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The statement was issued jointly with Cora, who thanked the team's executives and called his two seasons with the Red Sox "the best years of my life." Cora, 44, added that he did not want to be a distraction for the team, but his statement did not include an apology or an admission of wrongdoing, either with the Astros or with the Red Sox. A report published last week in The Athletic said the 2018 Red Sox had also broken the rules by using technology to steal signs. According to that report, which cited three unnamed people who were with the Red Sox that season, some players would use the video replay room, which is intended for teams to use to determine whether to challenge on field calls, to decode sign sequences during games. M.L.B. is probing those allegations against Boston, and Manfred said in his report that he would wait until that investigation is over to determine Cora's punishment. But considering that Luhnow and Hinch were both suspended for a year even though they were found not to be involved in the planning or execution of the Astros' ploy it stands to reason that discipline for Cora could be even more severe, especially if the Boston accusations are confirmed. For the Red Sox, Monday's report was damaging enough to force them to act on Cora. The league said it had conducted at least 68 interviews and reviewed thousands of videos and documents, and the nine page report repeatedly referenced Cora's involvement. The Astros used video equipment to decipher a catcher's signs, and that information was relayed to batters by various methods most often by having someone bang on a nearby trash can with a bat; the number of hits on the trash can indicated what type of pitch was coming. "Cora was involved in developing both the banging scheme and utilizing the replay review room to decode and transmit signs," the report said. "Cora participated in both schemes, and through his active participation, implicitly condoned the players' conduct." Cora was considered a rising star during his time with the Astros, and had already agreed to become the Red Sox manager before the end of the 2017 World Series. He held many of the now popular qualifications for managing jobs he is a strong, bilingual communicator with deep family roots in the game, had recently played in the major leagues and is comfortable with the news media after his years as an analyst for ESPN. After hiring Cora, the Red Sox at his request sent a delegation to his native Puerto Rico to help after Hurricane Maria. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
'Businesses Will Not Be Able to Hide': Spy Satellites May Give Edge From Above SAN FRANCISCO In October, the Chinese province of Guangdong the manufacturing center on the southern coast that drives 12 percent of the country's economy stopped publishing a monthly report on the health of its local factories. For five consecutive months, this key economic index had shown a drop in factory production as the United States applied billions of dollars in tariffs on Chinese exports. Then, amid an increasingly bitter trade war between the United States and China, the government authorities in Beijing shut the index down. A small start up in San Francisco began rebuilding the index, lifting information from photos and infrared images of Guangdong's factories captured by satellites orbiting overhead. The company, SpaceKnow, is now selling this information to hedge funds, banks and other market traders looking for an edge. High altitude surveillance was once the domain of global superpowers. Now, a growing number of start ups are turning it into a business, aiming to sell insights gleaned from cameras and other sensors installed on small and inexpensive "cube satellites." The companies and governments that spent decades using internet services, cameras and other devices to collect data on regular people may soon get a taste of their own information technology. "Businesses will not be able to hide from competitors or regulators or watchdogs," said Mark Johnson, chief executive and co founder of Descartes Labs, another satellite information start up. "They need to realize that their traditional competitive advantage information will be available to everyone." Nearly 730 Earth observation satellites were launched over the last decade, according to Euroconsult, a research firm that tracks the space market. In the next 10 years, 2,220 more will follow them into orbit, training an increasingly wide array of sensors on the planet. Orbital Insight, in Palo Alto, Calif., is one of the first companies to build a business around cube satellite data. Sitting in Orbital's offices on a recent afternoon, James Crawford, the company's founder and chief executive, who goes by Jimi, opened his laptop and pulled up a report on three big name retailers: J. C. Penney, Macy's and Sears. You don't need satellite photos to know that Sears is failing. Companies like Orbital Insight are typically tight lipped when it comes to more important data as are their customers mainly because they see this information as a competitive advantage. But the line graph showed how Mr. Crawford and his start up can target the performance of individual businesses. Orbital Insight tracks activity in more than 260,000 retail parking lots across the country, and it monitors the levels of more than 25,000 oil tanks around the world. Not surprisingly, Orbital Insight and SpaceKnow said, some of their customers use this satellite data to track the progress of their direct competitors, though those customers and their competitors are very reluctant to talk about it. Mr. Crawford believes the satellite analysis will ultimately lead to more efficient markets and a better understanding of the global economy. Fred Abrahams, a researcher with the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, sees it as a check on the world's companies and governments. Mr. Abrahams and his team use satellite imagery to track everything from illegal mining and logging operations to large scale home demolitions. "This is why we are so committed to these technologies," he said. "They make it that much harder to hide large scale abuses." All of this is being driven by a drop in the cost of building, launching and operating satellites. Today, a 3 million satellite that weighs less than 10 pounds can capture significantly sharper images than a 300 million, 900 pound satellite built in the late 1990s. That allows companies to put up dozens of devices, each of which can focus on a particular area of the globe or on a particular kind of data collection. As a result, more companies are sending more satellites into orbit, and these satellites are generating more data. And recent advances in artificial intelligence allow machines to analyze this data with greater speed and accuracy. "The future is automation, with humans only looking at the very interesting stuff," Mr. Crawford said. Orbital Insight does not operate its own satellites. Nor does SpaceKnow or Descartes Labs. The start ups buy their data from a growing number of satellite operators, and they build the automated systems that analyze the data, pinpointing objects like cars, buildings, mines and oil tankers in high resolution photos and other images. Now, satellite operators are building similar systems, selling analysis as well as the raw data. The market topped 4.6 billion in 2017. By 2027, it will reach 11.4 billion, according to Euroconsult. What began with satellite cameras is rapidly expanding to infrared sensors that detect heat; "hyperspectral" sensors that identify minerals, vegetation and other materials; and radar scanners that can build three dimensional images of the landscape below. As it reconstructs the Guangdong economic index, SpaceKnow uses infrared imagery, which can help show activity around roughly 600 factories and other industrial sites in the province. After a new satellite went up in December, a Virginia start up called HawkEye 360 will soon track wireless signals a way of understanding the behavior of everything from cellphone networks to cargo ships. This could provide new insight in the progress of cellular companies like AT T and Verizon, including how many cellular towers are in operation, how active they are, and what technologies and wireless bands are being used. But as technology improves and costs drop, some still warn satellite intelligence gathering has its limits. Finding useful information in satellite imagery can be expensive, said Shawana Johnson, a veteran of satellite intelligence work who is now the president of Global Marketing Insights, a consulting firm dedicated to this area. "You have to want to look at a variety of activities across the Earth and look at them daily or weekly for the cost to makes sense," she said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
For the first 70 years of her life, Bess Myerson barely breathed without making headlines. She was the first and only Jewish Miss America (1945). She worked as a city official on behalf of two mayors; for one Edward I. Koch she was instrumental in helping get elected. She also ran for Senate, appeared regularly on three different television game shows, survived cancer, and was tried and acquitted on charges of conspiracy, mail fraud, obstruction of justice and using interstate facilities to violate state bribery laws in a case that garnered international headlines and attention for Rudolph W. Giuliani, the United States attorney in Manhattan at the time. So it was something of a surprise when it was revealed that Ms. Myerson had died at 90 on Dec. 14, 2014, roughly three weeks before the news media learned of her death. "It is one of the strangest and saddest stories I know," said Simon Lazarus, who worked with Ms. Myerson in the 1970s after she was appointed by Mayor John V. Lindsay as New York City's commissioner of consumer affairs. In that role, she became a celebrated and respected consumer advocate. "She went from being a prominent entertainment TV personality and vaulted into politics and became a really significant figure in New York politics for a time one who was very admired, and then went through this bizarre transformation and disappeared from view," he said. Last week, Mr. Lazarus and nearly 20 other friends, colleagues and journalists recalled Ms. Myerson, the 5 foot 10 head turner and her wild, action packed life. It began with her early days spent speaking Yiddish in the Sholem Aleichem Houses in the Bronx to her reclusive final turn taken after her 1988 trial, and the years she spent in Florida and California, living out her last days with the daughter who tried (unsuccessfully) to make a movie honoring her mother's legacy and life. Esther Margolis, friend of Ms. Myerson's and publisher of "Miss America, 1945": "The pageant officials tried incredibly hard to get Bess eliminated when she made it to the national competition. But she stood out like a beacon. She was so gorgeous. And it was not just the first year they had a scholarship. It was the first year they had a talent competition, and she could play the flute and the piano. Really play." Sam Haskell, chief executive of the Miss America Organization: "There's a famous story that her sister was with her when she arrived to compete in Atlantic City. All the girls wearing the tight, white 34 swimsuits were the ones getting catcalled. And Bess was a normal size 36, and the suit she arrived with was lime green. So Bess said, 'I've got to do something.' It turned out her sister was a size 34 and had a white swimsuit with her. It looked va va voom on Bess, but she couldn't even get it off. Her sister actually sewed her into the suit and the night of the competition, she wore it for the entire evening underneath her gown. She was crowned in that swimsuit." Ms. Dworkin: "My recollection is a little different. As I remember it, Sylvia was larger than Bess and put the swimsuit on herself to stretch it so it would be less immodest. Anyway, when Bess won, she went on this tour and expected to be loved and applauded. Instead, everywhere she went, she was met with terrible bigotry. People didn't want her at their country clubs. People didn't want her at their hotels. There was a horrible incident with the parent of a World War II veteran at a hospital who screamed at Bess that it was because of the Jews that her son was dead. After a couple of months, she had to go home. She had nothing left to do." Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti Defamation League: "She became a treasure trove for the A.D.L. after that. She was beautiful, she was articulate, she understood what it meant being Jewish. Miss America was a much bigger thing back then than it is today, and she represented the promise of that contest and the reality that the country was still racist, anti Semitic and bigoted. She had the guts and the courage to be a proud Jew and to stand up for it." Simon Lazarus, general counsel to Ms. Myerson at Consumer Affairs: "Right when she was appointed as commissioner, we got this invitation from the Better Business Bureau to speak. At that time, it was really the business establishment, and she gave this speech and said, 'Your organization needs to come out and support tough regulation.' She was really critical. Evidently, Mayor Lindsay was not happy. He was a fine mayor, but he really was socially a part of the New York City WASP establishment even though he was quite liberal." Sid Davidoff, administrative assistant to Mayor Lindsay: "She was very strong willed, and very press savvy, and she would go off and do her own thing. For the mayor's staff, it was always an issue because you'd get a call from a TV channel saying she was on the air giving a press conference in a supermarket and you had no advance notice about it. It was always happening. But to John Lindsay's credit, he would say: 'It's Bess Myerson. What do you expect?' " Henry Stern, deputy to Ms. Myerson at Consumer Affairs: "When we did things in the public interest, we just went and did them. She took advantage of her celebrity to expand the bounds of what a normal commissioner could do. She made enemies, but it worked. You couldn't talk to Bess for five minutes without apologizing for something you'd done, and she obtained these apologies in the nicest way. It was a luxury she had as a beautiful woman who was strong in character. We went to Washington to testify once, so we rushed out to the airport. The plane had closed its doors and was starting to taxi down the runway and they turned it around for us and we got on the plane. I don't know what she said or did to get them to do it. It never happened to me before and it certainly never happened since." George Arzt, City Hall bureau chief for The New York Post, and press secretary to Mayor Koch: "Some people in the Cuomo campaign were carrying around placards that said: 'Vote for Cuomo. Not the homo.' David Garth, Koch's media guru, needed to defuse the whispering campaign, and Bess and Ed were friends. So he put them together during the campaign. It was very successful. They were never boyfriend and girlfriend." Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a founding editor of Ms. magazine: "He gave her power and she gave him glamour, and they each needed both." What to Know About the 2021 New York Election None Meet N.Y.C.'s New Mayor: The win for Eric Adams, who will be the city's second Black mayor, signals the start of a more center left leadership. G.O.P. Inroads: While Mr. Adams easily won the mayor's race, Republicans gained seats on the City Council for the first time since 2009. The party also won seats typically held by Democrats across the state. Buffalo's Write In Winner: After a surprising primary defeat, Mayor Byron Brown seemingly triumphed in a write in campaign for a fifth term. Election Results: See the full results from New York here. Mr. Stern: "I met Bess's second husband, Arnold, once or twice, and I first heard about her early on she was in the newspapers because she was in some dispute with her first husband, Allan Wayne. That was years before I went to work with her. Did I get a sense from her day by day that her private life was difficult? No. She never screamed or raised her voice. I never heard her use obscene language or denounce anyone. She was well behaved. But I know she had difficulties." Maureen Connelly, press secretary to Mayor Koch: "After declaring her candidacy for Senate in 1980, Bess's doctors found more cancer cells and put her back on chemo. The way I found this out was that I came into the office on a Sunday morning to prepare her for an appearance on a TV program and she was smoking a joint. I said: 'Bess, this is not the best way to prepare. You won't be crisp.' She said, 'Better to be foggy than throwing up on camera.' " Cindy Adams, gossip columnist, and a friend of Ms. Myerson's: "She fell in love with this guy, Carl Andy Capasso, who wiped her off her feet, and took her away from reality. He was sexy and he was young. She knew he was married. She said, 'He's going to get a divorce.' She was definitely crazy for him. Andy was always manipulating. He wasn't a pastor. He was a sewer contractor. He didn't have exactly the highest standard of morals." Ms. Adams: "The possibility exists that the seeds of dementia started early. She had actually shoplifted. She was spinning downward. She was Bess Myerson and yet she was going into an abyss. I can't remember when I last saw her. It was when she moved to her daughter's, and it was a while ago. I called once or twice in the early days but I didn't keep it up. I knew you couldn't. She had Alzheimer's. She was getting further and further from reality." Mr. Stern: "The political career she narrowly missed would have been fascinating to see. I can't say she's as smart as Hillary Clinton, but she was a very special person. And I think she was one election cycle ahead of her time." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
A grand jury in Chicago revived the criminal case against the actor Jussie Smollett, indicting him Tuesday on charges that he lied to the police in connection with the alleged hate crime attack against him a year ago. The indictment came 11 months after prosecutors dropped similar charges against him. The new charges were announced by a special prosecutor, Dan K. Webb, who was assigned to the case after a judge ruled that the Cook County state's attorney, Kim Foxx, had not properly handled it the first time. In a rebuke to Ms. Foxx's office, Mr. Webb criticized the decision by her prosecutors to abruptly drop the case, saying in a news release that his review of the record showed that her office had believed it had strong evidence against Mr. Smollett. Mr. Webb said the state's attorney's office had not offered any evidence showing that it had gained new information indicating Mr. Smollett's innocence, nor any documentation that similar cases had been handled the same way. Mr. Webb said that he had not reached any conclusions about whether prosecutors engaged in wrongdoing and that he was continuing to investigate. A timeline of the case What we know about the evidence Mr. Smollett, 37, was charged last February with filing a false police report after the Chicago police concluded that he had paid two brothers to stage an attack on him in which they shouted homophobic and racial slurs and yelled, "This is MAGA country," a reference to President Trump's 2016 campaign slogan. The police said Mr. Smollett was looking for publicity because he was unhappy with his salary on the television show "Empire," which dropped him from the cast after his arrest. The new indictment charges Mr. Smollett with six counts of disorderly conduct related to false statements to Chicago police officers. Five of the counts were related to accounts Mr. Smollett gave police the morning of Jan. 29, 2019, when he said the attack occurred; and one was related to a statement he made on Feb. 14, around when the police started to view Mr. Smollett as a suspect. In a statement, Tina Glandian, a lawyer for Mr. Smollett, noted that he is in litigation with the Chicago Police Department, and raised questions about whether it was fair for Mr. Webb to partly base his investigation on evidence from that department. She highlighted the fact that Mr. Webb's office said it had not yet found evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the prosecutors. "The attempt to re prosecute Mr. Smollett one year later on the eve of the Cook County State's Attorney election is clearly all about politics not justice," she said in the statement. Ms. Foxx is running for re election and faces a Democratic primary next month in which her opponents have criticized her management of the Smollett case. Her campaign issued a statement on Tuesday denouncing the "James Comey like timing" of the new charges, referring to the former F.B.I. director's public pronouncements about the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server just before she lost to Mr. Trump. Mr. Webb's decision to seek charges "can only be interpreted as the further politicization of the justice system, something voters in the era of Donald Trump should consider offensive," the statement read. Mr. Smollett's case transfixed the country for weeks last year, first after reports that he had been the victim of a bigoted attack, eliciting messages of support from politicians, celebrities and civil rights groups. When the police revealed that Mr. Smollett was being investigated for possibly orchestrating the attack, the tone shifted. The president's supporters seized on the case as a hollow attempt to demonize them as racists. In October, Mr. Trump told a gathering of police chiefs in Chicago that Mr. Smollett's report of being attack was "a scam, just like the impeachment of your president." The police had built a case based on surveillance camera footage, interviews with the brothers, text exchanges between the men and Mr. Smollett, and a check he had given them. None of the text exchanges explicitly mentioned a staged attack, and Mr. Smollett maintained that the money was to hire the brothers to physically train him for an upcoming video. Last March, just a month after his arrest, the state's attorney's office dropped the charges against him, explaining that Mr. Smollett was not a threat to public safety and that he had a record of service to the community. He agreed to forfeit the 10,000 bond that had released him from jail. The office's decision angered some officials in Chicago, including the police superintendent and the mayor at the time, Rahm Emanuel, and the city later sued Mr. Smollett for more than 130,000 it said it had spent investigating his claim of being attacked. Mr. Webb said that part of the rationale for reopening the prosecution was the resources expended by the police department while investigating his reports. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
SCAN a roster of Toyota Prius buyers and you'll find performers, policy makers and entrepreneurs. After being bowled over by the boldface names Apple's Steve Wozniak, Google's Sergey Brin, earth conscious artistes from Natalie Portman to Bill Maher I wonder this: can't these people afford a nicer car? Shouldn't someone as cool as Mark Ruffalo (who cleverly called his Toyota "the Priss") drive something that's faster and sleeker than a garden gnome? The answer, of course, is that famous Prius owners just like driving a 50 m.p.g. hybrid even if they could commute via yacht and helipad. And even for many middle class converts, the Prius's 26,000 median price is hardly a burden: Toyota figures the average Prius household pulls in nearly 83,000 a year, which is rather high for an economy car. Those figures help to illuminate Toyota's logic behind the 2011 Lexus CT 200h. Is this deluxe hybrid hatchback a better car than the Prius? You bet. Is it really worth an extra 7,000 or 8,000? For a bargain hunter, no. But for a certain well heeled, light footed buyer, the Lexus should be a painless stretch. The CT 200h won't quite match the Prius's mileage, but at a robust 44 miles per gallon in my own combined city and highway driving, it's close enough. And despite its pokey Prius based hybrid system, the Lexus gives people good reasons to move up. The CT is more luxurious, more quiet and feels more solidly put together. And its distinctive design, inside and out, may attract two types of customers: bored Prius owners who want something new, and people who crave high mileage but wouldn't be caught dead in a Prius, for either its econobox vibe or its granola image. The CT 200h is the latest offshoot of Toyota's MC platform, the versatile foundation for an army of models including the Prius, the Corolla and Camry sedans, the Scion tC coupe, the Sienna minivan and various crossovers. To make the body more rigid, Lexus bolts on a pair of "lateral performance dampers," an industry first designed with Yamaha. Instead of a solid link between suspension components such as a strut tower brace that spans the left and right shock absorbers Lexus connects them with a hydraulic mount that limits body roll in turns and quells vibrations over bumps. As in the Lexus HS 250h hybrid sedan, the CT 200h also adopts a double wishbone rear suspension, a slicker design than the Prius's torsion beam arrangement. But unlike the homely HS, whose sales have fallen short of expectations, the CT 200h is a striking, daringly styled hatchback a description not often associated with the conservative styling studios of Toyota or Lexus. The Lexus projects confidence from any angle, from its wind carved prow to its teardrop roof and the jaunty epaulets of its rear fenders. It also looks appropriately expensive, something that's not easy for a compact car to pull off. The CT's rich appearance easily matches the BMW 1 Series or the Audi A3. Terrific paint never hurts, and my test car featured a color shifting shade of purple brown called Fire Agate Pearl. The dapper interior plays to another Lexus strength, beginning with a banked central control panel that's clean, eye catching and ergonomically correct. Lexus's distinctive Remote Touch control setup, with its gently sloping wrist rest and fingertip operated joystick, is an intuitive winner. Excellent audio and navigation systems smoothly defend the car's price premium, but their on screen graphics reminded me of AOL a bit stodgy and artless, especially compared with the sophisticated displays in an Audi or a Mercedes Benz. The optional leather seats could benefit from a better class of cow, one reminder that this car starts at 29,995. My nearly loaded test car was 36,725. Lexus says the CT's multilink rear suspension leaves more room for cargo, but you wouldn't know it from the stingy space and high load floor. The nickel metal hydride battery pack (1.4 kilowatt hours) has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is below the cargo deck. The Lexus could not accommodate even two medium size roller bags unless the rear seat was folded. The CT 200h adopts the Prius's powertrain: a 1.8 liter, 98 horsepower 4 cylinder engine with an electric motor that raises total output to 134 horsepower. Acceleration is on par with the Prius, with a 0 to 60 m.p.h. run in an unhurried 9.8 seconds. But Lexus paid special attention to quelling noise and vibration. An oversize silver knob switches the Lexus's throttle response and steering effort among Eco, Normal and Sport modes. There's also an E.V. button, which can let the car cruise roughly a mile on electricity alone. But E.V. operation worked only below 25 m.p.h. before the engine automatically fired back up, so it's useful only in crawling traffic. But if the Lexus won't outrun other luxury compacts, it easily outsips them, even the Audi A3 TDI diesel. That Audi usually settles in around 33 34 m.p.g. in combined real world city and highway driving. The Lexus is rated 43 m.p.g. city, 40 highway, but I did better, averaging 44 over several days of driving. The difference, should you care, is that those German diesels are decidedly more fun in motion. My 44 m.p.g. average included trips on clogged freeways and Manhattan streets. Those snarls, increasingly common, quickly wreck the mileage of any car powered strictly by gasoline. But the Lexus returned 47 m.p.g. on one such jaunt, taking advantage of its engine's start stop function and its ability to move silently from traffic lights on battery power. The government figures the Lexus will burn just 1,374 a year in gasoline, nearly 400 less than the diesel A3 hatchback and about 700 less than a tiny Mini Cooper. While the high mileage and low emissions are faultless, Lexus's other pitch is that the handling is sporty. But honestly, any number of more affordable small cars, like the new Ford Focus, Mini Cooper and Volkswagen Golf, feel livelier. The Lexus does feel more connected to the road than a Prius, but that is faint praise. Using Princess and the Pea math, I'd venture that there are 17 mattresses between you and any road sensation, down from 20 in the Toyota. Turning the silver knob to Sport mode raises the steering effort but does nothing for cornering response, so it's an entirely artificial effect. In Sport mode, the driver's hybrid readout, which helps coach you toward better mileage, is replaced with a tachometer, and the throttle response is quickened. But there's so little torque available that the Lexus just oozes through turns, with solid control but no sense of playfulness. As in the Prius, the Lexus Hybrid System seems intended to discourage you from ever exceeding 65 m.p.h.; hammer the gas beyond that speed and nothing much happens. So it's actually best to drive in Eco or Normal mode, succumb to the hypnotic suggestion and get your kicks from mileage rewards on the trip computer. Take the Sport mode literally and it's like having Marley's Ghost under the hood, sighing, moaning and clanking his electronic chains. Even fuel miserly Scrooges may wonder what they did to deserve such a haunting. Under acceleration, the Lexus strains as loudly and obtrusively as an old Ford Escort. It positively hates climbing steep hills, demanding constant throttle adjustments to maintain a steady pace. If this were any other luxury car, I'd proclaim such a powertrain a deal killer. But the typical buyer of a Lexus hybrid probably wouldn't floor the gas pedal if a T. Rex were in the rear view mirror. Keep your foot leashed below half throttle, and the Lexus feels like an entirely different car, whispering as serenely as a big luxury sedan. One question remains: Who is the buyer, and how many are out there? The small luxury class has grown to include the Volvo C30, in addition to the Audi A3 and BMW 1 Series, but these cars have mostly struggled to carve out a niche. Finding a culprit doesn't require an advanced degree. All are well over 30,000, and many Americans find that price to size ratio out of whack. Yet the Lexus, I suspect, doesn't need to impress people interested in conventional small cars. Lexus hopes to sell 1,000 of the luxury hybrids a month, more than the monthly sales of small nonhybrid models from Audi, BMW and Volvo. Some previous Lexus hybrids, like the LS 600h L and GS 450h sedans, promised to revolutionize hybrids by offering the three way benefits of luxury, performance and stingy mileage, but succeeded only on the luxury front. The LS, priced up to 120,000, became one of the epic sales failures of recent years. The CT 200h's claims to sportiness also turn out to be marketing hoopla. Yet this Lexus is a much more legitimate hybrid proposition, because it nails two of the three attributes, with genuine luxury and high mileage. Roll your eyes when you see the Lexus pinballing through city streets in the commercial. But nod your head when you hear that the CT 200h is stylish, deluxe and can top 40 m.p.g. even in rush hour traffic. INSIDE TRACK: A small car for people who can afford a big one. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
As Collin Morikawa hoisted the huge Wanamaker Trophy above his head on Sunday evening, giving it a quick, jubilant shake, the lid went clattering off. Again, he was providing exactly what golf needed in a season dimmed by plague. First the 23 year old Morikawa delivered a dazzling final round to win the P.G.A. Championship at San Francisco's T.P.C. Harding Park, becoming the long overdue first major champion of 2020. Then came the comic relief, the sheepish smile as the top of the trophy went astray. After Morikawa made two unforgettable shots to emerge from a throng of tenacious contenders on the back nine Sunday, it was tempting to consider the future of the game, all the more so since that throng included Matthew Wolff, a 21 year old in his first major, and Scottie Scheffler, a 24 year old, who finished tied for fourth. But the real value of Morikawa's beguiling, gutsy victory lay more in what it showed about the state of golf now than what it portended. According to early ratings returns, the tournament drew its biggest TV audience in five years, even as golf was competing with the resumption of U.S. league sports. And, as has happened throughout the PGA Tour's return since mid June, fans turned out in person despite being prohibited from attending, notably collapsing parts of the fencing that blocked views of the 12th and 13th holes from the viewing public. Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry was an exception to the fan less rule that has governed golf's return. With his team eliminated from the N.B.A. postseason, Curry followed Morikawa's group on Sunday, then crashed the post round news conference to offer his caddying services to the champion. The interest in Sunday's final owed as much to Morikawa's jaw dropping shots as it did to a preposterously talented field which, at one point on Sunday, featured a seven person tie for the lead. A win for either would have carried significance. Casey has started more major championships (64) without gaining a title than any other active player. And this was the fourth time that Johnson has held or shared a 54 hole lead at a major and been unable to close the deal, an ignominious record. For all his talent, Johnson, 36, has won just one major, the 2016 United States Open a point impudently noted on Saturday night by Brooks Koepka, winner of the previous two P.G.A. Championships. "I like my chances," said Koepka, who was two strokes behind Johnson after the third round. "When I've been in this position before, I've capitalized." He noted that Johnson had "only won one, so I'm playing good, so we'll see." Koepka quickly fell out of contention on Sunday, shooting a four over 74, while Rory McIlroy publicly challenged his comments about Johnson. "Sort of hard to knock a guy that's got 21 wins on the PGA Tour, which is three times what Brooks has," said McIlroy, who, like Koepka, is a four time major winner. Ultimately, though, that squabble and Johnson's unfortunate retreat from the top of the leaderboard paled next to Morikawa's thrilling, and remarkably mature, play. "All my caddie friends say the same thing," said his caddie, J.J. Jakovac. "They're like, I just cannot get over how mature your guy is. He's like an old soul or something." Morikawa's familiarity with the course certainly helped him. By his own calculations, he played at Harding Park at least a dozen times during his college career at the nearby University of California, Berkeley. "To be honest, through college, it wasn't my favorite," he said. "I don't think I played it extremely well." Just a little over a year after turning pro, Morikawa has now won three times on the PGA Tour, twice in the relative silence of this summer's spectator free tournaments. Morikawa said he wouldn't have minded hearing a big reaction when his 293 yard drive at 16 reached the green, since he and his caddie couldn't see where the ball ended up. "This is the one time I really wish there were crowds right there," he said. Still, his 65 and 64 over the weekend gave him the lowest closing 36 hole score ever at a men's major. The previous record of 130 was held by Tom Watson (1977 British Open), Ian Baker Finch (1991 British Open), Anders Forsbrand (1994 British Open), Marc Leishman (2015 British Open) and Tiger Woods (2018 P.G.A. Championship). So Morikawa wasn't inclined to think about what was missing, except, very briefly, the lid to his new trophy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Each week, the Open Thread newsletter will offer a look from across The New York Times at the forces that shape the dress codes we share, with Vanessa Friedman as your personal shopper. The latest newsletter appears here. To receive it in your inbox, register here. Hello and happy first week of 2018! I hope everyone had a good new year. I spent mine in multiple layers of clothing (it was minus 30 in Canada). At least when I wasn't huddled indoors by the fire or thinking about what I am looking forward to this year. There's a lot. Really. Here are five examples to start us off. And that's just in the next six months. 1. All those jobs to be filled! There are designer openings at Burberry and Celine and Fendi still needs a C.E.O. Get ready for a whole new round of fashion musical chairs. 2. Also get ready for a whole new red carpet attitude, starting this Sunday with the Golden Globes, where all the actresses (or most of them) have decided to wear black to make a statement about the treatment of women in Hollywood. Finally, they are using clothes to do more than bolster their bank accounts. 3. The Olympics! And the February 9th parade of wearable flags known as the Opening Ceremony outfits. At no other time and place are national symbols considered so synonymous with style. Plus, I'm a sucker for a sparkly skating outfit. Vera Wang has already announced she's working with U.S. mens' competitor Nathan Chen. 4. Meghan Markle's wedding to...that guy? That red haired prince guy? It's happening on May 19th, the ultimate contemporary fairy tale, and will be the ultimate windfall for whichever designer she chooses to do "The Dress." Especially given that pretty much every other dress (and coat and bag) Markle has worn since the engagement was announced has sold out. Place your bets now. 5. "Ocean's 8." The all female incarnation of the feature film, which comes out in June, stars Cate Blanchett, Rihanna, Sandra Bullock and Anne Hathaway and spotlights ... the Met Gala! And with it more designer cameos than there were rhinestones on Mariah Carey's Times Square gown. Get ready to spot the style maven. And then there's the actual Met Gala the month before, with Rihanna as a co host (get it?) celebrating an exhibit looking at Catholicism's influence on the designer mind. Just think about what that means for the party dress code, for a moment. I predict Virgin Marys and monks, everywhere. And in between it all is fashion week, which starts this weekend with men's wear in London (I know, take a breath) and pretty much runs straight through couture and women's wear all the way to...mid March. It's going to be a busy one. To start it right, here are some great reads you might have missed over the last two weeks. Have a good weekend! Every week on Open Thread, Vanessa will answer a reader's fashion related question, which you can send to her anytime via email or Twitter. Questions are edited and condensed. Q: A few years ago, I started buying expensive shoes very occasionally, instead of cheap ones every few months. (I felt guilty about working conditions at fast fashion factories, and about the waste I was generating.) But city sidewalks don't know how much you paid, and they eat up my nice Alumnae boots and Louboutin flats nearly as quickly as they did the ones from Zara. What warning signs should I be on the lookout for so I can keep my shoes in good condition, without getting ripped off by weekly cobbler visits? Alex, New York A: First: good for you. As someone who firmly believes there is way too much stuff in the world and way too much of a tendency to see it all as disposable, I long ago made it my New Year's resolution to buy less, but buy better, and try to take care of my things more. (I use my grandmother as my guide for this.) For me, "sustainable fashion" is an oxymoron, but a "sustainable wardrobe" is a goal. That said, you are asking the wrong question (sorry). Don't look for warning signs: Prevent them from occurring. Before you even wear a new pair of shoes with their perfect, smooth soles take them to the cobbler and ask for metal taps on the toes and rubber caps on the heels. You can also add thin rubber soles. It's not expensive, since nothing is actually being repaired (that takes artistry and experience and costs more), but it will go far toward preserving the integrity of your shoes and they can be easily replaced once worn through. That tiny preventive measure will save you lots of money in the long run, and it will also ensure you get to keep wearing your investment accessories. It's like hanging clothes up after you wear them or learning to iron: one of the lost arts of taking care of a wardrobe. VANESSA FRIEDMAN | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
The sporting outfitter Frontiers International Travel recently introduced a website dedicated to fishing in Iceland, one of the most highly regarded wild trout and char destinations in the world. As part of Frontiers' Iceland offerings, the well known guides Barry and Cathy Beck will host a brown trout fishing tour of Iceland from June 11 to 19, with prices starting at 7,256 per person. Guests will join the Becks for fishing on the 12,000 year old Lake Thingvallavatn, one of the country's largest lakes. From there, the tour heads to the sparsely populated Highlands region. Fishing spots will include the Tungnaa River and the Kaldakvisl River. Lodging for the first few days will be at the Ion Luxury Adventure Hotel, set against a backdrop of mountainous lava fields and home to the Silfra Restaurant, which specializes in Nordic cuisine. Later nights will be spent at the Hotel Highland, at the edge of Iceland's most active volcanic area. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
For much of the fashion community, President Trump's election was a disappointment (to say the least). Though many designers stayed quiet in the following months, the spigot opened during this fashion week as designers used the platforms available to stand up for the causes that most concern them. "The election has colored everything that we do," Tracy Reese said. After walking in the Women's March on Washington, the designer and her team felt inspired. "We wanted to use our voices, something that was new for a lot of us," she said. She invited four poets, including her sister, to read at her show, giving them no parameters except that the poems should tell women's stories. "We put very little restraint on them because it was all relevant," Ms. Reese said. "I've never designed for one kind of woman. It's always for different women, different shapes, different colors, different ages." Mara Hoffman took a similar approach, inviting the four co chairs of the Women's March to recite lines from the activist Angela Davis and the poets Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde. "These four women organized the largest protest in the history of the world for human rights," Ms. Hoffman said. She wanted her show to continue the apparent momentum they sparked. "The march happened, but now what?" she said. Several designers sidestepped performances and instead incorporated political statements into their collections. Prabal Gurung and Christian Siriano, for example, turned to T shirts. At the end of his show, Mr. Gurung sent his models out in tops printed with phrases like "The Future Is Female" and "I Am an Immigrant," while Mr. Siriano showed a T shirt with "People Are People" inscribed across it, paired with a pink skirt. "The collection started off with a conversation about borders," Mr. Chow said. "We felt like we needed to make some commentary about nationalism, isolationism and xenophobia." Why New York? "Because it's made up of people of all different cultures, of immigrants," he said. At Chromat, Becca McCharen Tran channeled her postelection feelings into all of her designs, conceptualizing "garments that can help the wearer stay afloat and protected" in partnership with Klymit, an outdoor goods company. That meant rain boots, flotation devices, bathing suits and mesh netting. "I definitely think the collection grew out of the collective anxiety we're feeling," she said. It was a way for her and her team to take a stand. "During the protests, we were in the studio sewing," she said. Perhaps the subtlest reflection on America's present and future was Raf Simons's first collection for Calvin Klein, in which the designer celebrated "different characters and different individuals" with a series of easy, unfussy looks that included an American flag turned into a skirt. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
FOR most people, investing has not been fun these last few years. At best, it has been stressful. But there are investments that have nothing to do with stocks or bonds or real estate that may be at least enjoyable if not always moneymaking. I've come up with about a half dozen, and over the next few weeks, I plan to explore some of them, including investments as different as horses and restaurants. My goal is to see how people do this successfully or whether they have a broader definition of success than just making money. This week, I'm going to look at films, given that the influential Tribeca Film Festival is under way; it runs through Sunday. Investing in a movie seems a risky proposition. Movie studios lose tens of millions of dollars on films almost every week. But for some amateurs, being part of the film festival circuit, let alone making it to a big Hollywood premiere, can be glamorous. For a serious investor, with more at stake, there are many ways to make money in films that have little to do with box office success. Dennis Wallestad, chief financial officer of the Treasury services division of JPMorgan Chase, said he wanted to back a promising filmmaker after spending over a decade as a benefactor to David M. Lenz, an artist who gained wide acclaim in 2006 when he won a competition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. He met the filmmaker Nate Taylor because their wives knew each other. On the surface, they seem nothing alike. "I'm a C.P.A. from Milwaukee and as white bread as they come," Mr. Wallestad said. "He's a goth with a mohawk." Yet after many meetings, Mr. Wallestad put up 300,000 to make the film "Forgetting the Girl." He also ran all aspects of the film's finances and whittled away waste as he does in his day job. "I wanted to help someone else," Mr. Wallestad said. "My covenant with Nate is, You do the art and I'll take care of the business." Earlier this month, "Forgetting The Girl" won the audience award at the SoHo International Film Festival, and Mr. Wallestad said that had attracted interest from two dozen distributors. This type of success right out of the gate is an anomaly. Kristina Leigh Copeland said she rounded up nearly 3 million from investors, mostly family, to make "The Wall Street Conspiracy," a documentary about naked short selling, the esoteric, and now illegal, practice of using shares you never borrowed to bet that the value of a stock will fall. But so far, the film is available only on her Web site. She said she realized now that she needed to cut her budget for her next film. For investors, controlling the budget is crucial but also relatively obvious. There are other less obvious risks to consider. Marc Jacobson, an entertainment lawyer in New York, said the biggest risk to someone's investment was that the film was not completed. "Someone who has a couple of million dollars to invest is not going to be able to invest in a 100 million blockbuster," he said. "Most will work in the 1 million to 2 million range, and producers often can't finish the film." He said one precaution is to demand a completion bond, which is an insurance policy that the film will be finished on time and on budget. He said many directors balked at this because the insurance company might interfere with their vision. (These companies also require 10 percent of the budget be held in reserve and charge a fee of 4 percent of the budget.) "There are many ways to make money these days in film, but you can only get that if the film is completed," Mr. Jacobson said. An adviser who knows the business is crucial in this. His most recent one, released this month, is "Unraveled," about a lawyer, Marc Dreier, who defrauded investors of 740 million to support his law firm and is now serving 20 years in jail. Knowing the industry, Mr. Simon has been able to sell off various rights to different investors beyond the theatrical release, like video on demand and cable, to make and promote the film. "We don't have huge marketing dollars for a theatrical release," he said. "The real key is the video on demand life can be huge for this film. People anywhere in the country can watch it right now on every single cable system in the country." This option did not exist when his previous film, "Nursery University," about the hypercompetitive preschool admissions process in Manhattan, was released. For that, he raised the funds, which he said were in the mid six figures, from 10 investors. While the film did not break even, Mr. Simon advised his investors on Section 181 in the Internal Revenue Code, which has now expired but allowed them at the time to deduct their investment in "Nursery University," against their unearned income in the years the film was made. "For the small independent films, the financiers should be investing in the film for reasons other than profit," Mr. Simon said. "They have to enjoy the experience of being part of the business, of going to the festivals and being part of a very fun industry." Of course, few people need to be told that many films do not make a profit. But how do people make money in films? The portfolio model is one way. "If you're going to invest in a film, the wise economic advice is don't invest in a single picture," said Bob Rubin, a former senior executive at Universal and Sony and the founder of Hollywood2Go.com, which offers seminars on how Hollywood works. "The likelihood of success is very low and the risk is high. If you want to get into the business in a bigger way, find a way to invest in a portfolio." Another way is to wait until later in a film's production. Most commercial films have a defined payout structure, where the people who put money in first will get paid back after everyone else. Mr. Jacobson said he had advised clients on lending money at 15 to 20 percent interest to finish a film or pay for the marketing costs, which are investments that get paid back sooner. They can also lend money to a filmmaker that will be secured by the tax credits films receive from the states where they are shot. "If a film is due to get back 350,000, they could lend 80 percent plus some rate of interest," he said. "They get paid back when the tax credits come in." Yet another option is avoid the risk of theatrical release and aim for a more captive market. That is what Chat Reynders, chairman and chief executive of Reynders, McVeigh Capital Management in Boston, has done in his two decades of investing in IMAX films made for educational institutions. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Watching male and female models stride down the runways in tandem as more designers combined their women's and men's collections this New York Fashion Week raised the questions of what is masculine and what is feminine, how much those distinctions matter, and who gets to decide. Depending on which show you viewed, it's fine for men to sport blue feather boas or fishnet shirts with a bow (Jeremy Scott). Or for women and men to wear virtually interchangeable clothes, in restrained, minimalist androgyny (Raf Simons for Calvin Klein). Or for women to feminize the puffer by wearing it off the shoulder, cinched at the waist (Public School). Society is in a time of renewed ferment about gender. Culture wars rage over bathrooms and even the very notion that men or women have to choose one fixed gender identity. President Donald J. Trump reportedly likes his female staff "to dress like women"; just what this means isn't entirely clear. The divide looms between those who welcome the new fluidity and those who yearn for clearly defined gender roles. So designers on the runway this week engaged in a continuing dialogue about how clothing defines masculinity and femininity and how it scrambles these notions, too. Fashion has crossed many of these lines for years, of course. Women have long appropriated men's clothes for comfort and authority. In the 1960s, longhaired men in paisley, florals and bell bottoms defied conventions of what men were supposed to look like and what clothes they were supposed to wear. Jean Paul Gaultier put a man in a skirt back in 1984. And last year, Jaden Smith wore clothes designed for women in a Louis Vuitton advertisement. But showing the women's and men's lines together allowed for rapid fire consideration of what the differences were, really. Material? Designers used the same fabrics for many of the men's and women's collections. Cut? In some cases, the tailoring seemed uncannily similar. Accessories? Many designers included accessories that once would have been thought exclusively feminine or masculine on both male and female models. Fashion, like society, is clearly not opting for hard and fast rules. Yet each designer brought a particular sensibility to the gender continuum. Raf Simons made his name in men's wear before expanding to women's clothing. His first collection for Calvin Klein was also the first time the house showed both men's and women's lines in the same show. Mr. Simons was known for a distinctive male model, skinny and less bulked up, and he has said he designed some of his distinctive slim shouldered suits for that physique. In this show, much of the men's and women's clothing looked all but identical; there were a few times when it was hard to figure out whether the model was a man or a woman. There were glen plaid suits with double breasted blazers and black leather jackets with silver rose cutouts for men and women. The marching band pants and varsity stripe motifs were echoed in the men's and women's clothes. Mr. Simons played with the idea of transparency: women in sheer tops showing nipples; men in sheer tops showing theirs. But he did not overtly cross gender lines by putting men in skirts. And he showed some simply beautiful feminine clothes, such as the dresses made of feathers encased in sheer plastic. For Public School, the designers Dao Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne took street motifs often associated with men parkas, puffers, hoodies, anoraks and toyed with how to dress women in them. The off the shoulder puffers for women were a surprisingly sensual look for a normally unisex coat; the men in the show wore the puffers short, not big or baggy. As with the other runway shows, combining men and women allowed the designers to present one aesthetic and show how it applied to each gender. At Public School, a man walked out in a plaid shirt and slightly baggy pants with a zipper, followed by a woman wearing the same plaid shirt as a dress with a navy train. A man wore an oversize glen paid top; a woman wore the same glen plaid ensemble but belted and draped more closely to her body. Generally, the men's and women's looks were not interchangeable; rather, men were in recognizable men's clothes, and women were more often in dresses and skirts, with bare shoulders and material gathered in artful folds. It was a brasher vision than Calvin Klein's, further along the continuum of sexual distinction. Jeremy Scott had it both ways: gender traditional in his unabashed sexuality for women and nonconforming in his use of what were once thought of as feminine colors, styles and accessories for men. Many of his designs for women were sex kittenish, including baby doll dresses, fishnet stockings, go go boots, short shorts in pink knit, and clingy tops in silver lame. Men wore styles and colors that used to be associated with femininity: clingy velour pants in fuchsia and purple or jackets with gold fringe and purple sleeves. And sometimes Mr. Scott drew inspiration from both tropes in one look: He sent out a male model in a plaid skirt worn like a tunic over ripped jeans, finished off with an oversize parka. Men and women wore his signature Jesus motif coats with leopard accents the women's coats tighter, the men's looser. In the end, designers ran the gamut, from blurring the lines between men and women to embracing them, sometimes in the same collection. It may be that fashion's refusal to decide, to render any one verdict, is as radical as some of the more overtly political statements made this week on the runways. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
