar and distancing. Ernaux was raised in a traditional working class Roman Catholic family in Normandy, and the first two thirds of her book is generational; it is the world Edouard Louis so brilliantly updated and dramatized in his recent novel, "The End of Eddy." It is only as Ernaux moves into the 21st century that she becomes completely individual retired, divorced, a famous writer (best known to English speaking readers for the translations of "A Man's Place" and "A Woman's Story"), the mother of two grown sons. In the process, as her publisher puts it, "a new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective." Throughout "The Years," Ernaux traces the collapse of Catholic prudishness as it's attacked by secularism, the pill, the legalization of abortion and the women's movement. While as a teenager she was terrified of losing her virginity before marriage, in late adolescence her unmarried sons begin to sleep with their girlfriends at their mother's apartment. The other important theme in Ernaux's memoir is how we've been gradually led, guilt free, into greater and greater levels of consumerism. By the 1990s, she notes, there were so many kinds of yogurt and dairy dessert that even if you ate a different one every day you couldn't sample them all in a year. On the other hand, "In nursing homes, an endless parade of commercials filed by the faded eyes of elderly women, for products and devices they never imagined they would need and had no chance of possessing." Ernaux certainly isn't a Marxist, but at the same time she sees history as sociological and the economy as determinative. She uses herself as a "case," a person who has been conditioned by advertising and consumerism. She marvels at how quickly people have learned to use the mobile phone, computer, iPod and GPS and she is unable to imagine the devices we'll be using in 10 years' time. People must keep up, acquire the latest gadgets; to fall behind would be to accept aging and dying. She remarks on how goods can freely circulate, unlike refugees, who are "turned away at the borders." She knows that possessions can't make people happy, but also acknowledges the popular belief that this "was no reason to abandon things." Change happens so imperceptibly that only big events like the collapse of the Berlin Wall or 9/11 allow us to establish a "before" and an "after." Closer to home, photographs set a time line, as do family holidays, and both are used as markers throughout the book. But because everything, no matter how obscure or distant, is now available on the internet, we inhabit "the infinite present." Ernaux attributes the "I remember" concept that summons up an endless list of events and products, no matter how trivial, to the French writer Georges Perec, but it actually started with the American artist and poet Joe Brainard. Unlike their random lists, Ernaux's are arranged chronologically, and so she becomes something more than a list maker: a Greek chorus commenting on politics and lifestyle changes. And yet her recollections are evanescent, unstable, because the media have taken charge of memory and forgetting. And the media have divided people into generations: "We belonged to all and none. Our years were nowhere among them." The media have become the gatekeepers of the imagination. Like Proust, Ernaux is always trying to envisage the book she will write this very book we are reading, in a fluent, idiomatic translation by Alison L. Strayer. "She would like to assemble these multiple images of herself, separate and discordant, thread them together with the story of her existence, starting with her birth during World War II up until the present day. Therefore, an existence that is singular but also merged with the movements of a generation. Each time she begins, she meets the same obstacles: how to represent the passage of historical time, the changing of things, ideas and manners, and the private life of this woman?" Feelings themselves seem to go in and out of fashion. People now find the words "honor" and "patriotism" absurd. Other, newer emotions are unnamable: "There was no specific word for the feeling one had of simultaneous stagnation and mutation." Life, caught up in meaningless rituals, feels as if it's slipping by, but at the same time "progress" has landed us in a place we no longer recognize. Ernaux comes to despise Christmas, "the most grueling period of desire and hatred of things, the peak of the consumer year." Because "she feels no particular age," she feels no older in her 70s than women in their 50s, but she knows that younger women have no doubt about the age difference. Perhaps, as Ernaux's book suggests, changes in attitude occur more rapidly in France. I remember when I lived in Paris in the '80s and '90s how shocked I was that feminism and gay liberation were considered old hat, fads that had prevailed only in the '70s. "Feminism," Ernaux observes, "was a vengeful, humorless old ideology that young women no longer needed, and viewed with condescension. They did not doubt their own strength or their equality. ... The struggle of women sank into oblivion. It was the only struggle that had not been officially revived in collective memory." The opinions Ernaux summarizes aren't hers; they're the common wisdom of the society around her. Everything in France is treated as a fad or fashion, which has the virtue of giving every idea its moment in the sun. In America, ideas fade less quickly, protected by the university tenure system. "The Years" is an earnest, fearless book, a "Remembrance of Things Past" for our age of media domination and consumerism, for our period of absolute commodity fetishism. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
LOS ANGELES It is Netflix's world. Hollywood just lives in it. Nominations for the 77th Golden Globes were announced Monday morning, and Netflix dominated the film categories to a jaw dropping degree. The streaming giant has only been a competitor on the movie side of the Globes since 2016, when it received a sole nomination for Idris Elba in "Beasts of No Nation." This time around, the hard campaigning Netflix was showered with 17 film nominations, including six for Noah Baumbach's "Marriage Story," the most of any movie. "Marriage Story," an unnerving portrait of divorce, was nominated for best drama, actress (Scarlett Johansson), actor (Adam Driver), supporting actress (Laura Dern), screenplay (Baumbach) and score (Randy Newman), although Baumbach was passed over in the directing race. Two other Netflix films, "The Irishman" and "Two Popes," were also nominated for best drama, with two movies from traditional studios, "1917" and "Joker," rounding out the category. Netflix wound up with 34 nominations over all, including a leading 17 in television. Amazon Prime Video, Hulu and Apple TV Plus also lit up the nomination scoreboard, adding to the streaming incursion. "Being four and a half weeks into the launch of the service, we weren't expecting nominations," Jamie Erlicht, the co head of Apple TV, said by phone, noting that other video platforms took years to earn awards recognition. Apple's centerpiece series, "The Morning Show," was nominated for best television drama and the show's stars, Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, each picked up nominations for best actress in a drama. The soap, which got sluggish reviews from critics, has been going through something of a backlash to a backlash: It has a 94 percent approval rating among Rotten Tomatoes users. "We think we are well positioned as we go from Season 1 to Season 2 for the audiences and the critics to align," Erlicht said. The traditional entertainment company with the largest number of film nominations was Sony Pictures, which accumulated 10, including five for Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" and a pair for Pedro Almodovar's Spanish language "Pain and Glory." HBO had the second largest number of television nominations: 15. There were prominent snubs. Greta Gerwig's rapturously reviewed "Little Women," scheduled for release by Sony on Christmas Day, received attention for Saoirse Ronan's lead performance and for Alexandre Desplat's score. But the movie was not nominated and Gerwig was overlooked for her direction. Globes voters were widely criticized for putting forward an all male directing field, despite an array of other choices. The nominated directors were Tarantino, Todd Phillips ("Joker"), Sam Mendes ("1917"), Bong Joon Ho ("The Parasite") and Martin Scorsese ("The Irishman"). HBO's "Game of Thrones" also got the cold shoulder. The series has never won best drama at the Globes it has won a record tying four times at the Emmys and it will stay that way. The fantasy's final season drew a lone nod, for Kit Harington's lead acting. The group behind the Globes, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, has shed some of its reputation for eccentricity, but it still makes calculated choices spreading nominations far and wide to ensure that every studio boss attends; honoring younger stars (like Ana de Armas, an acting nominee for "Knives Out") along with older ones (Emma Thompson, recognized for her "Late Night" performance). Members continue to split their top film prize into two categories, drama and comedy musical, often in bewildering ways. It was decided that "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" could compete as a comedy alongside the Nazi themed "Jojo Rabbit." Because what is funnier than the Manson murders and the Holocaust? In another puzzler, especially for an awards contest adjudicated by journalists from overseas, foreign language films are ineligible for the marquee best picture categories. So don't look for much guidance on the Oscar hopes for Lulu Wang's "The Farewell," one of the few bright spots in indie cinema this year ( 17.6 million in ticket sales), or "Parasite," Bong Joon Ho's acclaimed tale of economic inequality ( 18.3 million). Both were nominated for best foreign language film, however. "Portrait of a Lady on Fire," "Les Miserables" and "Pain and Glory" drew the remaining slots. In truth, the Globes do not predict much. The press association only has about 90 voting members; roughly 9,000 film industry professionals vote on the Academy Awards. The top winning films at the Globes have only gone on to win the Oscar for best picture 50 percent of the time over the last decade (although they did match last year, when "Green Book" was the big winner at both ceremonies). The Globes are mostly coveted as marketing tools. Studio advertising executives will immediately roll out new TV commercials and digital billboards based on the nominations. Three nods for the war epic "1917" could help Universal Pictures generate interest in its Christmas Day release in theaters; in addition to nominations for drama and director, "1917" was singled out for Thomas Newman's score. Globe voters pushed Cynthia Erivo deeper into the Oscar conversation by honoring her performance as Harriet Tubman in "Harriet," a sleeper hit with 41 million in ticket sales. The male acting races will be competitive. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Will an Antibody Test Allow Us to Go Back to School or Work? When will life return to normal, or at least a new normal? A major answer to the question of when and how Americans can return to public places like work and school could depend on something called an antibody test, a blood test that determines whether someone has ever been infected with the coronavirus. People who are believed to be immune may be able to safely return to work. It would be especially important to know which health care workers are protected from getting infected and could continue to care for sick people. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently announced that it would begin using antibody tests to see what proportion of the population has already been infected. On Friday, the National Institutes of Health announced it would test 10,000 healthy volunteers around the country for the presence of antibodies. "Within a period of a week or so, we are going to have a rather large number of tests that are available," Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the leading infectious disease expert in the U.S., said Friday morning on CNN. He said the White House coronavirus task force was discussing the idea of "certificates of immunity," which could be issued to people who had previously been infected. "As we get to the point of considering opening the country," Dr. Fauci said, "it is very important to understand how much that virus has penetrated society." Immunity certificates, he said, had "some merit under certain circumstances." The idea of providing proof of immunity to allow workers to return to their jobs is being considered in many countries, including Britain and Italy. But as with any test, they are not perfect, and there have been problems with their accuracy. Here's what we know and don't know about these tests. What exactly is a serology test? A serology test looks for signs of an immune response in this case, to the new coronavirus. When your body encounters a virus, it takes some time for it to recognize the invader and to begin to scale up an immune response. Immune molecules called antibodies are a crucial part of this response. The first type of antibody to appear is called immunoglobulin M or IgM, and its levels spike within a few days of infection. But IgM is a generic fighter. To target and destroy a specific virus, the body refines it into a second type of antibody, called immunoglobulin G, or IgG, that can recognize that virus. As IgG levels rise, IgM levels drop; IgG levels peak around 28 days after the onset of infection. There is a third type of antibody, called IgA, that is present in mucosal tissues like the inner lining of the lung. IgA is known to be important for fighting respiratory infections such as influenza, and is likely to be central in coronavirus infection, too. Many of the tests being developed look for levels of all three antibodies; some look for just IgM and IgG, and still others test for only one type. What can these tests tell us? And what can't they? Let's begin with what they can't tell us. Because the antibodies come up so late, these tests are not helpful for diagnosing an early infection. "For that they are useless," said Dr. Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. The tests are more effective at detecting the presence of antibody responses across large numbers of people, not just to determine who is immune but how widely the virus has spread in the population. Virginia's new lieutenant governor elect says she won't force vaccines. From 25 to 50 percent of people who become infected may never develop symptoms, and some may become only mildly ill. Others may have known they were sick, but could not get tested. Serology tests would be able to identify these people and help scientists better estimate the death rate of Covid 19, the disease caused by the virus. "We don't currently have good numbers for the numbers of people who are infected now, much less people who were infected before who were never tested," said Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York. "So it's really important from an epidemiological perspective to do these types of serology assays." Governments around the world are also hopeful that serology tests can tell them which people are protected from re infection and can safely go back to work. Knowing the full scope of the pandemic would help them decide when to end social isolation measures and allow businesses and schools to reopen. Tracking the rise and fall of antibody levels may also enable scientists to back calculate the dates of infection, and help them predict whether the virus shows seasonal fluctuations. I'm pretty sure I had the coronavirus already. Can I take a test and go back to work? Not yet. Most of the tests being developed offer a simple yes no answer to the question of who has antibodies, and who was exposed to the virus. But simply having antibodies is no guarantee of immunity. "Being immune means that if you're exposed to the virus, your immune system will clear the virus out before it can establish a productive infection," Dr. Rasmussen said. Some people because they had mild or no symptoms, for example might have developed antibodies that are too weak to prevent re infection. Conversely, others who have low levels of IgG may still be protected. That's because antibodies are just one well understood piece of the immune response. Immune cells called T cells may also be involved. "A lot less is known about how these different parts of the immune system work together to provide protective immunity," Dr. Rasmussen said. Some tests, like one developed by Dr. Krammer, offer not just a yes no answer, but a clearer picture of the antibodies' ability to neutralize the virus. Plasma from people who have strong antibodies is being used to treat people who are unable to mount an immune response. When will serology tests be widely available? Some are already available and being used, but it's the early days and it's unclear how good they are. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration granted an emergency use authorization to one such test. But others are being used in research projects and by hospitals. In March, the F.D.A. allowed developers to begin to sell or use antibody tests without first getting the agency's permission, once the companies had done their own evaluations to ensure the tests were accurate and reliable. Since then, more than 70 test developers have notified the agency that they have serological tests available. But the agency said some companies have falsely claimed that their tests were F.D.A. approved, or falsely claimed they could diagnose Covid 19. The C.D.C.'s project is one of dozens. The World Health Organization is also planning to test large numbers of people in multiple countries. Some universities, townships and countries have begun testing on their own as well. But "serological tests are plagued with issues," Dr. Rasmussen said, and problems are surfacing even as these tests proceed. In the U.K., for example, the tests are plagued with false negatives (not picking up antibodies when they're present) and with false positives (indicating antibodies when there are none). Some of the tests may not be specific enough to the new coronavirus; they may pick up a signal from antibodies made in response to infections with the coronaviruses that cause common colds. False positives, in particular, are dangerous because they can lull people into believing they are immune when they are not, and becoming exposed to the virus. "Certainly if somebody thinks that they're protected and they're not, that would be a problem," Dr. Rasmussen said. If someone is immune to the virus, how long will the immunity last? This is a new virus, and so we have no way of knowing exactly how long immunity to the virus will last. Our best guess comes from looking at its cousins, the common cold coronaviruses, as well as the more dangerous ones that caused SARS and MERS. Immunity to these viruses persists anywhere from one to eight years. The best way to find out, Dr. Krammer said, is to follow people with and without the antibodies and see when they might become reinfected. "Those are the studies that are now needed," he said. "They will take time." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Tre Cotten got his big film industry break this year in "One Night in Miami," the first feature directed by Regina King. Mr. Cotten is an expert in voice and speech training and a self described "research nerd," adept at seeking out audio recordings and other materials to identify the habits that make a character's language unique. He was eminently qualified to help the actor Eli Goree, who plays Cassius Clay in the film, reproduce the rhythms and tones of the boxer's Louisville sound. Yet many crew members were surprised to see a Black man doing this kind of work even on a film that recounts an imagined meeting between Malcolm X, Jim Brown, Sam Cooke and the man who would become Muhammad Ali, and which was written, directed and cast by Black people. Over the past five months, major film and television studios have signaled renewed efforts to depict people of color thoughtfully and authentically. It isn't really possible to verify the sincerity of these efforts, but the changing role of dialect coaches and how they're allowed to work may offer a way to judge their success. What makes things tricky, Mr. Cotten said, is that his craft is inconspicuous by design. As a general rule, audiences only notice accent work if the results sound awkward or fake. Coaches have no guild or union, and most of their employment comes from word of mouth recommendations, or through professional circles mediated by white peers. This can make it difficult for nonwhite coaches to be hired. Erin Washington, the chairwoman of the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee for the Voice and Speech Trainers Association, estimated that more than 95 percent of jobs go to white coaches, regardless of the character's ethnicity. As a discipline unto itself, accent and dialect coaching is fairly new. Until around the 1970s, questions about accents were left entirely to producers, writers and directors, almost all of whom were white. A well meaning white writer, outwardly committed to naturalism, might still look for material from the eavesdropped conversations of friends or neighbors. Others drew on equally weak depictions in other movies or shows, leading to an inane feedback loop. "Those erroneous linguistic portrayals ended up codifying stereotypes," said Cynthia Santos DeCure, a dialect coach, bilingual actress and professor of acting at Yale Drama School. "The mistakes were replicated over and over again. For a long time, audiences and then writers accepted them as gospel." Many coaches pointed out the oversights that could have been prevented if studios or audition rooms were more diverse. Fewer Latino characters would roll their r's. Fewer Russian characters would squeeze their palates, and fewer Irish characters would hyperextend their vowels. Here are more fascinating tales you can't help but read all the way to the end. None Getting Personal With Iman. The supermodel talks about life after David Bowie, their Catskills refuge and the perfume inspired by their love. A Resilient Team for a Broken Nation. With the Taliban in control, what, and whom, is Afghanistan's national soccer team playing for? The Fight of This Old Boxer's Life Was With His Own Family. A battle among Marvin Stein's family over his fortune broke out, and he suddenly found himself powerless to fight for himself. Al Pacino's work in "Scarface" and Hank Azaria's dialogue in "The Birdcage" might not have inspired a generation of degrading mimicry. John Malkovich could have been halfway decent in "Rounders." Perhaps Gerard Butler wouldn't have to apologize for "P.S. I Love You." Mickey Rooney's performance in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" could have been averted entirely. Accent work can be startling (Robert De Niro in "Cape Fear"), confusing (Keanu Reeves in "Dracula"), goofy (Nicolas Cage in "Con Air") or inexplicable (Jon Voight in "Anaconda"). It can also be head shakingly offensive, and a self sustaining fountain of cultural incompetence. Raised in Puerto Rico, Ms. DeCure is the first person of color to be certified in Knight Thompson Speechwork, a program with a progressive attitude toward ethnicity and pronunciation. Her initial training, however, was in the style of Edith Skinner, a teacher whose approach has been criticized for suppressing the speech patterns of immigrants. Ms. Skinner died in 1981, and her mentor, the phonetician William Tilly, had an eager following in the 1920s among New York City public schoolteachers and voice instructors hoping to scrub out the "signs of social inferiority" they detected in the English spoken by new arrivals. When Ms. Skinner guided students in basic phonetics, she prescribed a series of rigid drills and exercises that tended to strip away marks of class or nationality, in pursuit of a stagy, placelessly confident ideal she called Good American Speech. Her book, "Speak With Distinction," is still used in college and graduate drama programs all over the country. Ms. DeCure, 54, said that while it's normal for high profile, white, American born actors portraying an English or Australian character to demand accent training in their contracts, this advantage remains rare for nonwhite actors, who are more likely to be cast for physical traits. Dominican actors playing Chileans or Jamaican actors playing Kenyans are largely on their own. "We celebrate it when white actors nail an accent," she said. "We celebrate it! Until we can offer that same detail and attention to all linguistic identities, and to a myriad of accents, we're still going to be erasing the humanity of those stories and those characters." Claudia de Vasco, who lives in Los Angeles, spent nearly two decades feeling periodically frustrated by the lack of opportunities for Latino accent coaches like herself. Over the course of her career, she often encountered producers who doubted her expertise on "real" American speech, despite the fact that she was born in the United States. And although she was seldom consulted for dialogue for non Latinos, the reverse is overwhelmingly common. "Right now, most Latino families on TV are coached by white coaches," Ms. de Vasco said. "On the one hand, a coach should be able to coach whatever they're skilled at. But if we're really trying to deal with racism in this industry, then it's fair to say that who coaches people of color plays a big part in how those people are represented." Ms. de Vasco, 37, said she hopes that working conditions for nonwhite coaches will catch up with the times. The market is already demanding it. Lang Fisher, an executive producer, pointed out that weak accents can alienate an increasingly diverse and sophisticated viewership, at a time when streaming services have made programming more accessible to people around the world. The Netflix series "Never Have I Ever," which Ms. Fisher created with Mindy Kaling, centers on a teenage daughter of South Asian immigrants, and has a sizable fan base in India. Others are interested in collective organizing. Last month, Ms. de Vasco began a Facebook group for accent coaches of color, hoping to develop a database that potential employers can draw from when looking for experts in a given language or dialect. Members can share job opportunities, and they're encouraged to compare rates, which they can use to negotiate better fees. Until recently, almost all of the handful of agents or managers who represent accent coaches have been white, but Ms. de Vasco may be changing this as well. Shortly after starting the Facebook group, she was hired as a representative for the BrickHouse Talent agency. "When casting directors understand that they've been making an error, they're usually open to rectifying it," said Aurora Lizardi, the owner of BrickHouse and its principal on camera agent. "Claudia understands that, and then she can say, 'Let us help you.' We can sit down with directors, educate them on the nuances of our community, and show them how they can help move that needle." Since finishing his work on "One Night in Miami," Mr. Cotten said that networking has gotten somewhat easier. Besides his tutoring with Mr. Goree, he'd helped Leslie Odom Jr., figure out a young Sam Cooke, having listened to differences in diction between Cooke's studio albums and "Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963." ("That was Mr. Soul, in front of Black audiences, so we used that as a template," Mr. Cotten said.) Regina King had never worked with a dialect coach before but said she was pleased with the results. "My phone's been busy," Mr. Cotten said recently, describing the coaching he's been able to do via Zoom. "And that's good, but I want to make sure that I'm not the only one out there. One of the most repressed things for Black people in this country has been our voice. Right now, we're seeing if we can really find our voice, at this time, and this specific moment, to specifically tell this story this beautiful thing the way the team wants it to be told." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