In the ballet, Spartacus (Mikhail Lobukhin) and Phrygia (Anna Nikulina), his beloved, are taken prisoner by Crassus (Alexander Volchkov). Now a gladiator, Spartacus, to his horror, is forced into committing murder; he inspires a revolt but after defeating Crassus, lets him go. Aegina (Svetlana Zakharova), a courtesan, incites Crassus to take revenge. Spartacus, outnumbered, is pierced to death and his body lifted high into the air by dozens of spears. It's more Boris Eifman than, well, Boris Eifman. That's only fair; Mr. Grigorovich came first. "Spartacus" opens as Crassus stands with an arm raised holding a military standard and his lower half obscured by rows of shields. In an instant, the armor breaks apart to reveal an army. Amid a swirl of capes and flashing blades, the men pour onto the stage with stouthearted marches, lunge jumps and forward leg kicks. In this ballet, the army is part of the scenery, though Mr. Volchkov, soaring through the air in arched, backbend jumps, never truly seems to step out of it. His virtuosity and bearing lack weight. Throughout "Spartacus," galvanizing group dances, in which the power of unison is forcibly displayed and replayed, contrast with danced monologues for the main characters that reveal emotional interiors through malleable, sculptural movement passages. In an early one, Mr. Lobukhin hugs himself and then stretches his arms imploringly; soon, anger takes over, and he whips the chains connecting his wrists from side to side and collapses to his knees. Like Mr. Volchkov, Mr. Lobukhin showed the outlines of the character; his Spartacus needed more refinement and wildness that couldn't be earned through yet another jump or an anguished reach of splayed fingers. Ms. Nikulina's plasticity as Phyrgia wavered in and out of seamlessness; glimpses of the way her legs could caress the air were too abrupt, and her tendency to chase after the music mournfully gave her character too slight an air. Yet in her final solo, after Spartacus is killed, Ms. Nikulina, hair streaming around her shoulders, came into focus: Tension left her body even as she stood on point with her fists clenched. Ms. Zakharova, a glittering Aegina from the start, reveled in her depravity. With a twinkle in her eye and catlike enchainement, she used her willowy frame like a showgirl. She has the legs to bring down an army, and she did. Enticing Spartacus's men with courtesans and wine, Ms. Zakharova wrapped her long limbs around a staff covered with a floral vine. Phallic symbols go on for days in this ballet. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
A dead or dying phone or laptop is enough to send anybody on a mad dash to find a way to charge the device, but you might want to think twice before using that random cable found at an airport charging station or docking into that hotel USB port hackers could be waiting. As the busy holiday season approaches, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office is warning travelers about a USB charger scam, or "juice jacking." "A free charge could end up draining your bank account," Luke Sisak, a deputy district attorney, said in a video posted online this month. Juice jacking happens when unsuspecting users plug their electronic devices into USB ports or use USB cables that have been loaded with malware. The malware then infects the devices, giving hackers a way in. They can then read and export your data, including your passwords, and even lock up the gadgets, making them unusable. Juice jacking exploits the fact that somebody doesn't have a full battery, said Liviu Arsene , a cyber security expert at BitDefender , a Romanian cybersecurity and antivirus software company. Mr. Arsene cautioned against using USB cables found already plugged into charging stations or even given away as promotional gifts. "You can easily brand these things so you can make it look like any other cable," he said, adding, "When people see it, they don't really think or expect it to be malicious in any way." Other ways to protect yourself include carrying your own charging wires, only charging directly from an electrical outlet and using portable batteries that were bought from known vendors, Mr. Arsene said. "Don't believe everything you see, and don't believe everything you get your hands on," he said, noting that starting with Black Friday, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. But it isn't just cables that pose a risk for tech consumers; it's the ports, too. Like scammers who steal debit card numbers by putting illegal card reading devices, or skimmers, on A.T.M.s, hackers can easily rip out USB ports and replace them with their own malicious hardware, said Vyas Sekar , a professor at CyLab , a security and privacy research institute at Carnegie Mellon University . "It's easy to modify the outlet if the attacker has physical access," Professor Sekar said. Though Mr. Arsene and Professor Sekar said they were unsure of how often hacking attacks like these happened, the growing ubiquity of USB charging ports in places like hotels, airports and public transportation has translated into an increased risk of falling victim to such scams. "People want the convenience of charging their phones and tablets wherever they go," Professor Sekar said, adding, "Obviously I would like it too, but there is a risk." Professor Sekar said consumers could also use attachable protective devices on USB cables known as "USB condoms." "What they do is a very simple trick," he said. "They essentially disable the data pin on the USB charger." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
The next time you click through a wedding feature on a celebrity website, or flip through a weekly gossip magazine, you may consider that the glamorous, sinfully expensive gown being featured may have been given to, not purchased by, the star wearing it. As the field of bridal dress design becomes more crowded, a number of designers are following the pattern set by Hollywood's red carpet scene. In return for much needed publicity, designers are giving dresses to celebrities, whom potential customers can see immediately on television and in social media. "It's the same for weddings as for red carpet appearances," said Ronnie Rothstein, who along with Mara Urshel owns Kleinfeld Bridal in Manhattan. "Everyone is looking to improve their brand awareness. People don't want to admit what's going on. Red carpet? Yes. But weddings?" An industry built on selling romance has little incentive to tamper with its customers' sentimental fantasies, but it is also a field with a firm focus on its financial realities. "Giving goods away is tremendous for our business," Mr. Rothstein said. "Everyone is so celebrity conscious these days, it doesn't matter if it's a B or C list celebrity. The media coverage is so big and they all show the celebrities dressed up. It may not have been that way years ago, but now it only takes a minute for a picture to go around the world." The designer Dennis Basso, who has dressed many celebrities over the years, acknowledges that giving away gowns is part of the business. "It's always been a wonderful experience when you do a wedding gown for a celebrity," he said. And this giveaway aspect, he admits, is not exactly new, but he said that it has changed. "Years ago it was the studios who paid for their stars' dresses," something they no longer do, he said. For the dresses seen on Hollywood actresses, the individual arrangements they have with the designers or retailers can vary. Most often "red carpet" dresses are borrowed, which somewhat lessens the designers' outlay. But when it comes to wedding gowns, some of which can cost 18,000 or more, typically they are not returned. According to Mr. Rothstein, they become "semi disposable." A red carpet dress, he said, is worn briefly during an award show and can be returned and used as a sample garment, whereas a wedding gown is usually used all day and evening and is often too soiled and used looking to be worth taking back. If a gown is given away, it becomes a business arrangement, Mr. Zunino said, and the brides owe him or the retailer who has given it a credit each time it is seen in public. Most often, he said, gowns that are given to celebrity brides come with a written formal agreement about what is expected in return. "Everything must be in writing. It's a business arrangement." Among those who have worn his gowns is Tiler Peck, a principal ballerina with the New York City Ballet, whose June 2014 wedding was featured in the Vows column in the Sunday Styles section of The New York Times. "My wedding gown was beyond anything I ever dreamt of wearing," Ms. Peck said of the blush color fully beaded, form fitting gown. "I thought it was sophisticated and extremely feminine, and the silhouette was stunning. When Ronnie and Mara gifted me the dress, I was literally in tears." Mr. Rothstein provided the dress and Mr. Zunino personally fitted it at Kleinfeld Bridal. There was no written agreement, which was unusual, because Mr. Rothstein said he believed Ms. Peck was "a mensch," and she told him she would do whatever he needed in return for the gown. Another whom Mr. Zunino has dressed is Tara Lipinski, the former Olympic figure skater, who is getting married next summer. Mr. Zunino made a custom dress for Ms. Lipinski and lent it to her to wear to her engagement party last May. In return, Mr. Zunino has the right to use photos of her in that frock for advertising. Claire Pettibone, a designer in Los Angeles, spoke about the publicity value in having a high profile bride. It was "a lovely surprise," Ms. Pettibone said about learning that Priscilla Chan wore one of her gowns for her marriage to Mark Zuckerberg in 2012. Ms. Chan, in an effort to keep the marriage a secret, went to a small shop in Denver, called the Little White Dress, and purchased the Pettibone gown using an assumed name. "We custom make our gowns, but we had no idea who this one was for," the designer said. When word got out about the marriage and Ms. Pettibone's dress, it was "hugely impactful" on her business, Ms. Pettibone said. Similarly, Pnina Tornai, a designer in Tel Aviv, said that when the costume designers of "Sex and the City: The Movie" chose to show one of her dresses, it represented a big boost to her business. Ms. Tornai, who provided the dress free, said, "Jennifer Hudson wore my gown in the movie, and that was important." Despite the sales bump the Chan Zuckerberg wedding brought to Ms. Pettibone, she said, "We don't have a budget" to give away gowns in exchange for exposure, although she will on rare occasions when "the coverage is going to be enormous." And when she does supply a dress free, she said there is always a commitment on the part of the celebrity about publicity. Last spring, Mark Zunino said he flew to New York to fit a gown for Misty Copeland, a principal ballerina of the American Ballet Theater, for her wedding last July. The dress, made from off white silk peau de soie with an overlay of laser cut silk embroidery on Italian silk illusion, was given to her by the owners of Kleinfeld Bridal, where she was shopping. (The ballerina may have worn several dresses during her wedding weekend, but in an email sent last week to Kleinfeld Bridal and shared with The Times, she said that she wore the Zunino dress for the ceremony.) "She's a very private person, and this understated yet elegant gown definitely had the 'wow' factor in a very subtle yet attention getting way," Mr. Zunino said. "Gifting a gown is like getting a walking billboard," said Randy Fenoli, a star of "Say Yes to The Dress" on the TLC cable network. "It builds up a following." Mr. Fenoli said he thinks the whole bridal design industry is more saturated with designers now, and because of that, they are always looking for new ways to build their businesses, not just for dresses. He said everything for a wedding is gifted if you're famous. Some event planners will take a decreased rate just to put a celebrity on their roster, as will florists, cake decorators and others. "I think it has a lot to do with the age we're in now of false celebrities like the Kardashians," he said, adding that while there are some elegant people in the industry who can and do pay for everything, those plying their trade in reality television are not paid nearly as much as are the major stars of scripted TV shows or film. "I think the B list actresses take the freebies," Mr. Fenoli said. "They're working their way up." Perhaps the expectation of being given a dress just naturally follows from the expensive swag bags these celebrities get at awards shows. Mr. Fenoli said that he finds it "ironic there are so many people who cannot afford a dress who have to sacrifice to pay, and then there are many who can afford one and get it gifted." Amsale Aberra, the dress designer, said: "We love to work with celebrities and, of course, I will give her a gown. It's a small price for me." While she declined to identify any of the women to whom she has given dresses, she said when she does so, there is a specific agreement in place. "We need access to photographs," she said. "I always speak about that before. I will give a dress for publicity. I think everybody knows the deal, from the giver to the taker." "Normally we have an agreement," Mr. Zunino said, "It states clearly that if we gift a gown, we get a photo of the bride in the dress, credit for the design and we can use it for publicity wherever and whenever we want." But both Mr. Zunino and Mr. Rothstein admit that no such explicit agreement was in place with Ms. Copeland, because it was assumed one was not needed, Mr. Rothstein said. "The dancer loved the gown," he said. "I said we would give it to her, and I assumed she knew what that meant. However, I have yet to see a picture of her at the wedding wearing the dress." ("Coming soon," Ms. Copeland said in an email to Kleinfeld last week.) As for Ms. Lipinski, her arrangement with Mr. Zunino has not been extended to the dress she will wear at her wedding. She said that she has turned instead to Reem Acra for her wedding gown. Ms. Lipinski would not discuss the arrangement she has with that designer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
When you learned about genes in high school, chances are it went something like this: Our DNA holds about 20,000 protein coding genes. To make a protein, a cell makes a copy of the corresponding gene, in the form of a single stranded molecule called RNA. The cell uses the RNA molecule as a template to make the protein. And then the protein floats off to do its job. That's certainly true. But there's more to the story. Some of our genes don't encode proteins; instead, they create long RNA molecules that don't serve as protein templates. They have different jobs. One of these so called long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs, for short) is vital to women's health. Women carry two copies of the X chromosome, of course, while men have only one. Yet both sexes produce the same number of proteins from X chromosomes. The cause of that balance is a lncRNA called Xist. In each cell in a woman's body, Xist locks onto one of the two X chromosomes and inactivates it. Then the cell is able to produce proteins only from the X chromosome free of Xist. If that bit of RNA fails, women produce extra proteins. Studies on mice suggest this can lead to cancer. Xist is far from a fluke. In a study published last year, a team of researchers identified more than 58,000 different kinds of lncRNAs made by human cells. But it is not clear what they all do, or even if they do anything at all. Some researchers argue that most lncRNAs don't serve any function and are probably just sloppy cellular accidents. They point out that a lot of DNA in the human genome is little more than padding between genes. LncRNA doubters maintain that sometimes a cell's protein making machinery accidentally reads a stretch of this so called junk DNA and spews out a useless RNA molecule. The cell promptly destroys the molecule, correcting its mistake. "A lot of scientists think this all may be noise," said Howard Y. Chang, a geneticist at Stanford University. Dr. Chang is not one of them. In a study published last week in the journal Genes Development, he and his colleagues were able to discover a number of functional lncRNAs. To do so, they used an innovative method to explore millions of years of RNA evolution. "This is the most powerful, clear cut example that we should reconsider junk DNA," said John Rinn, a cellular biologist at Harvard University who was not involved in the research. One clue that a gene may have an important function is that it hasn't changed much in millions of years. Gene mutations tend to be harmful, and they are less likely to get passed down to future generations. Scientists have long known that this is true for protein encoding genes. The genes for hemoglobin, for example, are nearly identical in humans and chimpanzees, despite the fact that our common ancestor lived some seven million years ago. In fact, scientists can identify similar hemoglobin genes in fish, suggesting that they have been crucial for vertebrates for hundreds of millions of years. When scientists have used this method to study lncRNAs, however, they have often come up dry. Once a lncRNA gene is identified in one species, it can be hard to find versions of that gene in related species. That failure could be a sign that lncRNAs are fleeting accidents, rather than important, long lived adaptations. Some researchers have countered that lncRNAs evolve differently than proteins. Proteins fold up into tight, complex structures. lncRNAs are long, flexible strands, with a few hooks they use to latch onto certain pieces of DNA. Mutations that alter the long stretches of RNA between these hooks may not have much effect on how they work. Over millions of years, related lncRNA genes may pick up so many mutations that their evolutionary histories can be hidden. Dr. Chang and his colleagues reasoned that lncRNA genes might still hold onto a little similarity over time and across related species: In order for lncRNAs to keep working, those hooks shouldn't change much. To test their idea, the scientists investigated the history of one well studied lncRNA genecalled roX, discovered in the common fruit fly in 2008. If roX can't work, male flies die. Subsequent research revealed why. RoX is the mirror image of Xist in humans. In male flies, roX grabs onto the male's single X chromosome and puts it into overdrive. "The amount of gene activity is cranked up twofold," said Dr. Chang. Thanks to roX, males make as many X chromosome proteins as females and thereby thrive. Dr. Chang and his colleagues searched for roX like genes in closely related species of flies. Instead of trying to find matches for the entire roX gene, they only looked for stretches that matched the hook encoding parts of the gene. They hit pay dirt, identifying roX genes in 47 species. The fact that these flies share a common ancestor that lived 40 million years ago suggests that these newly identified genes have some impressive staying power and encode lncRNAs important to survival. The scientists then looked more closely at several fly species, discovering lncRNAs made by the newly discovered genes on the X chromosomes of male flies, just as expected. Dr. Chang's team also performed a transplant, replacing the roX gene in the common fruit fly with genes from other species. Fairly often, the transplanted gene was able to take over roX's job and keep male flies alive. This method may help scientists figure out whether other lncRNAs are sloppy accidents or essential molecules. In their new report, Dr. Chang and his colleagues also describe an examination of a long noncoding RNA molecule called HOTAIR, found in humans and mice. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
My typical morning, my cat usually jumps on my face. Then my alarm goes off about 4 o'clock. I cry for about a good three minutes. Usually during the day, I am numb. I am on autopilot. So I give myself that three minutes to let everything out. So that way I don't you know, have a breakdown. I grocery shop for thousands, maybe millions of people a day. I don't know. We're the back, legs, arms. We are the body of Amazon. We don't need your thank you commercials. We need better protections and to be paid what we deserve. "Amazon has reportedly confirmed it's going to stop paying its warehouse workers that extra 2 an hour in coronavirus hazard pay." "Amazon's unlimited unpaid leave policy ended on May 1." "That means if you have coronavirus, you are expected to still show up to work even after two weeks have passed." I have lupus nephritis, which means my immune system is weak. So if I even get the mild condition of just getting corona, I would end up in critical condition because that's how weak my body is. They're still getting cases every other day or every other week, and not just our warehouse on Staten Island but across the United States. I'm home now scared to go to work. They ended the UPT policy. My leave of absence ended May 9. I requested a new leave, and Amazon denied it. This is my source of income for the past two years. I don't want to give up the job, but in this pandemic, they're making me choose between my life or a customer's order. Amazon is acting like the pandemic is over and everything is back to normal. They call us essential. They call us heroes. But I'm just going to say it. We are expendable. You have 30 million plus people on unemployment in the country. Hazard pay would actually help because a lot of people are the sole breadwinners now in their household especially too because we're risking our lives. Bring the unlimited UPT back. That keeps us safe versus coming in, walking around, not knowing whether they have the virus or not. Business is phenomenal for them right now. Even as unrest builds, it has done nothing to knock Amazon's share price off the perch, even hitting new record highs. A decent amount of people that I work with have quit. I thought about it. I want to, but I can't. Me and my sister work hard for everything. We were homeless. You know, my biggest fear is going back to that. "Amazon is facing questions about its initial response to employees who complained about safety." "Two former Amazon employees say they were fired for their activism." Definitely not scared of them. My mother was a Marine, and I was in the Navy. But am I scared of losing what keeps a roof over my head and food in my stomach? Yeah, that I'm scared of. We didn't sign up to come in and risk our lives. We didn't sign up to be someone's hero. It's a shitty choice. In these uncertain times, I just want to remind you that it's still an uncertain time. Don't let these policies expire before the pandemic is over. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
POINT JUDITH, R.I. There was a time when whiting were plentiful in the waters of Rhode Island Sound, and Christopher Brown pulled the fish into his long stern trawler by the bucketful. "We used to come right here and catch two, three, four thousand pounds a day, sometimes 10," he said, sitting at the wheel of the Proud Mary a 44 footer named, he said, after his wife, not the Creedence Clearwater Revival song as it cruised out to sea. But like many other fish on the Atlantic Coast, whiting have moved north, seeking cooler waters as ocean temperatures have risen, and they are now filling the nets of fishermen farther up the coast. Studies have found that two thirds of marine species in the Northeast United States have shifted or extended their range as a result of ocean warming, migrating northward or outward into deeper and cooler water. Lobster, once a staple in southern New England, have decamped to Maine. Black sea bass, scup, yellowtail flounder, mackerel, herring and monkfish, to name just a few species, have all moved to accommodate changing temperatures. The center of the black sea bass population, for example, is now in New Jersey, hundreds of miles north of where it was in the 1990s, providing the basis for regulators to distribute shares of the catch to the Atlantic states. Under those rules, North Carolina still has rights to the largest share. The result is a convoluted workaround many fishermen view as nonsensical. Because black sea bass are now harder to find in their state waters, North Carolina fishermen must steam north 10 hours, to where the fish are abundant, to even approach the state's allocation. Mr. Brown and other New England fishermen, however, whose states have much smaller shares, can legally land only a small fraction of the black sea bass they catch and must throw the rest overboard. And New England states like Maine, where fishermen are beginning to catch black sea bass regularly, have only a tiny allocation and no established fishery. "Our management system assumes that the ocean has white lines drawn on it, but fish don't see those lines," said Malin L. Pinsky, an assistant professor in the department of ecology, evolution and natural resources at Rutgers University, who studies how marine species adapt to climate change. "And our management system is not as nimble as the fish." The mismatch between the location of fish and the rules for catching them has pitted recreational fishermen against commercial ones and state against state. It has heightened tensions among fishermen, government regulators and the scientists who advise them and raised questions for fishery managers that have no easy answers. Reflecting these tensions, Senators Richard Blumenthal and Christopher S. Murphy, both Democrats of Connecticut, noted in a letter to the acting inspector general of the Commerce Department in June that fishermen in their state were experiencing "extreme financial hardship" because the apportionment of resources was so outdated. "We request that your office investigate how the current system impacts the region's fishermen and whether the structure should be reformed to bring quota allocations in line with current data on actual fish population distribution," the senators, joined by Representative Joe Courtney, also a Democrat of Connecticut, wrote. "As species of fish move north, the allocation levels should migrate with them." Although such shifts in allocations are possible, said Tom Nies, the executive director of the New England Fishery Management Council, in practice they are difficult to execute. "If you're giving fish to somebody, you're taking them away from somebody else," Mr. Nies said. But, he added, fishery managers at state and federal levels are examining ways to take into account the effects of warming ocean temperatures. Those approaches include changes in how permits are structured and giving states with nascent fisheries representation in councils that oversee states where the fish are well established. "I would be surprised if you find very many fishermen who will tell you that climate change is not happening," he said. "I think there's a clear recognition from everybody that this is a problem, and a lot of people are working on how to address it." One approach being actively pursued by scientists and managers is developing methods to incorporate temperature data and other characteristics of the environment into the surveys that regulators use to set fishing quotas. Richard J. Seagraves, the senior scientist for the Mid Atlantic Fishery Management Council, said that in a series of surveys distributed and town hall style meetings held by the council, "the most pressing concern expressed by all parties was the failure to address ecosystem considerations, like a changing climate and the physical effects on fish stocks." The government periodically monitors fish species to see if they are thriving or at risk of extinction. The surveys are intended to determine how much fishing a given species can sustain, in order to avoid overfishing. But even in the best case, trying to estimate the size of fish populations is an uncertain proposition. And the migration of species in response to warming temperatures has made the task considerably harder. "From a scientific perspective, there are some really interesting questions," Dr. Pinsky said. "Where did the fish go? Did we eat them? Or did they go somewhere else? Those are questions we haven't really had to grapple with." A 2014 survey of butterfish a small, silvery fish that provides food for many larger fish species and is popular in Japan illustrated the problem with traditional assessment methods. A previous survey of butterfish had been unsuccessful at figuring out how robust the population was there was too much uncertainty in the assessment's sampling of the fish. Because regulators could not make a judgment about the status of the species, butterfish fishing was temporarily suspended. But when a team of scientists began talking to fishermen, they realized that the earlier survey had not taken into account the movements of the butterfish in response to changes in water temperature. "What we learned from working with the fishermen was that the animals were probably occurring outside the survey," John A. Manderson, a research biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's northeast fisheries science center. Dr. Manderson and his colleagues developed a way to factor movement patterns and temperature shifts into models for assessing the fish. Once their work was incorporated into the next survey, which found that butterfish were still plentiful, the fishery reopened. Dr. Manderson said that listening to fishermen, who are often in the best position to know how many fish there are and where they are, was the key to understanding what was occurring. "What started out as an academic exercise turned into a collaborative one," Dr. Manderson said. Yet it remains difficult to tease apart how much of the dip in a fish population is a result of climate change and how much is a result of overfishing, or even of a natural fluctuation in population numbers from year to year. A growing number of scientists and managers favor moving eventually to what they call ecosystem based management, a system that is focused on the environmental niche a species occupies, rather than individual species themselves. Under such a system, regulation would be aimed at making sure that there are enough fish available to maintain an ecological balance of predators and prey, and quotas might be based on a category of marine species, rather than specific fish. The West Coast has already adopted some version of this approach in the north Pacific, setting an overall quota for groundfish caught in the Bering Sea. "Climate change is going to make it hard on some of those species that are not particularly fond of warm or warming waters," said Mr. Brown, who is the president of the Rhode Island Commercial Fishermen's Association, a trade group. "But as the impacts of climate change descend upon us, there are also species that are going to be victorious, hugely victorious." Yet the changes are happening so fast that regulators will have to adapt quickly if they are to have any hope of keeping up. Marine species, Dr. Manderson said, are moving north at 10 times the rate of animals on land. "Our ideas of property rights and laws are purely land based," he said. "But the ocean is all about flux and turbulence and movement." He added, "Even the science is too slow." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
How a Gang of Droogs Get Fit (Ultrafit) Off Broadway Nine droogs (and one alternate droog) gathered an hour and a half before showtime at New World Stages on a recent Friday night. To a chorus of syncopated grunts, oohs and aahs, they began to warm up. Most actors preparing to go onstage exercise their voices, do some stretching or Zen out with peace and quiet. The unusual high intensity warm up for "A Clockwork Orange," however, could rev up Floyd Mayweather for his next pay per view. Now Alex, who unmercifully pummels his way through young adulthood for sport before eventually finding that his angry impulses have been conditioned out of him, and his fellow denizens of the Korova Milkbar have arrived Off Broadway. The most taxing part of being in the all male cast may be the training. But the results? Sculpted physiques straight out of Men's Health magazine. Ms. Spencer Jones said that the training is not just a matter of showing off a fit cast. "Physique is second to me, really," she said. "Alex makes a point in the book of saying as a young man, you should be the best version of yourself that you can be. And certainly Jonno's translation of that is: 'Don't let your body go to waste when it's in its prime.'" The play's vividly physical displays of sexuality and violence (shirts? what shirts?) are complemented by a contemporary soundtrack that includes David Bowie, Muse and, in a nod to the novel, modern day versions of lovely Ludwig Van (Beethoven). It's not a musical, but there are complicated, intense, erotically charged choreographed fight scenes that require the cast to be in top shape to get through the show night after night. Ms. Spencer Jones, 30 and a Liverpool native, said that the idea of casting only men came from what she called "a classical point of view." She had been mainly working on Shakespeare as the artistic director of a theater company called Action to the Word, which she created in 2008 in London, and the pool of actresses she was working with was small. But, she argues, there was also an artistic reason. "The women in the novel are dehumanized and faceless and sort of stripped away of their complexity," Ms. Spencer Jones said. "I wondered how far I could explore that by not having them." The sets and costumes are minimal to keep the audience's focus on the script's challenging language "Nadsat" is the slang Burgess developed for characters in the novel and the casual ruthlessness of its characters: Alex, Dim, Pete, Georgie and more. Mr. Davies has deftly inhabited the Alex character for three years. When he first joined the cast, he said he was "skinny as hell" and had no idea what it would require. He dedicated himself to fitness and healthy eating. "When the audition came around and we had a workout as part of it," he said, "I thought, 'This is actually a really wonderful way to tie together all of my passions.' I've never done a piece that could really be strictly called physical theater. And I've never done so much movement onstage." Ms. Spencer Jones said she was committed to mounting the play in a way that was faithful to Burgess's writing, rather than the 1971 film version by Stanley Kubrick, a classic in its own right. She is now in talks to develop an all female version in London another opportunity for her to pay tribute to a book she fell in love with as a teenager. "It's 90 minutes of worship to him really," Ms. Spencer Jones said of Mr. Burgess. Will Carr, deputy director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, said that the visceral production would have excited the novelist, who died in 1993. "It doesn't pull any punches and the physicality is a big point of it," Mr. Carr said. "Its treatment of sexual violence is as powerful as the film. And the fact that it is all male gives you a new perspective on that." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
PROVINCETOWN, Mass. Varla Jean Merman has a good arm, and when she threw her hairpiece into the swimming pool the other evening at the end of an increasingly frenzied number in her cabaret show, it landed on the surface just right. Then it floated there, inert and disheveled. "Everyone loves a wig in a pool," Varla said, like a breathy midcentury hostess reassuring her guests. "It looks like an Irish setter's in there, taking a nap." The pool deck of the Crown Anchor, a hotel and nightlife complex known for its drag shows, is not where Varla or Jeffery Roberson, the performer who plays her had planned to spend the season, in front of an audience on folding chairs. Under a lighting truss framed by tall trees in full leaf, the stage there is a new addition: an improvised attempt to salvage this coronavirus summer by moving at least some entertainment outdoors. Art galleries are open, and so is the pirate museum. Whale watching boats are running, and restaurants seat diners inside and al fresco. But tea dance at the Boatslip is on indefinite hold, the cabaret is empty at the darkened Post Office Cafe, and no revelers spill out of bars at 1 a.m. to throng Spiritus Pizza until 2. The nightclubs are closed; so are bars, unless they've morphed into restaurants. Either way, 11 p.m. is last call. And with indoor entertainment spaces shuttered, only two establishments the Crown and Pilgrim House have shifted to open air stages since that became an option, just after Independence Day. Neither offers shows the customary seven nights a week. Visitors are here, but in diminished numbers. That's to be expected, given that millions nationwide are unemployed because of the pandemic, and that travelers to Massachusetts from 42 states must quarantine for two weeks upon arrival. So there is a curious quiet along Commercial Street, Provincetown's narrow main thoroughfare, which would normally be clogged with festive, free spirited masses. In this town of 3,000, which as of Wednesday had reported just one new coronavirus case in the previous 14 days, tourism is the main industry, bringing in more than 250 million in 2019. Yet concerns about economic survival coexist with vigilance about the virus not least because the population includes a significant number of older residents and the state's highest rate of people living with H.I.V. To the comedian Judy Gold, who has owned a second home here since 1994 and has been performing on local stages even longer, there is a clear link between the community's memory of the 1980s and '90s and its mindfulness now. When people ask her what it's like in Provincetown these days, she has a simple response. "We went through the AIDS crisis here," she tells them. "Everyone's wearing a mask." Along Route 6 on Cape Cod this summer, electronic signs in town after town flash variations on the same public health mantra. Cover your face. Practice social distancing. At the Provincetown border, a sign on the median repeats those entreaties and adds a third that might tug at your heart, if this is a place that you love. Doing that has required confronting some difficult realities. Mark Cortale, a producer and artist manager who programs the Art House on Commercial Street, said he hoped until mid May that he could open its two intimate stages for a 10th season. The audience, he thought, could be capped at half capacity, with jauntily masked blowup dolls filling empty seats. Then Kristin Chenoweth, whom he had booked for two August performances in the 700 seat auditorium at Provincetown Town Hall, called to postpone until the same weekend next year. And Cortale's principal client, Seth Rudetsky, who hosts the starry Broadway the Art House series, told him bluntly that those concerts had to move online. "He was like, 'Wake up,'" Cortale said. "'Are you watching the news?'" Determined not to be foiled completely, Cortale hunted around for an outdoor space for performers who were eager to play Provincetown this year. Maybe an old amphitheater in the Cape Cod National Seashore would do, if he could rig up a generator? In late May, on Facebook, he spied the solution in a post by Rick Murray, the owner of the Crown: a photo of a poolside outdoor stage, with socially distanced seating. Entrenched rivals, the Art House and the Crown both draw acts from the worlds of drag, Broadway and cabaret. Even in a good year, the window for making money is tight in Provincetown, and competition can be brutal. But when Cortale proposed putting some Art House performers, Roberson and Gold among them, on that stage, Murray agreed. Their willingness to work together, Murray acknowledged in an interview, "turned a few heads in town." Or, as Roberson jovially said, it "probably wouldn't have happened unless it was the end of the world." It may not be the end of the world, but for now at least, the pandemic has altered Provincetown changed the mix of people in its streets, dimmed its spectacle, dulled its sparkle. "You know what it is?" Gold mused the other afternoon, from a safe social distance in an airy room at the Crown. "It's the magic. The magic is gone this year." No show tunes waft through the windows of piano bars; no dance music throbs from the clubs. Performers in drag don't weave through sweat slicked crowds on bikes and motor scooters, calling, "Come to my show!" And the artists who were always out sketching they've disappeared, too. Gold misses all of that, and with it the cherished sense of a place where straight people understand that they are the exception, not the rule. The strange, skewed thing about Provincetown this summer, she and others said, is how disproportionately heterosexual the day tripping visitors are. Town Hall, where Jennifer Holliday, Alan Cumming and Margaret Cho would have played this season, sits silent in the evenings. But its Commercial Street facade stops passers by in their tracks. Bathed in blue and red light, it has a caduceus a symbol for medicine, with winged staff and twined serpents projected high on either side. The display's designers, Chris Racine and Shelley Jennings, mean it as a tribute to front line workers. It is a striking complement to the plentiful street signs labeled "MANDATORY MASK ZONE," and to the friendly "community ambassadors" in red pageant style sashes, whose paid job it is to remind people to mask up properly. Compliance is startlingly close to universal. The town's director of health, Morgan Clark, said she was trying to walk the fine line of keeping everyone safe while protecting both their physical and mental well being. In Provincetown, artistic expression is part of that. "My favorite kind of movie," she said, "is where people sing or dance against all odds." That's pretty much what's happening at Pilgrim House singing and joking, anyway. The drag artist Russ King, a.k.a. Miss Richfield 1981, ordinarily would be selling out the hotel's 180 indoor seats. Instead he's onstage in its pebble paved parking lot, where the capacity is 56, with social distancing. Given a cast and crew of four, that means just 52 audience members in a space that David Nelson Burbank, Pilgrim House's entertainment manager, aptly described as "homey." In the course of a normal year, King does more than 100 shows, 60 of them in Provincetown, from Memorial Day to mid September. This summer, he said, barring any cancellations because of weather or closures because of the pandemic, he will do only 36. Hard as it is to build audience cohesion when people are seated at a distance from one another and from him, he is grateful to be there. "I'm really blessed to be employed," he said. Over at what Varla drolly calls "the Crown Anchor Poolside Emergency Theater," about 80 spectators are permitted at each performance. Most take their masks off once they're in their seats, to have a drink or a snack, though in my experience on two consecutive nights, there was much less than the state mandated six feet between audience members in different parties. Gold and Roberson do solo nights at the Crown, but "The Judy Varla Show" is their joint enterprise. For that, their microphone stands are placed to keep them two yards apart and because there is singing, they must be at least 25 feet from the front row. It's not an ideal way to work: too far from the audience, in too much darkness, to see many faces properly, and without walls for the laughter to bounce off. But what a ripe time to be among the few performers with a live outlet for social commentary. In Roberson's solo show, "Superspreader," there is a pointed moment when Varla holds up a little white mask and ridicules those who say having to wear one is "ripping away their right to breathe fresh air." "Well," she says, looking out at the crowd, "I remember a time not too long ago in our country where almost everybody in this room was federally prohibited from the right to get married." It's a risky line, because it isn't a joke. It's an indignant assertion of what real oppression is, and what's just selfishness masquerading as righteousness. The other night, as a soft breeze floated in off the harbor, she let that idea land. Then she turned to her keyboard player, said, "Hit it, honey," and got on with the show. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
This has been a good year to try new things indoors. Especially for Bruce Nauman. The controlled terrain of this artist's studio has always been more than a work space; it's an arena in which everything, from his body to his words to just the fact of his breathing, can gain the status of art. As early as 1967, first on 16 millimeter film and then with one of the first consumer video cameras, Mr. Nauman documented himself bouncing balls up and down, or stamping his feet on the floor, or walking and playing the same notes repeatedly on the violin. Alone inside he zeroed in on himself with a precision, a menace and a dark humor that would characterize his whole career, and averred that the studio walls were all he needed to approach the biggest questions of creation and mortality. Mr. Nauman is now 78. He would have every right to take it easy at his home in New Mexico or just tend to his horses after a lifetime of innovation that was summed up in a mighty retrospective two years ago at the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1. (Another major retrospective has just opened at Tate Modern in London.) But he is not done with trying new things indoors, and a profound new exhibition at Sperone Westwater Gallery confirms how sedulously he is still pushing the studio's limits. The principal surprise here is a new digital artwork, activated by an iPad touchscreen and projected at high resolution on a gallery wall, which depicts the artist's studio in New Mexico in forensic detail. Grab a pair of COVID obligatory rubber gloves at the front desk, and you can examine this large warehouse from every angle, spinning it around with the same familiar gestures we use every day on our germ covered phones. You can rotate, zoom, look down from the ceiling or up from the floor, like you can with Google Earth. Mr. Nauman is not present or so it seems at first in this document of his studio, a 30 by 60 foot hangar of no great architectural distinction. Movement and time have been suspended, and it feels like a room embalmed. In fact, the work's title is "Nature Morte," which is the French term for "still life," though its invocation of death (la mort) is hardly incidental for Mr. Nauman, who has stared down the end of life with a deadpan consistency in his sculptures, his neons and his video documented performances. (When he was playing his violin back in the studio in 1969, he tuned the four strings to the notes D E A D.) Let me admit: I got nervous when I first heard that Mr. Nauman was making a work for the iPad. So many artists have faltered in the face of digital hucksterism, and I had initially feared that "Nature Morte" was going to be a mere Apple formatted sequel to "Mapping the Studio" (2001), his eerie night vision recording of his work space that filled the basement of Dia Beacon in that museum's first years. But "Nature Morte," I soon learned, is as physical as it is digital. Mr. Nauman undertook the rote business of scanning himself, using a wand equipped with a 3 D camera at the business end. He had to get into every crevice of the studio, above and below and around each object, in order to translate it from matter into media. To make this rendering, the artist needed more than software. Mr. Nauman had to stretch, to crouch, to jump, to lunge, to twist, to shimmy. Notice, as you navigate this digitized studio, how parts of the rendering appear swollen or scrunched. Some sections of wall are totally missing. Objects that should be on the ground seem to float. Spin it in the wrong direction and the walls seem to splinter and disintegrate. Those streaks and glitches are records of the artist's motions in the studio that make visible the gap between his ideas and his actions, between the high abstractions of art and the dumb facts of his body. So often, Mr. Nauman has translated his body into a material, into some malleable or ductile substance casting his knee in resin and then extruding it to six feet long, or slicing his projection in pieces as he walks in an uneven contrapposto. In this iPad work, the body has now become the most fluid of substances: it's information, it's data for an app. Through the medium of the iPad's touchscreen, Mr. Nauman has found a channel to fuse the body and the studio. They come together in a work that feels both like a new direction and a summation, where the artist is everywhere present and yet nowhere to be seen. Two other works by Mr. Nauman, both also substantial, accompany "Nature Morte" at Sperone Westwater and complement its engagement with mortality and preservation. "Two Leaping Foxes" is the latest in a decades long series of sculptures comprising polyurethane foam animal forms the kind taxidermists use suspended upside down to form a kind of chandelier. Two caribou hang near the ceiling, deer sit frozen in midair, and the titular jumping foxes dangle just above the floor. My mind flashed, as I watched Mr. Nauman walk this invisible line, to a passage from Kafka, another artist who pushed bodies to extremes. Here is the first line of Kafka's "Zurau Aphorisms," written at the height of World War I: "The true path is along a rope, not a rope suspended way up in the air, but rather only just over the ground. It seems more like a tripwire than a tightrope." And this is the rope that Mr. Nauman has balanced upon for half a century: an obstacle that seems stupidly simple but turns out to be grandly challenging. It requires the keenest acumen to stay standing, even when your movements seem silly or hopeless. Mr. Nauman began all the works here before the death this May of his wife, the painter Susan Rothenberg. The fact of her passing gives these isolated artworks a greater desolation, as though the nakedness of the splayed out studio and the unsentimentality of the aging body constituted acts of mourning. But all of us, since March, have had to learn to keep going when we end up alone. Inside our own four walls we can see death, but to let art in is a commitment to new life. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
Sequestered in the sound booth, the playwright Paula Vogel wept her way through an entire box of tissues. It was 1997 and the last time she would get to see Mary Louise Parker and David Morse perform their starring roles Off Broadway in "How I Learned to Drive," the memory play that won Obie Awards for all three of them and their director, Mark Brokaw, as well as a Pulitzer Prize for Vogel. "Now, I am grateful to any actor who ever does any role in my plays," she said over a late January lunch in Providence, where she taught for years at Brown University, and where she and her wife still keep a part time home. "But I really imprinted on this first cast." A critically lauded downtown hit at the Vineyard Theater that transferred across the street for a commercial run, "How I Learned to Drive" arrives on Broadway for the first time this spring, starting previews on March 27 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. By all accounts, the experience on that original production was so extraordinary that the principals long ago started musing about a reprise. In the meantime, Parker starred in "Weeds" on Showtime, Brokaw directed her twice on Broadway, Morse went there with "The Seafarer" and "The Iceman Cometh," and Vogel made it to Broadway herself for the first time just three years ago, with "Indecent." In separate interviews, the four collaborators spoke recently about the history of "How I Learned to Drive," evolving awareness of sexual trauma and, for Vogel's part, why she used to say publicly that the story wasn't inspired by her own life. These are edited excerpts. I was so freaked out I didn't tell the theater company. I got off the plane in Alaska and they said, "Where's Cherry?" I said, "OK, some good news and some bad news. First the bad news. Cherry is playing 'The Heiress.' Now the good news. I have this play about " And I think to the artistic director I said, "about my uncle." I wrote it in Juneau in about two weeks, staying up all night. MARK BROKAW When you hear what the play is about, the last thing you would think is that there's laughs in it. But Paula was so wise to lure the audience in. And the way that she spaces out the events of the play you know, she saves till the very end what is really the gut punch, and by that time you're ready to receive it. VOGEL I became obsessed with "Lolita" in college and grad school. I was fascinated by the empathy for Humbert Humbert. I was fascinated by the look at Lolita as a peer to Humbert Humbert. I had already thought when I was 23 or 24, "I don't know how you would do this as a play" my story as a play. I became extremely obsessed, I still am, with the notion of negative empathy. DAVID MORSE I was offered a movie, a very classy movie from a great novel, and the character in it was a father who molests his daughter. I thought, "I can't do this." Then I was asked, just out of the blue, to come to the Vineyard Theater. Reading the play, it's an uncle and his niece, and along the same lines of the movie. But the tone of it was so different. There have been women in my life who have experienced things like this. So it felt important to be able to tell this story, because of the way it was told. VOGEL Three things that I want to talk about. One was a promise to my mother, who read it. To say that her health was fragile is putting it mildly. She asked that I not say that it was autobiographical. The other thing is that whenever women write autobiographically, we are told that we are confessional. No one says that about Sam Shepard, or David Mamet, or Eugene O'Neill. Third thing was there's a myth, and it's I think a very perilous myth, that the reason that women become lesbians is because of sexual trauma, a fear and a hatred of men. The last thing I'm going to do is get put into that category. Now I'm 68, man; I'm in the grandmother category. So say whatever you will. MARY LOUISE PARKER They sent it to me and I read it. It took a few times. I went and asked if I could read it aloud. I wasn't sure if I was too young at the time, which is so ironic because now I'm a little too old, but the second I went to read it out loud, I just felt, I can't wait to do this. It was a scene where she's 13. There are certain ages that are just viscerally so available to me because the memories are so strong, you know? Something about being a 13 year old girl, an 11 year old girl. BROKAW I remember the first few audiences especially. There's a scene where she's with an older man who's trying to convince her to neck, as well as a few other things, in the front seat of a car. VOGEL We wanted it to feel like two people who are very attractive, feeling that eroticism on a summer night, until the very last moment, where she says, "Uncle Peck." BROKAW I just remember the audience gasping at that moment, because there was no thought in anybody's head that it was a relative. VOGEL I think we wanted to pull the rug out. People didn't even talk at that point about saying to people, "This may cause a trigger." That wasn't on anybody's mind. PARKER Reactions after that play were really, really strong, in a way that a handful of times in my life I've seen. People were rattled. VOGEL One of the things I heard was the men saying, "Huh. I'd have some difficulties if she were my niece." And I heard women in the audience go, "If he were my uncle...." And then there was the other response, of people coming forward and saying, "May I talk?" Three out of 10, four out of 10, may be the percentage. I never knew that I'd write a play with that great an audience concurrence. MORSE The numbers of people who couldn't leave after the show because they needed company people who would just be in tears out there. But I think the thing that people were surprised by, and it's what I responded to, was the affection you have for that man, because of the way Paula wrote it, her compassion. It's not what you expect when you see a story about a pedophile or sexual abuser. VOGEL The thing that David gave me that was so important I mean, Mary Louise gave me a clarity David gave me the ability to feel love. Which will make a lot of people very angry. Which is, sometimes good people do terrible things. Sometimes people have illnesses. I don't forgive him the person Peck is based on , but I feel a sympathy, a sorrow, because of David. MORSE Is there going to be a different feeling about Peck? I don't know. BROKAW Trauma is public now and not hidden away, in a way that it was before. There's so much out there now about these deeply damaging relationships that are caused by behavior inflicted by trusted authority figures, able to continue for so long because there was a network of people that were enabling them. In this story, that's true also. I look at that very, very differently. VOGEL I didn't go into this concerned with the forgiveness of that person Peck is based on . I went into this concerned with the forgiveness of myself. Because the truth is the children always feel culpable. And the structure of this is me getting to a point where I'm like, "You know what? You were a kid." That's all I wanted, to get there and feel that. And have it be such a basic truth that my childhood self would accept it. PARKER There was a picture of me and David on the cover of The Village Voice back then. It was this really moody picture, and it said, "Theater Too Tough for Uptown." And that was kind of true. Now we're doing it. It's much riskier than when we did it before, because of the conversations that people are having and how everything is quite polarized. BROKAW It's kind of crazy this play's never been done on Broadway. I feel really lucky to be able to bring this great piece of work to be seen and taken seriously in a way it should be. When something happens on Broadway, there's a certain stamp that gets applied to it. And I think the play deserves that. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