The American Medical Association, a powerful lobbying group representing the nation's doctors, announced on Wednesday that it opposed the House Republicans' proposed legislation to replace the federal health care law, saying it was concerned the bill "would result in millions of Americans losing coverage and benefits." The group, which provided crucial support for the Obama administration's contentious health care legislation before it was enacted in 2010, also sent a letter to the two House committees responsible for drafting the Republicans' bill, called the American Health Care Act. The group's concerns echoed some others raised this week among industry organizations like hospital groups worried about the possible losses of coverage that could result from the proposed legislation that was released on Monday. All of the major hospital groups, including the American Hospital Association, also came out against the bill. "We are very concerned that the draft legislative proposal being considered by the House committees could lead to tremendous instability for those seeking affordable coverage," the hospitals said in a letter to Congress. The hospitals also raised concerns about Republicans' plans to significantly alter Medicaid, which they said could result in a loss of coverage and cuts to health care services. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Early this week, the bricks and mortar version of 1stdibs, the high end online marketplace, will open in the Terminal Stores building: the blocklong, late 19th century brick warehouse and relay station that was once home to the Tunnel, the grim nightclub owned by Peter Gatien. The 50 odd exhibitors corralled there a mix of art, antiques and contemporary furniture dealers join neighbors Uber and L'Oreal; on the building's cavernous main floor, where ravers once hallucinated, is Porchlight, a Danny Meyer restaurant, one of a few in what will become a food court along the lines of Eataly or Chelsea Market. The move comes as 1stdibs continues to expand as a global e commerce site, a process that has not always been smooth for the dealers that are its lifeblood. Nearly three years ago, they were affronted by changes that added commissions to sales generated through the site and also veiled their names. "We lost 2 percent of our dealers when we changed our policy," said David Rosenblatt, the company's C.E.O. "But since we introduced e commerce, we've grown our inventory from 440,000 items to 860,000." Some dealers still grumble privately. Others who once balked say they are eager to continue a relationship with the company. "We didn't end up raising prices," said Kiel Wuellner, president of Newel Gallery, in business since 1939, and with a capacious booth in the Terminal Stores building and 7,000 pieces on the site. "What happened is that we are no longer able to pass along our standard trade or discount pricing. But the reason we have invested in 1stdibs is the amount of business it brings us. We're the largest antiques shop in New York City for the past 80 years, and this makes us global." There are now 4,000 dealers from 28 countries (more than half of which are outside the United States) on 1stdibs, according to the company; last year, e commerce sales reached over 250 million, up from zero in 2016. In the Aero booth, a powder coated dark green aluminum outdoor chair by Thomas O'Brien with a whorled back is 1050. The polyethylene version of Faye Toogood's plump Roly Poly chair, priced at 570 and already a best seller on the 1stdibs website, is a bargain when you consider its bronze incarnation costs 45,000. Among a funky, still anarchic looking collection of '70s era Italian Radical design by Gufram are contemporary productions of that impish work: anthropomorphic green foam coat racks by Guido Drocco and Franco Mello start at about 4,600; Bocca, the disco glam lip shaped sofa by Studio 65, is about 7,500. A slightly grubby, but comfy looking, brown corduroy Danish modern sofa in Nate Berkus's booth is 4,400. At Assouline, which has a booth here too, you can find Miles Redd's "The Big Book of Chic" for 85. Last Wednesday, Inga Davidsson of Area ID was hanging an Italian chandelier of florid amber colored glass ribbons and curlicues tipped in red, Venetian style ( 4,950) in her 315 square foot booth: a north facing spot with a window, prime real estate that she is renting for 3,200 a month. Ms. Davidsson sells an eclectic selection of midcentury furniture artfully styled, like a bergere from the '50s now covered in a bold Miro like fabric ( 2,950) along with contemporary shagreen pieces. "I hear there is a men's bag store there now," Ms. Davidsson said of her old place. "I wish them luck." As for the former 1stdibs space at 200 Lexington, you'll still find more than 50 dealers who've signed on with Incollect, the 4 and a half year old 1stdibs competitor. Others have opened their own showrooms in the building. The beloved antiques store Lost City Arts, which will give up its lease on Cooper Square in March, will have a 4,500 square feet showroom there. It also has a booth at the 1stdibs Gallery. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
More than a year into Twitter's efforts to turn around the company under the leadership of Jack Dorsey, its business is shrinking. And yet, investors seem to have finally been given a glimmer of hope for the future. But first, the bad news. On Wednesday, Twitter reported its first fall in revenue since its initial public offering in 2013, posting sales of 548 million in the first quarter, down 7 percent from a year earlier. But that beat investors' low expectations for the company; Wall Street analysts had predicted revenue of 509 million. Twitter also surprised investors in another crucial area, adding nine million users in the first quarter, for a total of 328 million active users monthly. That is a 6 percent increase from the previous year, and the largest quarterly net increase in new users since early 2015. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
A great white shark named Unama'ki being tagged in waters near Nova Scotia in 2019. MyBookie, a betting website, wanted gamblers to wager on sharks as they migrated. They Wanted You to Bet on Sharks. The Odds Were Not in Their Favor. Some bookies warn that you'll sleep with the fishes. But one oddsmaker wanted you to bet on them instead. Last Wednesday, MyBookie, an online sportsbook, invited gamblers to place wagers on the summer migration patterns of nine great white sharks. The company's website displayed odds on various aspects of each shark's travel itinerary, using data mined from Ocearch, a nonprofit that's been tracking the animals' movements for years. An interactive map on Ocearch's website monitors shark migration in near real time, providing gamblers ample fodder for wagers akin, perhaps, to a virtual horse race, conducted entirely at sea. With most public sports out of commission because of the coronavirus pandemic, the betting market has been thin in recent months. Wagering on sharks could give gamblers an outlet, and some conservationists wonder if it might result in positive press for oft maligned great whites. But others worry about the ethical implications of merging these two disparate pursuits and a tumultuous week of conversations reveals that MyBookie might have bungled its first foray into shark speculating. In an interview, Chris Fischer, the founder of Ocearch, said he was unaware of what MyBookie was doing until he read a Forbes article about the event. Though MyBookie representatives had contacted the nonprofit via Facebook early this month, a formal meeting about a collaboration had yet to occur when the virtual sportsbook debuted the event, without Ocearch's permission or knowledge. Mr. Fischer said that staff members at Ocearch asked MyBookie to suspend the site on Wednesday afternoon, just hours after it had gone live. The two organizations are now negotiating, and it's unclear whether the (now defunct) shark betting endeavor will resume. Mr. Fischer stressed that while he believed MyBookie mishandled this event, he was not ready to dismiss the general idea that gambling and wildlife conservation might safely intersect. "At first, I thought, we can't be doing science and gambling at the same time," Mr. Fischer said. "But this is totally out of the box. If you're thoughtful, you ask, 'How could this manifest?'" Another online bookmaker, which is no longer in business, placed odds on 2007's Great Turtle Race, a conservation event that followed satellite tagged leatherbacks as they "raced" from Costa Rica to feeding areas south of the Galapagos Islands, said David Strauss, MyBookie's head oddsmaker. (Mr. Strauss is his professional name; he asked that his real name not be used out of concern for his safety.) With most sports left in a lull from the lockdown, Mr. Strauss took inspiration from 2007's events, and began to trawl the internet for other tracked species. A cadre of sharks cruising off North America's Atlantic coast, he reasoned, might provide a fun alternative to betting on pro table tennis or who would play the Penguin in the next Batman movie. "With no sports running, we've had to get more creative than usual," he said. "The shark is a good animal for this it follows some of the same migratory patterns, so you can set odds on it. We kind of know where it's going to go, but we don't know when it's going to get there." Though perhaps best known for their toothsome smiles, great white sharks are a fairly cosmopolitan bunch. Some embark on seasonal journeys that stretch for thousands of miles, likely in search of real estate rich in food and mates. But much about the sharks' sojourns remains unknown gaps that groups like Ocearch are trying to fill. Since its founding in 2007, the organization has outfitted more than 100 great white sharks with tags that ping their location to researchers whenever the beasts break the water's surface. Melissa Cristina Marquez, a shark scientist and founder of Fins United Initiative, said in an email that a betting campaign like MyBookie's, while unconventional, could be a new way for the public to engage with sharks. Others saw additional benefits to such a team up. It could lead to an especially positive outcome if MyBookie "offered donations to shark researchers," who work in a field that is often in need of more financial support, said Jasmin Graham, a marine biologist at Mote Marine Laboratory. But Catherine Macdonald, a shark researcher at the University of Miami, isn't so sure about the gimmick. "There isn't necessarily only one right way to care" about sharks, she said. But in an era in which franchises like "Jaws" and "Sharknado" still predominate the public's conception of great whites, gambling could end up reinforcing the association between sharks and entertainment, perhaps "cheapening" the animals' significance. In the hundreds of millions of years that they have traveled the oceans, sharks have become linchpins that hold entire marine ecosystems together. "They have huge impacts," Ms. Graham said. "They don't get a lot of respect for all the work they do." Sharks' lives should be seen as more than "a betting game," Dr. Macdonald said. Even well intentioned wagers could saddle the animals with a reputation that eclipses the "evolutionary marvels" they are. Whether or not MyBookie poses that particular risk remains to be seen. In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Strauss said he hoped the event would be back up and running by the next day, two days after being put on hiatus. (As of June 23, the company's shark betting site is still dormant.) Mr. Fischer stresses that Ocearch will need much more time to assess if MyBookie's proposal is good for his organization as well as the animals it seeks to protect. "We've never dabbled in this space," Mr. Fischer said. But he noted that Ocearch's brand had been "hijacked" before, including one instance in which a foreign company put several of the nonprofit's tagged sharks up for paid adoptions. Any contenders for Ocearch partnership require "a fair bit of vetting," he said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
It is only Week 10 in the N.F.L., but it is not too early to think about the playoffs. Of course, there are the obvious teams that have virtually clinched postseason spots or virtually, well, not clinched them (ahem, the Jets). Many teams in the middle are playing games that will be vital to determining if they are in or out. Some have positioned themselves well. Others are in a bigger hole than one might imagine. Luckily, there's a tool to quantify every team's playoff chances, no matter the situation: The Upshot's Playoff Simulator. Here's where things stand going into Thursday night's Colts Titans game. The Chiefs (8 1) and Steelers (8 0) may not have mathematically made the playoffs, but simulating the season a few hundred thousand times reveals that each has more than a 99 percent chance to get there. Although not unbeaten, the Chiefs are actually in a slightly better position than the Steelers: They could lose their next six games, and as long as they beat the Chargers in Week 17, they would still be more likely than not to make the playoffs. The Steelers are not in quite as strong a spot right now; they probably need to win two of their last eight games to get in. The Titans (6 2), who are just a game ahead of the Colts in the A.F.C. South, and the Buccaneers (6 3), who trail the Saints in the N.F.C. South, have a little more work to do, but both still have more than an 80 percent chance to get in. None Week 11 Predictions: Here are our picks against the spread. N.F.L. Tightens Covid Protocols: As cases rise and Thanksgiving approaches, the league is requiring masks inside team facilities and increasing testing. The Packers' Defense Is Their M.V.P.: Green Bay's oft overlooked defense has kept the team from falling out of the Super Bowl chase. The Long Path to the Super Bowl: With 18 weeks in the regular season and fewer teams earning byes in the playoffs, the Super Bowl is still a long way off. Playoff Simulator: Explore every team's path to the postseason, updated live. While it might seem like the difference between 6 2 and 5 3 at this point in the season is marginal, it makes a huge difference in how likely a team is to make the playoffs. The next tier of teams, at 5 3 or 5 4, like the Dolphins, Browns, Colts, Raiders, Bears, Rams and Cardinals, may consider themselves in good shape. But they are truly on the bubble, roughly a coin flip to make the playoffs or not at this point. A big reason is that a division title is slipping away from these teams and, without it, they may all end up hoping for a limited number of wild card berths. The teams at 6 2 or so are better off: They can win their divisions or falter late and still slip in as wild cards. For bubble teams like that, every game is important and may shift their odds significantly. The Eagles are 3 4 1 but still have a 73 percent chance of making the playoffs, the Simulator predicts, better than seven teams with winning records. Why? Philadelphia plays in the woeful N.F.C. East, where the 2 6 Washington Football Team is in second place. The Eagles could lose all five of their remaining out of division games, and as long as they go 3 0 against the N.F.C. East, they will probably make the playoffs at 6 9 1. Even a 2 1 record in those divisional games will give them a fighting chance at the playoffs at 5 10 1. The Jets are in even worse shape. Should they do the impossible and finish 7 0, their chance of getting in the playoffs would still be minuscule. It is possible to construct a scenario, involving the Jets winning every game and just about every other wild card contender especially the Browns, the Colts and the Dolphins collapsing, in which the Jets would sneak into the playoffs at 7 9. (Editor's note: This is also not going to happen.) And even as the season is only a little more than half over, quite a few other teams are also in serious peril of missing the playoffs: The chances for the Patriots, Cowboys, Giants, Lions, Broncos, Panthers, Bengals, Texans, Falcons and Chargers currently range from 9 percent to 2 percent to get in. In general, these teams probably need to finish 6 2 at minimum to get in. Which teams are looking like top seeds? Under the new 14 team playoff format, only the top seeds in each conference get a bye, so finishing first is more important than ever. Right now in the N.F.C., the Saints, the Packers and the Seahawks are in the mix for that spot, each at about 25 percent to win it. A handful of other teams including the Buccaneers, the Cardinals and the Rams still have a shot, although each would probably need to go 7 1 to finish first. In the A.F.C., as one might expect, it's a two team race between the Steelers and the Chiefs. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Bottle service is far from dead it just comes with extra incentives to draw a crowd these days. At the Red Rabbit Club (on the site of the former Gilded Lily), moneyed patrons are courted by dancers, a magician and other forms of entertainment. Party hosts have included 50 Cent, Future, Travis Scott and Jonathan Cheban . "We are offering a unique venue with remarkable energy and newsworthy entertainment," said Richie Hosein, the owner, who also operates the AM Southampton nightclub in the Hamptons. This wonderland of plush velvet banquettes is situated down two flights of stairs, past a long bar. Seventeen tables, which range from 2,000 to 20,000 for bottle service, flank a dance floor and a sizable video screen that shows psychedelic imagery. Weekend nights bring a carnival dancer or two, complete with confetti and sparklers. On Saturdays, John Stessel, a 24 year old magician, performs card tricks and fire stunts, and makes shots appear out of nowhere. He does everything but pull a red rabbit out of a hat. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Arlette Kavugho, 40, mother of six and an Ebola survivor, carries Kambale Eloge, 16 months old, whose mother died of the disease, in Katwa, near Butembo, Democratic Republic of Congo. USAID's Predict project helped identify Ebola's routes of transmission. Scientists Were Hunting for the Next Ebola. Now the U.S. Has Cut Off Their Funding. Dennis Carroll, the former director of USAID's emerging threats division who helped design Predict, oversaw it for a decade and retired when it was shut down. The surveillance project is closing because of "the ascension of risk averse bureaucrats," he said. Because USAID's chief mission is economic aid, he added, some federal officials felt uncomfortable funding cutting edge science like tracking exotic pathogens. Congress, along with the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, were "enormously supportive," said Dr. Carroll, who is now a fellow at Texas A M's Bush School of Government and Public Service. "But things got complicated in the last two years, and by January, Predict was essentially collapsed into hibernation." The end of the program "is definitely a loss," said Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit global health organization that received funding from the program. "Predict was an approach to heading off pandemics, instead of sitting there waiting for them to emerge and then mobilizing. That's expensive." Allowing Predict to end "is really unfortunate, and the opposite of what we'd like to see happening," said Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former prime minister of Norway and former World Health Organization director general. She was co chair of a panel that in September issued a report detailing the world's failure to prepare for pandemics. "Americans need to understand how much their health security depends on that of other countries, often countries that have no capacity to do this themselves," Dr. Brundtland said. Even though USAID is "incredibly proud and happy over the work Predict has done," the program is closing because it reached the end of a 10 year funding cycle, said Irene Koek, acting assistant administrator of the agency's global health bureau. "We typically do programs in five year cycles, and it had two," she said. Some similar research will be part of future budget requests, "but it's still in the design and procurement cycle, so exactly what will continue is a bit of a black box." Like the Science Times page on Facebook. Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. In mid October, the agency said it would spend 85 million over the next five years helping universities in Africa and Asia teach the "one health" approach that Predict used. ("One health" describes the nexus between animal, human and environmental medicine). But it will not involve the daring fieldwork that Predict specialized in. Among the institutions that worked on Predict projects are those staffed by wildlife veterinarians and disease trackers like the University of California, Davis's One Health Institute; the EcoHealth Alliance; the Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs the Bronx Zoo; the Smithsonian Institution, which manages the National Zoo in Washington ; and Columbia University's Center for Infection and Immunity. Some Predict projects will be taken over by other government agencies, such as the Pentagon's Defense Threat Reduction Agency or the National Institutes of Health. But those agencies have different missions, such as basic research or troop protection. They do not share USAID's goal of training poor countries to do the work themselves. As an agency that gives money to countries, USAID often has a friendlier, more cooperative relationship with governments in poor nations than, for example, Pentagon led efforts might. "I've always been impressed with the way they were able to work with ministries of health," said Dr. James M. Hughes, a former chief of infectious diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who was on Predict's advisory board. "They have a high level of trust, and they help countries comply with the International Health Regulations." USAID still supports some health related programs like the President's Malaria Initiative and the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. But Dr. Carroll described those as "cookbook portfolios." How to fight those diseases is well known, he explained, so the agency just comes up with a budget for drugs, diagnostic kits, insecticides, mosquito nets, condoms or other long established interventions. Predict more often placed medical detectives in the field, training local doctors, veterinarians, wildlife rangers and others to collect samples from wild and domestic animals. It can be highly specialized work. Getting blood samples from pigs or wild rodents is fairly routine, but catching birds, bats or monkeys alive is not. Gorillas are harder. (Scientists usually content themselves with just collecting gorilla feces.) Predict also experimented with novel ways to catch and release animals unharmed, to transport samples without refrigeration and to use DNA testing that can scan for whole viral families instead of just known viruses, said Dr. Christine Kreuder Johnson, associate director of the One Health Institute at the University of California, Davis. Predict sponsored epidemiological modeling to predict where outbreaks are likely to erupt. It also sought ways to curb practices, such as hunting for bushmeat or breeding racing camels, that encourage eruptions. The Zaire strain was found in a bat that roosts in caves and mines, said Dr. Jonathan Epstein, an EcoHealth Alliance veterinarian, while the Bombali type was in a species that roosts in houses. Distinctions like that are important for telling people especially people who eat bats which species are dangerous. "We generated an illustrated book on how to keep bats out of houses by putting screens on windows or mesh below the roof thatch," he said. "That's the kind of thing Predict paid for." Predict served as a proof of concept for a much more ambitious idea that Dr. Carroll proposed several years ago: the Global Virome Project, which envisioned trying to compile a genetic atlas of all the viruses circulating in all animals. By some estimates, there are more than 800,000 such viruses waiting to be discovered. Many scientists questioned the wisdom of spending as much as would be needed to do that over 3 billion. But those experts also argued that Predict, which is focused on viruses dangerous to humans, was very much worth the relatively modest amounts of money it cost. "Predict needed to go on for 20 years, not 10," Dr. Epstein said. "We were getting to the point of having a trained work force that could gather animal samples and labs that could test for unknown viruses, not just known ones." "Once it stops, it's going to be hard to maintain that level of proficiency." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
Jose Vera Ramirez is among the immigrant seasonal workers employed by Phil Steinhauer's landscaping company in Centennial, Colo. Businesses were chosen by lottery to be able to hire workers under the H 2B visa program. Ronda Fox finally got the news last week, three months into planting season: The federal government approved her application to employ more than a dozen temporary foreign workers for her family owned landscaping business in Aurora, Colo. She had hoped to have her crew in place by April 1, but had initially lost out in this year's visa lottery. "Better late than never," Ms. Fox said. In Centennial, a quick car ride away, Phil Steinhauer faced the same hiring challenge for his landscaping business. But his application for 150 temporary foreign workers was selected through the federal lottery in the first round, and his hires were in place when the season started. Mr. Steinhauer, though, is far from satisfied with the way he had to fill the jobs. "You can't build a business on a lottery," he said. What the two business owners have in common is their reliance on the H 2B visa program, which allows unskilled workers from Mexico, the Philippines, Jamaica and dozens of other countries to take temporary nonfarm jobs in the United States. Debates over using foreign workers for seasonal labor lower wage jobs that Americans have spurned have been as constant as the calendar. But a tight labor market and the fraught politics of immigration have added new urgency to the issue in an election year when Republicans and Democrats are wrestling for control in Congress. Unions and immigration opponents argue that the program suppresses wages and deprives Americans of jobs. Advocacy groups contend that foreign workers are often exploited. Employers insist that the refusal to face up to the worker shortage just encourages businesses to hire undocumented immigrants surreptitiously at below market wages. But this year, the conflicts have intensified. Record low unemployment rates have left landscapers, restaurants, hotels, amusement parks and others scrambling for low skilled seasonal labor. Changes in the rules governing the program caught many employers by surprise, threatening the crab industry in Maryland and tourist havens in Maine. The visa program also feeds the increasingly bitter debate over immigration. To Mr. Steinhauer, "it's a labor issue that gets thrown into the immigration debate because people are coming from foreign countries, and the country is so divided on that." Congress has capped the annual number of H 2B visas at 66,000 evenly split between the winter and summer seasons although administrations have at times increased the allotment. Workers from previous years used to be excluded from the quota, but Congress halted that practice in 2017 in response to complaints that foreigners undermined American workers. This year, the traditional first come, first served system was replaced by a lottery after the government was swamped with applications. Some longtime users like Ms. Fox, who said she filed her application at 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 1, were shut out. Last month, after frantic requests, the Department of Homeland Security agreed to issue an additional 15,000 visas. Ms. Fox got lucky and snagged a dozen of those slots, though her crew, all veterans of previous seasons, is unlikely to arrive from Mexico until next month. Ford and Rivian no longer plan to work jointly on electric vehicles. Elizabeth Holmes took the stand in her trial. Follow along with our reporters. Ken Griffin, head of Citadel, bid highest for a copy of the Constitution. Applicants have to prove they can't fill jobs. "You really cannot find a reliable work force at 15 an hour," the occupation's prevailing wage in Colorado, Ms. Fox said. The area has a 2.5 percent jobless rate, so when it comes to hiring, she said, "there's just no worker bees here." Her company, All Seasons Landscaping, is in Colorado's Sixth Congressional District, which wraps around Denver like a question mark. It has an unusually high proportion of college graduates and an unusually low unemployment rate; the average annual salary for workers who are not self employed is nearly 63,000. Landscape work is harsh. Digging in the dirt and heaving equipment in blistering heat produces aching backs and raw hands. Low skilled workers can earn a similar wage making a sandwich or working in an air conditioned warehouse. "We put a 5,000 ad in The Denver Post, and we didn't have one applicant," Ms. Fox said. Paying a wage high enough to attract local workers would put her out of business, she said, because her customers would balk at the resulting price increases. Like Ms. Fox and other landscapers, Mr. Steinhauer signed planting contracts with customers last year based on the assumption that his crews would earn roughly 15 an hour. "These are unskilled positions," he said. "Would you pay 50 to plant a bush in your garden?" "With the economy as good as it is, I don't know many families who are telling their kids to become landscape laborers," Mr. Steinhauer said. "And who wants to work a job where you get laid off in November and then come back?" Creating jobs, particularly for neglected blue collar working men, and reducing immigration have been at the center of President Trump's agenda and a lodestar for his supporters. Lower jobless rates support the Republicans' case that the economy is improving. And the increasingly hard line on immigration provides a framework for the administration's policies on legal as well as illegal migrants. These political crosscurrents are coursing through the Sixth District, which has one of the most closely watched midterm House races. A revision of the district's boundaries combined with waves of immigrants and refugees from Ethiopia, Mexico and Nepal in recent decades has turned it into one of the state's most diverse. It is one of 25 districts that sent a Republican representative to Washington in 2016 at the same time it gave Hillary Clinton a plurality in this case, by a nine point margin. Defeating the five term Republican incumbent, Mike Coffman, is a critical part of the Democrats' push to win back the House in November. Mr. Coffman distanced himself from Mr. Trump during the 2016 campaign, though he has supported him in more than 95 percent of his House votes. On immigration, Mr. Coffman has taken a more moderate line, supporting, for example, a permanent solution for the so called Dreamers, undocumented adults who were brought to the United States as children. And he recently called on the president to part ways with his adviser Stephen Miller over the family separation issue. Ms. Fox, who describes herself as a fierce independent and a "conservative by nature," said that the Dreamers should be protected from deportation and that she was disturbed that children were being separated from their parents at the border. "I don't agree with any of it," said Ms. Fox, who wants a long term immigration policy. She hasn't settled on her midterm vote yet, but said she liked Mr. Coffman. As for the H 2B program, Mr. Steinhauer and Ms. Fox said they did not blame Mr. Trump for its flaws, noting that there were similar problems under Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush. "I put the blame on Congress," Ms. Fox said. "The whole issue is so toxic. Everyone in politics is afraid to do anything." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Because of rough seas in the Atlantic, SpaceX called off a test on Saturday that would have destroyed a rocket in flight to demonstrate that its spacecraft are safe for astronauts. The company will now try to conduct the test on Sunday between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. Eastern time. Since 2012, the company founded by Elon Musk has been flying to the International Space Station for NASA, but it has never before carried a human crew, only cargo. In a final major milestone before it is ready to start taking NASA astronauts to the station, SpaceX will test a system that is to rescue astronauts in case of an emergency during launch. "The main objective of this test is to show that we can carry the astronauts safely away," said Benji Reed, director of crew mission management for SpaceX, during a news conference on Friday. This flight of a Falcon 9 rocket with a Crew Dragon capsule on top is known as an in flight abort test. It will not have any astronauts aboard, and it will not be like most launches where "we're really hoping for it not to be exciting," said Kathy Lueders, manager of the commercial crew program for NASA. About 84 seconds after launch, the Falcon 9 rocket will shut off its nine engines, simulating a failure, and powerful thrusters on the Crew Dragon will ignite to propel the capsule away. The force of that sudden departure will destroy the rocket, possibly even causing it to explode. "Probably a fireball of some kind," Mr. Reed said. After reaching an altitude of about 25 miles, the Dragon will then drop off the "trunk," or bottom half of the spacecraft, and small thrusters will push the capsule into the correct vertical orientation before parachutes deploy. It is to splash down in the Atlantic Ocean just 10 minutes after launch. While weather on Saturday looked favorable at the launchpad, waves and winds were high at the splashdown site. A success in SpaceX's in flight abort test would bring NASA closer to the culmination of its strategy of turning to private companies SpaceX and Boeing for providing transportation for its astronauts. In the past, NASA built and operated its own vehicles, like the space shuttles. Delays have pushed back the first commercial crew flights by a couple of years, but NASA hopes that the first crewed missions will take off this year. In California, SpaceX is completing construction of its next Crew Dragon capsule and plans to ship it to Florida within a few weeks. Last month, Boeing launched its capsule, called Starliner, in a test flight without astronauts, but a problem with the spacecraft's clock led to calling off a planned docking at the space station. Boeing and NASA are investigating what went wrong and NASA will decide whether it will allow astronauts on the next Starliner flight, or if it will require Boeing to first repeat the uncrewed orbital test flight. Since the retirement of the space shuttles in 2011, NASA has had to rely on Soyuz rockets built by Russia for taking astronauts into orbit. It is looking to buy one or two more seats from Russia, at a cost of more than 80 million apiece. If SpaceX and Boeing experience further delays, NASA will have to cut the number of astronauts at the space station, which would limit the amount of scientific research. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
HARRIS EISENSTADT'S 'POSCHIAVO 50' AND PLAY at the Owl (Jan. 18, 7:30 p.m.). Mr. Eisenstadt, a drummer, is also possessed of a cinematic compositional voice. He wrote 50 short pieces during a residency at the Uncool Festival in Switzerland last year, and he's been gradually unveiling them at the Owl, playing one show per month since November. For each concert he's enlisted one or two different collaborators; at this one he'll be joined by two fellow percussionists: Patricia Brennan on vibraphone and Chris Dingman on marimba. Also on the bill is Play, a trio led by the drummer Vinnie Sperrazza and featuring the pianist Jacob Sacks and the bassist Masa Kamaguchi. Play investigates the repertoires of mid 20th century composers, usually in a briskly swinging style. 718 774 0042, theowl.nyc BILLY HARPER QUINTET at Smoke (Jan. 12 14; 7, 9 and 10:30 p.m.). Mr. Harper was of the most consistently exciting tenor saxophonists to emerge in the late 1960s and early '70s. He seemed to wield his horn like hot iron; his book of compositions, meanwhile, read as an insurrectionary tract, while fusing concepts from John Coltrane and Joe Henderson. His powers are undiminished, though we haven't seen a leadership recording from him in roughly a decade, and he does not headline his own shows in New York often enough. Catch him here with Freddie Hendrix on trumpet, Francesca Tanksley on piano, Hwansu Kang on bass and Aaron Scott on drums. 212 864 6662, smokejazz.com TOM HARRELL at the Village Vanguard (through Jan. 21, 8:30 and 10:30 p.m.). Mr. Harrell boasts a smoky surety on both trumpet and flugelhorn; at 71, he's making some of the best music of his career, employing his bop Romantic sensibility in midsize ensembles that feature some fabulous supporting actors. Through Sunday, he performs with Danny Grissett on piano, Ugonna Okegwo on bass and Adam Cruz on drums. After a break on Monday, the band plays six more nights with Jaleel Shaw joining on alto saxophone, and the drummer Joe Dyson subbing for Mr. Cruz. 212 255 4037, villagevanguard.com KEYON HARROLD AND FRIENDS at the Blue Note (Jan. 15 18, 8 and 10:30 p.m.). In the fall Mr. Harrold released a bold, expansive album, "The Mugician." It finds his trumpet coaxing an electrified ensemble into all sorts of approaches slow jam, vague Caribbean groove, contemporary jazz balladry then tearing into them with animated, inventive soloing. He will draw on that material here, likely with special guests. (The album features a long list of guest vocalists, and when he played the Blue Note last January, Mr. Harrold brought along the rapper Big K.R.I.T. and the vocalist Bilal.) 212 475 8592, bluenote.net ANNA WEBBER at the Jazz Gallery (Jan. 18, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). The compositions of Ms. Webber, a saxophonist and multi reedist, play in fresh ways with chime and repetition and schematics. The synced up interactions she has with her band don't feel clinical or bolted down; they're open and resonant and exposed to the wind. Here she leads a remarkable septet, featuring Jeremy Viner on tenor saxophone and clarinet, Jacob Garchik on trombone, Chris Hoffman on cello, Matt Mitchell on piano, Chris Tordini on bass and Ches Smith on drums and vibraphone. 646 494 3625, jazzgallery.nyc WINTER JAZZFEST (through Jan. 17). Temperatures should be unseasonably high this weekend good news for the Winter Jazzfest Marathon, taking place Friday and Saturday at clubs and theaters across Lower Manhattan. Corralling over 100 sets of boldly programmed music, it's your opportunity to catch a gust of the trade winds sweeping across contemporary jazz. Acts include the Comet Is Coming, from London; the flutist Nicole Mitchell, this year's featured festival artist; and the upstart Onyx Collective. The rest of the festival consists of nightly shows at venues around Manhattan, Sunday through Wednesday, all of them worth considering. winterjazzfest.com | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
When my father ordered champagne, it baffled my boyfriend, but not me. We'd been dating for about six months, and my parents were meeting him for the first time in 2001 at brunch at a French brasserie in San Francisco. It was the first time they'd ever met any of my boyfriends. My immigrant Chinese parents had long made it clear that they weren't interested in hearing about my dating life. They weren't going to confront the possibility of my romances which they considered a distraction from school and work unless they thought I was on the verge of getting engaged. By comparison, my boyfriend, a Californian of Serbian and Northern European extraction, had been introducing his girlfriends to his parents since high school. Even though he knew that meeting my parents was a momentous affair, he was only just starting to learn the nuances of cross cultural communication all that went unspoken yet was still understood in my family. My mom didn't scribble "I love you" on notes in my lunch. She didn't pack my lunch; from early on, I did it myself. She and my father had demanding careers, and had raised their three children to be self sufficient. Still, I knew that they loved me, in the jackets that my mother pressed on me whenever I was bare shouldered, and in the choice morsels that my father placed in my rice bowl. The arrangement with my parents spared me from having to disclose my heartbreaks, and spared them from having to extend themselves to men who weren't going to be around permanently, but also kept us at a distance at least about my love life. That's not to say they didn't drop hints about whom they'd like me to date: preferably someone of Chinese descent, perhaps with parents, like them, who came here on graduate school fellowships in science and engineering. At 26, I was apparently approaching old maid status, and my parents were eager to meet my boyfriend and my sister's too, even though they weren't of Chinese descent. I was just as eager to drop the secrecy about my boyfriend. The dining room where we had brunch airy, with soaring ceilings and Art Deco chandeliers was glamorous and bustling. My father was a stoic man, unflappable, with a deadpan sense of humor, but he seemed achingly hopeful. Looking at the menu, he lit up. What better way to mark the occasion than by ordering a bottle of Piper Heidsieck? As we clinked our champagne flutes over plates of waffles and omelets, my parents turned expansive about the past. Decades ago, they'd served the venerable champagne at their own engagement party, a Chinese banquet in Chicago. A friend had been able to buy the bubbly on discount. The guests fellow hungry Chinese grad students had been ravenous, and my parents kept ordering more courses in a feast to remember. Ms. Hua's parents were not able to meet their in laws in Taiwan before they wed. My parents wed without having a chance to meet their respective future in laws, who lived half a world away in Taiwan. In those days, it was too expensive to make an international call, let alone fly home. Their families held a wedding reception in their absence. Over the next few months, my boyfriend learned how to navigate my family, addressing my parents with their formal titles Drs. Sylvia and Lou Hua, acknowledging their doctorates, in keeping with the Chinese respect for education and learning how to say "happy birthday" in Mandarin to my grandmother, who took his hand and burst forth with pleasantries he couldn't understand. He nodded and smiled along, then maneuvered his chopsticks more handily than me at the dinner table. My family could see that he was steady and attentive the sort, like my father, who saved warranties and read the car manual from cover to cover. That winter, we planned to travel to Peru, to hike the steep and winding Inca trail and visit the crumbling ruins of Machu Picchu, using the Spanish we'd learned in the class where we had met. When I told my mother in a weekly phone call, she insisted that we book separate rooms. "It's safer if we share the same room," I said. "People can be animals," she said. We'd never had the talk about the birds and the bees, unlike my boyfriend, whose mother had given him a book in elementary school on such matters. "Tell her that her daughter can be the animal," my boyfriend said mischievously in the background. "I'll do the right thing," I told her, and left it at that. Not only was I dating someone who made me laugh and believed in me and my dreams, who accepted my quirks and my family's, I was learning how to share more of myself to my parents. Around them, I finally could be whole, Chinese and American. The following autumn, I ran the Portland Marathon, my first. I'd been training all summer, logging in miles before and after work and on weekends. After driving to different spots on the course to cheer me on, he met at Mile 20, with a bag of gummy bears, and we ran the rest of the way together. In the final stretch, he carried on a one sided conversation, keeping me going when I no longer had the strength to talk. That day, I realized that he would always be there for me, by my side, but my parents weren't as sure. We like him, my mother said. "But maybe you should see other people." They'd waited a year, expecting our imminent engagement. My boyfriend and I were in our late 20s, having fun, and we still had time. I didn't want to set a deadline. At Thanksgiving, the issue of marriage weighed even more heavily on my parents. My mother pulled me aside and asked if I liked my boyfriend, who was downstairs. "Do you really like him?" "Yes, Mom." I had to get back to chopping onions and celery for the stuffing. "If he asked you to marry him, would you?" she asked. I bolted from the room. After dinner, at the doorway of the house, my father said brightly, "Call if there's any news!" We were leaving for a trip to Thailand and Cambodia the next day. My cheeks hot, I climbed into the car with my boyfriend. Why were they being so pushy? After years of silence about my love life, my parents were clamoring to get involved, but I didn't want him to feel pressured. A week later, he proposed, at dawn at Angkor Wat, Cambodia, as the sky lightened from pink to gold to blue above the temples. He carried around the velvet box in his travel pouch, sticky against his body, as we toured the sights. Sign up for Love Letter and always get the latest in Modern Love, weddings, and relationships in the news by email. Unbeknown to me, he'd asked my parents for their blessing just before Thanksgiving. He had a business meeting nearby, and called ahead to see if my parents could meet in the late afternoon. He understood without being told that they would appreciate this gesture. "It will have to be an equal marriage," my father told him. "Please don't say anything to her," my boyfriend said. He explained that he wanted the proposal to be a surprise in a memorable spot. Surprises were another American ritual that my parents didn't quite comprehend. When we were children, if they bought us a birthday or Christmas present, they often gave it to us immediately. Why wait, when you could use that outfit or play that video game now? They tried their best to keep the proposal secret. Planning our wedding, we asked my parents if there were any lucky or unlucky days, based on the Chinese calendar. "Superstition," they told us over the phone. "Pick any day you like." We chose April 17, 2004. Five minutes later, they called and said we had to change the date. Spoken aloud, the date 4/17 si yi qi is a homonym for "die together" in Mandarin. "That's kind of romantic, isn't it?" we said to each other. "When we go, we go together?" We picked the following Saturday: 4/24. On the other hand, though, the date had an abundance of unlucky 4s. "Four plus four is eight," I told myself, which is a lucky number in Chinese culture. Maybe my interpretation wasn't orthodox, but I was adapting it. We've been fortunate in our 16 years of marriage and the countless toasts that have followed. Throughout it all, my husband has proved to be even more filial than me. Ms. Hua and her father on an annual holiday walk. Once, as we set off on our family's annual holiday walk around a reservoir, it started drizzling, the clouds low and gray, and the wind brisk. My father had been diagnosed with Parkinson's, which slowed his steps, and completing the hilly, three mile loop had taken on an even greater significance. My husband held a large umbrella over my father's silver hair, and left his own exposed to the elements. He stood tall his shoulders broad, his hair wavy, chestnut, and rain flecked beside my father, elegant in his topcoat. That evening, we would dine on dishes from East and West, and toast to our health and wealth over glasses of champagne. But first we finished the walk together, one step at a time. Vanessa Hua is the author, most recently, of the novel "A River of Stars." She lives with her husband, Marc Puich, and their two children in the San Francisco Bay Area. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Michael Cogswell, executive director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum, at the Armstrong archive at Queens College in 2011. "Louis Armstrong," Mr. Cogswell once said, "is endlessly interesting." Michael Cogswell, who turned Louis Armstrong's trove of memorabilia into a scholarly archive and transformed the joyful trumpeter's two bedroom brick house in Queens into a popular museum, died on April 20 in Manhattan. He was 66. His wife, Dale Van Dyke, said the cause was complications of bladder cancer. When Armstrong died in 1971, he left behind 72 cartons packed with artifacts from his decades as probably the most celebrated figure in jazz. Inside the boxes were 650 reel to reel tape recordings of songs, ideas and conversations; at least 5,000 photographs; 86 scrapbooks; 240 acetate disks of live recordings that he made at home; five trumpets; and 14 mouthpieces. Mr. Cogswell, a saxophonist whose master's thesis was on four solos played by the pioneering free jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman, knew little about Armstrong when he answered a newspaper ad in 1991 for the archivist job. But after spending three years cataloging the archive at Queens College Armstrong's wife, Lucille, had bequeathed the house to the college he had become a devoted Satchmo fan and expert. And, consumed by the life and career of Armstrong, Mr. Cogswell rarely played the saxophone again. "Before the job, there were two people in this marriage," Ms. Van Dyke said in a phone interview. "When Louis came into Michael's life, he came into my life, and all of a sudden there were three people in this marriage, and that was fine with me." But the archive was only the start of Mr. Cogswell's 27 year association with Armstrong's legacy. Over the next nine years, as the executive director of what would become the Louis Armstrong House Museum, Mr. Cogswell worked with a small staff on a 5 million renovation that preserved the house lavishly decorated, on 107th Street in Corona, a working class neighborhood as if the Armstrongs were still living there and created a museum inside it. In the basement is a permanent exhibition featuring Armstrong's gold record for "Hello, Dolly!," a trumpet given to him by King George V of England and a manuscript Armstrong wrote about living in Corona. Inside Armstrong's den are samples from his vast record collection and a portrait of him painted by Tony Bennett. The garage was converted into a gift shop. In 2009, Mr. Cogswell reflected on his fascination with Armstrong. "I haven't hit bottom yet," he told the Queens College website. "Louis Armstrong is endlessly interesting. He was a trumpet player, vocalist, actor and author. But for all these accomplishments, what inspires me is Louis Armstrong, the person. "He was a beautiful guy. He was humble. He was generous. He was a genius." Michael Bruce Cogswell was born on Sept. 30, 1953, in Buffalo, N.Y., and raised in Fairfax County, Va. His father, Charles, was a marketing consultant and a former brigadier general in the Marine Corps. His mother, Margaret (Hoyt) Cogswell, was a homemaker. After three semesters at the University of Virginia, he dropped out in 1973 and played with bands in Charlottesville, Va., and Boston. Later returning to the university, he received a bachelor's degree in musicology in 1983. He earned a master's in jazz studies at the University of North Texas, in Denton, and played locally with the Pinky Purinton big band. He worked in the university's music library, where he organized the bandleader Stan Kenton's collection, which included some 2,000 manuscripts. Once he started working at Queens College, Mr. Cogswell earned a master's in library science. Loren Schoenberg, senior scholar and founding director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, said an email that Mr. Cogswell's development of the archive and museum helped elevate Armstrong's reputation beyond being a beloved entertainer, making many more people aware that he was the "prime architect of jazz." Mr. Cogswell used his knowledge of the Armstrong archive to write the book "Louis Armstrong: The Offstage Story of Satchmo" (2003). One more project occupied Mr. Cogswell for more than a decade: building a 23 million education center across the street from the Armstrong house. It will house the archives, an exhibition gallery, a jazz club and a museum store. It broke ground in 2017, nearly a year before illness caused Mr. Cogswell to retire. (The coronavirus pandemic has halted construction.) In addition to his wife, he is survived by two brothers, Frank and Charles. Armstrong's personal archive has been augmented over the years by donations of photographs, correspondence and recordings. But perhaps the most unusual donation came in 1997, when Mr. Cogswell received a call from a woman named Dorothea Vunk. She offered a gift: the trumpet that Armstrong had received in 1934 from King George V. Several years later, Armstrong gave it to Ms. Vunk's husband, Lyman, a young member of Charlie Barnet's band. "Michael said, 'Thanks, where do you want to meet?'" David Ostwald, the former chairman of the Armstrong museum, said by phone. "She said, 'I'll meet you at the subway.' Michael had all these official papers, but she had the trumpet in a paper bag and surreptitiously handed it to him, and she quickly disappeared." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The National Hockey League and its players' union announced on Monday that the two groups agreed on a four year extension to the current collective bargaining agreement, a pivotal decision that paves the way for hockey to resume play amid the coronavirus pandemic. As part of the deal, the sides set dates for the so called Phase 3 and 4 of a return to play protocol. The start of formal training camps is slated for July 13, with teams traveling to two hub cities starting July 26. The existing C.B.A. and Monday's extension will carry the league through the next two Olympics N.H.L. players will participate after not playing in 2018, pending an agreement with the International Olympic Committee and through a period of uncertainty until salary cap numbers and escrow percentages can be more definitively planned. The league reportedly selected Edmonton and Toronto as the two so called hub cities that will host its proposed return to play, but is awaiting approval from the players' union. An expanded 24 team playoff would unfold with the Western Conference teams vying in Edmonton and the Eastern Conference side of the bracket contested in Toronto, starting Aug. 1. The selection of the two Canadian cities was made over the course of a month, after the N.H.L. whittled down a list that initially included 10 potential hub cities. The pool was reduced to five Las Vegas, Chicago and Los Angeles were the other candidates after considering public health statistics and other data. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Michael Bay, the director of the 1998 cosmic disaster movie "Armageddon," once gave an interview discussing the worst crisis in the making of the film. "Three weeks before our first day of principal photography, I went to see the spacesuits," he said. "They looked like an Adidas jogging suit on a rack. That's where I almost killed myself." Because, he said, if you don't have "cool" spacesuits, the whole movie is sunk. Apparently Elon Musk ascribes to the same school of thought. Or so it seems judging from the white and black launch and re entry suits the astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley will wear when they hop into their white and black Tesla and ride to the Cape Canaveral launchpad to climb into the white and black SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule for the maiden voyage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station. After all, when it comes to capturing the public imagination around space travel, style matters. "Suits are the charismatic mammals of space hardware," said Cathleen Lewis, the curator of international space programs and spacesuits at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. "They evoke the human experience." Little wonder, given that the prototype was created by Jose Fernandez, a costume designer who worked on "Batman v Superman," "The Fantastic Four," "The Avengers," "X Men II" and well, you get the idea. As Mr. Bay said apropos of his "Armageddon" experience: "There are people around Hollywood that are expert designers, there are expert spacesuit helmet designers. It's a very specialized craft." Mr. Musk simply went to that source rather than the usual Air Force and Navy contractors, though when Mr. Fernandez was first contacted, he told Bleep magazine in 2016: "I didn't know what SpaceX was." Invited to be one of six to try out for the job, Mr. Fernandez created a helmet (he had only two weeks) and ended up working with Mr. Musk for six months to design the suit, which was later reverse engineered to meet space travel requirements. The tuxedo associations are not an accident. Mr. Fernandez told Bleep that during the design process, Mr. Musk "kept saying, 'Anyone looks better in a tux, no matter what size or shape they are.'" The goal, Mr. Fernandez said, was to have the astronauts put the suit on and "look better than they did without it, like a tux." The space program has always understood the use of visual cues, according to Ms. Lewis. The Mercury suits were originally a standard Air Force green until someone painted them silver. And though there are, she said, "a lot of theories as to why," including that the silver was reflective and made the astronauts more visible, "the most likely conclusion is it looked new and high tech." Mr. Musk is taking that insight to a new level. The results tap into the romance and mythology of space the "going boldly where no man has gone before" promise not to an awkward reminder of tiny individuals adrift in an environment where they clearly don't belong, as represented by the inflated Michelin Man profile of the classic spacesuits. Think of the big white ones worn by the Apollo crew for the original moon shots. Even Boeing's new cobalt blue Starliner suits, though sleeker than the orange ones of the Discovery launch in 2011, known as "pumpkin suits," have the same general profile. By contrast, the SpaceX suits speak to the traditions of the fashion industry, the way designers like Courreges and Paco Rabanne embodied space travel in the 1960s, the time of "Barbarella," when it was all body con physicality and optimism. The Musk suits have darker panels down the sides to visually taper and mold the torso, squared off shoulder lines, aerodynamic seams from collarbone to knee and matching knee high superhero boots. They do not have the dangling hoses, knobs and wires of the traditional suits. The SpaceX suits can do this partly because they are not meant for use outside the spaceship and thus do not need to be what Ms. Lewis calls "personal spaceships" equipped with an oxygen supply, cooling system and communications capabilities. And unlike most past suits, which were designed to be comfortable for an astronaut while strapped into a couch, and hence often looked baggy and hunchbacked when vertical, the SpaceX suits look as neat standing up as they do reclining. They also fulfill the myriad and demanding technical requirements of what is an entirely functional garment. A spacesuit is a piece of hardware that must connect to the ship, not just color coordinate with it. That is what distinguishes the suits as an Elon Musk production. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Re "Weird Science and Self Pity From President During Briefing" (news article, July 29): How refreshing to hear Donald Trump actually show some understanding, even if only partial. Trying to figure out why "nobody likes me," Mr. Trump concluded, "it can only be my personality." Indeed, Mr. Trump, your personality does explain, albeit not completely, your unpopularity. The very fact that you are discussing your unpopularity at a briefing about a catastrophic virus is itself evidence of the narcissism that partly explains that very unpopularity. Yet this horrid behavior is itself insufficient to explain why you are held in such low regard. A more complete explanation would surely include a consideration of your incompetence; your corruption; your general failure to grasp how viruses, tariffs, science and a host of other things work; your sexism; your homophobia; your support of white supremacists; your contempt for the majority of your constituents; and countless other aspects of your failed presidency. In sum, Mr. Trump, you are unpopular because of your myriad shortcomings as a leader, and not merely because of your personality flaws. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Hidden behind a sliding glass door in a built in wardrobe of 's childhood home was a secret room, and a red phone. Dalton was 6 when the space was revealed to him by one of his three brothers. Many years later, he realized this was his family's escape room. This incident is recounted as fiction in Dalton's debut novel, "Boy Swallows Universe." His three brothers are embodied in one a mute savant named August and Dalton's alter ego is the 12 year old Eli Bell. The fabricated setting is the same as his biographical one: a suburb of Brisbane, the sprawling city in the eastern Australian state of Queensland. Eli's mother, like Dalton's, is a drug addict who is romantically involved with a career criminal. Lyle is a second tier heroin dealer, which explains the escape room. (Dalton and his mother agree the book is a "50 50" mix of fact and fantasy.) Dalton is a celebrated magazine journalist in Australia, known for his lyrical prose, so it comes as a shock to learn of the sometimes brutal circumstances in which he was raised. This coming of age story begins in 1985 and ends a few years later with Eli's budding career as a newspaper reporter. In between, while seeking to avenge a murder, Eli infiltrates a women's prison on Christmas Day, uncovers an organized crime syndicate and falls in love with an older woman. Yet while there's plenty of action, and much of it suspenseful, this is not a straightforward crime caper. The red phone comes to play an important role: In a streak of magical realism, a mysterious voice on the other end of the receiver dispenses cryptic yet prescient advice to Eli. Somehow this device is not annoying. Eli is, in his own words, "a rolling tumbleweed of confusion and despair," and the phone is a tool by which his mind makes sense of trauma. Like all children, Eli must live with the consequences of decisions made by others. His father, who tried to drive him and August off the road when they were little boys, is largely absent, or else consumed by alcohol fueled rage. His mother is frequently out of it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