SAN FRANCISCO In an escalation of its ride hailing war against Uber, Lyft has begun to explore going public in 2018 and is trying to strengthen its position by raising more capital, including 1 billion in new financing led by an investment arm of Google's parent company. Lyft has had talks with investment banks about an initial public offering next year, according to two people briefed on the discussions, who asked to remain anonymous because the conversations are confidential. Lyft has not decided which bank may become its lead underwriter for an I.P.O., the people said. To bolster itself ahead of any public offering, Lyft on Thursday said it had raised 1 billion in financing led by CapitalG, a venture investment arm of Google's corporate parent, Alphabet. The funding values Lyft at 10 billion before the introduction of new capital a significant jump from the company's last valuation of 6.9 billion. The new investment further complicates the convoluted web of financial relationships in the ride hailing industry, where companies like Lyft and Uber have hauled in enormous amounts of funding from firms that often put money into competing companies. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
It's tax time again, which means many people will be writing checks to the Internal Revenue Service. But not a lawyer in Los Angeles, who last year put all of his earnings, 840,000, into a tax shelter and plans to put 1 million in this year. He doesn't have to pay any income tax. In fact, he was able to borrow back some of the money to live on and write off the interest on the loan. The attorney accomplished this feat by putting his earnings into a captive insurance company, a vehicle that allows companies to insure themselves against risks that are too expensive to buy coverage for in the regular insurance market or to cover events that are unlikely to happen but would be costly if they actually did. Until a decade or so ago, most captives, as they are known, were set up by large companies. But captives have gained in popularity among small business owners who see another benefit: They can be designed so that the risks they insure are so unlikely that the captives will never pay out a claim and all those premiums will go back to the business owners or their heirs with little or no tax. Stephen M. Moskowitz, a tax lawyer and certified public accountant in San Francisco who advised the California lawyer, said he also worked with a dentist who set up a captive to insure against a terrorist attack in his dental office. He said in an interview that he was confident he was following the letter of the law. "All these Fortune 500s that make billions in profits and don't pay any income taxes? How do they do that? They follow the rules," he said. "My personal opinion is these rules were put in to benefit the big boys, and the medium boys got a hold of them." The question is whether these small captives have gone too far. This year, the Internal Revenue Service placed them on its annual "Dirty Dozen list of tax scams." Small captives now share space with phishing, identity theft and offshore tax avoidance. In its commentary, the I.R.S. criticized wealthy individuals who canceled or greatly reduced their income by putting money into small captives. The agency took particular exception to promoters who drafted policies "to cover ordinary business risks or esoteric, implausible risks for exorbitant 'premiums,' while maintaining their economical commercial coverage with traditional insurers." "They said a couple of things that are extremely general one about unscrupulous promoters," said Celia Clark, a lawyer in New York who wrote an article in Trusts and Estate Magazine last year about the asset protection and estate planning benefits of small captive insurance companies. "But when you're dealing with that level of generality, I don't get anything out of that that would be useful. We're waiting to hear how it plays out in court." Other lawyers are warning their business owning clients to be wary of the siren song of captives or at least to make sure they have a real insurance need and are not blinded by other supposed benefits of captives. David Slenn, a lawyer at Quarles Brady in Naples, Fla., and the chairman of the American Bar Association's captive insurance committee, said the push to set up small captives had gotten out of hand. The interest in captives is being driven by lawyers and accountants who are seeking additional fees now that the estate tax exemption has been permanently set and there is not as much annual business, he said. "When you consider insurance and what it's traditionally used for and you compare that to some of the worst offenders with a captive, you see it was set up to achieve a different role," Mr. Slenn said. "We're starting to see this flood of people from the trusts and estates world using the captive as part of an estate planning structure. It's becoming absurd. People are marketing captives as a possible substitution for estate planning." He predicted that the I.R.S. would go after the worst offenders to make an example of them. These include captive insurance companies that are owned by trusts as opposed to a company and have accumulated a lot without ever paying out claims. Another is the the captives that make loans to the heirs of the business owner who benefits from the trusts or allow the heirs to use their interests as collateral to buy something else. However these captives are set up, Mr. Slenn said, they have distorted the original purpose of captives and also sidestepped the gift tax laws. The costs to set up a small captive, about 100,000, and to maintain them, around 50,000 a year, are steep. But they can be deducted as business expenses. At the outer limits, captives are being promoted as a way around gift and estate taxes and as a vehicle to retain employees in a private company. If a captive were found by the I.R.S. to be abusing the law, the deductions would be denied and back taxes and penalties owed. But the burden of proof seems to be high. The I.R.S. went after Mr. Moskowitz's dentist who insured against a terrorist attack in his dental practice but lost, he said. "At first blush you'd say, 'No way,'" he said. "The I.R.S. said no. The tax court said yes. We won." Other insurance risks that get listed for policies written by captive insurance companies include disability, employment practice liability, business interruption and online attacks. Yet most business owners who set up captives keep their regular insurance they also get a deduction for those premiums and never pay out a claim from their captives. So they keep all that tax free money in a company they or their heirs own. "You hope there are no claims," Mr. Moskowitz said. "I've owned my house for 25 years. I've never made a claim. But the insurance company keeps taking your premium." The insurance company has at least been insuring against the risk of fire. And likewise, a small captive is supposed to insure a legitimate risk. Beckett Cantley, an associate professor at John Marshall Law School, said recently that the I.R.S. had started to question whether someone would have bought insurance for a certain risk without the tax benefits of a captive. The agency is also looking at loans made immediately back to the person who set up the captive. "If you needed the funds so badly for the business, why did you take out such a large insurance policy?" Mr. Cantley said. Then, there is the estate planning component for people who don't need the money in their lifetime. Ms. Clark, whose clients are almost entirely family held businesses, said using captives to pass wealth to children or grandchildren free of estate and gift taxes is appealing to her clients. As she explained it, the captive could be set up and owned by children and grandchildren. Except for the money paid to establish the captive as an insurance company, the rest of the money put into the shelter would be free of gift tax. "The really huge advantage that I didn't spell out in the Trusts and Estates article because I don't want the wrath of an enormous agency coming down on my head is that the only gift that is considered a gift is the initial contribution being paid into the trust," Ms. Clark said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
After Mr. Carlino read Mr. Conroy's novel about a son's troubled relationship with his authoritarian and abusive father, a Marine Corps fighter pilot, he later recalled, he wrote furiously, finishing the entire screenplay in 21 days. "I loved its humanity. I loved its humor," Mr. Carlino told The New York Times in 1980. "The people were very real. They just leaped off the page for me." Lewis John Carlino was born on Jan. 1, 1932, in Queens to Sicilian immigrants. His father, Joseph Carlino, was a tailor, and his mother, Ida (Orcel) Carlino, was a homemaker. Mr. Carlino's father died when he was 14, and his mother moved the family to Los Angeles, where he graduated from Manual Arts High School. He enlisted in the Air Force as a medic in 1951 and served during the Korean War. Upon returning to civilian life, Mr. Carlino attended El Camino College in Torrance, Calif., and then studied playwriting at the University of Southern California. After graduating in 1959, he earned a master's degree in theater from the university in 1960. His first plays were produced by the university's Workshop Theater while he was an undergraduate there. His work later found its way onto professional stages in Los Angeles and New York, where he earned the Drama Desk Vernon Rice Award for excellence in Off Broadway theater. After a successful run at a summer theater festival in 1967, his play "The Exercise" opened on Broadway in April 1968, starring Anne Jackson and Stephen Joyce. But the reviews were negative, and it closed after only five performances. When Mr. Carlino returned to El Camino College to direct his play "The Brick and the Rose" in the early 1960s, he met and married Natelle Lamkin, who later acted in local productions in Ojai, Calif. They had three children: Vone Natelle Carlino, who died in 1988; Lewis John Carlino II, who died in 2018; and Alessa, who survives him, along with one grandson and one great granddaughter. Mr. Carlino's first marriage ended in divorce in 1970. In 1976 he married Jilly Chadwick, whom he met while she was working as a script supervisor on "The Brotherhood." She died in 2015. Though his work faced harsh criticism at times, Mr. Carlino always prided himself on knowing his characters inside and out. Discussing "Resurrection," Mr. Carlino emphasized his ability to create and intuit his subjects. "I've lived moment to moment with every character in that screenplay," he said. "If I don't know the answers, nobody does." Especially as he grew older, Mr. Carlino focused less on seeking critical acclaim and more on the satisfaction of sculpting complex characters. After projects including "The Great Santini" received mixed reviews, he moved to Whidbey Island and began choosing his work based on whether the story would allow him to evoke emotion. At the time of his death, his most recent play, "Visible Grace," was in development for production. "I love to write people, you know," he said in the Times interview. "I'm trying to get back to subjects that have some affirmation for the human condition." "The work that I do from now on," he continued, "should make you feel good about being alive." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Sarah Kershaw, a former reporter for The New York Times who covered real estate, the Pacific Northwest and New York City schools, died on Monday at her home in Sosua, a beach town in the Dominican Republic. She was 49. She was found with a plastic bag tied over her head and pill bottles beside her, said Osvaldo Bonilla, a prosecutor for the province of Puerto Plata, who is investigating her death. Officials are awaiting the results of toxicology tests before determining the cause of death, but Ms. Kershaw told friends that she planned to end her life because she suffered from a debilitating illness, Mr. Bonilla said. Contrary to an initial report released by the Dominican National Police, Ms. Kershaw was not strangled, he said. Her husband, William Paul Norton, was held for questioning but was released without charges. Ms. Kershaw joined The Times in 1995 as a news clerk, writing articles about New York City schools and New Jersey on a freelance basis, before leaving for Newsday. She returned to The Times in 2000 and covered local news until her promotion to bureau chief in Seattle. She later wrote for the Styles and Real Estate sections. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
It took Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez too long to bring coherence to the pandemic's response. Overconfidence in our health care capacity took care of the rest. MADRID For years, we have heard Spain's leaders say that we had "the best health care in the world." This political fantasy has now met with a rude awakening. We have learned the hard way that being deemed the healthiest nation in the world by the World Economic Forum is not the same as having the best health care system. The health care workers at the forefront of the pandemic garbed in trash bags for protection and forced to choose which patients to connect to ventilators had long tried to debunk the myth surrounding the superiority of health care in Spain, denouncing serious deficiencies in the country's hospitals. We now know they were right. What we may never know is how many lives could have been saved if the country had heeded their warnings earlier. Spain has both one of the world's highest coronavirus mortality rates, with over 17,000 people, and the highest rate of infected health care workers. But hospitals had reached their limit before the first Covid 19 patient arrived. It was not uncommon for single a doctor in a hospital to treat up to 60 patients a day. Last year, medical professionals took to the streets, demanding dignity for their profession and better compensation. They are now being battered by the pandemic. The government's delayed response to the pandemic, coupled with an aging population and the physical affection that tends to characterize Mediterranean people, contributed to Spain becoming an epicenter of the epidemic. However, some of the decisions that undermined the response were a result of the austerity measures imposed after the 2008 financial crisis. The country spent a decade under the Excessive Deficit Procedure set by the European Commission. Budgetary restrictions forced the central and regional governments to make cuts to education, social welfare and health care, which increased inequality and poverty. A reduction in the number of doctors and hospital beds in recent years has become one of the most lethal consequences of focusing on numbers, not people. Public health in Spain has been sustained for over a decade by low paid professionals with temporary contracts, which is unfair given their level of responsibility. There is a chronic shortage of nurses in the country. Since the health care cuts began, more than 8,000 nurses have migrated to the United Kingdom, France or Germany in search of work. Those who opt to stay in Spain are paid around 1.000 euros, or about 1,080, a month. The shortage of personnel is among the major backlogs facing hospitals. About 700,000 patients were waiting for operations before the crisis, according to the Spanish National Health System. There is very little data on what has happened with those patients since. We don't know how many patients with pathologies unrelated to Covid 19 have died or have continued to decline because they could not be treated. Information provided by authorities in towns and cities around the country suggests there could be thousands of Covid 19 undiagnosed victims. The government has had to call in medical retirees and students to fill staffing gaps in the midst of the emergency. For weeks, a lack of resources has meant that three generations of health care workers have had to face the trauma of seeing the sick become terminally ill and comforting patients far from their families with a lonely final goodbye. The pandemic is testing health care systems around the world. With exceptions like Germany, most countries were unprepared. It's still too early to determine with absolute certainty why Germany's patient mortality rate is much lower than Spain's, but there are some apparent reasons. Germany's health care system has three times the number of intensive care units than Spain does, laboratories with the capacity to carry out massive testing among the population and enough ventilators to meet an unforeseen demand. And in recent years its leaders have endeavored to improve care. Spain was unable to pull together a coordinated response in the first weeks of the epidemic. Each of the country's 17 autonomous communities has a different health care model, which were all placed under a unified command after the declaration of the state of emergency. Until then, politicians from different parties made disparate decisions, competed among themselves, and sent contradictory messages. It took President Pedro Sanchez's central government too long to bring order and coherence to the response. Overconfidence in our health care system took care of the rest. Our leaders have spent years making the mistake, deliberately or not, of equating the quality of the health care system with life expectancy; Spain leads in that indicator because it benefits from factors such as nutrition and lifestyle. Now that the myth of infallible health care has been dispelled, and we've paid a high price for upholding that illusion, it's time to build a model that's capable of meeting the needs of an increasingly elderly and vulnerable population. Every day at 8 p.m., we applaud our health care workers from our windows and balconies. Politicians continue to remind us that without their efforts the situation would be even worse. This is fair recognition that will amount to empty words if it isn't backed up with concrete measures. Many health care workers will need psychological support, which should be provided. Job insecurity and exploitation must end. Personnel shortages will need to be covered. After the creation of a parliamentary commission to investigate mistakes made, the fragmented public health system must be overhauled to improve coordination. And resources should be provided to our health workers, if not at the level of "the best health care in the world," then at least at a level corresponding to a developed European nation. This time no one will be able to say Spain's health care workers don't deserve it. If the current emergency has taught us a lesson, it is that the most vulnerable in society end up paying for cuts in essential services. Austerity policies can never be valued over people's lives. As Spain faces difficult times once again, like the rest of the world, we cannot forget that the decisions we make to resolve this crisis will determine the fate of future generations. David Jimenez ( DavidJimenezTW) is a writer and journalist. His most recent book is "El director." This article was translated from the Spanish by Erin Goodman. 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 |
Good mental health care is scarce in many parts of the United States, but it is nonexistent in most of the world. In developing countries, the ratio of mental health professionals to citizens is about one in a million and that vast majority of people with treatable conditions like anxiety and depression are left to their own devices, or to the ministrations of local folk healers. This week, the World Bank and the World Health Organization are convening hundreds of doctors, aid groups and government officials to start an ambitious effort to move mental health to the forefront of the international development agenda. "The situation with mental health today is like H.I.V. AIDS two decades ago," Tim Evans, the senior director of health, nutrition and population at the World Bank Group, said Tuesday in a call with reporters. "We are kick starting a similar movement for mental health, putting it squarely on the global agenda." In a review of data from 36 countries, including poor nations in Africa and Asia as well as affluent countries in Europe and elsewhere, an international research team calculated that every dollar of investment in such programs would bring a return of 3 to 5 in recovered economic contributions and years of healthy life. The study appears in the journal The Lancet Psychiatry. "About 30 percent of total disability costs are due to mental health disorders this is huge number," said Dr. Shekhar Saxena, director of the mental health and substance abuse department at the World Health Organization and one of the study's co authors. An expert not involved in the research said the analysis used state of the art methods and was persuasive, given how little is known about interventions in developing countries in particular. "For a decision maker at the Ministry of Finance, these numbers would be a low risk, high gain investment," said the expert, Kjell Arne Johansson, an associate professor of global public health and primary care at the University of Bergen in Norway. Dr. Johansson added, however, that because there were "few health economic evaluations of this kind available," it was difficult to compare the expected returns on investment in other types of prevention and treatment programs. Mental health has traditionally languished near the bottom of the international health agenda, as well as nations' health spending. But international aid groups have sponsored dozens of interventions for anxiety and depression in developing countries: for example, training mental health workers in Liberia in the wake of the Ebola outbreak and the civil war there; and setting up screening and treatment services for women in Rwanda victimized by sexual or gender based abuse. In the analysis, the research team used a standardized tool called OneHealth to calculate treatment costs and outcomes in the 36 countries from 2016 to 2030. Assuming a 5 percent improvement in health and restored productivity, the research team calculated that an investment of 147 billion in treatment for these common mood disorders would result in some 400 billion in returns, said Dan Chisholm a health economist at W.H.O. and another co author of the study. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
A year from now, the world will begin to gather in Japan to celebrate the opening of the Tokyo Olympics, which were originally supposed to begin this week. Four months after the International Olympic Committee and officials in Japan postponed the Games amid soaring coronavirus infection rates and lockdowns across the world, uncertainty prevails. The unpredictable nature of the virus is making it impossible for officials to say definitively that the Games will happen or, if they do, what they might look like. Maybe there won't be spectators. Maybe only people living in Japan will be able to attend. Or maybe only those from countries where the virus is under control. Will there be an Olympic village, the traditional home for the roughly 10,000 competitors? Will athletes from the United States, where the pandemic shows no signs of abating, be allowed to attend? In a news conference last week, Thomas Bach, the president of the I.O.C., said that planning for the Games now involves multiple options. All of them, he said, prioritize the health of the athletes. "It includes all different countermeasures," Bach said of the planning. "An Olympic Games behind closed doors is clearly something we do not want. We are working for a solution that safeguards the health of all the participants and is also reflecting of the Olympic spirit." Bach has said a further postponement is not an option at the moment; if the Games cannot be held next summer, they will not be held at all. As sports leagues everywhere struggle to return to some semblance of normalcy while balancing virus outbreaks and safety concerns, the challenges of planning a global event that is still a year away have only grown or merely been exacerbated as hot spots for infections continue to shift. "People right now are focused on the health of the citizens of their countries," said Harvey Schiller, the former chief executive of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee. Despite a recent spike in coronavirus cases and a ban on travel from 129 countries, the official line in Japan remains that the postponed 2020 Games will open on July 23, 2021, in Tokyo. Shortly after Yuriko Koike, the governor of Tokyo, won a second term earlier this month, she met with Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, to discuss measures to contain the virus. "I would like to lead the Olympics and Paralympics next year as proof that we have overcome the coronavirus," she said. On Wednesday, Tokyo raised its pandemic alert level to red, its highest classification, in response to a recent spike in cases concentrated in the metropolis's sprawling nightlife district. In the last two weeks, Tokyo has recorded several consecutive daily records, hitting a peak of 293 new infections last Friday. Compared with other international cities, Tokyo has been relatively successful in containing the virus. A city of 14 million people, it has reported less than 9,000 cases and 326 deaths since February, compared with more than 3.5 million cases and nearly 140,000 deaths in the United States. Traditionally the financial engine of an Olympics, the United States currently poses perhaps the biggest threat to the Games. Part of Japan's strategy has been to close its borders to citizens traveling from 129 countries, including the United States and large portions of Europe, Africa, Latin America and the rest of Asia. Japan has recently announced plans to negotiate some reciprocal travel between Japan and Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and Vietnam, but it has not indicated when it plans to reopen its borders to travelers from the rest of the world. Even inside Japan, citizens remain wary about traveling: a plan to encourage domestic travel was met with resistance as people worried that Tokyo residents could spread the virus to other parts of the country. On Friday, the country's tourism minister discouraged Tokyo residents from visiting other prefectures and said that government travel discounts would not apply to travelers to or from Tokyo. Polls suggest the public is also wary of the Olympics. In a survey late last month by The Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan's largest daily newspapers, 59 percent of those polled said they wanted the Olympics to be postponed again or canceled. Koike, though, was recently re elected governor of Tokyo in a landslide, even as she adhered to the official position of holding the Games in 2021. In a sign of the continuing havoc that the coronavirus is inflicting on the global sports calendar, the I.O.C. on Wednesday postponed the 2022 Summer Youth Olympic Games, planned for Senegal, until 2026. Bach said holding three Olympics Games the Tokyo Games, the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing and the 2024 Summer Games in Paris plus youth Games in 2022 and 2024 was too overwhelming. The same day, Richard W. Pound, a longtime member of the I.O.C. from Canada, floated the possibility of a cancellation of the Beijing Games in an interview with Reuters. On Friday, Bach said specific plans for how the Tokyo Games would unfold were still far from complete. "How can you know already in detail maybe the most complex event to organize in the world?" Bach said in a news conference in which he announced his intention to seek another term as I.O.C. president. "You can put potential developments together, but you cannot have a solution today." The coronavirus has forced NBC, which has committed about 8 billion for the United States media rights to the Games through 2032 and is the I.O.C.'s leading source of revenue, to consider reducing its contingent of roughly 2,000 workers and hundreds of guests. NBC also has had to rethink how it will present the story of the Olympics, since that story has changed significantly. "It's impossible to predict what the circumstances will be a year from now," said Molly Solomon, the executive producer of NBC's Olympics production. With social distancing limiting her team's access to athletes, they have asked competitors to document their training regimens so the network has footage of this transformative experience. "I do think this has a chance to be the most memorable Games in history," Solomon said. During a recent conference call with athletes, though, leaders of the U.S.O.P.C. had few concrete answers. No one could say if athletes would still have to share rooms in the Olympic Village, if the common dining hall would be a potentially germ spreading buffet, or if the American team traditionally the biggest contingent at any Games might have to be housed separately from people representing other nations. "Athletes are yearning for more concrete communication directly from the I.O.C. and other organizations," said Han Xiao, chairman of the U.S.O.P.C.'s Athletes' Advisory Council. The United States team of more than 500 athletes might have to be smaller, though so far the I.O.C. has maintained that it does not plan to reduce the number of events or participants. "There is a lot of speculation and proposals, but not one specific plan that anyone is able to focus on," said Christian Taylor, a two time gold medalist in the triple jump. Rick Adams, the chief of sport performance at the U.S.O.P.C., said the organization remained focused on Plan A a typical Olympic Games with most athletes living and eating in the Olympic Village and using a training center the U.S.O.P.C. will set up in Tokyo's Setagaya City neighborhood. But the organization also has considered how it would adjust if it has to come up with an alternative plan for housing and feeding its team, and for shrinking its support staff. "We understand what a pivot might look like," Adams said. "We know how to adjust quickly and would be able to do that." Xiao, the athletes' council chairman, said thinking about travel restrictions is keeping athletes awake at night. Many need to compete to qualify for the Games, and also to hone their skills for an event that for many is the zenith of their athletic lives. Doing that properly requires the intensity of competition, Xiao said. But athletes also need assurances that they will be allowed to take part. Governments generally can't interfere with a qualified athlete's right to participate in the Games, but those debates are usually related to political issues. The coronavirus has changed the equation. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
EMERYVILLE, Calif. Huddled under blankets to brace against the cold, J.B. August and his buddies couldn't help grinning as the doors of the boarded up GameStop store finally opened. The six men, strangers turned friends after camping outside on the sidewalk all night, let out whoops of excitement on Tuesday morning as they finally got inside to buy the boxy yet sleek new Xboxes. "I'm just treating myself it's therapy," said Mr. August, 35, before triumphantly carrying the device out of the store after 18 hours of waiting. "I never really have time to do anything for myself, so let me just go ahead and make an investment for myself and my peace of mind." The gaming craze on display in the Bay Area was echoed around the country this week as video gamers flocked to stores and crashed preorder websites in their rush to buy new video game consoles: Microsoft's Xbox Series X and Sony's PlayStation 5. The release of the devices heralded the beginning of a new generation for video gamers, but in many ways was just an exclamation point on what has already been a huge year in the gaming industry. With much of the world confined to homes throughout the coronavirus pandemic, many have sought out entertainment for the first time through games on various devices. Hard core fans are logging more hours on their screens, too. Gamers worldwide are expected to spend a record 175 billion on software alone in 2020, according to Newzoo, a gaming analytics firm, up from 146 billion a year ago. In the United States, gamers spent 33.7 billion across hardware, accessories and content through September, according to the NPD Group. And Piers Harding Rolls, a research director at Ampere Analysis, an analytics firm in London, projected that Sony would sell 8.5 million PS5s and Microsoft would sell 6.5 million of the Xbox Series X and the smaller, cheaper Series S through March. But some Wall Street investors wonder: Are the pandemic fueled growth and soaring profits of the video game industry which was already bigger, by sales, than the film and music industries sustainable after the virus subsides and doors to the outside are flung open again? When news broke Monday that a Pfizer vaccine candidate had been found to be encouragingly effective in fighting the coronavirus, video game stocks like Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts and Take Two Interactive fell along with quarantine mainstays like Zoom and Peloton. "It's a concern on the part of a lot of investors that once stay at home rules are eased, that these publishers will see less engagement with their games," said Yung Kim, an entertainment technology analyst for Piper Sandler Company. "It's a matter of how people decide to spend their time." Interviews with two dozen gamers, livestreamers turned influencers, analysts and company executives, however, found that most in the industry are convinced this is not just a pandemic related boom. People who believe gaming newcomers will be loath to drop their devices when concert venues, movie theaters and sports arenas reopen point to what they see as an inherent "stickiness" to their products. Gamers build communities and grow accustomed to socializing with their friends and family over rounds of Fortnite or Among Us, the argument goes, and those bonds only strengthen over time. "If you look at what teens are doing across America actually across the globe right now this is kind of their social currency," said Jaci Hays, the chief operating officer of FaZe Clan, an e sports conglomerate whose popular gamers can make six or seven figures a year. "We don't see it slowing down." Nick Kolcheff, a FaZe Clan member who earns a living streaming Fortnite and Call of Duty to the 4.5 million people following his Nickmercs Twitch channel, said the gaming boom had caused an entire generation of children to idolize famous streamers just as they would professional athletes. "There's a real commitment, there's a real addiction," he said. "After those teeth sink in, it's kind of hard to bob and weave and get out." Mr. Kolcheff declined to say how much money he makes from Twitch, but a recent study by the online lender CashNetUSA estimated that he earns more than 1.7 million annually from the platform. Twitch itself has had a banner year and now draws nearly 27 million average daily visitors, up from 17.5 million toward the beginning of 2020. The site, which is owned by Amazon, has hired hundreds of people this year, and is seeing nongaming live streams like cooking, travel, music and fitness flourish as well, said its chief operating officer, Sara Clemens. Ms. Clemens argued that the ecosystem Twitch had built could outlast the pandemic. "When people have built bonds on Twitch, when communities have formed around creators, those are incredibly durable over time, and so we are optimistic that those will sustain," she said. There are reasons for hesitation, however, despite many industry leaders' rosy forecasts. Joost van Dreunen, a New York University professor who studies the business of video games, said that if gaming companies felt as optimistic about the industry's future as they claimed, there would have been a slate of acquisitions and investments over the past several months. "It's strange to me that the industry, in this moment of incredible momentum, has failed or refused to use it as tinder to just light a fire," he said. "Why hasn't the top brass in the games industry taken more risk?" Some companies have made moves, as when Microsoft spent 7.5 billion in September to buy ZeniMax Media and its host of game studios. But an overall dearth of acquisitions, Mr. van Dreunen said, provides an opportunity for companies like Google and Amazon to force their way into the market by buying studios themselves. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Donald J. Trump and Boris Johnson: Is this how the era ushered in by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher finally ends? It once looked as though the financial crisis of 2008 might even bring about the end of laissez faire economics. "The idea of an all powerful market which is always right is finished," declared Nicolas Sarkozy, then the president of France. And Peer Steinbruck, Germany's finance minister at the time, predicted that "the U.S. will lose its status as the superpower of the world financial system." Even Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman, once known as the "maestro" of capitalism, declared himself "in a state of shocked disbelief" at the collapse wrought by the unfettered markets he had championed throughout his life. "I've found a flaw," he said. "I've been very distressed by that fact." But I suspect few would have guessed that the economic order built on Reagan's and Thatcher's common faith in unfettered global markets (and largely accepted by their more liberal successors Bill Clinton and Tony Blair) would be brought down by right wing populists riding the anger of a working class that has been cast aside in the globalized economy that the two leaders trumpeted 40 years ago. Britons' vote last week to exit the European Union was not simply about their idiosyncratic distaste for all things European an aversion shared by Thatcher, who saw Brussels as the kind of meddlesome big government she loathed. Brussels was merely a stand in for something deeper: the very globalization that Thatcher as Britain's prime minister so enthusiastically promoted. The so called Brexit vote was driven by an inchoate sense among older white workers with modest education that they have been passed over, condemned by forces beyond their control to an uncertain job for little pay in a world where their livelihoods are challenged not just by cheap Asian workers halfway around the world, but closer to home by waves of immigrants of different faiths and skin tones. It is the same frustration that has buoyed proto fascist political parties across Europe. It is the same anger fueling the candidacy of Mr. Trump in the United States. Across Europe in struggling Spain and affluent Sweden, even in Europe's champion competitor, Germany more citizens would like to see powers returned from Brussels to their national governments than would like to see more powers go the other way, according to a poll conducted last spring by the Pew Research Center. Older people throughout the European Union express nearly as much dissatisfaction as those in Britain's aging industrial heartland who defied the will of the young and voted to leave by a wide margin. Even at the very center of the European project, only 31 percent of the French 50 years old and up have a favorable view of the European Union. Their frustration is turning traditional ideological labels on their heads. Mr. Trump, a bombastic businessman who's never held office, and Mr. Johnson, the former journalist turned mayor of London, might not put it this way, since they continue to cling to a conservative mantle. But they are riding a revolt of the working class against a 40 year long project of the political right and its corporate backers that has dominated policy making in the English speaking world for a generation. As the conservative magazine National Review gleefully noted, the big "Leave" victories came "deep in the Labour heartland." So where does capitalism go now? What can replace a consensus built by a charismatic American president and a bull in a china shop British prime minister in favor of small governments and unrestrained markets around the world? The British political scientist Andrew Gamble at the University of Cambridge has argued that Western capitalism has experienced two transformational crises since the end of the 19th century. The first, brought about by the Depression of the 1930s, ended an era in which governments bowed to the gospel of the gold standard and were expected to butt out of the battles between labor and capital, letting markets function on their own, whatever the consequences. Netflix buys a visual effects company in a move to support its global ambitions. 15 minimum wage for federal contractors will take effect Jan. 30. In his 2010 book, "Capitalism 4.0," the London based economic commentator Anatole Kaletsky refers to a document in the archive of the British Treasury that shows the reaction of the permanent secretary to a proposal by the great economist John Maynard Keynes to use government spending to spur Britain's economy. It has three words: "Extravagance, Inflation, Bankruptcy." Mr. Keynes's views ultimately prevailed, though, providing the basis for a new post World War II orthodoxy favoring active government intervention in the economy and a robust welfare state. But that era ended when skyrocketing oil prices and economic mismanagement in the 1970s brought about a combination of inflation and unemployment that fatally undermined people's trust in the state. Even the former president of France Francois Mitterrand a Socialist who nationalized the banking system, increased government employment and raised public sector pay after being elected in 1981 was forced into a U turn. In 1983, he froze the budget and brought about "la rigueur": the austerity. The Keynesian era ended when Thatcher and Reagan rode onto the scene with a version of capitalism based on tax cuts, privatization and deregulation that helped revive their engines of growth but led the workers of the world to the deeply frustrating, increasingly unequal economy of today. There are potentially constructive approaches to set the world economy on a more promising path. For starters, what about taking advantage of rock bottom interest rates to tap the world's excess funds to build and repair a fraying public infrastructure? That would employ legions of blue collar workers and help increase economic growth, which has been only inching ahead across much of the industrialized world. After the Brexit vote, Lawrence Summers, former Treasury secretary under President Clinton and one of President Obama's top economic advisers at the nadir of the Great Recession, laid out an argument for what he called "responsible nationalism," which focused squarely on the interests of domestic workers. Instead of negotiating more agreements to ease business across borders, governments would focus on deals to improve labor and environmental standards internationally. They might cut deals to prevent cross border tax evasion. There is, however, little evidence that the world's leaders will go down that path. Despite the case for economic stimulus, austerity still rules across much of the West. In Europe, most governments have imposed stringent budget cuts ensuring that all but the strongest economies would stall. In the United States, political polarization has brought fiscal policy spending and taxes to a standstill. The cost of inaction could be enormous. Mr. Johnson's campaign to reject British membership of the European Union is already producing political and economic shock waves around the world. Mr. Trump whose solutions include punishing China with high tariffs and building a wall with Mexico is trying to ride workers' angst into the most powerful job in the world. There are less catastrophic ways to put an end to an era. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
Two decades have passed since diplomats from around the world emerged from a conference hall in Kyoto, Japan, with what was billed as the first deal ever to limit emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat trapping greenhouse gases that are relentlessly warming the earth's atmosphere. Climate diplomacy has made a lot of progress since then. All but one of the world's nations the United States have enlisted in the cause, making concrete commitments to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels. Leaving aside President Trump's past declarations that climate change is a hoax, there are heartening signs that the strategy may work: Global carbon dioxide emissions have stopped rising. Coal use in China may have peaked. The price of wind turbines and solar panels is plummeting, putting renewable energy within the reach of meager budgets in the developing world. The term refers to a measure of the amount of CO spewed into the air for each unit of energy consumed. It offers some bad news: It has not budged since that chilly autumn day in Kyoto 20 years ago. Even among the highly industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the carbon intensity of energy has declined by a paltry 4 percent since then, according to the International Energy Agency. This statistic, alone, puts a big question mark over the strategies deployed around the world to replace fossil energy. In a nutshell: Perhaps renewables are not the answer. Over the past 10 years, governments and private investors have collectively spent 2 trillion on infrastructure to draw electricity from the wind and the sun, according to estimates by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Environmental Progress, a nonprofit that advocates nuclear power as an essential tool in the battle against climate change, says that exceeds the total cost of all nuclear plants built to date or under construction, adjusted for inflation. Capacity from renewable sources has grown by leaps and bounds, outpacing growth from all other sources including coal, natural gas and nuclear power in recent years. Solar and wind capacity installed in 2015 was more than 10 times what the International Energy Agency had forecast a decade before. Environmental Progress performed an analysis of the evolution of the carbon intensity of energy in 68 countries since 1965. It found no correlation between the additions of solar and wind power and the carbon intensity of energy: Despite additions of renewable capacity, carbon intensity remained flat. Some countries have bucked the trend. Denmark has sharply cut its carbon intensity with vast installations of wind turbines. And yet Germany's experience seems to be more typical. The country went all out in deploying wind and solar energy over the past 10 years, but the decline in carbon intensity was minuscule, from 212 to 203 grams of CO per kilowatt hour. The renewables or bust crowd on the periphery of the meeting in Bonn might argue that the sun and wind owe their poor track record at decarbonization in countries like Germany to the fact that nuclear power was being phased out at the same time that they came online. It is true that Germans would have made more progress in the battle against climate change had they kept their nuclear reactors running and shut plants burning lignite instead. Still, there are other reasons behind renewables' poor track record in decarbonizing electricity. Nuclear power faces hurdles beyond popular mistrust. Notably, reactors require a lot of capital up front. But renewables have a hard time producing power at a nuclear scale. For instance, the Diablo Canyon reactor that California plans to close produces 14 times as much power as the Topaz solar farm, which requires 500 times as much land, according to Environmental Progress. The Wind Catcher farm in Oklahoma occupies 2,400 times as much land as Diablo Canyon but produces half as much energy. 1. Time for action is running out. The major agreement struck by diplomats established a clear consensus that all nations need to do much more, immediately, to prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperatures. 2. How much each nation needs to cut remains unresolved. Rich countries are disproportionately responsible for global warming, but some leaders have insisted that it's the poorer nations who need to accelerate their shift away from fossil fuels. 3. The call for disaster aid increased. One of the biggest fights at the summit revolved around whether and how the world's wealthiest nations should compensate poorer nations for the damage caused by rising temperatures. 4. A surprising emissions cutting agreement. Among the other notable deals to come out of the summit was a U.S. China agreement to do more to cut emissions this decade, and China committed for the first time to develop a plan to reduce methane. 5. There was a clear gender and generation gap. Those with the power to make decisions about how much the world warms were mostly old and male. Those who were most fiercely protesting the pace of action were mostly young and female. The most worrisome aspect about the all out push for a future powered by renewables has to do with cost: The price of turbines and solar panels may be falling, but the cost of integrating these intermittent sources of energy on when the wind blows and the sun shines; off when they don't is not. This alone will sharply curtail the climate benefits of renewable power. Integrating renewable sources requires vast investments in electricity transmission to move power from intermittently windy and sunny places to places where power is consumed. It requires maintaining a backstop of idle plants that burn fossil fuel, for the times when there is no wind or sun to be had. It requires investing in power storage systems at a large scale. These costs will ultimately be reflected in power prices. One concern is that by raising the retail cost of electricity they will discourage electrification, encouraging consumers to rely on alternative energy sources like gas and pushing CO emissions up. Another concern is that they will drive wholesale energy prices down too far. Because they produce the most energy when the sun is up and the wind is blowing, renewable generators can flood the grid at critical times of the day, slashing the price of power. This not only threatens the solvency of nuclear reactors, which cannot shut down on a dime and must therefore pay for the grid to accept their power, but also reduces the return on additional investment in renewables. A study by Lion Hirth of the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin found that the value of wind power falls from 110 percent of the average power price to 50 to 80 percent as the penetration of wind rises from zero to 30 percent of total consumption. "Competitive large scale renewables deployment will be more difficult to accomplish than many anticipate," he concluded. The diplomats in Bonn may be tempted to wave away these concerns. Thomas Bruckner of the University of Leipzig argues that in the case of Germany, expanding renewables to supply 80 percent of power by 2050 is "not a significant burden." Heavy German investment in renewable energy technologies over the last decade succeeded in bringing prices down, he contends; it will be much cheaper to go the rest of the way. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Economy |