IN the landscape of modern New York, there is much that might bemuse a time traveler visiting from the past. People these days sit and eat lunch in streets. Words scrawled floor to ceiling on the walls of subway cars are ads, not graffiti. And the waterfront is a premier address, no longer avoided as smelly and seedy, as it was when freight was unloaded there. Surprise might be particularly keen in Lower Manhattan along the Hudson. For decades, the 30 block ribbon from Washington Street to the West Side Highway was mostly a mishmash of warehouses, abandoned train lines and factories. The handful of residents on its stone lined streets included the tenants of flophouses, which had been built as hotels for sailors decamping from newly docked ships. Few traces remain of ocean voyagers, or industry. In the seeming blink of an eye, the area has become a mostly residential enclave, with the Hudson River Park offering a verdant front yard in the place of vanished piers. Warehouse to apartment tales are well known in New York; think SoHo, or Williamsburg in Brooklyn. But on this part of the waterfront, where the bulk of new housing has been added in the last few years, the reinvention has been unusually swift. For people who knew the area before, the change has been stark. In the 1970s Nancy Hechinger, a poet and a teacher, lived at Westbeth, a five building subsidized artist colony carved out of former telephone company labs at Bethune Street. At the time, the West Side Highway was elevated; the sidewalks, cast in shadows, were somewhat desolate, and drug dealing was not uncommon, said Ms. Hechinger, who as a result generally didn't venture out of Westbeth. There weren't many reasons to amble around anyway. One of the few businesses was a garage, at Washington and West 12th Streets, where Ms. Hechinger went to get her white Impala fixed. In 2004 after a hiatus of more than 30 years, most of it spent in California she returned to find her old neighborhood almost unrecognizable. The elevated roadway had been replaced by a busy surface road, while the oil stained mechanic's shop had become Barbuto, a popular restaurant. Also, there were a lot more people walking around at night, and the threatening atmosphere had dissipated. Conversions had become common. The apartment she bought in 2004 for 1.8 million, a 1,500 square foot two bedroom in a stucco sided former warehouse, was a case in point. The place has views of the river, which recently was dotted with colorful kayaks. "I have this horizontal feeling of the world in a very vertical city," Ms. Hechinger said, "and horizontal is calming." That view has been compressed by Superior Ink, a 17 story condominium that went up in 2009 on the corner. Other large new buildings have also popped up along the highway in recent years, despite the efforts of some longtime residents. Even so, their resistance eventually bore fruit, as zoning now mostly restricts very tall buildings. In Ms. Hechinger's opinion, such a not in my backyard mind set is hypocritical. "I don't want to be like, 'I've got mine, so you can't live here,' " she said. Moreover, said Joanne Wilson, another resident, new buildings can help revitalize the area because they draw people who spend money locally. Though she mainly works as an investor in new tech ventures, Ms. Wilson switched gears in 2009 to co develop a five unit condo on a former parking lot on West 12th Street, where she lives in a four bedroom duplex. "People are eating out and shopping and buying art," she said. "The waterfront will continue to evolve, which will be a positive thing for everybody." Squeezed between Washington Street and the highway, which is also called West Street, the area has about 10,000 residents. Though it overlaps in some spots with the meatpacking district, the West Village and TriBeCa, it can feel quite different from those established areas. Shops and restaurants are limited, residents point out, and the noise from rumbling trucks can take getting used to. Also, unlike most Manhattan streets, the divided highway with limited legal crossing points is nearly impossible to cross by jaywalking. If the ongoing condo colonization had pioneers, they might be the neatly arrayed white trio designed by Richard Meier on West Street, around Perry and Charles Streets, in the early 2000s. Popular, if controversial for adding a glassy style to this brick centric area, the towers also marked a sort of homecoming for Mr. Meier, who handled Westbeth's renovation. Buildings like 423 West Street, the stalled 10 story Hudson Blue condo project, echo the towers' look. Newer condos, among them 250 West Street, at Hubert Street, have older buildings as a shell; another such conversion is the Spice Warehouse at 481 Washington Street, a 12 unit building that has sold all but two of its apartments since May, said Pamela Huson, the Prudential Douglas Elliman broker who is marketing it. Nearby is the construction site for a sanitation garage that will ultimately rise 120 feet. The West Village Houses, a 420 unit complex clustered on Washington Street, make up much of the older stock. Built with public Mitchell Lama financing in the early 1970s, the low slung structures were in keeping with the small scale look favored by Jane Jacobs, the urban activist, who for many years lived on Hudson Street. The complex left the program in 2005 and is now mostly resident owned. But One Morton Square, a full block high rise rental and condo development with long bands of windows, built by J. D. Carlisle in 2004, is more emblematic of what has gone up recently. Neighbors concerned about a new project of similar scale, at 150 Charles Street, sued in August to stop construction, which is proceeding for now, pending a ruling. The Witkoff Group, the condo's developer, was supposed to have retained an older facade that of the Whitehall Storage building, the neighbors say. But not much of it remains. "It's not in the spirit of what the developers agreed to do," said David Gruber, who heads Manhattan Community Board 2, and who is not a plaintiff. Witkoff did not respond to a request for comment. None Testing the Limits: Only three of New York's 25 tallest residential buildings have completed safety tasks required by the city. The Downside to Life in a Supertall: 432 Park faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high rises may share its fate. Luxury Developers' Loophole: Soaring towers are able to push high into the sky because of a loophole in the city's labyrinthine zoning laws. An Evolving Skyline: The high rise building boom has transformed the city's skyline in recent years. Its impact will echo for years to come. Hidden Feats: Our critic looks at some supertall N.Y.C. buildings and how the ingenuity of engineers helped build landmarks. Although opponents of overdevelopment did get the city to rezone the area from Gansevoort to Morton Street in 2005, 150 Charles was an exception. Housing is pricey. Early this month, there were 56 properties for sale at a median price of 3.98 million, according to Streeteasy.com. The most expensive was an eight bedroom condo at Superior Ink, at 33.95 million; the cheapest was a studio in a tenement like co op on West 10th Street, at 399,000. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
Credit...Susan Wright for The New York Times "Expect four days of sacrifices," Carmelina Colantuono told me a week before I left New Jersey to travel with her family and their 300 podolica cows from Puglia, where the cattle pass the colder months, to their home in the Molise region of Italy. I was joining an eager band of cowboys, herders and pilgrims, some on horseback, some on foot, who wanted to experience her family's 110 mile transumanza, the twice yearly journey undertaken around the world to move grazing animals between winter and summer pastures. In Italy the transumanza proceeds along tratturi, lanes etched into the land by herdsmen, cows and other livestock over two millenniums. As an unbroken link to the culture's agricultural past, the network of tratturi "Almost a silent grassy river / on the footsteps of the ancient fathers," as the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio described them has a unique emotional resonance for Italians. A few stretches have been turned into roads, but elsewhere the routes remain as they've always been, wending through forests, across rivers and alongside planted fields. The tratturi exist outside any tourist itinerary, so the sacrifices for us modern journeyers, Carmelina explained, involve few options for comfortable sleeping, "and some days we can't even manage to wash ourselves." Our ultimate destination, the Colantuono family's farm in Molise, is in a town called Frosolone, known for its artisan knife making tradition. Molise, the second least populated region of Italy, lies just below Abruzzo, in the Apennine Mountains of south central Italy. The region's stunning, rugged land has been relatively untouched by development. Here and there are well preserved ruins of the Samnites, fierce adversaries of the Romans who for centuries remained proudly independent in their mountain stronghold. But with little industry and iffy transportation, the economy has long been stalled, and the human capital is continuously depleted by emigration. While so much of Italy groans under the weight of mass tourism, in Molise a little of the spillover would go a long way. To that end many hope the Colantuono transumanza will become an incubator of a new eco tourism boom, turning the route the family travels into a kind of wild, secular Camino de Santiago. Carmelina is known as "the last Italian cowgirl." She appears in the media with her cowgirl hat on, wavy black hair flowing down her back, dark eyes shining. In March, she was among a group of delegates from Molise who applied to Unesco for recognition of the transumanza as an Intangible Cultural Heritage. We rode through groves of cool green olive trees. We rode next to fields of yellow wheat, almost ready to harvest. As the daylight waned, some of the cowboys took out lights to shine ahead of the riders. Nunzio Colantuono, the second youngest brother, rode up next to us. "We still have an hour to go," he said. Now the only light was the glow of the moon and pinpoints of stars behind a scrim of clouds. We rode through a forest that smelled like sage and pine, the cowbells still gonging their ancient melody ahead of us. I could describe the feeling I had then, and often over the days ahead, as awe, but there was also something grounded about it, a sense of refuge and camaraderie among the people, horses and cows. In the dark I could make out the herdsmen on foot using their bastoni to redirect a few cows that had wandered into the brush. Other riders would trot up to ask me, "tutto bene?" After navigating a few scarily steep embankments, we arrived at the spot where we'd spend the night: a clearing next to the ruin of a former customs house, where 19th century shepherds walking the tratturi were forced to pay for passage with their animals. I'd planned to sleep with a blanket and pillow on the floor of a chapel, where most of the travelers would be hunkered down, but Carmelina mentioned a bed and breakfast nearby, where one of the documentary crews was staying. Did I want to spend the night there? Well, yes, I said. So far the transumanza was a small slice of heaven. Maybe the earthly sacrifices would begin the next day. Following the sound of the cowbells But in the morning the wonders kept multiplying. I woke up to find myself at a gorgeous, meticulously maintained ranch style property, Masseria Difensola, where I sat on a patio watching swallows glide between the trees while I had a breakfast of cappuccino, berry crostata and fresh figs. When I got back to the camp it was almost time for pranzo: ciambotta a stew of fresh vegetables followed by a seasoned beef dish called spezzatino. Over the next three days, time passed with an almost liturgical rhythm, a mix of repetition and variation, accompanied always by the hypnotic music of the cowbells and the cowboys' occasional "oh oh! ay ay!" We rode through fields of yellow green chamomile. We rode through fields of delicate green peas. The cows walked on as the views of rolling hills to either side went on for what must have been hundreds of miles. We passed through a grove of cherry trees and reached up to eat some right off the branches. We stopped, of course, for multicourse meals, twice a day, washed down with red wine. Some of the meals were cooked by the chef, some contributed by restaurants at towns along the way. In Santa Croce di Magliano, a town still not totally rebuilt after an earthquake 17 years ago, tables were set up inside an auto shop for dinner, and the young mayor delivered a heartfelt welcome speech. There, too, I confess I opted to forego a night of sacrifice and sleep in a bed and breakfast, albeit a bare bones room operated by the restaurant that had provided our dinner, rather than roughing it on the ground. I rationalized it as supporting the hard pressed local economy. An hour after we were back on the tratturi, a heavy rain started. None of my fellow travelers even flinched. The cows and horses had barely slowed their pace. I put a waterproof saddle cover over my head, but the rest of me quickly became soaked through. Here at last was my sacrifice. Yet in my still peaceful inner state, it really wasn't so bad. When we reached the next road crossing half an hour later, I handed Messico's reins to Mario, and he rode on while leading a riderless Messico. I got into a car, shivering but still unaccountably content. At the spot we'd spend the last night, next to a sanctuary of the Madonna in the remote town of Ripalimosani, everyone was standing around a tall, roaring fire, trying to dry off before dinner. I accepted the offer of a room at a comfortable bed and breakfast called Le Quercigliole, where I took a hot shower that restored me before we all sat down for pasta with a red sauce, veal with peas and