William McPherson, a novelist and Pulitzer Prize winning book critic for The Washington Post who won late life acclaim for a rueful essay describing his descent into poverty, died on Tuesday in Washington. He was 84. The cause was complications of congestive heart failure and pneumonia, his daughter, Jane McPherson, said. Mr. McPherson had been working as a senior editor at William Morrow in New York when Benjamin C. Bradlee, the editor of The Post, lured him to the newspaper in 1969 and placed him in charge of its Sunday book supplement, then called Book Week. When Book Week, jointly produced by The Post and The Chicago Tribune, ceased publication in 1972, Mr. McPherson became the first editor of its successor, Book World, produced solely by The Post. Under his editorship, Book World took its place as one of the leading literary publications in the United States, and his wide ranging, elegantly written reviews played no small part in establishing its reputation. In 1977, awarding him the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism, the prize judges noted his "broad literary and historic perspective." In late middle age, Mr. McPherson unexpectedly delivered a novel, "Testing the Current," a coming of age tale about an 8 year old boy living in a small Midwestern town in the late 1930s. More than five years in the writing, it was published in 1984 to the kind of critical superlatives to which Mr. McPherson, as an editor, might have applied the blue pencil. The novelist Russell Banks, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called it "an extraordinarily intelligent, powerful and, I believe, permanent contribution to the literature of family, childhood and memory." He added, "From the first sentence of 'Testing the Current' to the last, there is not one false note, one forced image. It is a novel written with great skill, and with love. It's what most good first novels merely aspire to be." After writing a sequel, "To the Sargasso Sea," published in 1987, Mr. McPherson embarked on a new journalistic adventure. On something like a whim, he headed to Romania after the fall of its dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, and stayed for nearly seven years, filing reports for Granta, The Wilson Quarterly and other publications. He pulled a last rabbit from his hat after he had returned to Washington and settled into a quiet life of occasional journalism, declining health and dwindling finances. In 2014 he chronicled his predicament, precisely and eloquently, in The Hedgehog Review. His essay, "Falling," described the downward spiral of a genteel man of letters who, through a combination of bad luck, bad investments and unrealistic expectations, now knew what it felt like to sit on a bench with a quarter in his pocket and no bank account. The essay struck a nerve with readers and attracted widespread critical attention. What made it so "somber and revelatory," James Wolcott wrote in his Vanity Fair culture blog, "is that the author is giving us the park bench perspective of what it means to be old and poor now, with no hope of reversing the downward trajectory." The cover of the novel "Testing the Current." "And," he continued, "more importantly, what it feels like. And what it feels like is a daily scalding of shame, humiliation and being disregarded as a nobody." William Alexander McPherson was born on March 16, 1933, in Sault Sainte Marie, Mich., where his father, Harold, was the manager of the Union Carbide plant. His mother, the former Ruth Brubaker, was a homemaker. He attended public schools and enrolled in the University of Michigan in 1951. After four years of study with no degree in sight, he was encouraged by school officials to try his luck elsewhere. He spent two years at Michigan State University, without earning a degree, and served a short stint as a merchant seaman before deciding, after a short visit, that Washington seemed like a nice place to live. In 1958 he found work as a copy boy at The Post, which quickly made him a staff writer for the women's page. In 1963 he was appointed travel editor. He later took a last, desultory stab at higher education, studying at George Washington University for two years, again leaving without a degree. He left The Post to become a senior editor at William Morrow in 1966. In 1958 he married Elizabeth Mosher. The marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter, Mr. McPherson is survived by two grandchildren. In a 1987 interview with Publishers Weekly, Mr. McPherson said he had had no intention of writing a novel, or, as he put it, to "add another tree to the pulp mill." But while he was walking to work one day in 1977, he said, a mental picture appeared unbidden: A woman on a golf course on a summer morning, taking a practice swing. "The scene hit me with such force that I sat down on the curb," Mr. McPherson told Washington Independent Review of Books in 2013. "It was so vivid; I saw it with such clarity and intensity that I couldn't get it out of my head. At home in my office that night I decided I should describe what I had seen." In a rush, he produced 12 single spaced pages. And over the next five and a half years, the novel took shape, with the first paragraph intact. It began: "That summer morning, in the distance, Daisy Meyer bent her blond head over her club, a short iron for the short sixth hole, in effortless concentration on her practice swing. Still engrossed in her projected shot, and seemingly oblivious to the murmurings of the women on the porch, she walked over to the ball, addressed it, and crisply shot it off." The novel, told through the intensely observant eyes of its young hero, Tommy MacAllister, blended crystalline description with the confused musings of a preadolescent mind struggling to make sense of events. In 2013, it was reissued, to much fanfare, by New York Review Books Classics. In "To the Sargasso Sea," Tommy made a return appearance, this time as a 40 year old playwright navigating a series of midlife crises. Mr. McPherson planned a third installment but never completed it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Nguyen Quang Thieu, 53, waiting to have his lung X Ray scan examined by Dr. Hoang Thi Phuong, head of the Respiratory Tuberculosis Department at the National Lung Hospital in Hanoi.Credit...Justin Mott for The New York Times Nguyen Quang Thieu, 53, waiting to have his lung X Ray scan examined by Dr. Hoang Thi Phuong, head of the Respiratory Tuberculosis Department at the National Lung Hospital in Hanoi. HANOI, VIETNAM Dr. Bui Xuan Hiep, the head of tuberculosis control in this city's Hoang Mai district, paged proudly through a large handwritten patient log. "This district's cure rate averages 90 percent," he said. Still, Dr. Bui could see problems. Seven patients had turned up with multidrug resistant tuberculosis; four had been cured, two had died and one had simply disappeared. It's a story repeated throughout Vietnam. The nation was once racked by a tuberculosis epidemic, one of the worst in which H.I.V. was not the driving force. But officials fought back fiercely. Twenty five years ago, battered by the aftermath of a long war, chronic poverty and a heavy handed government isolated from much of the world, Vietnam had nearly 600 cases of tuberculosis for every 100,000 residents. Today, it has less than 200. The easy to reach patients have been treated, and many of the rest are the hardest to help: heroin addicted couriers and laborers from the poppy fields of the nearby Golden Triangle, and mountain villagers who do not speak Vietnamese and are barely connected to the health care system. But the biggest threat is that the money is close to running out. "Our TB program is cost effective and has great impact," said Dr. Nguyen Viet Nhung, its national director. "But I always emphasize that this is a preliminary success. We need to sustain it." To reach Vietnam's ambitious goal of pushing prevalence rates down to 20 cases per 100,000 residents essentially eliminating tuberculosis as a public health problem its tuberculosis control program needs to spend at least 66 million a year. It now spends about 26 million a year. About 19 million of that comes from foreign donors, with more than a third from the United States, Dr. Nguyen said. Evidence of donor help is everywhere. The expensive diagnostic machines in hospital laboratories bear stickers from the United States Agency for International Development or from The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, 30 percent of whose budget is paid by the United States. But The Global Fund, the chief support of the tuberculosis program here, has long struggled to meet its fundraising goals, and Vietnamese officials worry about what happens when its current commitment ends in 2017. The White House tried to reduce the American contribution to the fund in fiscal year 2016 (Congress restored it), and proposed cuts to Usaid's tuberculosis programs in both 2016 and 2017. After years in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic, tuberculosis is regaining its notoriety as one of the world's great killers: an airborne bacterium that spreads easily among people living crowded together in jails, ships, mines, trenches or slums and insinuates itself deep in the lungs and grows, slowly tearing apart the tissue until victims are coughing up blood. Tuberculosis now kills more people around the world than AIDS, according to the W.H.O.: 4,100 a day, compared with 3,300 dying of AIDS, making tuberculosis the leading infectious cause of death in the world. Mortality from both diseases is dropping, but tuberculosis deaths have fallen more slowly, especially in Asia. Vietnam's success where so many other nations have failed is not just because of donor money, said Dr. Mario C. Raviglione, the director of the W.H.O.'s global tuberculosis program. "It succeeds because it's a Communist country," he said. "Socialist countries put a lot of resources into primary care: lots of doctors, lots of clinics. And once central government adopts a thing, they really do it. They give orders." Tuberculosis is an ideal disease for a regimented treatment approach. Almost all patients with "uncomplicated" tuberculosis bacteria that are not drug resistant can be cured if they take a standard menu of four antibiotics every day for six months without fail. The pharmaceutical supply chain, the Achilles' heel in many tuberculosis ridden countries, is impressive. On a weeklong tour of urban and rural clinics, not one nurse or patient reported ever running out of drugs. Those neighborhood clinics usually just a few examining rooms, a small pharmacy and a parking lot are as ubiquitous here as police stations and firehouses in the United States. They treat many illnesses, but their role in tuberculosis is simple: Every tuberculosis patient in the district reports once a day to take his or her pills in front of a nurse. Each dose taken is checked off on a yellow card. Most patients comply without complaint, doctors say. Many poor countries are chaotic; Vietnam, while poor, is not. Parks are neatly trimmed, public bathrooms are clean, and police in gold buttoned uniforms and high brimmed hats are omnipresent. Nonetheless, there are a few stubborn patients Dr. Bui's missing patient was a heroin addict who infected his mother with drug resistant tuberculosis before disappearing. And the country has one surprising gap: It has no quarantine laws. In New York City's outbreak of drug resistant tuberculosis in the 1990s, officials legally locked up patients who refused to take their pills. The rare noncompliant patient here faces no such threat. "We can't do that," said Dr. Le Minh Hoa, the head of treatment at Hanoi's provincial lung hospital. "And besides, we don't have enough spaces for the people who want treatment." Patients with drug resistant disease are especially hard to help. Their medicines, some of which are intravenous, must be taken for two years, and can cause deafness, psychosis and kidney failure. Patients must be hospitalized, their movements restricted to one or two corridors, sometimes for months until they are no longer coughing up live bacteria. Hospital wards are full of stooped, forlorn looking men and women in masks and pajamas waiting to be declared well enough to go home and become a district outpatient. If they become worse instead of better, the prognosis is usually grim. Extensively drug resistant disease (XDR TB) requires even more toxic drugs costing 25 times as much. Most XDR TB patients here die. Pham Thi Tuy, 25, was an unlucky woman she caught a drug resistant strain, perhaps at her job as a medical technician. Facing two years of treatment, she lay hooked up to an IV in Dr. Le's hospital, nauseated and exhausted by the drugs, watching videos on her cellphone all day. "I only went to the doctor for an earache," she said. "It didn't go away and didn't go away and they finally did a test and said it was TB." "When I finish this, will I still be able to have children?" Ms. Pham's eyes crinkled behind her mask, suggesting a sweet smile, and she gave a big thumbs up. There are many signs that the national tuberculosis program here survives on a shoestring budget. While its top laboratories have some modern equipment, the 64 provincial hospitals share only 60 rapid diagnostic machines, less than half the number they need, even though Vietnam pays only 17,000 for each, about a tenth of the American retail price. More ominously, hospital wards are dangerously crowded. Seven patients a room, with beds only a foot apart, is not an uncommon sight. (That effectively means 14 inhabitants a room, as many patients have a relative sleeping on the floor or in a corridor to do nursing chores and bring food.) Windows and doors are kept open to blow away the bacteria that patients cough up. In chilly Hanoi, patients like Ms. Pham wear parkas in bed; in tropical Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, they perspire in the muggy heat. Dr. Thuy Nguyen Thu, the head of the inpatient unit at the National Lung Disease Hospital, which treats the toughest cases, said four of her staff had caught tuberculosis in the last five years. New nurses were nervous, she said. Finding and keeping them in treatment is hard, said Dr. Tong Van Hieu, the director of the Quyet Thang neighborhood clinic in Son La. Some believe tuberculosis is caused by fog or dust or gold mine fumes, and turn first to folk remedies. In the cities, a new problem is on the rise. Vietnam's growing prosperity lets some patients afford private doctors who often ignore the official four drug regimen and fail to insist their patients take every pill. Pharmacists sell antibiotics without prescriptions, so some wealthy patients swallow only what they feel like taking. As a result, Dr. Phat Nguyen Ngoc, the head of a district hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, said about a third of his patients with drug resistant disease had gotten it because they had seen private doctors first and had taken too few pills, or the wrong ones. And sometimes, even when compliant patients play by the rules, treatment fails, anyway. In the Hanoi Lung Disease Hospital, Hoang Van Toan, a weathered farmer looking much older than his 49 years, sat wrapped in a blanket. He had taken all his pills, he said, but tuberculosis had somehow outwitted them. The room was bare, with no television or any other diversion. "I talk to my wife," he said, nodding at the woman sitting on the temporarily empty bed opposite him. "And I walk for three hours every day at dawn," he added, pointing out the window to a nearby park. He wears a surgical mask as required, he said, but that makes no one nervous in Hanoi; thousands of passing motorcyclists wear them, too. What made him saddest, he said, is that it is still too dangerous for his grandchildren to visit. Asked if he would make it through the next two years, he said "Yes," emphatically. "I was a soldier," he added. "I fought the enemy. I can fight this." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
In a packed ballroom, a dapper man in a silver tuxedo swing dances with a young woman to Count Basie's jazz classic "Shiny Stockings." A parade of 93 other women patiently wait their turn. The man smiles wide, playfully wiggling his hips at the end of the eight count beat. He's surprisingly spry for a 94 year old. The occasion? A birthday celebration for the Lindy Hop legend Frankie Manning. From the age of 80 until his death at 94 in 2009, he celebrated annually by dancing with as many partners as his age. "He knew that people loved that such an old guy could dance with so many partners," said Judy Pritchett, Mr. Manning's girlfriend of 21 years. Mr. Manning shimmied and taught dance classes around the world 40 weekends a year until he died. "Dancing is what keeps me young," he said in a television interview with the ABC affiliate in Seattle in 2007, just before his 93rd birthday. "If I was not dancing, I don't think I would be living to be this age." For other examples of the age defying properties of dance, look to 93 year old Dick Van Dyke vigorously tap dancing atop a desk in last December's "Mary Poppins Returns." The modern dance icons Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham also danced through their 80s. Studies show that dance provides multiple cognitive and physical health benefits, suggesting it may be the kale of exercise. A 2017 German report in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience analyzed brain scans from subjects who were on average 68 years old and engaged in either interval training or social dance. The study found that while both activities increased the size of the hippocampus, a region of the brain critical for learning, memory and equilibrium, only dance improved balance. These results echo those of a 2008 Journal of Aging and Physical Activity study by Patricia McKinley of McGill University in which seniors participated in a tango dance program. The report showed that long term tango dancing was associated with better balance and gait in older adults. Since falls are the top cause of injury and death among elderly people, dancing can be a potent tool in extending one's life. In a 2003 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers were surprised to discover that dance may help to improve cognitive function, similar to other studies that suggest that solving crossword puzzles may help to keep the mind sharp. The paper examined the relative benefits of both intellectual and physical leisure activities in older adults. "We broadly divided the activities into those that were cognitively stimulating, such as reading, and those that were physical, like riding a bicycle," said Dr. Joe Verghese, lead author of the study and Chief of Geriatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. From his clinic at the Bronx based Montefiore Einstein Center for the Aging Brain, he said in a phone interview that out of 11 different physical activities his team studied, social dance was the only one associated with less dementia risk. He speculated that dance functions like an involved intellectual activity because it's complex. Unlike walking on a treadmill, dance demands sustained mental effort to master new steps and requires coordination with a partner and the music. Dr. Verghese cautioned that this was an observational study, not a clinical trial. "It doesn't prove cause and effect. We can't say that the dancing prevented the dementia. We can only say that it was associated with reduced risk of developing dementia." Deborah Riley, a professional modern dancer and instructor, has seen firsthand how crucial a frequent dance program can be for seniors to fight frailty and memory loss. "The old adage 'move it or lose it' is pretty much true," Ms. Riley said. "If you don't move your feet and your legs, you will lose your ability to do that." For 15 years, Ms. Riley has taught dance to adults 50 years and older. She currently teaches in a program called Arts for the Aging and at Georgetown University Hospital. She said that music and movement help older people by triggering positive memories, sometimes transforming withdrawn seniors into talkative, engaged individuals. It's worth noting that the mental and physical benefits of dancing aren't just for the young at heart. "Dancing increases cognitive acuity at all ages. It integrates several brain functions at once kinesthetic, rational, musical and emotional further increasing your neural connectivity," said Richard Powers, a social and historic dance instructor at Stanford University. Mr. Powers teaches waltzing and foxtrotting to 300 undergraduates, often using the soundtrack of "Crazy Rich Asians" or Bollywood music to reflect their cultural backgrounds. For three decades, he has espoused the numerous health benefits of dance to students, including enhancing one's abilities to handle stress and adaptability to change. Students often tell him that they feel increased concentration in classes they attend right after social dance. One of the attention getting moments from Mr. Manning's 85th birthday party video is when he flips a redhead in a black and red minidress around his hip and over his shoulder. It's his signature dance move, the same one he showcased at age 27 in workman's overalls in the 1941 movie "Hellzapoppin." Ms. Miller, who lives in Florida and sports a sassy ombre pixie cut at 99, mused on the role of dance in her longevity. "Do you know any woman in the world who gets hired to do a job at 99 years old? But I am hired up until my hundredth birthday!" For the past 20 years, she has traveled the globe speaking at swing dance events including the Herrang Dance Camp in Sweden. Ms. Miller reflected on the source of her positivity. "Why I survived all this time, I don't know," she said. "Whenever there was a difficult crisis, going back to dancing always made me overcome it. Dancing has been the elixir of life, all my life." Marilyn Friedman is a writer and co founder of Writing Pad, a creative writing school in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and online. She is working on a memoir about swing dancing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Well |
There is a widespread belief among teachers that students' constant use of digital technology is hampering their attention spans and ability to persevere in the face of challenging tasks, according to two surveys of teachers being released on Thursday. The researchers note that their findings represent the subjective views of teachers and should not be seen as definitive proof that widespread use of computers, phones and video games affects students' capability to focus. Even so, the researchers who performed the studies, as well as scholars who study technology's impact on behavior and the brain, say the studies are significant because of the vantage points of teachers, who spend hours a day observing students. The timing of the studies, from two well regarded research organizations, appears to be coincidental. One was conducted by the Pew Internet Project, a division of the Pew Research Center that focuses on technology related research. The other comes from Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco that advises parents on media use by children. It was conducted by Vicky Rideout, a researcher who has previously shown that media use among children and teenagers ages 8 to 18 has grown so fast that they on average spend twice as much time with screens each year as they spend in school. Teachers who were not involved in the surveys echoed their findings in interviews, saying they felt they had to work harder to capture and hold students' attention. "I'm an entertainer. I have to do a song and dance to capture their attention," said Hope Molina Porter, 37, an English teacher at Troy High School in Fullerton, Calif., who has taught for 14 years. She teaches accelerated students, but has noted a marked decline in the depth and analysis of their written work. She said she did not want to shrink from the challenge of engaging them, nor did other teachers interviewed, but she also worried that technology was causing a deeper shift in how students learned. She also wondered if teachers were adding to the problem by adjusting their lessons to accommodate shorter attention spans. "Are we contributing to this?" Ms. Molina Porter said. "What's going to happen when they don't have constant entertainment?" Scholars who study the role of media in society say no long term studies have been done that adequately show how and if student attention span has changed because of the use of digital technology. But there is mounting indirect evidence that constant use of technology can affect behavior, particularly in developing brains, because of heavy stimulation and rapid shifts in attention. Kristen Purcell, the associate director for research at Pew, acknowledged that the findings could be viewed from another perspective: that the education system must adjust to better accommodate the way students learn, a point that some teachers brought up in focus groups themselves. "What we're labeling as 'distraction,' some see as a failure of adults to see how these kids process information," Ms. Purcell said. "They're not saying distraction is good but that the label of 'distraction' is a judgment of this generation." The surveys also found that many teachers said technology could be a useful educational tool. In the Pew survey, which was done in conjunction with the College Board and the National Writing Project, roughly 75 percent of 2,462 teachers surveyed said that the Internet and search engines had a "mostly positive" impact on student research skills. And they said such tools had made students more self sufficient researchers. But nearly 90 percent said that digital technologies were creating "an easily distracted generation with short attention spans." There was little difference in how younger and older teachers perceived the impact of technology. "Boy, is this a clarion call for a healthy and balanced media diet," said Jim Steyer, the chief executive of Common Sense Media. He added, "What you have to understand as a parent is that what happens in the home with media consumption can affect academic achievement." In interviews, teachers described what might be called a "Wikipedia problem," in which students have grown so accustomed to getting quick answers with a few keystrokes that they are more likely to give up when an easy answer eludes them. The Pew research found that 76 percent of teachers believed students had been conditioned by the Internet to find quick answers. "They need skills that are different than 'Spit, spit, there's the answer,' " said Lisa Baldwin, 48, a high school teacher in Great Barrington, Mass., who said students' ability to focus and fight through academic challenges was suffering an "exponential decline." She said she saw the decline most sharply in students whose parents allowed unfettered access to television, phones, iPads and video games. For her part, Ms. Baldwin said she refused to lower her expectations or shift her teaching style to be more entertaining. But she does spend much more time in individual tutoring sessions, she added, coaching students on how to work through challenging assignments. Other teachers said technology was as much a solution as a problem. Dave Mendell, 44, a fourth grade teacher in Wallingford, Pa., said that educational video games and digital presentations were excellent ways to engage students on their terms. Teachers also said they were using more dynamic and flexible teaching styles. "I'm tap dancing all over the place," Mr. Mendell said. "The more I stand in front of class, the easier it is to lose them." He added that it was tougher to engage students, but that once they were engaged, they were just as able to solve problems and be creative as they had been in the past. He would prefer, he added, for students to use less entertainment media at home, but he did not believe it represented an insurmountable challenge for teaching them at school. While the Pew research explored how technology has affected attention span, it also looked at how the Internet has changed student research habits. By contrast, the Common Sense survey focused largely on how teachers saw the impact of entertainment media on a range of classroom skills. The surveys include some findings that appear contradictory. In the Common Sense report, for instance, some teachers said that even as they saw attention spans wane, students were improving in subjects like math, science and reading. But researchers said the conflicting views could be the result of subjectivity and bias. For example, teachers may perceive themselves facing both a more difficult challenge but also believe that they are overcoming the challenge through effective teaching. Pew said its research gave a "complex and at times contradictory" picture of teachers' view of technology's impact. Dr. Dimitri Christakis, who studies the impact of technology on the brain and is the director of the Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development at Seattle Children's Hospital, emphasized that teachers' views were subjective but nevertheless could be accurate in sensing dwindling attention spans among students. His own research shows what happens to attention and focus in mice when they undergo the equivalent of heavy digital stimulation. Students saturated by entertainment media, he said, were experiencing a "supernatural" stimulation that teachers might have to keep up with or simulate. The heavy technology use, Dr. Christakis said, "makes reality by comparison uninteresting." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Education |
In yet another twist to an already tangled case, a judge on Wednesday rejected a petition by the granddaughter of the media mogul Sumner M. Redstone to join his former companion in the legal battle over his mental competency. The petition was made by Keryn Redstone, the 34 year old daughter of Brent Redstone, Sumner's son. And it essentially puts her in conflict with her aunt, Shari Redstone, who after public disagreements with her father over the years has said that she has reconciled with him. Keryn Redstone could still act as a witness in the case. Shari Redstone has spent the last several months challenging the suit, which was filed in November by Manuela Herzer, the former companion and onetime romantic partner of the elder Mr. Redstone. Ms. Herzer asserts that Mr. Redstone, 92, was not mentally competent in October when he removed her from a directive that would have put her in charge of his health care. A deposition of Ms. Herzer was scheduled for Thursday, but was delayed until next week because her lawyer said she had strep throat. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Turning their lobbies, pools, bars and rooftops into concert venues lets hotels bring music scene energy on site. Some are following the example of festivals like Coachella by hosting days long events, while other are throwing one time intimate concerts. Here, some of the hotels that have music events planned in 2019. Kimpton Hotels started its live music series, K impton Off the Record, in June. The hotel brand has seven intimate performances of no more than 200 guests slated for 2019. Performers are chosen based on how well they complement the hotel's locale. In August, for example, the indie pop band St. Lucia will perform at the Kimpton Goodland Hotel in Goleta, Calif. a hotel with its own vinyl record shop and record players in every room. Performances will also take place in Austin, Tex., Nashville, San Francisco, Toronto, Boston and Los Angeles. Ace Hotel isn't new to the festival scene. Every April for the last decade, the Ace Hotel Swim Club in Palm Springs, Calif., has hosted the Desert Gold festival. The 2019 version will take place from April 12 to April 21. Performers haven't been finalized, but in past years Blood Orange and Florence Welch have performed at the hotel. The New Orleans Ace will host its fourth Six of Saturns festival from April 26 to May 5. The chain's newest festival, Double Vision, was held at Ace Hotel Chicago in July for the first time in 2018 and will be back in the coming year. All the festivals take place poolside, on rooftops, in bars, private event spaces and, in New Orleans, at its in hotel music venue, Three Keys. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
"Don't worry about me," my mother says when I bring her some groceries. "I have a Ph.D. in loneliness." We choreograph our movements so as to keep our distance. I take care not to touch anything she might touch, much less touch her. As the severity and scale of the coronavirus pandemic have become clear in recent weeks, she has had no physical human contact whatsoever. This could go on for months. My mom puts the groceries away and we sit down to talk on her patio, keeping our chairs far apart. She didn't think much of my last column, in which I argued that we need to balance the public health risks of pandemic against the risks of a global depression. "I don't remember your degree being in medicine or epidemiology," she observes. I try to cheer my mom with optimistic forecasts from more authoritative sources. Michael Levitt, a Nobel laureate in chemistry at Stanford, accurately predicted the declining rate of increasing coronavirus cases in China based on available data, and now predicts that the pandemic will end sooner than most people expect. "We'll see," she says. Another Stanford professor, John P. A. Ioannidis, has suggested the ultimate case fatality rate from Covid 19 might be around 0.3 percent, much lower than most estimates. "Have you seen what's happening in Italy?" she replies. The fatality rate there appears to be just north of 10 percent as of Friday, 9,134 dead out of 86,498 confirmed cases. My mother was born in Milan (or, as she would correct me, Mi LA no), and she takes her native city's suffering especially to heart. When I point out that one likely reason why Italy has been so hard hit is that it is much more densely populated than the U.S. and has one of the world's oldest populations, she asks tartly, "And how is that supposed to comfort me?" I think of my mom as a stoical pessimist. She considers herself a highly experienced realist. She knows that calamities happen in the lives of people as well as nations and that they happen far more quickly, unexpectedly and irreversibly than most members of my generation have either known or been led to expect. She has been widowed twice, first at 26 and again at 71. Her mother fled Moscow and the Bolsheviks shortly after the October Revolution of 1917 and Berlin and the Nazis sometime after the Reichstag fire of 1933. She remembers the Allied bombings of Milano, which obliterated much of the city. She remembers the poverty after the war, and the time she snuck into a vineyard to liberate some grapes. She remembers the prejudice, when a grocer told her mother to "go back to where you came from." When I see her, she recalls a memory from around the time she was 3, when a young nun abruptly pulled her under her habit. By then the Nazis had effectively taken control of northern Italy. "She must have smelled that I was Jewish," she surmises, without knowing for sure what had induced the nun to hide her. "Well, not smelled. Sensed. Maybe that's why I've always been fond of the Catholic Church." The conversation returns to the coronavirus pandemic. "You're not taking this seriously enough," she says. "I do take it seriously," I reply. "I just don't think we should panic." She gives me the kind of look I used to get over some doubtful assurance that I'd done all of my homework. It doesn't help my case that Donald Trump, who talks about not letting the cure be worse than the disease, is sounding a lot like my column from last week. My mom will sometimes concede that the president possesses a kind of reptilian political genius. Otherwise, she sees him as embodying everything that's gone wrong in the United States since she arrived as a refugee in 1950: the triumph of coarseness; the nonstop dishonesty; the dangerous indifference to basic concepts of right and wrong. (She detested Bill Clinton for similar reasons, but not like she detests this guy.) My mom may fear the coronavirus, but I suspect she isn't entirely averse to the idea of a sudden sharp downturn, even if it hits her financially too. For years she's said that America could benefit from what she calls "a non fatal catastrophe." She doesn't mean this callously or altogether seriously. She just thinks America needs some blunt but bloodless lesson to help us distinguish between the things that matter and those that don't the sort of lesson she'd had long before I came around. So I sit on my mom's patio and listen. Not out of filial deference or compassion, but because deep down I know there's usually more wisdom in my mother's instincts and perceptions than there are in my clever (or not so clever) concatenations of facts, concepts and hypotheticals. And while I can't hug her, I can at least try to honor her by paying close attention as we should all of our elderly loved ones, now so vulnerable, never more precious. 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 |
A mysterious syndrome has killed three young children in New York and sickened 73 others, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Saturday, an alarming rise in a phenomenon that was first publicly identified earlier this week. The syndrome, a toxic shock like inflammation that affects the skin, the eyes, blood vessels and the heart, can leave children seriously ill, with some patients requiring mechanical ventilation. Many of the symptoms bear some resemblance to a rare childhood illness called Kawasaki disease, which can lead to inflammation of the blood vessels, especially the coronary arteries. "The illness has taken the lives of three young New Yorkers," Mr. Cuomo said during his daily briefing in Manhattan. "This is new. This is developing." Until now, parents and public health experts had found some solace in the notion that the coronavirus and the disease it causes, Covid 19, largely spared children the worst effects of an illness that has claimed more than 21,000 lives in New York State alone. But any sense of relief was shattered this week when a 5 year old in New York City died from the syndrome, which doctors described as a "pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome." A handful of cases have been reported in other states, including Louisiana, Mississippi and California. At least 50 cases have been reported in European countries, including Britain, France, Switzerland, Spain and Italy. Mr. Cuomo said that many of the children, some just toddlers, had not shown respiratory symptoms commonly associated with the coronavirus when they arrived at the hospital but that all of them had tested positive for Covid 19 or its antibodies. "So it is still very much a situation that is developing, but it is a serious situation," he added. The state will be working with the New York Genome Center and Rockefeller University to determine what is causing the illness, which Mr. Cuomo described on Saturday as "truly disturbing." He did not elaborate on the deaths of the two additional children. "We were laboring under the impression that young people were not affected by Covid 19, and that was actually good news," Mr. Cuomo said. "We still have a lot to learn about this virus." Mr. Cuomo has asked parents to be vigilant in looking for symptoms such as prolonged fever, severe abdominal pain, change in skin color, racing heart and chest pain. Before the announcement of the deaths attributed to the new illness, fewer than four children younger than 10 had died of the virus in New York, according to the most recent breakdown from the state. Mr. Cuomo said the state was working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to determine whether the confounding illness had been affecting children infected with the virus before this week. "It is very possible that this has been going on for several weeks and it hasn't been diagnosed as related to Covid," Mr. Cuomo said. On Monday, the New York City Health Department issued a bulletin asking doctors to report any cases of the syndrome. At the time, the health authorities said they knew of 15 such cases, involving patients ages 2 to 15, who had been in intensive care units since April 17. Earlier this week, one Long Island hospital, Cohen Children's Medical Center, said it had treated 25 children with symptoms of the syndrome that ranged from reddened tongues to enlarged coronary arteries. While some of the symptoms are similar to Kawasaki disease, including fever, abdominal pain and sometimes a raised rash, doctors who have treated hospitalized children in recent weeks said there appeared to be differences in how the coronavirus related condition affects the heart. Toxic shock is a rare complication of Kawasaki disease, but many of the children affected with the coronavirus related syndrome were in shock with very low blood pressure and an impaired ability to circulate oxygen and nutrients to vital organs. Whereas Kawasaki disease can produce coronary aneurysms when left untreated, the new syndrome seems to mostly involve inflammation of coronary arteries and other blood vessels. Doctors in New York have noted that cases of the new syndrome began to appear a month or so after a surge of Covid 19 in the region. That timing, experts say, suggests that the illness may be a post infectious immune response to infection with the virus. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Health |
The alt meat industry has created quite a sizzle, promising delicious burgers, steaks and even sushi that is grown from animal cells in the lab. But most cellular agriculture still looks like mush. The manufacturing process which starts with animal muscle and fat grown from stem cells in petri dishes is fine for making burgers, but it fails to provide the kind of texture needed for more substantial cuts of meat, like steaks. On Monday, scientists at Harvard University reported that they had found a way to more closely mimic the form and flavor of real meat, by growing the muscle cells of cows and rabbits on a gelatin scaffold. Their research was published in the journal Science of Food. "We showed that it can be done," said Luke MacQueen, the Harvard researcher who led the study. "Now we'll keep improving our methods, tweaking the type of scaffold fiber to try even more complex textures, tastes and nutritional profiles." Refining this technique and others like it could help more people, including serious carnivores, consider lab grown meat as a sustainable, ethical alternative to meat raised for slaughter, Dr. MacQueen said. In the body, groups of cells get physical support from an extracellular matrix, which is made up of water, collagen proteins and various nutrients. The extracellular matrix also provides essential cues for growth, cell orientation and differentiation. "Muscle cells need a structure to grow on, the same way the walls of a building need a steel frame or a house needs a wooden skeleton," said Kevin Kit Parker, a bioengineer at Harvard and also a co author of the study. To mimic this cellular environment, Dr. Parker and his colleagues decided to make scaffolds out of different concentrations of gelatin, a protein product derived from collagen. When collagen rich meat cuts, such as beef chuck, are cooked, the heat naturally melts collagen fibers into softer gelatin, giving meat its succulent texture, Dr. Parker said. To make gelatin microfibers, the researchers dissolved commercially available gelatin powder in water and spun it like cotton candy. Rotating the gelatinous slurry at high speeds allowed fibers to form at the bottom of the spinner. Using enzymes, the researchers then cross linked the fibers to form a strong, woven structure for cells to grow on. Rabbit and cow cells latched onto the gelatin scaffold, growing until they formed about a square inch of muscle. To test whether the final product resembled the texture and behavior of meat that chefs and home cooks use every day, the researchers performed a variety of food industry analyses: simulating cooking by heating the lab grown meat on a hot plate, compressing it as if with a meat mallet and measuring the force needed to cut each piece of meat. They found that their lab grown meat fell in between the springiness of a hamburger and a beef tenderloin. The Harvard scientists are not the only ones testing scaffolds for cell based meat. Some researchers have been inspired by the field of regenerative medicine, where scaffolds are used to help grow tissue that may one day be used for repairing organs or replacing grafts. They have transformed spinach leaves into scaffolds by removing all the plant's cells and using the empty cell walls as a frame for growing animal tissue. Other groups have modified apples, artichokes and the threadlike roots of mushrooms. Cellular agriculture companies are also devising scaffolds from naturally occurring materials, such as cellulose, starch and alginate, which may be more affordable than engineering scaffolds from scratch. "Different cells have different needs," said Justin Kolbeck, co founder and C.E.O. of Wild Type, a start up making cultured salmon. "Fish flakes differently because its underlying architecture is quite different from other types of meat. Our cells also grow at different temperatures from mammalian systems, so the scaffolds we develop need to be really optimized for fish cells in all of these regards." Before cultured meat or fish becomes a dinnertime staple, companies also must overcome challenges of scale, said Gregory Ziegler, a food science professor at Pennsylvania State University. They need to optimize the media that cells grow in and arrange large bioreactor facilities to culture enormous volumes of cells at a pace that matches customer demand. It took Wild Type three and a half weeks to create a pound of salmon for a tasting event at Portland, Oregon's Olympia Oyster Bar in June. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
What mysterious, gelatinous, clear blob that you might find washed up on a beach looks like a jellyfish but isn't? Meet the sea salp. It typically lives in deep waters, where its barrel shaped body glides around the ocean by jet propulsion, sucking in water from a siphon on one end and spitting it back though another. It swims alone for part of its life. But it spends the rest of it with other salps, linked together in chains arranged as wheels, lines or other architectural designs. "They're totally cool, and totally beautiful to watch underwater," said Kelly Sutherland, a marine biologist at the University of Oregon. Over years of watching them swim in chains, she made a surprising discovery. They synchronize their strokes when threatened by predators or strong waves and currents. But while linked together in day to day life, each salp in the chain swims at its own asynchronous and uncoordinated pace. Counterintuitively, this helps salps that form linear chains make long nightly journeys more efficiently. She and a colleague, Daniel Weihs, an aerospace engineer at the Israel Institute of Technology, presented their findings on Wednesday in Journal of the Royal Society Interface. The life story of the sea salp is peculiar. Each one starts life as a female, then switches to male and never switches back, but no one knows why. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
LONDON On the outside of the envelope that contained the invitation to Grace Wales Bonner's fall show were stamped a few lines by the American writer Ishmael Reed: "I had no systematic way of learning but proceeded like a quilt maker, a patch of knowledge here a patch there but lovingly knitted. I would hungrily devour the intellectual scraps and leftovers of the learned." Ms. Wales Bonner's own method is much the same. She is more serious, and her approach more scholarly, than many of her compatriots . Since her breakout collection in 2015, she has been patching her way toward a grand theory of style that connects fashion to history, to art and to black culture. For her move to London Fashion Week from the smaller London men's wear week where she previously has shown, she had an enviable venue: The Serpentine Sackler Gallery, where "A Time for New Dreams," a show she curated with the gallery, has just been extended through March 17. The show and her fall collection were meant to be of a piece, one complementing the other. On Sunday night, when guests gathered to see it, a man was seated at the piano, playing softly: Mr. Reed. He performed as part of the show and the writer Ben Okri recited a poem written for the occasion. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Three years ago, a large cache of artifacts, including poems, letters and notebooks by some of the greatest Yiddish writers of the first half of the 20th century, was discovered in the basement of a church in Vilnius, Lithuania. In scouring through them and other artifacts that had been rescued from Nazi efforts to destroy all traces of Jewish culture, researchers discovered a more humble document: the writing of a fifth grade girl telling of her daily life in Vilnius in the 1930s. Now that girl, whose name was Americanized to Beba Epstein, is the central character of a YIVO Institute for Jewish Research exhibition that went up online recently. The exhibition aims to explore Jewish life in Eastern Europe before World War II. By scrolling through Beba's story, a visitor will learn that the first movie she saw was "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and that her grandfather tried to squelch her mischievous side. "My grandfather used to tell me that I had to behave like a good religious girl," wrote Beba, who was born in 1922, in what she called her autobiography. "If not, God would spank me with iron rods so I hid from God." There are photographs of Beba and her sister Esye among their schoolmates, and stories of swimming and running in summer. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
"The environmental and climate costs of the technology we use are stunning," said John Schwartz, a climate reporter. Tech's Environmental Impact and What You Can Do About It How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? John Schwartz, a climate reporter, discussed the tech he's using. What does your tech setup look like for work and at home? It's pretty messy, and it's all about the laptop. I use a MacBook Pro that I carry back and forth. At work, The Times gives me a big second monitor and a dongle to charge the phone and tie in the backup drive. At home, I have a desk but do much of my evening research and writing in an easy chair in the living room with the laptop propped up on the chair arm. More important than the way my system is set up is what I do with it. I have configured my computer system at work so that along with whatever stories I'm dealing with, the big extra monitor shows me a stream of photos of my grandkids, my children and my folks. It's no news to readers that the technologies we use can make us jittery, angry and sad. There's Twitter outrage, Facebook and Instagram FOMO, and the constant nagging of email and Slack. And let's face it, writing about climate change for a living isn't exactly cheerful. So that stream of photos brings me little bursts of pleasure throughout my day, a regular lift. Similar images show up on my Apple Watch and iPhone. Why shouldn't technology bring us joy along with all that angst? You're a climate reporter and self proclaimed Apple lover. Many Apple fans buy every new iPhone every year. Does your knowledge of the environmental impact of yearly upgrades change your tech consumption habits? I've been an Apple guy since buying my first in 1983. But I've never had the money to buy a new machine every year, and that kind of consumerism just isn't for me, despite my Apple fanboy ways. I'm cheap. My car is 11 years old, and I'll drive it until it dies. I wear clothes until they get so ragged that my wife sneaks them over to the donation bin or into the trash. Even though my employer now provides my laptops, I don't push for the latest and greatest. (I've even written a book about reaching financial security.) So my understanding of the environmental cost of replacing tech hasn't changed my habits, though it's definitely a factor people should consider when the tech press starts trumpeting the latest toys. Outside of your job, what tech products are you personally obsessed with? For someone who loves technology, I don't have much of it in my house. My wife is a proud Luddite, and doesn't like tech for tech's sake; we don't have Alexa or HomePod or any of the talking gewgaws, no camera at the door. She yanked out all the wires for the security system that came with the house after it kept going off when the power went out. I'm still semi Luddite in some ways myself. I was recently visiting my daughter and son in law, and my granddaughter asked me to turn on "Aquanauts" for her. I couldn't even figure out how to turn on the TV. (It required the game controller to choose among the channels and subscription services.) It was a good excuse to read books instead. Having said that, I love my Apple Watch, which has worked its way into my consciousness in ways I hadn't expected: It tracks my exercise and lets me see my notifications without having to pull the phone out of my pocket and spend way too much time on my phone. The unobtrusive tech that gives me the most pleasure is my Jabra earbuds, which I use when I'm running and seem to be just about impervious to sweat. And the camera on my iPhone is my constant companion. I take daily pictures on my morning run and post them to Twitter and Instagram. There's been a lot of talk about recycling, but some of it seems futile. Lots of plastics can no longer be recycled. What should we do? Recycling is great in concept and fraught in practice. Like so many of the personal actions people try to take to address climate change, it can only do so much. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
Even now, when women represent half the work force, they're still paid considerably less than men and part of that pay gap may be a result of what happens at the salary negotiation table. That's assuming that women make it to the table, since research shows that they are less likely to ask for raises. Even when they do, their requests may be perceived as overly demanding or less agreeable. "We have found that if a man and a woman both attempt to negotiate for higher pay, people find a woman who does this, compared to one who does not, significantly less attractive," said Hannah Riley Bowles, an associate professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, who has conducted numerous studies on gender, negotiation and leadership. "Whereas with the guy, it doesn't seem to matter." So what's a woman to do if she feels her work merits a raise? A new study concludes that women need to take a different approach than men. Women, it suggests, should frame their requests in more nuanced ways to avoid undermining their relationship with their boss. You may be asking yourself, as I did, whether negotiating in ways more favorable for women means that we're just succumbing to stereotypes or whether the ends justify the means. "People associate men with higher pay because men tend to hold higher paying and higher level positions than women," Ms. Riley Bowles said. "When a woman negotiates persuasively for higher compensation, she clears the path for other women to follow." Even though working women tend to be more educated, on average, than working men, females who work full time only earn about 77 cents for every dollar that men earn annually, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research. That's up from about 59 cents in 1965. Part of the pay gap can be easily explained away. Women are more likely to leave the work force to care for children, for example, so they end up with fewer years of experience. Men also tend to work in higher paying occupations and industries. "But what you find is that when you pull out all of those factors, you still have about 40 percent of the wage gap or 9.2 cents unexplained," said Ariane Hegewisch, a study director at the institute. Academic research on gender and negotiation suggests that part of the unexplained gap may be tied, at least in part, to the negotiating process itself. It may be that some women have lower pay expectations. Men, on the other hand, have been found to be more likely to negotiate higher starting salaries. The work by Ms. Riley Bowles and her peers suggests that women in the work force can use specific advice. Here are some of their suggestions: BE PROACTIVE If you believe you deserve a raise, don't sit around and wait for someone to notice. "A lot of women, and this is quite commonly found, think, 'As long as I work really, really hard, someone will notice and they will pay me more,' " said Karen J. Pine, a psychology professor at the University of Hertfordshire in Britain and co author of "Sheconomics" (Headline Publishing Group, 2009). But "people don't come and notice." You also want to think about the best time to approach your boss. It may make sense to approach him or her after an annual performance review, said Evelyn F. Murphy, president of the WAGE Project, a nonprofit organization, who runs negotiation seminars for women. "Or, if you just took on a major responsibility or won an award." BE PREPARED Doing your research pays, literally. A study found that men and women who recently earned a master's degree in business negotiated similar salaries when they had clear information about how much to ask for. But in industries where salary standards were ambiguous, women accepted pay that was 10 percent lower, on average, than men. "In our experiments, we found that with ambiguous information, women set less ambitious goals," said Ms. Riley Bowles, who ran the study. "They asked for less in a competitive negotiation and got less." That theory also holds in other areas where there aren't set expectations, like executive bonuses and stock options. "You get bigger gender gaps in those less standard forms of pay," she added. That's why you need to be prepared. Informational Web sites like Payscale.com and Salary.com can help uncover what people are being paid for a particular position in your geographic area. And Glassdoor.com and Vault.com provide intelligence on pay inside a company employees share their salaries online. Part of your preparation may also include talking to peers. But remember that women tend to be less connected to male networks in the workplace and are more likely to compare themselves to people they think are similar, Ms. Riley Bowles said. That means they may be comparing their salaries with other women. "If a woman asks her girlfriends how much they are paid and a guy asks his guy friends, Jane and Jim will come up with different numbers," Ms. Riley Bowles added. TAILOR NEGOTIATIONS This is where the women may want to use a different strategy. A new study by Ms. Riley Bowles shows that women are more likely to be successful if they explain why their request is appropriate, but in terms that also communicate that they care about maintaining good relationships at work. "The trick is trying to do both of these things at the same time and in a way that feels authentic and fits within the norms of the company," she added. Using this approach, the study found, women were more likely to be granted a raise without harming relationships, at least in an experimental setting. The results were consistent for women negotiating with other women and with men. Some of the language used in the study provided an explanation on how to explain why you're making the request now "My team leader advised me to do this" while at the same time communicating that you are taking the boss's position into account: "What do you think?" The study doesn't suggest specific language, but offers some general outlines. Instead of explaining why you deserve a raise directly, for instance, frame it in terms of why it makes sense for the organization or the person you're trying to persuade. "Make the company the focus," she said. And if you're thinking about using an outside offer to help negotiate a raise, take heed. It's effective, but Ms. Riley Bowles said her studies have found that it tends to leave a more negative impression on women. "Women may need to be more strategic than men about how they raise an outside offer so that it doesn't put them in a negative light," she added. ANTICIPATE Try to envision what kinds of objections your boss may have, Ms. Murphy said, and think about what your response might be. "There is no single way through this," she added. "It's largely reactive once you start the process." If you're unsuccessful, ask your boss for recommendations on what you could do to move to the next level in your job. That way, "you are still in control and are still being constructive," Ms. Murphy said. "If you trust your own language and your own ability to perceive these potential roadblocks or damaging outcomes, then you will find your way through them." NEGOTIATE AT HOME Before you even start negotiating for a raise, or a promotion, consider how it might affect your life at home but don't assume that one has to come at the expense of the other. Working women who double as caregivers still carry a disproportionate load of household chores, even as men have begun shouldering more responsibilities. Try to re examine some of these roles and think about how new divisions of household labor may help each partner's situation at work, Ms. Riley Bowles suggested. Some people believe the negotiations at home may be more challenging then those in the workplace. "That is the big secret in our culture," said Paula Hogan, a Milwaukee based financial planner who works with a career counselor in her practice. "The workplace has become increasingly gender neutral and at home there is still a lot of old thinking." BE CREATIVE If you have family responsibilities, it helps to consider alternatives like flexible work schedules. "Be sure you are thinking as creatively as possible for win win solutions," Ms. Riley Bowles said. And remember that it's your responsibility to suggest these solutions (or to seek out companies known for considering them). "They are not going to come to you and say, 'Gosh, I notice you have three kids now. Would you like Tuesdays off?' " said Ms. Hogan. "It's your job to present the business plan." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
Laila Lalami begins "Conditional Citizens" with the promise of U.S. citizenship: On a steamy day in 2000, she goes to the Pomona Fairplex, a place that also hosts the Los Angeles County Fair, to be sworn in as an American citizen. Moroccan by birth, Lalami came to the United States for graduate studies in linguistics, fully intending to return home. But she met a man, fell in love and stayed. She and hundreds of other immigrants who have studied and mastered the grand ideals of this country are handed miniature American flags that day and pledge an oath to the United States, its Constitution and its laws. These ceremonies can be deeply moving, and Lalami, a novelist who often writes about being an outsider, emerges convinced she is now an equal citizen in a country where everyone shares common values. "I thought, somewhat naively, I admit, that I would be treated no differently than other Americans," Lalami writes. In joining America's 22 million naturalized citizens, she assumed she had gotten the key to the promised land; she is the bearer of an American passport. It doesn't take long for her an immigrant, woman, Arab and Muslim to grasp the yawning gap between the ideal taught in civics lessons and reality. In many ways, she argues, she is a "conditional citizen," one who soon understands what it is like "for a country to embrace you with one arm and push you away with the other." Conditional citizens, in Lalami's account, are not allowed to dissent or question the choices of their government; if they do, they are viewed with suspicion, their allegiance to their new country questioned. Conditional citizens also have less freedom of movement. Border patrol agents rely on at least 136 checkpoints (the total number in operation at any given time is not publicly available) that are up to 100 miles inside of U.S. borders to stop and question residents. That territory potentially ensnares two thirds of this country's population, and each year, hundreds of U.S. citizens are wrongfully held in immigration jails. Lalami shows how our nation's schizophrenia toward immigrants Immigrants built this great country! We are a nation of immigrants! Immigrants bring disease, crime and rob us of our jobs! can give conditional citizens whiplash as they are simultaneously regarded as America's best hope and its gravest threat, a combination of suspicion and rejection that Asians, Italians and the Irish, among others, have all faced. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
The National Book Foundation announced the Longlist for the 2016 National Book Award for Young People's Literature on Monday. The 10 nominated books represent a stylistic and thematically diverse range, with fiction, a graphic memoir and nonfiction that address subjects like domestic violence, sexual identity, race, social activism and how children cope during war. The remaining longlists, for the poetry, nonfiction and fiction categories, will be announced over the next three days. Finalists will be revealed on Oct. 13, and the winners will be announced at a gala in New York City on Nov. 16. Here are the nominees: Kwame Alexander's "Booked" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), a coming of age novel in verse about a 12 year old African American boy named Nick who is dealing with a bully and problems at home. Kate DiCamillo's novel "Raymie Nightingale" (Candlewick Press), about a girl named Raymie who hopes to win the Little Miss Central Florida Tire competition. John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell's (Artist) "March: Book Three" (Top Shelf), the final volume in a graphic memoir trilogy about the Civil Rights movement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
The artist and architect Jorge Otero Pailos at his exhibition "Repetiteur," installed in a rehearsal space once used by Merce Cunningham. With "Repetiteur," the artist and architect Jorge Otero Pailos preserves both the fingerprints and the spirit of Cunningham and his company in their rehearsal space. Evocative and easily overlooked, "Repetiteur" by Jorge Otero Pailos, occupying an obscure rehearsal room at City Center, is on view this week only. Time is short. Time happens to be Mr. Otero Pailos's subject. Back in 2010, Artangel, the London based arts nonprofit, commissioned Mr. Otero Pailos , the Spanish born architect, artist and Columbia University professor of historic preservation, to collect dust from Westminster Hall, the oldest building at Britain's Parliament. A storied space with immense stone walls and a hammer beam roof commissioned by Richard II, Westminster Hall is where the English established a court system, held Anne Boleyn's coronation banquet and tried Charles I for treason. Mr. Otero Pailos's medium is natural liquid latex, a conservator's tool. At Westminster, he applied it to the hall's east wall, the latex acting like a sponge, absorbing dirt and other particles. Reinforced with fabric and peeled off in long sheets, it skinned, or cleaned, the wall, returning the stone to its original color. The project preoccupied Mr. Otero Pailos for several years. When he finished, he hung the casts from the hall's ceiling like two enormous tapestries honey colored and translucent, glowing like amber in the light coming through Westminster's tall, arched windows. That exhibition, presented by Artangel, opened in 2016, just after the Brexit referendum passed, and not surprisingly it provoked some Britons to interpret the latex tapestries, with their odor and hints of flaying, as a metaphor for national martyrdom and decay. Over the years, various artists like Eva Hesse and Rachel Whiteread have traversed similar terrain using latex casts. For Mr. Otero Pailos, the goal is to capture architecture's "intangible heritage," as he calls it. His works save not a building's walls, floors, windows or doors but remains of architectural habitation: whisperingly faint but still visceral remnants of actual bodies that occupied real space. Westminster belonged to a series of projects Mr. Otero Pailos has undertaken called "The Ethics of Dust," a phrase borrowed from the 19th century critic John Ruskin. To Ruskin, great historical buildings spoke volumes. Restoration desecrated architecture by removing traces of the past. But properly conserved, a building retains evidence of the passage of time, layered like sediments of the earth. "Repetiteur," at City Center, in effect does for Merce Cunningham and dance what "The Ethics of Dust" aimed to do at Westminster. Cunningham rehearsed his dancers in a particular studio at City Center whenever the company performed there. During rehearsals, the troupe would lean against the walls to rest, leaving fingerprints and sweat in the stucco and plaster. Not long ago, City Center decided to refurbish the room, whitewashing it and refinishing the old wainscoting, so beforehand Mr. Otero Pailos arranged to make latex casts of the woodwork, vents, electrical outlets and so on. 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. He produced six casts, currently displayed in four foot square light boxes on shin high platforms or podiums, placed around the now renovated studio according to the same grid system that Cunningham used to deploy his dancers, a system based on the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching. What results is visually minimalist and low key to a fault. But it's also kind of haunting. Doubled in number by the mirror that fills one long wall of the room, the light boxes have an accompanying soundtrack: audio clips that Mr. Otero Pailos took from videos of Cunningham preparing his troupe to perform three works "Exchange" (which premiered at City Center in 1978), "Roaratorio" and "CRWDSPCR." And so, like "The Ethics of Dust," "Repetiteur" involves an act of historical conservation, which in this case meditates on the specific relationship between architecture and dance. Each dance rehearsal or performance, after all, takes place in a particular architectural space from which the dance is as inseparable as it is from its own choreography or dancers. Or as Mr. Otero Pailos has put it, a film of a dance is no more an adequate record of the dance than a photograph of a demolished building can substitute for the actual building. In essence, "Repetiteur" restores what's missing from such a film conjuring up not just the architecture of the practice studio at City Center but also what you might call the architecture of time, study, repetition and pain that went into the making of Cunningham's art. We talk about preserving prized buildings and places. But architecture is more than bricks and mortar. It is the spaces we devise in which to live our lives, dream dreams, struggle and invent things. This is the larger point of Mr. Otero Pailos's work, too, capturing vestiges of steps taken, leaps made. Through May 5 at New York City Center, Harkness Studio, 130 West 56th Street, nycitycenter.org. It is free and open to the public. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
There's no "r" in May much to the dismay of oyster lovers who've learned to follow this rule of thumb: Eat raw oysters only in months containing the letter "r." But what does the spelling of a word have to do with the viscous helping of flesh you slurp out of a half shell? The short answer is nothing. The life cycle of a particular species, the temperature and quality of the water in which an oyster grows, and how the mollusk is handled after leaving that water all can affect its health and taste and your health. "Essentially if you buy oysters that are grown in healthy waters and they're handled properly, then there's no problem with eating them any time of the year," said Donald Meritt, an aquaculturist at the Horn Point Oyster Hatchery at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Science |
Customers at McSorley's Old Ale House jeer at Lucy Komisar, who was among the first women to drink at the pub after the city passed a new anti discrimination law. Prior to this, McSorley's, which opened in 1854, had not admitted women. A waiter initially tried to bar Komisar's entry; once she was inside, some customers booed her, and another dumped a beer on her head. August 10, 1970.Credit...Barton Silverman/The New York Times Customers at McSorley's Old Ale House jeer at Lucy Komisar, who was among the first women to drink at the pub after the city passed a new anti discrimination law. Prior to this, McSorley's, which opened in 1854, had not admitted women. A waiter initially tried to bar Komisar's entry; once she was inside, some customers booed her, and another dumped a beer on her head. August 10, 1970. Misogyny is everywhere. Or at least "misogyny" is everywhere. The word, which conventionally means hatred of women, was once a radical accusation. But recently, it seems to have eclipsed the gentler "sexism" and "chauvinism" in popular use. It's now unremarkable to find "misogyny" in a headline, much less a tweet. On one end of the spectrum, the term is used to describe societal inequity, evidenced by things such as the gendered wage gap in the United States, the difficulties women have in finding adequate medical care and the career destroying prerogatives of men like Les Moonves. "Unfortunately, violent misogyny is nothing new in politics," ran a 2018 CNN headline. "Women's self harm is being fueled by misogyny," read a Guardian story last August. A New York Times Op Ed from December explored "The Special Misogyny Reserved for Mothers." Kim Schrier, a pediatrician running for Congress (now a Democratic congresswoman), flatly called Donald Trump "misogynist in chief" in a tweet last year. A look at archival photographs, including those from The New York Times, shows how, as the term came into popular use, misogyny has also been a part of our visual landscape, from headline news to everyday experience. But like so much of our current discourse, the word's resonance drifts between the weighty and the meme ified. One report indicated that a mongoose in Kenya might be a misogynist. "Chill with that misogyny," reads a T shirt available to buy on Etsy. And don't forget the mug that features a whimsical but woke shark saying " I'm fin ished with misogyny ." Disdain for women, it is sometimes argued, is also the reason certain corners of pop culture are dismissed. "Has Internalized Misogyny Kept Me From Reading Romance Novels My Whole Life?" one writer asked. Hating the Kardashians has also been read as anti woman, because in so doing we reduce the celebrity sisters to mere stereotypes. In the nesting doll logic of the moment, disparaging any woman's respite from misogyny whether it's reality TV, a self care beauty regimen or astrology is itself misogynist. So, misogyny is having a moment, in more ways than one, but it also has a long history. The term emerged in the 17th century, in response to an anti woman pamphlet written by an English fencing master named Joseph Swetnam. The 1615 tract, titled in part " The arraignment of lewd, idle, froward and unconstant women " (froward meant disobedient), was published amid early modern anxiety and debate about women's place in society. Basically a compendium of sexist jokes, the dyspeptic work was aimed at an audience of "the ordinary set of giddy headed young men," and it was very popular. "Women are crooked by nature," Swetnam wrote, sounding like a proto incel. To him even "the fairest woman has some filthiness in her." Going all the way back to Eve, womankind was "no sooner made but straightway her mind was set upon mischief, for by her aspiring mind and wanton will she quickly procured man's fall , and therefore ever since they are and have been a woe unto man , and follow the line of their first leader." They were like pumice stones because their hearts were filled with holes, he wrote, like painted ships because they looked pretty but contained only lead . Not surprisingly, the pamphlet drew several published responses from women. In one, an anonymously written feminist play called " Swetnam the Woman Hater, Arraigned By Women ," the character standing in for Swetnam was named Misogynos. Misogyny was little used for the next few centuries, but its popularity skyrocketed in the mid 1970s, more or less entering the lexicon of second wave feminism with Andrea Dworkin's 1974 critique "Woman Hating." In the book, Dworkin argues that a deep, ingrained prejudice against women informs aspects of society from legislation to cohabitation. As she summed it up two years later, "As women we live in the midst of a society that regards us as contemptible. We are despised ... We are the victims of continuous, malevolent, and sanctioned violence against us." (An idea familiar to women like Kathrine Switzer, pictured below, who was famously harassed as she became one of the first women to run the Boston Marathon in 1967.) In the 1980s and '90s, reading Dworkin became for many a discomfiting and exhilarating collegiate rite of passage. Her writing is a strident and raw look at the systemic bias affecting the everyday experiences of women. Was there actual hatred lurking beneath every meeting with your boss or commanding officer, every date, sermon, novel, TV commercial? Yes, Dworkin insisted. At the time, this was a radical idea and to many it still is. This understanding of misogyny became a commonly held idea among feminists: the issue was structural. Society was organized in a misogynistic way, even if its individual members didn't see themselves as woman haters. As the writer and activist Audre Lorde wrote in 1980, there is a "piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us." Susan Faludi, author of the 1991 book "Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women," echoed this idea, arguing that efforts against equality "are encoded and internalized, diffuse and chameleonic." Much like "racist" which was once mostly used to describe certain sheriffs, politicians or neighbors misogynist is now as often applied to the system of institutions that creates an unequal America as it is to individuals. In this broadened meaning, happily married men, men with daughters and women themselves can be implicated. The way the word is now used, you don't have to hate women to be a misogynist, despite what Webster's dictionary still says today. But can that one word do all this work? Can it describe some of the worst, most violent impulses in our world and everyday acts of gender bias? Should we use the same term to describe marital rape and the dearth of strong female leads on TV? It turns out, it already is, and we already are. Some dictionaries have taken note. William Safire, the New York Times columnist who wrote for decades about the texture of our language, noted in 2008 that the Oxford English Dictionary had expanded its definition by 2002 to include "prejudice against women." "Sexist and misogynist are now in some respects synonymous," he wrote. "Because sexist has been so widely used, apparently misogynist in the same sense of 'prejudice' rather than 'hatred' now carries more force with those who are familiar with the word." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
In the days following the Grammy Awards in January, as the president of the Recording Academy, Neil Portnow, came under fire for saying that women in music should "step up" to advance their careers, the academy announced the formation of a task force to examine its practices but gave no details about who would run it, or what exactly it would do. On Tuesday, the academy, which presents the Grammys, announced that Tina Tchen, who served as Michelle Obama's chief of staff, would be the chairwoman of the task force, and said that the effort would "identify the various barriers and unconscious biases faced by underrepresented communities throughout the music industry and, specifically, across Recording Academy operations and policies." A study released before the Grammys found that, in five top categories over the last six years, only 9 percent of nominees were women. Looking at the industry more broadly, the study, conducted by the University of Southern California's Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, found that for the most popular songs each year, women made up 22 percent of the performers, 12 percent of songwriters and just 2 percent of producers. "The music industry faces numerous challenges from combating long held biases to making sure women are represented and respected within the community," Ms. Tchen said in a statement. "This task force is an important initial step by the Recording Academy to demonstrate its commitment to tackling these challenges in a comprehensive way." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Read our updates and analysis from the Golden Globes ceremony. Regina King, at Sunday night's Golden Globes, pledged in her acceptance speech after winning best supporting actress in a motion picture that women will make up 50 percent of the staff for any of her projects in the next two years. She won for her role as Sharon Rivers in the Barry Jenkins directed "If Beale Street Could Talk." In her speech, King also thanked Jenkins for "giving us a film that my son said to me when he saw it, that it was the first time he really saw himself." Amy, thank you for the prayers, sweetheart, thank you so much. Oh, this is so fantastic. And Annapurna, thank you so much, everyone. I mean, this is odd, but it's not. My publicist Mike Liotta, the Annapurna publicists, Daniella, Jesus, Seth, Marvin, who have been championing and working their asses off to get people to come see this film. Barry Jenkins. I love you with all my heart. Thank you for your empathy. Thank you for telling stories so rich and thank you for giving us a film that my son said to me when he saw it, that it was the first time he really saw himself. Thank you so much for that. Plan B, Jeremy, and Dede, oh, my gosh, what a journey it's been, all the way from "Year of the Dog" to here, Jesus, man, oh, my gosh. My son, Ian, boy. Oh, thank you so much for all the love that we have been receiving for "Beale Street," we are so proud of this film. The Baldwin family, thank you so much for trusting Sir Barry Jenkins to tell James Baldwin's words and allowing us the opportunity. Thank you, God, for allowing me to be a witness. Hollywood Foreign Press Association, okay. Oh, cheers, cheers. Oh, my gosh, one more thing. So often everyone out there, they hear us on the red carpet and they say celebrities, we're using the time to talk about ourselves when we are on our soap box and using a moment to talk about the systemic things that are going on in life. Time's Up times two. The reason why we do this is because we understand that our microphones are big and we are speaking for everyone. And I just want to say that I'm going to use my platform right now to say in the next two years everything that I produce I am making a vow and it's going to be tough to make sure that everything that I produce that is 50% women. And I just challenge anyone out there anyone out there who is in a position of power, not just in our industry, in all industries, I challenge you to challenge yourselves and stand with us in solidarity and do the same. God bless you. Thank you. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
"That is Joe mentum! He's an unstoppable force, as long as he never leaves his basement. You stay down there, Joe! Even if you win, you stay down there. It's going to take a few months to fumigate the burger farts out of the Oval Office couch." STEPHEN COLBERT "One disturbing part of this poll was the fact that 14 percent of voters would vote for another candidate, would not vote or did not know. Did not know? How the hell do you live through three and half years of Donald Trump and have no opinion? 'What's that? Who's president? Donald Trump? The guy from "The Apprentice"? Well, I missed that one. I was binge watching a marathon of Kevin Spacey movies' what?" STEPHEN COLBERT "Yup, Joe Biden has his biggest lead yet. When he read about it in the paper, Biden was like, 'Wow, good for Joe Biden. He must be thrilled.'" JIMMY FALLON "Not only is Biden ahead the polls, he also raised more money than Trump last month. Yeah, Trump's so desperate for money, he's going to start writing a tell all book about himself." JIMMY FALLON | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
To Invest in Your Child's Theater Dreams, First Invest in the Theater Dean Roth, the owner and president of a New Jersey company that makes parts for the tool and die industry, admits he has utterly failed to talk his teenage daughter out of pursuing a career in musical theater. Instead of watching helplessly as she bounded down an uncertain career path, he became a Broadway investor to get an inside track: He said his initial 1,000 outlay, in the 2011 revival of "Godspell," was "tuition for me to find out what the business was like." Since then, he has invested in 22 other shows, with six returning profits so far. And he and his daughter, Kim, now a musical theater student at Syracuse University, have come to an understanding about where to draw the line between meddling parent and struggling artist. Like so many parents juggling feelings of pride and concern as their children step into adulthood, Mr. Roth said he wanted his daughter to understand the risks as well as the rewards associated with a career in the arts, and the only way he could see doing that was for both of them to get closer to the business. "I wanted her to go into this with open eyes and know what she was getting into," Mr. Roth said. As with practically everything in New York, especially the insular world of Broadway, connections mean everything. Being a child of an investor in a show doesn't secure a part or even an audition, but it can create opportunities that open doors. "Getting to know a director and having the opportunity to observe a rehearsal or a script reading to get a deeper understanding of the business, that is a definite advantage," said Pippin Parker, a playwright and the dean of the drama school at the New School in New York City. Ken Davenport, a Broadway producer and blogger who raises money for shows and has worked with Mr. Roth and other investors, said he has seen more parents invest in shows to encourage a passion they share with one of their children or to bolster the child's career prospects. "The parents don't have the friends or relationships, so they do it the old fashioned way by writing a check," he said. "All that check does is get you in the door. It's up to the kids to prove themselves." Of course there's no substitute for talent, Mr. Parker and others said. "Investing is a wonderful and glorious activity, but unless you know what you are doing as an investor, the best you can hope for is a glass of Champagne with Bette Midler," said Peter Cooke, the head of the drama school at Carnegie Mellon University, which sends many graduates on to Broadway careers. The only career path he can see, he said, "is being well trained." There are different ways productions raise money, but for many shows, affluent individuals play a key role. Typically, these are people with at least 1 million of investable assets what the finance industry calls an accredited investor, who is presumably able to swallow the considerable risks associated with this type of investing. Producers raise the money by putting together pools of investors, who tend to give an average of 25,000 to finance a production in a Broadway theater. Sometimes there are different investing tiers, and those who give more can get perks like having their names printed above the show's title on posters and Playbills, or getting an invitation to a dress rehearsal. The investor pools are usually organized as a limited partnership, like a private equity investment fund. Very often these investors are people who know the show's insiders, including the actors, writers, directors and others bringing it to the stage. Tim Speiss, a former board chairman of the Abingdon Theatre Company, a Broadway production group, said he once auctioned an item for a production in which the winning bidder could get his or her child a small speaking part in one performance. "There are some very clever ways to raise money," said Mr. Speiss, who is a wealth adviser at EisnerAmper, an accounting and advisory firm based in New York. Once a show gets up and running, the investors might get their money back, proportionate to what they put in, plus any profit after the show's expenses are covered. Many shows are money losers: Just one in five will end up being profitable, and even fewer are runaway successes. But Mr. Davenport points out that those odds aren't much different than those of any other alternative investment in which a high net worth investor might dabble. As far as privately held start ups a favorite of private equity investors some 50 percent of new companies fail after the first four years, according to labor statistics. Linda Huber, an executive at a financial services company in New York, began investing in Broadway a few years ago when her daughter, now a high school senior, showed an interest. Her daughter, Claudia Lopez Balboa, gives her advice on which shows to bankroll. So far she has invested in four, including "On Your Feet," a musical about the lives of Gloria and Emilio Estefan, a story that resonated with her daughter's part Cuban heritage. "For art that's worth making, it's the responsible thing to support these endeavors it's a thing to do together," Ms. Huber said. Her daughter is about to graduate from St. Paul's School, a New Hampshire boarding school, and plans to go to the University of Michigan in the fall to major in finance and minor in arts management. Ms. Lopez Balboa said that Broadway had captured her imagination since she saw the show, "Bring It On," as a middle school student she recalled skipping all the way home afterward. "I wanted to produce a show that would make you leap in the air," she said. She reached out to Daryl Roth, a 10 time Tony winning producer (and no relation to Mr. Roth, the tool and die executive) to seek out an informational meeting about the business. Ms. Roth recalled that initial meeting and said she was impressed by Ms. Lopez Balboa's energy and interest enough to hire her as an intern for two summers. Ms. Roth, the lead producer of the show "Kinky Boots," said she understood where Ms. Lopez Balboa was coming from because her son Jordan had also dived into the theater world. "I wanted to help Claudia learn and be excited about working in theater," Ms. Roth said. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Your Money |
There is no collection of human beings too small for conflict, as anyone who has had roommates or endured a family car trip surely knows. But social science exists to test and sometimes to affirm our self knowledge as a species, which is why 11 people spent the summer of 1973 crossing the Atlantic on a small raft powered only by wind, ocean currents and the ambition of a Mexican anthropologist named Santiago Genoves. This journey, the subject of a fascinating new documentary called "The Raft," was not an early exercise in "Real World" style television, though a film camera was present on board the vessel, silently recording the interactions of the young, international, scantily dressed crew. Genoves, who designed the Acali (as it was called) and made the crossing with his subjects, was motivated by idealism and curiosity rather than or perhaps in addition to prurience. After surviving an airplane hijacking, he conceived of an experiment that he hoped would reveal whether violence was wired into the human genetic code or whether it arose through social conditions. In its mixture of high mindedness, arrogance and dystopian potential, the voyage of the Acali recalls other notorious undertakings of its era, notably Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment. In this case, instead of being confined to cells and divided into opposing groups, the subjects were set adrift for three months and encouraged to be as open and free as possible. News reports emphasized the salacious aspects of "the Love Raft" spreading rumors of orgies at sea which were exaggerated, though not entirely alien to Genoves's plan. He had selected his 10 companions based partly on their physical attractiveness, and his questionnaires were designed to get them thinking about sex, which he theorized was a source of conflict. It turned out to be more of a logistical challenge, given the small dimensions of the Acali and the total absence of privacy. Genoves's contemporaneous diaries and later reflections read in voice over by the actor Daniel Gimenez Cacho ("Zama") provide one narrative thread in "The Raft." If the director, Marcus Lindeen, had followed the usual documentary methods, blending old footage with interviews and maybe a re enactment or two, he would have accomplished something worthwhile, illuminating a minor chapter in the history of intellectual hubris and casual nudity. But what he does is something far more interesting. By setting Genoves's words in counterpoint with the recollections of seven of the participants who are still alive, he reinterprets the experiment, finding meanings that the scientist missed. (Genoves died in 2013). More than 40 years after the crossing from the Canary Islands to Mexico , the six women who sailed on the Acali gather aboard a plywood replica built for the film on a soundstage in Sweden. Their reminiscences are thoughtful and emotional their well worn faces beautiful, weathered afterimages of the ones we see in the footage from 1973 and they expose the complicated power dynamics that emerged in the group, as well as an easy camaraderie that challenged Genoves's hypothesis. When violence failed to erupt except for one incident, in which the target was an unlucky shark he tried to instigate it, a blatant violation of basic ethical standards in social science. Though he comes across in his own writings as witty and self aware, the picture that emerges decades later is of a moody, manipulative Svengali, blinded by his ego to what was really happening on the raft. Before setting sail, Genoves had given the most important jobs to women. Maria Bjornstam, an officer in the Swedish merchant marine, was the captain. Edna Reves, who had served in the Israeli Army, was the ship's doctor. Servane Zanotti was the designated diver . The other men seem to have accepted this arrangement without complaint, but Genoves had a habit of undermining the women's authority. For no good reason, he took away Bjornstam's command, an act of mutiny that, she dryly points out, is generally punishable by death. Another woman, Fe Seymour, one of two black Acali crew members, recalls his casual racism and misogyny, though some of the others disagree. Their collective testimony amounts to a feminist critique of Genoves's methods and assumptions. Toward the end, Seymour argues, movingly and persuasively, that the experiment was a success, but not in the way its architect had intended, and not with results he could recognize. He was so intent on finding violence and dissension that he failed to read the data on solidarity and problem solving on the deeply rooted human potential to be decent that was right in front of his eyes. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Waterfront living brings one closer to the healing blue of oceans, lakes and rivers. But what about helping to actually heal the earth? Experts say interest in waterfront green living may be on the rise. "Based on my experience and in talking to other realtors, homeowners today who are buying a primary or vacation home by the water are paying more attention to sustainability," said Seth Tilton, a realtor for ERA Evergreen Real Estate Company in Hilton Head, S.C., and a certified expert in sustainable real estate. "There is a lot more awareness about overall wellness than ever before and green living is a part of that." Most of these buyers gravitate to recently built homes, Mr. Tilton said, because they're more likely to be eco friendly than older ones. "A property that's 20 or 30 years old doesn't usually incorporate sustainability, unless it has been extensively renovated, because there wasn't as much awareness on the topic back then," he said. Features of a green home may include solar panels that supply heat and air conditioning, energy efficient appliances, LED lighting, and insulated windows and walls that minimize energy use. Waterfront homes might also include recycled shells or colorful tiles as part of the construction adding an eco friendly warmth and sense of place. About 35 minutes by car from Savannah, Ga., this home is part of Palmetto Bluff, a 20,000 acre coastal community and nature conserve with a focus on sustainability and environmental education. In 2003, the owners established the Palmetto Bluff Conservancy, a nonprofit that protects the diverse ecosystem of wetlands, forests and wildlife like white tailed deer, wild turkeys and gray foxes. Once the project is complete, more than half of the community's land will be in a conservation easement never to be developed. Every Palmetto Bluff home has eco friendly features and amenities including ample green spaces and footpaths; multiple fitness centers, restaurants, a dog park and spa; and more than a dozen land and water activities such as fishing, sporting clays and boating. The Home The home, with five bedrooms and baths and two half baths, is in Palmetto Bluff's River Road neighborhood, characteristic for its classic residences and adjacent to a 120 acre preserve. It's light and bright with a white color theme and overlooks the inland waterway. The entry level includes a sprawling living room with high ceilings, an open kitchen, a second back kitchen and the master suite. An additional three bedrooms are on the second floor while a fourth bedroom, with a sitting area and kitchenette, is above the three car garage. Sustainable features include energy efficient appliances and heating system, green construction and paving materials and insulation that's designed to minimize the use of heat and air conditioning. This home, called Villa Laterite, is in Sasawane, a coastal village in Alibag, a three hour drive south of Mumbai. It was built in 2018 and sits just over 600 feet away from the sea. The area, a popular second home and vacation spot for Mumbai residents, is known for its scenic beaches; excellent, inexpensive seafood; and cultural sites such as historic Kolaba Fort. The Home Spanning three levels, the villa has three bedrooms and baths and a contemporary Indian aesthetic of dark Burmese teak woods mixed with gold finishes and colorful patterned tiles. High ceilings and natural light are a feature throughout. A large living and dining room, kitchen and bedroom are on the entry level while the floor above has two more bedrooms and a family room. The third level has an uncovered tiled terrace. Villa Laterite has solar water heaters and LED lights, and a generator on hand as a power backup. Three wells, along with a rainwater harvesting system, supply the home with water. Outdoor Space The home is built on more than an acre of land and the property is lush with native trees including mango, lemon, papaya and guava. It also has spacious lawn, a produce garden, a lap pool and multiple decks. This apartment, in an upscale seaside resort development in Andalusia, on Spain's southeast coast, is part of a residential community that's scheduled to be completed in November. Located in the heart of Sotogrande's vibrant marina, the community consists of two buildings, one with eight apartments and the other with 56; this property is in the latter. All residences have electric heaters that supply hot water using thermal solar energy, energy efficient appliances, LED lighting, and walls and roofing with thermal insulation that cut down on the use of heat and air conditioning. Amenities within the community include a pool and multiple green areas with native plants. The beach, five golf courses and activities such as horseback riding, tennis and sailing are a short walk away. The Home The apartment, which includes two bedrooms and two baths, has an airy feel and contemporary style that includes light wood finishes. The kitchen is long and narrow and opens to the living and dining area as well as a hallway leading to the two bedrooms and baths. The master bathroom has two sinks, and both baths have large showers. Outdoor Space There's a spacious terrace off the living room with unobstructed views of the marina and the Mediterranean Sea. The terrace can also be accessed from the master bedroom. This three bedroom, two and a half bath home is in the coastal Los Angeles neighborhood of Marina del Rey, known for its namesake harbor and vibrant seaside restaurants. The property is a block from the harbor in one of the few areas close to the water that has single family homes; direct waterfront properties in Marina del Rey are mostly apartments and condominiums. The Home Split into three levels, the home has a dramatic entryway with a glass wall and two story ceiling. Common spaces including the kitchen and living and dining rooms are on the entry floor, while the bedrooms are on the second level and a spacious covered roof garden is on the third. Sustainable features include energy efficient appliances and solar energy that heats the home and supplies hot water. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
White actors, writers and directors still dominate Broadway stages, according to an annual report released on Wednesday by the Asian American Performers Action Coalition in partnership with the American Theater Wing. About 20 percent of shows in the 2017 18 season on Broadway and Off Broadway stages were created by people of color, the report found. Nearly two thirds of roles were filled by white actors on Broadway, and about 94 percent of directors were white. The study examined the city's 18 largest nonprofit theaters, as well as all 41 Broadway stages. It is a snapshot of a single season, and varies each time it is done. In the seasons since 2017 18, several shows with casts that feature a high percentage of performers of color including the musicals "Ain't Too Proud," "Tina," "Hadestown" and "West Side Story," as well as "Slave Play" and "A Soldier's Play" have been staged on Broadway. The study found that Off Broadway theaters invested as much as six times as much in white actors as they did in actors of color. It noted that a similar gap likely exists on Broadway stages, but it could not say for certain because Broadway theaters do not publish their negotiated salaries. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Growing up on the prairies, I formed a vision of the American South based almost exclusively on James Dickey's "Deliverance" first the 1970 novel and later the 1972 movie, Burt Reynolds heading deep into rural Georgia with three buddies to battle a landscape so bloody and beautiful it seemed an honor just to be there even as they tried desperately to escape. But it was another Dickey book, the sweet love letter to literature "Metaphor as Pure Adventure," that taught me the pleasures of writing. "One begins with the sensible world, which in its entirety is a gift, and a gift also in each of its parts," he proclaims. "But there is a second gift that you give yourself, based on the world's great gift. . . . those pictures of the world inside one's head; pictures made of the real world but pictures that one owns, that one infuses with one's own personality. They are fragments of the world that live not with the world's life but with ours." Not long after he wrote that passage, Dickey started teaching poetry at the University of South Carolina. A young was his student, and even the quiet, profound title of Gautreaux's dissertation, "Night Wide River," shows he was listening. Now, nearly 50 years and six books later, Gautreaux's latest story collection, "Signals," affirms that he is Dickey's true heir. Gautreaux's stories all begin in the relatively humble territory of realistic fiction. He describes his method, simply, as follows: "I try to imagine a normal, average man, with a old boring job, and give him a problem." Gautreaux has been called the "cartographer of the Louisiana back roads," but he also loves machines more than anyone I've read: gas stoves, trains, typewriters, sewing machines, pipes, pianos, church bells. It's one of the chief pleasures of his work finding out how things function and how to fix them. (Or not: A reader's heart breaks with Gautreaux's when something is declared "past fixin'.") But the real thrill of this collection is its inevitable march into poetry, what Dickey called "a magical arena." Gautreaux delivers a reliable, generous, surprising profusion of metaphors in each of these 21 stories. In one, a garage full of junk is slowly revealed as a stand in for the mysteries of marriage. In another, a windshield breaks into a "million diamonds," and the man recovering from the crash feels his mind come back to him changed, "like a book dropped in the ocean and washed up on shore, all there, but slightly warped." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
DECATUR, Ga. Last year, on Easter Monday, my friend Genia a 47 year old woman in my congregation, a mother of two kids the same ages as my own died of breast cancer. Ten years ago, she was the first person I met after my husband and I arrived here from New York City to co pastor the church her extended family had helped start generations before. We had moved to Decatur because our infant daughter had a life threatening condition, and her care was too much to manage in a tiny apartment on a minister's salary. I went to see Genia while she was recovering from a surgery. It had taken place in the hospital across the street from the children's hospital where my daughter was transferred by medical jet. For both Genia and me, our daughters' births had ushered in the possibility of death too quickly. Genia found the lump while breast feeding. My water broke at 18 weeks, and my daughter weighed two pounds when she was born 10 weeks later. In 15 years of ministry, I have sprinkled the heads of dozens of babies and washed hundreds of feet. But there isn't a ritual in the prayer books for what my parishioner turned friend and I were experiencing: the blessing of motherhood appearing with the angel of death. So we made up our own, needing to honor the fact that our living and our dying are intertwined. Mostly, we sat together in silence, as meditation offered a peace when the words of our faith tradition were not enough. We continued this practice off and on for 10 years, when she got better and when my daughter got worse, when the cancer returned in Genia's spine and then her liver, when a reconstructive surgery gave my daughter the ability to breathe on her own and gave my previously nonverbal girl a voice and the chance to enter kindergarten with her peers. And, finally, when the cancer spread to my friend's brain and she struggled to say anything at all. Last year, on Palm Sunday, after a few moments of prayer and silence together, I stroked a blend of essential oils across Genia's forehead and rested my hand on her shoulder, anointing her in the same way the woman in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew honored Jesus' body with expensive perfume. I foresaw the void I'd feel when her corpse was carried out from that room and out of my reach forever. This is not how last rites go in the prayer book, but Genia and I had become adept at creating meaningful rituals for ourselves. Slowly, laboriously, she reached up to rest her own hand over mine and said, "Thank you." A fitting goodbye for a woman who maintained her gratitude over a decade of trials and who would be remembered by everyone from her father to the clerk at the Y.M.C.A. as a person capable of being entirely present to others. Back when we planned her funeral, she asked me not to give a homily but instead to lead the crowd in silent meditation the kind that had sustained her throughout her illness, the kind we had fumbled our way through together. I immediately thought of the pitfalls the trouble sitting still, the potential for loud sobbing, the ill timed cough or high pitched question in a funeral with a significant number of children. But where I saw the potential failure of ritual, she saw the unexpected beauty. All those she loved sitting in one room, the sanctuary that had held her family for years, breathing together, searching for meaning beyond words, grasping for the thread that connects the living and the dead, clearing the mind to make room for the peace that surpasses understanding. She was right. In the moment, 850 of us managed to be quiet long enough to surrender to the paradoxical dynamic of letting go and searching for something greater. It was only 10 minutes, one for each year of her cancer, honoring her ability to stay present to life while anticipating her oncoming death. The silence ended with an Emmylou Harris song that Genia had picked out. "When I die, don't cry for me, I'll be gone and I'll be free." Despite the song's command, it seemed that all 850 mourners wept at that moment. But not me. Even as I commended her spirit to God, my voice only broke once. She was gone, my companion in motherhood and centering prayer, her body cremated, her place in the front pew now empty every Sunday. What I needed was my own mourning ritual, one that unleashed me from the burden of presiding over other people's grief, one that let me access my own. As I walked home that night, I thought about the other side of Genia: the risk taker, the party lover, the one who could find joy as easily as she could rush to comfort pain or sorrow. I remembered the woman who was known for her cheery call of "Love ya!" whenever she parted from family or friends. I took a shortcut past our neighborhood pool. The reflection of the moon floated on its surface. I remembered our jaunts to the beach, to the mountains the ones she begged me to take a weekend off from church for, the ones I too often declined. I started to cry. My face wet but my body still dry, I unlocked the pool gate with my key, and still wearing my clergy collar, its stiff white plastic arc circling my neck like the crescent of the moon cradling the rest of its shadowed body, I jumped in, calling "Love ya!" to my friend before the water took me in. This Holy Week of the pandemic year, a year when memorials for the dead are indefinitely postponed and in person Easter rituals are canceled across Christendom, we will mourn the pomp and circumstance of the sacred rites, but we can still linger in the intimacy of our bodies. We can savor the dampness of our tears and the coolness of the water when we wash them away. We can care for those with whom we are quarantined, if not in the bathing of little feet and anointing of brows, then by taking the time to practice silence together, to offer a long, loving look into the eyes of someone seated a safe distance away or on the other side of a teleconferencing camera. There's so much glory to be experienced even on this side of the resurrection. Beth Waltemath is a writer and minister, who serves as co pastor of North Decatur Presbyterian Church. 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 |
Netflix upended the entertainment business by successfully moving into nearly every genre scripted dramas, comedies, stand up specials, documentaries, reality shows and feature films. But one type of programming has proved tricky for the streaming giant: the talk show. In the last two years, Netflix has canceled three shows in the genre: "The Break With Michelle Wolf," "The Joel McHale Show With Joel McHale" and "Chelsea." Two other Netflix talk shows "Norm Macdonald Has a Show" and "The Fix," starring Jimmy Carr, D. L. Hughley and Katherine Ryan haven't generated much buzz. Part of the problem may be that talk shows make for an awkward fit with streaming. From Johnny Carson to Trevor Noah, talk show stars have bonded with audiences by riffing on current events. Netflix and other streaming services, on the other hand, have won over viewers mainly through binge worthy programming that has no real expiration date. "Late night hosts usually make jokes off of the day's events, and people have to watch them pretty soon," said Jeff Ross, the longtime executive producer for Conan O'Brien. "When you're at Netflix, people can wait a month and maybe it just doesn't hold up. A daily show, how do you binge that?" Two Netflix talk shows that have fared better are "Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj," which won a Peabody Award this year, and "My Next Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman." Mr. Letterman's program has gotten a lot of attention for Netflix, thanks to its celebrity guests (Barack Obama, Kanye West, Ellen DeGeneres) and its star's shift toward a sincere demeanor after a career of late night irony. But the size of the audiences for those two shows is a mystery, given Netflix's habit of releasing viewership data only in select cases. Netflix conceded that coming up with successful talk shows hadn't been easy. "The timeliness of the genre is a challenge for us as an on demand service," said Brandon Riegg, Netflix's vice president of nonfiction series and comedy specials, in a statement. "We've worked with many talented artists to pioneer talk shows for streaming audiences, and although some shows ended, we hope everyone involved is proud of what they created." For several talk shows created for streaming services, the small number of episodes ordered by programming executives has been another obstacle, some producers have said. The series hosted by Ms. Wolf the comic who drew national attention for her no holds barred performance at the 2018 White House Correspondents' Association dinner lasted all of 10 episodes before Netflix ended its run. And Hulu canceled "I Love You, America," hosted by Sarah Silverman, after a mere 21 episodes. Most hit talk shows on traditional TV, by contrast, are broadcast just about every weeknight, becoming an almost unnoticed part of a viewer's routine. "A talk show is about habit," said Gavin Purcell, a producer who helped run Ms. Silverman's Hulu program after working on Jimmy Fallon's NBC shows. "With Fallon, we're not trying to get you there every single night. We get you two or three times a week and that's a win. We want Jimmy to be part of your life." Netflix moved closer to a daily frequency with "Chelsea," the show hosted by Ms. Handler, streaming 90 episodes in its first season but still failed to break through. Viewers hoping to sample that first season will run into trouble: Netflix has removed 66 "Chelsea" episodes. It is the only instance of the company's having scrubbed content that it owned and created, according to a Netflix spokeswoman. Mr. Riegg, the Netflix vice president, said in a statement that Netflix had reduced the number of available "Chelsea" episodes before the show's second (and final) season in an attempt to provide "an easy way for viewers to catch up before the new episodes launched." 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. Mr. Riegg added that he had been heartened by the addition of Mr. Minhaj and Mr. Letterman to Netflix, and he noted that neither host depended on mining the day's headlines. Like John Oliver's program on HBO, Mr. Minhaj's "Patriot Act" is a weekly show specializing in single issue deep dives. By focusing on topics ranging from Saudi Arabia to the streetwear brand Supreme, the host can be relevant without having to weigh in on trending topics. Another Netflix talk show that has remained aloof from the news is Jerry Seinfeld's "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee," an interview program that started on the streaming service Crackle before Netflix bought the rights. Another Netflix talk show that ignores current events the decidedly casual interview program hosted by Norm Macdonald has not met expectations, however. Mr. Letterman, who is listed in the show's credits as "special counsel," acknowledged Mr. Macdonald's plight on a recent episode of Marc Maron's podcast "WTF" when he described a conversation he had had with Ted Sarandos, Netflix's chief content officer. "I remember saying to Ted Sarandos, after all of Norm's shows had been produced, I said, 'Boy, I think you guys really got something here,'" Mr. Letterman said. After a pause for comic effect, he added, "Apparently not." The comedy and show business historian Kliph Nesteroff said the problem now faced by streaming services brought to mind the early days of television, when hosts like Steve Allen learned that the new medium came with its own rules and demands. "If you look at the early 1950s, most of the shows on television that were transitioning from the radio stayed with the same format," he said. "All of the shows that didn't do anything new visually, and just filmed a radio show, failed. It was the early innovators like Steve Allen that played with form that succeeded." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
When Jessica Lewis, 32, and Jas Jeet Singh, 36, were tracking the early weather forecasts for Sunday, the day their wedding was to take place on Jekyll Island, Ga., they were disappointed to see that it was supposed to be 81 degrees and partly sunny. For their outdoor ceremony, they joked, 79 degrees would be ideal. But a two degree difference in temperature became the least of their worries as the forecasts took an ominous turn and Hurricane Matthew came into sharper focus. Still, they remained optimistic, telling guests they were certain that the storm would pass and the venue would be cleaned up and ready in time. "We kept telling people, 'Look, we're going to be there,'" Mr. Singh said in an interview on Friday. On Wednesday, as the door was closing on their plane from Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington to Jacksonville International Airport in Florida, they learned that the island, which is about 75 miles north of Jacksonville, was under a voluntary evacuation order. By Thursday, that order had become mandatory and the venue said it would be unable to host the ceremony because it could not receive food shipments. On Friday the couple decided to tentatively reschedule their wedding for Thanksgiving weekend in Virginia. They were not alone in having to rearrange their wedding plans because of the hurricane. Jessica McClellan, 28, and Mark Kennedy, 29, had planned to get married on Saturday afternoon in McClellanville, S.C., which is near the coast and about 40 miles northeast of Charleston, S.C. When it became clear that the hurricane would force the evacuation of the community, the couple hastily rescheduled their wedding to Thursday evening. For Ms. Lewis and Mr. Singh, the disruption was bad enough, but for their 140 guests some of whom were coming from India, Japan and Nigeria it meant the expense of canceling or changing travel plans at the last minute. Mr. Singh and Ms. Lewis said they felt bad about upending the plans but were grateful that none of their loved ones were hurt in the storm. They said their losses were less than 10,000 because the venue and vendors had been "extremely helpful" and accommodating; some declined to charge anything after the wedding was canceled. The couple got engaged in December. According to their wedding website, Ms. Lewis said she first knew Mr. Singh was to be the man in her life when he sang "Take Me Home, Country Roads" at a karaoke party; he knew she was the one for him when she used "spate" in a Facebook post. They had been planning their wedding since February; it was to feature a Sikh religious ceremony in the morning and a civil ceremony in the evening. Mr. Singh, who is known as JJ, was familiar with the island through his position as the treasurer of Leon N. Weiner Associates, a residential and commercial real estate developer in Wilmington, Del. He introduced Ms. Lewis to the island, which in 1886 was bought to become an exclusive winter retreat, known as the Jekyll Island Club, with members that included J.P. Morgan, Joseph Pulitzer and William K. Vanderbilt. "I fell in love with the place," said Ms. Lewis, an energy and infrastructure issues analyst at the Government Accountability Office in Washington. "It was just one of the most romantic places to have a wedding I've ever seen." The couple arrived on the island on Wednesday night, but evacuated on Thursday and relocated to Brunswick, Ga. They later had to evacuate a second time, to Hilliard, Fla., about 30 miles northwest of Jacksonville. Ms. Lewis said they were "a little bit in mourning" after the delay in their plans, which Mr. Singh had meticulously plotted down to the minute. Still, they remained chipper. "It gives me a chance to lose five more pounds," he said, to which Ms. Lewis chimed in: "I hear that!" For the wedding of Ms. McClellan and Mr. Kennedy, frantic phone calls were made, and vendors and caterers were quick to accommodate the last minute change of plans. Half of the 200 invitees were able to attend, including two of the groom's aunts and an uncle, who drove 16 hours from Canada and arrived at the ceremony an hour before it started. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