potatoes, and pastries baked by the Colantuono women. Home to the hills of Molise The next morning the sun was out as I woke up, chagrined to realize I'd slept through the cows' departure at dawn. But Maurizio came to fetch me, and we met up with the herd just as they were about to hit what I'd been told was the most breathtaking moment of the journey, the crossing of the Biferno River. I wished I'd gotten to swim on horseback with the cows myself, but instead I got to watch it unfold like a movie. Antonio Colantuono, on a sturdy brown horse, plunged in first, followed by the 300 cows, moving in the water as briskly as they'd walked for the past three days, then clambering up the riverbank. I stood mesmerized as Franco and his girlfriend, Pasqualina, appeared in the middle of the herd, riding bareback together on the same horse, like a mythological god and goddess. Back on Messico, I was happy to be once again following the cows. Now we made our way up narrow rocky paths and over hills covered in wildflowers, looking down into valleys shrouded in clouds of fog. At 10 a.m. we stopped at a town called Torella del Sannio, the ancient seat of the Samnites. An enormous copper pot of water boiled over a fire as three aproned women rolled out fresh pasta dough on a table. There was an immense frittata and bowls of zuppa di vino bread soaking in wine and scattone, just cooked pasta swimming in wine. Fortified, we pressed on. The mood among the riders and walkers was turning pensive as the tratturi passed through remote, serene landscapes, with hilltop medieval towns appearing here and there in the distance. We walked through terrain thick with bushes of small pink wild roses and tall yellow Scotch broom. The cowbells still echoed in the cool mountain air, but the cowboys' whoops had gotten scarcer the cows must have known how close they were to home. It was strange to realize all this would soon be over and everyday life would recommence, but for me the thought of arriving in Frosolone came with its own sweetness. My grandfather, a knifemaker, had emigrated to the United States from the town in the 1920s with my grandmother and uncle, just before my father was born. My family had lost touch with relatives there, but I'd recently gone back a few times and fallen in love with the place I'd heard so much about as a child. Now, nearing the end of the transumanza, I understood better how the interlocking culture of a town like Frosolone works, the devotion both to making things and to the agrarian traditions. I looked forward to reconnecting with my new friends there. Before the final stretch of road I jumped off Messico and handed the reins to Carmelina. I would do this last part on foot, and she would ride Messico into the blocked off center of her hometown, where a crowd would cheer as the mayor reached up to hand her a bouquet of roses. Then, once the cows were settled in their mountain pasture, and the horses were relaxing in the shade, the travelers would sit down one final time for a meal together lasagne, steak, roast potatoes and salad this time inside a spacious hall. We'd listen to speeches about the journey we'd just made and share the hope that the Colantuono transumanza will initiate a surge of interest in tourism to Molise, lifting some economic misery. Many of us would shed tears too complicated to explain. In the meantime, walking that final mile, I must have been exhausted. But as I looked up to see the medieval buildings and church spires of Frosolone rising on top of the mountain, all I felt was wonder and gratitude. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The Rev. John Perdue, center, is helping to revive hockey's Flying Fathers. From left, Sister Mary Catherine Perdue, who will play a role in the show; the Rev. Paul Patrick, a current Flying Fathers player; Frank Quinn, who played on the original team; and Barrie Schultz, the team's general manager. PETERBOROUGH, Ontario The Rev. John Perdue is only 33, so he does not remember much from the heyday of the Flying Fathers, a troupe of hockey playing Catholic priests who played comedy filled charity games beginning in 1964. The Flying Fathers were the Harlem Globetrotters of hockey touring North America and Europe, compiling more than 900 wins and only a handful of losses, and raising an estimated 4 million. They assessed penalties for skipping Mass on Sunday or "acting like a Protestant." They brought out a horse, Penance, who was outfitted in goalie pads and trained to kneel reverently. Sister Mary Shooter would put on a display of skating and puck handling, then throw off her habit to reveal her true identity: the Rev. Les Costello, who won a Stanley Cup with the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1948 at age 20 before retiring two years later to enter the priesthood. By the early 1980s, Hollywood even took notice and tried to make a movie about the Flying Fathers for which Wayne Gretzky auditioned. After the team's 25th anniversary, in 1989, a number of Fathers retired and, although the team played until 2009, its aura dimmed. Now Father Perdue, the vocations director for the Peterborough diocese and a former two time junior hockey champion, is trying to bring it back. "When I was a young boy, they were very big," he said. "Everybody in the Catholic world knew about the Flying Fathers." That is a tall order. Priests do not enjoy the same popularity they did when the original Flying Fathers played, in large part because of sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church. Spectators may not be receptive to priests doing comedy routines. The new Flying Fathers know they can't escape the shadow. "The church needs a good news story," Father Perdue said. "There are many reasons why this is a beautiful thing to do." The Rev. Kris Schmidt, 32, from Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, said, "The church, now more than ever, needs to see priests as human, and I think it's a great way that this bridge can be formed." Some are not so sure the Flying Fathers can be relevant again. "I think the glory days are over, but they may as well try," said the Rev. Pat Blake, 84, the longest serving member of the original team, who played for more than 40 years. Father Perdue said encouraging more men to enter the priesthood was part of his motivation for reviving the Flying Fathers. When the number of seminarians declined in the original team's waning years, it recruited police officers and firefighters to fill out the roster. The original Flying Fathers at St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City during their first European trip. The team's founder, the Rev. Brian McKee, stands fourth from the left. The team's star, the Rev. Les Costello, is second from the left in front. Talent wise, no one on the new team is like Father Costello, who played 21 N.H.L. games. He died in 2002, several days after hitting his head on the ice during a Flying Fathers game. The current players, who range in age from their 20s to their 50s, expect to be as skilled as a good high school team. Some grew up playing competitive junior hockey, and the Rev. John MacPherson, 55, reached the varsity level at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. Another, the Rev. Tavis Goski, 29, spent summers as a skating instructor. Many of the priests have stayed sharp by playing in weekly pickup games. The priests have been recruited from across the country; with everyone so spread out, they have not practiced together. Father MacPherson, from Kentville, Nova Scotia, who played with the Flying Fathers from 1988 to 2008, said that missing practice was never a problem. "They practiced once back in the 1970s and lost the next game," he said. "So they said, 'The heck with that, we're not doing that again.' They just trust in their coach: God." In the days leading up to the tour, Father Perdue mapped out a script. Sister Mary Shooter, also known as the Flying Nun, makes a cameo in her flowing habit and scores on a penalty shot. She is played with gusto by a real life nun: Sister Mary Catherine Perdue, who is Father Perdue's sister. The tour has also introduced a Flying Monk, played by Father Perdue. The Flying Fathers are not straying from the original script "an unusual mix of religion, hockey and comedy," said the Rev. Tim Shea, 70, who played his first game in 1969. According to a new book, "Holy Hockey: The Story of Canada's Flying Fathers," by Frank Cosentino, church leaders did not support the idea of the team in the early 1960s, believing that such showmanship was unbecoming of a priest. Eventually, Bishop Alexander Carter of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, was won over. "Oh, boy, are we really going to do this?" Father Perdue remembered thinking at the time. "There was this giant legacy that we would be stepping into. I said, 'Guys, if we're going to have a team of hockey playing priests, you can't do this and not invoke the legacy of the Flying Fathers.'" Father Perdue called Frank Quinn, a retired police officer and former general manager of the original team. With the organizing committee meeting in progress, Quinn, 75, came bursting through the door wearing a Flying Fathers jersey, a Flying Fathers jacket and a Flying Fathers hat. Quinn got approval from former players and managers to use the name Flying Fathers, and the first test case was a benefit game in Ennismore, Ontario, in January 2018. The Flying Fathers won, beating a local high school team , 13 6, but six of those goals came on a "touchdown" after a football made its way into the net. The 650 seat arena in Ennismore was full. Among the crowd was the Rev. Vaughan Quinn, 85, a former Flying Fathers goalie but no relation to Frank, wearing an original team jacket. In his day, he would lie on top of the goal performing a juggling routine while play was in the other end. "He literally had tears in his eyes," said Barrie Schultz, 48, who has taken over as general manager of the Flying Fathers, "because he couldn't believe this was happening again." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
The charms of Bushwick, Brooklyn, had already started to wear thin for Ryan Cheal when the L train shutdown was announced in 2016. So he started looking for a new place last summer, about six months before repairs were scheduled to begin. His girlfriend, Kelly Godzik, lived a few blocks away and was also dreading the looming shutdown, but had no plans to move, as her lease wasn't up soon and she really liked her roommate. But subway and real estate realities often can lead couples down unanticipated paths. Ms. Godzik was browsing listings on Mr. Cheal's behalf when she came across a one bedroom in a new building by the Broadway Triangle an area where Bushwick, Williamsburg and Bedford Stuyvesant meet a short walk from the J, M and G trains. And she decided to accompany him when he went to see it. "Our jaws were dropping when they showed us this place," said Mr. Cheal, whose previous apartment had been a rough around the edges three bedroom share that rented for 3,000 a month. Ms. Godzik felt her resolve to stay at her current place also shabby and soon to be in the boondocks of Brooklyn melt away. "Coming in, everything was so shiny; no one has lived here before. All the places we'd lived before were pretty beat up, walls not repainted between tenants," Ms. Godzik said. "We were like, 'Get us out of the Bushwick dingy hole.'" Occupations: Ms. Godzik is a freelance marketing operations and project manager at Conde Nast; Mr. Cheal is a property manager for a family owned residential real estate company. Apartment aesthetics: The big windows, high ceilings and light gray cabinets caught the couple's attention when they first toured the apartment. "We really like the California aesthetic. The first trip we took together as a couple was to Malibu," Ms. Godzik said. "We're obsessed with light, airy, macrame." Keeping the apartment light and airy: "We didn't want it to be too crowded. Living with roommates, we realized how easily things could get cluttered," Ms. Godzik said. "We were like, 'Let's only bring in things that have a purpose.'" Moving in together was a big step, but after seeing the building's rooftop, which would be outfitted with a number of barbecues come spring, the couple conferred for only a few minutes before deciding that they wanted the apartment. But only if there wasn't a broker's fee. "I feel like if you've lived in New York long enough you can figure out how to find a nice place that doesn't charge a fee," Ms. Godzik said. "If there had been a broker's fee here, we probably would have passed, on principle," said Mr. Cheal, who works as a property manager for a residential real estate company in Manhattan, and had recently walked away from a well priced apartment in Williamsburg after the broker told him the fee was a whopping 20 percent. Not only was this apartment no fee, but when they sat down to talk about how much money they would need to provide up front, the broker said the building was partnering with a new company, Obligo, that covered the cost of the security deposit for financially qualified tenants in exchange for a small monthly fee for the duration of the lease, in their case 15. (Through the company, they also authorized the landlord to charge up to the full deposit if there were damages to the apartment.) All they needed to put down was the first month's rent of 3,000. "We used the money we would have paid for a security deposit to furnish the apartment," said Mr. Cheal, who was more than happy to leave behind his apartment and also his broken down Ikea furniture "college kid like junk" on the curb in Bushwick. The couple had been living in their apartment for about four months when it was announced in January that the L train wouldn't be shutting down after all. "When we found out, we were like, 'What? We've been lied to,'" Mr. Cheal said. "One of my friends on the L train had been able to negotiate her rent down 300 a month," Ms. Godzik said. Once they recovered from their surprise, however, they agreed that although the shutdown had been a major factor in their decision, they were happy they made the move. Their new neighborhood, populated by many Orthodox Jewish families, is much quieter than the previous one, where drunken arguments often spilled out from the bars into the streets. And after years of living in scuffed up shares, they love having an apartment where the only issue has been the pilot light in the oven going out. "We both made a big step up, apartment wise," Mr. Cheal said. "And we both like living together," Ms. Godzik added. The only problem is the transit situation. Before they moved in, Ms. Godzik thought she could take the J train to Fulton Street a smooth commute to her job at the World Trade Center, where she works in marketing for Conde Nast. But the nearby Lorimer J train stop is local, and the J train doesn't always run local. "So depending on whether it's running local or not, getting to work every morning is kind of a crapshoot," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
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