A United Airlines pilot's decision to divert a flight to remove a family with an autistic daughter has set off a firestorm online, with some calling for a boycott of the carrier. On Twitter, hundreds of the family's supporters have admonished the airline with the hashtag boycottunited; and a report by ABC News, published on Yahoo.com, has received more than 10,000 comments in less than 24 hours, ranging from harsh criticism of the family's parenting practices to reprimands of flight attendants for being insensitive to passengers with special needs. On May 5, a United flight out of Houston was diverted from Portland to Salt Lake City after the aircraft's pilot became concerned about potential behavior issues by an autistic passenger, Juliette Beegle, 15. The incident began when Donna Beegle, her mother, began to worry that her daughter, who had refused to eat before boarding the flight, would become agitated because of waning blood sugar, she told ABC News. Though usually reserved for first class passengers, Ms. Beegle asked a flight attendant if she might be able to purchase a hot meal for her daughter, but the flight attendant refused and offered a sandwich instead. Ms. Beegle said she explained that her daughter had special needs and would only eat hot food and warned the attendant that Juliette could have "a meltdown" and begin "crying and trying to scratch in frustration," if she did not eat. When Juliette's crying and vocal outbursts not unusual for children with autism did increase, she was brought a hot meal, which she ate and which settled her down, Ms. Beegle said. But shortly after, the captain announced that the plane would be making an emergency landing in Salt Lake City because of a passenger with a behavior issue. Paramedics and police were brought on board to assess the situation and eventually asked the Beegles to disembark. In videos taken during the incident and in subsequent news reports, fellow passengers have defended the family and criticized the flight attendant, pilot and airline for being insensitive to the girl's needs and for overreacting to behavior that is not uncommon. The airline will not be releasing the names of the pilot or the flight attendant involved, Karen May, a spokeswoman for the airline, said on the phone. United did issue the following statement: "After working to accommodate Dr. Beegle and her daughter during the flight, the crew made the best decision for the safety and comfort of all of our customers and elected to divert to Salt Lake City after the situation became disruptive. We rebooked the customers on a different carrier and the flight continued to Portland." The airline also actively participates in autism awareness and supports programs and events, including its Autism Airport Program, which provides a simulated travel experience for children with autism, Ms. May added. Ms. Beegle is most interested in autism awareness training for airline employees, she told ABC News. Her formal complaints to both United and the Federal Aviation Administration are already being investigated and, of course, the issue continues to be debated online, where some have leaned toward harsh criticism of Juliette, calling her a "brat" and labeling her parents as inept: "So I guess if you have autism, even at age 15, you have the right to throw a giant tantrum?," wrote Arm Chair Critic, whose comment was "liked" by more than 450 readers. Others fought back with admonishments of the general public's ignorance of autism and how it affects both the child and parents: "Some of you people need to spend a little time around special needs kids. Yes some can be spoiled, just like any other kid, but their behavior is related to their communication disability," wrote Dan Wormer. "Please, read a book and learn about autism before you do something really stupid, like this flight attendant." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The living room floor slopes in Laura Osnes's fifth floor walk up on the Upper West Side, baffling Lyla, the resident Chihuahua, making guests question their alcohol intake and necessitating the removal of the rolling desk chair. The kitchen is of a size that invites unfavorable comparisons to a postage stamp, and the dishwasher is 35 years old (that would be Ms. Osnes's husband, Nathan Johnson). But there is a deck, high ceilings and exposed brick and thanks to the five flight climb, absolutely no need to join a gym. It's all very "Barefoot in the Park," an association that delights the apartment's occupants, who, while approaching their 10th anniversary, seem as much like newlyweds as the characters in that Neil Simon play. "We're very happy here," said Ms. Osnes, 31, a two time Tony Award nominee (for the musicals "Bonnie and Clyde" and "Rodgers Hammerstein's Cinderella") and a star of the Broadway musical "Bandstand," which opened April 26. When Ms. Osnes triumphed in a reality show talent competition and won the lead in the 2007 Broadway revival of the musical "Grease," the prize didn't include help in smoothing the way from her home in Eagan, Minn., to the mean streets of Manhattan. "It was like, 'See you in New York for your first rehearsal,'" recalled Ms. Osnes, who was knee deep in wedding plans at the time. "It was super close to the theater I'd be working at," Ms. Osnes said. "There were laundry facilities a floor away, and a doorman. And they served continental breakfast. Moving here with a job and a brand new husband and a great apartment set us off on the right foot." But after a year, the couple wanted to see some trees and save some money, and it so happened that a cast mate from "Grease" was vacating her one bedroom rental and looking for someone to take over the lease. Ms. Osnes and Mr. Johnson were willing and eager. "We were ready for a change. We were ready for the New York experience," said Ms. Osnes, who wasn't sure initially just how much of that New York experience she really wanted. "When we lived in the high rise and I went to visit friends in walk ups, I thought to myself, 'I will never do this. Why would anyone live like this?' And then, a year later, I found myself living in a five flight walk up. It's funny how your attitudes change the longer you live here." Ms. Osnes and Mr. Johnson exude a sunny optimism, a can do and make do spirit. Faced with less than meager work space in the kitchen and both avid cooks they installed a tiny drop down wood counter in the living room. And with little wall space to hang show posters and a certain disinclination to bring her work home, Ms. Osnes went with show magnets instead. They're neatly lined up on the refrigerator door. The apartment is furnished mostly with pieces the couple had on their wedding registry and hauled to New York from Minnesota. They've since replaced the sofa and bought an accent chair, both gray, as well as an off white rug, and they recently hired Mike Harrison, an interior designer, to add some polish. Mr. Harrison successfully pushed for more throw pillows on the sofa, painted an accent wall colonial blue, hung a round mirror on the brick wall to give the living room more depth, and moved around a few pieces of art. But he knew better than to mess with the liquor cabinet, which is the domain of Mr. Johnson (his wife drinks nothing stronger than tea). Mr. Harrison also stayed away from the wall unit, which holds Ms. Osnes's very special property: 10 binders of Playbills (arranged chronologically, starting with the "Man of La Mancha" Broadway revival she saw during a trip to New York as a high school student in 2003) and a selection of board games, including Yahtzee, Life, Sorry, Scrabble and Clue. Be warned: Ms. Osnes takes her Scrabble very, very seriously. "Laura is incredibly talented at it, but she doesn't want to brag," Mr. Johnson said, adding, "I no longer play Clue with her; I know what the outcome is going to be." As soon as the weather turns fine, the fun and games move to the deck. Early on, the couple had it resurfaced and bought a grill. Now, a favorite handmade rug from the Citizenry, a home goods website, has come outdoors for the season. "Even though other people around us have decks, it still feels really private," Ms. Osnes said. "We love having friends over, and when Nate grills, our place becomes a real hang." Because they live on the top floor, it is sometimes easy for Ms. Osnes to forget the building has other occupants, so she might just burst into song. "Sometimes I'll see people in the hall and they'll say, 'Oh, we heard you singing yesterday,'" Ms. Osnes said. 'And I'm like, 'I am so sorry.' And they're always very nice and say, 'No, we love it.'" Of course they love it. Who wouldn't? | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The choreographer Paul Taylor, who is preparing his next premiere for March, has been making dances since 1954. But there's one curious divide within his output, too little discussed. Between 1954 and 1962, he made a series of 17 works with designs by the artist Robert Rauschenberg; the last of these was "Tracer." The next work he made, "Aureole," also from 1962, was the first one that made Mr. Taylor a big choreographic name and audience hit. This responded to its Handel music with a lyrical happiness that went against the modernist grain of American modern dance at that time; and its musical danciness has characterized much of Mr. Taylor's style ever since. But the popularity it brought him (it was soon being danced by Rudolf Nureyev and ballet companies) lastingly alienated him from Rauschenberg; from John Cage (who had dedicated a piece of music to him); and from others in their circle, some of whom are still alive. All these early stages of the Taylor trajectory were marvelously evident in a quadruple bill presented by his studio company, Taylor 2, on Friday through Sunday at the 92nd Street Y. Here was early Taylor, with works from 1956 to 1962, among them two pieces designed by Rauschenberg ("3 Epitaphs" and "Tracer") and then "Aureole." The contrast between those 1962 works, "Tracer" and "Aureole," remains striking. Does it matter now that these artists fell out then? Rauschenberg and Cage achieved fame within a very few years anyway (and fell out with each other). But it seemed to some, as it still does to some today, that Mr. Taylor had compromised that popularity is what he had decided to court whereas Rauschenberg Company bided their time, uncompromisingly, till acclaim came their way. Others, however, were and are able to love both the popularly entertaining and the disquietingly avant garde aspects of Mr. Taylor. The program's big historical event was the revival of "Tracer," the last of the Taylor Rauschenberg collaborations, unseen onstage since 1964 and, after no more than 10 performances back then, remembered by few. Its reconstruction by the dance scholar Kim Jones, assisted by Thomas Patrick and other former Taylor dancers, has involved instinct and imagination as well as research; but Mr. Taylor has given it his approval, letting it stand as part of his history. It first reached the stage on Sept. 30 at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. You have to smile about its Rauschenberg decor: It consists of an upended bicycle wheel, which spins by remote control now and then. This is Rauschenberg acting as an heir to Marcel Duchamp, creator of the early ready made "Bicycle Wheel" in 1913, showing the anti utilitarian aspects of the quotidian. Wheels became a Rauschenberg motif. (I assume he was also joking about originality: "Have I invented the wheel?") "Tracer" opens with one dancer curled in a ball beside the wheel, but almost all the movement that follows carries on regardless of it. It's an austere and experimental piece. Because that wheel is attributed to Rauschenberg, it became the most valuable element of "Tracer" and until this reconstruction, almost the only part to survive. A few years ago, Mr. Taylor sold the original for 437,000, to endow his new American Modern Dance endeavor. Taylor 2 uses instead a super right replica by Jeff Crawford. The Rauschenberg costumes patterned tights were rediscovered by Ms. Jones and are the basis for those worn here. The score (played here on tape) is by James Tenney. The cast consists of one man (Lee Duveneck) and three women (Alana Allende, Rei Akazawa, Amanda Stevenson), who dance all four pieces. They make an admirable case for "Tracer"; I hope this revival has a longer life. They show how uncompromising the "Tracer" choreography still is poses and movement sometimes alternate and how Mr. Taylor was deliberately trying different ways both of responding to music and showing independence from it. Some images prefigure later Taylor choreography, as in the way the man cradles one woman in his arms. A pattern for the three women, hopping around one another in a figure of eight, already shows Mr. Taylor's felicity of design. Watching "Tracer" and "Aureole" in quick succession they formed this program's second half was to feel both sides of the old argument. The breezy charm and singing musicality of "Aureole" are a real change of tack, but all the older works here show Mr. Taylor's steady investigation of choreographic musicality. "Junction," made to Bach in 1961 and the immediate predecessor to "Tracer," has been revived in recent years; like "3 Epitaphs," it points to several directions that Mr. Taylor was to take. During Friday's performance, you could see all six young Taylor 2 dancers come into bloom. Mr. Duveneck, stern and powerfully built, dancing Mr. Taylor's own roles, grew steadily sweeter and more powerful. In "Aureole," his alternation between sculptural firmness and ardent plasticity was wonderful to behold. Borne by the music, he seems to be discovering new zones of himself. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
"Summer Camps Close or Prepare for 'Bubble,' Putting Parents in Bind" (news article, May 23) outlines the difficulty camps and parents face without a consistent policy for opening. Camp is critical to a child's well being, and the need for recreation, exercise and socialization is even more critical after months of lockdown and social isolation. Overnight camp may be a safer option for New York's kids. With a strict policy of lockdown, segregation and testing, and by controlling the movements of staff and the activities of kids and denying access to unscreened individuals, we can create a temporary respite from the anxiety around Covid 19. There are certainly reasons to be cautious about the well being of our kids in the Covid world, but summer camps pose no greater risk than keeping them confined to the eye of the storm. If it can be deemed important that we have restaurants, bowling and beaches available as part of a normal healthy lifestyle, it's doubly important that our children have summer camp options available so that they, too, can return to a semblance of normalcy. Shea Hecht Brooklyn The writer is chairman of the National Committee for the Furtherance of Jewish Education and a board member for Camp Emunah. Re "How to Lower the Risk of Infection at Summer Camps," by Aaron E. Carroll (Op Ed, nytimes.com, May 21): My colleagues and I cannot agree more with this point: "We should pledge public funds to camps, as we hopefully will to schools, so that everyone can benefit." Without that support, the risks of camps being test cases are too grave, as many camps cannot afford to execute the needed changes properly. Nonprofit camps are in a much better position to not open than for profit camps. The nonprofits might have endowments, or major donors, and do at least have the ability to raise funds should the camp not open. Many camps have spent at least 50 percent of tuition by opening day and might not have cash in the bank to refund if they don't open. This could devastate many camps, even permanently. I believe this might be one of the reasons some for profit camps continue to steadfastly work toward opening, even in red zones. Lauren Brandt Schloss Wheatley Heights, N.Y. The writer is executive director of Usdan Summer Camp for the Arts, a nonprofit camp that has chosen not to open. Aaron E. Carroll has conjured gossamer threads of fantasy as to how an overnight camp could be run, suggesting no congregating in dining rooms, no indoor activities, canceling camp activities when it rains and daily screenings for the virus. In reviewing the 2019 medical records of our six week summer camp of 300 children, the infirmary recorded 94 visits by children who evidenced symptoms that would be considered within the Covid 19 complex. Enforcing the proper protocol today would eviscerate the camping experience before the summer had begun. For the greater welfare of our children, our camp board of directors made the most painful decision not to open camp this summer. As great as a camping experience can be, the welfare of all of our children takes precedence over all. Roger Korman Bay Harbor Island, Fla. The writer is a member of the board of directors of Camp Tel Yehudah in Barryville, N.Y. As parents grapple with the safety or even possibility of sending their children to summer day camp, I offer a possible solution that was very common in Connecticut suburbs where I lived in the 1950s and '60s. Mothers faced with 10 weeks of continuous child care got creative. In our neighborhood five or six mothers of similarly aged kids would band together and hire a teenager or two to create a "camp." Each day, the camp would circulate to a different house. What are the advantages? A small group of kids whom you know. An environment confined to five or six yards. Lower cost. So what did we do in these camps? Bike decoration and bike parades, games like red light/green light, kickball, board games, arts and crafts, and sprinkler runs. Each day after lunch our "counselor" would read to us for half an hour. It was simple, it was flexible and it was not stressful for parents or kids. Think about it. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
It took all eight races of the season for Toyota Racing to finally score its first victory in the 2013 Federation Internationale de l'Automobile World Endurance Championship, but the triumph in the season finale Saturday in Bahrain ended the team's otherwise frustrating year on a positive note. Anthony Davidson, Sebastien Buemi and Stephane Sarrazin shared driving duties in the Toyota TS030 Hybrid during the six hour endurance contest, held at the Bahrain International Circuit. At the finish, they were 70 seconds ahead of the Audi R18 E tron quattro of Andre Lotterer, Benoit Treluyer and Marcel Fassler. It was a race of attrition, with the factory backed operations from archrivals Toyota and Audi each suffering setbacks. The pole winning Toyota of Alex Wurz, Nicolas Lapierre and Kazuki Nakajima retired early because of an engine issue. A drivetrain problem caused Audi's lead team also to drop out, and although its drivers scored no finishing position points as a result, Loic Duval, Tom Kristensen and Allan McNish had earned enough counters in the previous seven rounds to secure the season's driving title. In other racing news from the week: Don Panoz, the racing entrepreneur and businessman, has sued Nissan seeking to bar the Japanese automaker from displaying, racing or selling cars similar to the DeltaWing racecar that he helped bankroll in its development, Automotive News reported Monday. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Ray Knox still owns and occasionally rides the custom made French bicycle that he pedaled from Paris to Athens in 1984, solo, when he was 25. A floor standing 1940 Philco radio given to him by his grandfather, an electrical engineer with patents for work on televisions, fluorescent lights and rocket guidance systems, still works and is displayed in his home's hallway. Behind his desk, Mr. Knox, 54, keeps the tool and die maker's chest that belonged to his father, Horace F. Knox, who was also a World War II Navy pilot and later went into real estate. Parked on Mr. Knox's semicircular driveway on a sunny March day was another personal treasure in his life for many years, a 1966 Cadillac Fleetwood Sixty Special. The 19 foot long luxury sedan originally belonged to the Curries, an older couple who lived next door when he was growing up in Glen Ridge, N.J., a small suburb south of Montclair and one of the few American towns that still use gas street lamps. As a boy, Mr. Knox helped the Curries with household chores, more so after Ruth Currie became a widow in the early 1970s. He would also occasionally wash her light metallic green Cadillac Crystal Firemist was the formal name of the paint sometimes for pay, sometimes not. "I became like the adopted grandson," said Mr. Knox, who is divorced and has two college age daughters. He was a 17 year old high school senior when Mrs. Currie died in 1976, and he was surprised when her daughter offered him the Cadillac, which had been driven just 25,000 miles. "She told me: 'You were always so good to her. I know she'd want you to have the car,' " Mr. Knox said. He remembered his neighbor warmly, describing her waist length red hair and how she smoked with a cigarette holder. "She'd greet everyone with, 'Oh, darling, how are you?' " Mr. Knox said, recalling how she spoke with a slight affectation. "She was an elegant, lovely lady." The Curries' Fleetwood was among numerous Cadillacs in the neighborhood. Another neighbor was a salesman for Central Cadillac in Newark and drove a new model every year. "I grew up ensconced in the Cadillac culture," said Mr. Knox, the youngest of four children. His father, who owned some 60 cars in his lifetime, broke his loyalty to Lincoln for a brief dalliance with Cadillac in the 1970s. Mr. Knox took his inherited Cadillac to Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where campus life included road trips. "Nothing as crazy as in 'Animal House,' " he said, referring to the 1978 movie in which fraternity brothers wreck a borrowed Lincoln Continental during a road trip gone awry. The Ray Ban sunglasses from Mr. Knox's college years still reside in the Cadillac's glove compartment. After college, Mr. Knox worked on Wall Street in commodities and fixed income markets. He used the Cadillac as transportation until 1990, adding about 45,000 miles. That year, he bought his first new vehicle, a Jeep Grand Wagoneer, and had the Cadillac repainted in its original color. The 1966 Cadillacs continued a creased design introduced the year before. It was a pivotal look for the brand, influencing models for decades to come. The crisply folded body lines, bladelike vertical taillights and V shape grilles of today's models seem to continue that lineage. Mr. Knox likens the car's angular design to Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture, in particular the Frederick C. Robie House on the University of Chicago campus. "It's all horizontal lines, like the side view of the Cadillac," Mr. Knox said of the house, which is considered a high point of Prairie Style architecture. "And there are also many areas that are all vertical lines, like the front and rear of the car." Mr. Knox's everyday driver is an S.U.V., a 2007 Lexus GX 470, which handily serves his outdoor activities. At least once a year, he makes a 14 hour trip by bicycle to Manchester, Vt., 185 miles away. An ardent swimmer, he has competed in races in the Hudson River and in Bermuda, winning or placing at the top of his age group. The Cadillac is driven year round when the weather is good. An occasional excursion to Fusick Automotive in East Windsor, Conn., for parts becomes a 250 mile round trip with a detour to a favorite Mexican restaurant, Besito, in West Hartford. "The more you drive them, the better they run," said Mr. Knox, who does much of the car's maintenance and also owns a restored 1962 Oldsmobile Starfire that belonged to his former wife's grandmother. "Letting them sit creates problems with the engine and electrical systems." Except for the repaint, the Cadillac remains in excellent original condition. A ride around Greenwich conjures a different era. The wide bench seats, upholstered in a pillow style damask cloth with leather trim and metallic look stitching, looked and felt like comfortable sofas. Each could easily accommodate three across, with the low driveshaft hump ensuring ample legroom even for middle seat riders. The six way power driver's seat still works, though this car lacks the seat warmers that Cadillac introduced that year as an industry first. The lap belts unlock by pressing a button bearing the Cadillac crest. Deckinglike strips of walnut, which Cadillac promised were three eighths of an inch thick, trim each door. The black and silver instrument panel design was typical of the day, with a horizontal band speedometer and small gas and temperature gauges. In 1966, "infotainment" was provided by an AM/FM radio, a 191 extra and one of the many options that drove this car's price to nearly 8,000 (the equivalent of about 57,000 today). Mr. Knox prefers to listen to an aftermarket stereo cleverly installed in the ashtray compartment, hidden behind a swiveling access panel. The unit controls a CD changer mounted in the car's expansive trunk. He pressed a button to switch from 1960s Rolling Stones to "Low Rider," the 1975 hit by War. "I'd play that for my daughters whenever we drove in the car," he said. "They really got a kick out of it." A cruise along the Merritt Parkway highlighted the plush, isolated ride. Though more vocal than today's engines, the 429 cubic inch V 8 hummed unobtrusively. There were no squeaks or rattles in the 47 year old sedan, and just a bit of wind noise intruded on the relative serenity. The area's twisting back roads betrayed the Fleetwood's lumbering road manners. "It's like driving a water bed," Mr. Knox said. "It kind of swishes from side to side." Riding in the rear seat, Sandra Hill, Mr. Knox's girlfriend, said the softly sprung car's sway through the curves left her feeling a little queasy. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Berlin The budget of Documenta, the pace setting quinquennial exhibition of contemporary art traditionally hosted in Kassel, Germany, ran 8 million over budget primarily due to costs incurred at a second venue this year in Athens, officials said Thursday. Christian Geselle, the mayor of Kassel, said at a news conference that auditors were still reviewing the finances but that costs attributable to the Greek part of the exhibition had been higher than anticipated. Prior reports in the German media have indicated that the expense of air conditioning venues in Athens were to blame for a portion of the cost overruns. The budget deficit became a source of irritation between the creative team of the exhibition and the government of Kassel and the state of Hesse, which are shareholders in the company that operates the exhibition. The governments stepped in earlier this month to guarantee loans of 8 million euros ( 9.6 million) to avoid bankruptcy and to provide the company with something of a safety net. "Documenta is one of the biggest strokes of cultural fortune for Hesse, Kassel and beyond," Hesse Culture Minister Boris Rhein told the news conference. "It is our duty to ensure that it continues." The 2017 exhibition was the first to be spread evenly over two locations and Mr. Geselle was careful not to suggest that the concept of utilizing a second venue was itself a problem. "Documenta is firmly anchored in Kassel and will remain so," Mr. Geselle said. "We have to beware of jealously guarding Documenta all for ourselves, or we will look provincial and petty. We want to be open to the world." Founded in 1955, Documenta brings hordes of art lovers to Kassel, a city south of Hanover that is otherwise off the tourist map. With a tradition of granting its creative team a free hand, the exhibition has a reputation for identifying new artistic developments and for displaying challenging political comment. This year's edition, which closed on Sunday, drew record crowds. The organizers of the exhibitions said that, with more than 1 million visitors in total, it became the most frequented contemporary art exhibition of all time. About 891,500 visited the Kassel exhibition venues, while 339,000 attended the Athens show. The work of some 160 artists was presented, with themes that encompassed debt crises, migration, war and the rise of right wing populism. Mr. Rhein praised the artistic team for the exhibition, which he described as "interesting, controversial and well attended." The exhibition's artistic director Adam Szymczyk and the rest of the creative team have objected to suggestions that they were at fault for the budget deficit and suggested the depth of the financial crisis had been exaggerated. Mr. Szymczyk did not attend the news conference and could not be reached for comment. Mr. Rhein said Documenta will look closely at what caused the budget overshoot and how it could have been foreseen sooner. "It is clear that Documenta is reaching its limits, organizationally, financially and in size," he said. "We have to watch out for that. It will be a part of our discussions." The company's shareholders will rethink Documenta's structure to take account of its growth, Mr. Rhein said, adding that Hesse and Kassel would welcome participation by the federal government which also provides funding for the event as a third shareholder. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Art & Design |
When Amuche Chukudebelu, a programmer at a finance company, became a landlord about a decade ago, he knew very little about how to set the rent for the two apartments he planned to rent out in his brownstone in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He didn't want to be a landlord who was constantly raising the rent on his tenants. But despite locking in relatively high rents initially, the market quickly rose around him, and by 2014, he had one tenant paying 1,450 a month when the market rate was closer to 2,000. "I was like, 'Wait a second. I'm way below market,'" said Mr. Chukudebelu, who has since become a real estate agent at Citi Habitats and found his dilemma at best uncomfortable. "You want to be compassionate, but there are also expenses that are increasing. And the market is the market." While the city's larger, institutional landlords may use algorithms to set rents, informing tenants of increases by letter, for many smaller landlords, the process is not so impersonal. They may rent just a few units, often in the building where they live, relying on the income to make their mortgage payments. Many see their tenants in the hall, know what kind of music they listen to and exchange neighborhood gossip on the stoop. And though most say that they follow general principles and guidelines when determining rents, not all of those are financial, and they are far from uniform. Squaring business interests with one's personal and political beliefs, of course, can be a messy business. Consider the brouhaha last year when Politico revealed that Mayor Bill de Blasio, a small landlord who has made affordable housing one of his signature issues, had raised the rent on one of the units in a two family Park Slope house that he and his wife own. While the increase, from 2,400 in 2009 to 2,850 in 2016, broke down to a relatively modest 2 or 3 percent per year, Mr. de Blasio, who declined to be interviewed for this story, had spent the previous two years calling for and getting zero percent increases for the city's rent stabilized units. While the Rent Guidelines Board sets increases for the city's million or so rent regulated tenants, increases on market rate units are entirely at the discretion of landlords, who weigh potential profits against the possibility of losing reliable tenants and the cost of vacancy. As for determining what the market rate is, small landlords say they do various things, from looking through nearby listings to asking neighbors and visiting open houses. Christopher Athineos, who with his parents owns 150 apartments in 9 buildings, a mix of rent regulated and market rate units in Bay Ridge, Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights, said that while "obviously this is our business, you get close to it" especially if you get to know your tenants well. His parents bought their first property in 1968 and still live in one of their buildings. Mr. Athineos grew up with some of his current tenants and goes to their children's baptisms and other events. He even agreed to help the niece of an older tenant scatter the ashes of that tenant when she passed away. "I do cut people a break. I have a couple of senior citizens in Bay Ridge one woman, her husband passed away a long time ago, she's in her 80s, on fixed income. I'm like, 'Sign the lease renewal, no increase,'" Mr. Athineos said. "Or I increase her 5, so she doesn't feel like a charity case." For other tenants, he said he usually raises rent by 1 to 3 percent on the second renewal. "No one likes an increase on their first year," Mr. Athineos said. "But I've made the mistake in the past where I don't increase them for four years, then all of a sudden, you have to ask them for 75 or 100, and they're like, "'Oh my god, you're killing me.'" The key thing, landlords agree, is to hang onto good tenants the ones who pay on time, take care of the apartment and call you when the radiator's leaking all over the floor, but not, as one landlord said, "because the refrigerator makes too much noise." Minimizing turnover is important, because empty apartments have to get cleaned, repainted and repaired. And there is often at least a one month gap between tenants, with no rent coming in. Some landlords avoid raising the rent at all when they have a good tenant, preferring to catch up to the market the next time they list the apartment. One tenant whom he had been renting to since 2006 "was like a ghost," he said approvingly, so he was happy to keep her at the same rent that she paid when she moved into the three bedroom duplex garden apartment, 2,500 a month. But last summer, the tenant got a new roommate who started calling him all the time about what he said were minor problems or nonissues. So at renewal time, he sent them a letter raising the rent to 4,500. "She assured me her new roommate would not be calling me anymore, and we negotiated a new rent of 3,500," Mr. Bernard said. "From what I gathered, the new roommate came from a Manhattan doorman building and was accustomed to 'Hey, a light in the apartment is out.' That's not brownstone living. We don't do concierge service." Landlords who share houses with their tenants are often even more willing to go below market rate sometimes substantially for a friendly tenant. Mary and Larry Heintjes are artists who own a carriage house on the border of Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, and rent out a studio apartment across the hall from their two bedroom. The unit goes for well under market rate. As Ms. Heintjes explained, "We wanted a certain kind of person, someone who is kind and communicative. We didn't want to lose that kind of person by charging a rent that would be for someone who is more corporate." That view was shaped by their history in the house. The same day that they closed on the property in 1997, Mr. Heintjes's mother had a stroke. During the renovation, they decided that she should move in with them. She stayed for five years, until she needed round the clock care, which is when they turned her room into a studio apartment. With property taxes increasing and their two daughters nearing college age, they needed the extra income, but they wanted a renter who felt like family. Charging considerably below market rate has allowed them to get just that. Previous tenants, a couple who bought a house in Albany, stay with them regularly when they are in the city. But last spring, they needed to find a new tenant after nearly a decade with virtually no rent increases, so they consulted a friend, Craig Meachen, who is also a real estate broker. He helped them calculate a rent that was several hundred dollars higher than they had been charging, getting them closer to market rate. But even in the coziest relationships, money and paying the mortgage can be a big issue. After Bibi Calderaro, an artist and broker, and her husband, a photographer, bought a townhouse in Bed Stuy six years ago, they rented out the garden apartment for 1,800 a month. The first few tenants were on yearlong fellowships, and another moved out because she wanted a dog. With every transition, they recalibrated the rent to the rising market. Last year, they listed the apartment for 2,300, or 100 more than the previous tenant had been paying, and got no takers. Then they lowered the price to what the last tenant had been paying, and still it didn't rent. Grudgingly, they lowered it again, to 2,175, in response to what the market was telling them. But that didn't make the rent decrease any easier to take. That monthly income is how "I pay my mortgage," Ms. Calderaro said. "We're not only trying to keep up with inflation, but the real estate taxes have gone up. Our economy is much more fragile than larger landlords'." Still, if there is a common thread among most small landlords in the city, it is that they choose not to chase the highest rent they could get. When Marta Satwin Ramberg, an architect, and her husband, a graphic designer, bought and renovated a three unit rowhouse in Ridgewood, Queens, six years ago, they picked a midpoint between the going rate for unrenovated apartments in the area and what seemed like unreasonable asks in several nearby buildings that developers had redone. Last fall, they asked 2,000 for a railroad style two bedroom. Being cognizant of those things can certainly make asking for more rent difficult, as Mr. Chukudebelu, the landlord in Bed Stuy, discovered when he finally approached his 1,450 a month tenant about an increase. At first, he asked for 100 more a month, which she agreed was reasonable. But the next year, when he tried to raise it another 100, she balked, and they negotiated a two year lease with 75 and 50 increases, which would eventually bring the rent to 1,675. After that, he said, "came the moment of truth." He asked for another 75 increase, wanting to bring the rent to within a few hundred dollars of the 2,000 market rate. "And I knew that was a stretch for her," he said. "That definitely weighed on me. But then I was like, 'Do I take a loss so she doesn't?'" Ultimately, the tenant got a roommate, and they now pay 1,800 a month, which puts the rent close enough to market rate that Mr. Chukudebelu can ask for much smaller increases at future renewals. In hindsight, he realized that his impulse to avoid raising the rent at all on a good tenant was well intentioned but a bit naive, since it put him so far behind. "I wanted to be compassionate," he said, "but that was a little too much of a compassionate viewpoint." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
The technology inside Amazon's new convenience store, opening Monday in downtown Seattle, enables a shopping experience like no other including no checkout lines. SEATTLE The first clue that there's something unusual about Amazon's store of the future hits you right at the front door. It feels as if you are entering a subway station. A row of gates guard the entrance to the store, known as Amazon Go, allowing in only people with the store's smartphone app. Inside is an 1,800 square foot mini market packed with shelves of food that you can find in a lot of other convenience stores soda, potato chips, ketchup. It also has some food usually found at Whole Foods, the supermarket chain that Amazon owns. But the technology that is also inside, mostly tucked away out of sight, enables a shopping experience like no other. There are no cashiers or registers anywhere. Shoppers leave the store through those same gates, without pausing to pull out a credit card. Their Amazon account automatically gets charged for what they take out the door. There are no shopping carts or baskets inside Amazon Go. Since the checkout process is automated, what would be the point of them anyway? Instead, customers put items directly into the shopping bag they'll walk out with. Every time customers grab an item off a shelf, Amazon says the product is automatically put into the shopping cart of their online account. If customers put the item back on the shelf, Amazon removes it from their virtual basket. The only sign of the technology that makes this possible floats above the store shelves arrays of small cameras, hundreds of them throughout the store. Amazon won't say much about how the system works, other than to say it involves sophisticated computer vision and machine learning software. Translation: Amazon's technology can see and identify every item in the store, without attaching a special chip to every can of soup and bag of trail mix. There were a little over 3.5 million cashiers in the United States in 2016 and some of their jobs may be in jeopardy if the technology behind Amazon Go eventually spreads. For now, Amazon says its technology simply changes the role of employees the same way it describes the impact of automation on its warehouse workers. "We've just put associates on different kinds of tasks where we think it adds to the customer experience," Ms. Puerini said. Those tasks include restocking shelves and helping customers troubleshoot any technical problems. Store employees mill about ready to help customers find items, and there is a kitchen next door with chefs preparing meals for sale in the store. Because there are no cashiers, an employee sits in the wine and beer section of the store, checking I.D.s before customers can take alcohol off the shelves. Most people who spend any time in a supermarket understand how vexing the checkout process can be, with clogged lines for cashiers and customers who fumble with self checkout kiosks. At Amazon Go, checking out feels like there's no other way to put it shoplifting. It is only a few minutes after walking out of the store, when Amazon sends an electronic receipt for purchases, that the feeling goes away. Actual shoplifting is not easy at Amazon Go. With permission from Amazon, I tried to trick the store's camera system by wrapping a shopping bag around a 4.35 four pack of vanilla soda while it was still on a shelf, tucking it under my arm and walking out of the store. Amazon charged me for it. A big unanswered question is where Amazon plans to take the technology. It won't say whether it plans to open more Amazon Go stores, or leave this as a one of a kind novelty. A more intriguing possibility is that it could use the technology inside Whole Foods stores, though Ms. Puerini said Amazon has "no plans" to do so. There's even speculation that Amazon could sell the system to other retailers, much as it sells its cloud computing services to other companies. For now, visitors to Amazon Go may want to watch their purchases: Without a register staring them in the face at checkout, it's easy to overspend. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
MELBOURNE, Australia As the reigning Australian Open champion Naomi Osaka opened her season earlier this month, she checked herself as she expressed her goals for the rest of the year. "I think just to try as hard as I can every match," Osaka said. "Because for me, when I feel like I do that, I somehow end up winning the match, no matter what." As she heard herself, her eyes widened. "Oh, that sounds really arrogant," she said, clearly embarrassed. Osaka had spoken into a microphone what she has already made clear with her racket over the past two years: Underneath her quiet demeanor, she has an assured confidence that has helped carry her to two Grand Slam titles. She may be soft spoken in public, but she is also steely and determined. Osaka, 22, showed that mettle most unmistakably during the 2018 United States Open final against Serena Williams, closing out a title even as Williams got into heated arguments with the umpire over penalties and the crowd booed what they felt was unfair treatment for the 23 time Grand Slam champion. She followed up that victory by winning the Australian Open last year. Now, as the No. 3 seed, Osaka has beaten 42nd ranked Zheng Saisai in a second round match, 6 2, 6 4, and she will face the 15 year old phenom Coco Gauff in the next round. Gauff was down 0 3 in the third set on Wednesday but came back to beat Sorana Cirstea, 4 6, 6 3, 7 5. Osaka routed Gauff 6 3, 6 0 in the third round of the U.S. Open last year, in a match that was memorable because of Osaka's grace and compassion toward her younger opponent after the match ended. "If I had a child or something, that's something I would want my child to see," Gauff said after Osaka encouraged her to stay on court to address the crowd as she fought through tears. "It just shows what being a competitor really is." After beating Gauff last year, Osaka's first bid for a Grand Slam title defense ended with a loss to Belinda Bencic, an opponent who had beaten her twice previously in 2019. "There were moments where I accepted defeat and I was O.K. with it," Osaka said this week. "After the match, I was just so disgusted with myself, because when I was a kid, I would dream to be in that position so I could fight to go to the finals and win it. But for me to like sit there and think that it's O.K. to like lose in the fourth round is like kind of pathetic." It was after that match that Osaka told herself she would fight for every point. She entered the Australian Open with a 14 1 record since then, winning titles in Beijing and her birthplace of Osaka, Japan, in the fall. Her lone defeat since the U.S. Open came against second ranked Karolina Pliskova in the Brisbane semifinals earlier this month, a match Pliskova won in three sets after fending off a match point for Osaka. On the court, Osaka has thrived by turning one of her weaknesses into a strength. A shoulder injury forced her out of the year end championships in Shenzhen, China, but since then she has been hitting more aces than usual, maximizing her serves to make the most of each use of her shoulder. "I feel like every serve that I serve should count," she said, "and it's been working out really well." She also arrived in Melbourne with a new guide: the coach Wim Fissette, a Belgian who coached Kim Clijsters and Angelique Kerber to Grand Slam titles, and also worked with other top players, including Simona Halep. Fissette said Osaka set herself apart by setting her goals so high. "I've worked with many top 10 players but there's a big difference in ambition; you would expect it all to be the same, but it's not," Fissette said. "With a player like Naomi, you go to tournaments to win them, not to play finals or semifinals," Fissette added. "That's the ambition, and I love that ambition. I love working under pressure." Fissette said he found Osaka to be more tactical than he had expected. And while others would try to avoid pressure at the top of the sport, Osaka has embraced her status as a favorite, he said. "Some players, they really need to be an underdog," Fissette said. "Others, are like her; she doesn't want to be in an underdog position, because she feels she's the best out there." By hiring Fissette, Osaka broke up a pattern of hiring people who had previously worked with the Williams sisters. And Fissette has coached players to five wins over Serena Williams in the last 11 years, more than any individual player has earned against her on the court. Osaka has looked up to Williams since she started in the sport as a girl ("I said, 'I want to be like her,'" Osaka said in 2018 as she described a report she had done on Williams in third grade). Last week, Osaka posted a photo of herself with Williams on Instagram as they sat together during an exhibition for Australian fire relief. She captioned it: "me and my mom lol." Williams, who has not always taken kindly to the young players who have made star turns by beating her at Grand Slams, responded with heart emojis to Osaka, whom she first met in 2014. "I have always had some sort of admiration for her, because I met her when she was super, super young," Williams said of Osaka. "It was really cool to see her grow from that age to No. 1 and multi Grand Slam champion. I thought the picture was cute, so I felt like I should like it and comment on it definitely not the mom, though." Osaka said she still felt star struck around Williams and other tennis stars, and characterized her interactions with Williams as one directional. "I'm going to have to give you a briefing of how I am as a person," Osaka said during the Australian Open draw when asked about Williams. "I don't talk to people; I just stare at them from a distance. That's lesson No. 1. Lesson No. 2 is that if I were to talk to Serena, she talks to me and I get surprised that she talks to me, and then I don't talk back." One space where Osaka has been increasingly comfortable expressing herself is in documenting her fashion choices on Instagram. "It's really weird because people have been telling me they really like my fashion sense," Osaka said. "Honestly, I'm very sorry, but that's way more of a compliment than when people tell me they like my tennis." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ. The sales results from the major collector car auctions that wrapped up here last week included a long list of record prices and strong indications that the recovery of a market battered by the recession was nearly complete. No one should have been surprised that a 1958 Ferrari 250 GT California Spider sold at RM Auctions for 8.8 million. Or even that the heady prices paid for American collectibles 3.9 million for a 1967 Chevrolet Corvette coupe with the L88 engine option at Barrett Jackson was not stop the presses news. (An update with prices for the cars included in "Measures of the Collectible Car Market" on Jan. 12 can be found at nytimes.com/autos.) But there were also some head scratchers, particularly the seven figure prices realized by a few undeniably shabby cars. A fire damaged 1967 Ferrari 330 GTS roadster sold for 2.1 million at the Gooding Company sale, where a tattered 1956 Mercedes Benz 300SL Gullwing brought 1.9 million. Even a rusty, abandoned 1965 Porsche 911, dismissed by onlookers as little more than a parts car, sold for 116,600 at the Bonhams auction. To purists, it was almost as if the cash for clunkers program had come to town, or that mutts had invaded the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show and taken home Best in Show. (In fact, the agility trials added to the Westminster show this year will allow mixed breed entries.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
For my daughter Vivie's birthday, I put together a book of photos from her first five years. From the 2,000 or so photos during her short lifetime, I chose 100, trying to display an array of her indoor and outdoor experiences, her family and friendships, her growing personality, from the big crumple up her whole face smile to the recent version in which she crinkles her nose and scrunches her eyes and opens her mouth. In about 99 percent of the photos, I see later, she's smiling, either right at the camera or while enjoying some wholesome pursuit biking, berry picking, beater licking. I realize this because it's pointed out by the nice lady at the photo processing place, who says what a happy family and child I have. After her comment, I see the photos in a new light. They are so happy. And she is a happy child, a little like a sorority girl in her approach to the camera: a big grin, her head tilted just so, her arm slung around her sister's shoulder. But the photos are almost boring in their sameness. Why have I not thrown in the one with her chin bloodied before she got three stitches, or even one with food on her face? What about one of her famous tantrums, or the one where she's a baby and she's lying on the rug by herself looking at the ceiling, and there are my feet and the bottom of my bathrobe as I stand near her, putting clothes away in her dresser? I have albums of such photos from my childhood. Here is me in front of a tinseled tree in my crushed velvet Christmas dress, looking as if I need to go to the bathroom. Here is me on the Fourth of July, my face pink and wrinkled up, crying while I hold a sparkler as far away from my body as possible. Here are Mom and I lying on the corduroy couch under a blue afghan, dark circles under our eyes. Here is one that I can't find just now, but I can picture it because I've seen it so many times: Mom so pretty with shoulder length hair standing behind me with her hands on my shoulders. I'm wearing a poncho and there's a curl dangling down the middle of my forehead and I have a funny expression. Mom's wearing a yellow T shirt, which is odd because Mom, when she was alive, was not a T shirt person. It says, I swear, "Leave Me Alone: I'm Having a Nervous Breakdown." Or maybe it said, "Leave Me Alone: I'm Having a Midlife Crisis"? I don't think I'm making this up. I know now that she was having a rough time, but who bought Mom that T shirt? I can't imagine her buying it herself, but I can't imagine anyone buying it for her, either. My daughters are part of a generation of kids who won't sift through their family stories from a shoe box of old photos. They'll have their tweaky, one eye shut shots deleted or edited out or forever marooned on the hard drive of someone's old Mac. Last year for Christmas, I bought my daughters a Polaroid camera, which I thought would be an antidote to all this, a reminder of a simpler time of photography. Never mind that the film was about 20 for 10 exposures or that, according to the packaging, it was filled with a "caustic paste." If punctured, it was to be kept away from "skin, eyes, and mouth" and from "children and animals." I left the store with a mix of Christmas accomplishment and eco angst that I'm familiar with. I had the Cabbage Patch doll of presents and a box of film filled with chemicals, basically. But on Christmas morning, the girls were excited about the camera. The 10 exposures were gone in about 10 minutes, giving us a stack of those perfectly imperfect Polaroid shots: Daddy's forehead, half of my eye, the reflection of the flash in the window, Vivie with a pillowcase over her head. I hadn't thought to stock up on more film. Or maybe I had and it was too expensive. A few days later, we went to buy more and couldn't find any after looking in three stores. And so we ended up ordering four packs online. Those came in the mail and were used in about a week (more photos of the window, the ceiling, of them with their friends sitting in chairs, a close up of Olive's lost tooth). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
"You," one of television's more addictive treats, returns for a second season on Thursday. It has moved to a different shelf of the candy store it's now a Netflix series, after premiering on Lifetime but it's as tasty, and as bad for you, as ever. The first season won a rabid following, and a lot of critical attention, for its clever fusion of the conventions of the romantic comedy with the conventions of the bluebeard serial killer tale. As Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) cute, courteous, literary and deranged pursued his quest to be the perfect New York boyfriend, the bodies piled up, and the rom com was shown to have been a horror story all along. The distance between the genres vanished. It was a good trick, part of a long tradition, from Hammer Films to "Scream" to Jordan Peele, of using dark comedy to make audiences feel less guilty about enjoying homicidal suspense and bloodshed. And it was well timed as a cautionary MeToo allegory: Joe's ability to make psychopathic narcissism look like romantic sensitivity and the eagerness of his victims to believe in it was a perfect representation of the big city dating hellscape. But for all the attention devoted to the show's extreme critique of the controlling mansplainer, and its biting depiction of millennial vacuousness, the real dramatic engine of "You" is simpler (and perhaps even more subversive). What's really entertaining about it is the screwball comedy of watching poor Joe trying to keep all of his plates spinning to stay one step ahead as his lies get harder to keep track of and his regretful but necessary killings become harder to cover up. The action is a Rube Goldberg like maze, and Joe is the rat whose escape we can't help rooting for. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
January LaVoy rehearsing for "Native Guard," which is now being staged at the Atlanta History Center. ATLANTA It was 2014 and in retrospect, an altogether different period in American history when this city's Alliance Theater first staged its adaptation of "Native Guard," Natasha Trethewey's Pulitzer Prize winning poetry collection that conjures little known scenes from the black Civil War experience, and challenges the way the broader story of the war has been told and memorialized. The nation's first black president was still in office. "Charlottesville" was not yet shorthand for a hate rally. And grand statues of Confederate heroes stood, as they had for decades, in the hearts of southern cities like New Orleans and Memphis. Today, some of those statues have been taken down, while the fate of many similar monuments remains a searing topic of debate. And the Alliance, one of Atlanta's premier theater companies, has resurrected its adaptation of "Native Guard," this time not in a traditional playhouse, but at the Atlanta History Center, where it is being deliberately and provocatively staged just steps from the museum's Civil War exhibit. The idea sprang in part from necessity. With the Alliance's home base at the Woodruff Arts Center under renovation, the company decided to take its 49th season on the road, performing in venues around metro Atlanta. But the revival of "Native Guard" is also a deliberate effort by the theater to elbow its way into the roiling debate about race and historical memory that was sparked after a racist neo Confederate sympathizer, Dylann Roof, massacred nine African Americans in June 2015 at a Charleston, S.C., church. "It felt like we were the ones broaching the subject in 2014," said January LaVoy, the New York based actor who once again plays the character based on Ms. Trethewey, the United States poet laureate from 2012 to 2014. "Now, in 2018, these conversations are being had all the time, in all sorts of ways and very impolitely." Audiences at the play, which runs through Feb. 4, are being encouraged to stay after the performance to take part in what is billed as an Act II, a moderated audience conversation about the work, race and history. At intermission, they are encouraged to walk through the History Center's Civil War exhibition and admire its extensive collection of rifles and ordnance, with words from Ms. Trethewey's imagined monologue by a black Union soldier still fresh in their ears: "Some names shall deck the page of history/as it is written on stone. Some will not." The wrongs Ms. Trethewey describes have not been easily righted. As calls for the removal of Confederate symbols have mounted, particularly around the South, the backlash from neo Confederates and other whites concerned that their own history is being erased has been occasionally ugly, and even deadly. Though many see the public memorials to the breakaway Southern states as little more than celebrations of white supremacy, President Trump has lamented the removal of "our beautiful" Confederate statues. Artists, art historians and preservationists have weighed in on what to do with the decommissioned Confederate statues, and on questions of their artistic merit. In Baltimore, a statue of a pregnant black woman with a raised fist, created by the artist Pablo Machioli, briefly occupied a space where the city's Lee Jackson memorial had stood before its removal in August. Good natured petitions calling for alternative monuments to the African American hip hop artists OutKast and Missy Elliott have appeared in their respective hometowns of Atlanta and Portsmouth, Va. This is the context in which the Alliance seeks to interject its revival of "Native Guard." Ms. Trethewey's celebrated 2006 book is itself a kind of literary monument to her experience growing up in Mississippi as a biracial child, to her African American mother, and to the Louisiana Native Guards, the black Union soldiers who fought on the Mississippi coast and guarded a prison camp for captured Confederates at Ship Island, south of Biloxi. "The book is trying, in many ways, to talk about those things that have been forgotten or erased or somehow left out of the historical record, and I'm very concerned with trying to inscribe, or reinscribe, those things," Ms. Trethewey, an English professor at Northwestern University, said in a recent phone interview. The Alliance's artistic director, Susan V. Booth, approached the Atlanta History Center with the idea of staging the play alongside its collection of Civil War artifacts. It was enthusiastically embraced by F. Sheffield Hale, the center's president and CEO. "I said, 'Hell yeah," recalled Mr. Hale, who said he was already a fan of the book. "It fits into our new strategic plan of working with other institutions and getting different people from different ZIP codes and different interests in here," he said. Mr. Hale is not a historian but a history buff, an Atlanta native with a law degree from the University of Virginia. Since taking the helm of the museum in 2012, he has helped raise 65 million for the center, bringing glossy upgrades to its main campus in the affluent Buckhead neighborhood, but also a fresh emphasis on diversity and historical nuance. The famous cyclorama painting, "The Battle of Atlanta," that was once housed near the Atlanta Zoo, has been moved to the center and placed in a custom built cylindrical gallery that will open to the public in November. The massive work, originally painted to celebrate Northern victory but later associated with the Lost Cause myth the romanticized and often whitewashed version of the Confederate story will be accompanied by materials that will, as Mr. Hale has said, "demonstrate the power of the use and misuse of historical memory." Ms. Booth, the director of "Native Guard," said that only small things will change from the earlier productions of the play. Ms. LaVoy and Neal A. Ghant, another actor returning from the original cast, deliver the full text of the book without a single deletion or alteration. "The beauty of the piece is its constructed elegance," Ms. Booth said. "I didn't want to change a word." A gallery space has been transformed into a theater, with Ms. LaVoy and Mr. Ghant performing on a simple set that evokes a Ship Island beach, with a huge burlap backdrop. A number of Ms. Trethewey's poems take up photographs as their subject, and in many cases the photos she refers to in "Native Guard" are projected onto the burlap. The epigraphs Ms. Trethewey sprinkles throughout the book are set to music; at one point, a vocalist, Nicole Banks Long, breaks into a fiery rendition of Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam." Producers offered free wine to entice the audience at the first preview to stay for Act II. The racially mixed crowd seemed eager enough to weigh in on what they had seen, and talk about the ways the distortions and elisions of American history have affected their present. One woman, who said she had moved from South Africa, lamented that this country had never engaged in a formal reckoning with its past, the way her homeland did after the fall of apartheid. "The lack of a formal reconciliation process here in the United States," she said, is "still baffling to me." Toward the end of the show, Ms. LaVoy recites "Incident," a quiet and haunting poem about a Ku Klux Klan cross burning. When she performed it in 2014, Ms. LaVoy said, "It felt like I was telling stories as a warning, or you know, 'Those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it: Here let me help you, let me teach you.' "But then, after Charlottesville, I went back to the book, and I thought, 'My God, it wasn't past. It was prologue.'" | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Travelers can live the celebrated sweet and authentic Italian life by taking a half or full day tour on a Vespa, the popular two wheeled Italian motor scooter that many locals rely on to get around. Several companies offer excursions on the scooters; with most, tourists ride as passengers while the driver is their guide, but a few tours give visitors the chance to drive the bikes themselves. "To ride a Vespa is to see Italy through the eyes of Italians," said Uri Harash, the founder of the Italian private tour company Perfetto Traveler. "You get intimate with the streets and the area you're visiting in a way that's totally unique." Mr. Harash has created a three hour Vespa tour of Rome in which a driver takes clients to lesser known and famous sights such as the Trevi Fountain and to residential neighborhoods like Testaccio. Prices from 330 a person. Also in Rome, Bici Baci has a four hour tour called Rome Movie Sets in which a driver takes passengers to places in the city where "Roman Holiday," "Ben Hur" and, of course, "La Dolce Vita" were shot. One stop is Via Margutta, the street near the Spanish Steps where Joe Bradley, played by the actor Gregory Peck, lived in the film "Roman Holiday." Prices from 145 euros, about 155 at 1.05 to the euro, a person. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
The title of 's debut novel, "Everything Belongs to Us," is a statement of defiant optimism. It echoes a line from early in the novel, when an officer admonishes a rebellious protester he has jailed. "Not everything is your plaything," the officer says. "Not everything belongs to you." The year is 1978, and that protester is named Jisun, who, along with Namin and Sunam, is Wuertz's literary conduit for 1970s Korean history a time when President Park Chung hee's fixation on economic recovery after the Korean War entailed suppressing all forms of political dissent and allowing inhumane working conditions to flourish. The title of Wuertz's novel is therefore steeped in irony too: Under a program of authoritarian industrialization, everything belongs to something else to country, to patriarchy, to capitalism. Wuertz has written a rich and descriptive case study or a "Gatsby" esque takedown, if you will of 1970s South Korea. Reading "Everything Belongs to Us" is as much an education in sociology and history as it is a story about people, and the characters are so memorable they lend an intimacy to that history. Namin wants to save herself from abject poverty by becoming a doctor, and she plans to provide for a younger brother with cerebral palsy, even if it comes at great personal cost. "It was an exhilarating idea," she tells herself, thinking about how she would find her brother again after he had been left to the care of her grandparents. "Like being allowed to breathe cold fresh air after being trapped all her life in an underground cave." By contrast, her best friend, Jisun, is from one of the wealthiest families in the country and views her own privilege with disdain: "By the time Jisun arrived at the lauded gates of Seoul National University, she wanted to burn the whole place down. Not just for democracy or the repeal of the repressive constitution or anything else that the student activists shouted about every day. . . . She was fueled by personal vengeance." Her sense of independence is intertwined with tearing down the establishment a goal that Namin cannot understand. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Thom Brennaman, broadcaster for the Cincinnati Reds, apologized on Wednesday night for using a homophobic slur. "I am very, very sorry and I beg for your forgiveness," he said. A Fox Sports announcer who has been calling Major League Baseball games for more than 30 years was suspended on Wednesday night, the Cincinnati Reds said, after he used a homophobic slur during a live broadcast of a Reds doubleheader against the Kansas City Royals. "The Cincinnati Reds organization is devastated by the horrific, homophobic remark made this evening by broadcaster Thom Brennaman," the team said in a statement. "He was pulled off the air, and effective immediately was suspended from doing Reds broadcasts." The Reds said the organization planned to address Mr. Brennaman's remarks with its broadcast team in the coming days. The team said that it embraced a "zero tolerance policy" against bias and discrimination and that "we are truly sorry to anyone who has been offended." "In no way does this incident represent our players, coaches, organization, or our fans," the team said. "We share our sincerest apologies to the L.G.B.T.Q. community in Cincinnati, Kansas City, all across this country, and beyond." Mr. Brennaman, 56, was suspended after videos circulated widely on social media showing him apparently caught on a live mic on Wednesday night describing a place as "one of the fag capitals of the world." It was not clear where he was referring to. None Everyone Loves Ohtani: The Angels' two way star was a unanimous pick for A.L. M.V.P. and his superfans redefine devotion. Phillie Phavorite: Bryce Harper truly committed to Philadelphia and now he's back on top of baseball, winning the N.L. M.V.P. Cy Young Winners: Milwaukee's Corbin Burnes and Toronto's Robbie Ray had hit rock bottom before they worked their way up to stardom. Baseball Is Stuck in Neutral: The potential of a lockout has a star studded group of free agents waiting for the dust to settle. Free Agency Tracker: Get the latest updates on signings, contract extensions and trades. After the slur was broadcast, Mr. Brennaman segued into a promotion of the Reds' pregame show. The comment stirred outrage on social media, with some fans calling for him to be fired. Later Wednesday night, Mr. Brennaman apologized for his remarks, saying he was "deeply ashamed." "I don't know if I'm going to be putting on this headset again," Mr. Brennaman said in the on air apology, which he briefly interrupted to announce a home run by the Reds' Nick Castellanos. "I don't know if it's going to be for the Reds. I don't know if it's going to be for my bosses at Fox." Mr. Brennaman said he wanted to apologize to the "people who sign my paycheck," to the Reds, to Fox Sports Ohio and to "anybody that I've offended here tonight." "I can't begin to tell you how deeply sorry I am," he said. "That is not who I am. It never has been. And I'd like to think maybe I could have some people that could back that up. I am very, very sorry and I beg for your forgiveness." Mr. Brennaman then said he was signing off and handing over announcing duties for the rest of the night to another longtime announcer at Fox Sports, Jim Day. "It's disturbing how casually and recklessly Brennaman used an anti gay slur while wearing a microphone during a live broadcast," Glaad, the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy organization, said in a statement. "His 'apology' was also incredibly weak and not enough. We are demanding full accountability from Reds, MLB and FOXSports." In a statement early Thursday morning, Mr. Brennaman apologized for "the inappropriate comments I made during last night's telecast." "I made a terrible mistake," he said. "To the L.G.B.T.Q. community, and all people I have hurt or offended, from the bottom of my heart, I am truly sorry. I respectfully ask for your grace and forgiveness." Fox Sports said in a statement on Thursday that it was "extremely disappointed" with Mr. Brennaman's remarks, which it said were "abhorrent, unacceptable, and not representative of the values of FOX Sports." "As it relates to Brennaman's FOX NFL role, we are moving forward with our NFL schedule, which will not include him," the network said. Major League Baseball did not respond to a message seeking comment on Wednesday night. Chris Seelbach, the first openly gay member of the Cincinnati City Council, said it was "incredibly disappointing to hear Mr. Brennaman use such language of hate when our country is begging for unity." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Sports |
Perhaps you can't buy the presidency after all. That's one potential lesson from the 2020 Bloomberg campaign, a 101 day billionaire media supernova that burned hot and fast and through upward of 500 million in mostly ad money but won no states in the primary contest. (At least Mike Bloomberg can expect a warm welcome the next time he visits American Samoa.) One way to look at the Bloomberg campaign is as proof that attention hacking digital and media strategies are mostly hot air a quadrennial transfer of money from campaigns to creative consultants and media outlets that's hyped but not all that productive. If 500 million can't win you one state in the primary, what does that say about the Trump campaign digital ad juggernaut Democrats are terrified to go up against? Just how effective are all those pesky, political ads Facebook refuses to fact check? But to look only at number of states won obscures the marvel of the Bloomberg experiment, in which name recognition and an unlimited war chest helped elevate a candidate polling nationally at less than 3 percent on the day he announced to around 16 percent by the end of February. It allowed a less than charismatic campaigner with stop and frisk and nondisclosure agreement baggage who skipped the first four nominating states to still manage to crack 10 percent of the vote in nearly all of the Super Tuesday contests. If there's a lesson to draw from Mr. Bloomberg's media extravaganza it seems to be, as The Atlantic's McKay Coppins remarked, "how close it came to working." In barely three months, Mr. Bloomberg built a national media apparatus that sucked up huge amounts of politics' most precious and finite resource: attention. He managed to attack the left wing of the Democratic Party without damaging those in its center, and he provided a blueprint for how a Democrat with more raw appeal and connection to voters could compete with the Trump campaign's audacity online. The strategy however cynical worked, even if the candidate didn't. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Opinion |
Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night's highlights that lets you sleep and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you're interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox. President Trump announced a plan to suspend immigration to the U.S. on Monday night and his delivery method was, unsurprisingly, Twitter. "Now I know we've gotten used to it this shouldn't shock me," Stephen Colbert lamented on Tuesday night's "A Late Show." "But the United States of America has a president who just ordered a sweeping change in our national immigration policy via tweet. That would be like Obama announcing the death of bin Laden on TikTok." "But this is a big step for Trump because, remember, two thirds of his wives have been immigrants. So closing the immigration system is Trump's version of deleting Tinder." TREVOR NOAH "Now, if President Trump goes through with this immigration ban, it will be yet another policy he's pushing through during the corona pandemic. In fact, his administration has already shut down visa applications, they've paused the refugee program, they've blocked migrants from seeking asylum, and during corona, Trump's E.P.A. even decided to drastically cut enforcement of environmental regulations. So don't forget, while you're finally getting around to watching 'Ozark' and trying to bake bread for the first time, Donald Trump? He's also using coronavirus as an opportunity to do all the things he always wanted to do. The only difference is, when quarantine is over and you throw away your bowl of yeast, Trump's hobbies are gonna keep going for a very long time." TREVOR NOAH "Well, I don't necessarily agree with it, but it is probably the safest thing for the immigrants. Because right now, America is basically a petri dish on the floor of a bus station men's room." STEPHEN COLBERT "Well, even during the height of the 1918 flu pandemic, the United States allowed more than 110,000 immigrants to enter the country. So, Donald Trump is more xenophobic than Woodrow Wilson, and Wilson's campaign slogan was 'Let's punch an Italian.'" STEPHEN COLBERT "Last night the world was rocked by reports that Kim Jong un, supreme leader and man who cut his own hair before quarantine, may be gravely ill after secretly undergoing heart surgery. This was major news. I didn't know Kim Jong un had a heart crazy." TREVOR NOAH "He is reportedly in 'grave danger' after complications following a heart procedure, but because everything with him is secretive, no one knows for sure. One of the reasons they suspect he's not well is because last week, he missed the most important holiday in North Korea, which is a birthday celebration for his late grandfather. And that's especially alarming because, you know, he is not one to miss the chance to eat cake." JIMMY KIMMEL "A South Korean news site reported that Kim had heart surgery due to complications from 'excessive smoking, obesity and overwork.' See, that's why our president doesn't smoke and never works he's smart." JIMMY KIMMEL "If anything happens to Kim Jong un, his sister will take over. You know Kim's sisters, Kourtney and Khloe Jong un." JIMMY FALLON Lin Manuel Miranda freestyled a song for "Conan" on the spot. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Television |
SAN FRANCISCO Facebook, already facing scrutiny over how it handles the private information of its users, said on Friday that an attack on its computer network had exposed the personal information of nearly 50 million users. The breach, which was discovered this week, was the largest in the company's 14 year history. The attackers exploited a feature in Facebook's code to gain access to user accounts and potentially take control of them. The news could not have come at a worse time for Facebook. It has been buffeted over the last year by scandal, from revelations that a British analytics firm got access to the private information of up to 87 million users to worries that disinformation on Facebook has affected elections and even led to deaths in several countries. Senior executives have testified several times this year in congressional hearings where some lawmakers suggested that the government will need to step in if the social network is unable to get tighter control of its service. On Friday, regulators and lawmakers quickly seized on the breach to renew calls for more oversight. "This is another sobering indicator that Congress needs to step up and take action to protect the privacy and security of social media users," Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and one of Facebook's most vocal critics in Congress, said in a statement. "A full investigation should be swiftly conducted and made public so that we can understand more about what happened." In the conference call on Friday, Guy Rosen, a vice president of product management at Facebook, declined to say whether the attack could have been coordinated by hackers supported by a nation state. Three software flaws in Facebook's systems allowed hackers to break into user accounts, including those of the top executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, according to two people familiar with the investigation but not allowed to discuss it publicly. Once in, the attackers could have gained access to apps like Spotify, Instagram and hundreds of others that give users a way to log into their systems through Facebook. Read more about what you can do to secure your Facebook account. The software bugs were particularly awkward for a company that takes pride in its engineering: The first two were introduced by an online tool meant to improve the privacy of users. The third was introduced in July 2017 by a tool meant to easily upload birthday videos. Facebook said it had fixed the vulnerabilities and notified law enforcement officials. Company officials do not know the identity or the origin of the attackers, nor have they fully assessed the scope of the attack or if particular users were targeted. The investigation is still in its beginning stages. "We're taking it really seriously," Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive, said in a conference call with reporters. "I'm glad we found this, but it definitely is an issue that this happened in the first place." Critics say the attack is the latest sign that Facebook has yet to come to terms with its problems. "Breaches don't just violate our privacy. They create enormous risks for our economy and national security," Rohit Chopra, a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, said in a statement. "The cost of inaction is growing, and we need answers." Let Us Help You Protect Your Digital Life None With Apple's latest mobile software update, we can decide whether apps monitor and share our activities with others. Here's what to know. A little maintenance on your devices and accounts can go a long way in maintaining your security against outside parties' unwanted attempts to access your data. Here's a guide to the few simple changes you can make to protect yourself and your information online. Ever considered a password manager? You should. There are also many ways to brush away the tracks you leave on the internet. Facebook has been roundly criticized for being slow to acknowledge a vast disinformation campaign run by Russian operatives on its platform and other social media outlets before the 2016 presidential election. Ms. Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, testified in a Senate hearing that month about what the company was trying to do to prevent the same thing from happening in midterm elections in November. In April, Mr. Zuckerberg testified about revelations that Cambridge Analytica, the British analytics firm that worked with the Trump presidential campaign, siphoned personal information of millions of Facebook users. Outside the United States, the impact of disinformation appearing on Facebook and the popular messaging service it owns, WhatsApp, has been severe. In countries such as Myanmar and India, false rumors spread on social media are believed to have led to widespread killing. Facebook said the attackers had exploited two bugs in the site's "View As" feature, which allows users to check on what information other people can see about them. The feature was built to give users move control over their privacy. The company said those flaws were compounded by a bug in Facebook's video uploading program for birthday celebrations, a software feature that was introduced in July 2017. The flaw allowed the attackers to steal so called access tokens digital keys that allow access to an account. It is not clear when the attack happened, but it appears to have occurred after the video uploading program was introduced, Facebook said. The company forced more than 90 million users to log out early Friday, a common safety measure taken when accounts have been compromised. The hackers also tried to harvest people's private information, including name, sex and hometown, from Facebook's systems, Mr. Rosen said. The company could not determine the extent of the attackers' access to third party accounts, he said. Facebook has been reshuffling its security teams since Alex Stamos, its chief security officer, left in August for a teaching position at Stanford University. Instead of acting as a stand alone group, security team members now work more closely with product teams across the company. The move, the company said, is an effort to embed security across every step of Facebook product development. Part of that effort has been to gird Facebook against attacks on its network in preparation for the midterm elections. Facebook has spent months setting up new systems to pre empt such attacks, and has already dealt with a number of incidents believed to be connected to elections in Mexico, Brazil and other countries. Still, the recently discovered breach was a reminder that it is exceptionally difficult to entirely secure a system that has more than 2.2 billion users all over the world and that connects with thousands of third party services. "This has really shown us that because today's digital environment is so complex, a compromise on a single platform especially one as popular and widely reaching as Facebook can have consequences that are much more far reaching than what we can tell in early days of the investigation," said April Doss, chairwoman of cybersecurity at the law firm Saul Ewing. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
A Southern Town That's Been Holding On to Its Charm, for More Than a Century A group of populist reformers from up north arrived in Alabama in November 1894 with a radical plan. Their mission: to establish an experimental utopian community inspired by the economist Henry George, whose wildly popular book, "Progress and Poverty," influenced readers around the world in search of more equitable societies. In this case, their chosen setting was a swath of pine and pasture covered land perched high on a bluff overlooking Mobile Bay. There, wrote one of the founders, Ernest B. Gaston, these pioneers would build "a city set upon a hill, shedding its beneficent light to all the world." Somewhat more modestly, they christened their settlement Fairhope, asserting that their dream community would have "a fair hope" of succeeding. Henry George's acolytes put their faith in his concept of a "single tax" colony where the community owned the land and homeowners paid an annual tax that funded the creation of parks and public amenities. The founders set aside nearly a mile of beachfront as public parkland, writes a local historian, Cathy Donelson, in her book, "Fairhope." They quickly drew more settlers and soon vacationers, too. Early tourists arrived by steamboat, enticed with attractions like the giant water slide that deposited frolickers directly into the bay, while the annual Shakespeare festival offered free outdoor performances that used the scenic natural setting as a stage. "It's just a magical little place," said the author Fannie Flagg. "There are people that have come there from all over the world. Once they see it, there's a charm about it that they just love." Ms. Flagg was born in Birmingham and first visited Fairhope as a child. She was lured back years later. "When I started writing, I was living in New York and wanted a place to get away, so I thought, 'Why don't I go down to Fairhope?'" She wrote her first book in Fairhope, then returned again to pen the Oscar nominated screenplay for "Fried Green Tomatoes." She kept a home in Fairhope for many years, and still returns frequently. Today, Fairhope is still anchored by its public beachfront, with scenic views available from the Municipal Pier that stretches 1,448 feet out over the bucolic bay, and from the tree lined Henry George Park up on the bluff. A short stroll up the hill, past shady streets where rocking chairs sway on porches, is the very walkable downtown. Sidewalks are filled with more than a dozen different public art pieces and copious flowers in all seasons, from beds of petunias in summer to snapdragons in the dead of winter. New and historic buildings are home to antique stores such as Crown Colony, indie boutiques, and galleries like Eastern Shore Art Center, which runs a first Friday art walk. From March 15 to 17 this year, a large part of downtown will be taken over by the 67th annual Fairhope Arts and Crafts Festival, which brings in more than 300,000 visitors. Streets are closed to traffic and given over to wares from nearly 200 different artists, along with performances from the likes of jazz bands and dance crews. Later in spring there are sunset concerts near the bay by the Baldwin Pops, while fall brings the Fairhope Film Festival, including outdoor screenings in an amphitheater downtown. "The two of them were just great, loyal customers," said Page and Palette's owner, Karin Wilson. "When the bottom fell out in 2008, we really thought we were going to have to close. They were very concerned about our store; they wanted to meet with me and ask how they could help. We were meeting in the coffee shop and someone said something along the lines of, 'What are ya'll doing here?' One of them said, 'Oh, we're solving the world's problems.' I jokingly said they should do an advice booth, and the idea stuck. They've been here every Tuesday and Thursday since," offering thoughts and comfort to anyone in need of a friendly ear. "They're two women that everyone feels comfortable talking to. It's something very special that they created." Ms. Wilson's grandmother opened Page and Palette as an art supply and book store in 1968; her father eventually spun off a frame shop and gallery next door. Ms. Wilson bought the bookstore in 1997, adding the coffee shop and bar/event space, while her twin sister, Kelley Lyons, purchased the frame shop, now Lyons Share Custom Framing and Gallery. In a twist, the independent bookseller is now also the city's mayor Karin Wilson jumped into politics in 2016 with a successful campaign centered around a platform of smart development. Fairhope is now one of Alabama's fastest growing cities, with a 27 percent growth in population from 2010 to 2017. "There's this charm that we don't want to lose," Mayor Wilson said. "Owning the store, we meet so many people who say, 'We've always wanted to live in a community like this.' People choose to be here for a very specific reason and they're very motivated about keeping it that way." Certainly, there's much about modern Fairhope that seems a far cry from its socialist leaning heyday. The Fairhope Single Tax Corporation maintains a charming old world office on Fairhope Avenue, but today it owns only about 20 percent of the land in Fairhope. Those who live on that 20 percent technically lease the land and pay a single tax to the FSTC that includes their property taxes and a small fee. The other 80 percent of homeowners own the land beneath their homes. All are free to buy and sell as they please. Historic homes along the waterfront can get multimillion dollar prices. The brewery also makes a coffee stout with beans sourced down the road at Fairhope Roasting Company, which shares a garage door fronted space with Warehouse Bakery Donuts. The latter serves up old style chocolate glazed doughnuts, and more new school breakfast biscuits stuffed with fried eggs, small batch bacon and spicy mayo. One door down at District Hall, there's rock 'n' roll bingo with whiskey infused burgers. It's still the serene pace of life that lures most people to Fairhope. "When I was working on 'Fried Green Tomatoes' here," Fannie Flagg recalled, "writing a screenplay is so very difficult and some days I thought I would just pull my hair out. Every afternoon, I would walk across the street from my house and out onto the pier. I would sit there and watch the sun go down. The church was right behind me. The bells would ring and it would just be so peaceful right there in that spot. It kept me sane." Follow NY Times Travel on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Get weekly updates from our Travel Dispatch newsletter, with tips on traveling smarter, destination coverage and photos from all over the world. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
In 1976 three years after he left Roxy Music, one year after he released his dual solo landmarks "Discreet Music" and "Another Green World," and a year before he expanded the horizons of art rock with his work on David Bowie's "Low" Brian Eno put together an album called "Music for Films." "I should have called it 'Music Looking for Films,'" the English musician, 72, said with a genial laugh more than four decades later, video chatting from the home in Norfolk County, England, where he's been riding out the pandemic. "Music for Films" was partly an experimental foray into the new genre Eno was in the process of creating, ambient music, and partly a commercial gambit: An initial pressing of 500 copies were distributed to various film and television production companies. In 1978, after the influential first volume of Eno's Ambient series, "Music for Airports," became something of a cult sensation, "Music for Films" was released to the suddenly curious public. Eno is now putting out a compilation called "Brian Eno (Film Music, 1976 2020)," though he admits he just as well could have called it "Music That Has Found Films." These 17 tracks comprise only a fraction of his music that has appeared as scores or on soundtracks: "There are quite important pieces, in terms of my film music career, that are missing from this album," he said. "But they just wouldn't fit in this particular version." That was a unique idea at the time that now feels very contemporary, especially with the popularity of streaming playlists. My Spotify home page includes "Music for Studying" or "Music to Clean To" which of course made me think of "Music for Airports" or "Music for Films." How has it been to see much of what you envisioned come to pass? What I'm often surprised by are the things that I didn't predict. For instance, when I lived in New York in the early 1980s, I remember seeing this composer, Rhys Chatham, walking down the street with a Walkman. It was the first time I'd ever seen a Walkman. And I thought, "That's a stupid idea. That's never going to last." Laughs. "Why would you want to walk down the street and not listen to the street?" I completely failed to grasp that one. When did you change your mind? Well, in a way, I never have, personally, because I just can't bear walking around with headphones on. I don't like it. It cuts you off. Something that kind of disappoints me is that most of the new technology from the '80s onwards has been about the atomization of society. It's been about you being able to be more and more separate from everybody else. That's why I don't like the headphones thing. I don't want to be separate in that way. What do you think is the role of an artist in times like these? Well, the question of course one always asks oneself is the role to just give it all up and do something useful with your time? Laughs Like campaign or become a political activist. So that is a continual question in my mind. But my response to that is to say that it's not only the immediate future we have to think about, but also the long term future and what we want that to be like. So I think what artists do is generally a contribution in the long term rather than the short term. There are short term contributors as well, I'm not sure that I'm one of them. Did you have any formative moviegoing experiences where you were first struck by what a score or a soundtrack could do? The one I always mention was Fellini's "Juliet of the Spirits." I love the film, but so much of the mood comes from the music. I think it was the first film soundtrack that I bought, actually. And I remember listening to that and thinking music that goes with a film is a different kind of music. It can't be overspecific. It can't paint the whole picture. Because it has to make room for the picture! So, it can't fill in every detail, and film music that tries to do that, that tries to be sort of orchestral music, never works very well for me. Listening to "Juliet of the Spirits," I thought, this is a new way that music can be. Is it true that you don't like composing to picture, when you're working on film music? I've nearly always worked by hearing a description of the film, and then starting to work. Quite a few of the films I've made music for, I never saw the picture before I finished all the music. And I like that, because I don't want the music to map totally onto the film. I want the music to suggest to increase the ambiguity, basically. To expand the film a bit. Not to underline it. Often, and especially with Hollywood soundtracks, the whole point of the soundtrack is to tell you, the dumb sod watching it, "Now you're supposed to feel sad. Now it's funny. Laugh! Go on!" And I just don't want to be in that business of underlining things. Have any of the filmmakers you've worked with pushed back on that process? When I worked on "The Lovely Bones," there was quite a lot of to ing and fro ing between me and the director, Peter Jackson, where I would send things and he would say, "Yes, that kind of works, but something has got to happen at two minutes, five seconds." So that was probably the most specific working relationship I've ever had. But the problem I have is that I have no ability to extrapolate from the early stages of a film to its finished product. Whenever I see films in their early stages, before they've been color graded and everything, I always think, "Jeez, that looks really bad." I just don't have that imagination. And I know the same thing happens when I play pieces of music in their early stages to people, and I can see them going, "Huh." I think, of course, they don't realize that I'm going to make this do this, and that's going to be more subdued all the things that I kind of know you can do with music. So I'm used to listening to music in its crude, early stages and filling in the gaps. But I can't do it with film at all. This collection includes "The Prophecy Theme," which you, your brother Roger and Daniel Lanois wrote for David Lynch's "Dune." I've read some rumors that you actually ghostwrote the "Dune" score, though it's attributed to Toto. Is there any truth to that? I didn't ghostwrite anything. The only thing I wrote was that piece. This was in the days when people used to fly you everywhere ugh, I'm glad those days are finished but David Lynch flew me to Los Angeles to see "Dune," as it was at that point. It wasn't finished then. And I don't know whether his intention or his hope was that I would do the whole soundtrack, but I didn't want to, anyway. It was a huge project, and I just didn't feel like doing it. But I did feel like making one piece for it, so that's what I did. It seems like the material from "Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks" has been used quite a bit in film, beyond just the documentary you wrote it for, "For All Mankind." Why do you think it's been so resonant? Do you think it's become overused? It's an interesting question, this one of overuse. Another piece that I co wrote, "Heroes," with David Bowie, has been used such a lot and I used to think, "Oh, dear, it's going to wear it out. It'll lose its specialness." But actually, it doesn't seem to have done that. I suppose I think that one of the most fascinating things about music is its flexibility, about how amazing it is that a piece that was written, in the case of "Deep Blue Day," to go with a scene of approaching the moon in a spacecraft and flying under the moon, how that actually can also work for the scene in "Trainspotting" of somebody diving into a toilet in the search of his drugs. Laughs It's absolutely amazing that the piece can have that flexibility. And I am very happy that it can. "An Ending (Ascent)" is probably the most used of all my pieces in terms of soundtrack usage. I went through a phase of thinking, "I've got to stop having this thing turning up anywhere." But I've stopped thinking that now. I think, well, it works, and it still sounds pretty fresh. Actually, when I came here in March, I didn't do anything musical for about two months. I did think, "Shall I just accept this Covid thing as a kind of deadline and say, 'Well that's it, I'll now retire and do something else instead?'" That's still an attractive thought. It's quite nice, the idea that you just finish doing something rather than peter out, which is what normally happens. You just make a decision and say, "That's it. Now I'm going to work on other things." Wow. What would those other things be? The thing I always sort of put on the back burner, which I like doing and I think I do quite well, is theoretical writing. I've just started an essay in the last few days called "Inevitable ism." And this is about what I think is the sickness of utopian thinking, this idea that history has an inevitable direction. I'm fed up with inevitable ism. But you did start making music again at some point in the pandemic. When I'm in London, I have my studio there, and I go into the studio every day. But I thought, maybe I should get some of my gear from London, so a friend of mine drove some stuff down. I still haven't been working as much as I normally do, but it's sort of ramped up recently. What I've found is that I'm listening much more. I always work a lot, I'm pretty compulsive with working, but I don't spend that much time listening. I have this huge archive of unreleased material. It's enormous. And I've started listening to things again, some of these pieces are 20 or 30 years old. I've started hearing them in a different way. So one of the things I've been doing here is taking pieces from the archive and actually working on them further. Suddenly diving back into a piece that I'd completely forgotten about from 16 years ago or something like that. It's so unfamiliar, like a piece by another person, actually. So I feel I'm sort of collaborating with my various old selves. These sort of enthusiastic strangers who walk into the studio from 1995 or something like that. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
It was Monday, the regular day off during New York City Ballet's spring season. But a group of dancers gathered in the David H. Koch Theater to discuss the most pressing question facing the company: After Peter Martins, its longtime ballet master in chief, retired abruptly this year amid an investigation, what kind of leader should succeed him? The town hall style meeting was the first stop in a listening tour by the search committee charged with finding a new leader for the company and the School of American Ballet, its academy. The committee, which has hired Phillips Oppenheim, a recruitment firm, to help conduct the search, plans to hold more meetings in the coming weeks to sound out more of the company and staff, board members and donors the first phase of a process that is not expected to include interviewing candidates until fall at earliest. "We want to hear what they have to say," said Barry S. Friedberg, a member of City Ballet's board who is leading the search committee along with Barbara M. Vogelstein, the board chairwoman for the School of American Ballet. "We want to hear what they want in leadership, what direction they think the company should go in," added Mr. Friedberg, who said the committee had invited dancers to give their input privately and anonymously if they wished. Since City Ballet was founded in 1948, successions have been about as rare as in the British royal family. The choreographer George Balanchine led the company artistically for its first 35 years, and Mr. Martins for the next 35 years (at first in tandem with Jerome Robbins). Choosing a successor was always going to be tough, but the recent tumult there has made it tougher. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Dance |
On July 25, Hearst Magazines named Troy Young as its new president. And now the magazine company behind Esquire, Cosmopolitan and Harper's Bazaar has lost its chief content officer. Joanna Coles, a former editor of Cosmopolitan who was appointed one of the highest ranking executives at Hearst Magazines in 2016, has resigned from the company. Her decision to leave ends her 12 year stint at the publisher, which she joined in 2006 as the top editor of Marie Claire. Ms. Coles, who is known for using a treadmill desk at work, posted a short video on social media on Monday. "Have you any idea of the miles I have walked on this treadmill desk through the peaks and the valleys of Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan and as Hearst's first chief content officer?" she said while walking on her trusty machine. "But my route is being recalculated. It's time for a new adventure." The selection of Mr. Young, 50, to take control of Hearst's magazines signaled the company's intention to move more deeply into digital media. He was in charge of the company's online efforts before he succeeded David Carey, 57, as the president of the magazine division. In choosing Mr. Young for the job, Hearst had apparently alienated the company's other star executive. Ms. Coles, who was born in Yorkshire, England, was the New York bureau chief of The Guardian and a columnist for The Times of London before going into the magazine business. She distinguished herself at two Hearst titles by expanding the role of magazine editor into a position that embraced multimedia. While at Marie Claire, Ms. Coles became partners with the reality show "Project Runway All Stars" and served as an on air mentor to its contestants. Later, she made Cosmopolitan a popular destination on the Snapchat Discover platform, attracting three million daily visitors. Her television work has continued. Ms. Coles, 56, is a regular pundit on cable television and has worked on both sides of the camera for an E! channel reality show, "So Cosmo." She is also an executive producer of "The Bold Type," a series set at a women's magazine that airs on the ABC owned cable network Freeform, with the actress Melora Hardin playing a character modeled after Ms. Coles. She joined the board of Snap, the maker of Snapchat, in 2015, which paid her 110,866 in cash and stock in 2016. She signed a new contract at the beginning of last year and now receives a package worth 896,179 that pays out over a three year period, according to security filings. Earlier this summer she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for her contributions to journalism and the media business. "Joanna is an innovator, a connector and an inspired editor," Hearst Magazines said in a statement on Monday. "She's made the decision to start a new adventure and we thank her for her creativity and many contributions and wish her the very best." News of Ms. Coles's departure from Hearst was first reported by The New York Post. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Media |
Naked bikes grew into a durable market segment, an elemental style with a hint of a rowdy streak. As Ducati and other companies dropped all pretenses of modesty, riders took delight in the eye candy details: frames artfully welded, brackets skillfully fabricated, thoughtful details everywhere the eye roamed, especially, it seemed, on motorcycles made in Italy. The magnificently capable Monster 1200 S is the third generation of the family and a significant redesign, incorporating a domesticated edition of the company's 1,198 cc Testatretta engine. The signature Ducati trellis frame an abbreviated scaffold of steel tubing, rather than the aluminum extrusions that support most performance bikes is on full display, and the exhaust pipes snake proudly down the right side instead of tucking under the seat. Step closer, though, and you might wonder: Have Ducati's designers taken naked too far? In their zeal to provide full disclosure, the stylists of the Monster 1200 S gave us the full monty. I'm pretty sure I don't need a view of the radiator cap while riding, and the evaporative canister for the emissions system really might have been more creatively located. How about a tantalizing striptease instead? The unabashed nudity, even by comparison with other bikes in the naked class, has real drawbacks. Chief among them is the visibility of the TFT panel where speed and other vital data are displayed. It simply cannot be read when the sun falls directly on it. On the Interstate, all you can do is pace the traffic and hope for the best; even a vestigial hood or tiny fairing to shade the panel would solve the problem most of the time. The picture brightens once you hear the soulful exhaust note and head down the road. The Monster 1200 S (10 more horsepower than the standard 1200 and an upgrade to an Ohlins suspension and larger front brake rotors, for a 1,500 premium) quickly endears itself with a slim profile and wide handlebar that make it a cinch to maneuver at a walking pace. This is no small matter: Bikes that are a magic carpet on the highway BMW K1600, I'm talking to you can become unbearable when trying to simply turn around in the garage. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Jill Roosevelt of Brown Harris Stevens represented the seller, identified in city records as New York CPW LLC, but widely known to be Michael Lewis, a commodities strategist. Property records show that Mr. Lewis bought the sponsor unit in 2008 for around 10 million. Ms. Roosevelt, citing a strict confidentiality agreement, declined to comment on the transaction. The buyer was identified in city records as Michael B. Kim. This week's runner up, at 10,177,408.75, is a three bedroom three and a half bath sponsor unit at 737 Park Avenue, formerly a 1940s rental building on the northeast corner of 71st Street. The building was acquired in 2011 by Macklowe Properties and the CIM Group and converted into about 60 residences by Handel Architects. The 2,915 square foot apartment, No. 8C, which features a south facing corner living and dining room with nine windows overlooking Park Avenue, includes an eat in kitchen with marble floors and countertops. Monthly carrying costs are 6,736.87. "This apartment is an amazing marriage of old and new. You have a prewar building redesigned for contemporary lifestyles on one of the best blocks in the city," said Hilary Landis of the Corcoran Group, who represented the sponsor, along with Deborah Kern, also of Corcoran. Ms. Landis said the buyer was impressed with the "loftlike feel" of the apartment. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Real Estate |
"The Ascension," the new album by Sufjan Stevens, sounds gigantic. It should. It speaks to a convergence of crises: romantic, political, spiritual, existential. Stevens recorded the album largely alone over the past two years with his computer, drum machines and synthesizers; he's his own producer and engineer. Its songs are by turns wounded and angry, solitary and desperate for human contact, haunted by death and desperate to live on and find purpose. The lyrics invoke heartache, malaise, wrath, ancient legends and the Bible; the music opens up cavernous expanses and also goes boom. When Stevens announced the release of "The Ascension," he stated that the album's "objective" was "Be part of the solution or get out of the way. Keep it real. Keep it true. Keep it simple. Keep it moving." That suggests something blunt, topical, strident and one dimensional. It's not the album he made. As usual, Stevens conjures meanings where memories, faith, history, dreams and longing overlap. The album is both a cry of despair and a prayer for the redemption he's no longer sure he will find. In "Run Away," a shimmering, messianic love song, he urges, "Come run away with me" and promises, "I will bring you life, a new communion/With a paradise that brings/the truth of light within." But in "Tell Me You Love Me," he laments, "I lost my faith in everything," and adds, "Right now I could use a change of heart/Or a kiss before everything falls apart." His new songs often sum themselves up in succinct refrains like "I don't wanna play your video game" ("Video Game") or "I am the future, define the future" ("Lamentations"). And Stevens can deploy his drum machines to hit deep and hard; "Video Game," "Death Star" and "Goodbye to All That" have the impact of 1980s synth pop, topped with Stevens's own ethereal overlays. So "The Ascension" stands as the poppiest album in Stevens's huge, multifarious catalog but that's only relative. Over the two decades since he released his debut album, "A Sun Came!," in 2000, Stevens has recorded elaborate orchestral vignettes based on local lore ("Illinois" and "Michigan"), devotional meditations set to bare bones banjo ("Seven Swans"), classical piano pieces ("The Decalogue"), Christmas carol collections and his most recent album of new songs, the 2015 "Carrie Lowell," a whispery, quietly touching evocation of his parents' lives. "The Ascension" leaps to an opposite extreme: synthetic and outsized rather than intimately acoustic, metaphysical instead of biographical. It partly harks back to Stevens' 2010 album, "The Age of Adz," which embraced excess, piling synthesizers atop orchestras, choirs and rock band. Compared to that album, "The Ascension" is single minded, but far from simplistic. Stevens recorded "The Ascension" largely alone over the past two years with his computer, drum machines and synthesizers. Most of Stevens's new tracks are thickets of counterpoint, dissonance and noises that can be comic or ominous. And he never reduces his messages to preaching or polemic. He longs to believe, but isn't sure he can; he confesses to personal failings as he lashes out at cultural ones, and he finds no guarantees of hope. "Die Happy" repeats just one line "I wanna die happy" as the music brings out all the ambivalences of that sentiment: tinkling prettily and floating on celestial voices, later detuned and distorted and marching toward death. The album opens with "Make Me an Offer I Cannot Refuse," a ballad like melody that's accompanied at first by reverent, organ like chords. Then it's simultaneously cushioned and besieged, with chime and harp tones, otherworldly voices, ratcheting and rumbling percussion, staticky glitches and increasingly intrusive high frequency beeps that eventually register as alarms. "Lord, I need deliverance," he pleads. The title song of "The Ascension" places the narrator on his deathbed, consumed with regrets. "To everything there is no meaning/A season of pain and hopelessness," Stevens sings. "I shouldn't have looked for revelation/I should have resigned myself to this." He awaits his own ascension but is consumed in doubt; the song ends not with rapture but with a repeating question: "What now?" As the album proceeds, Stevens is as accusatory as he is humble. In "Death Star," over a sculpted, popping beat that Depeche Mode would happily claim, Stevens confronts a looming environmental disaster as a real life apocalypse: "Death star into space/What you call the human race/Expedite the Judgment Day/It's your own damn head on that plate." The album's finale is "America," a 12 minute, four chord, mournful indictment. Reversed keyboard chords swoop into earshot; a patient beat is built out of static and, eventually, drum kit sounds. "The sign of the flood or one more disaster?" Stevens asks. For the chorus, repeating and building to symphonic richness, he warns, "Don't do to me what you did to America," distantly answered by "Don't do to me what you do to yourself." Is Stevens addressing the president? Russia? Social media? Late capitalism? Words disappear for the last five minutes of the song, giving way to sustained, ambiguous chords, inhuman electronic tones and a sensation of gradual free fall; at the end there are glimmering arpeggios and a disembodied choir. But there's no resolution, no salvation. There's no promise of a happy ending anytime soon. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
The show can go on again at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Five days after going on strike, the musicians in its orchestra on Sunday ratified a new labor agreement that would reduce their guaranteed weeks of work and the size of the orchestra but increase their weekly salary. "A world class opera company needs a world class orchestra," the musicians said in a statement. "The musicians will never stop fighting for that ideal; but at this time, the music needs to return to the Civic Opera House." In two major respects fewer weeks of work and a smaller permanent orchestra the agreement was in line with what management had been seeking. But the musicians noted that they had worked to mitigate the concessions where they could; that further cancellations would be destructive for everyone involved; and that a long strike would hurt their colleagues in the company's other unions, which had already agreed to new labor deals when the orchestra walked out. "We needed to settle this contract not only for us, but for them," the musicians said. The ratified agreement reduces the number of guaranteed weeks of work for the players in the orchestra to 22, from 24, and reduces the number of full time orchestra members through attrition to 70, from 74. (Management had wanted to cut it to 69.) | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Music |
Where to Find Bangkok's Best Street Food While You Can It was a few minutes after 6 p.m., and Lim Lao Sa, a fishball noodle stand tucked into an alleyway near the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, had just opened. Rain was falling, hard. A series of deftly arranged tarps sheltered patrons sitting on red plastic stools at a handful of tables. Water drizzled off the tarp edges, down the concrete walls and past exposed wiring. Fluorescent bulbs cast harsh shadows. Lim Lao Sa's owners a brother and sister who'd inherited the 60 year old business from their father bickered vigorously. My friend Win Luanchaison, a real estate developer and fervent culinary explorer, and I tucked into our bowls. The quenelle like fishballs were at once springy and creamy, the rice noodles supple, the broth clear and sure of purpose. It was easy to understand why Lim Lao Sa cooked annually for the Thai princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn. "She eats egg noodles served dry," said Pawita Boriboonchaisiri, the elder sister. I wasn't going to take a chance. If Bangkok's ad hoc restaurants were threatened not only by clean sidewalk loving governments but, just as seriously, by gentrification and changing tastes I had to go before it was too late. In July, I flew to Bangkok for a week of eating nothing but street food. Pretty much immediately, I learned that street food was a term with many definitions. "For me, street food is only a cart," said Duangporn Songvisava, known as Bo, who with her husband, Dylan Jones, runs the restaurants bo.lan, which received a Michelin star in December, and Err, which serves rustic drinking food with a focus on quality ingredients. When she was young, Ms. Songvisava, now 37, remembered, as many as 20 carts would line up outside her school to sell snacks on sticks to students. "They have, like, the moo ping grilled pork on a stick, barbecue the sausage, the fishball. It just fills you up before you have dinner." Some were pushcarts, others bicycle based, but all were mobile and ephemeral. Now, Ms. Songvisava said, profit margins rule. "They just buy everything from the factory, use industrial processed food," she said. "A lot of seasoning and MSG involved to produce the food because people doesn't complain." Ms. Songvisava was telling me this over beers at Talad Saphan Phut, a night market that she considered a sad remedy for Bangkok's street food woes. It was here, at a lonely, out of the way parking lot, that the city had relocated vendors from the slated for destruction Flower Market, on the theory that loyal customers would follow. We were joined by an intrepid eating crew, which included Mr. Jones; Chawadee Nualkhair, the blogger, known as Chow, behind Bangkok Glutton; and the writer Vincent Vichit Vadakan who had put me up for my stay and is an editor at the Michelin Guide's Bangkok site. "This is like a good five to 10 kilometers from where the original was," said Ms. Nualkhair. "So the people who used to eat these guys' food wouldn't come here on a regular basis with this special trip." Only a few vendors in all of Bangkok, she estimated, cooked well enough that people would follow them to new locations. We decided to drown our concerns in the most apropos way: with street food. Along Thanon Chan, in a surprisingly quiet little neighborhood, were sois, or alleyways, full of food vendors, who had been relocated off the main street. Our gang descended upon them, ordering bowls of noodles yen ta fo, pink rice noodles in broth with wontons and fishballs, and bamee moodaeng, ribbony egg noodles with roast pork and watery rice porridge studded with bits of duck or nuggets of coagulated blood, and sweet braised pig's foot, and bags of all kinds of fried things. As we crowded around folding metal tables and accentuated our treasures with chilies in vinegar, or ground dried chilies, and cracked open Thai craft beers, it all felt deliciously normal the kind of Bangkok street food life I'd always imagined. By lunchtime, I would hook up with a friend for exploratory eating. With Dwight Turner, an American who's blogged for years at BKKFatty.com, I went to the farther reaches of Sukhumvit Road, a central artery through Bangkok. Several SkyTrain stops past the glistening condos and mega malls, the street food crackdown didn't seem to matter, and Mr. Turner and I had to squeeze past countless vendors of curries, sausages, fruit, flowers, electronics occupying sidewalk space. For Mr. Turner, street food was not necessarily defined by mobility. "The necessity," he said, "is that it's convenient, at a price that people are willing to pay." His definition which will no doubt enrage certain corners of the internet opened up what I could consider street food to include Bangkok's shophouse restaurants: boxy, frill free dining rooms where the cooking is done up front, in a kitchen that's often little more than an elaborate, sedentary cart. Such was the case at Sai Kaew, the duck noodle shop Mr. Turner brought me to. "In the beginning, I worked full time in an office like most Thais," said Sai Kaew's owner, Ruengchai Chartmongkoljaroen. Thirty years ago, however, he quit his job to push a cart. He set up 10 tables on sidewalk space he'd rented in front of a building, walked his cart in circles to attract attention, and of course worked on his recipes, developing the condiment that became his calling card: light, crunchy, slippery boiled duck intestines, or sai kaew. (Excellent with a slather of his vibrant green hot sauce, and a worthy foil for the sweetly rich duck.) The price for a bowl in 1987: 10 baht, or about 40 cents at the time. "Day 1, we opened from 12 p.m. to 2 a.m.," he said. "We sold half a duck." Business improved, but even so, he pushed the cart for 16 years before parking it at this shophouse, where on a good day he and his two daughters, who've learned the business from childhood will go through "50 big ducks." Though his duck noodles are now well known, the price remains right: Lunch for two was 160 baht, or less than 5. This trajectory was one I heard time and again as I ate everything from delicate pig's brain to incendiary papaya salad to rice noodles stir fried on a charcoal fired wok. There might be many reasons to open a cart a desire for freedom, a love of off cuts but eventually, almost everyone wants the security of bricks and mortar. Even Pritipal Singh Sirikumar, whose stand selling crisp, yummy samosas was founded by his father some 50 years ago, dreamed of moving from his open air nook about the size of a couch at the corner of a Chinatown soi. He said it would be to have his own shophouse. "Then we can put in tables and chairs. We can serve more customers. I will serve lassi." Mr. Sirikumar's sentiments were echoed by people like Pongsuang Kunprasop, known as Note, a friend I hadn't seen in a decade but who refused to eat street food with me. "Been sharing sidewalks with rats and cockroach at night for all my life," he wrote in an email. Over the course of a week, I did not see much vermin, nor did I fall ill. (I did carry charcoal pills, a gift from Ms. Songvisava and Mr. Jones, said to counteract food poisoning.) But I also came to appreciate the appeal of air conditioning, and to understand that the romance attached to the cart, by Thais as well as Westerners, does not always mesh with reality. It's hard work to push a cart, and unless you get lucky like Raan Jay Fai, a crab omelet stall that won a Michelin star in December (and that is now so busy the owner has said she would like to return the star) a shophouse restaurant, a permanent stall in a covered market, or even a job cooking "street food" in the food court of a fancy mall promises stability. And for Thais, entering the middle class is often about strolling down a clear sidewalk to work, dining in air conditioned comfort and going home to a modern condo. Who's to say they're wrong in those desires? Today, nearly a year after the crackdown, Bangkok's street food vendors and aficionados have grown accustomed to constant change. Talad Saphan Phut, the market where I'd talked with Ms. Songvisava, shut down in December, and the street food centric Sam Yan neighborhood is being redeveloped by Chulalongkorn University, whose projects have already displaced vendors in numerous areas. Street food in Bangkok has always been defined by mobility and ephemerality, but this is something new. However endangered street food is, pursuing it remains an eye opening way to discover a city like Bangkok. One morning, Rattama Pongponrat, known as Pom, an ebullient culinary consultant and former curator at Museum Siam, led me on a daylong binge, from a breakfast of toast with coconut jam to a sidewalk stand selling noodles with atypically thick slices of offal. There was fried chicken piled atop metal tables. There was glorious mango ice cream from a dinky corner shop. And there was Ms. Pongponrat, overjoyed at it all. When the sun was high, we strode through the shaded alleyways of Chinatown, past tropical fruits pickled in chilies, batter fried squid roe with a spicy sweet sauce until, finally, we burst out onto a bridge where Ms. Pongponrat had hoped to find one particular vendor. Instead, the bridge had been entirely cleared. "Oh, my God, it's all gone!" Ms. Pongponrat shouted. "I never knew it was a bridge. I've never seen this before in my life." She began swearing, then looked up at a well tended four story building, yellow with green shutters, the crisp style at once Chinese and Neo Classical. "What a beautiful building," she said in wonder. Then we plunged back into the fray to find another snack. If You Go Finding street food in Bangkok is easy you'll see fishball and satay stands parked, it seems, in front of nearly every 7 Eleven but finding the really good stuff takes a little more effort, and a bit of wandering. Addresses for many of the vendors are nonexistent or nonsensical, but this Google Map s hows just about every place I visited. Chinatown is an excellent place to begin, for its density of talented vendors and for the official protection they enjoy (at least for the moment). Yaowarat Road is the heart of its street food zone think rolled rice noodles with crispy pork belly, or sweet boiled lotus root on crushed ice but if you wander a little farther afield, you'll encounter the fishball noodle stand Lim Lao Sa (on Song Wat Road near Trok Saphan Yuan), Natthapon Coconut Ice Cream (on Phraeng Phuthon Road), and the high end drinking food restaurant Err (394/35 Maha Rat Road; errbkk.com). For a stroll through not yet gentrified Bangkok, take the Sky Train to Udom Suk station and head down Sukhumvit Road soi 103, through numerous vendors crowding the sidewalk. (Try them!) To the left, in the marketplace, is a bamee moodaeng stall that makes its own excellent noodles, and a few blocks northeast is Sai Kaew, the duck noodle soup shop. To see another way street food is evolving, check out Talad Ruam Sab, known as the Lunch Market, across Asok Road (Sukhumvit soi 21) from Srinakharinwirot University. There you'll find dozens of tiny stalls serving everything from sweet braised pig's leg to fiery crab curry with fermented rice noodles. Bring friends, stake out space at a communal table, and order promiscuously. Finally, there is the Michelin guide, whose Bangkok edition includes 28 street food vendors (all in shophouses, technically). Find it online at guide.michelin.com/th/en/bangkok. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Travel |
Hyundai is recalling nearly 138,000 Hyundai Tucson sport utility vehicles from the 2011 14 model years because the driver's side air bag may not have been properly attached to the steering wheel, the automaker has informed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. According to a report Hyundai posted on the N.H.T.S.A. website, two bolts holding the air bag module to the steering wheel were not properly tightened. "An improperly mounted driver's air bag would result in injury in the event of a crash," the report warned. Hyundai said it was not aware of any accidents or injuries because of the defect. The automaker explained that the driver of one of the vehicles might notice the problem as a rattle and began an investigation in December after noticing an unusual number of warranty claims for labor to tighten bolts. Hyundai described the recall as voluntary, but once a manufacturer is aware of a safety problem it must within five business days inform the agency of its plan for a recall or face a civil fine. N.H.T.S.A. has also upgraded its investigation into shattering sunroofs on about 65,000 Kia Sorento crossovers from the 2011 13 model years. The investigation began last October with a "preliminary evaluation," and the agency has now found enough reason for concern to upgrade that to a more serious "engineering analysis," according to a report posted on its website. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Automobiles |
Eastern Bloc was a typical gay dive bar, but Club Cumming feels more like a shoe box version of the Kit Kat Club that made Mr. Cumming famous. On a recent Saturday night, the crowd was a tightly packed mix of neighborhood gay men in vintage T shirts brushing up against Becky types in black and gender non conforming millennials wearing glittery tanks, colorful scarves and the occasional boa. It was sometimes hard to tell where the show ends and the audience begins. Nightly shows are only part of the scene; there are also strong sets from seasoned D.J.s like Michael Cavadias and Sammy Jo. While Fridays and Saturdays are more dance y with a drag twist, weeknight lineups can include Broadway belters, classical cellists and piano karaoke. Check the club's Facebook page for the schedule. During peak times around midnight, there can be a short line. But the door is not exclusionary, as exhibited by the diverse crowd. On weekends, there's usually a 5 to 10 cover charge. This is not the place for craft cocktails, but the mixed drinks are solid and strong (starting at 10). There's also a modest selection of beers in bottles and cans (from 5) and a few wines and proseccos ( 10). And champagne, of course ( 150, Veuve Clicquot). | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Style |
Q. How do those apps that block phone texting while driving know when to turn on? Do you need special hardware? A. Smartphone apps that temporarily disable incoming text messages and other driving distractions can be turned on manually before the driver starts the car, or can kick in automatically when the phone's motion sensor detects an appropriate amount of acceleration. Some distracted driving solutions, like the subscription based Cellcontrol, use a combination of hardware and software to block smartphone activity as soon as the car begins to move, but many apps rely on information from the phone's own hardware. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Technology |
On his first morning as President Trump's national security adviser, in 2017, H. R. McMaster invited me to drop by his office. He had heard that The New York Times was getting ready to report on a classified U.S. operation that attempted to sabotage North Korea's missile programs with cyberstrikes. "Is this the revelation of the modern day Enigma codes?" he asked, the military historian searching for an analogy from the World War II operation to crack German ciphers. It was a bracing start for what turned out to be a wild 13 month effort to devise a modern day security strategy for a president with no experience, more interest in cutting deals than designing a long term strategy and an unwillingness to sit for intelligence briefings, much less discussion of containing an angry, decaying Russia or of a 50 year plan to compete with a rising China. So "Battlegrounds" is, at its heart, the McMaster strategic plan that might have come to fruition had he worked for a president who was interested in strategic plans. Long before he walked into the West Wing, McMaster was the closest thing the Army had to a soldier scholar. His book about Vietnam, "Dereliction of Duty," was a devastating account of how the United States had a flawed decision making process that was largely based on self deception. In many ways, "Battlegrounds" is the sequel, seeking to ask the question of why not whether the United States, at another moment of protests in the streets and bitter partisan divides, is losing its ability to shape the world. But the answers this time are different, in McMaster's view. The key to his argument is that America is suffering from what Hans Morgenthau called "strategic narcissism," or, in McMaster's words, "the tendency to view the world only in relation to the United States and to assume that the future course of events depends primarily on U.S. decisions or plans." It's hard to argue with that premise: Every new president comes to office assuming that the world is waiting for direction from Washington. Some countries are. Others are looking for power vacuums they can fill, each in its own way. 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. That's been the story of the past two decades. Russia has emerged as a disrupter, knowing that it has neither the money nor the technology to take the United States on directly. China has become a builder why threaten to cut undersea cables, as Vladimir Putin's submarine force does, if you can dominate global communications? As Rob Joyce, an N.S.A. official who worked for McMaster as the White House cybersecurity coordinator, said: "Russia is the hurricane. ... China is climate change." McMaster realized that, and devoted much of his time in the West Wing to writing a "National Security Strategy" that would reorient the United States away from nearly two decades of counterterrorism and toward countering Moscow and Beijing, which he called "revisionist powers." It was an impressive document. Unfortunately, the president under whose name it was published, aides concede, did not read it. "Battlegrounds" expands on the written strategy the one the White House has barely mentioned since it was published and makes a strong case for containing Russia, pushing back on Chinese influence and using American leverage, and allies, to confront Iran and North Korea. What Washington needs, McMaster argues, is an integrated approach that recognizes that the old tools that drove Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1991, when McMaster served, are pretty useless 30 years later. He starts with Russia. "The United States and Europe were ill prepared for Russia's toxic combination of disinformation, denial, dependence and disruptive technologies," he says, a recognition that what happened in 2016 was not that America's radar was off. It's that the radar was never built. Fortunately, it has since been pieced together, and in the 2020 presidential contest, everyone from Facebook to Twitter to the United States Cyber Command has been pushing back. Disinformation has been blocked, clumsily. Botnets that spread ransomware that could be directed at election systems have been taken down, at least briefly. Unfortunately, McMaster's boss was not on board with this approach. In McMaster's time, he notes, President Trump often said improving relations with Russia "would be a good thing, not a bad thing," while succumbing to Putin's flattery and treating his criminal actions "with dismissiveness and moral equivalency." And, of course, the repeated references to "the Russia hoax," which meant no one in the president's circle could discuss election interference without dreading an eruption triggered by Trump's fear that the legitimacy of the election was being questioned. McMaster never deals head on with the fundamental problem that the administration had, on paper, a defensible Russia strategy, and the president kept undermining it. Instead, he cites his top Russia aide, Fiona Hill, who, he writes, always warned that "Putin seeks to divide; Americans and Europeans should not divide themselves." China, the climate changer, is, of course, immune to containment strategies. If the old Cold War was largely a military contest, Version 2.0 is a military, diplomatic, economic and technological contest. That change led to a misappraisal of the challenge: As McMaster points out, a succession of administrations convinced themselves that, over time, China would conform to a Western built system. (Trump succumbed to a different illusion: that the Chinese were all dealmakers, like the property developers he knew.) Crucial to McMaster's analysis is China's strategy to wire together its own collection of allies and dependent powers selling them Controlled in China technology, from Huawei's networks to, after McMaster departed, TikTok's addictive app. "It took the United States a decade and a half to understand the immensity of the Trojan horse it had let in," he says of how the United States blindly let a Chinese telecommunications giant gain ground, while American firms exited the market. But the reader yearns for McMaster's solution. Ban Chinese technology? Maybe President Trump is trying but even then China will dominate 40 percent or more of the world's telecommunications networks. Embrace an industrial policy that will win back the market? It is in dealing with the two biggest failures of the Trump administration, Iran and North Korea, that McMaster sounds the loudest alarms. While he was a major critic of President Obama's 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran, and criticizes Obama's aides for overlooking Iran's support of terrorism and terrorist regimes, he reports that internally he argued for staying inside the deal and using Trump's threats to toss it aside as leverage. But the president wouldn't think that many chess moves ahead, and dispensed with the whole deal a month after McMaster left. Now he fears that the United States, without allies to confront Iran, may slip into the place we are with other nuclear powers that Washington once declared could never possess nuclear arms: "Pakistan provides a stark warning. Iran could become, like Pakistan today, a nuclear armed state in which terrorists already enjoy a support base. The greatest threat to humanity in the coming decades may lie at the nexus between terrorists and the most destructive weapons on earth." North Korea, of course, already has those weapons and a lot more fuel for them now than when the Trump administration arrived with its threats of "fire and fury" if they were not turned over immediately. It was the president's ego that got in the way. McMaster knew, he says, that as soon as Kim Jong un proposed a summit, the president "would find a historic first meeting between a North Korean leader and a U.S. president irresistible." Not a single weapon or missile has been dismantled. But the sanctions regime is in tatters, undercut by Russia and China. Which takes me back to McMaster's question his first day: Are we facing the "modern day Enigma codes"? It turns out the Enigma this time is us. Americans want the unrivaled power, the global influence, and the economic growth and freedom that come with it, the kind we enjoyed with little challenge at the end of World War II and then, briefly, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But we want it free without the strategic investments in the world, without forward deployed troops, without marshaling the power of technologies America largely invented. The biggest of McMaster's "Battlegrounds" is here at home. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
Pierre Cardin has spent a lifetime waging battle, imposing his will and maverick sensibilities on the wayward human form. "When I design a dress, I don't design it around a woman's body," he once famously said. "I design the dress, and then put a woman inside it." That credo has informed much of the 97 year old couturier's prophetic output, on view in "Pierre Cardin, Future Fashion," a retrospective that opens on July 20 at the Brooklyn Museum. Highlights of the show they include a 1970 brief roll collar tunic over a black wool unitard, a 1969 orange and black "armor dress" made of Plexiglas and vinyl, and a 1968 Plexiglas helmet with a face shield attest to a relevance that persists to this day. Inspired by a youthful fascination with the American and Soviet space programs, Mr. Cardin's signature pieces did not so much move with the body as contain it, forming a kind of carapace cobbled from geometric shapes of silver foil, brightly colored vinyl and Cardine, a Dynel fabric that could be modeled into three dimensional forms. He mined their properties to lend substance and resilience to his sculptural space age designs. As far back as 1958, Mr. Cardin was putting models in crash helmets matched with tiny plastic skirts and colored stockings, and by the mid 1960s he was dressing men and women in malleable jumpsuits worthy of the Starship Enterprise. During that decade, his futuristic experiments gave rise to what he christened Cosmocorps, a collection of collarless or roll neck tops and jackets, some of them spliced with asymmetric zippers. Showcased in Brooklyn are his Cosmocorps jumpsuits and unitards, which doubled as foundation garments worn by both sexes under skirts, elongated vests, codpieces and theatrically outsize jewelry. A 1969 visit to NASA inspired runway novelties like a blue vinyl necklace and miniskirt accessorized with a clear acrylic visor, and even a line of supersize vinyl goggles. If some of those pieces seem provocative now, that may be because they anticipated the kind of current fashion flying under the banner of gender fluidity. "For me," Mr. Cardin told Mr. Yokobosky in an interview for the exhibition catalog, "it was especially important that my creations, regardless of gender, require the body to adapt." Mr. Yokobosky said this week, "Before Cardin we weren't having this whole discussion of how short can a skirt be, how long can a men's tunic be? And when do they become the same thing?" Mr. Cardin's most fanciful creations made ingenious use of wire mesh speakers and, in some cases, LED lighting. Screened in the exhibition is a 1962 episode of the animated television series "The Jetsons," in which Jane, the family matriarch, models a gown, "a Pierre Martian original," as she giddily proclaims, plugging in an attached electric cord to light up its contours. Similar midcentury innovations prefigured today's continuing romance with techno fabrics: neoprene and lab generated variations on nylon polyester, to say nothing of textiles that change color like a mood ring. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Fashion & Style |
Myth and history mesh in "The Warrior Queen of Jhansi," an unfortunately clunky, relentlessly corny salute to Rani Laxmibai ( Devika Bhise ), the still celebrated Indian ruler who joined the 1857 rebellion against the country's British overseers. Just 25, Laxmibai trained a regiment to protect the kingdom of Jhansi from annexation by the powerful British East India Company. Her bravery and convention flouting spirit are undeniably inspirational; but the movie, directed by Swati Bhise (the mother of its star), is so dedicated to lionization and so declamatory in tone that it almost repels engagement. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Movies |
Eller is lost: "I don't know when I am," she says. Her mind in tatters, Eller, the mangled soul of the new play "Terminus," endlessly attempts to relive her long gone past. She wants to remember, but she also doesn't. She faintly realizes that the reckoning of the "true true," as she puts it, could destroy her. Gabriel Jason Dean has written a handful of a role in his handful of a play, a tale of Southern Gothic horror where fantasy and reality, past and present, freely intermingle. But he is lucky that Eller is portrayed by the New York stage treasure Deirdre O'Connell ("Fulfillment Center," "The Way West"), whose heartbreaking, brilliant performance never draws attention to itself, never sacrifices the character's integrity for thespian pyrotechnics. The older woman spends her day in a house dress and dirty slippers, chatting with the ghosts of her dead family, like her sister, Annie (Clementine Belber), forever stuck in adolescence, and her mother, Leafy (Jessie Dean). D'Vaughn Agu's set makes the most of Next Door at NYTW's challengingly long, narrow space by adding a series of aligned doors, including to the oven and the fridge, from which Eller's thoughts literally emerge. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Theater |
Trump Is Trying to Bend Reality to His Will Disruption, disorder and disease are gripping the United States as the 2020 election draws near, leading to an unusual degree of unpredictability about our political future. Despite current state and national polling that favors Democrats, we still can't say for sure whether the nation will tip left or right. "Modern democracies are currently experiencing destabilizing events," three Danish political scientists, Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen and Alexander Bor, write, "including the emergence of demagogic leaders, the onset of street riots, circulation of misinformation and extremely hostile political engagements on social media." Driving this destabilization, according their new paper, "Beyond Populism," is the feeling millions of voters continue to have of being left behind, of "'losing out' in a world marked by, on the one hand, traditional gender and race based hierarchies, which limits the mobility of minority groups, and, on the other hand, globalized competition, which puts a premium on human capital" especially on "learning capacity," roughly measured by the presence or absence of a college degree. The crucial role of human capital is illustrated in a 2011 study published in the American Economic Review, "Sources of Lifetime Inequality," by Mark Huggett, Gustavo Ventura and Amir Yaron, economists at Georgetown, Arizona State and the University of Pennsylvania. The authors found that human capital, including learning skills, accounted for "61.2, 62.4, and 66.0 percent of the variation in lifetime earnings, lifetime wealth, and lifetime utility" a measure of life satisfaction. Petersen and his colleagues found that those experiencing rising levels of frustration are motivated to turn to the relative extremes of the political spectrum reflecting "discontent with one's own personal standing." This phenomenon, they continue, is concentrated among individuals for whom prestige based pathways to status are, at least in their own perception, unlikely to be successful. Despite their political differences, this perception may be the psychological commonality of, on the one hand, race or gender based grievance movements and, on the other hand, white lower middle class right wing voters. The traditional avenue to standing in society "tangible benefits including income and job access" and "intangible benefits including cultural hegemony, prestige, authority and social space" requires the "human capital" I mentioned above, which what Petersen described in an email as "the stock of skills and competencies that allow people to produce economic value" that "involve the cultivation of talents and skills that are valuable for others and, hence, based on a reciprocal relationship wherein status is granted in exchange for service." When inequality increases, the issue of status becomes sharper, and "people will simultaneously feel that (a) it is important to get status and (b) that it is very difficult to do so." In such a situation, at the extremes, "some people will feel that the use of fear and intimidation is an attractive shortcut to getting recognition," Petersen wrote by email. "It would be wrong to exclusively think of this as a right wing phenomenon. People on the extremes of both the left wing and the right wing are likely to be high in dominance motivations," Petersen continued, adding that we should expect dominance to be a key motivational factor among people supporting or advocating the use of violence for political purposes. While such supporters may appeal to a number of higher order ideological principles, a personal craving for status seems to be a key motivational factor according to our research. The difficulty of rising up the economic ladder is reflected in the decline in mobility in the United States. Research by Raj Chetty and colleagues has demonstrated that the percentage of children who make more than their parents has fallen from just over 90 percent for those born in 1940 to 50 percent for those born in 1984. The declines have been sharpest in the South and Midwest, as shown in the accompanying map in many of the areas that provided key support to Donald Trump in 2016. In a 2019 paper, "The College Wealth Divide: Education and Inequality in America, 1956 2016," three German economists, Alina Bartscher, Moritz Kuhn and Moritz Schularick, all of the University of Bonn, determined that in the United States since the since the 1970s "the real income of non college households stagnated, while the real income of college households has risen by around 50 percent." The income data is, however, dwarfed by the findings on wealth: While non college households were treading water in terms of wealth, college households have increased their net worth by a factor of three compared to 1971. The case made by Petersen and his collaborators that more Americans are becoming marginalized gets strong support from Noam Gidron and Peter A. Hall, political scientists at Hebrew University and Harvard, in their paper, "Populism as a Problem of Social Integration." They write: Our key contention is that populist politics reflects problems of social integration. That is to say, support for radical parties is likely to be especially high among people who feel they have been socially marginalized, i.e. deprived of the roles and respect normally accorded members of mainstream society. From this perspective, the sources of social marginalization may lie in economic or cultural developments and in how they combine. Large segments of the population, they continue, have been "left behind" relegated to vulnerable economic and social positions, increasingly alienated from the values prominent in elite discourse, and sensing that they are no longer recognized as valued members of society. As a result, the authors argue, "subjective social status" that is, "people's own beliefs about where they stand relative to others within this status hierarchy" has become a crucial factor in shaping political commitments: There is a consistent association between levels of subjective social status and voting for parties of the populist right and radical left. The more socially marginalized people feel, the more likely they are to gravitate toward the fringes of the political spectrum. Voters who feel a loss of standing, who experience themselves as marginalized, often turn left or right whites in this category may turn to the right; African American, Latino and other minority voters can find that the left has more to offer. "Changes in cultural frameworks," the authors write, are leading people who hold traditional social attitudes to feel socially marginalized as a result of incongruence between their values and the discourse of mainstream elites. The growing prominence of cultural frameworks promoting gender equality, multiculturalism, secular values and LGBTQ rights is the most notable of such changes. Steps toward inclusion are double sided: they can lead people who hold more traditional values to feel marginalized vis a vis the main currents of society. Gidron and Hall observe that extensive research has shown that support for the far right is often strongest, not among people suffering the greatest economic distress, but among people who are somewhat better off if still facing economic difficulties. This constituency of voters "a few rungs up the socioeconomic ladder" is, in turn, susceptible to "last place aversion," namely, a fear of falling even farther down it; and they often erect social boundaries separating 'respectable' people like themselves from others seen as lower down on that social ladder. Thus, the anti immigrant and anti ethnic appeals of populist right parties may be especially attractive to them, because they emphasize such boundaries. Those drawn to the progressive left, in Gidron and Hall's view, are "voters with status concerns but universalistic values that incline them against ethnonationalist appeals." These voters "are more often found among sociocultural professionals and people with higher levels of education" and, because they have universalistic values, they are likely to support "left parties" that "promise redistribution." Another major difference between voters who back left or right parties is the kind of work they do. According to Gidron and Hall, There are stark differences in the occupational bases of support for the radical left and right. Left parties seem to have particular appeal for people in professional occupations who may nonetheless feel that they are not receiving the social respect they deserve. By contrast, radical right parties appeal most strongly to people in low status occupations: manual workers and low skill service employees. What about socially marginalized voters who are conflicted holding, for example, conservative values on cultural, moral and racial issues, but more liberal and pro redistribution economic views? In these circumstances, the right has the advantage. In his 2016 dissertation at Harvard, "Many Ways to be Right: The Unbundling of European Mass Attitudes and Partisan Asymmetries across the Ideological Divide," Gidron reported that: Cross pressured voters (those who are conservative on some issues but progressive on other issues) are more likely to support the right; while support for the left requires progressive attitudes on all issues, it is enough to be conservative on one issue to support the right. Put differently, the right is likely to attract all those who are conservative on some issues and not only those who are conservative on all issues. Those who oppose state intervention in the economy, those who oppose progressive reforms on cultural questions such as gender norms, and those who oppose greater openness toward immigration should all gravitate toward the right, regardless of whether they are also progressive on some other issues. How many voters can be described as cross pressured by conservative cultural views and liberal economic views? A Voter Study Group analysis of the 2016 election by Lee Drutman found that just under 30 percent of voters feel this way. In addition, Drutman's study provided support for Gidron's view that these culturally conservative and economically liberal voters lean decisively to the right. Among the 24.3 percent of voters who fit this category and voted for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, 75.2 percent cast ballots for Trump and 24.8 percent for Clinton, a 3 to 1 split. Reinforcing the work of Petersen, Gidron and their colleagues are the findings of four political scientists, Ariel Malka, Yphtach Lelkes, Bert N. Bakker in a paper published in May. The four argue that the focus on Democratic and Republican identification masks another key divide between voters whose prime concern is protection from adverse cultural and economic forces and voters whose agenda is personal autonomy and economic freedom. They call these two constituencies the "protection based" and the "freedom based." The authors describe those with "a 'protection based' attitude package" as voters who combine "cultural conservatism with left economic attitudes." These voters prioritize "social order and economic stability, which, in the minds of citizens, may be satisfied by leadership and policy action that are unconstrained by democratic rules." Citizens who combine a culturally conservative worldview with an economically redistributive and interventionist set of preferences often place high priority on security, certainty, and stability. These citizens seem to apply a mind set to the political domain that attracts them to policies that maintain cultural tradition and uniformity (social conservatism) and that also entail top down provision of material security (left wing economic views). This type of worldview has been referred to as a 'protection based' attitude package, because it involves strong government intervention to provide protection against cultural and economic sources of insecurity. The protection based constituency is, thus, made up of those who feel under assault by liberal cultural trends and their challenges to traditional morality and by economic forces that are shifting rewards to those with higher levels of education and "learning skills." On the other side is "a freedom based" attitude package that "combines left wing cultural with right wing economic views, reflecting acceptance of cultural and economic risk rooted in the value of freedom." Malka and his colleagues suggest that "Anglophone democracies are more likely to associate free market economics with political freedom and democratic liberalism" and note that citizens of English speaking countries tend to score higher than citizens of other countries in self report measures of individualism, which tap a focus on personal as opposed to collective goals, individual autonomy, self differentiation, and competition. In addition, the authors suggest that in these democracies, consistent support for procedural democratic rules is linked with a classically liberal mind set focused on individual autonomy to pursue economic interests and cultural preferences without government interference. Four years ago, Trump won by decisively carrying what Malka and his colleagues call the protection based constituency voters whose privileged status as white Americans Trump has promised to protect, despite the implausibility of that promise in a world of increasing racial and ethnic diversity. These cultural conservatives are now "Trump's to lose," Malka said, noting that "he cannot afford to lose many of these whose economic attitudes are well to the left of the Republican Party's." During the current crisis, Trump has addressed core economic anxieties of these voters with legislation funneling an extra 600 a week to the unemployed, a 1,200 grant to adults in household with incomes below 150,000. a moratorium on evictions from federally supported housing and 350 billion for loans to small businesses. In this context, Malka wrote me, Trump's "efforts to stoke cultural conflict with authoritarian actions make sense from the standpoint of keeping this group on his side, but it comes with other electoral costs." Who Trump doesn't have on his side are the millions of Black and Latino voters frustrated by even greater economic hurdles than their white counterparts, compounded by a history of segregation and discrimination. These voters, an ever growing share of the electorate, loom even larger now than they did four years ago, and they are squarely in the Democratic camp. Trump's approval level, always low among Black and Hispanic voters, has plummeted as he has sharpened his ever present appeals to bigotry. In the first months of 2020, 16 percent of African Americans approved of Trump, according to Gallup. In the period from late May to June, that fell to 10 percent. Among Hispanics, Trump's approval over the same period fell from 34 to 26 percent. For Trump, this is his 2020 dilemma: As of July 28, Covid 19 cases reached 16.3 million worldwide, with 4.3 million in the United States Total deaths have reached 650,805, 147,672 of them in this country, according to the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to Politico, a mere third of Americans (32 percent) say they support Trump's handling of the pandemic. Trump pointedly declined to attend services for Representative John Lewis as mourners lined up for blocks outside the east front of the U.S. Capitol in 90 degree heat on Monday. He increased the number of federal paramilitaries in Portland as he attempted to confront Black Lives Matter protests he described as "anarchy." Trump is trapped between pressures: to keep feeding red meat to the white working and middle class voters who continue to support him while struggling to slow the defection of white, well educated suburbanites who delivered 42 House seats to the Democrats in 2018 and who now threaten to restore Democratic rule across the board. Facing these cross pressures, Trump has clearly staked out where his allegiance lies: with conservative white America. At a time when even the state of Mississippi is removing Confederate emblems from its state flag, Trump told Chris Wallace ten days ago on Fox News Sunday: When people proudly have their Confederate flags, they're not talking about racism. They love their flag, it represents the South, they like the South. People right now like the South. I'd say it's freedom of, of, of many things, but it's freedom of speech. Asked about changing the names of military installations currently honoring Confederate generals a proposal that has support from the Armed Forces and some Republicans in Congress Trump replied: Excuse me, excuse me. I don't care what the military says. I'm supposed to make the decision .... We're going to name it after the Reverend Al Sharpton? Trump knows where he is going. The question is whether enough of the electorate will follow. 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 |
YALE NEEDS WOMEN How the First Group of Girls Rewrote the Rules of an Ivy League Giant By Anne Gardiner Perkins As a female graduate of Yale, I'd always assumed that the story of women's admission to the college in 1969 was one of triumph a historic transformation commemorated by Maya Lin's "Women's Table" sculpture, prominently situated at the heart of campus. But "Yale Needs Women," Anne Gardiner Perkins's lively and engaging account of the college's first class of female students, shows that the reality was far more complicated. It was one thing to let women in the door; it was quite another to make them feel welcome, integrated and equally represented in Yale's deeply entrenched male culture. Among the women Perkins writes about are Connie Royster, whose aunt Constance Baker Motley was the first black woman to serve as a federal judge, and whose family worked as chefs and managers in Yale's fraternities; Kit McClure, who played trombone and became a member of the New Haven Women's Liberation Rock Band; Shirley Daniels, who became active in the Black Student Alliance and focused on Afro American studies; and Lawrie Mifflin, a field hockey player who struggled to establish a women's team and went on to work at The New York Times as a reporter, editor and executive. The challenges these women faced ranged from formidable hurdles like Yale's "thousand male leaders" quota under which more than 1,000 places were reserved for men and just 230 for women to smaller indignities like a professor who wrote, across one assignment, "Not bad for a woman." Further slowing the pace of change was the dearth of female professors and administrators. In 1968, the year before it went coed, "Yale College had two tenured women on its faculty and 391 tenured men," Perkins reports. The first time female students encountered a (visiting) woman professor "was like a door opening up to an incredible room they had not even known was there." Moreover, Yale's president, Kingman Brewster, proved to be a powerful obstacle to women's progress at the college, insistent on enforcing the male quota and unwilling to entertain opposing arguments. One of the few administrators making that case was Elga Wasserman, whom Brewster appointed head of coeducation at Yale but refused to grant the title of associate dean instead relegating her to "special assistant." Wasserman served as the necessary squeaky wheel in advocating for women's interests, including safety on campus, but paid dearly for her activism. She was excluded from decision making meetings, her memos ignored, her manner criticized. As Perkins makes clear, the issue of educational parity competed with other strains of social ferment, including Vietnam War protests, the civil rights movement and the sexual revolution. Raising awareness about the rights of women at Yale required making waves, and every bit of progress was hard won. In absorbing detail, Perkins describes the organizing efforts of those early years, from a protest by freshman women at an alumni lunch to the creation of advocacy groups like Women and Men for a Better Yale and petitions like one signed by 1,900 students calling for an end to gender quotas. Just being on campus didn't amount to belonging on campus. Women were not allowed in at Mory's, the traditional campus pub restaurant, during lunch, when faculty meetings often took place. They had to put up with constant questions about their sexual availability and the busloads of women still imported from other colleges known as "the weekend women" for the pleasure of male students. Mifflin and her hockey cohort were obliged to practice in a football stadium parking lot where they dodged the detritus of weekend tailgates (briquettes and beer cans). Their coach was a high school gym teacher; their uniforms hand me downs from a local state school. Reading the book, it was amazing to realize that during my first days at Yale, in 1983, the gender quota had been abolished only 11 years before, and that women had been present for just 14. It's no wonder, as Perkins notes, that there remains a considerable distance to go. While women now make up 49 percent of Yale's undergraduate student body, she reports, they comprise just 26 percent of the tenured faculty. "Courage and tenacity, of course, are not unique to Yale women, and neither are the challenges they have faced," Perkins writes. "There are women who have gone first and women who have spoken out in every town and city in this country. The nation needs still more of them. The battle to make Yale and other colleges and workplaces safe and fair places for women is not yet done." | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Books |
LONDON With the British economy showing feeble signs of resilience and a new central bank governor waiting in the wings, the Bank of England decided on Thursday to keep its benchmark interest rate and its economic stimulus program unchanged. The central bank left its interest rate at 0.5 percent, a record low, and held its program of bond buying at PS375 billion, or about 581 billion. The stimulus program, also known as quantitative easing, frees more money for lending to businesses and individuals. Some economists expect the Bank of England to expand its stimulus program this year to help the recovery, while others said recent economic data were encouraging and that further stimulus might not be necessary. Where they agree is that any action would probably wait until the next central bank governor, Mark Carney, takes over in July from Mervyn A. King, who has held the position since 2003. "There are broad improvements in business sentiment, and with equity markets heading to new highs, we are not expecting anything" until Mr. Carney arrives, said James Knightley, an economist in London with ING Bank. The British economy narrowly avoided falling back into a recession for a third time in five years at the beginning of this year. The 0.3 percent growth it recorded in the first three months of this year was hardly a sign of a robust recovery, but it allowed George Osborne, the chancellor of the Exchequer, to dispel critics of his austerity measures, who had argued that spending cuts and tax increases would pull Britain back into a recession. While still in decline, the manufacturing and construction industries shrank less than some economists had expected in April and the services sector also strengthened last month. Economic confidence is improving and house prices increased to the highest level in almost three years in April, according to Halifax, a mortgage lender. Under pressure to show his austerity program was indeed repairing the British economy by reducing the budget deficit without choking off growth, Mr. Osborne in March gave the Bank of England more flexibility in supporting the economy without the need to lower inflation in the short term. Consumer price inflation is at 2.8 percent, above the Bank of England's 2 percent target. Prices have been climbing faster in Britain than in the euro zone or the United States, squeezing households as salaries remain broadly unchanged. The European Central Bank cut its benchmark interest rate to a record low of 0.5 percent from 0.75 percent last week. The move was widely expected and was seen as mostly symbolic, to show that the E.C.B. president, Mario Draghi, was willing to act to bolster the euro zone as recession threatened to engulf countries that were previously spared, like Germany. The troubles in the euro zone have been weighing on Britain, which is a member of the European Union but not part of the euro zone. The region is Britain's largest single export market. Mr. Osborne repeatedly pointed to weak demand for goods and services from the euro zone as a reason for the slow recovery of the British economy. Mr. Knightley is among those economists who expect the arrival of Mr. Carney at the helm of the Bank of England, in two months, to bring some change there. Mr. Carney, now the governor of the Bank of Canada, might be more specific about what to expect from interest rates in the future, Mr. Knightley said. Few economists expect interest rates to increase before the end of next year. | 0 | N24News: A New Dataset for Multimodal News Classification | Global Business |
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